Goldberg vs. Brock Lesnar, WWE WrestleMania 33 (4/2/2017)

This was for Goldberg’s WWE Universal Title.

Many people have written many things about this match before now. Most of them are true. Instead of trying to walk over old ground and act like I’m the one who paved it or cleared all the branches and leaves off the path in the first place, I will instead talk about something else entirely that this match brings to mind.

I love kaiju movies. Or at least, I’ve come to love them in the last few years.

During the pandemic, specifically in August 2020, I got a little drunk and as money was, at the time, practically raining from the heavens above onto me in larger quantities than I knew what to do with after paying months’ of rent in advance and buying groceries and stockpiling my asthma medication from sketchy overseas online retailers(American insurance rocks, it’s the reason I started accepting commissions in the first place), I started to get a little weird with it. Expensive craft beers, new furniture, a rowing machine for me home, even investing some of it into stocks on a low level, you name it. A few weeks earlier, I’d bought a blu ray player a few weeks prior, but I didn’t have the collection I have now as a full on Physical Media Pervert, really only having THE FOG (1980) (which started my collection as a result of it not actually being for sale on any VOD service, so thanks for that on top of being one of my favorite movies), CASINO, and a box set of the first seven FAST & FURIOUS movies. Some would call it a perfect collection.

At some point, I got a little bit drunk, and I bought the full Criterion Collection Godzilla box set.

In retrospect, I have no idea why I did this.

I hadn’t seen a Godzilla movie since the summer of 2014 when the U.S. remake was released (I was just barely not homeless at the time, as 2014 YEAR IN LISTS fans will recall, so I never actually saw it in theaters but you bet I pirated that bad boy) and when Netflix released a lot of the old ones for a month or two to promote them. There was no great love in my heart for these movies, although like any sensible human being, I had a distinct sort of gut feeling that they were objectively cool and good things. I had a GAMERA DVD as a teenager, but I left it at a friend’s house in high school and never got it back before he went to college and I moved away, so it’s not like a thing I’d rewatched a whole lot.

When the set arrived, I began one of my infamous projects and set about watching every Godzilla movie, and also the offshoots, like the Mothra and Rodan movies, and I fell ass over tea kettle in love with this stupid shit. I have hard opinions about the Godzilla series (people are too hard on 1970s Godzilla, GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH and GHIDORAH: THE THREE HEADED MONSTER are actually better than the original, FINAL WARS actually rocks). I have encouraged other people to watch these movies, on and offline. I gleefully talk with friends on the internet about the Godzilla villain canon. I’ve spent money for blu-ray releases of 90s and 00s Godzilla double packs, I have a Gamera steelbook box set (this rocks) and a Rebirth of Mothra triple pack from the 1990s (this sucks). I would kill almost any one of you for a non-bootleg blu ray version of GODZILLA VS. BIOLANTE.

I love these movies so much. Something about them just immediately appealed to me, combining a deeply whacky sort of nonsense with a kind of professional wrestling approach to building the major fights, as well as a professional wrestling approach to canon (some of it is incredibly important, some of it does not exist and never happened, even if it is happening essentially for the third or fourth time). I love that it essentially operates as this little wrestling promotion itself, based around one central figure, with a rotating cast of major and minor characters, often recast and redesigned and with all different twists and turns. I love that every time someone new is behind the writing of the thing, there can be either a wildly new vision, or as seen in the Heisei series from 1984 through 1995, a genuinely stunning level of contuinuity. The original GODZILLA is rightly respected as an unimpeachable classic, a Great Movie, and so the clicking didn’t happen so much with that one as it did with the others, because early into becoming a Movie Guy, that one stood out to me as something I was supposed to like and appreciate and revere. Somewhere around the Anguirus vs. Godzilla fight in the follow up, when I loved this and all of these supposedly goofier and less serious successors almost just as much as the original classic, it clicked for me that, oh, I actually genuinely love this shit, wow.

So anyways, this match is sort of like all of that.

Two different sorts of unstoppable forces come at each other, in a third match where the King of the Monsters has had his ass summarily handed to him two times in a row, only to rise up when it matters the most, beat the ass of his greatest threat, and reclaim his throne. A canon history that mostly matters but not entirely. Fireworks and grandeur and an insane man reacting to everything on the floor in the broadest ways possible. Goldberg is no great villain, he is no King Ghidorah or Gigan, but likewise, Brock Lesnar is no great hero himself, their struggle coming closer to one of the earlier or later films than any of the whacky 70s ones.

Brock Lesnar defeats the one great remaining foe, it would appear, and leaves not only with the title again, but looking more unstoppable than ever before.

It is all beautiful.

You can talk about the mechanics of this match, but they are very simple and honestly not worth going too deep into. Brock’s initial revenge spam fails, but he breaks out a rare piece of hyperathleticism by dodging Goldberg’s spear, crowds him with all the Germans, and wins with the F5 on the second pass at it. If you really needed to know the X’s and O’s of this one, hey, there you go. It rocks, and it rocks in a way that I don’t think written word entirely does credit to. It is not a match for bloggers or for star ratings, it is a spectacle in the purest sense, and it whips so much god damned ass.

