The 2017 CWF Rumble, CWF-MA CWF Rumble (10/14/2017)

In this specific Rumble, unlike virtually every other Rumble ever, Trevor Lee’s CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title was on the line, in addition to him starting at #1.

What really works about this — rather than Lee acting as an overconfident champion and simply going wire to wire to prove a point — is that it happens through the orders of Golden Ticket holder Roy Wilkins, forcing Trevor into this spot.

It is not the 2016 CWF Rumble.

That match, I thought, was the best match of its kind anywhere in professional wrestling all decade.

A year prior, this match was immaculately constructed, and filled up with enough talent to carry the more ambitious booking sections of the match, while expertly utilizing its weirder and less experienced acts early on. The problem that this match has, especially in the early and middle sections, is that they cross over a line and now there are just too many inexperienced, weird, or novelty local nostalgia act wrestlers for this to truly be a great match. It is a balancing act with guys like that, and while a fifth or a sixth of the field being made up of guys like that is alright, a third or nearly half of the field being essentially warm bodies is not.

What works for this though is that it is a one man show done by one of, I don’t know, the ten to twenty best wrestlers in the entire world.

Relative to that sort of a thing in other Rumbles, it is not 1992 and it is not 2004, but it is a truly spectacular Trevor Lee performance, and especially in the last quarter or so of this thing, an outstanding story that CWF Mid-Atlantic crafts around him.

Trevor Lee going from wire to wire is a lovely story and one that CWF gets as much out of as possible, given how few really believable other winners this match has to offer up (count them on one hand, you’ll have enough fingers left over to carry the groceries into the house). Ric Converse is great at the start against him before the match loses its way, Nick Richards is a fun oddity once again, and in the last third, they unload all they’ve got with guys like Arik Royal, Chet Sterling, Roy Wilkins, Brad Attitude, and Cain Justice. Trevor Lee is especially great throughout, not only hitting all the old Rumble iron man bits by hanging on the ropes and putting on an exhaustion selling clinic, but also innovating in fun new ways, such as catching his feet on the ring frame underneath the apron.

The real genius of the thing comes once all thirty are in, with one of the great booking swerves of the year and decade. Roy Wilkins, using the Golden Ticket to come in at #30, have his stablemates all come in in the last five, and making Trevor Lee start at #1, enters with the brass knuckles around his hand, only for Lee to duck and immediately throw him out. It’s not only a beautiful piece of comeuppance for maybe CWF’s single most despicable antagonist, but a lovely piece of smaller scale booking that throws the rest of the match into doubt by removing what felt like the match’s natural final boss.

Wilkins knocks Trevor out and busts him open (although not as much as anyone would hope for) with brass knuckles right after, and the match again does as good of a job as it possibly could at creating doubt.

Following a Brad Attitude and Chet Sterling skirmish once the final four hits, young shit kicker Cain Justice is left against Trevor Lee, and it turns into this kind of match unto itself, one of CWF’s most compelling of the year. Justice still has so much to learn but between Trevor Lee’s exhaustion and the damage of the brass knuckles, there’s that all-powerful “well, maybe” thrown in there that makes every near elimination just that much more believable. Doubly so when Cain begins to zero in on Trevor Lee’s left arm, adapting his strengths to the match in a way that makes it all the more believable, even if, deep down, we know what’s really going to happen.

Trevor stomps him down onto the apron and off, falling off a second after Cain Justice, to get again keep a hold on the title. It’s not quite as impressive a feat as it ought to feel like as a result of a weaker field, but the king does stay the king, and it’s still somewhere among the year’s more impressive performances.

If decidedly not a great match, another outstanding feat of booking from CWF Mid Atlantic, and yet another unbelievable performance out of Trevor Lee.

Trevor Lee vs. Arik Royal, CWF-MA For The Record (9/9/2017)

This was for Lee’s CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

As opposed to their first meeting during Lee’s reign eleven months prior, this has a little more behind it, as if Trevor Lee can beat Royal this time, he’ll break Royal’s record to become the longest reigning Mid Atlantic Champion ever, on top of already being pretty universally recognized by this point as the best. You so rarely, in sports, get to see a situation like this, and it’s what makes professional wrestling so cool when taken seriously. I’m writing this at the end of October 2022, and you won’t get to see Kareem try and stop LeBron from getting the scoring record and making him second place. Ray Allen and Reggie Miller didn’t get the chance to try and stop Steph Curry a year ago from the three point record. However, in professional wrestling, you get things like this. There’s a higher profile one to come in Japan in 2018, there’s been one this decade already, but it is a rare thing this match gets to do.

What we have is not just a title match itself, but one side fighting to make history and the other side fighting to preserve their place in it. Forget just some great professional wrestling storytelling, this is some great pure sports nonsense, the reason you script this shit out to begin with.

