Kevin Steen/El Generico vs. Future Shock, PWG DDT4 2013 (1/12/2013)

This was a semi-final match in the 2013 DDT4 tournament.

Like the Briscoes match, it’s another match that very deliberately doesn’t feel like all it can be, but also one that sacrifices it for a great story and thus still feels like a great match, even if it’s just over the border.

Steen insists on going directly after Adam Cole after the loss of the title. There’s no hateful and rude blind tags between Steen and Generico this time. Steen pays the price for trying to go it alone when Kyle lands a cheap shot and the young guns get to work, once again a victim of his own aggression. Control work isn’t amazing, they did better against Roddy and Eddie in the first round, but it’s petty and mean spirited enough to do the thing it has to do. Between our heroes, there’s only one tag, but it’s perfect. The camera sadly doesn’t capture it half as well as they did in the BOLA six man that provided a path to tonight, but it’s the reverse scenario. Kevin Steen finally needs El Generico, and he’s there to take the tag.

El Generico does what he does. Steen actually bothers to help this time, leading to them finally now getting on the same page entirely. The old Package Piledriver fed up into the Brainbuster beats Adam Cole. Steen and Generico finally get entirely on the same page going into their final ever match as a team. This is part of the puzzle more than it is a must-see match on its own, but the puzzle’s gonna look weird if you skip out on any one singular piece.

A stop along the way, but a stop worth making.

***

Dojo Bros vs. Future Shock, PWG DDT4 2013 (1/12/2013)

This was a 1st round match in the 2013 DDT4 tournament.

It’s probably best known for a comedy spot where Roderick responds to a “SUCK HIS DICK” chant by pretending he’s going to suck Adam Cole’s dick, Adam getting really excited about it, and then Roderick chopping him in the dick. Fair enough. It’s a wonderful little spot.

This match is also a real banger.

To be clear, there’s some stupid shit here. Kyle O’Reilly sells a backbreaker by rolling onto all fours and pointing as his back over and over for some reason. Generally, he’s very clearly the worst guy in this, especially when Cole’s fired up enough to be a dive guy tonight. There’s a few very silly multiple superkick sort of exchanges. But for the most part, it rules. Once again, the Dojo Bros have a certain sort of American Wolves style long-ish multiple control segment sort of prestige wrestling tag match that Aries & Strong largely brought into style on the U.S. indies before them but do it with much more aplomb, urgency, and a much more organic feeling than either team on average.

Dynamite final third especially for the most part, save a few silly pure crowd pleaser sequences. Kyle and Adam leaned really hard on their teamwork, with Cole reigning in the cheating to seem to go with how Kyle’s still wrestling in PWG. The Dojo Bros were immediately a better team than expected, and shortly after that, a better team than Adam and Kyle may have ever been together. But once Kyle is taken out of the match, Cole sneaks the title in and whacks poor Roddy across the face with it and steals the semi-final berth away from a much heavier favorite given the blowaway debut performance on the last show.

For whatever reason, I didn’t like this much at the time, but it really really did a lot for me this time. Dojo Bros, man.

***1/4

 

Super Smash Bros. vs. The Young Bucks vs. Future Shock, PWG Threemendous III (7/21/2012)

This was a ladder match for the Smash Bros’ PWG World Tag Team Titles.

One of the defining spotfests of the era, and on a shortlist of the best ladder matches of the 2010s.

This is a match that will live forever as long as there are people making gifs and as long as the million highlight videos of it still exist. It’s a famous match in the history of independent wrestling in the 2010s, and with good reason. A million totally ludicrous things happen. I didn’t feel like capturing any of them because you can find them in so many other places, and this is as much a sonically pleasing match as it is a visually pleasing match. But there’s more to a great ladder match than that, which this match totally understands and works to.

Like any truly exceptional ladder match, there’s virtually no dead space and a real sense of brutality in addition to all of the incredibly cool things they’re doing. This isn’t a riff sessions to create gifs and highlight videos. This is a fight. They go some truly spectacular things later on, but this is a fight, and it brings out the best in everyone involved. The Young Bucks are in their stride as cowards slowly revealing themselves to also be a pair of little psychopaths, and the match falls apart without them acting as this lightning rod of hatred. Everyone’s good in this though. The blistering pace means everyone is boiled down to only getting to do their absolute best stuff, leaving no room for anything bad like SSB having to fill space between cool double teams or Kyle O’Reilly trying to sell.

