Commissions continue again, this one coming from Four Pillars of Hell. 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 $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), 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.
We did not cover enough FUTEN the first time we looked at 2010 apparently, but that is fine. My ideal use of the commission system — outside of older stuff I genuinely have not seen before — is to look back at the best style of wrestling there is.
This is pretty good.
Nohashi is not the most impressive or spectacular wrestler there is. He’s a longtime M-Pro guy, but I would wager that most people who know him know him because of a run in the 2006 CHIKARA Tag World Grand Prix tournament as Shinjitsu Nohashi, where he was also not all that impressive. He has a willingness to jump the gun and hurl his head into the skull of Makoto Hashi, perhaps the strongest skull in the entire world, but other than that, I have nothing either positive or negative to say about him. He is here to fight, and that is that.
However, this is sort of the great thing about FUTEN (and also BattlARTS).
Everyone is welcome here, and it’s what makes this version of shoot-style my favorite. Everyone is not the perfect fighter with their prereq ten thousand hours that makes them great at this. Some people are great wrestlers from elsewhere trying their hand, some people are promising rookies, and others like Nohashi are weird journeymen seemingly giving this a shot because nothing else has really worked and a fight is a fight.
For Nohashi, it doesn’t work.
Hashi eats him alive once it becomes about who can sustain the most brain damage and keep going, and after all of that, chokes him out with a rear naked to win in three minutes and forty six seconds. The match is not as violent or wild as I sort of need for a match this short to really impact me as great, but I love it in terms of what it represents.
Taro Nohashi is the control group here.
So certain things stand out, a baseline is important. So often, these types of shows or imitations of these types of shows or promotions fall short because everyone is presented as capable of this. What I admire so much about this is that, because Nohashi makes a big mistake and gets owned, it shows how hard it is to fight like this. Makoto Hashi feels tougher and better as a result, and for the rest of the year, people who are better than Hashi feel even tougher and cooler as a result.
If everyone could do it, it wouldn’t be half as cool.
God bless FUTEN, man.
I do not understand every commission exactly, I am not overcome with a wealth of things to say about this, but I am more than happy to be paid $5 to watch four minute matches that are 50% headbutts and end with a CHIKARA alum being choked out by Makoto Hashi.
The best tag lineup FUTEN could ever run at this point.
At different points in this match, you have either the greatest shoot-style pairing of all time in Ikeda vs. Ishikawa, a rematch of the year and decade’s best shoot-style match in Ikeda vs. Ono, a continuation of a great match from the previous month’s show in Ono vs. Usuda, or, without quite so much recent or historical background, a simple great grappling match up in Ishikawa vs. Usuda.
Not a weak one in the bunch.
The weakest is Ishikawa vs. Usuda, but even that one rules. It’s just the only pairing of the four here that’s wrestled completely as a competitive and professional match, rather than something that turns into stand up fighting, with zero feeling of contempt between them. In a match that’s full of pairings that otherwise always have that feeling — or at least with Ono and Usuda, a pairing with some real heated moments — it’s the only pairing without it, and stands out as the least of the four as a result. The thing is that it’s still really great, and also that of the pairings, it gets the least play. The Ishikawa vs. Usuda run early on is really only there to establish a baseline of acceptable behavior and a look at how this might go normally, so as to make the other three pairings really stand out.
All the other pairings waste zero time getting to this idea, creating a real hostile environment for something like the last two-thirds of the match. Ikeda vs. Ono, like Ishikawa vs. Usuda, gets some play early on, but truly, this match comes down to two extended one on one periods.
Firstly, the historical one. The one that made your eyes light up, like they do every time you come across a match listing and see their names across from each other, no matter who’s on the apron or where it is in the world.
What you want out of this is Ikeda vs. Ishikawa, and it does not let you down.
Everything here is as you left it.
Yuki Ishikawa and Daisuke Ikeda spent five to ten minutes going god damned wild on each other. Every shot is not only hard, but harder than the one before it, and feels imbued with all of the hatred and spite that the man throwing it can muster up at a given moment. I have written before about strikes that feel like they come with curse words in parenthesis, and rarely is that more true than when Ikeda and Ishikawa are wailing away on each other. There’s more than that, of course. Ishikawa occasionally grabbing a kick to try for a hold creates a feeling of desperation and achievement better than almost any single repeated action in wrestling history. The way the exchanges are constructed and placed is again the sort of thing that ought to be studied. It’s not just that it rocks to see people hit incredibly hard (although it really really does), but that each one builds on top of the ones before it and capitalizes on the feeling and the energy built by those previous moments.
The best sequence of the match is the one that totally sums these two up together. Following a double down, Ikeda reaches from the mat to grab into Ishikawa’s nose or eye in a classically futile display, before Ishikawa reverses it into an armbar. Ikeda makes the ropes, stomps on Ishikawa’s hand on the ground, again just to be an asshole, before then unloading with a real disgusting sounding punt to the face.
Following that, there’s something of a gamble, as the balance of the match is given over to the Usuda vs. Ono match, continuing from the month before.
It’s a gamble that pays off though.
Ono and Usuda are not only fantastic together, but they do such a great job at furthering that real interesting story from the month before.
The idea is still the same, the striking power of Takeshi Ono against the submission attack of Katsumi Usuda, but it’s even better here. Not only do they come in at a point where the match basically insists upon a more frantic and violent match given what they have to follow, but after already laying the groundwork a month prior, they’re freer to just tee off. Ono has more success with his punches than he did previously, really really rocking the hell out of Usuda, but in a great turn of events, the success makes him overconfident and leads him to fighting more recklessly than he did one on one. Ishikawa repeatedly bails him out (no real place to throw this in the piece construction-wise, but the saves are so great, highlighted by a bit where Ishikawa tries to hold back Ikeda with a waistlock, but Ikeda dives forward to simply headbutt Ono on the ground to break a hold), so he never really adjusts despite that Usuda is having more and more success, so when Usuda really zeroes in on the leg in the last minutes of the match, Ono never figures to stop him until he’s at a point where he can’t.
Usuda keeps at it on the leg, and with Ikeda able to always neutralize Ishikawa for just long enough, he eventually gets a real mean looking heel hook with the other leg trapped, and finally gets Takeshi Ono to tap out.
Katsumi Usuda stays the course in a way he failed to a month ago, genuinely learns something over the course of two matches, and the payoff feels surprisingly good.
The match is not only ultra rewarding in every way (a two match story paid off, slow escalation, unbelievable displays of brute force), but a stellar example of how to handle a match like this. One of the greatest pairings of all time shares the stage with, and eventually cedes it to, one of the recent great ones, allowing for a real satisfying little payoff in its own right, all wrapped up in a boatload of wonderful violence.
It‘s usually applied to more traditional meat and potatoes pro wrestling rather than shoot-style, your heavyweights against your fliers, hardcore wrestlers dragging traditional types down into the dirt with them, all of that. Usually, the most you see it talked about as it pertains to shoot-style is something like the Vader UWFi run where it’s super super obvious.
With Usuda and Ono though, it‘s true.
Katsumi Usuda is a grappling-focused wrestler who can throw a quality kick if he has to, whereas Takeshi Ono is an absolute demon on his feet with his punches and kicks, who also has the ability to hang on the ground if he has to.
This is quite simple, but it‘s the entire idea of the match, and it rocks.
Mechanically speaking, I mean, yeah, of course it does. Ono rarely fails to have good matches and with a steady hand like Usuda, it obviously works out. The shots are hard, the holds and counters and transitions all look great, and above all, there‘s that genuine feeling that all the good matches in this style tend to achieve. Because of how Ono works, using the jab and the fear of it to create space, combined with Usuda constantly going to the takedown, it creates the feeling of an actual fight, or how this sort of a match would go if this were real, and that helps so much.
What makes it even better is — again — the thing pro wrestling in any style, but especially one so connected to realism like this, ought to always strive for, which is the ability to take something that feels like a proper competition, and cleverly manipulate it so as to create as much drama as possible.
The way the match is constructed, creating a real simple narrative around even these slight approaches in style, each man‘s style existing an inverted mirror of the other‘s, is the sort of thing that ought to be studied.
Usuda in this match, or rather the way his strategy is treated, is especially impressive. He spends the match under the gun just a little bit, backing off and dodging Ono‘s hands as best he can while trying for the takedowns. It’s not immediately successful, but as the match gets a little longer, he has more and more success. As the ground game wears Ono down more when he’s forced to hang on in an area where he is less comfortable, Usuda also has the chance to land more of his kicks and knees. Ono gets his own punches and kicks in, but as Usuda has set the tone for the majority of the match, those shots feel more and more out of desperation than anything else, even slowly taking Ono’s great advantage away from him.
Katsumi Usuda constantly feels at the end like he‘s finally got it and that, by dragging Ono repeatedly down to the mat in between increased success with his kicks and knees, that he’s chipping away at something. However, the thing that matters the most in the closing moments is that while Takeshi Ono is not afraid of Usuda on the mat, Usuda still has a healthy fear of Ono’s hands. When he still tries to duck and dodge them to get another takedown, Ono is able to snatch him, and quickly move into his real gnarly Ground Octopus for another sudden victory.
Ono wins not just because he can adapt a little better as an all-around fighter, but really, because his specialty created more fear in Usuda than Usuda‘s did in him, creating the sorts of openings that allowed him to succeed. You can never know if it was a set up by Ono at the end or just him happening to take advantage quicker, but I think that’s beautiful. It works just as well both ways, and yet again on this show, a viewer is presented a choice based on how they want to view it.
Styles — even within the same kind of niche, like these two — make fights.
As a result of properly establishing, working, and mining these stylistic differences for as much as possible, FUTEN once again presents a hell of a god damned fight.
Of all the discoveries going back through some of the stuff I missed or got wrong with the approach to 2010 A YEAR IN LISTS (CMLL this year is super not for me, love some of the early year IWRG maestros and bloodlettings, there was another incredible Aja/Meiko match before the famous one six years later, etc.), the one standing out the most is that even at #18 in the Wrestler of the Year rankings on the first pass, I may have drastically underrated Daisuke Ikeda, and even at #3, I may have slightly underrated FUTEN.
Take this match for example.
Shoot-style, at least to people not super heavily immersed in the history and style, is defined by its biggest hits and main event matches, maybe more than any other style of wrestling. (I don’t know if this is contentious or not, I guess I could hear arguments for lucha or deathmatches, but this immediately comes to mind with shoot-style.) However, as a match like this shows, sometimes the more direct middle of the card efforts ought to be far more appreciated than they are.
Ikeda and Suruga work for only ten minutes and twenty four seconds, and not only offer up another rendition of the greatest story ever told in wrestling — ambitious punk takes a wild swing early and spends the match being pummeled for his hubris — but do so with a spectacular amount of violence and hate, in a super efficient package.
Manabu Suruga is not an unknown entity, but like a lot of independent shoot-style guys who debuted in the early 2000s, he never quite achieved the same fame or greatness as either the big name Inoki-ism attached shooters or the gods from the 90s, Ikeda among them. He has the skill to hang, has an impressive resume of great matches to his credit, and packs a real motherfucker of a kick.
He’s a perfect Daisuke Ikeda opponent.
The problem is that he is not Daisuke Ikeda himself.
Suruga gets the man’s attention by rushing him at the bell, but as soon as Ikeda has more than like two seconds of space, he begins absolutely beating Suruga’s ass.
It’s one of the great beatings of the year.
Every kick is not only loud as hell, but manages to feel a certain way. The lighter kind of mocking ones feel like the rudest offense in wrestling all year and the heavy ones feel like the most hateful shots in the world. Suruga has his shots and beats some ass in his own right, Ikeda doesn’t steamroll him and he has a few impressive downs to Ikeda on the mat for a count of 8 or 9, but it becomes clear that he simply does not have the firepower. On top of just whipping a ton of ass, it’s also kind of a fantastic complement to Ikeda/Ono from two months earlier, as someone with a little less skill (all around, but specifically he lacks Ono’s punches) and high level experience tries to go at Ikeda in the same way, only to get absolutely wrecked for it.
Daisuke Ikeda drops like six kicks to the head in a row on Suruga, slaps the shit out of him to wrap it up, before then also putting on a cross armbreaker to win rather than gamble on another ten count. It’s the best possible finish for a match like this, because it works for whatever approach you prefer when looking at a match like this. Narratively, it’s a great insult, putting the icing on the cake by forcing Suruga to endure the indignity of a submission instead of a ten count. Looking at the match more as a pure contest, it’s just as great and maybe does a little more for Suruga, with Ikeda opting for the quick finish rather than doing what a few recent opponents mistakenly did to the man himself, and letting him stick around long enough for the tides to change. Realistically, like most of the great wrestling, it’s a little of both.
Perfect for what it is.
One of the great stories wrestling can tell, compounded with extra violence, and wrapped up in ten minutes. They don’t all have to be epics.
One of the best things about tag team wrestling is that, a lot of the times, it can achieve much more than singles wrestling. Or at least, it can have more to offer.
Take this match for example.
Here, you get to see not only Ikeda defend home turf against K-DOJO’s heavy hitter Kengo Mashimo, but also weird little oddball Takahiro Oba try to find a way to survive against heavy hitters Mashimo and Makoto Hashi when that doesn’t feel much like his game at all. And then, yes, of course, you will also bare witness to the real thing your eyes lit up for when seeing the line up on paper, which is Ikeda and Hashi hurling their skulls into each other as many times as possible.
It’s all great.
All of it.
Relative to how much many people have heard or seen of him, Oba is probably the big revelation here. He’s a freak for sure, an overly energetic guy who seems to prefer grappling, but can throw late in the match, and tends to use his weirdness to draw people in before he gets them good on the ground. If I hadn’t done research and found out that he was a BattlARTS/FUTEN specific guy who debuted like a decade earlier, I would have assumed he had debuted in 2009 or something, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It’s a perfect kind of younger sidekick performance. Weird enough to be super endearing, but technically spectacular in the first half when the match asks it of him, and reliable in big moments when the strikes actually land later on. He and Mashimo — also great in the quiet and reliable way that Mashimo often is — are not the primary focus in this match by any means, but each of them helps the match a whole lot in its less insane moments.
Primarily though, this not a match for revelations, unless we are talking about the Book, because yeah, on top of your neat little stories or whatever, this is also a remarkable display of violence.
This match is about Makoto Hashi wrestling Daisuke Ikeda, and it does not disappoint.
As previously stated, the aim here is to see who has the stronger skull, an achievement only truly decided by running them into each other as many times as possible, and it turns out that there are possibilities we never even considered.
Truly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a match with this many headbutts.
Not all of them are perfect ten out of ten Shibata or Kingston/Hero grotesque skull crackers, but in its own way, the modulation in the volume and horror of the shots thrown in this match is a beautiful and much more realistic. Although every shot being a gross thud would rock, only like five to ten of them hitting that level out of maybe forty plus makes this feel more like a genuine fight, in the same way that Ikeda showing the concussive effect (I specifically did not say “selling”, because man, shit, yeah, taking a million headbutts probably does remove at least some of the performance from it at certain points) of the match by hitting things less and less clean adds to that sense of immersion in the same way.
Mashimo and Oba eventually just clear it apart from a few saves in submissions for the last five plus minutes, and the stage clears for the show that, again, you came to see in the first place.
They repeatedly hurl their skulls into each other, in different combinations and with different attempts to stay up and come back, and to different counts by the referee, but as the sequence goes on, something wonderful becomes very very clear. Makoto Hashi, for all his success and greatness, including maybe the harder skull, is not quite as gifted or experienced in matches with these rules as one of the all-time kings in Daisuke Ikeda. He simply does not have the right combination to end him, and while winning the implicit battle of the match, cannot actually win the match itself. The headbutts hurt him just as much at a certain point, and unlike Ikeda with the kicks that become his equalizer when Hashi has a harder skull, he does not possess another weapon aside from his pro-style suplexes, which he rarely get to hit.
Having let him stick around just a little too long, Hashi has little recourse when Ikeda rushes him with a motherfucker of a lariat against the ropes, and than a real nasty kick across the mouth and jaw. It’s not the nastiest kick of the match, it’s not even like the fifteenth grossest shot thrown between Hashi and Ikeda all match, but it’s enough to win, and more importantly, it feels like something that in a war of attrition, works as the exact sort of finish the match earns.
