Hangman Page vs. CM Punk, AEW Double or Nothing (5/29/2022)

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This was for Hangman Page’s AEW World Title.

I liked this a lot at the time.

Naturally, that isn’t to say I thought it was perfect or that it belonged on any end of the year lists. It wasn’t even the second best match on the show. There were flaws to it, both the obviously mechanical as well as choices in construction, and I always thought they had a better one in them that lent itself more to the blood and guts and pure narrative strengths of each man at this point in their careers, but I liked it.

Two years later, it’s very hard to look at it as just a match anymore.

So much has come out since, and even more has happened since. The clearly leaked fake Cabana firing report that, just on a gut level, feels like the work of someone who never wanted Punk here in the first place (not to hurl accusations out, there are a few potential camps, either one with a grudge or one who lost a lot of power with another genuine capital s Star on the roster). The weird shoot promo going off of that, which was carried out poorly enough that nobody totally got it and it just muddied the waters, then the others to follow, which made two of AEW’s top babyfaces each less likeable. The reports since of Hangman shooting with high chops here which feel wildly overblown, then Brawl Out, then Brawl In, CM Punk’s multiple mental breakdowns, and all of that. It’s, if not a gigantic one, a genuine inflection point in the graph of wrestling history, the sort of thing that will inspire pieces on print or video, TEW scenarios with it as the major event that went differently, and things of that nature.

History will not remember this match as a match, so much as something that was the backdrop to a bunch of other stuff that, eventually, ended the best run (All Out 2021 through this, but more liberally, through All Out 2022) in company history.

Which is a shame because, like, what did you think this place was, fuck you, I like it even more on rewatch.

Again, to be clear, it is very much not a match without flaws.

The two batched Punkshot Lariats are bad. Bad. They’re not match-ruining flubs, I don’t think, and things that would be forgotten by now if almost anyone else had done them, clearly blown up months later by people who wanted something he did to make fun of to act like all AEW was losing was a washed old guy, but they are admittedly low points in the match. Punk’s try at the Sharpshooter also looks positively rotten, on par with the infamously terrible Rock Sharpshooter. There are some other non-Punk flubs, and in general, something about the match feels not totally completed or realized. In a lot of ways, like some other CM Punk matches in AEW (the two Starks matches building to a finale that never comes, the Eddie Kingston epic), it feels like a match plotted and wrestled with a sequel in mind. Not so much that it’s lacking in offense or scope, but that the idea of the match is one that by its nature sets up a return and in the vague feeling that, despite animosity guaranteeing this would be a pipedream, these are two real talented wrestlers working some things out and figuring out how this pairing works.

Being fair too, that isn’t to say this is useless in terms of the nuts and bolts. A few rough things, both major and minor, do not ruin a match that mostly rules otherwise. Chalk it up to real anger probably, but every shot in this match looks and sounds great. There’s also, again while not totally something you can praise as an acting performance and a display of this command of character, tons of great mean little looks and reactions early on. It might not be a work, but at all times, this feels like a match between people who do not like each other at all, and there’s something really exciting and wonderful about that, especially when explored in the way that this match allows them to, full of escalating shoves, slaps, forearms dragged across the face, taunts, and the like. More in depth, the leg selling of Hangman Page in the last third or last quarter is genuinely great as well, hitting the great zone in between nerd bait and blowing it off, exactly as a sort of fluke lingering injury ought to be handled.

It is a CM Punk match though, and the areas in which these matches have always succeeded have always been the larger ones.

Narratively speaking, I think this is one of the more interesting AEW matches ever. Not in terms of crowd reaction or what it meant on a larger timeline, but in the sense that the heart and soul of the company gets genuinely thrown by, for the first time, not being the absolute 100% favorite, and has essentially lost the match before it ever begins.

The match is, I think, really spectacular at exploring that, and the difference between the two in a lot of fascinating ways.

An easy thing to look to is just Page being rattled by the crowd and making mistakes — posing longer, stealing taunts, giving Punk the room to breathe that he often didn’t give anyone else, on top of the title belt tease at the end — but there’s more there than just that. Punk’s advantages often come through classic experience-based veteran tricks, like faking stumbling by the ropes only to turn quick to knock Hanger to the floor, and in a rattled state, Page overcompensates by going too fast. When a moonsault set up fails once, Page rushes into it the next time he has the chance, and maybe hits it a little too fast and hurts his leg in the process, which hinders him just as much as any mental struggle later on. There’s also famously the last bit, which illustrates a mental lapse better than many other attempts in recent history, with Page dropping the title and going back out for the Buckshot, but plainly leaving Punk way too much time to recover, and losing because of it. It genuinely feels like a necessary step in the evolution of a promotional Ace, the first stumbling block after finally getting there, and although everything since has failed it, the match itself still does so well with these ideas.