In the end, the manic behavior of the Bucks in the first half comes back to cost them. At a point, they took out Rick Knox with an obscene ladder shot to the face that left a referee bloodied and carried away. It’s maybe an accident, but considering the feud they’re suddenly involved in with Rick Knox, it just as likely wasn’t at all. They luck out near the end and maybe have it won, only for Rick Knox to make the big time return. He shoves the ladder over AND DOES A FLIP DIVE OUT ONTO THE YOUNG BUCKS??????? Player Uno and Stup are then able to go up and retrieve the titles to retain.

The Young Bucks have only had a handful of matches (or perhaps only one) better than this, but for the other four, this is very likely the best match of their careers.

One of the nicest things I can say about this is that it’s one of only a handful of ladder matches since the mid to late 2000s that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to either be the near-perfect first Money in the Bank or trying to be the first Ladder War. There isn’t a slanted-ladder-climb or a ladder bridge spot to be found. It’s not quite as brutal and simple as something like Sheamus vs. John Morrison in 2010, but it walks one of the tightest ropes ever managing to bring both a back-to-basics approach to this while simultaneously offering some of the cooler spots in a ladder match all decade. A lot of wild stuff happens, but it all feels like it stems from either the Bucks being insane, the other teams wanting to hurt them in addition to trying to win, or just simply trying to win.

In addition to the wild setpieces displayed, there’s just as many really horrific shots with a ladder or chairs that keep this grounded in something much realer and easier to understand. All of the insanity springs forth from the foundation laid by a chaotic brawling first third, rather than the match seeming to be explicitly about insanity.  It’s the magic of these peak era PWG brawls and big gimmick matches, and this is among the very best of them.

****

Future Shock vs. Super Smash Bros., PWG DDT4 2012 (4/21/2012)

This was a semi final match in the 2012 DDT4 tournament.

Real fun thing. It’s a weird match up on paper, but it’s another well charted out bombfest, and it just works. The contrast makes it so much more interesting than a lot of other SSB spotfest tags or would-be hyperserious Kyle or Cole matches, so it’s as much of a struggle for style and pace as it is a display of cool shit. A lot of very cool shit to be sure. Not a match that leaves you a lot to write about, but another incredibly incredibly easy match to like, even involving at least one guy that I rarely like this much. The teamwork of the Brothers is more valuable than Cole and Kyle being a young superteam, and they beat Kyle with the Fatality.

Not complex in the least, but an effectively plotted out display of all the coolest stuff everybody has to offer. Textbook PWG at its best.

***1/4

The Young Bucks vs. Future Shock, PWG Steen Wolf (10/22/2011)

This was for the Bucks’ PWG World Tag Team Titles.

Not a match without flaws — Kyle O’Reilly is in it, after all, and jesus, the Bucks’ vinyl pants — but a ton of fun, and one of the all time great Respect The Ambition sorts of matches. They really just fucking went for it, and mostly got there give or take a double Dragon Screw, a few crappy KOR elbows, and a contrived thing or eight.

There’s just a real energy to the whole thing, but it’s not some mindless spotfest. The Bucks work a formula, and it’s the best they’ve looked yet, given that it’s not like they’re in there against a superworker or two. They’re petty and shitty enough to get the crowd behind the new boys, but mean enough on offense to keep it interesting. Kyle is a crummy hot tag, but it’s a double segment match so we get both Cole working face in peril and doing far better as a hot tag before the final run.

The final third is nuts, but not in a way that you might expect, given the reputation that this has. It’s experimental for these guys, as nobody quite has Their Thing totally down yet. Some Bucks stuff that’s been phased out, some Kyle and Cole stuff that I wish they still did, but it’s all really tidily assembled. The kids do really well and push the champions, but they’re not prepared for pure goddamned cheating. Cole gets punted very hard in his shitty little dick and the Bucks beat Kyle with More Bang For Your Buck. An absolute delight, one of the ten or twenty best Kyle matches ever.

It’s a match you could very easily level heavy complaints against, but it’s a little too charming for me not to love, in spite of everything.

I am a generous man, because sometimes it feels good to like stuff.

***1/4

The American Wolves vs. Future Shock, ROH No Escape (7/9/2011)

Sometimes you can have the right idea and still be totally wrong in one way or another. The impulse to finally elevate some kids is a good one, but this is done in the least effective and most half-measured way possible, and winds up accomplishing nothing. It’s a dumb twenty-ish minute American Wolves bombfest where the only real point is that Kyle and Adam can hang. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, was something established in their Briscoes and Kings of Wrestling matches three months before this, and does nothing for them at all. It’s old ground, covered in the least efficient way possible. A great start to the Sinclair era of ROH, as it goes over old ground and fails to live up to the promise, only to act like it did anyways. 

