Ilja Dragunov vs. Bobby Gunns, WXW World Tag Team League 2018 Night Two (10/6/2018)

(photo credit to @NadinePhotosEff on Twitter)

This was for the vacant WXW Unified World Wrestling Title.

If you know about this match, you probably also know that we’re not really here to talk about what happened between Ilja Dragunov and Bobby Gunns.

From the start of this match, the crowd is split (I would like to believe this anyways as few things are more upsetting than someone chanting both sides of a chant duel, stand up for something and pick a side, coward) and they get into a GUNNS, BOBBY GUNN/IL-JA dueling chant. And for the next fifteen or so minutes, until things become dramatic as the show nears its conclusion, they simply do not stop. It’s not entirely organic, of course, we’re not talking about early independent crowds for Danielson/London or Joe/Hero having nearly combative crowds, standing up and shouting at each other across the room. It feels like there’s a moment after maybe five or six minutes where it begins to slow down, before it picks back up in fervor and pace, and it very clearly feels like everyone is realized that this is A Thing now, and they have decided to make it a bit, and it loses the fame feeling. All the same, it’s an incredibly memorable thing, and a wholly unique atmosphere, although not even the single best WXW atmosphere for a Dragunov title match in 2018.

While the crowd is having a wonderful time, the wrestling match in front of them is also borderline great too.

Gunns and Dragunov are not the most natural fit in the world, as Gunns learns throughout the match to stop trying to do arm work to someone with zero interest in selling it, but they eventually get close enough to the same page to put together something pretty fun. Hard shots and big suplexes, and given the stature of both in the company, some real drama over the nearfalls because either man winning is believable. It is, in some theoretical world where you can simply look at the physical nuts and bolts of a match removed from every other aspect of it, probably still really good, and maybe even great.

The thing is that you can’t do that.

Bobby and Ilja have their match, and the crowd makes it so much better. Not only because of the effect of these loud responses — especially in the last third or so when the crowd loses their will to do the bit and begins genuinely going nuts for the nearfalls and all of that — but because, on some level, the insane reaction brings a sort of energy out of both guys that probably wouldn’t have been there, to this level, otherwise.

The atmosphere is not the match and the match is not the atmosphere, but they are together, and you cannot separate them. It’s always a very futile exercise, trying to separate one part of the thing that catches the most attention or does the most work, but that’s where it lands. It is all one thing, and as a complete package, it is one of the more unique things in wrestling all year. Combine it with a match that, mechanically, is just good enough to be great, and I like it a whole lot.

One of the great examples in recent history of the effects of live atmosphere on a wrestling match, taking a match that is very good at worst and turning it into something that, even if it’s not a match you necessarily love (and I don’t think I love it nearly as much as I did at the time, or as others did at the time), it is something you are absolutely going to remember.

***

Bobby Gunns vs. Mike Bailey, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2018 Day Two (3/10/2018)

(photo credit to GD Photography.)

This was for Gunns’ WXW Shotgun Title.

If you’ve seen this match before, you will never forget either the match itself, or at worst, a few minute stretch in it.

Before that though, and independent of maybe the spot? idea? segment? of the year, it is kind of just a fun little efficient midcad match between two guys who, on paper, maybe do not match up all that well, and another piece of proof from this show of how you really ought to just wait and see sometimes. These two do not immediately match up on paper, with Gunns being more of a character guy at this point despite having a few great matches to his name, and Bailey being all action. Both are really good at their specific things, but not so much historically when they try and overlap, especially when one considers Gunn’s penchant for arm work and Bailey’s less-than-perfect selling in limb-focused matches. It’s not to say that this looked like total shit on paper, so much as that a bridge had to be made somewhere, and neither of these two had proven to be all that great at or all that interested in building bridges.

Sometimes all you need is one good idea to build that bridge though, relieving either man of the responsibility on their own.

Or rather, sometimes you need one really really really really fucking great idea.

To be clear, it is not perfect.

Mike and Bobby get a little scatter brained sometimes in terms of the arm work that Bobby Gunns puts in, Bailey is still not the world’s greatest seller in terms of a specific focus of a match, along with other real minor ass complaints here and there about some facials, the few bouts of shout-selling that the match maybe doesn’t earn in some moments (this especially doesn’t matter because they really really earn it in other moments), issues getting moving, not committing entirely to the one really cool thing they do.