Mostly, it’s a match and a statement about the importance of honesty and comfort. Hangman Page goes through the ringer, removed from what’s helped him overcome before, and for better or worse (mostly worse!), CM Punk has always known exactly what he is.

Punk gets him off of that distraction, the most confident man of all time waiting out a crisis of confidence, and wins the title with the GTS.

It’s the end of the match, but also the end of a lot more.

Within the next week, CM Punk would break his foot stupidly doing a dive into the crowd in celebration. Everything else goes from there, and writing this nearly two years later (5/16/2024), nothing’s been quite as great since. Page has spent most of the last two years drifting, tied down either to his loser buddies after one of the best feuds in company history (Hangman/Mox), or as a tool to get over worse wrestlers. CM Punk injured himself again in his return in September 2022, and based on all his matches since then to this point, some stellar efforts not withstanding, that very likely was the one that ended his second in-ring prime.

You never quite know what you have until it isn’t there anymore, and even though everyone at the time acknowledged Peak AEW as something that felt like an all-time run as it was happening, years removed from it, it somehow feels like we also didn’t totally know either.

This is not the end of everyting good.

Great wrestling has happened since, great wrestling will likely continue to come out of this promotion (unless you find this like ten years in the future, who knows what could happen), a lot including both men, and likely much more after you read this to come from one of them.

It is the end of the best version of this company though, for every reason — and likely even more, specific to any one individual’s tastes — that comes to mind.

For better or worse, this is one of the more important matches of the decade, right up there with Punk/Mox II in the same way. While that is absolutely a better match and an even more underrated one for all of the same reasons, I think that CM Punk vs. Hangman Page is destined to be one of the more underrated matches of its time. It’s nowhere near as great, but it is great. Beyond that, a great start to an unfinished story that one imagines is even better, in any number of ways, and if not on the level of the very best Punk work in these initial first nine months back, one that makes it clear just how much was lost, and just how great everything was that’s been torn down since.

While it would be wrong to hold this up as some ultimate illustration of what was taken from us by a year of problems with faults in every direction, it is still a great match in spite of everything, and one whose greatness feels emblematic of a time that, although very very recent, also feels like it happened a million years in the past.

A modern tragedy.

***

 

Jeff Cobb vs. Hangman Page, ROH Final Battle 2018 (12/14/2018)

This was for Cobb’s ROH World Television Title.

Another one that, at the time and on paper, I sort of just moved past mentally, but that actually genuinely ruled.

Both Cobb and Page, in years past, have been real guilty of not living up to themselves after showing flashes of potential (that they would come much closer to unearthing in the years following this match) in the middle of the decade, with things like Cobb’s better California based efforts and what Page showed in bigger matches in midcard feud enders against Jay Briscoe and ACH, and this is what living up to that potential looks like.

Part of that has to be owed to the booking, to be fair.

ROH is not exactly lighting the world on fire with its creativity, but the combination of the vision of what Hangman Page is supposed to be (peoples champion babyface) and, along with AAW around the same time, being the first company to really get what Cobb is supposed to be a an antagonist means that this has a chance where it might not have otherwise. There’s probably a version of this ROH could have run a year earlier, Page still as a generic Bullet Club heel and Cobb again miscast as the babyface, that I would not have enjoyed much at all. There’s probably a babyface vs. babyface version of this that’s nowhere near as good as this either. However, finally letting everyone do what they’re best at and most naturally suited for helps a whole lot, and probably does a significant amount of the heavy lifting here.

What they ought to do in the match, bell to bell, is also exactly what they do. An overmatched Page goes to the air a little more than usual when he cannot lean on his natural size and power like against a sizeable chunk of the ROH roster otherwise, Cobb occasionally pays for showing off when he tries to embarrass Page by doing the same, and they trade a bunch of bombs until something finally breaks, either through Page making a mistake he cant afford with his disadvantages in the match, or Page finally breaking through the wall that is Jeff Cobb.

(It’s the former. Page repeats the Buckshot, and Cobb catches him with the Tour of the Islands, before doing what Page failed to do moments earlier, and immediately following with a repeat of his best move to guarantee a win.)

There’s also just some of that inexplicable pro wrestling magic on display here.

I struggle to find another way to put it.

