Mount Rushmore 2.0 (Roderick Strong/Adam Cole/The Young Bucks) vs. Chris Hero/Mike Bailey/Candice LeRae, PWG All Star Weekend 11 Night Two (12/12/2015)

(an explanation for newer readers who didn’t see the way I approached this in 2013 and 2014 – no, it was not a handicap match. Candice had the dead weight she’s already spent a year too long dragging around on the team with them, but given that he contributes basically nothing to the match on top of being an alleged serial rapist, I think you all are gonna me do this.)

(this is also a big one for fans of the “here’s everything wrong with the match, ***” genre.)

This was a GUERRILLA WARFARE match.

It’s supposed to be the big blowoff, and got a lot of praise at the time. I was mystified when I saw the match, especially given the lack of praise to the more recent version of this with Super Dragon in it, and that feeling hasn’t gone away.

Mount Rushmore 2.0 gets what’s coming to them, all the bells and whistles of a big PWG blowoff match. Adam Cole is back. Kyle O’Reilly returns midway through the match to replace the (alleged) rapist. Multiple referee spots, Excalibur gets involved, Rick Knox does a move. Some cool prop work. In the end, the good guys win. Nothing you haven’t seen before, but it retains a certain charm no matter what, especially carried off by many of the best wrestlers alive.

Unfortunately, the way this plays out makes it clear that the magic is gone. That’s not to say they lost it, in some ambiguous and nebulous sort of a way. PWG isn’t what it was, but there are still moments and matches to come over the next year and seven months that are among the best stuff to ever come out of the company.

It is to say that, seemingly, they have forgotten it.

The key in the past to this match working was that feeling of violence permeating everything. A chaotic energy that sweeps up everyone involved in the match. The Young Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction match four years earlier is one of my favorite matches of all time and perfectly embodies this idea, as well as being the high bar for a match like this. That’s not to say cool shit can’t happen, but there needs to be more to it than that. It’s also not just that Super Dragon and/or Kevin Steen aren’t in this match, because this sort of a match has been great without them in the past too, most notable in recent memory with Candice’s handicap Guerrilla Warfare match against the Young Bucks in 2014 that was also among the best matches of the decade, and the recent match on the second night of the 2015 BOLA. The formula is just kind of forgotten about now, and replaced with something more like a stunt show than the wild and frenzied brawls of the past. If not literally bloodless, certainly more spiritually bloodless than matches like this had been in the past.

Immediately, the differences are clear. The heels never eat that same level of shit early on, their work in control is more cool than it is despicable, and they go through everything a lot too fast to get as much out of it as possible. That even goes for use of the weapons, like things are brought in and used once or twice, and never seen again. While not a match without cool and nasty offense, it seems at some points as if that is the point, rather than using those things to enhance what already existed.

While the match doesn’t have nearly enough in common with the match three months earlier, the one thing it does have in common is that the focus seems in the wrong place. It doesn’t seem quite fair to say Hero, Seedball, and Candice got entirely eaten up, but it felt at all times like the true focus of the match was either on having a Great Match or on letting you know how good and cool the bad guys were. Beyond that, when you combine Kyle’s return being as an active participant, the sex creep also returning, and multiple interference spots, the heels wind up ganged up on for much of the back segment of the match. It’s a fair point to argue this as them getting all that they deserve from all those they’ve wronged, but it’s also only really been a few shows of them wreaking havoc so they’re not at THAT point just yet, I don’t think. Mainly, it removes a sense of catharsis here, because while hard fought, it’s not entirely even or fair.

There’s a thrill in brutal things happening to bad people, but like so much of this match, it never quite feels as earned or as impactful as it should. Or, specifically, as it has in the past.