There are a hundred words I could write about this match and that others have written about this match. Very little of it matters. Professional wrestling is never entirely art nor is it ever entirely science, and a match like this has a way of making that exceptionally clear, leaning far more towards the former than the latter, and at the same time, veering entirely off of that spectrum and wildly into the air, never to return, much like Jet Jaguar.

A beautiful match that can be summed up in a thousand different ways, but perhaps no more efficient one than a firm and a heart “hell yeah, dude”.

*** but also ***** but also star ratings are fake and this match makes that clearer than most

Triple H vs. Seth Rollins, WWE WrestleMania 33 (4/2/2017)

Reposting this, as I couldn’t find it on Twitter and quote tweet for some reason. This was a commission from Bren as part of the “five worst matches” commission. You too can pay for reviews over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon.

(ORIGINALLY WRITTEN — 11/27/2021)

In doing this, there were some problems. The request was the five worst matches I’ve ever seen, but I already wrote about the 2015 Royal Rumble. I wrote about the 1991 Great American Bash as a whole. Various Triple H matches, Davey/Eddie at Final Battle 2011 (the match that cost me a toenail). I wanted to try and avoid things I was going to write about in the future. Your ZSJ/Ciampa three fall matches, your blood money retirement home epics, your Undertaker vs. Shane McMahons, etc.

However, I cannot imagine a match more specifically designed for me to come away truly revolted with the entire process, and so this felt correct to do here.

Seth Rollins is really maybe my least favorite wrestler ever. I felt something off about him the first time I saw him in 2005, and spent the next fourteen years incredibly confused at not only all the praise he got (save the initial Shield run) but the praise that he got instead of the people clearly making most of it happen. Carried by Josh Abercrombie, enhanced by every tag partner he had, given every booking gift in the world and still only barely having great matches. One of the only wrestlers I dislike on the same level is Triple H, and so their pairing together in 2014 was a specifically disgusting sort of a thing. Putting Rollins not only into a six month long Triple H feud but then also blowing it off in a half hour WrestleMania epic that not only insists on high drama and emotion but that ALSO tries to be a limb work match feels like a very deliberate and equally as specific attack on my very person.

Every moment of this is excruciating.

It is not an Encounter, but instead, an Ordeal.

It begins with the entrances, as not only is Triple H a solid three plus years late to the Cool Motorcycle Guy With Evil Wife bit (on top of making a poor Ron Perlman), but Seth Rollins once again cloaks himself in Game of Thrones shit for Mania. The KINGSLAYER motif is there, but he also has dragon scales on some of his gear and then golden gear, so he’s mashing multiple different motifs together and just being Guy Who Likes Game of Thrones (as he naturally lacks any substance of his own).

I’d complain more about that, actually, but few things fit Seth Rollins more than basing so much of himself around a pop culture phase that would be not only over within two years, but largely looked back on now as a great shame as a result of how bad it got in the end.

Some things are just too perfect, you know?

As for the match, it’s some real hot dog shit in ways both expected and unexpected.

Seth Rollins comes in with a hurt knee and that’s the whole thing, despite it never once stopping him from doing every single move he’d ever thought up in his head or performed before this. Instead, it’s half an hour of rolling around to try and simulate pain, but clearly never being in enough of it to make a difference. The result is that on top of the ways I always expected this to suck (both men are slow at this point, Rollins’ highspots post-knee injury look like he’s trying to run through molasses, neither is very creative or smart and prone to WWE Bullshit), it also sucked in ways I don’t always expect from them. Add in the usual WWE stunt spots, interference theatrics, sledgehammer drama, and a few different offensive move theft ideas (Triple H teasing a Pepsi Plunge, Rollins using the Border City Stretch as if he hadn’t already borrowed enough). Rollins wins with Pedigree, as they can’t even abandon that bit even when it would be the most thematically appropriate, needing Triple H’s ultimate fall to come at the hands of his own move because nothing Rollins could come up with could be good enough. Don’t at me about how it’s the biggest insult or some dog shit. If the story is “this guy made me worse and i want to be good again”, then maybe using the finish he passed down isn’t the best ending.

The big takeaway, once again, is that a Triple H match at this point is a litmus test for virtually everyone who undertakes it, so long as it doesn’t become something like the Sting match or the Roman Reigns match, which are both political hits moreso than wrestling matches. A Triple H match at this point exposes those who take it on completely. The Black Lodge of professional wrestling matches.