Of course, that isn’t to say this is some miracle of all the stars aligning, but every single thing that could go right in this match happens to do so. Beyond putting them in their correct roles, the New York crowd is unbelievably into every single thing that happens in the match despite the very obvious nature of the result (and the result of every match involving one of the future day one AEW guys), and on top of them wasting no time in the match and making everything either count or making it super cool and getting the concept of it exactly right, it feels surefooted and nearly one hundred percent correct in a way that neither Adam Page nor Jeff Cobb had ever touched before without the aid of an all-time great.

The simplest explanation for a mystery like this is often correct, that thing that happens every so often beyond simple planets aligning, where it feels like a match was simply written in some book somewhere on high as a thing that was going to be Great, and so despite every reason for it not to be, it simply is.

A genuine shocker, showing the greatest qualities of both along with the power of the weird and wonderful and inexplicable magic that occasionally manifests in the most unpredictable places in wrestling.

***1/4

Kazuchika Okada vs. Hangman Page, NJPW G1 Climax 28 Day Five (7/20/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 G1 Climax tournament.

If you are seeing this with newer eyes — i.e. if your first exposure to Page came after AEW was founded, and if you have never seen him before then — this is probably not the match you think it is. It is still a great match, I think, but real far from exceptional. Perhaps you conjured up a vision here of Little Kazu being a God damned prick, the 2017 version we saw against Kojima in his career performance, and turning it on an ultra likeable guy in Ol’ Hanger, but that’s not what we got at all. In fact, we basically got the opposite of that.

Hangman is real far from being a natural villain, as one might expect from a wrestler who later flourished and found himself as an everyman quasi-brawler. It’s not that he’s in there gouging eyes and threatening fans or nothing, but he’s clearly a guy reigning it in and working as an aggressor, trying to be an Okada Opponent in a lot of ways. It’s hard to call it a mistake, because the whole babyface route hadn’t been opened up for him just yet (only starting to reveal itself in ROH in recent months), but in hindsight, it is very weird.

Likewise, even at his most likeable as a mid-slump weirdo, Okada is not at his very best here. I do not want to cheer for him, he is not a likeable person. The match suffers for casting two talented wrestlers in the opposite roles that they belong in, handicapping it significantly from the start.

All the same, I still genuinely really liked this.

The greatness of the match relies almost entirely on the mechanical content of the match itself, and both Hanger and Little Kazu simply brought it. A match that very easily could have been nothing turns out to be a real effort showing by both. You can put a ton of that on Page, obviously showing out big in a Korakuen Hall main event spot and doing just about everything he can think of and doing it as well as ever, but Okada didn’t exactly just clock in and out either. Okada’s showing up with harder elbows than usual and working with some real urgency too, credit to him. It is one of those Okada matches where a guy empties the clip at him and he survives it before hitting the Rainmaker, but given that it’s not all that long and given that it is a brand new pairing, it’s not something I had any real problems with this time.

Page and Okada also just so happen to stumble on a cool little idea themselves by the end of the match that helps a lot too. In over his head, Hangman begins trying bigger and bigger things and missing and repeating himself, and generally losing his cool. While he can stand and trade and hang with Okada for most of the match on a purely physical level, it’s here where he collapses, and where Okada bursts forward, real veteran in the playoffs shit.

With the opening, Okada has no real problem getting where he has to go, and delivers again off the Rainmaker.

If everyone involved insists on presenting Little Kazu as a babyface, then this is the ideal way to do it in the G1. A brand new match up against another talented wrestler, only twenty minutes, and all-action. Not a guarantee by any measure, and certainly not a perfect match, but in front of a white hot Korakuen Hall, just fun enough to count.

***

The Young Bucks/Hangman Page vs. The Briscoes/Punishment Martinez, ROH Wrestling (6/23/2018)

Another great Bucks/Briscoes build up tag.

Mostly, that’s because they are once again simply let loose against each other in a main event in front of a hot crowd.

You do not need to do a whole lot to help a Bucks vs. Briscoes match at this point (or any point after like 2010) outside of simply clearing a path and letting them go, and it is once again tremendous. Neither is ever talked up as one of the great opponents of the other, but this 2018 stuff really makes a tremendous case for it, displaying a real special kind of physical chemistry between the teams, on top of all that they have in common ideologically (and how The Briscoes always manage to get the best version of a wild Young Bucks match out there).

They are not alone though, and the other two add a lot to this.