Excalibur hits a Jackson with the Tiger Driver ’98. The sex pest spears another off the apron, and Roderick and Kyle O’Reilly spill off the apron through a table outside (this part is fine as they have their own issues — also never really settled after this for some reason?). Kikutaro comes to give Hero a thumbtack elbow pad after being attacked earlier, and he hits a thumbtack Rolling Elbow for the win. Largely left out of this run are Candice LeRae and Mike Bailey, the two best babyfaces in the match and in the company. It’s sort of a perfect metaphor for what this and what PWG often feels like it’s becoming at this point. At least they get to contribute to the match though, unlike poor Trevor Lee who’s been shunted down the card and forced into being a heel after his string of losses all year to these guys, without even the payoff of being on the winning team. Hero winning and getting the glory is hardly the end of the world, but this has always been a struggle that felt like it belonged to the younger wrestlers and the underdogs, and robbing them of that moment doesn’t feel right.

The glory goes to one of the more established guys in the company, an announcer, and a sex pest. Like so much of this match, it just feels incorrect.

I’m not going to say this isn’t a great match though. It is. The stunts are wild, the action is cool, and if scatterbrained, it is at least a match that doesn’t waste my time like these matches sometimes can (and will in the future). There’s nothing I hate about it and a lot to like. While I can’t help but look at the match and see what it used to be and what this version specifically is not, for what it is, it’s pretty great. It’s just that what it is, this time, isn’t my favorite thing in the world and what it used to be just may be.

An end of an era for PWG, but given how this match went, it’s clear that that era has been over for some time already.

***

Mount Rushmore 2.0 (Super Dragon/The Young Bucks) vs. Biff Busick/Trevor Lee/Andrew Everett, PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2015 Stage Two (8/29/2015)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match.

Undeniably, a hard banger.

At the same time, it’s something of a disappointment as well.

First though, the positives, because there are so many. Biff Busick is a god damned maniac, and Trevor Lee and Andrew Everett are capable of some tremendous feats. The Young Bucks are completely in their element in a match like this, largely abandoning the schtick they’ve started to lean on more and more in 2015, and getting back to the basics of doing a bunch of reckless cool shit. Once again, their best work of the year comes in a big PWG brawl in which they’re paired against other absolute maniacs and in which they deliver a startlingly efficient and relentlessly brutal stunt show. Few were ever better at a thing like this than the Bucks, and although this isn’t among the very best versions of this match, it’s still the best version of them that exists.

Super Dragon is on a completely different level than anyone else, and despite complications that hurt the match, he is the reason why this is as great as it is.

Even as a diminished version of what he was in his last go around (perhaps the greatest version of Super Dragon to ever exist is the one we got in two matches in 2011 & 2012), Super Dragon brings what nobody else on the independents can. He’s a genuine star, a God in this building, and one of the last of the Old Ones from the golden age of the independents. AJ Styles and Roderick Strong and Chris Hero nail one or two of those points, but not all three, and neither is capable of the level of violence that Super Dragon is, or the general feeling he evokes in his environment. It’s a testament to the power of not seeing something for a while that Super Dragon feels as special as he did a decade earlier in his return to the ring, even as the match clearly takes a toll on him. For all that I dislike about the match, one thing they get near completely right (the lack of completion is for allowing Rick Knox offense on Dragon, something that works for the Bucks, but not the big bad) is the way that Super Dragon always feels like a force of nature. Our three heroes are able to cut off and punish the Young Bucks for their constant transgressions, but Super Dragon is always there, and only Biff Busick ever has any concept of how to handle him.

A great thing about the Super Dragon aura, and specifically how he conducts himself, is that when someone can get him in a lasting and meaningful way, it feels like a big deal. Even small things manage to feel like a victory with a guy like Super Dragon, so an Andrew Everett hurricanrana here or there feels significant. If that feels significant, the run that Busick goes on against Dragon in the climactic third of the match feels like a major deal. It’s the one time a company outside of Beyond seems to have gotten what seemed, to me, to be plainly obvious about Biff Busick’s potential as a top level indie babyface. The runs that the oddball team of Our Heroes go on in the end are also a delight, and the fact that they happen on Super Dragon make them a far more impressive show of these guys finally managing to get on the same page. There’s not nearly enough of Super Dragon in this match, as he clearly gets fucked up again after Busick hurls him into a ladder in the corner and then he takes a gross header following a Trevor Lee/Biff Busick Everest German & European Uppercut team up, but what he contributes before such a moment is invaluable. A rising tide lifts all boats, and with his famous surfboarding adventure, Super Dragon raises the tide much higher than usual.