None of this especially matters all that much.

When Gunns adds onto that arm work by not only bending Bailey’s pinky entirely backwards, but then uses his wrist tape to hold it there for a real good chunk of the match, all of those smaller complaints just have a way of rushing right out the back side of my head, as if they never existed in the first place.

It is both the coolest and grossest thing in the world at once.

(Hard to imagine why I love this match, I know.)

The idea alone would have elevated an already great match somewhat above its station, but it’s the work they add to it that does so much.

Bailey has it there for at least three or four minutes, and it makes every single thing a thousand times more interesting. Obviously, Gunns’ attacks on the hand in that position are way grosser now, a punt to the hand or wrist that clearly catches the bent pinky first are the most brutal part, but even regular attacks on the arm have way more weight to them like this. It also makes Bailey’s own attacks so much more dramatic and sympathetic. His inability to grab the ropes when he tries to climb or hook his hands for a Dragon Suplex feels more genuine because, fuck man, look at his hand.

There’s this stretch where he tries to throw palms with his right hand but Gunns keeps ducking and Bailey repeatedly almost falls over as a result of how weird the other side probably feels and/or how desperately he’s swinging, leading to him hitting Bobby with one from the left featuring the four fingered hand. Usually, that’s the sort of thing I hate to see, but in this moment, with this great a set up, there’s a real triumph to it, and to Bailey finally getting some distance from all this.

Bailey gets his finger free and does a few moves and nearfalls, disappointingly sort of giving in to what’s expected, but thankfully, it’s over before too long, allowing at leat for an idea this great to be close enough to the climax to still feel important. Gunns wins with a double armbar with his legs and a Stretch Muffler with the arms for good measure.

Again, it is maybe not the best finish in the world. Given the novelty of the match’s greatest feature, I would have preferred that playing more of a role, or alternatingly, Gunns reverting back to being a truly despicable goon when this fails, but it still works. You can buy Bailey having a real hard time getting out because of the messed up hand, and it doesn’t really hurt Gunns’ entire thing, because he is naturally scummy enough that there’s kind of a cap on how legitimate he can ever feel, in the best way possible. Good pro wrestling.

2018’s reigning and likely full-term leader in the what is the name of this blog awards.

***1/4

WALTER/Mike Bailey vs. John Klinger/Bobby Gunns, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2018 Day One (3/9/2018)

Going into Day Two’s two big title matches (Klinger/WALTER, Gunns/Bailey), it’s a nice little classical build up tag.

Classical only in the sense that, yeah, throwing a two on two tag team combination out there there night before the four involved have two different one on one matches together, because otherwise, this is a God damned sprint and a half.

In terms of, like, analysis, there is not all that much to it.

Four guys throw out some sick offense for a while, and eventually, Mike Bailey beats Gunns with the Green Tea Plunge. It is not a build up tag that expressly tries to establish anything going into these matches, but instead, offers up samples to whet the appetite, and it feel impossible to say they don’t succeed in that task.

It just rocks, I guess.

Wrestling’s weird sometimes. There is no formula. There is no right thing. It is an art and at the same time it is a science, and then also at the same time, it can just be the presentation of the raw materials themselves. Sometimes it is as simple as letting four great wrestlers riff around for fifteen minutes.

***

Ringkampf vs. Bobby Gunns/Jaxon Stone, WXW Broken Rulz XVII (11/18/2017)

This was a No Disqualification Elimination Tornado Tag match for WALTER and Thatcher’s WXW Tag Team Titles.

Following his upset over Timothy Thatcher and then his embarrassment of WALTER, Bobby Gunns and goon ass partner/heater Jaxon Stone jumped Thatcher in the locker room, and Gunns put his cigarette out on Tim’s eye to give us Punished Thatcher. The result is this, a match with three different gimmicks stacked on each other, but that feels entirely correct at the same time. Even with WALTER and Thatcher not being the sorts of wrestlers to often wind up in matches like this, because of the way the feud has gone and the strength of the feud itself, it makes complete and perfect sense. It turns out that when you actually book more than a simple series of matches, you can get away with and accomplish a whole lot more.

