The Colony (Fire Ant/Soldier Ant) vs. Team FIST (Chuck Taylor/Icarus), CHIKARA Aniversario Yang (5/24/2009)

It’s another one of the Black Friday Sale commissions, this time from Eamonn. You too can pay me to write about wrestling matches and/or other media I suppose over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match, and a discussion in the DMs on anything more (or less?) than that. 

(for the record — I feel less gross about this as while Icarus was named in Speaking Out, CHIKARA is dead, and nobody is still booking him and either acting like it never happened or is something that can be moved on from with a quarter-hearted apology post. Even before that, it’s a career that wasn’t going anywhere at all. It’s not the same as the last match with these sorts of problems that I was paid to review.)

This was a Masks vs. Hair match.

It’s the end of a great little few month feud for CHIKARA and the highlight of one of their best years ever. Team FIST of Taylor, Gran Akuma, and Icarus had previously ended the career of poor Worker Ant in February in a match that kept The Colony out of King of Trios, won said King of Trios the next month with a stunning Taylor submission victory over Bryan Danielson, and then spent April in a series of altercations between the teams in which they tried to also unmask the two remaining Colony members. It’s a feud that easily probably could have lasted another few months, but CHIKARA in 2009 was experimenting in a lot of ways and one of them was trying to end a feud like this while it was white hot.

Given how enduringly great this is, it’s hard to fault the decision.

There’s a certain sort of CHIKARA match that I think many of you know if if you’ve watched the promotion for any length of time, or even paid attention to it in a tertiary sort of a way. Matches fought between less experienced wrestlers and colorful characters, typically full of weird little choices and errors both in execution and construction. However, what they lack in a mechanical sense is made up for by an overwhelming sense of heart. For all the weaknesses, they’re still matches with such a strong emotional core, often paying off long running themes and stories in wholly satisfying ways. It’s commonly seen in big matches like the Icarus/Shane Storm 2005 YLC final or apuestas matches like Jigsaw/Icarus, Akuma/Shane Storm, and Tim Donst/Hydra, to name a few. The best and perhaps most widely heralded match of this genre is the famous Fire Ant vs. Vin Gerard match from 2008 Young Lions Cup, in which an unbelievable emotional climax happened, but not without some mechanical faults and real Choices (a Burning Hammer no-sell) thrown in there as well.

This is one of those matches.

I didn’t remember it being like that, but there’s a lot to not love here. Icarus and Soldier Ant opening the match doing fighting spirit spots off of German Suplexes, Icarus like in general, execution throughout that’s hardly perfect outside of all-time great Fire Ant, and a somewhat odd ending as Fire Ant simply repeats the Beach Break again after a kick out to win. There’s also a big piledriver spot off the apron through the table that someone comes back from, which is handled JUST well enough to be fine, but is also the sort of thing I’m just never going to love. Couple that with a CHIKARA crowd that’s always on the border between neat and unbearable landing more on the latter here with the “HOLY POOP” chant (see, they can’t swear!) and rooting on Fire Ant with a cutesy “HE’S ON FIRE” chant.

However, there’s still something about this that still works.

It would be an easy match to dismiss if it wasn’t also so great.

Of course, they play those old CHIKARA hits, and they have very rarely been played as triumphantly as they are here.

To echo the injury to Worker Ant months prior, Taylor takes Soldier Ant out of the match early on with an Awful Waffle off the apron through the table. Fire Ant survives a lot without it ever quite reaching a point of parody, including the low blow that won one of their previous matches as well and Chuck’s Cross Crab that made even the greatest of all time surrender. Soldier Ant is able to come back and just barely make a few key saves, and take out the interfering Akuma. While not my favorite thing, his comeback is largely limited to a few moves and then cutting off Icarus outside with maybe his best dive ever, this absolutely furious saluting elbow suicida. The new Green Ant is joined by a debuting Carpenter Ant to keep Akuma back, and Fire Ant is able to go on yet another roll in the end. Taylor survives one Beach Break, but Fire lands a sliding kick, and hits a second for the win.

Taylor and Icarus sit while they’re shaved bald, and they look like the angriest and most humiliated people in the world in that moment.

It’s perfect.

Independent of any of the wonderful story elements or emotionally satisfying payoffs/developments, they also do a lot right mechanically to enhance what works about it on paper. It’s a match wrestled at a fairly blistering pace and with very few missteps. It’s one of those stunningly confident matches that mostly makes that confidence look earned. There’s very little time wasted at all getting right into it and it’s not a match that ever feels as though they’re trying to fill time until [x]. Fire Ant is particularly great and, you guessed it, a real house of his first name when he’s able to come back. Even before that, there’s a real urgency to the offense of the Team FIST duo, particularly with some of the Taylor vs. Fire Ant exchanges. Their run against each other at the end is particularly urgent and desperate and in spite of the issue with the finishing choice itself, they’re really really tremendous together. (There’s not too much point praising Icarus, but he’s a very capable participant in this and shows why, once upon a time, it was very fun to troll people on a message board by claiming Icarus was better than their favorite wrestler(s).) In general when one looks at this from a little farther back, everyone in this is the best versions of themselves that exists. Two real dirtbags playing it perfectly and making their downfall feel all the more thrilling, and yet another killer performance from all-time great babyface Fire Ant.

Despite all the flaws, like always, it’s one of those matches that just sort of comes together in a perfect moment, creating the best version of itself that could ever exist.

The CHIKARA Magic, in action.

Sometimes you do, in fact, have to hand it to them.

***1/2`

 

Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. The Colony (Fire, Soldier, & Green Ant), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Three (4/17/2011)

This was the finals of the 2011 King of Trios tournament.