I don’t love this match the way that I loved their 2016 match.

To a large degree, that is because this feels like a kind of obvious thing and a retread on top of that. Arik Royal never feels like he has a chance of dethroning Trevor in the way that he did, even briefly, eleven months earlier. The obvious outcome impacts the story of the match in a sense too, as they offer up something less interesting than “Arik Royal has owned Trevor Lee for years”, with Trevor now having gotten past Royal definitively nearly a year before that, with Royal now desperate and reliant on nonsense. This is not an insult to this match so much as it is a complement to the story CWF spent years telling and that got blown off — maybe eleven months too early in retrospect, as “guy beats former Ace who had his number in the past” and “guy sets title reign length record against former Ace” feel like stories that could have dovetailed perfectly together into one match — in something close to the most perfect version of this the year before.

The fun part of that though is that “Arik Royal, on the verge of losing his place in history, leans entirely into cheating, interference, and bullshit” is still really really fun.

Between the interference of both All Stars managers and Roy Wilkins. Snooty Foxxx on the other end to remove Wilkins, and multiple referee bumps, there is some really well orchestrated and plotted out nonsense in this match. Trevor Lee blinded by powder to the eyes, reaching blindly, snapping the referee’s fingers, and accidentally robbing Royal of a win when he has a blinded Trevor Lee down for a ten count only for the referee to not be able to count, is some TREMENDOUS bullshit. Likewise, the All Star’s main manager, Coach, spending the match sneaking around brass knuckles, only for the end of the thing to be Royal getting them himself, only for Trevor to take him down and Royal never being able to actually use them himself, that is some outstanding nonsense.

So often in CWF Mid Atlantic, I find myself thinking a thing goes a step too far or not far enough in situations like this, but here and now — nevermind if I thought they should have used this match for this or not — I think they got the balancing act totally and completely correct.

Trevor stops Royal from using the brass knuckles, and levels up his usual STF into a Regal Stretch to not only beat Royal like he did eleven months prior, but to force a submission. It feels like how a match with these stakes ought to end, not on a cradle like the year before (one expertly turned into a hot nearfall in this match, to their credit), but now with a clear and undeniable submission. Trevor survives and overcomes all of it, and at the end, Royal vocally and physically gives up his place in history with his surrender to the champion.

Not all it could be, not all that it was the year prior, but still a lovely little chunk of professional wrestling.

***

Trevor Lee vs. Nick Richards, CWF-MA Absolute Justice 2017 (6/24/2017)

This was a No Holds Barred match for Lee’s CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

I wish this was better.

It’s still a great match.

For anyone who is new here, I have written A WHOLE LOT about why I love Nick Richards. He is a special sort of a dirtbag, the kind who leaps off of the page and feels realer than most gestures toward this idea in wrestling history. I can very easily see him being the reason that the head chef of a professional kitchen or the manager of the shop has to hang up a sign saying “DO NOT THROW KNIVES”. It is not a stretch to imagine him sleeping on an uncovered mattress and making all of his food off of a hot plate that is situated on a hardwood floor because he doesn’t have a table or a counter in his apartment.

He’s one of my favorites, and I am not interested in skill or talent or achievement. Sometimes you just connect with someone innately and just like them, and I just like Nick Richards a whole lot.

This is the match in which that run comes to an end, as all of that dirtbag sensibility comes to a head, as he face the Ace of the company in what ought to feel like, honestly, a much bigger match than it does.

In other promotions, the same sort of a match is an arguable best match in the history of the company.

However, this is CWF Mid Atlantic, and in this promotion, it is translated into a half hour Trevor Lee epic, the sort of inflexibility in a match like this that both reveals every weakness inherent in the promotion, and both why this little few year run of greatness never resulted in more than this, and why Trevor Lee’s title run is simply a really good championship reign and not one of the best ever.

That isn’t to say this isn’t bad. Again, it’s a great match.

Nick Richard immediately going for it, failing, and then spending the next half hour against the wall because he immediately betrayed his lack of confidence against one of the best wrestlers in the world? That’s fantastic. Nick Richards, in the aftermath of having given that up in a gigantic miscue, going more into brawling and abandoning his progress in the last year in a miniature shame spiral that allows Trevor Lee to have a chance, whereas he honestly might have lost had Nick stayed the course like he did against Arik Royal in 2016? That’s also some really great stuff.

For the most part though, it is an overly drawn out version of a match that, at half the length, would have likely been one of the year’s most memorable and interesting matches — and had CWF Mid Atlantic had the guts to see the interesting way out of their conundrum (rather than Trevor never losing the title and leaving the territory without ever doing a real job and passing the torch to anybody), could have become one of the more fascinating matches of the entire year — it is instead just another Trevor Lee defense, and for the first time, it is one in which it doesn’t feel quite as great to see him succeed in.