Daniel Bryan/Bryan Danielson is the greatest of all time and pulled a career level match from him through force of will and unstated political pressure. Men like Dean Ambrose and Dolph Ziggler in 2016 did their best, and showed what they had to offer when not being crushed inside the belly of this horrible machine. Later in the decade, Randy Orton, John Cena, and Batista will all get a final crack at it apiece, and it will lay bare every strength and weakness of each man individually. As Seth Rollins has never had much of a soul as it pertains to this thing, we all suffer instead for his failures as he is cracked open and shown to the world as a lifeless husk, devoid of any element that makes someone worth watching or rooting for.

A blank void in a shiny costume.

It is then no wonder that of all these people to undertake this test, he is the one to get the clearest green light as a top guy going forward.

I watched this for the first time outside of pay-per-view in the summer of 2020, and so I had none of the usual outlets to make myself feel better after a bad experience (bar, seeing a friend, going to the gym) and so I just walked around the city for half an hour or so and eventually just sat on a bench by the river for another ten or fifteen minutes before then going back home. It’s not the absolute worst watching experience of my life, it’s not like I thought I had COVID because of how bad it felt, but it was still a match that did truly deep psychic harm.

This go around, it’s not quite that bad (although I am going to leave the house again and not watch wrestling when I return). It is, however, still a match match so stupid, bad, and offensive that I think less of myself every time I do it.

Give me thousands of dollars to make up for it.

This was the opposite of a religious experience.

Watching and then writing about this match is like being abandoned by God.

Light your house on fire and walk into the nearest body of water, there’s no point to any of this, everything you enjoy will have its own version of this match. All your heroes will die and your enemies will take power. Punch yourself in the dick until you can’t feel your hands anymore. Crawl into the Earth and live with the moles. There isn’t any point in liking anything. A terrific advertisement for nihilism until you remember how fucking boring nihilism is. This is the creative nadir of professional wrestling, the last half an hour or so of something beautiful falling down a fucking gorge and finally finding where the bottom is.

As i predicted for the last decade before this, Seth Rollins was the man capable of finding that bottom once and for all

I may never watch a worse professional wrestling match?

I cannot imagine that there is one.

 

Bayley vs. Sasha Banks vs. Nia Jax vs. Charlotte Flair, WWE WrestleMania 33 (4/2/2017)

This was an elimination match for Bayley’s WWE Raw Womens Title.

As one might expect from throwing main roster WWE’s three greatest female wrestlers together, and also Charlotte Flair, this absolutely rocks.

Certainly, there are flaws. It feels very rushed relative to what it could be, given the past Charlotte/Bayley and Charlotte/Sasha title matches on major events (and the Bayley/Sasha and Bayley/Nia title matches on NXT Takeover specials), and it all gets kind of short changed as a result. Story beats like Nia dominating all three until they gang up to get her out, or slooooooowly mounting Sasha/Bayley tension, manipulated by Flair, all kind of get the shaft as a result of not quite getting to breathe as much as they have the potential to.

Still, it is pretty great, because what they are allowed, they make the most of.

While it is not as long as it ought to be, given the success of most of these match ups in the past, it is still just one of those matches that I have so much respect and admiration for as a result of how airtight it is.

Every moment of this match is one either of consequence or of quality, with something like ninety percent finding itself capable of fitting into both of those descriptions. The performances in the match are as good or as great as possible. Nia Jax makes the most of the power offense she gets to do. Bayley is Bayley, even in a more diminished role and in a shorter match, there’s not a better babyface on the show. Sasha Banks is sort of a bit player in this, as even if she’s the second one eliminated, she feels less vital to the thing than Nia Jax does in the sense that any babyface could have held Sasha’s role, but everything she does is very good. Cool and eminently watchable and wild in all of the best ways. Flair’s blend of cowardice and athleticism once again is never put to greater use than in this Bayley series, and this is no exception. In addition to maintaining the heights of unlikeability that she reached in the February title switch, she’s also able to land her corkscrew Moonsault dive better than ever in this match, and suffers no real mechanical difficulties.

The match is primarily about Charlotte Flair and Bayley and their feud, and in many respects ought to have just been a final one on one meeting, but they bring it to a satisfying enough close no matter what, as Flair now finally suffers an undeniable defeat not as a result of interference, but a a result of her own machinations backfiring. Flair eliminated Banks by throwing her into an exposed steel buckle and then controlled Bayley briefly as a result of sending her into the steel as well, and so it’s only fitting that it’s her overzealous charge in and avoidance by Bayley that sends her into that same piece of the ring. Hoisted upon her own petard, not only a lovely micro piece of crime and punishment but also part of a larger story about Bayley now finally outsmarting Charlotte after months of things going the other way, Charlotte gets knocked out, allowing Bayley to head up for the flying elbow drop for the win.

It’s a lower key win than you’d like, despite the great and simple set up and narrative told in the match itself, and it’s not unfair to have Questions about that, making the golden girl’s big loss into something people will remember less. I am a paranoid person by nature, and this is something that occurred to me, and maybe to you as well.

However, I think it still just kind of works out.