As for the match, it is a terrific chunk of pro wrestling ass pro wrestling, with both match and story working hand in glove to enhance each other.

Firstly, the match is great in and of itself.

There’s a real feeling of chaos that the tornado tag element brings, and on top of that, it really helps out the challenging team. Gunns is still kind of a puppy with big paws and Stone is a classic WXW nothing boy. If asked to control either WALTER or Thatcher for a large swath of time in a normal tag team match, I do not believe it would turn out very well, or at least nowhere near as well as this did. Instead, they’re allowed to brawl all over and use chairs and wooden boards and switch in and out. The tornado element allows them to attack both men and rotate the pairings around and do a bunch of different things, really being the thing so responsible for this not just being great, but being REALLY great.

In a less interesting and more common way, WALTER and Thatcher yet again add so much to a match and help a less talented team out so much. Every shot is great, every sell is perfect, and there’s so much energy and intensity put into it. The Thatcher vs. Gunns stuff is especially great, with Thatcher yet again working as one of wrestling’s great babyfaces at this point. Not only in the crispness of his attack, but the way he comes back and fires up. There is something about his performance in this match that makes me want to see him win, and the moment where he tears his eye patch off and just begins whipping ass is one of the best, most uplifting, and most reaffirming moments in professional wrestling all year.

Secondly, as a piece of professional wrestling storytelling, as a narrative work created by the actions of the men in the ring, this match is one of the most impressive — if not best — of the entire year.

For the first two-thirds of this thing, this match is about Ringkampf trying to get Bobby Gunns alone and punish him. They’re at a disadvantage because of the rules, but eventually, Stone gets put through two chairs with a tandem Powerbomb — a spot specifically set up and called for by the angrier Thatcher, out for punishment and vengeance — and they get Gunns all by himself.

It’s here where the match really impresses.

Rather than simply having Gunns caught and destroyed a few moments later, WALTER and Thatcher take their time and make a spectacle out of it. It’s a beautiful thing, not just because of the myriad of ways they have to punish this disgusting little shit ass, but because Gunns doesn’t just fold. It’s the same sort of an idea that allowed him to steal one from Thatcher and hang on so long against WALTER, being toyed with because he made someone so pissed off simply by existing, and he almost pulls off a fall here in a similar way. It’s not only a match that delivers what the people came to see, Bobby Gunns finally getting his receipts, but that also quietly toughens up and legitimizes Gunns in the exact correct way. Not by beating either man or with some big kickout to shout “HE IS TOUGH AND COOL”, but by surviving the initial attack, cheating his ass off to come back just a little, and then being beaten up even worse. Bobby Gunns is a consummate villain, and you don’t further their careers through making them likeable, you do it by slowly making them slipperier and slipperier, surviving more and more, and gradually making it more believable for them to win, so that on a night when it does happen, it is not quite a surprise.

Such a night is not tonight.

Timothy Thatcher turns Gunns’ attempt to introduce thumbtacks on him, surviving it and fighting up with tacks in his face and back, and finally giving him the beating that he’s been pleading for for the last two and a half months.

Gunns finally gets caught, and after WALTER pulls Thatcher off a genuinely disgusting ground and pound and powerbombs Gunns through a wooden board, Thatcher puts a foot on his chest to pin him and keep the titles. 

This is not a match that had the drama we often expect out of truly great matches or that one expects out of the end of a feud I’ve descibed as one of the year’s best, but sometimes, I don’t want to see drama. Bobby Gunns was a mother fucker. He stole one off of Thatcher, spat at WALTER’s show of respect after a close match, trying to blind Thatcher with a cigarette, and talked a world of shit while doing it. I want to see him punished. I want to see him beaten half to shit. I want to see him obliterated, and this is a match that gives me exactly what I wanted out of it.

So often I will complain about heels getting comeuppance in other companies, talking about them being more focused on delivering a Great Match than doing the most satisfying possible thing, and this is the exact sort of thing I want. It’s not exactly CM Punk vs. Jimmy Rave in terms of threading the needle and building a bridge between those things. but it’s the next best thing, choosing substance over style and being all the better for it. Relative to stories like this — dirtbag shitheels stepping a little too far over the line and paying for it — this is the modern ideal.