Still, they do a lot of things and there’s at least some sort of an aim to it, so it’s hard to call it a bad match. It’s also hard to call it a great match when the actual focus is less on the elevation of Future Shock and more on the elevation of Kyle O’Reilly individually. This match is roughly eighty percent Kyle, for reasons the elude me beyond just that he’s Davey’s boy. He gets to work almost all of the finishing run, in addition to being the one tough enough to fight past a control segment. It’s baffling to see them treated like a Kyle showcase and not a team of near equals here, and it’s not just because it’s wrong, but mostly because Kyle sucks.

He can throw a kick and move through holds well enough, but every instinct he has is horrible.  Kyle O’Reilly is one of the most infuriating wrestlers I’ve ever come across because it’s always this coin flip with him, I never know if a match is going to be good or bad, because he swings wildly from pole to pole, often times from moment to moment. Every time he does a good thing, he immediately follows up with a bad thing. He clearly emulates Davey Richards, and that just about ruins him for me because the natural thought following “wow, he REALLY wants to be like Davey, huh?” is “what a nerd” and “why would I ever cheer for someone like that?”. Ruins the valiant young babyface routine entirely. Ruins him as any kind of a babyface entirely. Holds the match back significantly as well, especially when his partner has a proven track record elsewhere at this point of actually being able to carry sections like these. When Cole is in the ring, however briefly, this is a much more basic and more interesting match as a result, solely because it’s not bad in those moments. I’m not going to call Adam Cole this all time great young babyface worker, but it’s something he’s at least good at. Very weirdly, good things tend to be better than bad things. 

ROH doesn’t know the difference between good and bad things though (you imbecile, you fucking moron), so we get what we got here, and also the next nine years and counting, as they continue to find new and inventive ways to shoot themselves in the feet whenever possible and miss seemingly unmissable shots. The match succeeds in the moment because they do cool things, but it succeeds simply as a good match, and in this way it is ultimately also a failure.

The Kings of Wrestling vs. Future Shock, ROH Honor Takes Center Stage Night Two (4/2/2011)

This isn’t a must see match, again, but it’s another perfect sort of Center Stage match. WCW Saturday Night type ideals wearing the clothes of a U.S. indie opening match. I struggle to think of many better sentences than that. 

A day after losing the ROH World Tag Team Titles to a reunited World’s Greatest Tag Team (awful awful fucking match, WGTT reunion was a bad call, I won’t be covering any match of theirs), Hero and Castagnoli are mighty ticked off and attack from the bell. This is about the same as the Briscoes vs. Future Shock match the previous night in that the structure of the match treats Kyle O’Reilly with the proper disdain by having him be the one controlled and not letting him be responsible for the hot tag run or much of the final half. It’s the correct decision. The Kings are better on offense than the Briscoes (or anyone!), but make the decision to jump right into control instead of letting the kids do anything before that. 

Adam Cole is again terrific in this environment. Given like two or three minutes of high risk and basic babyface offense, going wild in a show opener tag team match, before being shunted the hell out of there. Kyle comes in, and this is less good. He tries some of his bullshit and it seems very out of place against two actual high level professionals. Thankfully, he doesn’t get to do much of it before this is over. He is not worth respecting and unlike the Briscoes, the Kings don’t give him a whole lot in return. That was a shorter Great Match, this is a Short Match that happens to be great. A small difference, but it’s a difference all the same. A combination Cyclone Kill/Bicycle Kick puts down O’Reilly, instead of allowing him something bigger. 

The Kings of Wrestling probably won’t be the tag team of the year. They only worked for eight months of the year and didn’t get to do quite as much in that time. It’s a bigger ask in a more diverse scene than before, but I’m completely sure that they were the best tag team in the world for those eight months. Future Shock aren’t a bad tag team and they’ll have better matches than this, but there are few regular Future Shock matches with as little errors as this. One more notch on the belt for the Kings.

***

The Briscoes vs. Future Shock, ROH Honor Takes Center Stage Night One (4/1/2011)

Such a delightful little match. 

Adam Cole and Kyle O’Reilly are not perfect wrestlers (in fact, one of them is bad!), but they are perfect wrestlers for this match. Having recently turned heel in part due to a frustration over people thinking a new generation of teams had surpassed them, the Future Shock team makes a perfect sort of avatar for them to fight against following such an acclaimed European tour in March. The crowd might not love the ANX entirely on their own yet, but they are falling in love with these kids. After watching this match again, I’m not so sure the feud shouldn’t have just been the Briscoes vs. Future Shock all along. Cornette era ROH and beyond likes the slow elevation and hindsight is 20/20, but this is clearly working and would have worked even better than the thing they tried to force. 