The match right before this, as you may have just read about if you read these in order, largely slipped under the radar because of the greatness and the grossness of this, and after seeing it again, it’s hard to argue with that behavior. This match simply whips too much ass to ignore.
A stellar example of the real shit once again from the masters of it.
The main event of this show — Daisuke Ikeda & Takahiro Oba vs. Makoto Hashi & Kengo Mashimo — is quite the celebrated one among circles of fans watching old FUTEN or who were watching at the time, and while that status is more than earned, the result of that is that this one has, at least to my memory, always slid in somewhat under the radar.
It is time for everyone to look a little deeper.
Now, I understand some of the hesitation.
Ryuji Hijikata is not the most impressive wrestler. That’s not to say he’s bad or really anything close to it, but the ceiling is somewhere between fine and pretty good. I don’t believe he stood out too much on early BattlARTS shows, and in his run in the All Japan juniors division in the 2000s — where I first came across him — “this guy’s pretty good” was the strongest impression I ever remember having.
However, Takeshi Ono is also in this match, so none of that matters.
A month removed from one of the best matches of the decade, and a Hoot of the Century contender, Ono doesn’t exactly equal that (what can?), but does something that’s still real impressive, and has the best Hijikata match that I can ever remember seeing.
Takeshi Ono, in his way, is capable of miracles. Yeah, Hijikata is not super interesting and would otherwise blend into the scenery against many other wrestlers, likely delivering a good to great match anyways, but one that I would forget within half an hour, but he is not just facing any other wrestler. When those boxing glove punches of Takeshi Ono land as loud as they do, with the clear visual force that they do, and when every other strike both looks and sounds like absolute death, you tend to forget a lot. Just on a purely lizard brained level, Takeshi Ono has a higher floor than most other wrestlers, because every minute or so, the man will throw out at least one strike — be it a punch, kick, or knee — that would make most people shout in terror or shriek in delight. There’s a lot that a match can get away with, little things anyways, when it constantly offers up these moments of violent joy.
Fortunately, this is not a match requiring miracles.
It genuinely rocks, and then also offers up all of those thrills on top.
Beneath all the incredibly loud pops and smacks, there’s a classic sort of pro vs. shoot style thing going on.
Hijikata might have root here, but he’s spent much of his time wrestling very different matches in recent years, and only really succeeds when he an begin bringing some of that offense into the match. When he pushes past the punches and kicks, throws some of his own for distance and begins countering armbars into Sidewalk Slams or using a Brainbuster, it seems possible for the guy. Doubly so when he’s briefly able to hurt the arm of Takeshi Ono or uncork one of the year/decade’s grosser headbutts.
The thing is that while upsets are more than possible, especially in this world, Hijikata is not properly equipped to achieve one.
For all he can do to Our Hero, he has no great hold to slap on once he’s taken all this damage, nor does he quite have the firepower strong enough to keep Ono down for the count. He never panics, it’s not as if he fumbles the match away, but the best he can ever really do is put some fear into Takeshi Ono, and once that happens, he has no idea what to do with an even more desperate striking machine.
Ono comes back, beats the shit out of Hijikata again, before putting on this super gross Octopus Hold on Hijikara on his side on the mat, not only holding him in a rough position but putting more into the leg against the neck than almost anyone ever does, until Hijikata submits.
Hijikata and Ono deliver a lovely little pocket epic. A match that, like all the best ones, succeeds on a few different levels — narrative, mechanical, and just whipping a ton of ass — and that does so with genuinely zero waste on the thing. If it happened today, it might be one of the best matches of the entire year, but as it is here, it’s neither the best of the show, nor the best match Ono had in a thirty day span. It’s easy to look past it, given that next match on the show and given that Ono already had a meaner and more efficient match a month ago, but if any of this sounds good to you, try and still your gaze for a moment, and look it right in the eyes.
Daisuke Ikeda and Takeshi Ono wrestle for four and a half minutes, and as a great shame to every other match in wrestling — not only this decade, but in all decades — it is not only among the best of the year and of the decade, but genuinely in mind, it is one of the best matches ever.
Every second of this rocks.
There have been matches since, six times longer or more, with less great moments per capita than this.
It is a remarkable achievement.
Daisuke Ikeda is constantly under the gun from the truly horrific sounding punches of Takeshi Ono, and until the last five seconds of the match, spends the duration of this match being beaten about the face with that very gun, as frequently as possible, and it is unbelievably good. Many matches have tried to do something like this, someone beaten to shit by a better striker only to magically grab something at the end. It’s classical pro wrestling, but few matches ever have done it better or more violently or cooler than this match does.
Ono spends 95% of this match punching Ikeda as hard as he can in the face from what feels like a hundred different angles, absolutely stuffing him when he tries to do any sort of pro wrestling shit to him, before Ikeda finally finally grabs some kind of reverse Fujiwara Armbar out of a top mount to suddenly attain a victory and send a message out into the world that if you are tough and cool enough, you too can survive one of the baddest men alive punching you in the the head as hard as possible for four minutes if you just so happen to have that dawg in you.
There has never been a better match under five minutes.
In truth, there have not been many better matches period.
An absolute delight. Too long in this style and a little too meandering to be more than just really fun, but it’s still around twenty minutes of really gross suplexes and some staggeringly hard face punching and kicking.
On that note, my god, Takeshi Ono in this match. Nobody here is bad and everyone contributes a lot to this being good, but Ono stole it, because he steals almost everything he’s in. Takeshi Ono is the best wrestler who never makes film and he steals this match. He’s magnetic, such a shithead, but also weirdly endearing against a larger Kengo Mashimo. Beyond that, he’s the best face puncher in the history of shoot style.
Eventually, it ends. Not a super well paced match, so it feels like it could end at any time, but I’m sure that does a lot for some people too. Kengo finally gets some distance from Ono’s full court press and begins asserting his size, before choking him out with a sleeper for the win.
This isn’t a match that gives you a lot to write about. It’s a one note match without much in the way of character work or story stuff, without any sort of great flow to it and no real ideas to speak of. But, it’s very fun and it’s not talked about a whole lot, so I wanted to cover it.
I think you should watch it, so long as you temper the expectations a little bit.
It’s not 2008 BattlARTS or anything, it sure isn’t Ikeda vs. Ono from 2010, but a FUTEN three boy is better than most other wrestling you’re gonna watch.
A note, quickly, about what I’m intending to do here…
Decade lists are fun, and they are forthcoming. GWE III is also only six years off or whatever. But I think that it would be irresponsible to do the former without some sort of re-visitation, and I’ve never been the sort who could just kind of do a project. Always whole-ass one entire thing, buy the ticket and take the ride, all of that. My intention is to cover 25 matches you may have missed, five promotions and tag team of the year, ten shows, and as with 2019, the Top 25 Wrestlers of the Year. I will obviously not be re-treading 2019 but this is the first of nine of these, unless the plague gets me, in which case, hey, enjoy this one at least. 2011 probably drops some time in late June or early July. We’ll see. If you like what you read, hit the ko-fi or venmo or mail me a wad of cash or other rewards for my work (DM me, we can talk). I’m not dying or anything like I thought I might be in March, but I’m still out of work because of all of this pandemic business by virtue of being an American, so any little bit would be very cool of you here.
2011 is an odd year to write about for wrestling.
The transitions that took up so much of 2010 largely came to fruition in 2011, at least in America. People left scenes, other people took them over, and the most important promo, storyline, and match of the decade happened over the summer. On a smaller scale, internet broadcasts became more and more prevalent, Dragon Gate USA faded into a larger irrelevance than it experienced in 2010, CZW had its last great year of the decade, all of that. In a more personal sense, it ruled. 2011 ruled. But it’s all concentrated in a way that makes a thing like this frustrating, if not necessarily difficult. My favorite live wrestling experience was in 2011, I’ve written GLOWINGLY about a lot of stuff that’s happened, but the good wrestling felt hyper-concentrated in the hands of a few promotions and a few wrestlers. A lot of repeat names and usual suspects. Trying to make this list was a lot harder in 2011 than it was in 2010. The top twenty five wrestlers of the year turned into a top forty list before I edited it down because there were a bunch of different people. A lot of people are going to dominate this list, but maybe not quite as much so as 2010? And less so than in 2012, I hope. I’m not going to trade away accuracy to make the most interest possible list, but I would like to spread out the love a little more.
At the very least, a list that someone can’t just throw darts at a board and basically predict, which is my fear in a year like 2011, that one of you slack-jawed yokels lovely readers could have predicted any of these little lists totally and completely.
Also, this is now a multimedia Experience following an accidental copy and paste realization that I can embed Spotify links too, so enjoy a playlist of songs from 2011 that I liked, emphasizing all the good kids of music (rock, different kinds of rock, electronic music that happens to have a delightful Riff, Gil Scott-Heron, like four or five hip hop songs, a Big Talk song you discovered as the halftime song in an NFL Jamboroo article in 2014, etc.).
Listen to it while you read all of the lists and look at the pretty pictures.
Also like, just to get it out of the way — I am going to be discussing and praising some bad people. Sorry. They did very good work. My brain was broken in 2007 when my childhood favorite killed his family and then skirted all responsibility. I’m removed enough to praise the work of these men without feeling like I’m condoning anything about them as people. I’ll assume that if you’re reading this 20,000 word monster, you have the same kind of brain sickness, and we can leave it there so I don’t have to hand wring before every word of praise about the work of the Briscoes or Quackenbush or Sami Callihan or Shingo Takagi/anyone in the DG system in 2008 when the monkey thing happened (or whoever else! new things come out all the time! who knows?!).
TOP 25 HOOT OF THE YEAR/FUN THING YOU MISSED/CATCH ALL NOT-MOTY-BUT RECOMMENDATION LIST CATCHALL (CHRONOLOGICAL):
Sami Callihan vs. Alex Colon, CZW From Small Beginnings Comes Great Things (1/7/2011)
Masato Yoshino vs. Don Fujii, Dragon Gate (1/18/2011)
The Golden Lovers vs. HARASHIMA/KUDO, DDT Sweet Dreams 2011 (1/30/2011)
Ikuto Hidaka vs. Takefumi Ito, ZERO1 (3/6/2011)
Chris Hero vs. TJ Perkins, ROH Defy or Deny (3/18/2011)
Roderick Strong vs. Willie Mack, PWG Card Subject to Change III (4/9/2011)
The Kings of Wrestling vs. Jun Akiyama/Akitoshi Saito, NOAH (4/24/2011)
Drew McIntyre vs. Chris Masters, WWE Superstars (5/13/2011)
The Briscoes vs. The Nigerian Nightmares, CZW Proving Grounds (5/14/2011)
Virus vs. Guerrera Maya Jr., CMLL on CadenaTres (6/7/2011)
Rey Mysterio/Alex Riley vs. Alberto Del Rio/The Miz, WWE Raw (6/27/2011)
Sami Callihan vs. Necro Butcher, CZW New Heights 2011 (7/9/2011)
Yuki Ishikawa/Munenori Sawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda/Manabu Suruga, FUTEN (7/18/2011)
Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Toru Yano, NJPW G1 Climax 21 Day Nine (8/13/2011)
Big Van Walter vs. Fit Finlay, WXW Surprise! (8/14/2011)
El Generico vs. Shuji Ishikawa, Union Pro (9/19/2011)
Madison Eagles vs. Cheerleader Melissa, SHIMMER Volume 44 (10/2/2011)
John Cena/CM Punk/Sheamus/Kofi Kingston/Evan Bourne/Mason Ryan vs. Alberto Del Rio/Christian/Dolph Ziggler/Cody Rhodes/Jack Swagger/David Otunga, WWE Raw (10/3/2011)
Matt Tremont vs. Brain Damage, CZW Cerebral (10/7/2011)
Fire Ant/Soldier Ant vs. Atsushi Kotoge/Daisuke Harada, CHIKARA Klunk In Love (10/8/2011)
The Young Bucks vs. Future Shock, PWG Steen Wolf (10/22/2011)
Masaaki Mochizuki vs. Ryo Saito, Dragon Gate Gate of Destiny 2011 (11/3/2011)
Daniel Bryan vs. William Regal, WWE Superstars (11/10/2011)
The Young Bucks vs. Fire Ant/Soldier Ant, CHIKARA High Noon (11/13/2011)
HARASHIMA vs. KUDO, DDT God Bless DDT (11/27/2011)
EVENT OF THE YEAR:
10. NJPW/NOAH/AJPW “ALL TOGETHER” (8/27/2011) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN
Not quite weird enough to be on the level of the all-star big venue shows in the middle of the decade, but charming enough to make the list in a less busy year for all around great shows. Did I cover anything from this show? No. I didn’t feel like I needed to. Writing “this was good!” and dropping a *** is boring. It’s an all star benefit show that failed to produce any great matches, but that’s not an issue because that wasn’t ever the point. Go into this show looking for that, you’ll leave disappointed, and you’ll deserve to be. Go into this like you’re watching pro wrestling’s version of one of those 1980s relief concerts (nobody is as good here as Freddie Mercury at LIVE AID, sadly), and there’s a lot to like.
9. ROH “MANHATTAN MAYHEM IV” (3/19/2011) ~ MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
If you, for some reason, had to watch one ROH show in 2011, this is the best one by far. It’s the only one I’d recommend watching for any purposes outside of that. A lot of ROH shows in 2011 have one or two good matches, this is the only one with multiple great matches and nothing to ruin it. Even the Davey Richards match is good, thanks to Chris Daniels and also the comedy of Davey almost Marek Brave-ing himself. The two tags (LAX/KOW & Briscoes/ANX I) are among the best matches in ROH all year, and the main event is a surprisingly great and endearing coronation. The sole flaw is how little was done for the next nine months and most of the next nine years to follow up on the promise that this show set up, but this is one of a handful of times when it didn’t seem entirely stupid to have any sort of hope for the future. A theme of 2011.
8. DRAGON GATE ~ “KOBE PRO WRESTLING FESTIVAL 2011” (7/17/2011) ~ KOBE, JAPAN
The second best wrestling show of the day still makes the list. It’s always an occasion worth remarking upon when a company’s arguable two best matches of the year come from the same show. It’s definitely worth noting when one of them is possibly the best singles match in company history. Shingo vs. Tozawa is immense. Spiked Mohicans vs. Dragon Kid & PAC is a delight. This will not be the last time on this list I speak about either. The undercard isn’t so bad itself. The big flaw is a bad Dream Gate main event, but that’s a flaw with most major Dragon Gate shows. One of the five to ten best shows in company history and almost certainly the best Kobe World ever.
7. PWG “DDT4 2011” (3/4/2011) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA
With a different team in place of the American Wolves, this could have been the best show of the year. With a different team in place of the American Wolves, it could be an all time great PWG show. Alas, the Wolves made it all the way to the semi finals. Still, it’s a coming out party for the Young Bucks as a heel team, and a one night display of how good the Nightmare Violence Connection was and could have been as a full time act, before throwing both at each other in one of PWG’s best and most important ever main events. Not a flawless show, but one of the most important shows of the decade, because it’s here where Kevin Steen becomes God in Reseda.
One of the best all star shows of the decade, packed full of guest spots and sensational matches you wouldn’t normally see from the company at this point. Everything that the final night of a big tournament should be, managing to highlight locals, the big stars, and doing something unique all at the same time. The tournament final is one of the best matches of the year, but this is also home to a handful of other great performances. Not all of it holds up (hello LDRS vs. Future Shock!), some of it ages very well (hello El Generico vs. Daisuke Sekimoto!), and the tournament matches are all pitch perfect. The platonic ideal night three of a tournament, in ways that N3 of the three-day BOLAs never totally seemed to get. Still, only the second best tournament show of 2011.
(In some ways, the worst show of the entire decade, because it’s hard not to call this the birth of 2010s European indie wrestling. It’s the breakout of Zack and Marty to a broader audience, another big match success for The Coward, etc. Hard to hold that against them at the time, given how much the quality of this came from non Europeans, but if you’re drawing a line backwards, this might well be the point of origin.)