A perfect end to, secretly, one of the year’s best feuds, and while I can’t quite call it one of the few best matches of the year, it is one of my absolute favorites.

***1/4

WALTER vs. Bobby Gunns, WXW Fight Forever Tour – Frankfurt (9/30/2017)

After his monumental upset win over Thatcher on the first of the month, Gunns tries to end September by completing the set, while WALTER seeks to teach him a lesson for spending the last twenty nine days unable to stop talking that shit.

Yet again, despite not having the best opponent in the world, WALTER delivers.

It’s a classic kind of WALTER formula thing at this point.

He kicks and pummels the dog shit out of Gunns at the start, Gunns evades justice, and you get your ringpost chop. There’s a fun evolution of Bobby Gunns’ strategy from the Thatcher match, where he now works both arms on purpose, focusing on the left arm for his armbar, but also the right hand specifically to stop the chop and to make it harder to escape. Gunns’ work is again more functional than great, but WALTER covers the rest in the way you’d expect maybe the best wrestler in the world to. A bunch of great little sells whenever there’s even so much as a pause in the action, even when back on offense.

With his work on both arms, Gunns buys himself a longer stretch of time against WALTER than he could ever hope for otherwise, but without bombs to throw at the end, he’s a sitting duck in a way he wasn’t against a hurt Thatcher. WALTER pushes through it, has the size and power to get out of things in a number of ways, and eventually hurls Gunns on his brain with the Fire Thunder Driver for the win.

A lovely match, even if it’s not quite as great as Thatcher vs. Gunns.

Part of that is because you can only come out of nowhere once, and Bob Gunns now has to suffer the mortifying ordeal of being known. The other part is that Thatcher crafted a more subtle version of the same thing, with no interest in a longer finishing run or things like “near falls”. WALTER instead cares about those things and so he uses his hurt arms more and more. While that’s not the end of the world as a result of how great WALTER is at expressing the pain in his limbs (and hands especially, a take that I’m sure is very surprising to hear come from me), it is not an issue the Thatcher match ever really confronted. Likewise, it’s a little hard to believe Gunns hanging in there with WALTER late in a match, even with the hurt appendages, and that’s another issue that Timothy Thatcher solved with Bobby Gunns.

Saying all of that, this still rules a whole lot.

Gunns and WALTER’s version of the same story might not be as interesting or admirable as what Thatcher did with the kid, but it’s still a match that kicks a lot of ass and has a lot of function and utility. It’s not new for Bobby anymore, but it’s an establishing kind of a thing. He can do this to WALTER too, even if the loss of an element of surprise means he can’t win doing this, he does what matters. He hangs around, and maybe more importantly, gets the big statement after the match, when he responds to an extended hand with a middle finger.

Even in defeat, Bobby Gunns is an absolute mother fucker, flaunting that not a single lesson was learned and that, probably, not a single lesson can ever be learned.

While not as good as the match that put it all into motion, another deeply impressive success for this little program. More importantly, another resounding victory for WXW in both a year and an individual week full of them.

***

Timothy Thatcher vs. Bobby Gunns, WXW Fan Appreciation Night (9/1/2017)

Timothy Thatcher faces a somewhat promising young wrestler, and makes them not only look better than ever before, but shines them up in just the right way and just the right amount so that their victory over him by the end of the match feels, if not one hundred percent genuinely earned, than at least like something that makes a ton of sense within the confines of the match he’s created and the story he’s built.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

In the interest of total fairness, Bobby Gunns is not horrible here. He could be just about anybody, this is a match of Tim Thatcher’s specific like and making, but Gunns does alright. He’s not some outstanding athlete and he doesn’t do any one thing exceptionally well in a mechanical sense, but there is enough there to let other portions of the act do most of the work. He has a certain hateable presence that at least feels natural (it’s professional wrestling, what something feels like is more important than almost anything), and it feels innately good to see Thatcher punish him.

Fortunately, this match offers up plenty of that.