Probably not as great of a match as any of the challengers against Bayley one on one would have been, but great is still great. A nice little wrestling story here, and in a larger sense, it is just nice to see the WWE even very briefly seem to get Bayley correct on the biggest possible stage, even if they’ll then spend the next two and a half years getting her stunningly and embarrassingly wrong.

***

Asuka vs. Ember Moon, WWE NXT Takeover Orlando (4/1/2017)

This was for Asuka’s NXT Womens Title.

I love this match.

More than that, I love this feud, even with the bad ending to it, and to really go into the first match of their two, I think it’s first important to go into some background information.

A year ago, Asuka ascended to the throne by choking out Bayley, effectively ending the Four Horsewomen era of the division. Four and a half months later, she beat Bayley in a rematch to send Bayley out of NXT, and solidified not only her control of the title and division, but the end of that era of NXT as a whole. That same night, Ember Moon made her debut, and it feels like there has been a collision coming ever since. Ember Moon’s also gone undefeated in the same way Asuka has, beating every other female wrestler in NXT with the sick Eclipse finisher, leading to yet another one of those perfect little easily set up wrestling matches. You build up two forces on parallel paths, then suddenly fuck those lines up, and send them careening at each other, and that’s where the magic happens.

This match is that magic.

Immediately, there is a tremendous physical chemistry between the two. Two wrestlers with cool and fast offense throw a bunch of it out for fifteen minutes or so, and that is that. Big counters, huge moves built up pretty well, explosions of striking and other offense. Asuka and Ember Moon are both wrestlers who don’t do a ton of wild offense, but get so much and make so much out of the things that they do do, both through a sort of pure presence, but also from the way that they perform those pieces of offense. Moon especially has a kind of late 2000s Jeff Hardy quality to the dive she has and the way she throws her body around here. It’s not actually reckless, but feels reckless and heavy in a way that feels legitimate and not entirely like a performance. In a larger sense, it is sharp and fast and unbelievably crisp and cool, once again an Asuka title match that is far and away the best match on one of these shows.

With regards to the story, it’s another way in which this match excels.

Constantly, Ember Moon is ready for Asuka in ways that nobody else has really been, outside of maybe the Bayley matches. Even saying that, Ember feels prepared and ready in a way Bayley wasn’t, not only being aggressive but being ready for more of Asuka’s offense than just the finishing hold. Asuka never quite feels panicked, to the match’s benefit (as the final bit of it hits harder as a result), but there is a sense throughout the match that builds up that Ember Moon has a realer shot at this than anyone in the last eight months.

That feeling compounds upon itself, up until this perfect moment when Moon climbs up the ropes, only for Asuka to shove the referee into the ropes to stop her from hitting the Eclipse. Asuka follows with an especially nasty head kick and gets the pin.

Asuka keeps the title and makes it to a full year as NXT’s top champion (this show is main evented by Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Bobby Roode, I mean come on, there is no argument), but not without surrendering a significant chunk of the dignity and goodwill she had built up over the last year and a half. She’d been mean before, especially to Bayley, but never used a tactic like that to win a match, and it matters so much. Ember Moon loses her undefeated streak, but comes out having gained something maybe even more important (as her streak was never going to rival Asuka’s), being the one to finally make Asuka slip and really get desperate.

It’s a remarkable first act, perfectly laying out every story and everything at stake between the two, laying a foundation for a rematch that could have been one of the great payoffs in professional wrestling not only all year or all decade, but in wrestling history period. No matter how the story actually ends, it’s had to take that or this match entirely away from them.

***1/4

Aleister Black vs. Andrade Almas, WWE NXT Takeover Orlando (4/1/2017)

Almas’ second best match of the month by a few hundred miles, but all the same, a lovely debut for Al Black.

To be clear, it is not the best they can do. Given that, a year later, they would get to show off the exact best that they can do against each other, this is not some great crime, as what it actually is is still real fun.

As with most NXT debuts, the focus is on the debutee, in this case Big Satan Al Black Their entrance, their offense, whatever little details they’ve worked on with the coaches for distinct and overly rehearsed camera shots, things like that. Al Black’s got a better entrance than most and plugged into the WWE system, that is not allowed to do a lot of long matches and confined to just the stuff he does well, he looks spectacular. He’s one of the first name signings in a while to genuinely and really benefit from WWE presentation in a way that I’m not sure that we’ve seen since Seth Rollins/Tyler Black, guys who really need this sort of assistance because their brains just are not very good. In this match, Al Black comes across like more of a star that at any point in his career before this (and arguably ever since), not only before the bell, but during it, as all of his stuff matters and gets to breathe, and kicks ass without anything egregious thrown in in terms of kickouts or comebacks or any dumb little spots that he shouldn’t be doing.

With regards to the match itself, typically, unless someone’s nose gets cracked wide open, they aren’t usually great, because they aren’t meant to be. This is on the borderline, but I think works just enough to get them there, and that’s not an insignificant accomplishment given what these matches often are.