Mechanically, it is as fine as always. The selling is good. The offense looks and sounds remarkable. They manage a few really spectacular nearfalls. It’s just never quite what it feels like a CWF match with this build and such an interesting story ought to be.

Trevor Lee keeps his title yet again with an especially high angle STF.

I wish this was better, but still, it’s a great and real interesting match. Not only because it’s a fun little story told, but because for the first time, the holes in this entire CWF Mid Atlantic Trevor Lee reign begin to show themselves.

***

Trevor Lee vs. Alex Daniels, CWF-MA 80s Night (4/29/2017)

This was for Lee’s CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

In as much as so many of Trevor Lee’s CWF title matches, or the thing as a whole, reminds me of a golden era ROH World Title reign, the match that this one in particular brings to mind is Bryan Danielson vs. Jimmy Rave from the 4TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW (2/25/2006). It’s one of my favorite matches ever (I am not saying it’s one of the best matches ever, it is probably only a top ten match of this reign, but I just really connect to it), and one of my favorite stories ever told. A dirtbag playing a long con game against the best wrestler around, but being just innately talented enough to frustrate him beyond this, leading to a kind of accidental legitimization as a result of how far he gets. If anyone ever paid me to review it or other Rave matches like that, I might wind up hitting two or three thousand words.

So, about this match.

Alex Daniels is a real motherfucker.

He’s not Jimmy Rave. Few are. I think 2005-7 Jimmy Rave is one of the greatest heels of all time, I’d put him against anyone. He’s the only wrestler I’ve ever SPECIFICALLY bought a ticket to see get beaten up. Rest in peace. Anyways, Alex Daniels is a phenomenal little dirtbag. He’s got this sort of Ben Mendelsohn thing going on. Curly hair, beady eyes, sad face, but one that effortlessly portrays a kind of scumminess and low down villainy within. He is a fantastic shitheel and had he kept at it — especially at this time in the history of independent wrestling — probably could have made a whole lot of money. While that doesn’t happen, he is one of the best possible people who could have been cast in this specific role, as the Jimmy Rave to Trevor Lee’s Mid Atlantic Bryan Danielson.

It’s not EXACTLY the same.

This being Daniels’ second ever match in the territory, they don’t quite have the same history to play on and Daniels has no real offense that the CWF faithful have seen end a match thus making it harder to gain real believable nearfalls outside of the value of cool moves and well built up close counts, the exact character quirks of our old style dirtbag shitheel villain aren’t quite as established, he is not as experienced of a wrestler, and neither man is quite as great as the wrestlers in the match that this reminds me the most of.

All that being said, they mostly nail it.

Daniels is a coward who run and hides, and who is incredibly gifted at portraying such a wrestler in a believable way (it’s all small stuff, snarls and eye motions, but Daniels genuinely feels like he actually is this sort of a cagey menace rather than someone who is merely portraying a wrestling heel), but he is very specifically a coward until he isn’t. He doesn’t cheat to take over. After nearly a quarter of the match stalling and getting his ass kicked, he finally gets into the exact positions he either wants to be, or just so happens to be, where he can take control. The beauty of the thing is that it is never made specifically clear if he had a specific plan, a general idea, or if it’s just pure luck and circumstance, and that the match makes zero attempt to spell that out for anybody.

When Alex Daniels is in control, the same largely holds true. His offense is basic and mean. Not mechanically brilliant, but the exact level it needs to be at for this match to succeed. More important is what he chooses to do, and it’s here where they really nail it. When pushed, Daniels is capable of some real spectacular stuff, but it’s either something he breaks out to stem the tide when the better wrestler begins to naturally fight back, or some attempt to show off. The former works (until it doesn’t), and the latter never does.

On the other side of the match, Trevor turns in my favorite performance of his all year to this point. In a match like this, what does the most for Daniels and for the match as a whole is not for Trevor to sell danger and that he’s met his equal or something quite so unbelievable (I specifically did not review the Chip Day match the month before for a reason), but instead that this little asshole is the most annoying man at the world, and that he is slowly getting kind of annoyed with himself for Daniels lasting this long and getting this far. Trevor’s barely patient destruction of Daniels in the first third and his more frantic attack in the back third make this approach real clear, and it’s a blast.

The real accomplishment of the match is the last third of the thing, which in spite of everything working against it covered previously, is one of my favorite Trevor Lee finishing runs of the entire title reign.

Daniels is an irritant more than a threat, but inch by inch and minute by minute, there’s a Hey, Maybe that creeps further and further in there. When he’s repeatedly able to fight off the STF and when he grabs this tight flash cradle, somehow against all odds, it is genuinely a terrific nearfall, the kind that creeps up on you in the moment. Heart in your throat for half a second, wondering after the fact why you thought that was it, before realizing minutes later that the why is less important than the fact of the thing itself.

