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This was a Loser Leaves CZW match.
It is the end of one of the great feuds in wrestling history, or at least the main branch of it. They will have another match in IWA Mid-South in 2007, they will have a very strange feeling feud in Ring of Honor in the last third of 2009, they will have weird little offshoots in PWG and Beyond and they will have that wonderful epilogue in AIW that was one of the best matches of the next decade. (You can read all about all that came before and after this over at Brock Hates Wrestling, where a better writer than I explored the entire feud in detail in an invaluable read.) But more or less, this is it, and it feels like the one that counts the most, certainly the one with the most poured into it.
You can argue — and more than most feuds, there is real room for a long discussion and argument — over what the best Hero/Kingston match is. They’ve had so many different versions of this thing with different tones and slight character differences, and I think it comes down to what you value the most as a wrestling fan. Among the absolute best they put together (this, IWA-MS TPI 2007, ROH Final Battle 2009, AIW), there isn’t truly an answer that I would be upset for somebody for.
Personally, I waver between two of them.
I just know that the best Hero/Kingston match took place in 2007.
Part of that is the live experience. Being there in Midlothian, Illinois and seeing and hearing all of that up close in a sizeable-but-not-that-large rec center (aka The Midlo-Dome) at seventeen years old leaves an impression that never quite leaves, but it does not have the specific strengths that this match does. Hero and Kingston’s last match in a two year CZW feud lacks the bombast and spectacle of their Last Man Standing match in IWA, but something more primal about this has always appealed to me just as much, if not more.
It’s not perfect. Not completely. They arguably go a little long, and because of the way it’s wrestled and paced, immediately all back and forth and a whole lot of striking, it begins to wane at points once they get past twenty minutes and a few things find themselves repeated. It proudly has a more spartan nature than their bigger show gimmick matches, and the sorts of nonsense they got into in IWA or ROH has a way of helping to avoid the lulls this occasionally wondered towards.
However, of all of the Hero/Kingston matches, this is the one with the most feeling.
King and Hero also have, of all their matches, the one that I think feels the most desperate and frantic, and down to Earth, so to speak. I mean that literally, as much as I do figuratively.
This is a dirty match.
I don’t mean that they cheat a lot here, or that they get especially hardcore. There isn’t a weapon used in this match. What I mean by that is that there is just something kind of disgusting about this match on a human level, as we see the different depths that both wrestlers sink to and the different ways that both men go about reaching their absolute moral bottoms.
The way this reveals itself through the match is also a fascinating contrast. Everything that happens here is enormously mean-spirited and rude and petty, and as insulting as possible whenever there is a split path before either man. For Hero, it means trying to insult Eddie as a wrestler, doing things he knows will make him unbelievably mad, like using the Kenta Kobashi machine gun chops, or breaking out a rare Lariat. Hero also beats the shit out of him and taunts Eddie when he shows weakness, it’s not all some mental warfare using Eddie’s established favorites against him, but they’re these wonderful attacks on him as a person. In contrast, when Eddie goes low, he goes low. He is desperately gouging eyes, swinging for the fences, biting, cursing up a storm, all of that. It feels just as hateful as everything Hero does, but in a totally different way.
Another big thing this has going in its favor for me is that it is the one match between these two in the 2000s in which Chris Hero feels like the protagonist.
Kingston isn’t purely antagonistic, the villain to Chris’ hero, but as the crowd has embraced Hero following a double turn months earlier involving the best and most unhinged and most realistic choking angle in independent wrestling history, it feels more even than it ever has before or ever will again. When things get tough, Kingston is the one choking and reaching for the eyes. He is still naturally likeable enough and Hero still just sort of offputting at times, as mentioned above, that you can go for Kingston if you want, but what this match does so well is that, really, you can support anybody.
Between these two, things have simply broken down enough that there is no right or wrong anymore between them, and while I would usually find such a concept an unbearable eye-roller, between Hero and Kingston, it feels completely correct.
In the moments where Hero shows off a rarer protagonistic side, it is a genuine blast. Not just because it’s novel at this point, not really having come out in a major match since his summer/fall 2005 feud against Arik Cannon in IWA Mid-South, but because he is now genuinely good at it. There’s a confidence to his appeals to the crowd that wasn’t ever there before that makes it work better than it ever had, and in contrast with this rabid animal in Eddie Kingston, it’s genuinely appealing on some level.