It’s a pure show of offense, and it’s not especially well thought out and it’s not the fireworks show that it could be, but everything that they do do together is really cool. Crisp and impactful, but just as importantly, all very different. A major strength of peak NXT (“peak” being an iffy term of course, the actual peak ended in 2015, but you know relative to like the 2020s) is matches like this, where guys doing totally different things get hurled at each other, and so everything that happens is interesting and different, and it has a way of just naturally making a match more interesting. This is as good of a display of this as any, their 2018 title match is one of the best displays of that philosophy ever, and it makes this really work in a way where a La Sombra vs. Tommy End match (or a Andrade El Idolo vs. Mal Black match) probably wouldn’t, given their instincts outside of this strict system.

Black gets his debut win with the Black Mass spinning head kick, and of all the changes WWE forced on him, finally turning his unquestioned coolest move into his actual finish i the best of them by far.

A very good little time here.

three boy

The Hardy Boyz vs. The Young Bucks, ROH Supercard of Honor IX (4/1/2017)

This was a Ladder Match for the Hardys’ ROH World Tag Team Titles.

It is not their best work.

Their first match, on a NEW show in 2014 in a baseball park of all places, is genuinely one of my favorite matches of the decade and in the careers of both teams. So, be aware that I’m not saying this dismissively. At their best, or at least at their collective best, this is a match up that I really really actually thought the world of.

But this is not quite that.

Each go around this match up has (2014, 2017, 2022) is worse. You can chalk that up to the first turn being the Bucks at their peak, the second being the Bucks getting dumber, and the third being the Bucks no longer really being very good at all. The more sensible thing, I think, is to chalk it up to simply the process and the facts of human aging. 2014 was the last time the Hardys were genuinely a great tag team in one of their reunions, still physically fit enough to keep up without things noticeably slowing down to suit them, whereas that’s not quite the case in this run, and certainly is not the case a half decade later.

It is, however, still pretty fun!

The bulk of the work here falls on the Young Bucks, both because of the Hardys now getting up there in age but also because they’re about to return to the WWE at WrestleMania the next day in ANOTHER ladder match, but they are totally up to the task. For whatever this match loses both due to increased age and due to ladder matches naturally being less good than regular ones a lot of the time, Nick and Matt really do their best to make up for with a real nutty bumping performance, careening into tables from all different heights and angles and both into and off of ladders at remarkably high speeds and velocities. This isn’t to say Matt and Jeff don’t have their good moments, from Matt’s right hands to the few big things Jeff does, but it is to say that the quality of this relies on the Bucks, and they do as much as possible to ensure the success of this match.

Outside of the pure mechanics and the insanity of the things they do, this is also a pretty well laid out match, and one with a few small little nods to the Hardys’ history in ladder matches that I really appreciated. The Joey Mercury face breaker spot tease is a more obvious one that’s called out on commentary, given that he had a backstage role in ROH at the time, but what I loved even more was the use of the finishing sequence from the initial Hardy Boyz vs. Edge & Christian ladder match from No Mercy 1999. Ladders facing different ways, two guys on each, and one going down but one man stepping onto the other ladder first. It’s something that worked for the Hardys in the match that made them stars, and it’s a tactic they employ here, or at least a thing they’re familiar doing in a similar circumstance, only for it not to work out this time. That’s nice. It’s not the sort of thing that makes or breaks a match, but it’s a nice little nod to the larger history of wrestling and what the Hardys were trying to do here in a passing of the torch.

(Said passing of the torch is maybe not perfect, given that the Bucks already had it for anyone would have been swayed by an ROH ladder match, but like so much of this match, the attempt is an endearing thing in and of itself. It also makes their later brief AEW thing sort of redundant, which is also funny to me.)

The Bucks stereo superkick the Hardys off a ladder and get the belts down to win.

A forgone conclusion, but one reached in a delightful enough journey that it doesn’t quite matter so much to me.

Far from the best version of this match up, but given the enormity of the Hardys’ weekend, a super admirable performance on top of the match still being just great enough on its own terms.

***

Jay Lethal vs. Cody Rhodes, ROH Supercard of Honor IX (4/1/2017)

This was a Texas Bullrope Match, but in a rarity, the good kind where it ends on a pinfall or submission.

I don’t blame anyone for not knowing how much this ruled.

Between 2017 ROH being largely and correctly written off by most people, Cody Rhodes’ less than stellar output in his first few months as an independent wrestler, and Jay Lethal being Jay Lethal, I would guess that a lot of people just haven’t watched this match before. It’s not a match that exactly DEMANDS attention either, as it’s not that bloody and as they don’t go so overboard with big spots to try and garner attention and game the system. I’m not entirely sure why I actually did, outside of that nefarious impulse to watch everything and go further than anyone else doing projects like this (cherry picking is for cowards, once again). I might have not ever watched this if I didn’t have this particular brain sickness, and so I totally get why other people without this exact version of The Fever didn’t lay eyes on it.

I’m also not necessarily going to say you HAVE TO either.