Alex Daniels’ one nearfall is all he’s really got though. Unlike Jimmy Rave, he doesn’t quite have the arsenal yet to push it beyond where luck, persistence, and a little skill has gotten him. Trevor Lee reads him completely correctly, and shows some persistence of his own by repeatedly getting after the STF after Daniels reacted so desperately and violently when he first tried to go there.

To make it as satisfying as possible, Trevor slaps the shit out of Daniels to knock him down while he’s got a hold of the leg, finally laying in the nasty beating that so much of this match has been building up to, before snatching on the STF finally for the win. Daniels gains something, to be sure, but the match is mostly something much simpler than a simple elevation in defeat and that Trevor’s reign has been missing for a few months. Some miserable little bastard steps up and tries to do some crimes, only for Trevor to stop him, and send him scurrying back out of town (in under half an hour too!).

In the place of the hundred other epics in this title reign, this one just feels like some good ass pro wrestling, and I love it for that reason.

A wonderful match, and my favorite of all the Trevor Lee CWF matches so far in 2017.

***1/4

Trevor Lee vs. Smith Garrett vs. Chip Day vs. Cain Justice vs. Aric Andrews vs. Otto Schwanz, CWF-MA End of an Era 2017 (2/25/2017)

This was an elimination match for Lee’s CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

It’s great.

***1/4

Trevor Lee vs. Brad Attitude, CWF-MA Battlecade X7 (12/30/2016)

This was for Trevor Lee’s Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title, with a cornucopia of tremendous bullshit rules in the challenger’s advantage, such as a firm 30:00 time limit that would give Attitude the title if hit, a title loss on disqualification, and lastly, with the challenger being unable to be disqualified.

It is a tremendous piece of bullshit and very possibly the year’s best display of such.

Credit to CWF booking first and foremost.

That’s not to say Brad Attitude isn’t good. He’s fine here. He hits hard and he’s an absolutely miserable mother fucker at all times, a real contemptable piece of garbage. If the central duty of a heel like this is to make me want to see him get his ass kicked and lose, there are few greater heel performances in 2016 than Attitude in this match.

It is however to say that, because of all the little things in and around this match and all of the many ideas put forward about what this is and what it can be, it is something greater than simply the sum of its parts.

From the start, this match is about the bullshit. Attitude trying to bait Trevor into simple revenge with the beer bottle, trying to set up little spots where he could give into anger and use a chair or a trash can or things of that nature. The match also excels in its construction in later segments, in which Attitude manipulates multiple referee bumps, uses the weapons he’s allowed to use, but always in ways that are real despicable. It’s the sort of a heel performance, in terms of action, that I often ascribe to 2000s Jimmy Rave in which, save maybe one or two pieces of offense, nothing that Attitude does is likeable or cool at all. Trevor doesn’t bleed like anyone would really want when he tries it, but each transition to that attempt is scummy as hell, denying the crowd even the thrill of something all that impressive happening, with Brad Attitude striking in desperation as well.

Trevor Lee’s comebacks, likewise, strike that perfect balance between mechanical genius and incredibly smart and inventive storytelling. He’s frantic because of the time, but always trying to walk this tightrope in between winning and making this son of a bitch pay. Trevor tries to turn weapons against him whenever possible and to get as much out of punishing Brad Attitude as humanly possible.

Best of all in this regard, the match hits a real classic WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? bit, in which Lee stopped Attitude from using the bottle himself, and stomped his hand on the bottle on the mat, adding in the lizard brain thrill of broken glass to my hand attack brain fetish as well in one of my favorite spots of all time.

It’s all quite beautiful, and if not as filthy, bloody, and grimy as I would like a match with this level of bullshit and character and build up to be, it’s still such an impressive match for how much it does with what it has to work with. Trevor Lee vs. Brad Attitude is not something you’d pick out ahead of time as being one of the best matches of 2016, and yet through six months of careful work, nearly the exact correct amount of skullduggery and classical pro wrestling bullshit, they create something out of practically nothing.

The only real problem comes at the very end.

With both referees in the house knocked out during the match, a referee who Brad Attitude had previously assaulted returns and refuses to count his pin garnered off of pure skullduggery. He then looks the other way when Trevor Lee gets revenge for Absolute Justice six months prior by breaking a glass bottle on Attitude’s head for the win. The revenge spot itself is perfect, the absolute best possible end to the feud. However, the way the rules are set up makes it feel weird, with Lee circumventing the nonsense rather then completely overcoming it, only saved in some part because it’s Attitude who caused both of those prior referee bumps and who’s suffering the consequences of all his prior actions at once.

