The H8 Club (Nick Gage/Justice Pain) vs. Tough Crazy Bastards (Necro Butcher/Toby Klein), CZW High Stakes III (7/9/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Sam G. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was a Fans Bring The Weapons match for Pain and Gage’s CZW Tag Team Titles.

Many deathmatches and/or big brawls have something to say.

So many of the great deathmatches are about generational conflict, like Gage/Tremont or Gage/JWM or Kasai/Takeda, but like a Shuji Ishikawa vs. Masashi Takeda, you can also simply tell a perfect bully vs. underdog story within the environment. There are great tag team deathmatches about outsider underdogs against faces of the promotion, or famously, one of the all-time retirement spectacles. There are so so so so many things that can be done within the framework of extreme violence.

This match has none of those aspirations.

It is pure violence and mayhem and wandering carnage, ninety percent of it seems thought up on the fly based on whatever fan-procured weapons they are around at any given time, and it absolutely fucking rules.

Necro, Toby, Pain, and Gage wander about the New Alhambra for some twenty minutes, destroy almost everything in their path including one of the glass doors coming back inside the building, and almost every bit of it is cool as hell. Not everything is perfect, but it’s one of those matches where the things that go wrong — typically involving Justice Pain on one side of a power move or the other — are even nastier looking than what might have been had they gone right, and so they make the match just a little bit better. There’s a sense of anarchy that the best matches like this have and that this has in spades. Not only in terms of how they seem to just stumble upon things and riff on them in increasingly horrific ways, but also in a lack of bodily control at times. In the best possible way, it feels at times as though things just happen to the people in this match, against their own will, a larger universal force throwing items in the way and making things just a little dirtier and more hateful than usual.

They have the sort of match in which, if I began capturing a spot here or there to post or simply insert into this piece, I would wind up just capturing 75% of the thing or more. Superplexes on cage walls, people hurled into grocery carts, one of the best Necro punch fights of all time, metal filing cabinets smacking off a bare head repeatedly, and what feels like a million other things that hide in the shadows behind the real huge bits.

So many things happen and they all rule.

Nate Hatred returns at the end to destroy Pain and Gage, and after a senton bomb to Nicky under a pile of chairs, Necro gets the pin to give the superteam the titles.

It’s barbaric and wonderful stuff, a deranged fight that hits in the way the best matches like this do, ruling simply because it does. Self-evident, the stuff that makes you hoot and holler and shout in delight in your own home in the wee hours without realizing a noise is leaving your body until it’s already escaped. The sort of shit that makes you lose control of your body, reaching out through the screen and taking it over, even if only for brief moments in reaction to the psychotic nonsense it offers up.

This is not exactly Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher in terms of insane spectacles of violence and mayhem from the summer of 2005 that are so much better watched than read about and that kind of defy the written word, but it’s also not that far off either. Words are bullshit, this is not a match designed to be written about, and I would implore you instead to click x on the window right now, before the end of this sentence, and watch the match instead.

An unbelievably sick match, and to my memory, also only the second best match these teams had against each other.

***1/4

 

Biff Busick vs. Matt Tremont, Beyond Wrestling Uncomfortable (6/22/2014)

This was a Fans Bring The Weapons match for Biff’s CZW Heavyweight Title.

Sadly, it’s the only singles match they ever have together.

That isn’t to say this isn’t a ton of fun and even great in a lower level kind of way. It is to say that this match in this environment doesn’t feel like the best way that this could have gone on. While the match is a blast and one I’d recommend watching, it does feel lesser than what they’re capable of. Biff is one of the best in the world, maybe the literal best independent wrestler in the world at this point. Matt Tremont is the best American deathmatch worker of the decade, at minimum.

You put them in another match without rules, ideally in the Dub itself, and it can be something great and really memorable.

Put them here in Beyond and in a match like this, and there’s a lower ceiling. It’s not just that Biff’s win is all but assured in his home promotion and with CZW’s title not likely to change hands on the midcard of another company’s show. FBTW is not the greatest stipulation in the world, and that has so much more to do with the limitations here than anything else. It’s about fan participation, getting pops for using whatever gets brought out there, so matches under this umbrella always feel more about that than anything else. The crowd here luckily brought some cool stuff like five different guitars and stuff with tacks glued on and a pineapple, it’s not like they’re having to use a portrait of Finlay Dick with thumbtacks on it or some hare-brained lighttube contraption, but that weakness is still there. It’s a charming adventure around to see what everyone brought, with enough blood and intensity and all-around meanness to still make it great.

Biff winds up holding onto the title with a wild Half Nelson Suplex off the top onto a big old pile of stuff. Keyboards, some guitars, you name it. It’s the best possible ending for a match like this, lacking one obvious super weapon and instead using them all in the biggest, dumbest, and most spectacular way possible.

Ultimately a testament to the greatness of both men that this is as great and fun as it is when matches like this so often fall short.

***