This is not one of the best matches of the year exactly. I don’t know that your view of the year is woefully incomplete if you haven’t seen this match. And in a time where we’ve since seen Cody show a little more than he was at the time this happened, I don’t think a bloody Cody gimmick match being really good is going to surprise a lot of people either.

I just like it a whole lot.

There’s a real simplicity to this that I admire a whole lot.

A lot of matches claim to be old school (this often is just a cover for being boring), but this is a match that genuinely does, outside of a few signature moves and maybe a few transition spots, feel like it happened fifteen or twenty years ago. All of the punching and the smacking to be sure, the simple layout of the thing, but also the restraint with big moves that they show, done for once in ROH in the 2010s in a way that doesn’t hurt the match at all. There’s also something of an old school ROH feeling to little portions here too, teasing moves and having them cut off once or twice before they’re hit later on. It’s a simple little bit of wrestling ideology, but it works so well for me, making the eventual success of these moves later on seeming like individual victories to games within the larger game itself.

With regards to offense with the gimmick, so much of this revolves around the rope and the cow bell, and working to the things that being tied together allows them to do. Both in ways you’d expect, like being pulled into the ringpost or off the ropes and fights over the length of the rope, but also in nastier ways you might not immediately expect. Cody repeatedly smacks the cow bell into Lethal’s ribs at important moments here, not so much because he’s working the body, but just as this real gross and ultra mean spirited thing that a heel would do. It’s the perfect attack for the role he’s playing, being both a very memorable thing to do, but also not at all likeable, a perfect sort of heel balance, which allows this match to work even in spite of Jay Lethal not being likeable at all.

My favorite use of the rope though comes in a bit you’d never see in an older Texas Bullrope Match, as Cody cuts off the Lethal Injection by simply yanking the ropes and sending Lethal flying backwards on his neck. It’s a real nasty landing, as well as being both a cooler and more logical block of the move than usual.

The simplicity of the match extends to the back half just as much as the front. The basics work as well as they ever have. Punches, chops, hitting people with heavy objects, and bodies being sent soaring through tables.

Lethal takes a god damner of a spill off the top through a ringside table, again as a result of a yank on the rope, but he survives the Cross Rhodes back inside. Cody’s problem — and one that will go on to haunt him in bigger matches — is that outside of that, he doesn’t have a lot of real big offense to lean on when opponents do. Cody forgets the setting he’s in and tries the Disaster Kick, only for Lethal to finally learn the rope as well and yank him back off the ropes into a cutter. Lethal lands the Lethal Injection on the second pass, and gets the win.

Simple good ass professional wrestling here, operating a your classic story of good (work with me here) and evil, as well as telling a real solid little story about the nature of a Bullrope Match itself and how you can’t win until you learn how to use it. Not for everyone, but if it sounds like you’d like something like this, you probably will.

One of the year’s better kept secrets.

***1/4

Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Mike Quackenbush, CHIKARA Bad Wolf (4/1/2017)

WrestleMania Weekend 2017 gets its grapplefuck classic and the best match of the weekend, and surprisingly, it comes out of CHIKARA, meaning that not only is it an impressive match for this weekend, but the best match this company has put forth in nearly four years.

Like other matches like this — both in terms of the people involved and the style it’s wrestled in — there is sort of a self-selection to who watches it, and so I will rephrase and say this once again. The people who watch this are almost guaranteed to at least like it, and like me, most of you will probably love it. If you are some sort of boring water-brained weirdo who doesn’t like this sort of wrestling, this is not for you (and that includes this site too, probably). If you are going to disqualify a match because Quack is a big ol’ geek or because he’s a shithead in real life, or because CHIKARA hosts some real eye-rolling stuff at this point at other points on a show, you know, you were probably never going to watch this to begin with. Why hell, you’re probably not even reading this review to begin with!

I love that.

I love that for you, but way more importantly, I love that for me.

This is one just for us fellas.

Mechanically, it is a god damned DELIGHT.

Zack and Quackenbush are incredible at this, and this is a match that thankfully sticks entirely within their wheelhouses. That’s not so much a worry with Quack, who has aged into knowing exactly what he’s great at and primarily only doing that, but for Zack who has been all over the place in his matches this weekend (the previously reviewed ACH match, one of the worst EVOLVE title matches ever against Big Mike on 3/31, will have a good match against Mark Haskins later in the day), it’s a refreshing show of control, whether or not that decision comes from him or not. The match sticks almost entirely to grappling and it is so cool. Brand new holds, sick counters and transitions, fighting on just about everything, and a real struggle at all times. Not only over each hold individually, but a struggle to really establish anything, and to really have any sort of prolonged control over any direction this winds up going.

That struggle isn’t just something expressed mechanically, but it becomes part of the story of the thing too, two wrestlers with a lot in common not only trying to outdo each other, but having to reckon with these horrible funhouse mirror versions of themselves.