Still, I’d sort of just prefer that Trevor Lee is the one who gets his ass with the beer bottle straight up. I don’t know if there was a better way to do it, 99% of the match still worked out so much better than it should have, but the finish just feels off in a way that no other piece of the match does.

For the most part though, another major storytelling victory for CWF Mid-Atlantic, and another really spectacularly great main event that I cannot imagine working half as well anywhere else. CWF has had a few better matches, but I struggle to think of a more purely impressive achievement than this.

***1/2

Trevor Lee vs. Arik Royal, CWF-MA CWF Rumble 2016 (10/1/2016)

This was for Lee’s Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

First, I will give you The Damn Veggies.

As with just about every Trevor Lee CWF Mid Atlantic Heavyweight title match, save the real cream of the crop best match of the year contenders, it is too long at nearly half an hour. That is more a little too long than so long that it ruins anything, it is a minor complaint, but it is the major one here that hurts them. Too many things that don’t manner, a solid ten minutes of work here that could be totally removed to the benefit of the match.

I say that specifically because, really, this match is pretty god damned great.

Speaking in a purely mechanical sense, this is a delight. Arik Royal is a spectacular bully and Trevor Lee is one of the most purely likeable wrestlers in the country. He bumps huge, sells remarkably well, and has that sort of special quality to his comebacks that I often find hard to put into words. I naturally want to see him succeed, not just because he’s so sympathetic in those latter sections, but because he kicks so much ass and in such a believable way in the former. Everyone hits hard, just about everything they try in a pure nuts and bolts way works, and it’s exactly great enough to yet again allow the strengths of the company to really shine through.

The big thing here is that, once more, the CWF Mid Atlantic long term storytelling lands another major victory.

Arik Royal has owned Trevor Lee for the last three years, beginning with Trevor Lee’s first failed challenge to The Ace when he was champion, and going through different tournament finals, title challenges, and tag team matches. Royal spends the match not as yet another would-be Trevor Lee challenger with this idea in their head of how to solve the puzzle, but as someone who knows he can do it, not just because he’s done it before, but because he’s done it so many times before.

It’s a fascinating piece of new ground for a Trevor Lee title defense, in no small part because it also informs the way that the match unfolds in a purely mechanical level. Someone trying to grind out and/or bomb out Trevor Lee isn’t anything all that new following the Cedric Alexander and the John Skyler challenges, but both are just different enough from what Arik Royal does for this to work. The difference between both and this is that there’s neither stalling nor subterfuge on display. Royal rushes him and spends some 75% or more of the match in control. The result of that change from the norm is not only the simple thrill of doing something new, but the peril that it feels like Our Hero is in when he’s unable to really shut down Royal or deal with him in any real way.

Beautifully, it’s not for lack of trying.

Repeatedly throughout the match, Trevor Lee makes his best attempt to grab his safety blanket and go to the arm. He’s stopped once, cut off a few more times after a brief attack or two, and it’s another major difference between this and just about every other Trevor Lee title defense to this point. Trevor has his pockets of offense, of course, he’s not eaten alive and he has wonderful comebacks like always, but this is such an interesting match because he clearly tries something and is completely stifled every time he attempts it.

The greatest little CWF Booking wrinkle of all comes at the very end, in which Trevor never really gets to have a proper Trevor match and feels like he’s once again being slowly picked apart and destroyed by the one guy who has his number, only to grab it out of thin air. One regular strength cradle would have been interesting enough, Trevor finally at a loss after eight months, only to reach into the aether and grab something. The genius comes not in the act itself, but the font in which it’s written, using the samme exact kind of cradle that Royal used to beat him the first time out.

Arguably, it’s a little cutesy, but in a promotion like this and with wrestlers like this, I buy it. Arik Royal has always seemed like the sort of hyper jock who often doesn’t consider why or how, but just powers through and wins. Trevor Lee has always seemed like his counter, obsessed with the why and how, using it here to finally win when he had no other clear path to do so.

Truly, another wonderful piece of storytelling from CWF Mid Atlantic, capping off one of its more purely interesting matches of the year.

***1/4

Trevor Lee vs. John Skyler, CWF-MA Back To School Bash (8/27/2016)

This was for Lee’s Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

It’s a different environment and feeling for this show, coming from a school gymnasium instead of the Mid Atlantic Sportatorium. It’s a much larger venue with the fans far more spread out and less crammed together, and while I’m sure they made more money on a show like this maybe (it also might be a charity thing, I don’t know entirely), the energy is at a lower level than you might get on a “regular” CWF Mid Atlantic show, especially for a match like this.

Still, it works.

Force of talent and all of that.

Once again in one of these big Trevor Lee title matches, there is a big story to tell, and it’s an interesting one.