With the Hanger, that’s not all that shocking. Not only because he has a history of working really well with Jay Briscoe, but because at this point, he is finally starting to really develop. Not just the flashes we started to see in 2015, but a full on really good hot tag, and a lack of any noticeable weak points in the match. It’s not his career match, but given how many of those saw him in situations where he didn’t have to do nearly as much, it might just be his career performance so far. Not just because of the hot tag, but because this asks him to be a believable ass kicker against a much bigger guy, and it’s something he gets almost entirely perfect, showing a nearly complete picture of the wrestler and character he would eventually become.

On Martinez’s end though, it is a little bit of a surprise!

Now, that’s not to say he is some revelation here, that the match works because of him, and that it is a God damned shame he never showed this again. None of that is true. However, it is one of the better showings I’ve ever seen from him too, slotted exactly right in this match and hitting his bits and getting out, but still showing a lot in those moments. He has better bumps than I remember, better offense than I remember, and most of all, in a spot where he absolutely could have let the match down or at least caused it to be worse than this, he simply did not. The standards are lowered for the guy, especially among the others in this specific match, but it’s one of the only times ever where I can recall watching the guy and being even a little impressed.

The match is also pretty immaculately laid out too, another of those perfect marriages where the Bucks and Briscoes seem to understand each other perfectly. Wonderful construction mixed with a chaotic feeling at all times, but without ever going overboard, and always moving forward in the right direction, and escalating as well as always.

A best case scenario for all six, and the match as a whole.

Nick Jackson ducks under the Doomsday Device, and when Matt cuts off the other Briscoe, he’s able to roll down into the Victory Roll to just barely take the win.

We’re past the point where I am going out of my way to praise Ring of Honor booking, but in this specific program, it’s a real good one. They began a month ago with the Bucks nearly having it and the titles won, and now on the go-home show, they prove it’s possible, in a way that still leaves a lot of room for questions going into the pay-per-view. Nobody’s reinventing the way things are done here exactly, but a great example of the quietly confident and steady booking this company is still occasionally capable of.

One of the year’s more underrated matches, if only by virtue of taking place on ROH TV.

***1/4

Kenny Omega vs. Hangman Page, NJPW Wrestling Dontaku 2018 Day One (5/3/2018)

The forgotten match.

Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Despite generally liking both of them, or at least liking Hanger and liking Kenny as a singles babyface separate from the entire Elite business, I don’t really have a habit of engaging with the more virulent and vocal fans of both of these wrestlers. So, maybe this isn’t all that forgotten.

Maybe it’s just this strikes me as so clearly better than their American work.

That’s not totally an insult to that work. While their actual World Title match was super middling, their pay-per-view opener in the finals of a number one contender’s tournament in 2020 was genuinely really good, and only a little lesser than this match. Half for reasons out of their control (no real crowd to speak of) and half for the reasons a lot of Kenny’s work in between New Japan runs has not been my favorite (asking him to be a bad guy when he is one of the least genuine feeling antagonists in wrestling history), but with the same energy this has. In both cases, it allows these matches to overcome slight problems, and succeed anyways.

In that match, it was simply that it was only like fifteen minutes and all action, so for whatever misguided ideas they had about the story and what Omega is actually great at, it succeeded on a purely mechanical level.

Here, in May of 2018, it succeeds less on that level as there are still some issues with the nuts and bolts of the thing (bad elbow exchanges, too back and forthy for the way the first third of the match goes, not enough focus on the best part of it, maybe two or three minutes too long), but it works because they get the core of the matter more correct than in any other meeting between the two.

Kenny Omega is at his best as a pure offensive machine babyface, sometimes as the focal point of something, but a lot of the times, simply as the guy reacting to stronger environmental factors.

On top of all the cool moves, this is a match that simply allows him to be as he is.

Cody and Hanger get him before the bell, and the match benefits a lot from a rare and measured injection of some good old fashioned bullshit. Not like a 2020 EVIL main event title match level of cover up bullshit, but some table spots here, a spoonful of interference at the start, and enough blood to keep it interesting. The latter comes as a result of Hanger hitting Kenny with the Rite of Passage on a table lying on the floor, staining the top of Omega’s head. Everything looks cooler with the red seeping through, and Omega’ natural explosiveness and hotdoggery is put in great contrast against Hanger’s (mostly) more simplistic attack. Omega gets to be in his element, reeling cool stuff off moment after moment, in a match designed to ask nothing more of him than that, and constructed to give that near maximum impact.

He is a force of nature to be channeled in one way or another, and I’m not sure any company understood and/or understands that better than New Japan did in 2017 and 2018. Even if it’s nowhere close to being the best example of this concept in action, it’s as good of a display of the idea as any.

It isn’t perfect.