Both of these guys are kind of the same in a lot of aspects. They know a thousand different holds and counters, they were likely heroes to different generations of fans who liked a lot of the same stuff before accusations or total radio silence about accusations made that feel weird in retrospect, and primarily, they’re both skinny grapplers who are just sort of unlikeable and hiding extraordinarily petty dark sides within whenever anyone outdoes them. Zack moreso than Quackenbush (not entirely for xenophobic reasons but when comparing different sorts of aloof nerds who are actually extraordinarily petty just barely below the surface, a union jack does help make that decision clearer, plus Quackenbush is able to sell panic and frustration and other emotions in a more sympathetic way than Zack is often times), but it’s a quality that comes pouring out of both men.

The joy of this match is that it is wrestling as a conversation.

Part of being wildly similar sort of psychotic freaks is that both Zack and Quack start with a smile and some talk, but absolutely none of it seems sincere at all. They joke around with each other talking about their holds and counters, one-upping each other, and it’s all done with a smile, but it so phony in the best possible way. They always look unbelievably pissed off when they’re not looking at each other or stuck in holds that give them more trouble than they’d have against anyone else, before putting those bullshit grins back on their face when they look at each other again, and it is genuinely so interesting. Usually, the play with one of these wrestlers is to have one of them slowly revealed as false against another wrestler like this, like the Gresham/Sabre Jr. trilogy, or any number of 2010s Quackenbush matches, but pairing two wrestlers like this against each other is such a novel concept. Type against type doesn’t often work like you’d think, except in a circumstance like this when it absolutely does, and nothing is like it.

It takes almost nothing for the veneer to slip, and when it does, it’s beautiful.

There’s not some single point when a switch flips here. It’s not Zack’s first uppercut of Quack’s hard slap in response, it’s not a surprise German Suplex from Quackenbush late in the match, or anything so obvious. The holds get meaner and tighter and more complex as the top this mentality leads them to less friendly places, the counters come harder, strikes become a little more plentiful, and at some point in that process, the phony niceness is simply gone.

Something else about this that rules is that absolutely nothing is solved.

Nobody really outwrestles the other here, at least not in the ways that they clearly want to. Zack Sabre Jr. learns absolutely nothing when Quack schools him here and there. Quack is never really outdone by the younger grappler either. Things get more intense, and all that really comes out of this are minor differences that aren’t inherently advantages. Zack Sabre Jr. is better at getting into his stock holds than Quackenbush is, but Quackenbush is much better at improvising, performing grappling alchemy and pulling new things out of thin air. Neither is shown to be a more important or stronger skill, so much as it’s just a difference in the games of the two.

In the end, Zack Sabre Jr. wins not because he ever outdid the old man or because of his ability to get to His Stuff easier, but simply because Quackenbush made a mistake that he didn’t. In turning the heat up, Quackenbush overreaches and takes a risk he’s not quite so adept at. He falls off of a springboard, barely recovers, and hits an angry back senton followed by a lift for a big bomb that feels like an attempt to end the match quick now that he’s finally thrown off. Zack Sabre Jr. reads the response entirely correctly, slips out, and grabs a quick European Clutch for the win.

Neither man throws the other off, as they spent so much of the match trying to do, and instead it’s Quackenbush’s own annoyance at his totally minor mistake that costs him, which feels absolutely perfect.

The way it happens is very much unplanned, but it fits the match so much better than anything they could ever dream up. In a largely even contest, it’ a lack of recent ring time that costs Quackenbush, both in his minor slip and his overreaction to it. Zack Sabre Jr. is maybe not quite as skilled, but in a match like this, sometimes it’s just about who avoids that unforced error. It’s not the happiest ending, but it does feel like the most true to life one, which for a Zack Sabre Jr. match, may be the most stunning thing of all.

On a weekend full of otherwise largely disappointing Zack Sabre Jr. matches, a much better wrestler manages to reach in and pulls out one of the best Zack Sabre Jr. matches of his entire peak. Something close to the ideal version of a thing, and even if it feels like they maybe have an even better match in them, you don’t want to chance

***1/2

Ethan Page vs. Darby Allin, EVOLVE 81 (3/31/2017)

This was an Anything Goes match.

Genuinely, this match is mostly really really really great, a tremendous feat given who these guy are at this point, and a significant step up from their other matches together.

It’s not perfect, of course, and I don’t just mean like execution being off in a moment or two, but things that kind of hurt what they were doing. There’s a bit near the end where The Gatekeepers interfere and Austin Theory is put into a big babyface spot to help take them out, and Darby does a big stunt in the crowd onto them to abandon the match weirdly, and I think Darby might also be a blood packet coward here (it’s totally fine to not bleed, but either do it or don’t). These sort of small things that still have the effect of taking one (me) out of the production for just a moment, in a match that is otherwise such a wonderful display of recklessness and violence that it allows for zero other moments like that.

Mostly though, this is a stunningly great display of complete nonsense.

The trick, as it turned out, was not only to just let them do everything they could think of, but to make the match as maximalist as possible in that regard.