Thatcher spends much of the first half of this punishing and humiliating Gunns in very easy and casual ways. By this point in his career, on somewhat large stages for three years now, you know what it looks like when Thatcher, as a character, really respects an opponent, and this is not that. It’s a delightful departure from the norm, not exactly joking around and doing bits, but simply working lighter and with visibly less tension to him.

Gunns lucks out by hurting Thatcher’s left arm, seemingly on accident, and responds exactly like he ought to, as a character. As a petulant and arrogant little swine, he goes to it here and there, but this not really being his thing, he is not as good at it as Tim is. Thatcher’s selling keeps it present, but it exists as this anchor for Bobby Gunns to pull on whenever he’s in trouble, and that happens almost constantly. He always poses or does some bullshit that allows Thatcher to come back, and commence pummeling him around, and it’s a great way to change up a common type of match like this in a way that also manages to feel really natural.

Sadly, Thatcher fails to ever really shut down Bobby Gunns like he would against someone he takes seriously, and it allows Gunns to escape a sleeper at the end. He gets a Cross Armbreaker, and although it’s on the right arm and not the left, Thatcher sells the damage to the left enough to still make it work. He can’t reach over with the hurt arm or find a way out because of it, and shockingly, gives it up with a straight submission, before looking forlorn about the way things went.

Both a quality chunk of wrestling and a quality chunk of wrestling storytelling here, and a great start to secretly one of the more fun little feuds of WXW’s brief peak.

three boy

Bobby Gunns vs. David Starr, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2020 Night Two (3/7/2020)

This was for Gunns’ WXW Unified World Wrestling Title and David Starr’s career in WXW.

We need to talk about David Starr.

This is not a conversation I want to be having. I don’t enjoy this. I got back into independent wrestling in a “watch current things, not stuff from 1-2 years back” way in 2017 during the middle of the David Starr vs. WALTER rivalry, and I gravitated to him. A hard fighting technician, who could have these big dramatic hardcore matches, but who also seemed to value a sort of efficiency in his work? He was perfect. Somewhere in 2019, that changed, and I don’t know why. My instinct is to blame European wrestling as a concept, but he had been in Europe for years already. I’m not sure why it happened. I’m not sure when it happened. But it’s happened and I don’t think it’s something we can chalk up to just being the way one promotion is anymore. This is another thirty minute plus David Starr match. Say what you will about it being for the title and in a main event. Say what you will about it being David Starr’s final match in WXW. These are fine enough reasons to go big. Admittedly, I haven’t seen the Corvin match yet. There’s a Jeff Cobb match I need to see too. Thanks to a service industry job and the coronavirus, I’ll be watching both of those pretty soon. But it’s been over six months like this, I’m not sure David Starr is a great wrestler anymore.

Of course, he is very far from bad. That’s the frustrating thing. David Starr is no longer in the conversation for best wrestler in the world, but he has become the runaway pick for most frustrating wrestler in the world. The first third or so that’s all down on the ground and grappling focused, that’s great. It’s tremendous work. They slowly escalate from the ground up and it’s very well done. The fight outside isn’t ideal, as they repeat a few things, but there’s a spot off the Big Medium Ramp, and there’s some sort of cumulative selling. None of this is necessary at all though, as Starr misses a dive and careens into a row of chairs, hurting his left shoulder. The work on it is very good. Starr is a tremendous vanity seller and while Gunns is not a wrestler who’s lighting the world on fire, he’s again at his best when a match gives him something to focus entirely on. He still doesn’t always do this, and he still has some crummier moments, but the moments when he’s on are the best moments in his entire career.

David Starr then makes his comeback about twenty minutes in and the finishing run lasts for half the match.