Of all the matches ROH ran during their stay in the former home of The Mothership, this is the one that’s most at home in Center Stage. An under fifteen minute match, designed to showcase a reinvigorated heel act and showcase a promising young team, largely used as a reason for heels to be in the ring so that valiant babyfaces (ANX) can come to the ring after the match and engage in a pull apart brawl. This belongs in Center Stage. 

It’s a tremendous little match as well. Kyle is a dumb asshole who constantly looks like he’s trying to think about what the next spot is and does very goofy things like a double Dragon Screw, but the Briscoes getting to beat him up is wonderful. The Briscoes are just about perfect as these kinds of heels too. They give the ROH fans what they need to give them and still wrestle in that classic sort of style and do all the cool moves, but they’re very rude and dismissive about it. They hold back just enough so that Cole and O’Reilly seem cooler and more cutting edge by getting to perform most of the jaw dropping pieces of offense, but turn it on when they’re pushed to that point late in the match. 

Adam Cole is especially great here. Again, it’s going to seem weird to anyone reading this who hadn’t seen pre-Bullet Club Adam Cole. He was once the most promising young wrestler on an all around level in the world. The CZW heel act will get covered soon enough, but he’s so great as a white meat babyface. The team with Kyle only helps him, because while Kyle is being the most annoying wrestler in the entire world, treating Davey Richards like Chris Benoit did the Dynamite Kid for some reason, Adam Cole is sticking to the basics. Chops and young boy sort of offense and reckless Tope Suicidas. There’s this kind of checklist of all the best things a guy in his spot can do to win me over, and he’s checking off every box in this early part of his career, before he figures out how little he actually has to do for these cretins to respond. The only negative about this is that it created an unrealistic picture of the scenery, allowing so many people to infer that Kyle O’Reilly was actually good and not simply a bad wrestler who was always surrounded by good ones. 

The back half of the match smartly focuses on Cole trying to survive against the new vastly angrier version of the Briscoes, which is the right move. He fits in perfectly against them, as opposed to trying to plug in the bullshit of Kyle O’Reilly, who increasingly feels like an evolutionary misstep in between Bryan Danielson/Chris Hero era technicians and the mid 2010s Grapplefuck era. A godless construct, one of the failed mutations from ALIEN: RESURRECTION. Anyways, The Briscoes keep stuffing him and it owns. They can cut off Cole more and more because he’s on his own at a point. Cole and Kyle make a great sot of dream team, but they were never a very successful team in all honesty, and the primary reason in a kayfabe sort of way feels like because of how totally different they were. The Briscoes on the other end are a perfect organism together. They have almost never been on different pages, and with a fire lit back under them, the same holds true here. Kyle gets cut off every time and the energy of Cole gets him killed by the end. The Briscoes win with the Springboard Doomsday Device. 

This should have happened at least ten more times, but the one we got was as close to perfect for its time, place, and stated aims as a match also involving Kyle O’Reilly can be. A WCW Saturday Night main event wearing 2010s indie clothing.

***

Future Shock vs. Leaders of the New School, WXW 16 Carat Gold 2011 N3 (3/13/2011)

It’s a rematch from a week ago, now in front of a larger and much more lively crowd. In circles of people who have seen both matches, this is The Good One. Even then, this is upsettingly inconsistent. 

I’m willing to chalk this one up to Quarantine Madness, but I had watched this for the first time in years just a few months ago, and I liked it so much more than I did here on the third time. I don’t hate it, and I think it’s just barely a great match, but this is not a style that ages all that well. I’m won over by its charm far more than by the actual content of the thing. 

There’s a lot of the same stuff early on. Maybe finally seeing that first match hurt this. They keep the good parts, the establishing back and forth stuff early on. They keep some of the bad stuff too, of course, Kyle O’Reilly is still in this match. He doesn’t do a shitty little pose in between his mounted palms now, but he still misses most of them by a thousand miles. The control work on Marty is much more pronounced here and far better. Either WXW has better ring mic work than ROH, or Kyle O’Reilly has the best striking night of the first few years of his career here. I’m not sure which one makes more sense. Everyone’s a little extra mean here. A week ago, the meanness was a little thing that occasionally popped up, but it’s less of an accident here and more of what the match is. 