5. BATTLARTS “ONCE UPON A TIME ~REMEMBER THAT TIME~” (11/5/2011) ~ TOKYO, JAPAN
A fitting farewell show to a promotion one could fairly call the greatest wrestling promotion of all time. It’s violent, it’s diverse, and above all, there’s so much heart in every single match. The shoot style show of the decade, with all disrespect intended to just about every other pretender that’s tried to fill the void immediately left open once this show ended.
The most important show in CHIKARA history, and they clearly knew it. Everything that matters in the company gets a major stage, all leading to the most important match in company history. Not everything is great, but everything delivers as much as it possible could, even resulting in goons like Ares and Tim Donst having a great match. The sole major CHIKARA act available that lacks some large scale character moment or blowoff match to have showcased instead faces the top tag team on the independents, and might have stolen the entire show if the main event wasn’t one of the most emotional, overwhelming, and cathartic matches that the company ever put on. To whatever extent such a thing is possible or exists anymore following all that’s come out, there is no better expression of the charm of CHIKARA at this point than High Noon.
3. PWG “FEAR” (12/10/2011) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA
Does the image alone not do it for you?
Fine.
In as much as CHIKARA’s High Noon totally encapsulated the company’s entire approach and feeling at the time, this show does the same for PWG. It’s got some weird stuff, it has some only-in-Reseda style dream matches, (an uncomfortable match built like one-third around a groping act but then two-thirds around some fun young guys throwing out every spot they can think of), and a fun surprise or two. Most importantly, it’s a show based around one specific match. It’s the show that happens to feature the independent wrestling match of the year, one that goes above and beyond any expectation, and which delivers the company’s own long awaited emotional catharsis.
Not the best PWG show of the year, nor the most important, but the most PWG show of the year. In a lesser year (2010, 2012, 2017, 2018, 2019), it might run away with this.
2. WWE “MONEY IN THE BANK 2011” (7/17/2011) ~ ROSEMONT, ILLINOIS
Calling it the IYH: Canadian Stampede of the 2010s is perhaps an insult to how well rounded and efficient that show is, because this is still a 2010s WWE PPV, but it is almost definitely the best pay per view WWE’s put on this decade. It is not QUITE the best live wrestling show experience I’ve ever had, because independent wrestling is inherently better than going to the circus, but an incredible experience all the same. It’d be a lie to say there are NO weak points on the card, but they’re so minor compared to everything that this show gets right. Beyond simply having the best match of 2011 and the defining match of the entire era and maybe decade on it, there’s so many different sorts of things on this show. The ladder matches are different, there’s a smartly booked heel victory, and one of the most fun Big Guy Fights of the era too. WWE is the circus, but for once, that’s not an insult. Beyond that variety, this did something that only one other WWE show this decade was able to do, which is leave me with an actual sense of hope and excitement for the future.
But it’s not #1.
I know! I’m shocked! It was my working #1 too, up until the time came to actually do it.
This is a great and iconic show, but it’s an incredibly top heavy one. The match of the year is not a guarantee of the show of the year. It’s the definitive show of the decade maybe, and I still struggle sometimes with whether these can mean BEST or simply [x] Of The Year/Decade, meaning which best encompasses the period. I think if you give me the choice between a show that is both great and important and a show which is simply great, I’ll almost always go with the former. That’s not the situation here.
1. PWG “BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011” (8/20/2011) ~ RESEDA, CALIFORNIA
Because this is not an unimportant show.
It’s the arrival of Peak PWG. The previous shows in 2011 all feel like a matter of getting certain ducks in a row (Kevin Steen becoming a hero in his own right while still in opposition to #1 hero El Generico, The Young Bucks becoming The Young Bucks, Hero and Claudio passing the torch), and this show is both a formal declaration of what the most important independent in the country is and an official passing of the torch from one era to the next. It’s not just that Claudio puts El Generico over for the first time, four years in the making, or that Chris Hero’s bully formula pays off in a big way to give Willie Mack THE RUB, or that Hero and Claudio also put the Young Bucks over in addition to that. It’s not even that the show ends with the first BOLA final yet without a major star from a previous generation there to steady the boat. It’s that all of that happens in the span of three hours.
Beyond that, it’s an incredible show. It’s as top to bottom great as Money in the Bank, with less weight carried solely by the main event, because of something like the performance of Fit Finlay or how great Castagnoli/Generico and Hero/Mack in the first rounds were. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if the main event didn’t deliver, or was simply a great little match. Instead, it’s a pocket epic that this list is going to come back to a little bit later on, as the two new heads of the scene take the most interesting route, and deliver a bottle episode, resulting in their best ever match together to that point.
On average, the best wrestling show of the year. Beyond that, the most important independent wrestling show of the year, the era, and possibly the entire decade.
A guide book to the next eight years and four months, in all ways positive and negative.
PROMOTION OF THE YEAR:
HONORABLE MENTION: WWE NXT REDEMPTION AKA FOREVER SEASON
My fear is that in 2012, there will be more than five actual great promotions and I will not be able to honor NXT Forever Season at the point where it dies, so I’m going to do it here, since it was goofier for more of 2011 than it was in 2012, even if the TRULY insane things happened primarily in 2012.
One more time for the people in the back, one of my favorite things I wrote when covering 2011, if not the favorite –
The first four seasons of NXT all lasted four months or less. NXT Season Five lasted over fifteen. The first four seasons of NXT had winners. This season simply had a survivor, as when NXT turned into NXTin June 2012, Derrick Bateman was the only contestant still on the show. Even he wasn’t an original contestant, instead joining the cast in WEEK SEVENTEEN to replace Conor O’Brien when he was eliminated. Nobody replaced the other eliminated contestants. The aim was nebulous at best, with the winner (which never came) being promised the chance to pick their own pro for Season Six, with the caveat that it was full of former competitors from the previous seasons. There was never a season six (or a movie). This simply wound up going on forever, and at some point, the concept of these men having a Pro or this being any sort of competition was forgotten about.
Instead, it was a show where everyone there (with the exception of our heroes…keep reading) seemed to hate being there, and it eventually made everyone insane. Tyler Reks and Curt Hawkins feuded with General Manager William Regal and tried to get traded, only for him to make them janitors for months on end instead, which somehow dovetailed into a screwball caper involving Matt Striker being kidnapped for a month. The Prime Time Players formed at some point, feuded with The Usos for an indeterminable stretch of time, and were traded to the “main” roster for no real reason, but not before they briefly had tensions over the romantic affections of Tamina Snuka. Tyson Kidd and Michael McGillicutty had a feud over a.) failson Michael being mad at Kidd being friends with other second generation guys just because he grew up with the Harts, b.) what it means to be a failson, and c.) Michael stealing Kidd’s wife’s panties and smelling them. Vladimir Kozlov got super into planking in the summer of 2011. Trent Baretta had a run on the show and, along with Kidd, had one of those random C-show three boy runs that people in WWE stumble into sometimes.
The highlight was a six month plus romance quadrangle involving Derrick Bateman (aka EC3’s shitty dead cousin), Maxine (aka Katrina of Lucha Underground, with Regal occasionally referring to her as the devil in a great piece of accidental fanwank), Johnny Curtis (aka Fandango), and Kaitlyn (aka Kaitlyn). At some point, the evil Maxine dumped charmingly stupid hunk Bateman for hanging out with Kaitlyn too much, and began consorting with evil pervert Johnny Curtis (complete with unmarked grey van) to upset him. Johnny Curtis then began introducing a chloroform rag, kidnapping Matt Striker with it, and asking everyone in sight if they wanted to get weird. He turned a men’s restroom into his private office, and constantly alluded to also having a van office and a basement office. He and Maxine schemed either to get off of NXT together by doing…something?…to William Regal to force his hand, but were also incredibly willing to stab each other in the back at the drop of a hat, no matter who was offering, only for all of their schemes to backfire.
Sometimes Bateman and Kaitlyn went on capers to stop them, but sometimes plans just fell apart when they didn’t think of a second step after “chloroform Matt Striker and hold him hostage”. In that particular case, Curtis left Striker knocked out in an equipment box because Alicia Fox walked by and he was still holding chloroform, but when he couldn’t catch her, he went back and someone else had kidnapped Striker away from him, to be revealed later on to be part of Reks and Hawkins’ plot to get Regal to make them stop being janitors by blackmailing them into taking the fall, so Regal would be mad at someone else. Bateman and Kaitlyn freed Striker on accident when they found him tied up in a closet when looking for a place to make out, leading to Curtis and Maxine blaming it all on each other before Regal forced them to stay together as wrestler and manager, ensuring this by forcing them to be handcuffed together whenever Curtis doesn’t have a match.
None of this is made up.
It’s one of the strangest, most endearing, funniest, and best storylines in WWE history. It’s the best story of the 2010s that nobody talks about besides like three people I know who I know watched this nonsense along with me.
Naturally, like this season, it never concluded.
WWE found out about NXT being incredibly weird and original at some point after WrestleMania 28, and made it boring again, before any of that could reach a proper close. People were shipped off to brands, JTG and Hornswoggle got thrown onto NXT, and all of the weirdness gave way to the show become another version of WWE Superstars. Curtis, Maxine, Bateman, and Kaitlyn all sort of drifted apart, and the show just suddenly became this other thing. The closest we came to any sort of resolution was a pretty cold Bateman/Curtis match on one of the first episodes of Full Sail era NXT, and this was never about matches.
The legacy of NXT Redemption/NXT Season Five/NXT Forever Season is something like that, and like this match. It should not have worked. It was very silly, it seems almost designed to fail, but everyone involved tried their best and it succeeded, even while completely abandoning the premise of NXT as a competition, and occasionally, wrestling as a framework.
Instead, the show flowered without the burden of having to be on television and became about the concept of purgatory. Some people were trying to escape this Fallujah of professional wrestling by any means necessary. Others embraced where they were at, because you might as well, and got into the sorts of antics and romantic entanglement based storylines that I still occasionally think about today. It’s incredibly stupid, it had no point, no value, no relevancy, and it brought out the funniest and most creative sides of everyone who was willing to simply accept where they were at and have some fun.
NXT Forever Season wasn’t good, but being that it was as close as the WWE ever got to simply becoming a sitcom, it’s some of the best story work ever to come out of the WWE.
5. NEW JAPAN PRO WRESTLING
TOP HEAVY? Surprisingly no. A common complain about New Japan Pro Wrestling in most of the 2010s and through most of their history, but not all that apt here when you dig deeper. Tanahashi’s reign anchors things and that’s mostly great stuff, but there’s a surprising amount of interesting or good things underneath it. Nagata and Nakamura spend the year kind of just fucking about, but it’s fun as hell to watch those two fuck around. Masato Tanaka had a nice little run as CHAOS’ temporary #2, and Minoru Suzuki’s takeover of Kojima-gun leading to the slow reformation of TenKoji is the kind of long term, non-title oriented, and sprawling midcard storyline that I’d call for New Japan to have now. Junior division is held steady by the Prince, and there’s even a slight peak at the end of the year of the lower card workhorse pushes for Ishii and Honma that would become a trademark of the artistic/creative peak over the next three to four years.
4. DRAMATIC DREAM TEAM
The first year that DDT itself was an entire great promotion, instead of feeling like “the promotion with The Golden Lovers and HARASHIMA”. DDT saw arguably it’s best ever singles matches in 2011 as part of the Togo reign, while also being able to deliver the sorts of funsmallermatches that make an entire promotion fun to watch. The Dick Togo stuff as a whole is almost perfect. The KUDO reign largely delivers. The Golden Lovers and HARASHIMA don’t quite get to shine as much as they had in other years, but they still get plenty of chances and always deliver. 2011 DDT explores the deeper parts of a really talented roster, and save for an overreach in the main event of the biggest show of the year (something the promotion before and after this are also guilty of), there are virtually no major misses in this run. I had DDT as the promotion of the year in 2019, and they weren’t half as interesting then as they were in 2011.
3. DRAGON GATE
My initial thought was to put Dragon Gate at #2, but I hesitate because so much of it is lost. Not forever, I don’t think, but there’s no real impetus for the Dragon Gate Network to focus its attention on more than either deep nostalgia (Toryumon) or more than the most recent past. So, this is largely conjecture and what I remember from when I watched the year largely in full, but this may be the best year in Dragon Gate history. Reorganizing the roster, mostly, into two opposing units made everything much clearer and also much more interesting. Beyond this helpful bit, DG also gained a huge boost both from the heel turn of BxB Hulk and the return of Akira Tozawa. Admittedly, it’s hard to confirm these things when so much of 2011 Dragon Gate is just lost. It’s not online, it’s not on the DG Network either really. No company in the world right now has such a casual disinterest in anything but its own present like Dragon Gate. So, this is based on years old opinions and what little I’ve been able to find.
RIP in Peace Open the Dragon Gate.
2. CHIKARA
2011 is the last year in which I would ever say, “hey, you gotta see this CHIKARA show” instead of “hey you gotta see this CHIKARA match”. This is not to say CHIKARA didn’t still produce great matches in 2012 and 2013, even sparingly for the rest of the decade, but it would never again be as consistently great as this. The 12 Large Summit carried the year for this traveling circus of different types of sex perverts, along with the usual high points like gigantic team tournaments, weird and wonderful guest spots, and a whole lot of heart behind just about about everything. It’s an entirely personal thing to say, but 2011 felt like the last year that the CHIKARA magic existed, or at least in which I believed in it, which is functionally the same thing. Not what it was at its very best, better than it would ever be again.
1. PRO WRESTLING GUERRILLA
This wasn’t hard. For most of the decade, this isn’t a hard category. This year, it’s PWG, and I don’t have to think about it for more than a second. Four of the five or six best wrestlers in the world provided the foundation for the company in 2011. Every other great company in 2011 is not as great as they’re going to be (DDT, NJPW, Dragon Gate probably?) or not as great as they once were (CHIKARA, CZW, NOAH). PWG produced only one show all year that wasn’t incredible. Over a fifth of the top twenty five best matches of 2011 happened in PWG and over a fifth of the twenty five-ish names on the WOTY list spent significant time in PWG in 2011. Outside of the math, it’s a slam dunk too. It’s a seamless transition from one era to the next, at a point where the majority of other U.S. indies stumbled in this task, to put it nicely. But, if you’ll allow me to dig a little deeper.
PWG is not only the best wrestling company of 2011, but additionally the promotion most of the year and era itself.
As much as Ring of Honor summed up the Bush years (everything lasts forever, incredibly self serious, deeply stupid, puts forth a pretense of legitimacy while all the best stuff is pure grit and violence) and GCW perfectly sums up the Trump years (outwardly cheap, devoid of most value, repetitive to the point of a numbing effect, enables and gives voices the worst aspects of Our Thing — both America and indie wrestling), PWG is the independent wrestling of the Obama years. It’s light, it’s positive without shouting about how positive it is but also making sure you know it, and in retrospect, it ruined the brains of a lot of people until 2015 or 2016. Myself included! At the time, it felt like this celebration, that a great evil had been maybe not defeated, but contained and humiliated to such an extent that certain beliefs and opinions were okay just to laugh at, because nobody could possibly be taking them seriously anymore. Mostly, it’s this idea that the right things were not only happening all on their own, but that they would continue, because they had so far.
In retrospect, it’s no surprise that The Young Bucks eventually got everything they could ever hope for, given that the grand climax of PWG’s banner year is an even greater evil returning, being whitewashed, and helping our Problematic Fave Kevin Steen humiliate, dominate, defeat, but never quite banish these little psycho church boys gone mad. As much as ROH was sometimes embarrassingly self serious, and GCW is embarrassingly and almost proudly hollow, Peak PWG is something somewhere in between. The self confidence to know that despite often saying differently, this was not THAT serious. The ability to get there on a dime when the situation called for it, because of the brain damage we all suffered in the previous era but agreed to mostly ignore after the way it all ended. Fun as hell, but the idea of fun as a marketing concept beyond that, when most everything else was so much stupider in so many different ways. PWG succeeded in its time because of how little it asked of you. Watch a PWG show. Have a good time. That’s it. A victory lap, both earned and also preemptive, for all the right things, held in perpetuity.