Pro wrestling is weird. There aren’t really any rules. Things are bad, but someone comes long and does them well. You can pretty much do anything if you do it well. A finishing run that’s half the match isn’t the worst thing in the world. In the last twenty four hours, a review was posted of a match between El Satanico and Sangre Chicana where the final stretch was the last ten of twenty minutes. There’s classic All Japan title matches that do the same thing for longer. Very few things are bad categorically. It’s not that this can’t be good, or that matches this long can’t be great, but this wasn’t, and the long matches Starr’s been involved in really haven’t been. Here, he puts on one of the finer selling performances in recent memory. It’s nerd bait, it’s vain as hell, but him crumbling when he tried the cartwheel evasion was goddamned incredible. He sold it all match, he sold it well, and it mattered. It’s the sort of thing I get on other people for not doing. That alone can’t make the match. Bobby Gunns is very good in this match. Starr leads him well enough. They just don’t have forty minutes worth of material. By about twenty five or rhirty in, this is very firing. A WXW crowd is a lively crowd, and they are tired by the end. They’re engaged, they care about this match and David Starr, but enough is enough. It’s just not here tonight.

Any discussion of this match has to also include this one groanworthy segment. Bobby Gunns hesitates to cheat because he wants to win. David Starr is able to slip in the low blow and title shot, and then the arm trap Piledriver. It’s the exact sequence lifted from the famous Jordan Devlin match in OTT in October (the bad one of their two in 2019), and Bobby Gunns kicks out. As if one would now assume that he is tougher than Jordan Devlin as a result. A year ago, there was a similar sort of WXW/OTT mirror. I thought it worked incredibly well, as WALTER played on a recent history of backinf off and covering up against Devlin to lure Starr in. It was an ode to something everyone had seen, but didn’t come off cheap. This comes off incredibly cheap. There is no cause for it, and it just feels very silly and petty. From there, David Starr makes some NXT Faces and they have a re-set spot because him being sad is some just as devastating as all of that. Bobby Gunns retains with two consecutive Northern Lights Bombs. This feels less like the finish the match earned and more like the one that was on paper somewhere. I do not believe Bobby Gunns could defeat David Starr cleanly. He should not have. Even if David Starr is the best loser in wrestling of his generation, this one’s real demoralizing. Not a single big win in his entire WXW run is a little far. I’m all for the correct ending, and this wasn’t it. David Starr has his wins in OTT, but I really wish he got to win in the only promotion where he’s still booked like the babyface everyone in the crowd recognizes him as.

A tremendous performance coupled with a solid performance, in the middle of a bad match. Yes, it’s possible. It’s these incredibly well crafted gears that go into making a bullshit Mickey Moose watch. Great parts to a far worse whole. It feels weird to write and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it feels correct, and there are no real rules actually. David Starr is one of the most talented wrestlers in the world, and maybe he sucks. He is one of my favorite wrestlers and while he is always good, I do not like his matches anymore. He is one of the smartest wrestlers in the world and is right on just about every major social issue confronting our world right now, but he hasn’t had more than a handful of great matches in the last six to nine months. I don’t know what to say. For someone who is so anti-WWE to the extent that if it’s a work, it’s a Brian Pillman level super work, he sure wrestles a whole lot like a bad NXT main eventer. It’s very frustrating and confusing. Matches like this do not help. A great individual performance in a bad match still ultimately results in a bad match. A great individual performance in a not-great match still doesn’t produce something great. In some ways, it’s more frustrating than actually being bad. I could handle that better, it’s a sort of absolute thing that sets in concrete. WALTER is The Coward now, and he is bad, because he works for a bad company that does not understand exactly why he became such a star. It sucks, but I can get it. There’s no wiggle room. David Starr is nothing but wiggle room, maybes, and meaninglessly great individual performances. At some point, all the great little moments in bad matches stop being a persuasive argument when that’s all the argument there is. At some point, when this sort of a match is all you have, the problem isn’t a structural one, I don’t think. He’s the worst great wrestler in the world.

Alternately, shifting his entire approach to be a more selfish one — focusing more on how great he individually looks in these big epics moreso than how the match as a whole comes off, the end result being talking more about great David Starr performances than great David Starr matches –as a reflection of his OTT heel character as a phony populist pretending to be about the greater good but actually only ever being out for himself (genuinely terrible character, a perversion of the things people actually love him for, and borderline irresponsible by OTT in a time like this) could be one of the greatest works in history. Galaxy brain level stuff. Truly admirable. No, I have not broken self isolation in five days. why do you ask?

It wouldn’t suddenly make this match good or fix any of the many other similar eggs that Starr’s laid in the last six months, but I would at least respect something that courageous and that evil. The only way to defeat Shawn Michaels is to become Shawn Michaels.