Of course, it’s still a 2011 independent spotfest and the charm and meanness of the first half can only get them so far. Not everything is so great (again, Kyle) and there’s a few more minutes to this than there need to be. There’s a few very bad parts — AGAIN, KYLE — like a dueling sole butt contest (what? why?), or him doing a worse double sharpshooter than Natalya Neidhart. There’s then always the weird sort of disconnect that you get when you see something that so clearly sucks absolute shit and it gets a “THIS IS AWESOME” chant before you realize that these guys could do almost nothing and achieve that. There’s just far too much stuff that feels beneath them in the second half. Quadruple downs into stereo on-their-knees strike exchanges. Whole lot of groanworthy stuff before they pull it together for a good little finish. The LDRS win with their absolute dogshit finishing combo of a basement dropkick/Michinoku Driver, which I’m sure is named after a lesser Godspeed! song. 

All that said, it’s so much better put together than the assault upon my being that was the back half of the IPW:UK match, with the result being less that I hate all four of them and myself and more that I can at least admire the ambition, even if this can never blow me away like it did once upon a time. 

The sort of match that I imagine all four would look back upon now while peeking through their eyes in horror, be it because it was very stupid, because there was virtually no schtick, because it was actually charming, or because it was under twenty minutes and featured nobody staring at their hands in disbelief. Every one of these men eventually became better than matches like this, barely on the right side of a very thin dividing line, before only Zack Sabre Jr. bothered to continue being better than it. 

One of the worst great matches of the decade. 

Alternately, one of the greatest bad matches of the decade.

schrodinger’s ***

The Leaders of the New School (Zack Sabre Jr. & Marty Scurll) vs. Future Shock (Adam Cole & Kyle O’Reilly), IPW UK No Escape (3/6/2011)

The rarely discussed first match. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before, but when looking it up, I found that RPW’s on demand service had a two week trial deal. I’m taking advantage of that, and if there’s something on there you want to say without paying anyone, I’d advise you to do the same. 

Don’t watch this shit though.

I liked their 16 Carat match (which happened a week later) a lot, despite the problems that stemmed from youth and a combination of bad European wrestling brains and Kyle just making bad decisions a lot of the time. This has all of those problems without any of the virtues (charm, hot WXW crowd, everything working as well as possible). They start pretty well, with some fun matwork and hard hitting, and then it loses its way and never finds it again. I don’t entirely blame Kyle because there were two opponents and one partner who didn’t reel him in a little more, but he did a whole in this that took me out of it, especially with Zack in some real unfortunate would-be shootstyle stuff. 

The “10,000” hours” theory isn’t really true about pro wrestling, but it’s a lot truer about this style of wrestling than many others, and it’s why this sort of stuff is one of my bigger pet peeves. Nobody does it worse than pre-2015 Kyle O’Reilly though, so, jesus christ man, I’m just gonna go into it. I hate him. I don’t hate him so much anymore, he stepped up a level in 2015 and while he’s been allowed to be schticky and lame in WWE, I don’t hate him the way I did for like five years. 

Young Kyle bothers me here in the way that the young fiery kicker archetype almost always bothers me. Kyle inherited Davey Richards’ kind of hollow eyes that always give away the entire game, so nothing he does feels legitimate, which is a problem when he’s working a style that tries to say it is the most legitimate. He just fucking bothers me and I’ve never been satisfied with how to best explain it. Sometimes, a person can just hit a point with you and everything that they do bothers you, and I absolutely can’t deny that Kyle is there. Every facet of his being makes me at least a little upset. Everything about him feels phony as hell and incredibly calculated. He’s a nerd and like the eyes he inherited, he doesn’t understand subtlety. Everything is big sweeping gestures once a certain switch flips, and all of his big stupid gestures feel like a put on. I’ve always felt a natural aversion to something so obviously being marketed to me, and I’ve rarely felt it more than with this schmuck. Kyle O’Reilly is absolutely the result of extensive market testing, performing the sorts of functions of technical wrestlers who everyone loved, but with absolutely none of the heart or the understanding of why things worked. 

Look at this and try not to become physically ill.

I’d call Kyle the worst part of the match and blame him alone for the reason this isn’t as good as the rematch a week later in Germany, but this also has future Rev Pro style British commentators, so Kyle’s only the third worst part of it. Sections of this sort of preview how good the 16 Carat tag will be, but this is not very good at all. Disjointed and weird, managing to both go too big and too small at the same time. 

At some point, one of these teams used a move to win it. 

I’m gonna level with you, I didn’t finish watching this. I was watching ALIEN: COVENANT on the television with this match on the computer, and I had taken my headphones off at some point in disgust. I just never bothered pausing the match. I checked the tab again after one great scene, and then the match was over. 

I’m not going back. 

I highly recommend ALIEN: COVENANT. Fassbender’s terrific.