John Skyler somewhat adapts Cedric Alexander’s plan from June of trying to extend Trevor, instead of letting Trevor extend him. However, his plan is a little different in that he doesn’t use this approach to exhaust Trevor and then bomb him out, but instead to frustrate him and try and take Trevor Lee’s wind away.

It’s not a winning strategy, but I love the different approaches people are taking. As a result of many different things, this didn’t quite meet the obvious aims for this reign to be up there with the great independent wrestling prestige reigns like Joe or Danielson or McGuinness, but I love the effort. A significant part of what made those so special, especially Samoa Joe’s as he really focused on this aspect, is the idea that the champion is this puzzle to be solved, months and years of different challengers trying different approaches. Not all of them worked, some of them worked up until the point where Joe would force them out of it (which added this other tremendous wrinkle, the challenger having to also avoid being punched out of their strategy), but it gave these wrestling matches an authentic sports feel where so much other wrestling lacked that.

The match is a little long (although by CWF standards, thirty minutes isn’t the end of the world), I’m not sure if they got as much out of this story as they possibly could have, and the crowd is maybe not the best possible crowd for anything more layered like this, but it works.

Early stages with Skyler bailing out whenever Trevor gets a major advantage like a snap of the ankle or a real big hold on an arm is all tremendous, and they’re really really good at manufacturing a feeling like Skyler is in over his head until he finally finds his opening. The attack on the body is good, and Trevor’s occasional attacks on the arm are a nice wrinkle to add in. Trevor’s selling of the body and Skyler’s attempts at stealing his wind are not the best and Skyler’s selling of the arm could have been much better, but neither was bad enough to really hurt the match. In general, there’s a lot here and I think they managed to mine a lot here, even if it wasn’t all gold.

Specifically, the back third of the match does a tremendous job in shifting the story to being about how Skyler’s overplayed his hand. Lacking the late match arsenal to make the most of his plan and finish Trevor and lacking the ingenuity to find something more, he repeats himself. Trevor can go to the arm with more and more success, and when Skyler retreads old ground with the repetition of the slingshot spear, Trevor ducks it the second time. A block of Trevor’s trusty STF goes into a new STF/Border City Stretch combination, and the bad arm makes all the difference.

Not the tightest narrative in the world, but a fun and engaging story with a few neat and less expected turns in the back half.

As is often the case with these Trevor CWF title matches, there is more ambition than anything else. As is often also the case with these matches, just enough of their grand plans and designs go right so that I cannot help but find that ambition charming.

***

Trevor Lee vs. Andrew Everett, CWF-MA Absolute Justice 2016 (6/18/2016)

This was for Lee’s Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

Following the previous match covered on this show, CWF arguably tops even that, delivering not only what I feel is the best title match in company history, but also one of the better overall productions in company history.

Over the course of CWF Mid Atlantic’s 2016-2017 peak, you have a few real high points, and this is one of them. As a show, Absolute Justice 2016 has maybe my two favorite matches the company ever put out, but there are also entire other shows that are great. The end-of-the-year Battlecade in 2016 for example, represents the artistic peak of the company to me. Not just one exceptional match, but many of them, organized in a fashion that feels like an accomplishment for the entire roster and not just two wrestlers. There are a handful of booking masterpieces also to come in the next eighteen months or so that are unbelievably impressive. So, there are these other high points.

However, as a whole, in terms of one match or segment, this is the best individual thing that CWF Mid-Atlantic ever produced.

A common criticism of Trevor Lee title matches that you’ll find on this site is that they’re too ambitious. Sometimes that means they go for too many things, but for the most part, it just comes down to length. There’s no reason for him to take a kid like Jessie Adler to forty five minutes or even to go fifty-five with Cedric Alexander. These matches often overreach, be it slightly or wildly, and despite incredible performances from Trevor Lee in them, they never come together as great matches. The pro wrestling equivalent of a basketball player dropping 45 in a loss or a running back getting 200+ yards in a loss. Impressive, but ultimately meaningless.

This is not exactly the opposite of that, it’s still a thirty-nine minute match, but it is the closest Trevor Lee ever came to my knowledge of pulling it all together.

A long match, but one that mostly earns that, and that attains a certain feeling by the time it’s over.

Genuinely, something special.

As always with CWF Mid-Atlantic, a good part of that is because of how well they set up matches like these and the stories involved in them. Not so much in a mechanical sense, although there’s some overlap there, but in the set up for the match. Obviously, there’s a lot of history here, with Trevor at one point being jealous of Everett, then becoming friends again once nobody would boo Trevor anymore. They come to this fight not with any one antagonist, but with a string of recent tag team miscommunications and rising tempers, necessitating a rematch of what was, at one point, the company’s most celebrated match. Trevor’s criticized Everett for missing some shows recently for higher profile bookings while Trevor’s made it a priority to try and do everything (despite this behavior having arguably contributed to Everett’s injuries in the past), while Everett has started to resent Lee starting to act above him. Nobody is completely right and nobody is completely wrong, but it’s the sort of thing that just has to happen, and that’s one of the best builds that there is.