**1/2

Special credit to the the crowd chanting “INDEPENDENT” and “BERNIE SANDERS” in support of David Starr during his farewell speech, but who still showed up here. It’s a very weird thing. There is no ethical consumption of major European wrestling, besides OTT. You can buy a ticket here to see Starr or to see Thatcher’s farewell or greats like Kingston and Daniel Makabe, but it all feels a little hollow to be here in this venue and to chant that. It’s 2020, and you know who signs the checks. The moment this stipulation was made, you all knew. You knew whose thumb was on the scale, forcing things to that way. Implicit force isn’t explicit force, there was no mandate, but soft power is still power. WXW is what it is. Look the thing in its eye and call it what it is. You can’t have it both ways. David Starr might not be a great wrestler anymore, but at least he understands that.

Bobby Gunns vs. Timothy Thatcher, WXW WTTL 2019 Night Two (10/5/2019)

Tim’s house/in the middle of our street

This was for Gunns’ WXW World Unified Wrestling Title, a title shot that Thatcher earned by winning the Shortcut to the Top.

Since I last watched WXW, Bobby Gunns has once again become reviled. Not for any real reason, but it’s more of the company and Bobby embracing what happens to all but a few long reigning champions in wrestling history. Commentary does a perfect job of laying this out as both men come to the ring, contrasting the “Thatcher Wonderland” song with the endless “GUNNS, BOBBY GUNNS” chants that either elevated or ruined his big title match the previous year at Tag League against Ilja Dragunov (the answer is actually both, somehow). Not a flashy story, but a simple and good one. They have history too, as Gunns’ rise up the card in 2017 saw him put a cigarette out on Tim’s eye, turning him into Broken Thatcher birefly, before scoring an upset win over Tim.

This is a classical European style main event title match, which is to say it’s needlessly half an hour long and there’s just enough stuff in there for me to call it borderline great but ultimately settle on it just being very good, or rather, to shrug my shoulders and mostly agree if someone else did. It’s fine. There’s no reason this had to go as long as it did, when they didn’t have thirty minutes of compelling work to do. They had fifteen for sure, maybe twenty. Definitely not half an hour worth of stuff. The story is that Gunns is talented and actually p good on the mat, but not as good as Thatcher, definitely not as tough, and makes dumb cocky mistakes that hurt him. It’s a good story that’s told fairly well, but it’s one they just tell for too long. Thatcher’s nose is broken open a third of the way through the match, following an opening struggle that could have been condensed down to half its length. ‘Thatcher is better on the mat than [x]’ isn’t something you have to spend a while on, you know? It’s an assumed thing at this point. The blood is nice though and it provides an escape hatch at least.

It’s an escape hatch that’s forgotten about though. The Bobby Gunns control segment feels a generation long. He’s not nearly as good of a striker as he is on the mat, and the nose torture is less a central focus of his work here and more a thing that he gradually forgets about. Similarly, he occasionally works on the left arm of Thatcher, and that never comes what it could be either. Tim handles it well in the moment but it doesn’t matter at the end, and it’s just one of many things Gunn does just to fill space. Thatcher’s also somewhat out of his element as a fired up babyface on the comeback, and this match never really got me back into it. Tim is one of the best wrestlers of the last decade, he has so many strong points, but this isn’t one of them. I’m not a “Thatcher doesn’t show emotion” kind of guy, but it doesn’t translate all that well here. Those moments are nice, but they don’t shorten the match up or do anything to solve the issues here. Thatcher doggedly sticks to a Rear Naked Choke in the closing moments before he finally gets the tap out with it. “30 minute title epic where he’s a bloodied babyface making a hard comeback” isn’t the best use of Thatcher, although if Bobby Gunns was more than passable, it may have succeeded anyways. It came close enough without it. But in a match with a result that should have left me elated, I was merely happy that it was finally over.

Timothy Thatcher finally winning another top title, two and a half years after losing his last one, should have resulted in something more than just a really nice moment. Everybody else seems to have loved it so it’s hard to deny that the match was a creative success, even if it’s hard to watch this and call it an artistic one.

**3/4