At no point did that victory feel more assured outside of than in this period from 2011 through the summer of 2014. It’s pure coincidence that this lines up almost perfectly with what I’d perceive to be Peak PWG, but it lines up too perfectly to mean nothing. PWG is the promotion of the year because it is the promotion most emblematic of the year.
(I reserve the right to hyperlink to this in 2012 and just say “Again, this” in the highly likely event of a repeat or threepeat.)
TAG TEAM OF THE YEAR:
5. THE BRISCOES (JAY & MARK BRISCOE)
Since Day One
Just a scratch
John Kronus
Barely bleeding, man
Just trying to look at some titties
Not cosmetically pleasing
VIOLENT PEOPLE
If promos or angles counted as much as matches, The Briscoes would be the tag team of the year. I want to point that. In a year where a handful of great speakers rose to prominence, or a more prominent level, and unleashed some of the best mic work of their lives, Jay Briscoe was the best promo in wrestling. If it matters at all, 2011 is the best promo year of the decade, and Jay Briscoe was the best promo of 2011. For all its heart and raw emotionality, Eddie Kingston’s HIGH NOON promo is one of the best ever, and I’m never 100% sure if it’s better than “Violent People” even as the best promo of the year. The Briscoes reinvented themselves as the realest versions of themselves, and aside from one VERY hateful Jay Briscoe tweet, it was largely unimpeded by any behavior out of the ring. The Briscoes’ turn and mic work in 2011 were so good that half a decade later, the Usos ripped it off completely, even down to one major catchphrase, and revived their careers for another half decade. The Briscoes in 2011 were that good out of the ring.
Unfortunately, they spent the bulk of their time in the ring in 2011 Ring of Honor, and for all the good they could bring to matches, it was a big ask tasking them with absolute turds like third run Haas & Benjamin and total mediocrities like the All Night Express, and asking them to compete with tag teams who wrestled more often and in places with a much higher level of competition.
Still, the Briscoes are one of the best tag teams of all time and any time they got to face a team on their level (Steen/Tozawa, Future Shock, CZW’s The Nigerian Nightmares), it was both a reminder of that and how embarrassing ROH was to let an act this good and real go to waste.
4. NIGHTMARE VIOLENCE CONNECTION (AKIRA TOZAWA & KEVIN STEEN)
As I said about the Peligros Abejas a year ago –
They had something like six matches together. Most of them are great, and half are among the very best tag team matches of the year. Not much volume to speak of, but as airtight a consistency/peak case as you can make.
It’s as true about this team as it was about their polar opposites in 2010.
3. THE KINGS OF WRESTLING (CHRIS HERO & CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI)
The year belonged to other teams, one dominating their scene and the other finally growing into themselves, but when Chris and Claudio were given full license, they still looked like the best tag team in the world. They just disappeared, that’s the only issue. ROH scaled them back a few months before they officially left, in an attempt to minimize the gigantic loss (it didn’t work). PWG only had them team up half as much as possible, always an issue when they’re also arguably the two best wrestlers in the entire world. If not for signing contracts in the middle of the year and taking themselves out of the running, it’s almost a guarantee that they would have won this a second year running.
2. STRONG BJ (DAISUKE SEKIMOTO & YUJI OKABAYASHI)
The best tag team in Japan in 2011, and for the foreseeable future. 2011 was the breakout year for the duo that’s very likely the Japanese tag team of the decade. While their six man and tag league work in the home base was all very good, the bulk of this comes from the interpromotional feud of the year, as the strongest boys in the world represented Big Japan against larger All Japan. The bulk of that was against the duo of Seiya Sanada and Manabu Soya, and various Soya team-ups elsewhere. One could also argue about plugging people into a formula, but this is early on in the formula, where there’s enough minor change-ups thrown in and it’s acted out with enough passion and energy that it’s not such a problem for me. Formulas aren’t bad until people are wrestling like they’re solvign equations, you know? Quality is quality, and no other team in the country produced like these two did.
One could argue that, on a quantity level, no other team in the world produced more than they did.
This is a close one. Both the obvious teams left largely benefited from one specific match up or storyline that delivered every time they went to it, and could be accused of a lot of things. It’s not a particularly strong year for this.
1. THE YOUNG BUCKS
Kevin Steen is in that picture with them because it’s that match up that got them here, honestly. That’s not a judgment entirely on Matt and Nick Jackson. It’s just a really great match up, responsible for a lot of great professional wrestling in 2011. It was one of the best and most natural feuds in all of wrestling, and the Bucks rode it to this award, getting more out of that pairing than Sekimoto and Okabayashi could out of their one primary match up, and then did a little more around the edges of that too.
Their two biggest tag team matches of the year (against NVC and Steen/Super Dragon respectively) were among the best matches of the year period. They got more out of Kyle O’Reilly than anyone had before or will for another few years. They got a great (three way) match out of the Bravado Brothers. In a year without a slam dunk TTOTY candidate, things like that are enough. Really though, 2011 saw them continue to grow into being The Young Bucks in italics, before being fired from TNA lit a fire under them, or whatever the narrative is. By the end of the year, they were enough of the way there to deliver their career match. In a weaker field, with competition that either left halfway through the year or had the same issues without hitting quite the same highs, it’s not a particularly hard sell.
Groan if you’d like. I get it. But despite lacking the quantity of their famous 2013-15 run of being Everywhere or the artistic aspirations of their 2018 back selling run, it doesn’t feel unfair to me to call 2011 the best work of the Young Bucks’ careers.
MATCH OF THE YEAR:
25. MANABU SOYA/SEIYA SANADA VS. STRONG BJ, AJPW PRO WRESTLING LOVE IN RYOGOKU VOLUME 13 (10/23/2011)
Is this the best Strong BJ tag team match ever? Maybe! I don’t love declarative statements about a team with as many great matches as Sekimoto and Okabayashi do, but yeah, maybe. This is really really great. If nothing else, it’s the high point of the interpromotional feud of the year. Strong BJ arrives totally and completely, taking two privileged system wrestlers down a peg to end the feud once and for all, and no other Sekimoto or Okabayashi win has ever felt quite so good. Admittedly, it’s the high level execution of a formula, but even years later, the formula rarely feels as potent and lively as it did here. There’s such a desperation and a punch to it this time. Given both all of the people who’ve been plugged into their roles since and the careers that Soya and Sanada have gone on to have (not all bad, never again touching these 2011 highs), it’s that much more impressive a feat in hindsight. This is the Strong BJ tag team match to watch in order to understand the style in totality.
24. SPIKED MOHICANS (CIMA & RICOCHET) VS. DRAGON KID/PAC, DG KOBE PRO WRESTLING FESTIVAL 2011 (7/17/2011)
This match grew on me with each watch like a fungus, and I am now sick. I loved this the last time. That’s the highest recommendation I can give a match like this for anyone who’s familiar with the sort of wrestling that I like. It isn’t necessarily my favorite style of wrestling, to say the least, but this is perfectly executed. No dumb stuff, not a lot of filler, and its all laid out perfectly. The sort of match that makes other matches in its vein look that much worse. This is the blueprint that every other match like it for years to come has tried and usually failed to follow. Up there with the greatest ever pure spotfests in Dragon System history. Like with all of those matches, there’s the smallest thread running through this thing to unify it, leading to a finish that’s both sensational and which feels very important.
23. MATT TREMONT VS. NECRO BUTCHER, CZW TOURNAMENT OF DEATH X (6/25/2011)
An incredibly rare occasion, as a torch is not only passed in a deathmatch, but passed in an actual great deathmatch. Beyond the importance in retrospect, 2011 being the last time Necro really shows up in these matches in the US, this being his last Tournament of Death and being Tremont’s first TOD (his first match in the TOD, in fact), etc., it just flat out rules. It’s a match not only with something to say and a point to make, but incredibly violent too. Just mean as hell on top of the emotional punch. The deathmatch of the year and if not for another Tremont effort six years and change later, it’d easily be the deathmatch of the decade too.
22. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA, NJPW G1 SPECIAL 2011 (9/19/2011)
Always a pairing I’ve liked, but until now, rarely a pairing that I’ve loved. It’s the most mature match they’ve had to this point, making up for whatever’s lost in charm by them no longer being children by wrestling a much more complete match. Knee work that sort of matters, hard shots from both men, and some light body horror to boot when Tanahashi’s tooth gets knocked out a few minutes into the match. By this point, half a decade or more has been spent with Tanahashi being obsessed with the perception of his own toughness, be it trying to prove he is Tough or eschewing the debate entirely. That debate ends here. It’s hard to keep that going when the man loses his front tooth, keeps going, and wins. One of New Japan’s great payoffs in a decade of vaunted Great Payoffs comes about entirely on accident.
21. EDDIE KINGSTON VS. FIRE ANT, CHIKARA MARTYR YOURSELF TO CAUTION (9/18/2011)
The second best match of the 12 Large Summit, save for the iconic final. Aside from one very very bad interference spot in the middle, a perfectly executed sort of face vs. face match, playing up to the specific strengths of each man, both as performers and characters. They are who they are, they react in completely natural ways to the other, and it’s up to the individual viewer to pick a side, based on who you are. I think that’s beautiful. The root of the drama is that while New York is Eddie’s home, they don’t love him quite enough to ever fully abandon longtime hero Fire Ant, only made worse when Eddie lashes out about it. A clinic from CHIKARA’s two all-time greatest babyfaces both on how to work a match like this, and also on why I say the former part with absolute conviction.
20. SAMI CALLIHAN VS. FIT FINLAY, EVOLVE 9 (7/26/2011)
One of the most delightful beatings of the year. What it could have used in a little editing work was made up for in pure meanness. A gigantic compliment to 2011 that not only is this only the 20th best match of the year, but that it’s only the 2nd best old man beating of the year and only the 2nd or 3rd best Sami Callihan underdog performance of the year. This is Finlay’s match moreso than it is Sami Callihan’s, delivering the second best old man performance of 2011, but with a lesser wrestler, it would have been far less interesting. It’s Callihan’s very nature — a total shithead, one who earns this beating time and time again, but one who still feels sympathetic through it all — that makes it work out so well in the end.
19. REY MYSTERIO VS. JOHN CENA, WWE RAW (7/25/2011)
A better version of the aforementioned Kingston/Fire Ant match.. Not just because for once, the WWE version of a thing is the one where booking gets the hell out of the way and lets them work, but because of who’s slotted into those roles. All due respect to Eddie Kingston, an all timer, but John Cena is the best Ace figure in his company’s history. All due respect to Fire Ant, AN ALL TIMER FUCKING FIGHT ME ABOUT IT, but Rey Mysterio is a top five underdog of all time. The matches succeed in the same way, as the underdog fights against the idea of being slotted into that role, forcing a much tighter contest than the favorite could ever expect. Similarly, it’s the one time these match ups ever got to happen in any meaningful way, resulting in the entire clash carrying some sort of invisible weight. A titanic clash that lived up to every expectation people would have had, for the ninety minutes or less that it actually got to be promoted.
18. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. TETSUYA NAITO, NJPW DESTRUCTION 2011 (10/10/2011)
Few things in wrestling in 2011 (and 2012, 2013, and 2014) were as satisfying as bright eyed young would-be babyface heir Tetsuya Naito gleefully flying far too close to the sun, lighting his wings on fire, and being sent careening downward into the sea.
This is perhaps the greatest example of the satisfaction such a thing can bring. The joy isn’t simply that he lost, it’s how he lost. It’s that he came in so assured of his coronation, based off of two fluky wins in the last year and a half, and little by little, he’s completely chipped away at and left totally exposed. You don’t dethrone the Ace while you’re still modeling yourself after said Ace. Naito approached his hero with a lacking heart and an imperfect will, and is broken down, dismissed, and embarrassed at every level.
The Coward Robert Ford tripping on a floorboard before he can line his shot up, and shooting himself in the dick instead of getting blood all over that nice framed picture.
17. DICK TOGO VS. HARASHIMA, DDT INTO THE FIGHT 2011 (2/27/2011)
A similar tale with a happier ending, as a champion at the peak of his powers is approached by the heir apparent, with a strategy that completely collapses at the worst moment.
HARASHIMA isn’t exposed and humiliated like Naito (or at all), so this lacks the same satisfying punch, but it’s much neater on the whole because HARASHIMA’s plan is actually correct. He just lacks to will to go all the way with it and falters in the end, just for a moment. This is some version of Little Kazu leaving the Dome in tears, except without the embarrassment of a man leaving in tears. It’s a slightly different version of another Old Man Match, in a year full of them. It’s no violent beating, but a lesson being learned, using the old man as a fulcrum for an Ace’s growth.
Only the third best match of the Dick Togo KO-D Title run, but the most important in hindsight. HARASHIMA tries to play tough and tortures the old man a little bit, but isn’t willing to go all the way with it, and pays the price at the last second. He’ll never make that mistake again. Something something half measures.
16. KEVIN STEEN VS. EL GENERICO, PWG STEEN WOLF (10/22/2011)
As a full package, including what happens after the match, it’s perhaps unmatched in wrestling by anything else, save for THE major thing that happened in 2011. I think about this as bell to bell though, and while this rules so much, that weird Young Bucks interference spot is there. It doesn’t matter so much for me discussing the match individually, but on a list like this, it’s a flaw that a lot of other matches simply don’t have, no matter how perfect the whole package is or how emblematic this match is of a cultural and power shift in independent wrestling. Still, a remarkable match. The most brutal ladder match of the decade probably (maybe it’s the Cole/Briscoe Ladder War, maybe something else, maybe if you mean “brutal” as “unbelievably bad”, it’s Rollins/Ambrose or Omega/Elgin), as it’s pared down to just the nastiest stuff. It’s an impulse I have a lot of love for, but 2011 is full of pared down violent fights I happen to like even more.
15. BIG VAN WALTER VS. SAMI CALLIHAN, CZW BACK IN GERMANY (10/1/2011)
Speaking of!
The first of two Walter vs. Callihan matches on this list. It’s a near perfect sequel, as it both embraces the original and completely abandons any hope of trying to match up to it. Not an attempt to duplicate, but a match that incorporates everything about the original and moves the story forward. Walter needs revenge for that match, and comes now when Sami is on the last day of a strenuous CZW European tour. There’s an inevitability to the whole thing, but Sami’s just defiant, petty, and rude enough to make him really work for it. In a five year run full of these grimy yet courageous performances in losses, this may be Sami Callihan’s finest ever performance in a loss. In a career full of these composed dominant heel victories over smaller wrestlers, it’s up there with the very best work Walter’s ever done. Together, this is a better pairing than any other that either man ever found themselves involved in. All the best heel revenge elements of something like White Castle of Fear cranked up past eleven on pure trucker speed.
14. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. NIGHTMARE VIOLENCE CONNECTION, PWG DDT4 2011 (3/4/2011)
The Young Bucks become The Young Bucks. No longer purely annoying, but outright villainous. Dangerous, in their own way, more than simply cheaters. In response, Kevin Steen becomes God in Reseda. It’s the formal kick off of PWG’s best feud-then-relationship of the decade. It’s a hell of a match when 2011 Akira Tozawa is the part of the match I think about last when writing a blurb about it.
13. L.A. PARK VS. EL MESIAS, AAA TRIPLEMANIA XIX (6/18/2011)
Absolute chaos. A real pleasure. The sort of match you know you probably overrated, but have no intention of watching again until it’s Of The Decade time. Maybe the easiest watch of the entire year, the sort of thing that you’re not supposed to watch before 10 pm or after 3 am, best enjoyed with a big gross sandwich and while at least a little bit inebriated. 2011 ECW MOTYC. The sort of match they invented caps lock for.
12. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI VS. CHRIS HERO, PWG EIGHT (7/23/2011)
The technical classic that it’s always felt like these two were missing out on all of the 5,000 times they fought from 2003 through 2011. Mechanically perfect if maybe a touch long at thirty five plus minutes, but not frustrating in the ways long Hero matches often can be, because of the focus they use. Hero pays the price for even slightly underestimating his partner and former student, as Castagnoli completely dismantles his leg, dominating Chris Hero in a Chris Hero match. For his part, Hero is remarkable, both in terms of being able to garner sympathy and also on a pure X’s and O’s level. Who doesn’t love a good crumble sell, right?