As they do, The Young Bucks take out Andrew Everett and Trevor Lee. Great wrestlers never quite suited for an environment like this. It was also Biff Busick and two guys. Biff might have had a real chance if he had the foes that the Bucks used to have. Kevin Steen or Drake Younger or even a Candice LeRae. He doesn’t though, and he is alone. Like Candice two years ago against Cole and the Bucks in her breakout babyface performance, as if laughing while saying the executioner is very good and she has only a little neck, Biff stands up in the face of it.

This time, the executioner is even better.

The Bucks hold the ring after Busick eats the thumbtack shoe double superkick. Super Dragon double stomps his head onto the seat of a chair like old times, and a wholly unnecessary and wonderful springboard assist on the Psycho Driver spells the end for Our Heroes.

Unfortunately, the major weakness of the match is that Our Heroes are not actually the heroes and/or the central focus of the match.  The Young Bucks are never supposed to be cool or appreciated. They are viscerally disgusting creatures, absolute cretins damned by God, and anyone who cheers for them belongs on some kind of a list. In this match, they seem to finally stop fighting it at all and because Super Dragon is impossible to hate, they give everyone what they want, at the expense of the other team. It’s an incredible act, but only when it works like it’s supposed to, and this is largely the end of that. All progress is lost, and save Busick’s flurry at the very end before his demise, it becomes simply a beatdown and a showcase for the coolest stuff the heels can think up, now fully embraced by the monsters populating the American Legion. In this moment, the match loses something significant.

The match is not alone, though, because so do The Young Bucks at this moment.

Or rather, it is this moment that reveals that something has been lost.

I wrote a few paragraphs back about how The Young Bucks are especially in their environment in a match like this, both in this moment in 2015, and in a historical sense. This does, however, feel markedly different from all the previous Young Bucks matches like this, and feels like a clear demarcation between Peak Young Bucks (2011-2014) and everything that comes after.

Primarily, it’s because this is the first time the Bucks have stepped into what is undeniably Their Element, but not delivered in quite the same way. That is to say, it’s a PWG garbage brawl with all of the surface level positive qualities that bring out the best in them, only without the element that often elevated those matches in the past to another level. In this match, The Young Bucks fail to eat shit. It happens maybe once or twice, but they never take the beating that they deserve and that always made previous version of this so unbelievably thrilling. Beyond that, they’re now the ones serving up the shit, but still acting in the same way, only for a crowd now urging them on, having turned bad themselves. Removed of the thing that’s elevated matches like this in the past and replaced by something worse and far grosser feeling, it’s simply a wonderful stunt show without the catharsis of seeing these guys beaten nearly to death and finally paying the yearly price for all their crimes. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it is inarguably a worse thing.

It’s hard to argue with the actual booking of the thing though. Mount Rushmore 1.0 went over strong for two or three months before being beaten for the first time. Between Trevor Lee’s debut on TV for TNA and Biff Busick’s upcoming departure for the Orlando retirement community, it’s hard to argue this should have gone another way. The shame is in how they went about it, in forgetting that The Young Bucks are never supposed to be cool, and in making the opposition look so much lesser before the end of the match.

I’ve often written about Pro Wrestling Guerrilla as the Obama-era independent, and as that era starts to wane, it’s appropriate now that even the old specialty doesn’t work quite as well as it used to.