For all the match gets right in how it presents Kenny and how it doesn’t ask too much of them time-wise, it still makes the mistake of casting Hangman Page as the antagonist at all. It’s for sure a victim of hindsight, figuring out how great ol’ Hanger is/can be as a working class adjacent babyface colors all the past heel work as a lot wasteful, but he’s also a little scatter brained here too. He doesn’t attack the head anywhere near as often as he should, which would be a much larger weakness (the match offering a perfect opportunity that’s never taken), except that he did go to it in moments of desperation, so it comes off more as a younger wrestler not totally getting it yet, and that works well enough. There’s also, again, maybe one, two, or three more minutes than it needs. Not ever getting to a point where I am praying for them to find their way to the finish or anything, but enough to where I could never call this tight or especially efficient.

Still, they just get too much right to deny, especially when the fireworks show hits like it does, and when it wraps up in a tidy enough twenty minutes or so with the predictable One Winged Angel finish.

If not the ideal version (in between sixteen and twenty two minutes, maybe even more shortcuts, face vs. face bombfest in 2023 at some point) of this match up, arguably the closest to that ideal that they ever came, all facets of the thing considered.

***

Kota Ibushi vs. Hangman Page, ROH Supercard of Honor XII (4/7/2018)

(photo credit to Scott Lesh Photography.)

You could drop a “sneaky great” on this one, or call it some kind of a surprise, but all that would do is tell people that you hadn’t been paying attention. As the build up match six days prior suggested, this absolutely rocked, because as that match also suggested, you cannot teach chemistry (unless you are a chemistry teacher, in which case, you absolutely can teach chemistry), and Kota and Hanger simply have it.

In terms of what a Kota Ibushi match can offer up, generally speaking, this is something like the best of both worlds.

Hangman Page may not offer up what Cody Rhodes did against Ibushi, in terms of how great it felt to see Ibushi beat the shit out of him, but everything else that match did so well is on display here. Like the match Kota Ibushi had with Cody Rhodes, Ibushi’s whole thing fits in incredibly well with this kind of American wrestler who is decidedly not any kind of a super worker. Hangman Page couldn’t really be called conservative in a lot of his offense like Cody, nor does he have the brain of a WWE System raised guy, but there’s still something basic and grounded (in a positive way) about him that provides the contrast that helps Kota Ibushi out a whole lot. The match goes farther than the Cody match though, with Page having his own really cool offense and hard shots to throw in, still making this something closer to a real Kota Ibushi Match, but one with a little more character to it. 

The big thing here though is the fireworks show, of course, and you absolutely get that. Kota Ibushi is the best fireworks show style wrestler in the world and this is a great fireworks show. It is not a real big match epic, so I can’t say it’s the best version of this, but a super tight fifteenish minute version of that match is the next best thing. There’s not an ounce of fat on the thing, and what’s there is all incredibly cool.

Additionally, this match offers up the reliable thrill of seeing someone clearly turn in a greater effort than usual when given a clear chance, as Hangman Page turns in his  best singles outing in years and years, finally looking like the wrestler he should have already been by now. Hanger has some bump freak tendencies of his own, and takes maybe the sickest spot of the night when he’s German Suplexed off the railing. He also elevates his striking to a more consistent level and not only doesn’t get embarrassed by Ibushi, but is genuinely just as good at it here. It’s a genuinely cool thing to see, someone finally putting shit together after early promise had seemed like it went dormant. In retrospect, the beginning of Adam Page becoming actually good, only taking one of the best wrestlers in the world and one of the easiest formulas in the world to bring it out of him.

Kota Ibushi takes Hanger’s dumb little head off with the Kamigoe to win. It’s no big surprise, but the result was never what you were watching this for. Give Ibushi fifteen minutes, someone half decent and a little different, and get out of the way. Even Bullet Club Pro era ROH can’t screw it up.

Secretly, one of the most fun matches of the weekend.

***

The Golden Lovers vs. Cody Rhodes/Hangman Page, NJPW Sakura Genesis 2018 (4/1/2018)

In theory, a simple little build up tag.

Ostensibly for the big WrestleMania weekend Ring of Honor show six days after this, main evented by the long-awaited (to some people probably?) Cody Rhodes vs. Kenny Omega singles match, but seeing as that match was itself a prelude to the main event of New Japan’s now annual summer show in America, it is effectively just the first of a few build up matches for the Omega/Rhodes match that’s really going to count. The goal is what it always is here, offer up a little peak of the thing, have the villain evade truly getting his ass beat, and leave people wanting to see the singles match.