PWG was the best wrestling promotion of the year. A significant amount of that came from Castagnoli on top of the mountain as a nigh unbeatable heel champion, looking like the best wrestler in the world, a man who can do anything. A year before Brock Lesnar’s mainstream return, 2011 Claudio Castagnoli is a human cheat code. This is not the greatest expression of that dominance, but it is the match that completely drives it home.
11. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI VS. EL GENERICO, PWG KURT RUSSELLREUNION II: THE REUNIONING (1/29/2011)
On that note, this does the same thing but in half the time and with an all-time great babyface instead of simply a great babyface.
This is absolutely immense. The enormity of the challenge before El Generico as he attempts to climb the mountain back atop PWG is laid bare early on, when Castagnoli very casually targets Generico’s knee with a minor attack, only to cause an injury that ruins his chances. Castagnoli’s never been as casually cruel in his physical dominance as he was here against his greatest opponent. El Generico was never known as a limb selling guy, but he puts on a performance here fit to rival all but the greatest ever in that category.
The sort of match you would use to illustrate a best of the decade case as much as you would a best of the year case.
10. EDDIE KINGSTON VS. MIKE QUACKENBUSH, CHIKARA HIGH NOON (11/13/2011)
The biggest singles match in CHIKARA history delivers in a very CHIKARA sort of way (hyperemotional, detail oriented, incredibly satisfying), as Eddie Kingston gets his penance. That man would have been the best man at his wedding. The greatest leg seller of a generation gets to show off on his biggest stage yet, and while this isn’t about him, Quackenbush is able to contort himself into being the perfect foil for Eddie Kingston’s big moment. At absolute worst, the second or third greatest emotional payoff in a company built around fist pumping emotional payoffs.
9. SHINGO TAKAGI VS. AKIRA TOZAWA, DG KOBE PRO WRESTLING FESTIVAL 2011 (7/17/2011)
Shingo Takagi is one of the best wrestlers of his generation. As such, there’s going to be debate on what his greatest performance might be. Some might say it’s the BxB Hulk hair match. Some might put it on one of his many elimination match runs, and if you wanted to be wrong and just look like you don’t entirely know what you’re talking about, one might say it was getting a not horrible singles epic out of a bum like 2019 Will Ospreay. I would instead present this match, in which he both delivers the single best limb selling performance in the history of Dragon Gate and also completely and totally makes a returning Akira Tozawa.
To be clear, Akira Tozawa is a DELIGHT in this match. He’s a ball of energy, but also convincingly works the majority of his bits into a heel routine despite rising to prominence as an underdog heel. He takes to the arm work Takagi offers him with great aplomb. But this is Shingo’s match. El Generico’s knee selling was great, Eddie Kingston got to have a big knee selling main event in 2011, but I think Shingo is better here at arm work than either of them. I’m fine being alone in that, but something about Takagi’s performance just really got me. It’s more than just the mechanical aspects, the way he holds it or the panicked look in his eyes, it’s the way he explores every other option before being forced to throw bombs with the bad arm at the end. Someone accepting their fate and fighting anyways is already an incredibly powerful thing, but seeing them trying to get out of that position before that decision adds so much extra weight to that decision. The result is a match that carries that specific sort of weight better than any other match in company history, and better than most other matches this year period.
Yeah, I don’t’ know how! Somehow, the second best limb selling performance of the year came from a Dragon Gate singles match.
Miracles can happen.
8. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI VS. EL GENERICO, PWG BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011 (8/20/2011)
On that note, my irrational fav.
I like this a hair more than KRR2. I’m on an island there. I get it, I’m not mad at anyone vehemently disagreeing with me. To me, this is so much more skillful than a main event epic, and that’s not exactly something that’s easy to do. This is a sub fifteen minute sprint, but one that never loses a concrete structure or a sense of what’s going on. Some may argue for the knee work of the January match giving an additional hurdle for El Generico, but to me, I like this more without it. I like these two the most when it’s simplified. Big and small, power against flight, the perfect underdog match up. In the story, it comes off now like Claudio doesn’t even bother with the leg, making him that much more of a mountain, giving the best babyface in the world that much steeper a climb. Is this higher than KRR2 because of the finish? Because of the result? It’s not a no. This would be a top twenty five match no matter what. It’s one of the best pairings of all time, and them working essentially a pay per view opener is impressive as hell.
It’s the tightest match they ever had, while sacrificing absolutely none of the speed, ferocity, desperation, bombast, everything that was great about every other match they’ve ever had. It’s one of the most efficient matches in the history of independent wrestling in the United States.
And yes, it is made by the finish.
Not the last time in 2011 that a great match is elevated by doing the perfect thing in the perfect way.
7. EL GENERICO VS. KEVIN STEEN, PWG BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES 2011 (8/20/2011)
This is a bottle episode of a pro wrestling match.
Bottle episodes are inherently more interesting to me than any other genre of television episode. The genre has specifically always interested me because without any distractions or tricks, things become entirely about the relationships and interplay between a set of characters, and it has a way of laying things totally bare, and reducing people down to the core of who they are. It’s very hard for a good show to do a bad bottle episode, and even bad shows have had decent bottle episodes. The closest thing Friends ever came to a bottle episode (“The One Where No One Is Ready” (no, I don’t have a vest count for this specific episode, I’m not ever watching it again)) is one of the only good episodes of the show ever. The result is usually comedic, producing some of the best and funniest writing possible within a set pairing (“Pine Barrens”, “The Dinner Party”) or within the whole group (“Cooperative Calligraphy”, “Chinese Restaurant”). Adapted to professional wrestling and these two especially, comedy is removed from that, and instead, it’s the barest bones encounter these two ever had.
It’s a rare feeling, for a match to feel this spartan and cramped, especially one with two more maximalist wrestlers like these two, but this feels that way. There’s a lack of space to the entire thing and a desperation to it. It’s hard to put a finger on why, outside of the nature of a one day tournament. And that really might be all it was. A one day tournament helping to produce that feeling in the air, and two talented wrestlers working to what they could sense around them, responding naturally to what’s out there in the aether. I don’t think it was a conscious choice at all, given how many other matches in Reseda lack this same feeling of confined space and the panic to escape, but this match taps into that somehow, and it results in the most interesting Steen vs. Generico match of all time.
At the end of the show and tournament of the year, they’re too worn down and beaten up to do anything but run at each other as fast as possible. A Shut Up And Play The Hits sort of match but when the hits are this good and they’re played this quickly and angrily, it’s a blast. I don’t think this is the best Steen vs. Generico match ever, I don’t even think it’s the best one of the year, but it’s the match that most succinctly and accurately sums up both who they are, who they are to the fans, and most importantly, who they are to each other.
It is the rivalry summed up completely and totally.
Functionally, this is the only Steen vs. Generico match.
6. DICK TOGO VS. ANTONIO HONDA, DDT SWEET DREAMS (1/30/2011)
The things that bother me about this match are less bell to bell and more the kind of fetishism it represents, and the way people put this on a pedestal, like it’s the only good wrestling in Japan in the last decade or something. I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t hold a match’s influence or response against it, but some of you make it real fucking hard. It’s not the match’s fault. Not entirely.
This is not a flawless match.
The first thing is that it’s next to impossible to ever buy Honda winning. The result is that even at its best, this all feels like sort of a put-on in a way that’s hard to overcome. It’s a great match, one of the best of the year and decade, but in a way that feels like they decided to have a Great Match, and so it is happening.
The arm selling by Dick is not ideal (also not BAD), you could trim a lot out of it, and yeah, it is kind of hard to get past certain homages. Jesus Christ though, this rules. Whatever it might lack, it makes up for in blood. I am a vampire. Give me the sort of blood this match does, and I can overlook a large amount of minor problems (and this only has a few). Honda delivers the performance of his life doing a Jerry Lawler imitation, and Dick Togo turns in a hell of a performance on every level, outside of the arm issues. The most impressive thing to me is the history behind it, as it’s the sort of match Dick Togo’s blown time and time again, underestimating someone and getting rocked, only to take the second chance he’s been given and rocking Honda when he gets the opening. It’s as much about Honda showing his own worth as it is about Dick Togo overcoming his own self destructive habits. I don’t care quite so much about the former, but the latter hits me in a particularly sweet place.
If you’re going to write a love letter to the past, this is how you do it.
Cover it in blood.
5. BIG VAN WALTER VS. SAMI CALLIHAN, WXW 16 CARAT GOLD 2011 NIGHT THREE (3/13/2011)
Sting vs. Vader on trucker speed again, but this time it’s the King of Cable final.
The closest European wrestling ever came to Fire Ant vs. Vin Gerard, naturally having to shop out half the job to someone from the Midwest, being unable to produce anyone actually likable themselves.
It’s one of the few times WXW got it totally and completely right. A tournament final that exists both as a traditional grit-and-heart underdog against a mostly unbeaten monster and also as a payoff to a two plus year storyline. A gutsy dirtbag gets revenge on a bully. Danielson vs. Morishima for people who dropped out of community college, moved to another state, and spent months doing meth with the biker who lived downstairs before going to a better community college down the street. The charm here is in the absolute simplicity of it. This is not a match concerned with being Great, it’s an incredibly confident match. It’s entirely about the story, and the story is that Walter is a bully and ultimately a coward, and when Sami presses him and punches him and gets him down, that cowardice is laid bare in front of the world. That’s it. That’s the match. It’s a thirteen minute match with these two very distinct halves, and it’s as perfect as this match up can ever be.
The gold standard for a match like this.
The work by which all other matches like it this decade should be held against, and by which most would be found extremely wanting. Every Walter match against an underdog since this match has failed to live up to what he did here. Every Sami Callihan underdog match before and after this has wanted to be what this match was. It’s the ultimate realization of everything he was about. The platonic ideal of the Sami Sprint, not simply being fast and violent, but having real stakes and a world of heart to it.
The least cowardly match in European wrestling this decade, naturally coming from the first and most satisfying major defeat of The Coward.
4. DICK TOGO VS. KOTA IBUSHI, DDT JUDGMENT 2011 (3/27/2011)
I’ve spoken of miracles, but this seems like something beyond that.
It’s a thirty six minute Kota Ibushi singles epic that not only do I not absolutely despise, but that I genuinely really really love. Dick Togo delivers Kota Ibushi his career singles match.
A lot of Ibushi stuff sucks because he’s so obviously this soulless brain dead vagrant murdering himbo that anything that asks me to feel sorry for him or relate to him in any way is going to fall short, because we are not approaching Kota Ibushi from the same place. I can however respect him as a dead eyed killing machine, and anything that approaches him from that angle, I can get. Dick Togo completely understands me and not only turns Ibushi into such a thing, but into this brazen representation of the idea of time and youth itself. Dick Togo could do some crazy things once upon a time, but when Ibushi can do things like this, none of that matters. Ibushi’s wilder moments are as demoralizing as they are spectacular. It’s like watching a Warriors Third against a BIG3 team. It’s beyond unfair, and frankly, pretty fucking rude.
For once, Dick Togo stands and takes it though. He adapts and prepares for Ibushi’s borderline sadism, doing things he wouldn’t expect, be it the moves of his then most famous foe, or inventing a Butterfly Destroyer. Somehow, Dick is able to come through. Against this maniac of all people, Dick Togo takes his stand, and it’s the most beautiful and inspiring thing in Japanese wrestling in all of 2011.
The high point of the reign, already one of the best things in wrestling.
Relative to people who like most of the same wrestling as I do, I’m on an island with this, but sometimes, something can just hit you exactly right.
3. WILLIAM REGAL VS. DEAN AMBROSE, FCW TV (11/6/2011)
What is the name of this blog?
What does that picture look like?
In all seriousness, this is a pair of perfect performances. William Regal delivers the beating of the year, and Dean Ambrose delivers the best selling performance of the year in response, impressively delivering the same sort of match as his 2010 bloodbath epic, now entirely within the confines of a classic Regal match. Neither is bound by their roles on WWE television, and instead, the match develops naturally from who they are as individual characters. Everything happens as it should, and the result is something incredibly special. Regal was never nastier nor more violent, and Dean Ambrose has a career performance on the other end of a match for once. 2011’s list, save for the MOTY, was dominated by either stories about old men fighting their own mortality and showing what they could still do and stories about bad things finally happening to bad people. This is the third best match of the year because it’s the one that marries those two ideas best.
The performance of William Regal’s career, and one of the greatest selling performances of all time by Dean Ambrose.
2. THE YOUNG BUCKS VS. APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (KEVIN STEEN & SUPER DRAGON), PWG FEAR (12/10/2011)
Another incredibly cathartic beating. The ultimate expression of PWG as Obama era victory lap, as horrible things happen to very annoying and silly people before their ultimate and final public flogging. Beyond how good and fun it was, it’s a delightfully violent throttling for the most part. Super Dragon’s all time greatest performance, as more than a wrestler but something more akin to a force of nature. The Bucks earn the offense they get and all the violence they receive in turn. I’s something like a legitimization, only without the unbelievable part of the formula where they somehow win. If not PWG’s finest hour, definitely its most satisfying one.
1. JOHN CENA VS. CM PUNK, WWE MONEY IN THE BANK 2011 (7/17/2011)
I cannot imagine you thought this would go any other way. The most slam dunk obvious award winner pick in the history of any of my lists. I cannot imagine reading this blog before, especially what I wrote about this match weeks back, and thinking this could ever go another way. Simply put, this is the Match of the Year. It is representative of the year in professional wrestling moreso than any other. It will likely be my Match of the Decade for the same reasons. Functionally, it invents the decade in American professional wrestling. It is both incredibly important and absurdly good and I think the world of it.
It’s a match I’ve accepted I will never be able to talk about subjectively.
If a match is more than a match, and the match is also THIS good, it’s the match of the year.
No blurb I can write about this match will be better than the review I wrote of this a few months back. I am exceedingly proud of it, and I sincerely doubt I can discuss this in any sort of shorter format, so I will not attempt it, and instead post this blurb from the end instead –
It’s powerful and weighty and real in a way that very few WWE or WWF matches can be. This is what wrestling should be at its absolute best. It’s a match to aspire towards. It’s more than a match, it’s a moment. It becomes a moment because of how much it has to say, and because of how well it manages to say all of these different things.
This is an an underdog story. It’s about outsiders and the value of hard work. It’s about a scumbag making good in his hometown. It’s about a scoundrel drawing a line, because you have to draw a line somewhere, and saying what is and isn’t acceptable. It’s about a dynasty being humbled for its overconfidence. It’s about the evil of corporations, the power of the little man, and a sort of deeply American individualism. It’s a clash of ideologies, where one side is won over by the end, and has to make a choice between himself and the greater good. It’s about right and wrong, and upholding the division between the two no matter what.
The best wrestling matches are about more than wrestling. They use wrestling to communicate something else, to teach some kind of a lesson or tell some kind of a story.
This match is about pretty much everything.
And it may be the very best wrestling match I’ve ever seen.
MONTH OF THE YEAR:
12. FEBRUARY
The Packers win the Super Bowl. Just a bad month in general, on top of the worst possible thing happening.
11. JANUARY
I spent like four days in bed with a cold, and couldn’t find the remote. I watched an entire episode of WWE Smackdown in real time. Jay Cutler sprained his MCL and fucking blew it. The Cape debuted on NBC and I found a glory hole in the community college math department men’s room.
10. SEPTEMBER
2 BROKE GIRLS debuted. I had a brief dalliance with a very mean spirited young woman who responded to our parting ways by trying to cut my tires, only to find out that I didn’t own a car, so I had to pay for my neighbor’s new tires, because it was the right thing to do. I struggled with actually figuring out how to tutor before realizing almost nobody who signed up for tutoring actually wanted to learn anything more than how to get a C. A lot of cancellations. 9/11, etc. bad month.
9. JUNE
Outside of the NBA Finals, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in June. That was really cool though. I looked into it, and apparently “Gold Cobra” came out in June. It’s not all perfect.
