Chris Hero vs. Human Tornado, PWG Pearl Habra (1/27/2008)

This was a street fight!

Another wonderful chapter in PWG’s greatest story. A classical type of 2000s US indie brawl. Crowd brawling and chair throwing, before moving into moves onto sat-up chairs or pairs of them in the ring. They do a lot of cool moves to each other, but it works on a higher level because they’re so damn good at projecting an air of contempt for each other, and absolute joys to watch in these roles. Tornado is a shifty little devil walking a line between luck and skill with perfect balance. Chris Hero is one of the ten greatest wrestlers of all time, and it’s yet again such a rare delight to pop in on this period and see him working as a capital-b Babyface. Everything else he’s ever done, once he really hit his stride around 2005, has always been colored by something else, or seen him as a face but used entirely to get other wrestlers ever, never letting anything be about himself. It’s remarkable because it’s just one more role he gets absolutely perfect, but it’s also just nice to see Hero get to be in this role. He has the fire necessary, and he’s one of the great sellers ever in a match like this when he commits himself to it too.

Someone could drop into this with no prior knowledge of the feud and understand it completely. It has a sort of granular quality to it, you can watch this single match alone and get the feud, but it works perfectly within the context of the feud itself.

Ultimately, Hero gets too wrapped up in punishing Human Tornado for his sins and suffers for his heroics yet again. Hero never has him BEAT beat, but he spends minutes near the end beating his ass ruthlessly and piling on instead of going for a win. Following a tope con senton to a pile of chairs, Chris Hero just so happens to land wrong and gets up with a limp. Tornado is a conniving goddamned snake and sniffs out the obvious, before going to the knee with all the weapons that Hero’s brought into play. When Hero can’t escape the Texas Cloverleaf, but is too good of a man to allow Tornado the satisfaction of his surrender, so Candice LeRae throws in the towel on his behalf.

Expert feud advancement, allowing Hero more violence towards Tornado than ever before in their meetings, but still cutting him off at the knee(s), and not allowing him the payoff just yet. This isn’t just PWG’s greatest feud, it’s one of the great feuds in independent wrestling period.

***1/2

Chris Hero/Necro Butcher/Candice LeRae vs. Human Tornado/Necro Butcher/Claudio Castagnoli, PWG All Star Weekend 6 Night One (1/5/2008)

This is in the middle of one of the great feuds in independent wrestling history, as Human Tornado turned into an EVIL PIMP and Chris Hero finally became a hero and saved Candice LeRae from his ire. In the process, Tornado turned Castagnoli against a now distracted partner and brought in Hero’s top nemesis as well. Hero doesn’t often get to actually play the hero, especially at the time here when he’s left CHIKARA, is sparser and sparser in IWA Mid South, and is horrifically underutilized in ROH. I can’t credit the feud with PWG’s ascent or anything, that’s a result of ROH’s drop off post-Gabe as much as anything else, but as a fan in 2008, I was incredibly willing to give my money to the only company to correctly utilize one of the best wrestlers in the world, and I know I wasn’t alone in that. The feud as a whole is among the best things Pro Wrestling Guerrilla has ever done, and this is one of my favorite matches

It’s not some spectacle of violence, but it’s quite the enthralling little fight in its own right.

Of course, you have three of the best brawlers in the history of independent wrestling, even if Hero is a small level below Kingston and the all time-king Necro, but the others hold their own. Human Tornado could be viewed as dragging it down with his more textbook independent junior heavyweight offense, but when he’s portrayed as the cowardly top heel using Claudio and Kingston as protection, that’s a lot more okay! Claudio is also out of his element, but this match belongs much more to the other two members of his team and Castagnoli commits no harm and thus no foul.

At a point, this memorably goes out of the building and into the rain. They fight for several minutes outside.

The god damned Necro Butcher begins picking up small rocks off the ground and starts throwing them at his opponents. As much as digging a CVS bag out of his pocket, this is the Necro Butcher in one spot. It’s fucking wild, it’s brutal in its own way, but there’s such a charm to it at the same time. I’ve been thinking about it with some regularity since I first saw this show in 2008.

If there is such a thing as a perfect spot, this is it.

Claudio Castagnoli adds something to it when he eats shit on the wet pavement and has rain water poured out of a recycling can onto him, but this is the Necro Butcher’s moment.

The match becomes something more normal back inside the building, but never loses this sort of fury. Candice LeRae is here trying her best, because there’s nobody else for Chris Hero and Necro Butcher, and because she deserves to get her own revenge. There’s a fine line here, before intergender wrestling was all that common (this is her first try at it in PWG, actually), and she walks the tightrope perfectly. She’s good enough to catch people off balance and pissed off and gutsy enough to keep going for her revenge, but eventually gets rocked yet again by Tornado. Hero is a tremendous face in peril. Chris Hero was )is) so great at everything that he often found himself working as a bad guy to help out people without his natural aptitude, but he’s as good as face as you could ask for in this. Beyond just hitting really hard and doing cool stuff, he’s got that fire in his belly in the first third of the match, but then adheres perfectly to the Steamboat Principle when he’s getting beaten down.

All hell breaks loose again, and it’s terrific. This match is mean as hell and consistently out of control, but they also keep up such a frantic pace to it. This is a match with a segment involving a man throwing rocks at three other men, but it is still a PWG match, and I say that in a nice way for once. It can hold both things at once, without losing the entire value of each thing. It’s a brawl with the pacing and layout of a 1996 Michinoku Pro match, even hitting a dive train of sorts near the end. The finish is perfect too. Candice shows the heart to fight her way back into it, and almost gets on a roll against Eddie Kingston, except that she stops being on a roll. Chris Hero intercepts the Backfist to the Future to protect her and Hero’s nemesis defeats him again with the Backdrop Driver. This is a vicious match with an incredibly mean spirit to it, but that’s an ending with real heart to it. Our heroes fought the good fight and had it won, but Hero chose the immediate moral good over a professional victory. f it was the end of this all, it would be incredibly bleak and nihilistic. It isn’t though. It’s something to avenge, a tremendous character beat in the middle of PWG’s greatest storyline.

The strength of this match is how much it manages to be at once. It’s a brawl, it’s a spotfest in its own way, it’s some classic pro wrestling. It’s everything. This is not a bloodletting or a match with the intensity of one of the bigger Necro singles matches of a Hero/Kingston encounter of the year past, but it’s just so much god damned fun. It’s violent, mean, part of maybe PWG’s all time great feud, but at the end of the day, I keep coming back to this because it’s such a blast. I can’t imagine watching this and not having the time of your life.

An ageless pick-me-up. Give it a whirl.

***1/2