And yet, it still absolutely rules in the end. Unlike many Young Bucks matches in recent years that are great in spite of the style they’re worked in, this is the opposite. A wonderful match, whose only upsetting qualities come from the approach taken in the end and in the way in which they forget themselves. Even then, it all goes down a little smoother in a match like this and doubly so when it’s Super Dragon in there with everyone, conducting yet another beautiful show of violence in his last (to date) ever opportunity at a match like this.

In spite of the flaws, a much better top to bottom match than the more acclaimed Mount Rushmore 2.0 match several months later. Only one of these matches in 2015 deserves the acclaim, and obviously, it’s the one with an all-time ass kicker conducting his final symphony.

***1/2

 

Adam Cole vs. Kevin Steen vs. Drake Younger, PWG TEN (8/9/2013)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match for Cole’s PWG World Title.

True to the expectations that now come with this particular brand of a no rules match in PWG, this is wild. They hit on something close to the same chaotic feeling in the great Steen vs. Young Bucks brawls, and accordingly, it’s the most exciting Kevin Steen’s been in months, even if he’s the one hanging back for much of this. It’s largely Drake Younger putting Cole through the torture chamber, but Kev’s just enough of a presence to loom outside the frame and always feel like a threat. Some wonderful and inventive weapon spots, all playing with the very easy story of Cole trying to do everything to survive this up to and including fighting honestly, because that would be ridiculous.

Most importantly, it’s the origin point of one of the great PWG commentary bits, which is talking about how ludicrously fat Adam Cole is, as he breaks a chair simply by trying to sit on it.

Adam Cole isn’t quite the bump freak that Drake is, but he’s got some really nasty landings here, and as the one taking most of the lumps, puts on one of his best ever performances. Goofy faces kept to a minimum, and at a brisk sub fifteen minutes, this one just flies by. Not a moment of dead space, and even if this never quite to be all it could have been, it’s a match that I only really have one problem with.

The finish, unfortunately, is not great. They do the right thing by refusing to give Adam Cole any sort of impressive victory where he overcomes anyone fairly or even does any sort of cool move. You’re not getting any excuse to cheer for him. Absolutely the correct philosophy with a character and wrestler like him. Unfortunately, it’s another one of these abrupt finishes after a real gross and awesome move. Steen breaks out the top turnbuckle BRAINBUSTAHHHHHHH on Cole, and he even bounces off of it to land on the floor instead of the ring. Drake pulls Big Kev out to try and take the pin, but Cole counters his pin into a crucifix to steal it.

It’s deflating and abrupt in a great way. Unfortunately, it comes after the grossest individual spot of the match, so it feels cheap in a bad way. Feeling cheated is great, it’s one of the best things a pro wrestling heel can elicit. But it should never come in a way where the response isn’t that this result is bullshit, but that this whole thing is bullshit. There’s no guidebook, almost anything can theoretically work, but any time a match ends and I shake my head and say “No, I don’t believe you”, that’s bad.

Incredible piece of violence and chaos before that though.

***1/4

Sami Callihan vs. Drake Younger, PWG All Star Weekend 9 Night One (3/22/2013)

(cw: horrific blood in one of the images posted underneath. don’t read this at work or in front of people who you don’t want to know you’re a dirtbag who loves this shit or at least don’t want to expose to a man’s head being split open)

This was a GUERRILLA WARFARE match and the deciding match in the Best of Three Series.

It’s another god damner, and after a less-than-ideal CZW series in 2012, one three way with the late great Trent Acid in 2009, and their great but still held back previous two matches in PWG, this is finally the Sami Callihan vs. Drake Younger epic that it’s always felt like they were capable of. It’s violent, it’s heated, it’s tight as hell, and above all, truly gruesome.

As you expect with Sami — and if we’re being fair, Drake too — there’s very little wasted time on this thing. They get to trying to mail each other and before long, an upside down trash can flips the back of Younger’s head and opens up the sort of wound that explains every single one of his social and political beliefs all those years later. Drake’s a perfect babyface here. You can argue that they did too much or went too far, but Younger sold every moment of it perfectly and always always always felt sympathetic when taking it and ecstatically triumphant and hopeful when mounting a comeback. Deathmatch Sting, y’all.