8. NOVEMBER
Thankgiving was probably cool? sole highlight i can find online is the corncob tweet tbh. would make it a top 3 month of 2017-19, but 2011 was an actual good year, so
7. AUGUST
I had a month to kill in between getting a great new job and starting it and also the fall semester. I didn’t really do anything for a month, because the job came with a great student loan rebate of close to $5,000 that functionally acted as a hiring bonus and also paying my rent for the next three years. I remember going to the gym a lot and only listening to Watch the Throne for a week or two. Either this August or August in 2012 is when i discovered WHY YOUR TEAM SUCKS.
6. MARCH
I turned 21 and that was cool. On the other hand, given a lift by the Super Bowl victory, Wisconsin decapitated unions in the state in a landmark political victory for the worst people in the world. Similarly, THE CAPE was canceled, failing to find new life on cable, and “Friday” went viral and has yet to actually go away. Arab Spring was cool.
5. APRIL
The government almost shut down and LCD Soundsystem’s “farewell” concert THE LONG GOODBYE was recorded. More importantly, the 2010s were basically invented in April 2011. GAME OF THRONES debuted in the same month that FAST FIVE came out. Personally, I don’t know. I completed a year of community college without dropping out or having a mental collapse. I did get a text about Larry Sweeney killing himself in the middle of writing a term paper though.
4. MAY
Randy Savage died, but in doing so, prevented the predicted apocalypse on May 21st. Derrick Rose won MVP, a wholly deserved award and anyone who criticizes it is jealous and a hater. We caught and compromised to a permanent end Osama Bin Laden. According to baseball-reference, this is the month where my dad got in a fight with a Cardinals fan and dodged a punch and the guy fell down the bleachers at Wrigley, which was very cool.
3. DECEMBER
This was the year I went home for New Years’ and didn’t die. I read FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ’72 for the first time. The US finally left Iraq. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL came out. Herman Cain sang the Pokemon song, and then died a day after I wrote this, rest in piss. A really good month, outside of Jimmy Darmody being killed off.
2. OCTOBER
Halloween was probably cool. I got hammered and bought an El Generico mask, and at some point, began seeing a woman I would eventually part ways with to go to real college and would later drunkenly and misguidedly propose to, but that’s a 2015 THE YEAR IN LISTS story. Met one of my best friends, resulting in trying out fantasy football for the first time. A fun month. CHINA, IL debuted on television.
1. JULY
MITB obviously but also my favorite cousin got married. I took a one week vacation home, one of the best vacations I’ve ever been on. It’s cool to vacation with family or a partner, but going somewhere on your own is something everyone should do. After I got home, I took that tutoring job I always talk about, which wound up totally changing my life in all the best sorts of ways. July 2011 also saw the release of both CARS 2 and the Kevin James vehicle, THE ZOOKEEPER, if you weren’t already sold.
WRESTLER OF THE YEAR:
2011 had a bunch of people on the 25-21ish bubble, so I want to note a few. 2011 saw only about fifteen to twenty people/acts with really great years, and a lot of people with very very good years, or people who were great but only didn’t have enough matches make tape. It’s a list with a lot of recurring themes, but the big one I want to communicate is that it was much easier to make the first two-fifths or so of this list than it was in 2010, before then becoming much much much more competitive. Everyone in the top ten would have won WOTY in 2019 or 2020, to date (7/31/2020).
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Christian
CIMA
Dolph Ziggler
Eddie Edwards
Go Shiozaki
Jun Akiyama
Kota Ibushi
Rey Mysterio
Soldier Ant
Yuki Ishikawa
25. JAY & MARK BRISCOE
Tag teams can make it as one entity, I don’t care. If they spent most of their time together as a team, I don’t see the argument against it. 2011 was a year of rebirth for The Briscoes, becoming interesting again for the first time in two or three years. They were stuck in Ring of Honor and what not, produced when they went to PWG and CZW, all the same stuff as the TTOTY blurb. Singles work from each man was also far from bad.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
Jay vs. Roderick Strong, ROH (1/15)
vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (3/4)
vs. All Night Express, ROH (3/19)
vs. Future Shock, ROH (4/1)
vs. All Night Express, ROH (4/2)
vs. The Nigerian Nightmares, CZW (5/14)
vs. All Night Express, ROH (9/17)
Mark vs. Jay Lethal, ROH (11/6)
24. YUJI NAGATA
Yuji Nagata might not be done making these lists, but this is the last year he feels like more than a “great in tournaments” candidate. Few people got to do as much as Nagata did in 2011, winning both the New Japan Cup and the Champions Carnival within a month of each other, and having a more formal Passing The Torch trilogy against Tanahashi and a longer run in All Japan in the spring and early summer. They weren’t all wild successes (the Suwama title match was particularly rough to watch, and the Masato Tanaka matches in NJPW were less interesting retreads from their 2008-9 feud) and he found himself leaning more on formula than I’d love, but it’s a good formula and especially worked out for him in those All Japan matches, where his opponent base was rarely up to par. Hard to go wrong with simple violence. The highlight comes not in any of these epics, but instead in a nine minute sprint against arguably Nagata’s best opponent ever, Tomohiro Ishii. It’s the sort of match meant to highlight Ishii, but in the way Yooj balances things out, he comes off just as impressive in a quieter way. The sort of performance that gets someone off the bubble and onto the list, which is the best way to describe Nagata at this point. Not what he was, still better than most.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Minoru Suzuki, NJPW (1/4)
w/ Jushin Liger vs. Minoru Suzuki/Masakatsu Funaki, AJPW (3/21)
vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi, NJPW (4/3)
vs. Suwama, AJPW (4/9)
vs. Seiya Sanada, AJPW (4/13)
w/ Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Hirooki Goto/Manabu Nakanishi, NJPW (5/29)
vs. Tomohiro Ishii, NJPW (11/12)
23. MASATO YOSHINO
It’s hard to be super confident about this because of the footage issue, admittedly. One of three Dragon Gate wrestlers on this list suffering for that reason. And yes, I am one of the all time high men on Masato Yoshino. He’s a very very cool wrestler to watch who rarely makes the mistakes that so many of his peers do. A rare blend of unbelievably cool shit and a straightforward approach.
This feels correct though, even half-relying on spreadsheet rankings from years back. Yoshino is maybe the most consistent wrestler in the history of his promotion, so even in a year where he was largely de-emphasized following the Dream Gate loss to Mochizuki in the spring, he produced more than most. King of the fun little tag sprint and up there with Shingo and Tozawa as some of the only foreign guys to consistently give a shit in Dragon Gate USA. Given how far the company’s fallen by mid 2011, and that stands out more and more every time. Add in one of the best Dream Gate matches of all time under his belt in January, and it’s another quietly great year for one of My Guys.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Don Fujii, DG (1/18)
w/ PAC vs. CIMA/Dragon Kid, DGUSA (1/28)
w/ PAC vs. Naruki Doi/Ricochet, DGUSA (1/29)
w/ Dragon Kid vs. Shingo Takagi/Susumu Yokosuka, DG (8/6)
w/ Dragon Kid vs. Akira Tozawa/BxB Hulk, DG (8/7)
vs. Naruki Doi vs. Sami Callihan vs. Chuck Taylor, DGUSA (9/10)
Ricochet is in the same boat as Yoshino, for the most part, only having a few higher highs. Working as a cocky little shit did what it often does for wrestlers as naturally gifted as Ricochet, and made him so much more interesting. The team with CIMA was the second best tag team in Japan, and on his own, Ricochet continued to improve exponentially. Bonus points for the work in PWG, beginning a background issue with El Generico when some of that cockiness found its way stateside as well.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Naruki Doi vs. Masato Yoshino/PAC, DGUSA (1/29)
w/ El Generico vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (4/9)
w/ El Generico vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (5/27)
w/ CIMA vs. Dragon Kid/PAC, DG (7/17)
w/ El Generico vs. Alex Shelley/Roderick Strong, PWG (7/23)
w/ CIMA/Akira Tozawa vs. PAC/Rich Swann/AR Fox, DGUSA (9/9)
w/ CIMA vs. Masato Yoshino/PAC, DG (10/2)
vs. PAC, DG (11/19)
vs. Masato Yoshino, DG (12/25)
21. SARA DEL REY
Another very quiet picture of consistency type. Nobody can ever be Bryan Danielson, but Del Rey approached things in the ring with the same sort of mentality, and 2011 was the first year of her career that her opponents consistently were up to par, and where she could have actual great matches, instead of simply being great in all of her matches. The 12 Large Summit gave Del Rey the chance to shine, and outside of the two finalists, Del Rey really might have been the best person in the thing, showing a lot of diversity with the sorts of matches she had in it and the different roles she excelled in.
The tragedy is that this penultimate year of Del Rey’s career is when she finally gets these sorts of chances and shows the ability to be one of the best wrestlers in the entire world, only to be effectively retired within eight months. It’s well tread territory on this blog that Moses never gets to enter the promised land, but we at least have the eighteen months or so Del Rey has in 2011 and 2012.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Claudio Castagnoli/Tursas vs. The Colony, CHIKARA (6/25)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, CHIKARA (7/31)
vs. Hallowicked, CHIKARA (8/27)
vs. Ophidian, CHIKARA (9/18)
vs. Kana, SHIMMER (10/1)
vs. Mike Quackenbush, CHIKARA (10/7)
vs. Kana, CHIKARA (10/8)
vs. Ayako Hamada, CHIKARA (12/4)
20. THE YOUNG BUCKS
A lower ranking than in 2010, but wrestling was much better in 2011 than in 2010.
The Bucks hit a career high at the end of 2011 and spent the year becoming The Young Bucks, but often suffered from a lesser quality of opposition than in years past, despite their own improvement. Still, their two best matches are among the best of the year, and they repeatedly were tasked with younger and less experienced opponents (Future Shock, Mack/Gatson, Cedric Alexander), and always left them better off than they found them. Add that to being one of the driving forces behind one of PWG’s best years ever, and it’s not an unimpressive year. They just weren’t in quite as many places quite so often, and didn’t themselves do anything quite as impressive as having as many great matches in 2010 TNA as they did, a Herculean task only topped by another all-time great team.
2011 saw the best versions of the Bucks yet, maybe ever on account of the simplicity they found in 2011, but A LOT of people were the best ever versions of themselves in 2011.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Willie Mack/Brandon Gatson, PWG (3/4)
vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (3/4)
vs. El Generico/Ricochet, PWG (4/9)
vs. Future Shock vs. The Bravado Brothers, ROH (9/17)
vs. Future Shock, PWG (10/22)
vs. Fire & Soldier Ant, CHIKARA (11/13)
vs. C+C Wrestle Factory, ROH (12/4)
vs. Appetite For Destruction, PWG (12/10)
19. DANIEL BRYAN
As good as that picture feels to look at and as good as that felt to see, it came at the end of the least substantial year in the career of the greatest of all time.
Despite looking like the best wrestler alive virtually every time he was given even just ten minutes or more against any number of WWE system goons, Daniel Bryan did nothing for the majority of the year. He began the year doing nothing with the US Title, until they remembered he had it and it was promptly taken away. He was called back in to re-legitimize The Miz, which isn’t something that’s actually possible at all, on account of him being The Miz. Nothing TV match after nothing TV match (to the point that I’m not sure if I actually recommend these matches, or if I just really like watching Bryan do anything?), brought in to legitimize menial talent after menial talent, only for the matches to show how great Bryan is in the end. An inspiring and well put together MITB win, one of the only interesting MITB matches since the original, only leading to more of the same before something finally clicked in the last month and a half of the year that if you have the best wrestler in the world at your disposal, you should use him in a more significant way.
For most of the year though, Bryan’s greatest contribution wasn’t a match itself, but one of the best segments in NXT history, even before the Forever Season.
Even at his least important and diminished, Daniel Bryan forces himself here through sheer force of will and talent. Even when doing nothing for a year, Daniel Bryan has a year this good.
It’s a year like 2011, as much as 2007, 2004, 2013-14, or the overrated 2006 that makes it clear who the greatest of all time actually is, for just how much Bryan was able to get all year out of just how little.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. The Miz, WWE (2/14)
vs. Sheamus, WWE (5/6)
vs. Sheamus vs. Cody Rhodes vs. Wade Barrett vs. Kane vs. Sin Cara vs. Justin Gabriel vs. Heath Slater, WWE (7/17)
vs. Wade Barrett, WWE (8/14)
vs. William Regal, WWE (11/10)
vs. Mark Henry, WWE (11/29)
vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Cody Rhodes vs. Zack Ryder, WWE (12/12)
vs. Dolph Ziggler, WWE (12/23)
18. DAISUKE SEKIMOTO
He’s here and Okabayashi isn’t, because Sekimoto delivered enough outside of the Strong BJ work, delivering in guest spots all over the world (save the bad Walter matches), and had an entirely different Mean Outsider run to his credit in Zero-1. Okabayashi didn’t and his work came almost entirely from a tag team with Sekimoto. That’s really the only difference.
Like with the Young Bucks, the case is virtually the same only stronger from year to year, but the competition was heavier in 2011. Sekimoto is the picture of consistency, truly. It’s a formula, and it’s fair to ride him a little for that when we’re talking about WOTY stuff and when the majority of his hits were tag team matches largely within one program, but a hit is a hit.
A hit is a hit and very few people delivered them as efficiently and as reliably as Sekimoto.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Manabu Soya/Seiya Sanada, AJPW (2/6)
vs. El Generico, WXW (3/13)
vs. Sami Callihan, CZW (4/9)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Manabu Soya/Ryota Hama, BJW (4/28)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Manabu Soya/Seiya Sanada, AJPW (6/19)
vs. Kohei Sato, ZERO1 (8/7)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Abdullah Kobayashi/Masashi Takeda, BJW (10/23)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Manabu Soya/Seiya Sanada, AJPW (10/23)
w/ Masato Tanaka vs. Shingo Takagi/Don Fujii, Mochizuki Produce (11/11)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Suwama/Takumi Soya, AJPW (11/19)
w/ Yuji Okabayashi vs. Suwama/Takumi Soya, BJW (12/18)
17. TAKASHI SUGIURA
Not quite the banner year for the Big Boss that 2009 or 2010 were, but still tremendous stuff to be found. Sugiura still spent half the year getting to have big title matches, and was allowed big singles chances following the title loss. Certain things simply didn’t work (Sugiura/Shiozaki III), and Sugi himself is also guilty of some major overreaches. The hits hit better than almost anything else in NOAH though, and the Kensuke Sasaki match in July is especially miraculous. Sugi’s 2011 is perhaps best known though for producing one of the greatest sprints of all time in the second KENTA match.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Trevor Murdoch, NOAH (3/21)
vs. Minoru Suzuki, NOAH (5/8)
vs. Kensuke Sasaki, NOAH (7/23)
w/ Go Shiozaki/Shuhei Taniguchi vs. Yoshihiro Takayama/KENTA/Yoshinobu Kanemaru, NOAH (9/11)
vs. KENTA, NOAH (10/10)
vs. KENTA, NOAH (11/13)
vs. Kensuke Sasaki, NOAH (11/14)
16. HARASHIMA
I will be making the WKO style Luchador Who Didn’t Make A Lot Of Tape argument for my guy here, extrapolating from what is available.
What is available is all great, and paints a picture of 2011 being the first year where HARASHIMA is clearly the best wrestler in his company, and one of the best in the world. I watched every HARASHIMA match from 2011 I could find on DDT Universe or elsewhere. He was great in every one of those matches. Most impressively, even while doing practically nothing, he still felt like the top and most important wrestler in the company, which is such a rare skill and an impressive thing to be able to do.
Often times he was let down by opponents (KUDO in the King of DDT final), or simply was a great wrestler in a ten minute or less DDT midcard match that didn’t have the ambition to match his performance (Honda, Takanashi, etc.). Despite that, like another all-timer a few spots prior, HARASHIMA found ways to shine whenever he could, stealing attention through pure force of talent.