There’s a moment maybe midway through the match on the outside of the ring, where both men have been cracked open seemingly hardway (if not, don’t fucking tell me, the beauty is in the illusion) and Hero fires off a string of real gross headbutts, before Eddie grabs him to try his own, and cannot. He collapses, while a blood soaked Hero lets out this kind of guttural scream as the CZW crowd fully embraces him and chants his name. Hero cups his ear and then points to them, and there’s something beautiful about it. Not just in the sense that Hero had always been hated by this crowd and learned quickly to play into it and now he gets this response at the very end, but within Hero’s larger career, finally learning how to be a genuinely awesome babyface.
As much fun as it is to see Hero live up to his name like this for the first time anywhere in over a year and a half, Eddie Kingston is maybe even better on the other end.
This is Kingston-as-Kawada through and through.
Not just because he gets booed by a chunk of the fanbase against a guy throwing elbows who keeps adjusting his pants, but the anger and hostility and the struggle above all, before he brute forces his way through at the end, only to be completely unfulfilled by what he though he wanted the most.
I write all the time when talking about big dumb wonderful heavyweight bombfests that nobody gets why some of that stuff works like it does, but Kingston in this match (and in general) gives one of the best performances ever in terms of clearly actually getting it. It is never that he gets up or stands and takes it that works alone or even just that he himself returns fire in ways just as violent and as disrespectful as his opponent’s attacks, it is all about the moments in between. Eddie struggling to stand and take it, exhausting himself solely to avoid giving Hero an inch of satisfaction, the way he looks angry at himself when he eventually does go down or register any kind of pain, that stuff. Eddie Kingston has made a career out of moments like this, and while he may have maybe better individual selling moments throughout his career, I don’t know that any one match has more great individual Kingston sells than this one.
The best of them comes right before the moment previously mentioned where the crowd embraces Hero, where Eddie tries to grab onto him to return fire, as he had done all match, but simply cannot anymore.
Hero and Kingston carry on like this for some time, taking the match in unexpected directions with less familiar offense, delivering the expected hits, and largely expanding upon every strength already mentioned, while also expertly showing the effects of the exhaustion in a match like this, and the toll that such vulgar displays of power exert in the end.
There’s another choice at the end that I find really interesting, in which there is never any one hard momentum shift or transition spot at the end, so much as there is the result of pure attrition.
Kingston simply is better in a low down and disgusting fight like this than Hero is, and in a match all about him going to lows Hero won’t and him struggling to hang on, it just feels right that in the end, he just very casually wins out. Hero eventually crumbles forward after another headbutt, and either through luck or divine providence of just being at the right place in the ring at the right time, Kingston finally the opening. A backdrop driver leads to a short-range Lariat in its own little bit of vengeance, and finally, Eddie’s Backfist to the Future nets him the victory he’s spent years hunting at the expense of everything else.
Of course, nothing this good at this point in CZW can stay that way for long, even like five minutes.
Famously, after Hero has his farewell speech thanking everyone, Zandig gets into it with Eddie Kingston, before Eddie storms off and shouts at him for ruining their moment. Zandig fires Eddie, and both men are effectively done with CZW barring a handful of guest appearances years later. It’s a hell of a thing, CZW willingly and unwillingly losing its two biggest stars not just in one night but in one five to ten minute span.
It also, super accidentally, feels like the finish that they deserve.
Kingston wins, he finally gets his legitimate win over Hero, but it only comes after totally alienating everyone with how far he was willing to go leading up to it, resulting in Eddie having to leave as well, to far lesser fanfare. In the process of getting what he wanted most, Eddie Kingston ensures he loses what was, up to that point, his home promotion. Nothing feels more like Eddie Kingston than this, his greatest victory absorbed by a heavy loss and mass applause for his opponent anyways, a Pyrrhic victory through and through, leaving Eddie Kingston more upset and aggrieved than ever.
As such, what’s meant to be the end between these two is really only the beginning.
Nothing ever ends.
A must-see, all-decade level great, chunk of violence, as two of the best to ever do it hit arguably their apex both as wrestlers and as characters. A mother fucker in every way that a match can be, spiritually correct professional wrestling on a generational level.
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HANDWERK 