Of course, the beating always found a way to get worse, because Sami is every inch the grimy psychopath that Drake is.

Following that, the small little chunk taken out of Drake’s skull begins spilling blood, creating one of the more gruesome images in decent wrestling history.

A staple gun is introduced, the beer pitcher of thumbtacks comes back into play, and Sami — ever one for the subtle details — literally throws salt in Drake’s head wounds. Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t also great. Sami does what he always does though, he plays with his food, and it costs him. He makes a show of stomping tacks onto his boots and Bicycle Kicking Drake in the face, but as soon as Drake can dodge one, he goes for everything possible. The match ends with the most brutal thing in it, the Drake’s Landing onto the seat of an open chair.

Not a match for the faint of heart, but frankly, I don’t want to associate with anyone who gets grossed out by something as trivial as the back of a man’s head being split wide open, you probably shouldn’t be watching a Drake Younger vs. Sami Callihan match in the first place. As it is, it’s a spectacle of violence that just so happens to feature remarkable performances as a psychotic bully and underdog hero respectively.

One of the great brawls of its time, and as enduring a monument to the talents of both men at their peaks.

***1/2

Kevin Steen vs. Adam Cole, PWG Mystery Vortex (12/1/2012)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match for Steen’s PWG Title.

For most of 2012, Kevin Steen has been leaning upon the reputation his sensational last two years have afforded him. Lots of crowd work, chair based mid level brawling in Ring of Honor, and generally not seeming like he has the same intensity or hunger now that he’s one half of a dual monarchy in independent wrestling. It’s fine. It happens.

Here though, it feels like the first time in a very long time that the best version of Kevin Steen shows up. He’s an absolute maniac again. Big Kev is mean, spiteful, vindictive as hell, and such a show off about it. He punishes one of these heir apparent shitheads like nobody else ever has to this point, but always suffers when he plays with his food and pushes it just a step too far.

This is also Adam Cole at his best, which is to say he spends over half of the match eating shit and getting murdered. He sins, he gets punished for it, and the cycle always repeats. Unlike Kevin Steen though, Cole is still just wide eyed and desperate enough to take advantage of every single moment where Steen fucks around just a little too long. Leave a window open an inch and Adam Cole’s in your house. Adam Cole, as we now know, isn’t much good when he has to do more than this or when he’s portrayed as more legitimate, but in this sort of a role as PWG Shane Douglas aka Movez Franchise, he’s nearly perfect.

But yeah man, Steen just kills him.

Steen kills him for four or five minutes totally unimpeded. Repeated dick shots, repeated powerbombs on the apron, classic super mean Big Kev work, before he breaks out the toys.

Of course, it’s only through these toys and instruments that Adam Cole has a chance in hell. He’s a coward who the previous five minutes showed can’t hang in a pure fight against Big Kev. Luckily, through Kev’s own need for vengeance for sneak attacks and a theft of the physical title, Cole is constantly given the tools with which he needs to succeed.

Of course, Big Kev takes a pound of flesh on the way there between all the chair shots and moves onto ladders and destroying a trash can using Adam Cole’s hideous fat body. And then, of course, the gigantic contraption that both men manage to assemble for the big setpiece of the match.

It’s one of the first big Chair Pyramid spots that I can remember, and it’s still probably the nuttiest. Part of that is because of the way the crowd still reacts to it like it’s the wildest thing in the world, but also because it’s taller and jankier than the more refined ones you’ll see as the spot becomes more popular. Cole is dead, once again. And then once again, Kevin Steen wants to do more and make him suffer one more thing. The tacks come into play finally, but because Kevin set them up, Cole can German Suplex him onto them, land a Superkick, and then the Florida Key to win the title. It’s hard to buy into it on the surface, but the way they wrestled this match combined with the sudden flukey nature of the finish made it come off perfectly.