That’s not really what happens, at least not on my end as a viewer, because Cody Rhodes vs. Kenny Omega is actually the worst pairing in this match by a not insignificant margin.

It isn’t even that they do anything wrong either.

Chemistry’s weird, right?

That thing that just clicks or immediately connects between people or ideas cannot be forced or taught or manipulated. You can make things better with shortcuts, this match even benefits from the (accidental) use of professional wrestling’s most enduring shortcut. Still, not everything that should work does work. Some things that shouldn’t work, or that seem less obvious, simply do. Cody Rhodes and Kenny Omega do not Have It together, despite a mutual flair for the incredibly dramatic, and the long storyline between them that makes up so much of this match.

However, every other pairing in this match really really works.

Inexplicably (see above), Kota Ibushi and Cody Rhodes simply work together. Likewise, both Hangman Page combinations are genuinely really good here, to the point where despite the actual goal here, the ROH match in six days I leave this wanting to see more of is actually Hangman Page vs. Kota Ibushi, nevermind that Hangman Page vs. Kenny Omega here is better than their more famous AEW Title work years later also. This is not to say Omega vs. Cody is bad, the snippets we get here are honestly better than I remember either of their singles matches being (it helps not going 35+ minutes, weirdly), but it is also also just the least interesting piece of this.

Speaking mechanically of the match as a whole, generally, the match is a really really well constructed fireworks show.

Yet again, a Kota/Cody meeting seems to find some bridge between Cody-ism (old school wrestling ideas but, as Cody is a WWE system guy through and through, without the best idea of how to 100% pull them off) and what the Lovers do best (really cool moves, melodrama). You get your basic kind of tag structure here, cool moves at the start before Cody uses a chair for the cut off spot, and then a real fun parade of sick spots, tinged with character work, before one real big setpiece and then a finish to further the story. It’s a very easy sort of thing to like, and when carried off by four wrestlers who are either great at the flashier aspects of the thing and/or who try really hard in other ways, it works.

It also helps that, at the start of the finishing run during Kota Ibushi’s great hot tag (something he has shown a real gift for in this Golden Lovers reunion year), Cody Rhodes gets busted open over the left eye, and it soon turns into a real gusher. This isn’t a match about blood loss and it is never even a thing that either Kenny nor Kota really goes after, and it would be more useful on any of the other three given that Cody is the central antagonist, but few things make a match feel bigger than some quality blood loss, and this is some QUALITY blood loss.

All the twists and turns the match has to offer in the back third just work a little better and carry a little more impact when aided by the easy visual charm of a man’s face covered in blood.

Kenny takes the big table bump off of the apron, not for anything Cody does but instead for Hangman’s Yakuza Kick to knock him off the ropes in a nice little rub, and against the two, Ibushi can only last so long. In his distraction with Hanger, Cody is able to roll him up with a big handful of trunks, and steals the thing while slightly getting revenge for the absolute ass beating he took in the Tokyo Dome three months prior.

The match fails to accomplish maybe its number one clearly stated goal, but given that it wound up being great anyways when it very easily could not have been, or could have been a far weaker effort than it was and given that this was a match with far more to offer than I had remembered, I think we’re all capable of a little forgiveness.

***

The Young Bucks/Hangman Page vs. SCU, ROH 16th Anniversary Show (3/9/2018)

Great match.

okay thanks.

***

Jay Briscoe vs. Hangman Page, ROH Death Before Dishonor XIV (8/19/2016)

This was an Anything Goes match.

Adam Page has joined the Bullet Club since we last checked in with him, and realizing that they squandered his really good 2015 push, ROH simply opts to run one of its great forgotten 2015 midcard feuds back.

It’s not unfair to call this a retread of that match.

This version of the match is not quite as great.

Jay and Hanger also repeat a fair bit of it. The neckbreaker with the chair around Page’s head, a lot of the little bits in the match, the general tone of the thing where they get to use a chair and one (1) table spot, but it never feels like it gets the same allowances as other brawls or the allowances that it should if they were REALLY serious about the Page push. That’s all still here, and those criticisms are totally fair.

What works though, and what still allows me to call this great, is the way that they use all of that to build upon what happened ten months ago.

It’s real clear that this time, they’re a little more serious. Likely because the Bucks have a little more power now and with Page in the fold, there’s a more vested interest in ROH getting it right. He’s not rocketed to the top exactly, but there’s a difference in the way this match treats Page and the way he was a Jay Briscoe villain of the month ten months earlier. Here, he’s ascendant at the very least, and shows clear signs of progress from where he was, improving the very specific areas of his game that caused him to lose before.