The match itself is less the story of any one point of attack, so much as it is that easy and wonderful story of old friends starting quietly annoyed with each other, and then growing from there. At some point, impossible to really pinpoint (a positive, in this case), a dam breaks and the match becomes pettier and meaner.

It’s a beautiful sort of match, helped significantly by how well it’s assembled and performed.

Mechanically, it’s as great as you’d expect, and then a little more. Both wrestlers are tremendous at slowly building the pace, and outside of a few moments of repetition from Everett, they’re really good at escalating their offense as well. Teases and payoffs, spacing their biggest offense out for (mostly) the best possible nearfalls. There are still maybe three to five more minutes here than are absolutely necessary, but it’s a textbook example of how something like this ought to be both assembled and performed.

In a larger sense, Trevor Lee takes a step here that his other matches before and after for this title have often lacked, which is that it’s not just this solo act. Trevor works the left arm and hand of Everett a few times, but given how Everett is, he never works it so much that it necessitates a larger selling performance. Obviously, this could have been even greater had Everett been better there, but Lee adapts to his opponent in a way that genuinely helps the match. Most impressive is the way that Lee, in a change from how people often do this, targets the left hand when he’s making a show of punishing Everett on the ground. Given that that segment transitions into trading chops as a show of frustration and anger, it’s a smart little thing that I found real impressive, doing something both cool and functional but also avoiding the often unforced error that tends to accompany things like that.

Both Lee and Everett walk a tightrope perfectly here in how they react to each other as well, getting all of the little character touches even more correct than larger mechanical ones. Nobody is the true blue babyface, but between Lee’s earned confidence and Everett’s understandable resentment of this given their CWF history, it would be easy for that to shift, and it never does. Lee eventually moves into more of a position of dominance, punishing Everett on the ground at a few key points, but Everett is mean enough in control and bitter-seeming enough in early moments that it all has a way of washing out.

Again, Trevor Lee is so impressive here in a small moment, pulling off one of the only good “look at your hands” spots of the decade after inadvertently cracking Everett’s face open outside, even as slightly as he did and briefly going after it. The trick is moderation, of course, not dwelling on it to an extent that it becomes this act of pantomime. A look at his hands, realizing how far this has gone, and shaking it off before going to something else. In that moment, it feels like a genuine reaction, and that makes all the difference.

Following the first half or so (as said moment may indicate), the match transforms into being something far more frantic and dirty, if more in tone than tactic.

Everett is finally able to crowd Trevor in the closing moments. After being the first man in CWF to survive Trevor Lee’s airtight STF, Everett’s flying finally begins to work. It’s a lovely thing that goes understated on commentary because of how great this is organically, Everett getting further than anyone else as a result of simply approaching Trevor like he always would, instead of getting in his own head like everyone else does. Everett falls short with two 630s in a row but when Trevor slumps over motionless after the second kick out, Everett finally seems to regain a conscience and gives pause.

Trevor leaps on him as soon as he seems to regain his bearings. Everett fights off the STF once, and then gets his leg free again, but Trevor doesn’t let go. Having been closer to a loss than ever as champion, Lee hangs on in a Bulldog Choke and Everett taps out.

Beautifully, it’s hard to say why specifically Trevor won. You can put it down to Everett coming to his sense at the worst possible time. You can put it down to Trevor having more guts and grit to him. Put it on Trevor learning the value of going all the way after wavering himself early on and almost losing for it, opting instead for a full-measure with his back to the wall. You can probably watch it yourself (either again or for the first time), and maybe come up with another angle that I didn’t think of. I love that. It works for a million reasons, one of those “the best matches are about something and the real special ones are about everything” sorts of things that always wind up standing the test of time.

That’s what this match does.

Partially, that’s because after the match, the hits keep coming.

Initially, that means this wonderful accident. Trevor Lee’s music (the Ruby Friedman cover of “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” from JUSTIFIED) lines up just perfectly with Trevor and Everett embracing again post-match. As Lee helps Everett up with their arms around each other, the part of the second verse with the lyric about walking together out of the mouth of this holler plays over it. (Trevor feels like more of a Boyd Crowder than Everett does, but nothing is ever perfect.) Independent wrestling, and wrestling as a whole, rarely puts something together that feels as perfect as this one little moment. It’s after the match, but as much as anything that happened at the end, feels like the real conclusion here.