More importantly than winning it cleanly is the way that it still feels dirty. It still feels just illegitimate enough to be mad about. Few things are easier to hate than knowing someone doesn’t deserve something, but not being able too point to anything concretely. At the end of the day, luck is maybe even more contemptible than theft.

As close as the indies ever came to their own version of Cactus Jack and Triple H, for better and worse. Not in the sense that it legitimized Adam Cole as some tough guy top level star, because those matches never really legitimized Triple H in that sense either, no matter what alternate history he may have tried to sell over the last twenty years. The actual thing those matches did was establish this shithead opportunist scumbag as someone just tough enough to hang in there and take advantage of every opportunity, leveraging both the legitimacy and likability of a brawler who fans have come to like on a more personal level to both establish the new heel and to drive people to hate them. Kevin Steen is as good a Mick Foley as there’s been since Mick Foley, in the independent wrestling setting at least. Adam Cole’s perfect in that other role at this point too.  Triple H’s rise to main eventing was done by doing a Shane Douglas rip off, so it’s only fair after all.

For whatever he still lacks in the ring, and never really gains, what he does better than most is his ability to portray this absolute scumbag. It’s a gift, some people have it, and Adam Cole has it. This match fails if he doesn’t, and I think this was a huge success.

If not a career Adam Cole performance, certainly in the top five to ten, and one of those matches you have to point backwards to to explain why at one point, he looked like he was going to be so much more than he became.

***1/2

The Young Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction (Kevin Steen & Super Dragon), PWG FEAR (12/10/2011)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match for the PWG World Tag Team Titles.

This is one of my favorite matches of all time.

Nothing ever feels as good as it did the first time, but this holds up as well as any match ever has for me, and it’s something I go back to time and time again.

It feels good as hell.

We can talk forever about mechanics or who sold what the best or great stories and payoffs, but the best wrestling just feels really good, and there are so few matches that have felt as good as this does. It felt great at the time, it felt great the last time I watched it a few years ago, it felt great here. I don’t watch a lot of wrestling without writing about it or cataloging it in one way or another. It’s a brain sickness of some kind, whatever, but this is the rare match that I watch at least once a year. Sometimes I’ll be a little buzzed or just flat out drunk, and I will throw this on because it always feels good to watch. It’s a time capsule back to a more hopeful time, in a lot of ways, but it’s also just an incredibly satisfying professional wrestling match.

As a Midwesterner, I rarely had the experience of being excited for a PWG show. I’m a not some young “it has to be live!” sort of weirdo. I started watching independent wrestling in 2004, knowing results has never bothered me. But between that and the long wait for PWG shows to come out, the feeling was always more “I really want to see this!” and less “I NEED TO SEE THIS!”. I needed to see this. I needed to see this before the match happened. If this show had been a week or two later, I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t have flown to California to see it. I had the money at the time (tutoring at a community college resulted in a $4,500/semester student loan rebate that I’m still not sure wasn’t a clerical error, horrible job but a great gig), and it would have been worth it. I pre-ordered this show the moment pre-orders became available. I paid for a PWG show. It’s the most excited I’ve ever been for a PWG show to come out. It’s the most excited I may have been for any independent wrestling show to come out.

Even the show banner, posted at a time when PWG did more than simply hurling names and matches on Twitter to promote shows, still inspires a certain feeling.

The match absolutely whips ass on its own though.

No match in 2011 whips more ass than this.

Few matches in the 2010s whip as much ass as this does.

Following the latest bit of the year long Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen feud at STEEN WOLF, Super Dragon made his return after over three years. Incidentally, he saved his most famous adversary, but not directly, coming off more as this force of nature. The hand of God itself finally intervening in events, no longer content to let things play out and forced to give these little shits what they’ve had coming for a long long time. The Bucks’ only chance is that maybe, this is not a unified team and that all those problems from six years ago aren’t quite over, because to men like Kevin Steen and Super Dragon, nothing ever ends. It’s enough of an opening that the Bucks could very well leave with the titles yet again.