Generally, he’s more aggressive. Specifically, he now has the noose as a prop and a tool that helps him fill gaps in his game. He’s not as tough as Jay and he eats a lot of shit in this match, but he’s able to use the noose in some real key moments, especially at the end.

Specifically, Page is able to avoid things that beat him the previous year. Jay Briscoe blocked the Rite of Passage off the apron and through a table on the floor in 2015, and he’s not able to in this match. Following that, Page chokes him inside with the noose and hits a second Rite of Passage for the victory. It’s an obvious show of progress, both in the win and how he gets it, but maybe things like this ought to be. It’s hard to be subtle about concepts like “young guy learns and adjusts in one hyperspecific way”. Ring of Honor commentary is still too absent-minded to really nail this down, it’s easy to miss, but this is an incredibly deliberate company and it’s hard not to see the connection.

If nothing else, a great example of how to slightly elevate someone, without harming the person he actually beats to get there.

Like much of Ring of Honor in 2016, it feels undeniable that it’s not as good as it used to be a year prior, a feeling exacerbated by repeating their footsteps like this. Unlike most of Ring of Honor in 2016, this match still winds up being pretty great, largely because it’s one of the few times they acknowledge their history and play to it in a way that feel progressive instead of regressive.

***

Hangman Page vs. Bryan Danielson, AEW Dynamite (12/15/2021)

This was for Page’s AEW World Title.

After spending his first match doing the work that both AEW and Kenny Omega failed to do for over two years in trying to present Omega as a best in the world level guy, it is now Bryan Danielson’s job once again to make up for what the promotion itself hasn’t quite been able to do on its own, with his goal this time being the creation of Adam Page as a main event entity.

If you’re reading this, I imagine you know that this goes to a one hour time limit draw.

That idea is nothing new for Bryan Danielson.

As many people know — especially many more annoying types acting as if Bryan’s been retired since 2014 or something — Bryan Danielson is no stranger to long matches. In part, Bryan Danielson made his name on longer matches. The Paul London match, multiple Samoa Joe ROH World Title matches, the seventy six minute clash against Austin Aries, a number of his ROH World Title matches, the list can go on. Some call him the greatest long match wrestler of all time, and while I don’t totally believe that, it’s something he has more practice with than just about anyone currently active in pro wrestling (count the others, you might not make it to one full hand).

I’m not quite going to say that this is better than every single one of those matches.

However, this is easily the best ever Bryan Danielson performance in a long match that there’s ever been.

Genuinely, a tour de force from the greatest professional wrestler of all time, not only putting on a more natural and convincing heel act than in those heralded mid 2000s matches (all the credit in the world to Bryan mechanically in those days, but the heel act in his ROH Title run often felt like a “look, I’m working heel!” bit, totally lacking in sincerity unless a next-level babyface like a Homicide or Nigel McGuinness in England was against him), but displaying a greater mastery of how to work matches like these against wrestlers like Page. Even when Bryan is called upon late in the match to have a hurt limb also as a heel, he manages to do what he couldn’t back in the day, and he sells it convincingly while never veering off into seeming sympathetic at all. It’s the performance of a man no longer needing to show he’s a Great Wrestler, instead radiating that out through such convincing and airtight work.

The things that have always been great about long Bryan matches are still great here. There’s a classic Bryan Danielson shell game approach to this, beginning by trying to take Page’s wind away with a lot of stomach and midsection work, before catching him slipping and going to the cut that presents itself and working on the arm. There’s also a stronger sense of character and story to this while presenting those familiar ideas, with them having a month’s worth of TV to set up Bryan not respecting Page an opponent and behaving the way he does as a result. Not that Bryan, being the greatest of all time, couldn’t get you to understand that immediately within the early stages of a match had they not had that, but it’s nice to have something like that with a little more flesh around it.

In general, the match is classic Bryan Danielson, only now performed with more confidence, more institutional support, and a more genuine feeling to it all.

The highlight of the entire match for Bryan isn’t working the ribs or working the cut. It’s not his bumping or the way he sets up Hanger for huge pops when he can do things like chop him or eventually hit the Buckshot Lariat.

It’s in the middle of a commercial break, when Page is being checked on by doctors for his cut, and Bryan Danielson has the time of his life with the crowd.