To get it out of the way first, the booking is not ideal. This isn’t entirely a “The Colony won too late” bit, because I understand some of those calls. The Colony weren’t a trio when King of Trios 2009 happened, and 2010’s BDK victory was necessary. The big one is that they should have won in 2008, given how colossal of a failure the big Lince Dorado push ultimately was. There’s also the issue of Claudio’s absence ruling the BDK out of the finals, and leaving Nu FIST as the only other heel act that’s halfway established and good enough to be a worthy foe for this moment. That presents the biggest issue of all, which is that this is a settled issue and has been for two years.

This isn’t a match without tense moments and a few dramatic twists and turns, but The Colony doesn’t have to get revenge on these guys like they do the BDK. That’s a wrong yet to be righted. This is a wrong that’s been righted before. It’s hard to muster up the same emotion, given that that entire element just about telegraphs the result. Given that and the idea that winning of King of Trios hardly feels like the same sort of accomplishment in 2011 that it would have years earlier, this doesn’t feel quite as big as I think they wanted it to.

Now that every problem with this match has been laid bare, this is a great match!

There are four great wrestlers in this match, one good one, and one bad one, and the other five are talented enough and helped out enough by clever layout that they don’t let John Boy drag the entire ship down with him while he fails to swim in deeper waters. Green Ant’s bad arm plays a part, and he’s already good enough to care about it for the duration of the match. Fire Ant The callbacks to the 2009 matches don’t quite hit their mark for the reasons discussed earlier, but they don’t waste a lot of time here and the big nearfalls wake up this graveyard of a crowd. It’s enough to cast any real doubt onto this thing, but they’re enough to make this good as hell along the way to what very obviously comes to pass. Icarus gets beaten with the mother of all Ant Hills.

It’s the third best ever FIST/Colony match ever to this point, at best, but it does everything it needs to do. Not the moment it should have been,

***

Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. Team Osaka Pro (Daisuke Harada/Atsushi Kotoge/Ultimate Spider Jr.), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Two (4/16/2011)

This was a quarterfinal match in the 2011 King of Trios tournament. 

Good and simple storytelling. Harada and Kotoge (yes, they were Osaka Pro before they were NOAH!) impressed on their CHIKARA trips in 2010, making it all the way to the semi finals in the 2010 King of Trios, along with fellow Osaka -> NOAH traveler Tadasuke, before losing to FIST rivals The Colony. On their way there, they embarrassed the then FIST trio of Icarus, Taylor, and Gran Akuma. Months later, Akuma would be ex-communicated and replaced by John Boy here. 

The match doesn’t exactly do an expert job of working to that, outside of Ultimate Spider Jr. being worked over for a long period. It’s more of a pure spotfest, but that fits in with the skillsets of two-thirds of the match, Icarus and Big Dust notwithstanding. Everyone’s pretty great at that though, and the match could have been far worse than it was, if say, they allowed Johnny Gargano to do more than a few things. He’s pretty terrible in this, easily outworked by Spider Jr. and just about everyone else in the match and on the show, but he’s not allowed to affect this much, and the match carries him up with it like a small boat.

They get into a really delightful fireworks show at the end, before one of CHIKARA’s strongest attributes rears its head for the finish. Companies with less respect for details might use a match like this to try and legitimize John Boy with a clean win at the end of it all, to send everyone away happy, no matter that a heel team was winning. Instead, Chuck Taylor cuts off the flashing lights and loud noises by slingshotting through the ropes and rolling up Spider with a handful of tights to steal it. Great stuff. Tease out something everyone can be happy with it, and rip it away. This isn’t about cool stuff, this is about good and evil, and this particular sort of lower tier hatefully banal brand of evil has only grown stronger since the last meeting. Nu FIST, like Team FIST before them, are not to be admired or legitimized in any way. Actual skill is secondary to the fact that they are a rotten group of young men. They cheat because it’s easy, and do harm when they can, solely because they can. 

You’ll get everything you want some day, but it’s not coming in the quarterfinals. 

A great little match, and more importantly, a really great display of tournament wrestling.

***

Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw/Fire Ant/Soldier Ant vs. Hallowicked/Team FIST/Amasis, DGUSA Enter the Dragon (7/25/2009)

There is at least one great match on this show, as the CHIKARA multi man doesn’t miss at this point. 2009 is arguably the peak of CHIKARA as a roster, if not as a creative endeavor, so everyone in this can go. Yes, everyone. Sleep on all-time level dirtbag Icarus at your own peril. This is a perfect showcase, and a great bit as CHIKARA steals the show away from a troupe of guys that made their bones working matches like this. A fast and inventive formula tag that always stays exciting. CHIKARA did a lot of these in 2003-5 before their guys were really ready and a few more in recent memory before that crop is ready, but this is the time where they absolutely nailed it. Every person in this match is doing unique stuff relative to everyone else in the match, and it feels like the winners win for a reason. Jigsaw and Hallowicked know each other well enough to even each other out. The two teams even each other out, so nobody can use teamwork in and of itself to really get an edge. Quackenbush has the experience edge on everyone though and keeps doing these tricky things that nobody else can or directing traffic for his side in a way that nobody on the oddball heel team is doing. The best DG tags aren’t just incredible spotfests, they’re actually moving forward with something, and this is CHIKARA’s best take on it. Real frantic dive train at the end to cap off a great end run, ending when Jigsaw hits Icarus with the Jig & Tonic to win.

This show was meant to showcase the best wrestling in the world in front of a new crowd (which seems like a comical thing to call 2009 Dragon Gate, but I’ll allow it) and wittingly or not, this match made sure that happened. 

***1/4