It happens. It’s the sort of thing that happens especially when one is a system guy and the system focuses elsewhere for much of the year. Finding a way to still get those numbers is what separates the greats from the all timers. HARASHIMA in 2011 isn’t a first round pick in your fantasy league, but he’s a guy who’ll get you to the finals off of a waiver wire pick up.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ KUDO vs. Golden Lovers, DDT (1/30)
vs. Dick Togo, DDT (2/27)
vs. Antonio Honda, DDT (3/27)
vs. Shigehiro Irie, DDT (5/29)
w/ Dick Togo vs. KUDO/Danshoku Dino, DDT (6/4)
vs. Masahiro Takanashi, DDT (9/10)
w/ KUDO/MIKAMI vs. Shuji Ishikawa/Kengo Mashimo/Sanshiro Takagi, DDT (9/25)
vs. KUDO, DDT (11/27)
15. SHINGO TAKAGI
2011’s ultimate system guy suffering because he’s largely abandoned by his system.
He makes it higher than HARASHIMA because he delivered in one big match much moreso than HARASHIMA did, but it was a down year in much the same way.
It’s rough because again, Dragon Gate footage from 2011 largely just isn’t there, and these are largely initial thoughts confirmed by the handful of matches with footage still out there. Ultimately though, him not being higher comes down to a lack of opportunities. Dragon Gate cycles people in and out of things, and in 2011, Shingo didn’t have a lot to do individually. He was one of the backbones of the large J3 vs. Blood WARRIORS feud that took over the company in 2011, and he did a wonderful job, but it wasn’t a task with a lot of glory.
In spite of that, Shingo Takagi was the best wrestler in just about every single match he was in, and like HARASHIMA, that’s the sort of thing that stays with me. It especially stays with me when he delivers a performance against Tozawa that isn’t only selfless, but one that sees him put forth the best selling performance in his company’s history and maybe the best ever singles match performance in Dragon Gate history period.
When an individual performance is that good, it doesn’t matter quite so much that the rest of the resume isn’t what it could be, so long as there are no major misses. The reason Shingo’s so great is that, save some Dream Gate matches that fail because of the style, he doesn’t miss and hasn’t for thirteen years. He just didn’t get the chance to hit in 2011 more than once or twice.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Cyber Kong/Taku Iwasa/Kagetora vs. CIMA/Ricochet/Dragon Kid/Gamma, DG (5/5)
vs. Akira Tozawa, DG (7/17)
w/ Susumu Yokosuka vs. Masato Yoshino/Dragon Kid, DG (8/6)
w/ Don Fujii vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Masato Tanaka, Mochizuki Produce (11/11)
w/ YAMATO vs. Akira Tozawa/BxB Hulk, DG (12/25)
14. HIROSHI TANAHASHI
After another disappointing Tokyo Dome match to start the year, Tanahashi looked like he was going to have another year like he’d had for the past few. A great title match or two, some G1 bangers, a few good little matches. A respectable year, if not one that makes a list.
Turns out he’s a slow starter in all areas.
Following the first Nagata match in April, Tanahashi turned it around in a big way, and 2011 saw him finally manage to completely unify his vision of what his wrestling should be, against all his greatest available opponents. He perfects what he and Nakamura should be against each other. He turns in one of the most interesting and outright FUN G1 Upset matches of the decade against Toru Yano, in a match that functionally creates Yano’s now famous role as beloved trickster out of what was once simply a villainous scoundrel. Most notably, he turns in a career performance to this point against Tetsuya Naito, not only leading him to a career match, but viciously owning him in the process in one of the great displays of political maneuvering of the entire decade. It would be even more impressive had he not also completely eviscerated Hirooki Goto as a wrestler and a character in June.
In between all of this, there’s a handful of really good little matches anyways.
It’s an exceptional all around year, for all the different things he did within the same role, especially the changes within the pairings where he fought guys two or three times in the same year. Not the best he’ll do, very possibly the second worst year he’ll have all decade behind 2010, but a significant leap forward that almost always falls through the cracks. I know you’re all smarter than this, but as always, New Japan’s history didn’t begin in February 2012.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Yuji Nagata, NJPW (4/3)
w/ Yuji Nagata vs. Hirooki Goto/Manabu Nakanishi, NJPW (5/29)
Shingo Takagi and HARASHIMA were scaled back in 2011, and still succeeded, but Randy Orton found himself on the other end of that.
Sometimes, a system wrestler is enabled by the system around them, emphasized for a year or two before being put back in the rotation, and the process repeats. Randy Orton’s had a serious of great years spurned on by booking, and 2011 is up there with 2004 and 2013-14 as being among his best. Save for finishing up a bad Miz feud in January and being tasked with Wade Barrett at the end of the year, Orton spent the majority of the year programmed against the best wrestlers in the company, namely CM Punk and Christian. In between repeated matches against two all time greats and a decent little Mark Henry feud too, he got plugged into a series of fun television matches against a bevy of fun midcarders. Orton has a formula, and when he gives a shit and has the right people with him, it can really work out well. He’s rarely hit the combination just right like he did in 2011.
Most importantly, he did jumping jacks AND threw a present at a man’s head in 2011, making it the most fun year of Randy Orton’s career, if nothing else.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. CM Punk, WWE (4/3)
vs. CM Punk, WWE (5/1)
vs. Christian, WWE (5/6)
vs. Christian, WWE (5/22)
vs. Christian, WWE (7/17)
vs. Christian, WWE (8/14)
vs. Dolph Ziggler, WWE (8/29)
vs. Christian, WWE (8/30)
vs. Mark Henry, WWE (9/18)
vs. Mark Henry, WWE (10/2)
vs. Dolph Ziggler, WWE (10/28)
vs. David Otunga, WWE (11/29)
12. FIRE ANT
Another major beneficiary of the 12 Large Summit.
Fire Ant wasn’t a focus of the tournament like Del Rey, Kingston, or Quackenbush, but he had a pair of the tournament’s most interesting matches against Jigsaw and the previously discussed Kingston match, doing opposite things in each match. He’s in a similar position in CDP matches over the course of the year, effectively working over Quackenbush’s arm in March before being just as interesting on the other end of that in December against Taylor and Gargano. Fire Ant repeatedly gets the absolute best out of those two, responsible for virtually every great match John Boy has to his credit in 2011. If you want pure action, Fire Ant also leads the show against future internet favorites Kotoge and Harada in October, and participates in one of the best Young Bucks sprints of the decade the following month. Fire Ant might not have hit the highs he did in 2008 or 2009, but it’s a remarkable diversity case that he makes for himself, on top of raw consistency.
To continue the theme of this last batch, it’s not unfair to call CHIKARA guys system guys to some extent. If that’s true, Fire Ant is the all time greatest CHIKARA system guy, on top of being its most endearing pure babyface.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Soldier Ant vs. Claudio Castagnoli/Tursas, CHIKARA (2/20)
w/ Soldier Ant vs. Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw, CHIKARA (3/13)
w/ Soldier & Green Ant vs. Chuck Taylor/Icarus/Johnny Gargano, CHIKARA (4/17)
w/ Soldier & Green Ant vs. Claudio Castagnoli/Sara Del Rey/Tursas, CHIKARA (6/25)
vs. Jigsaw, CHIKARA (7/30)
vs. Eddie Kingston, CHIKARA (9/18)
w/ Soldier Ant vs. Atsushi Kotoge/Daisuke Harada, CHIKARA (10/8)
w/ Soldier Ant vs. The Young Bucks, CHIKARA (11/13)
w/ Soldier Ant vs. Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano, CHIKARA (12/2)
11. MIKE QUACKENBUSH
The last great year for Lightning Mike, before phasing himself down. It’s an admirable thing to do, but 2011 showed that he still had it on an elite level. Quackenbush attempted more variance within his role than ever before in CHIKARA, and nailed it just about every time. Babyface tag title epics, technical classics with both his own students and famous outsiders, and even doing the unthinkable and working subtle heel in a pair of matches to end the 12 Large Summit, making himself into the ultimate monolith to be toppled over. Quackenbush has has a lot of great years in the past, there’s a really fair debate to be had (or there would have been), but 2011 is by far the most diversified and interesting version of Quackenbush that we ever saw.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Jigsaw vs. The Batiri, CHIKARA (2/19)
w/ Jigsaw vs. Fire & Soldier Ant, CHIKARA (3/13)
vs. Hallowicked, CHIKARA (5/21)
vs. Ophidian, CHIKARA (6/25)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, CHIKARA (7/30)
w/ Johnny Saint vs. Colt Cabana/Johnny Kidd, CHIKARA (7/31)
w/ Jigsaw vs. Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano, CHIKARA (9/18)
vs. Sara Del Rey, CHIKARA (10/7)
vs. Eddie Kingston, CHIKARA (11/13)
10. JOHN CENA
The cool thing about John Cena’s 2011 is that I don’t know whether to talk about him announcing Osama Bin Laden’s death to the world after winning the WWE Title or about the all-time performance in the match in which he lost it two and a half months later, which fundamentally invented WWE in the 2010s.
Hell of a year.
Cena’s case is incredibly top heavy, to be sure. When that top includes the most layered, most interesting, and all around greatest ever babyface Ace performance in the history of the biggest professional wrestling company of all time, it carries a little more weight than other people in the same boat. Beyond a perfect half hour journey from company man to a man realizing that right and wrong matters more than any logo or brand, Cena had a handful of other terrific matches around that. The other CM Punk matches before and after THE match were all great, and with bells and whistles on it, Cena got more out of Alberto Del Rio than anyone else all year. All that, on top of delivering one of the most perfect face/face Clash of the Titans matches of the era on free TV on short notice.
It’s hard to topple over Cena’s legendary 2007, but Cena’s 2011 is at least close enough to touch it.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. CM Punk, WWE (1/17)
vs. CM Punk vs. Randy Orton vs. Sheamus vs. John Morrison vs. R-Truth, WWE (2/20)
vs. CM Punk, WWE (2/23)
vs. CM Punk, WWE (7/17)
vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE (7/25)
vs. CM Punk, WWE (8/14)
vs. CM Punk, WWE (8/22)
w/ CM Punk/Sheamus/Air Boom/Mason Ryan vs. Alberto Del Rio/Christian/Cody Rhodes/Dolph Ziggler/Jack Swagger/David Otunga, WWE (10/3)
vs. Alberto Del Rio, WWE (10/23)
9. DICK TOGO
Very few things in wrestling in the last decade have hit me in the sweet spot more effectively than Dick Togo’s final KO-D Openweight Title reign. I’ve written time and time again that the best wrestling matches are about something, and Togo found different way after different way to talk about life as the champion of DDT. A near perfect anthology, outside of a title loss that wasn’t quite on par with the matches going into it. But that’s an incredibly big shadow to step out of. No title in wrestling in 2011 had three consecutive matches as good as Togo’s against Antonio Honda, HARASHIMA, and Kota Ibushi. It’s an incredibly high mark, and the best big match run from anyone in pro wrestling all year.
Togo would be a top fifteen guy off of his DDT work alone.
The fact that he spent time after his Japanese “retirement” touring Europe and having all sorts of odd matches, before popping into Reseda to face the best babyface in the world and genuinely giving a shit about each and every one of those matches puts him over the top. All that hard work gets you Dick.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Antonio Honda, DDT (1/30)
vs. HARASHIMA, DDT (2/27)
vs. Kota Ibushi, DDT (3/27)
vs. Shuji Ishikawa, DDT (5/4)
w/ HARASHIMA vs. KUDO/Danshoku Diino, DDT (6/4)
vs. Gedo, DDT (6/30)
vs. James Mason, ASW UK (8/2)
vs. Zack Sabre Jr., WXW (11/26)
vs. El Generico, PWG (12/10)
8. EDDIE KINGSTON
i was a highwayman/along the coach roads i did ride/with sword and pistol by my side
Listen to “Highwayman”.
Look at that still. You know what it’s from. You hear one of a few different phrases from it, depending on what hits you most. For me, it’s “that man would have been the best man at my wedding. that man would have been the godfather to my children.” Watch it again, right now. Tear up, just a little bit.
Now ell me he doesn’t belong in the top ten. I write these and people or matches have a way of inching up, and this is the ultimate example. Every point where it came time to put Kingston next, I just couldn’t do it until now.
It’s because nobody is like Eddie Kingston, and I want to see everything he does. Nobody is set upon in the way Eddie Kingston is. Nobody can mine drama out of a knee like Eddie Kingston can. Especially in 2011, nobody can be put up against the most likable wrestlers in the world and still preserve both their own edge and likability at the same time like Kingston can. He didn’t have the strongest resume in the world, but what it lacked in quantity, it made up in quality. What it lacked in depth, it made up for in sheer emotional weight.
For the last five years, Eddie Kingston had been the most engaging and realistic character in CHIKARA, the one who grounded everything else on the show just through his presence. Following the death of Larry Sweeney though, CHIKARA emotionally reorganized itself around Eddie Kingston, and the 12 Large Summit went about formally passing the torch and coronating King as the face of CHIKARA proper. It’s the ultimate compliment to Kingston that something with such an obvious ending and which was drawn out for six months never once felt dull, trite, or predictable.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. El Generico, CHIKARA (1/23)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, CHIKARA (3/13)
vs. Arik Cannon, CHIKARA (4/16)
vs. Akira Tozawa, CHIKARA (4/17)
vs. UltraMantis Black, CHIKARA (6/25)
vs. Jigsaw, CHIKARA (7/31)
vs. Fire Ant, CHIKARA (9/18)
vs. Mike Quackenbush, CHIKARA (11/13)
7. AKIRA TOZAWA
At this point, any of the remaining names would have been slam dunk WOTY winners if they had turned in these exact years at any point from 2017 through now. That’s as much of an intended indictment on recent years as it is a commentary on how exceptional the top seven wrestlers of 2011 actually were, because it is very very hard at this point.
Tozawa goes first.
Akira Tozawa’s US excursion is the best excursion by any Japanese talent ever. Don’t come at me with the Great Muta. Shut up. I know more than you. It wasn’t very good if you weren’t a child when you saw it. I don’t know who else even comes close, because I don’t think you can call Yoshihiro Tajiri’s ECW run a proper excursion, he just moved here and kept working in America for another six years after that. And that’s the best comparison.
Akira Tozawa was the more magnetic part of a tag team with 2011 Kevin Steen. Tozawa was in matches with two to three people at a time higher on this list than him, and was the best wrestler in those matches. Akira Tozawa in Reseda is one of the greatest and most natural babyfaces that I’ve ever seen. If not for, to me, the greatest in ring babyface of all time making Reseda his home for half a decade plus, Tozawa would be the best babyface in the history of PWG. Dragon Gate was already great when Tozawa came home and turned heel, but he lit a fire under everyone around him. Shingo Takagi was the better wrestler in that match in July, but Akira Tozawa wasn’t all that far behind him. Akira Tozawa lit a fire under BxB Hulk again as his partner, and adapted his style and offense into a heel act without losing anything, a rarer and rarer sight for Dragon Gate heels. Perhaps most impressively, Tozawa had a great Dream Gate title match against Masaaki Mochizuki and completely eschewed all of the worst excess of the style in the process.
It’s an unbelievable resume.
The one time in 2011 someone was absolutely better than Akira Tozawa, I called it the best singular performance in the history of the promotion, and I don’t think I can offer any higher praise than that.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Sami Callihan, DGUSA (1/28)
w/ Kevin Steen vs. The Briscoes, PWG (3/4)
w/ Kevin Steen vs. The Kings of Wrestling, PWG (3/4)
w/ Kevin Steen vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (3/4)
vs. Eddie Kingston, CHIKARA (4/17)
vs. Chuck Taylor, EVOLVE (4/19)
w/ Kevin Steen vs. El Generico/Ricochet, PWG (5/27)
vs. Chris Hero, PWG (5/28)
vs. Shingo Takagi, DG (7/17)
w/ BxB Hulk vs. Masato Yoshino/Dragon Kid, DG (8/7)
w/ BxB Hulk vs. Shingo Takagi/YAMATO, DG (8/21)
w/ CIMA/Ricochet vs. PAC/Rich Swann/AR Fox, DGUSA (9/9)
vs. Masaaki Mochizuki, DG (10/13)
w/ CIMA/BxB Hulk/Naruki Doi/Cyber Kong vs. Masato Yoshino/Shingo Takagi/YAMATO/Masaaki Mochizuki/Gamma, DG (11/4)
6. SAMI CALLIHAN
The volume pick.