Except that they just die. They’re absolutely murdered almost all match, and it’s perfect.

Years of luck finally run out, as they face this otherworldly thing that they cannot sneak or fluke their way past. They are left alone, to their own devices, and true to form, show absolutely no heroism in fighting. A lesser heel act would toughen up and try to show something. This match (and the Young Bucks as an act) excel for never once even glancing in the direction of such a concept. They earn the offense that they get here, but to whatever extent a match like this would or could legitimize them, they’ve already been legitimized by the match against Steen and Tozawa in March, or the three way Guerrilla Warfare in 2010. They are preening arrogant little shits, they deserve everything they get and more, and they’re dragged kicking and screaming into this ordeal.

The violence is obscene and glorious, but there’s some oddly primal feeling about it that helps. It’s beyond a chaotic vibe or a lot of cool things happening. Kevin Steen at his best felt like a force of nature, and even here at his best, Super Dragon leaves him in the wind. Super Dragon leaves everyone in the wind in that respect apart from maybe five to ten people ever. He is the concept of violence. It’s not quite supernatural, but he’s this otherworldly force that cannot be explained or understood, but has to be experienced firsthand. It’s an unholy beating, and when the Bucks finally stop it after something like ten minutes, it’s the most impressive thing they’ve ever done. Luck cannot exist in this environment, these two are too mean for luck to play any part in it, so after a beating this severe, it’s something the Bucks have actually earned. They’re not DANGEROUS, look at ’em, but they are survivors and they are a pair of little psychos, and they present a certain sort of danger in an environment like this, as long as they can always keep the match two on one.

The bigger force of nature is removed and kept at bay following a series of big moments where things finally break the way of the Young Bucks, in the frustrating ways they always seem to. It works for them. They victimize Big Kev again, work his bad knees a little bit. It’s a winning strategy, up until the sudden and violent point when it isn’t anymore.

They die again after that, in more brutal, succinct, and final ways. A Psycho Driver through a table. A horrific double stomp aided Package Piledriver.

That’s the match, and it’s beautiful.

Obviously, there’s more to it simply than that, but there’s a simplicity to this that you don’t get in a lot of Young Bucks matches. There’s not a back and forth run to it, it’s not fancy or pretty. They get the punishment they’ve deserved for years now, and it’s incredibly violent, it’s a little dismissive in the best possible way, and it feels as good as anything has felt all year in wrestling besides the one thing in July. It’s not quite the best match in PWG history or anything, but it’s up there with the last half hour or so of STEEN WOLF as an all around high point for the promotion, and thus, for the era as a whole.

This match is beautiful. It’s what wrestling should be, this incredibly engaging spectacle that offers you something a little more than pure violence too. It’s universal, I think, and then also deeply personal in its own way because of how often I go back to it. Beyond that, it holds up because of that simplicity. It’s good not only triumphing over evil, but just routing it and putting it on display in the purest way. It’s not the purely happy moments, it’s the moments that are happy because of who’s on the other end. All of Your Enemies suffering for their offenses in the most demeaning and satisfying ways. Mussolini being hung upside down in the town square. The Kick Six. James Harden going 0 for 27. The time in my freshman year of college that my racist roommate, who asked why MLK Day was important, got punched in the face by our third roommate for dropping a hard r. The Philly Special. Sid vs. Shawn at the ’96 Survivor Series, but with more chair shots. This match is a victory lap for twenty minutes. That’s why I watch it over and over and over again.

I don’t expect anyone to love this match as much as I do. But I don’t wish to associate with anyone who doesn’t love it a little bit.

The cathartic pro wrestling experience of the year and in most other years, the Match Of The Year.

****1/4