Jumping jacks and push ups at first to antagonize, before then playing with the reactions he draws and the smaller interactions with crowd members as a whole. Teasing the “YES” motion, only to stop short and give the finger in one of the greatest displays of a heel being withholding in wrestling history. My absolute favorite part was that eliciting a “FUCK YOU” chant, not rythmic in nature or anything and what feels like a genuine outpouring of anger, only for Bryan to pick up the speed on his jumping jacks to be in tune with the chant itself, only making it louder and more hostile.

Bryan Danielson is incredible here. A one of one performance in 2021, made all the more impressive by who he’s wrestling.

A friend of mine — someone whose fandom has largely fallen off since the mid 2010s, but who watched this and the big Bryan in AEW matches on hype alone — talked to me about this match a few hours after it happened, and said that it was like the old Bryan vs. Tyler Black matches, except if Tyler Black had a more human and welcoming and likeable sort of presence to them.

That probably isn’t totally fair to Adam Page, who is a good wrestler in the way Tyler wasn’t at that point (and if Page is a 1:1 of anyone, it feels more like what would happen if DDP never had the Diamond Cutter, but still improved like he did), but it’s not wrong.

His selling of the arm is far from bad or non-existent, but something about it doesn’t seem totally right. His cut’s insistence on closing up after a few minutes isn’t necessarily his fault, but it’s a weakness of the match that springs forth (or rather, that fails to) from his body and not Bryan’s. In general too, Hanger has the issue he always does, which is that he still doesn’t feel like a fully complete wrestler. A fun gimmick and good presence, but moreso a collection of pieces of offense. The sort of a guy who, as a wrestler, you describe through an expression of what moves he does more so than how he does them.

All the same, he has a certain quality to him that makes this fairly easy on Bryan, and makes something like this far more likely to succeed.

What works here from Page is less the offense and more the selling, carried forward less by anything he did mechanically, and moreso because everyone wanted to see him succeed. Like so many of the handpicked AEW acts, he doesn’t succeed because of technical brilliance or any one thing you can really point to mechanically (the least likeable babyface of them, Darby Allin, is naturally the exception here), but because there’s just something ABOUT HIM that works.

I want to see Adam Page win and succeed.

Every thing that happens in this match only solidifies that further. At no point here is Bryan Danielson admirable or cool, he never does anything I find myself wanting to applaud, and that’s in spite of him being the greatest of all time and one of my all-time favorites. People always used to talk up ROH Title run Bryan as “Flair-esque”, which never felt right, but in a recurring theme of that stuff vs. this match, it feels completely correct here. Completely convincing as the canon greatest wrestler of all time and best in the world, taking someone with a certain something, and gifting them something that packs as much of a punch as this does.

By the time Page finally reels off the Buckshot Lariat in the final minutes, after seeing it built up all match, something’s shifted. Nobody is ever wholly made as a top guy in one match, but at least in the arena and in this moment, Page comes a lot closer to feeling like one than he did an hour earlier.

Of course, it’s not a perfect match.

Hangman’s cut closes up and we’ll see in early 2022 how much more a real gusher can add to a classical title match like this. Some of the choices they make about placement aren’t ideal, and things like a big DVD nearfall feel like they happen too early, or something like a DDT on the concrete floor is reduced to being little more than another move when it should be a pretty big deal. Late in the match, when Bryan sells his hurt knee and Page his hurt arm, and they both sell after throwing kicks and clotheslines, it feels just a little over the top. Look at us, we’re selling, that sort of a thing. The way the match is constructed also, the majority of the pieces of this that feel necessary (Bryan’s shell game, blood, character work) come in at the start, with most of the less-than-necessary bits coming in the end, once everyone has largely figured out where this is going. There’s an energy lost somewhere around Bryan hurting his leg and Page’s table crash, which isn’t ever totally recaptured.

As with virtually every sixty minute draw, there comes a point when they have run out of things to do. I’ve yet to watch a single hour in wrestling where I thought to myself, “yes, all of that needed to happen”. Even the best ones. This is a match with forty to forty five minutes of great and near-essential work, and that’s pretty impressive. It’s also impressive that the stuff here that feels more like filler, like work on Bryan’s leg, works out as well as it does. Inessential, but never treated like it’s unimportant, and I think that’s an impressive distinction.

Flaws and all, it’s just such an incredible achievement.

An ultra-memorable piece of wrestling television, delivering one of the best matches of the year, but one that accomplishes something that feels real on top of that. Page is far stronger going out than he was coming in, the AEW World Title sees its first great match since Moxley/Kingston thirteen months prior, and Bryan Danielson puts the final stamp on one of the great comebacks ever.

Match of the Year is still just too strong given those flaws, but unquestionably in my mind, the home to the greatest performance in wrestling all year.

***1/2