The hardest working man in independent wrestling. I think there were four better independent wrestlers than Callihan who were working in 2011, but if I had to watch a match from any of them plus Sami, without knowing who the opponent is, I’d pick Sami.
The Sami Sprint is a known thing, of course, but he got so much out of it in 2011, and did it in so many different sorts of matches, occupying so many different possible roles. Beyond the epics you know about and that I wrote about in the MOTY section, there’s so many great little matches Sami had. Dude got a great sprint out of Davey Richards. Dude got Naruki Doi to give a shit on US soil. Dude had the best matches of the year for three or four different companies. The hits aren’t quite as high as the ones coming from the top five, but Sami might have had the best average hit rate of any professional wrestler working in 2011.
All said, it’s probably not even his best year.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Alex Colon, CZW (1/7)
vs. Akira Tozawa, DGUSA (1/28)
vs. Alex Colon, CZW (2/12)
vs. Yoshihito Sasaki, WXW (3/12)
vs. Davey Richards, WXW (3/13)
vs. Big Van Walter, WXW (3/13)
vs. Daisuke Sekimoto, CZW (4/9)
vs. Adam Cole, CZW (4/9)
vs. Zack Sabre Jr., EVOLVE (4/19)
vs. Brodie Lee, EVOLVE (5/20)
vs. Necro Butcher, CZW (7/9)
vs. Fit Finlay, EVOLVE (7/26)
vs. Naruki Doi, DGUSA (9/9)
vs. Masato Yoshino vs. Naruki Doi vs. Chuck Taylor, DGUSA (9/10)
vs. El Generico, WXW (9/30)
vs. Big Van Walter, CZW (10/1)
vs. Jon Davis, DGUSA (11/11)
w/ Arik Cannon vs. Spiked Mohicans, DGUSA (11/12)
vs. AR Fox, CZW (12/3)
5. CHRIS HERO
#1 to #5 won’t seem like such a drop by the middle of the decade, but it is a drop.
It’s a weird thing. Chris Hero worked for eight months like a guy running out the clock until he got signed, much moreso than his partner. This isn’t to say anything he did was bad (save one Davey Richards match), but that the urgency and energy of his all-time 2010 campaign just wasn’t there in 2011. And it’s such a shame, given both that he wound up coming back in December and how his run ultimately went.
He’s still Chris Hero though, and a playing-for-time Chris Hero is better than all but maybe five wrestlers in the entire world at this point.
While he stalled for eight months, Hero and Castagnoli were still the best tag team in the world and the most purely talented team of a generation. Hero still succeeded virtually any time he got to do anything. There’s a great TJ Perkins match on an ROH B show that would floor people if it happened in 2020. There’s a Chris Hero vs. KENTA match in WXW in May that absolutely rules, but is only their second best match together, and not a top 10 Hero match of 2011. Hero also gets his first crack at Zack Sabre Jr. as a real entity, and it’s just as good as any of their more famous matches later in the decade. Hero has the best ROH Title match of the year, and also finds the time to finish making Akira Tozawa, finally deliver a technical classic with his own partner after trying and failing for eight years, before ending his run making Willie Mack virtually out of nowhere. It’s a remarkable resume, and the fact that I can write it off as Hero playing out the clock on his first independent run is less an insult to his 2011 output than it is a massive compliment to the sorts of things he had been doing for the last six or seven years.
Even only two-thirds of the year from Chris Hero is enough to still be a top five WOTY guy.
For most other wrestlers ever, this would be a career year. For Chris Hero, it doesn’t touch the top five.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Kevin Steen, PWG (1/29)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. All Night Express, ROH (2/26)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (3/4)
vs. TJ Perkins, ROH (3/18)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. LAX, ROH (3/19)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. Future Shock, ROH (4/2)
vs. Zack Sabre Jr., WXW (4/10)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. Jun Akiyama/Akitoshi Saito, NOAH (4/27)
w/ Claudio Castagnoli vs. The American Wolves, ROH (5/6)
vs. Eddie Edwards, ROH (5/7)
vs. Akira Tozawa, PWG (5/28)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, PWG (7/23)
vs. Willie Mack, PWG (8/20)
vs. Willie Mack, PWG (12/10)
4. KEVIN STEEN
A #4 in 2011 is not the same as a #4 in 2010.
It hurts me to put a Big Match Guy over a Volume Guy or two, but when it’s right, it’s right.
On a one year “vacation” from Ring of Honor, Steen primarily wrestled in PWG, and in between an astounding hit rate, Big Kev wound up becoming the force of personality behind PWG becoming *PWG*. Cultural impact or whatever isn’t a major factor, but it’s something that becomes hard to ignore when it makes everything more exciting. Save for the occasions when he shared a ring with Akira Tozawa, there wasn’t a more magnetic force in independent wrestling than Kevin Steen, and it helped push everything up just a little bit.
Most importantly, 2011 was when Kevin Steen the personality and Kevin Steen the wrestler finally seemed to get on the same page.
For a long time, they didn’t, and things felt off. ANTICHRIST OF WRESTLING Kev in ROH doing flipping legdrops or whatever. The crowd work. Somewhere in 2011, it all clicked into place. The crowd work was still there, but with Steen leaning into playing a more beloved figure, it wasn’t so bothersome. He was able to do that while still feeling like a force of nature when a switch flipped, resulting in him feeling like a real person for the first time and everything coming that much easier.
He’s not the Wrestler of the Year, but if I was buying a Greatest Hits compilation from any wrestler in 2011, it would be Kevin Steen.
He might have ranked the same in 2010, and he might rank higher in 2012, but make no mistake, this is the best and most vital year of Kevin Steen’s career.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Chris Hero, PWG (1/29)
w/ Akira Tozawa vs. The Briscoes, PWG (3/4)
w/ Akira Tozawa vs. The Kings of Wrestling, PWG (3/4)
w/ Akira Tozawa vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (3/4)
w/ Akira Tozawa vs. El Generico/Ricochet, PWG (5/27)
vs. Fit Finlay, PWG (8/20)
vs. El Generico, PWG (8/20)
vs. El Generico, PWG (10/22)
w/ Super Dragon vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (12/10)
vs. Steve Corino, ROH (12/23)
3. CM PUNK
The most important wrestler of the year.
Like with Steen, it doesn’t matter, but it kind of does, because it added to everything he did after a certain point.
It’s next to impossible for a WWE guy to win this award, save the one who just might a few years later, because of the schedule and way they do things. A workhorse could do it, but CM Punk was equal parts workhorse and Character Guy, which meant that once he became the hottest thing in wrestling, he also got repeatedly dragged into the dumbest and worst shit imaginable.
Still, CM Punk is the emotional motor behind the match of the year, and the most consistent and reliable wrestler in the company (who was allowed to actually do things). 2011 CM Punk is both a volume and peaks case, and that’s always so impressive in the WWE. If you rode for 2016 AJ Styles’ WWE run in these conversations, you better do the same here, especially when Punk’s the reason the latter even exists in the way it does. CM Punk spent the year drawing blood out of a stone. In between the hometown babyface performance of a lifetime, one of the most interesting matches , and being the fulcrum by which John Cena could craft his own all-time great babyface performance, CM Punk also put together a really solid little consistency case for himself. The fact that he did so while also spending a quarter of the year helping build a Triple H vs. Kevin Nash Ladder Match is enough to get him this high on sympathy alone.
In 2011, CM Punk got what he wanted, getting to be both a megastar and a martyr all at the same time.
CM Punk is not the 2011 Wrestler of the Year though. It doesn’t really matter. What he did is bigger than that. When you think of 2011 in wrestling…I mean, shit, I don’t know. I don’t know your brains. When I think about it, the first thing I think about is Punk taking the title over the rail and blowing a kiss. When you do something that powerful and achieve something as important as he did in 2011, you probably shouldn’t get to win WOTY too.
And also two wrestlers were better than him.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. John Cena, WWE (1/17)
The Royal Rumble, WWE (1/30)
vs. John Cena vs. Randy Orton vs. Sheamus vs. John Morrison vs. R-Truth, WWE (2/20)
vs. John Cena, WWE (2/23)
vs. Randy Orton, WWE (4/3)
vs. Randy Orton, WWE (5/1)
vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE (6/6)
vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE (6/19)
vs. Rey Mysterio vs. Alberto Del Rio, WWE (6/20)
vs. John Cena, WWE (7/17)
vs. John Cena, WWE (8/14)
vs. John Cena, WWE (8/22)
w/ John Cena/Sheamus/Mason Ryan/Air Boom vs. Alberto Del Rio/Christian/Cody Rhodes/Dolph Ziggler/Jack Swagger/David Otunga, WWE (10/3)
vs. Dolph Ziggler, WWE (11/21)
vs. The Miz vs. Alberto Del Rio, WWE (12/18)
2. CLAUDIO CASTAGNOLI
Claudio Castagnoli is #1 in my math, on The Sheets. Even if it’s just by a hair, his name is the one at the top.
Sometimes math is wrong. It was only ever a guideline to begin with, it just happens to line up so frequently with what I actually feel and believe that it’s very easy for me to simply show people the math.
But the math can be wrong, and it’s wrong in 2011.
It’s probably the best year of Castagnoli’s career, and the most unstoppable he’s ever looked. A year before Brock Lesnar returned and everyone began saying “human cheat code”, Claudio felt like a human cheat code in a more realistic (thus scarier) sort of way. He did not have a weakness, and every match made this incredibly clear. In 2010, every Chris Hero match felt like I was watching the best wrestler in the world and he was intent on making sure the impression you left the match with was that he was the best wrestler in the world. In the first eight months of 2011, I felt that way about Claudio Castagnoli. He wasn’t quite as all over the place as his partner the year before, I think he was even better in that sort of a role than Hero ever was, because of how unstoppable he was able to come across physically as well as on a purely technical level.
I felt that way in the first eight months.
Then Claudio Castagnoli disappeared.
He didn’t get hurt, he didn’t suffer some tragedy. He signed a contract and reported to a developmental system that put him on ice because of the way that system operated. There is no what if about it, he just stopped having matches of the same quality as he had been for the first two-thirds of the year.
Claudio Castagnoli had an incredible 2011. A career year maybe. But it’s a real hard thing for me to get behind to call someone the Wrestler of the Year when they were barely around for a third of it.
Wrestler of the Year, to me, means the best wrestler of the entire year.
So, the math isn’t everything.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
w/ Ares/Tim Donst/Delirious vs. Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw/The Colony, CHIKARA (1/23)
vs. El Generico, PWG (1/29)
w/ Chris Hero vs. All Night Express, ROH (2/26)
w/ Chris Hero vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (3/4)
vs. Eddie Kingston, CHIKARA (3/13)
w/ Chris Hero vs. LAX, ROH (3/19)
w/ Chris Hero vs. Future Shock, ROH (4/2)
w/ Chris Hero vs. Jun Akiyama/Akitoshi Saito, NOAH (4/27)
w/ Chris Hero vs. The American Wolves, ROH (5/6)
vs. Kyle O’Reilly, ROH (5/7)
vs. Hallowicked, CHIKARA (6/24)
w/ Sara Del Rey/Tursas vs. The Colony, CHIKARA (6/25)
vs. Chris Hero, PWG (7/23)
vs. Mike Quackenbush, CHIKARA (7/30)
vs. Sara Del Rey, CHIKARA (7/31)
vs. El Generico, PWG (8/20)
1. EL GENERICO
2011 doesn’t have a clear cut slam dunk WOTY. Not in the way I think about it. Not like a Chris Hero in 2010. Nobody’s set themselves THAT far ahead of everyone else. There’s a handful of people you could go with. In that case, the best and most honest thing that I think you can do – the thing that I do in this situation – is to not think about it at all. Yank it up from your gut, and let your heart decide who the Wrestler of the Year is.
When data fails, go with raw feeling and sentimentality.
In my heart, I knew when he pulled the vent cover down along with the PWG World Title.
Even if the math didn’t line up perfectly, it was never a guarantee in one direction or the other. Sometimes, you simply feel it. This is the Wrestler of the Year. This year belongs to him. But if I have to make my case, let me make it.
I’ve praised others on this list for getting a lot out of a little, and save Daniel Bryan’s repeatedly being tasked with system mediocrities, few were asked to do as much as El Generico was in 2011. El Generico is responsible for not only one great Michael Elgin singles match in 2011, but two (2) of them. He put a great Kotaro Suzuki singles match out into the world. El Generico achieved a great non-gimmick match with a post-2005 Steve Corino. I’m not half as high as the 1-2-3 Kid as some of you overly nostalgic perverts out there, but that’s one of the most impressive performances of the year period. And for all the praise El Generico vs. Daisuke Sekimoto deserves, it’s the only time Sekimoto’s even come close to matching a usual effort when wrestling in Europe. He also managed to port the act over to Japan, work Union Pro against Shuji Ishikawa and not only delivered a near-career level match up to this point for the baby beast, but got the entire thing over perfectly in front of a newer audience.
Beyond the miracles, El Generico was the best babyface of the year, and I don’t think it’s particularly close. I’ve praised Tozawa and Cena and Punk and Fire Ant all of these people I love, but El Generico blows them all away. He got the House of Truth heat. Being rude to El Generico got a PWG crowd to boo RICOCHET. The babyface performances in the famous Kevin Steen and Claudio Castagnoli matches aren’t things I feel the need to harp on, when all four major ones made the MOTY list, but he’s perfect in every single one of them, and every single one of them is a little bit different. He can be a pure underdog. He can sell a leg with the best of them. And he can be a manic ball of energy out for blood. Within this role, nobody else in the world has quite the range or ability that El Generico does. He is the best babyface in the world, and after 2011, has become one of the best babyfaces of all time.
El Generico is everything a WOTY should have. He has a volume case, spread out enough to make a consistency argument, and varied enough for that to have an impact beyond simply being a beneficiary of one promotion’s outstanding system. He is the very best in the world in his role and position. His highs are among the best things in wrestling all year.
All along, this list has been making a case for El Generico as the 2011 Wrestler of the Year. I began writing this not committed to a WOTY pick. Claudio was the principal alternative, but I could have been won over by Big Kev or CM Punk on an importance and Big Match Guy basis. But with category after category, all of those other arguments faded away. It’s El Generico. How could it not be? El Generico was the emotional core of the promotion of the year, the driving force behind a not insignificant amount of the best matches of the year, and the central focus behind the show of the year.
Am I wearing that El Generico mask while I type this?
A better question is why you aren’t wearing one while you read this.
RECOMMENDED MATCHES:
vs. Eddie Kingston, CHIKARA (1/23)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, PWG (1/29)
vs. Michael Elgin, ROH (2/26)
vs. Kotaro Suzuki, WXW (3/11)
vs. Daisuke Sekimoto, WXW (3/13)
vs. TJ Perkins, ROH (3/19)
vs. Michael Elgin, ROH (4/1)
w/ Ricochet vs. The Young Bucks, PWG (4/9)
vs. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Pinkie Sanchez vs. Marshe Rockett, CHIKARA (4/16)
vs. 1-2-3 Kid, CHIKARA (4/17)
w/ Ricochet vs. Nightmare Violence Connection, PWG (5/27)
vs. Eddie Edwards, PWG (5/28)
vs. Roderick Strong, ROH (7/9)
w/ Ricochet vs. Alex Shelley/Roderick Strong, PWG (7/23)
vs. Claudio Castagnoli, PWG (8/20)
vs. Kevin Steen, PWG (8/20)
vs. Shuji Ishikawa, Union (9/19)
vs. Sami Callihan, WXW (9/30)
vs. Kevin Steen, PWG (10/22)
vs. Ophidian, CHIKARA (11/12)
vs. Steve Corino, ROH (11/18)
vs. Dick Togo, PWG (12/10)
That’s it! Thank you for reading this far or at least paying me the common courtesy of skimming to the end. Hope to get 2012 off by October or November. The expanded 2011 coverage maybe went a little too far, but everything is a process, and I’m looking forward to 2012.
As always, reading all of this has made you dumber.
HANDWERK 