The second piece of this is, as other fans will know, the return of local veteran Brad Attitude to initially celebrate the incredible work by offering the kids beers, only to turn on them and horribly beat down Lee to start one of the year’s best feuds. It doesn’t feel quite as connected to the match as that embrace did, but it’s one of the best angles of the year, and it’s what takes this from being an incredible and promotion defining match into ALSO being this remarkable segment on the whole.

Really maybe one of the best chunks of all-around professional wrestling that you’ll find anywhere all year.

Their best and most enduring work together, one of the best matches and stories of the year, and almost certainly the best match in promotion history.

****

Trevor Lee vs. Cedric Alexander, CWF-MA What A Time To Be Alive (4/30/2016)

This was for Lee’s Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Title.

In the sorts of circles I choose to spend my time in, “Danielson-esque” was a term I recall hearing a lot about Trevor Lee in his run as Mid Atlantic Heavyweight Champion. It was always, I think, supposed to refer to the prodigal nature of Lee’s advancement and how good he was in a number of roles and working these sorts of long matches. I don’t think it’s entirely bullshit, but it was the sort of thing that I usually pushed back on. A classic Please Calm Down moment if there ever was one. However, a match like this really has a way of showing both sides of the coin there. Trevor Lee is Danielson-esque here, partially in terms of his own performance on the ground in the first quarter, but unfortunately much more so in another way. On that calls back to one of the more boring years of Danielson’s career, in which he too was forced time after time again into matches that were great, but far longer than they needed to be.

Speaking about the match and the performances in it in a purely mechanical way firstly though, there’s so much to love here.

From the actual crispness of all the offense in this match to the outstanding display of bumping on both ends to the way it’s sold both short and long-term, there’s so much to love here. Trevor Lee and Cedric Alexander are two of the best wrestlers in the world, and this is the sort of match that you can look at almost any few moment chunk of and see exactly why. Cedric isn’t at his best as a villain, but Trevor Lee is as a local hero babyface absolutely is. He’s charming early on, responding to Cedric’s stalling by stalling on his own. There’s one especially great off-the-cuff moment where Cedric stalls by sitting in the front row and a fan sneaks a selfie with him. He gets mad like a good heel ought to, so Trevor returns the favor by taking a better one with the same fan, and doing it a few more times with other fans in the Sportatorium.

It’s this wonderful little chunk of classic pro wrestling, a hero milking a natural response from the villain, frustrating him and also endearing himself even more to the crowd in the process. Really and genuinely, it is perhaps my favorite part of the entire match.

The story of the thing is also pretty cool too.

Cedric Alexander shows up trying to push Trevor Lee long instead of that being Trevor’s decision for once, but it’s a kind of shell game, as he also tries to bomb out Trevor once he’s a little more tired. Not a fully Joe/Danielson in 2004 level shell game, but a respectable one all the same. They manage to tell this story well enough. The highlight, as repeated earlier, is the first third or so when they have the clearest command over this story and riff on the mat instead of just hucking bombs. However, they do a few things I liked a lot overall. Cedric was especially good at repeatedly cutting off Lee at different times, first by stopping his tries at early match limb work, and later at cutting off a big bomb throwing run to try and further grind him down.

However, the match is also is fifty five minutes long.

It doesn’t need to be that long.

Few matches ever need to be, but certainly not a match like this.

There are maybe thirty great minutes here, and most of them come in the first half. The back twenty to twenty five minutes of this thing become real tiresome, as nothing really ever develops beyond that initial story. Without a point of focus, there’s nothing to keep that story grounded or interesting, and it simply becomes a match in which they do a hundred things in a row for a very long time. They’re both still reasonably smart and avoid really overusing anything or hurting their offense in any way, but is a a match with like eighteen different potential escape valves not taken, and one that gets more and more tiresome each time they insist on continuing this sort of a journey. It’s not the absolute best expression of this idea, but yet another example of Trevor Lee CWF matches insisting on telling these stupid ass maximalist stories within spaces best reserved for more minimalistic approaches.

As a result, this match becomes one of the most frustrating things that wrestling has to offer, a long match with absolutely nothing to say (my fourth favorite Modest Mouse album). It’s an interesting contrast with other Trevor Lee overreaches, matches with a lot to say but without the talent to always back it up. This has the talent to still pull off bomb-riffing like this, but that leads to something that one could argue is maybe even more grating.

Perhaps even more frustratingly than the length of the match and all that’s wrong with it, it’s still too hard to be mean to anything about this match outside of the repeat decision to brazenly just grab headlines with a long match. It is a lot too hard to be dismissive of the performances in the match though. It also feels just a little wrong to do anything less, given how great Trevor and Cedric were individually, and then against each other as well.

It just feels even more incorrect to pretend this was anything more than a misguided attempt at headline-grabbing, once again buoyed by force of talent, and nothing else.

three boy