It is big and horrifying and unbelievably impressive set pieces and little else. Gross chair shots, table spots, thing with ladders, and the common thread running through it all is Darby Allin eating more shit than any human being has eaten on film in a long long time. This isn’t to say Ethan Page isn’t also very good here. It’s one of the best performances he’s ever had, simple bully power work that’s all crisp and clean mechanically on top of the attitude he brings to everything. However, this is Darby’s match.

Darby almost dies like three or four times here between a press slam into a row of chairs, one off the top through two tables, the dive onto all the extras where he does a Sasuke-eque trash can over the head  dive off the concourse and almost nobody catches him, a javelin throw into the Orlando Live Event Center’s concrete wall, and it’s all fantastic. The smaller little things that happen to him are also pretty great too, bouncing off of Page early on when he tries things, and finding ways to make even smaller and more common moments feel devastating. It’s also his best offensive performance yet too, if you’re into that sort of thing, reckless assaults using himself as a weapon, all of the things Allin will go on to specialize in starting to really emerge for the first time.

The match’s ending also stands out as a great little piece of booking that seemingly operates as a perfect ending to a long feud (the match will be run back the next month in another gimmick match anyways despite this clear climax in a classic bit of Gabe-ism, resulting in Darby losing much of the year to an injury that never had to happen), on top of kicking a galaxy’s worth of ass. For most of the feud and match, it’s been Page using Darby as a punching bag to show off his power, but at the end, it’s Allin who hammers Page five or six times in the face with a garbage can in a ow to get him on the table in a great little piece of revenge.

Following that, Darby gives a match like this — dangerous and violent and cool, but also very simple — the perfect ending by simply leaping off the top of a Big Ladder with a genuine mother fucker of a splash through the table to win.

Outstanding professional wrestling.

Beyond just being a shocking amount of fun, kind of secretly one of the best matches of the entire weekend, and for WWN, number one with a bullet.

One of the best ECW matches of 2017.

***1/4

Matt Riddle vs. Fred Yehi, EVOLVE 81 (3/31/2017)

More of that good ass EVOLVE midcard meat and potatoes. Or rather, at least as much of that meat and potatoes as a post-2016 and significantly emptier headed Matt Riddle match will allow.

For the most part, Yehi has his way.

Something like eighty to ninety percent of this is that good grapplefucking. Yehi is perfect for Riddle here in a way that other more traditional grapplers (Tracy Williams, for example) aren’t so much, in that not only is everything he does on the ground so different and strange and not only does he avoid ever getting bogged down in extended body part work that Riddle won’t care about selling anyways (there is supposedly a story here about Riddle having a hurt neck after a Drew Galloway match the day before, but if not for Lenny Leonard on commentary, you would never know this), but he’s also better suited to Riddle because he always mixes in strikes or more high impact moments and it seems like that works better with Riddle’s (bad) sensibilities than more traditional technicians do. As if Yehi is just enough of a jack of all/most trades to be able to get Riddle down to the mat for a prolonged period of time because his work also carries the promise that Riddle will eventually get to stand up and do really dumb shit too.

It doesn’t all go perfectly of course, as Riddle does eventually get to live up to that.

Matt Riddle’s birdbrained fighting spirit no-sell of a German Suplex might be at home in front of the dullards in the Electric Ballroom, but feels wildly out of place in EVOLVE and in a match like this. The last maybe twenty five percent of the match isn’t quite filled with moments like that, but with enough pieces of Riddle offense and Riddle reactions to things that don’t feel quite right. Dumber and worse than the rest of the match while also working against it in style and tone, despite his success in the original style and tone of the thing. It feels very much like he now thinks a great match has to be a certain way, and shoehorns these things into perfectly good matches, which after the first nine to twelve months of his career, is just the saddest shit in the world, outside of everything he’s up to outside of the ring.

Yehi manages to reel him in just enough though, not making Riddle smarter or anything, but wrestling a more intelligently composed and executed version of this sort of a match. Beyond Yehi’s own strengths, the match is just short enough so that it never gets too far away from them, as Riddle’s other work in 2017 proves that it very easily could and that virtually all of his matches are always just on the edge of.

Following a fight out of the Bromission and into Yehi’s Koji Clutch for the upset (watered down with a pass out stoppage loss, real coward shit), it’s the end to yet another outstanding piece of work from Yehi. Beyond that, it’s another story of success by someone realizing that Riddle’s real value is less as the main character of his own story and more as another cog in somebody else’s. This is probably good no matter what, but the trick to this being great is that this is Matt Riddle inserted into a Fred Yehi Match, rather than casting Yehi as yet another Riddle opponent in a Matt Riddle Match,

The latter is something of a shapeless mess, quickly becoming one of my least favorite things in (non-British) independent wrestling, whereas the latter is one of 2017’s most reliable hits. The success of the match, whether it intends to or not, comes down to making the most obvious and correct choice, which for EVOLVE is no small feat.

***