Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns, WWE WrestleMania 34 (4/8/2018)

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Universal Title.

Now, obviously, I do not need to tell you that these two have never topped their first match together.

I don’t mean that as an insult.

The first Lesnar/Reigns match is not only one of the best matches of the entire decade, the best wrestling match to happen in maybe the best year for pro wrestling all decade (certainly my favorite), but at worst, a top three WrestleMania main event ever. It’s not only an immense and deeply impressive thing, the wrestling equivalent of not just pulling blood from a stone but genuine actual alchemy, one of the great booking accomplishments of the entire decade. It would be impossible for this to live up to that, and on some level, I respect that it didn’t really even try to be a match like that.

What they do here is, respectfully, less of a match than it is an angle.

I think it’s an awesome angle, to be clear.

Brock Lesnar is ready for Roman Reigns this time, and dominates like ninety percent of the match.

There are clear callbacks to both their previous match and the big Lesnar/Cena match that was also among the best of the decade, and while Reigns is nowhere near as sympathetic or great in that role as Cena, there’s something about it that works. Chalk it up to Lesnar as maybe wrestling’s greatest bully of the twenty first century or chalk it up to Reigns having a gift as a put upon Failed Ace against more physically dominant antagonists, but it just kind of naturally works for me.

Doubly so when the match really flips a switch in its final moments, when Roman kicks out of a fourth F5 and Lesnar literally takes the gloves off, drops a series of audibly stunning punches and elbows to the head, and makes the Golden Boy bleed in front of the world.

Roman makes his one comeback after being split WIDE god damned open, but Lesnar catches a repeat Spear, and hits the fifth or sixth F5, and finally gets the win with it.

On paper, I love this.

The chosen one, with all of these totally fair gripes going into this about Lesnar being a part-timer and being given all these allowances, totally owned now that Lesnar knows exactly how great he is. Not a destruction like Lesnar vs. Cena in 2014, but the sort of match Lesnar never really feels in danger of losing. When Reigns survives more than expected, Lesnar unloads on him like he hasn’t really had to with somebody in years and years, but it never feels like something he cannot do.

It’s a genuinely brutal and vicious beating, but also one that it feels like Roman should have taken a long time ago.

One of the easiest routes to accepting an up and coming babyface is having them absolutely beaten to shit and falling short. In a vacuum, this is a stellar example of this. A build up where the young hero is 100% in the right in what he has to say, a match where he shows heart, but also a match where he gets his shit entirely beaten in and his skull caved in.

The great problem, of course, is that he didn’t take this three years ago.

Had this been the ending of their first match at WrestleMania 31 (aka Play), I think it really might have done something positive. The well was maybe already poisoned by the worst booked match in the history of wrestling a few months before then, but something about this — the violence of it, the genuine nature of the violence, the cruelness and finality of the defeat — feels like it was what would have really done Roman a favor back then. As it is now, nobody feels an ounce of sympathy. Three years later, he’s beaten The Undertaker at WrestleMania, he had the all-time level bomb against Triple H a year before that (through very little fault of his own), and a hundred other minor offenses you could point at. It is an attempt to right a ship that can no longer be righted in this sense, and it’s genuine shame that it happens entirely to boos for Reigns and cheers for Lesnar.

It is a correct idea, but one done far too late in the game to mean anything. All that will work now is the move that does work, only two and a half years later than this.

Still, I like this a lot.

There’s a classic Brock Lesnar Superfight element to this that works, blood is cool, etc., but I would be dishonest with you if I said I loved this match and thought of it fondly entirely because of what happened bell-to-bell.

Previously here, I have mentioned the former Wrestling With Words slack chat on here.

I have a great appreciation for everyone on there. Not just because it got me back into current wrestling in 2017 or because it was a genuinely useful outlet for me following the death of my father later in 2017, but also because I really enjoy most of the people/robots on there. Sometimes that extends to semi-professional respect for others who write/speak about wrestling (this blog would not exist without them, and at least some element of semi-professional jealousy), and sometimes, it just means that I like somebody on there as a person/poster/wrestling fan.

Among those is one of my two internet sons (at least on a conscious level. at this point, this blog has spawned several posters/blogs that clearly take some inspiration from what I’m doing, and I guess these people are my internet bastard sons or daughters.), who was a gigantic WWE and Roman Reigns fan in the years leading into this, and genuinely believed with his entire heart that this was Roman’s moment. He went dark for this match (in chat speak, this means logging out of the app and/or webpage until the match was over, one of the highest compliments you can pay a match, I did this recently for Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn), and following the result, had something close to a complete fandom mental breakdown.

Genuinely, it is one of my favorite moments as a wrestling fan.

Seeing someone go through what I experienced some three years and change prior — the various stages of grief, through to anger — before realizing it is not worth it to support the WWE on a week to week basis, talking them through it, and along with others helping to redirect them to other wrestling (2018 DDT, 2000s Ring of Honor, Peak All Japan, 2010s New Japan) is among my favorite experiences online as a wrestling fan.

I believe that everyone owes it to themselves to pay it forward.

Sometimes that can be applied in a professional sense, sometimes it can be applied to any hobby, and sometimes, that applies to wrestling fandom. There was a guy when I was like thirteen and doing fantasy booking on the WrestleZone forums in the early 2000s who yelled at me to watch old Mid South and 1985-1989 JCP named Big Earl, and I have always remembered that. I think that, generally speaking, we have a responsibility as peoplle to honor the people who maybe five or ten or more years ago in a similar state, pushed them towards great older wrestling, keep that same idea moving forward for the next generation, and it was through this match that I was at least partially able to do that.

This is a great match on its own merits. Absolutely.

However, I will always always always think of this match in terms of the total mental collapse I got to see it create in real time, and the journey that that mental collapse begin. As a result, sort of sneakily, it is one of my favorite matches of the year, or at least one of the first matches that comes to mind when I think of wrestling in 2018.

Brock Lesnar rocks. Roman Reigns rocks. Witnessing your friend and internet son have a mental breakdown also rocks. This match fucking rocked.

***+

Triple H/Stephanie McMahon vs. Kurt Angle/Ronda Rousey, WWE WrestleMania 34 (4/8/2018)

Hell yeah, dude.

Again, yeah, listen. Are there problems here? Of course.

Kurt Angle is WASHED. He does not belong in a wrestling ring at this point. I would argue that he hasn’t since probably like 2013, but it especially stands out here on a huge show, in a match with another old guy in Hunter who holds up at least a little better (although not great either), and Ronda Rousey, who looks genuinely phenomenal. All things truly considered, Kurt may be worse here than Stephanie also, who is obviously no professional, but at least eats shit and executes in a respectable enough way.

The construction of the thing also leaves something to be desired.

Far too much confidence is put in Kurt Angle and Triple H in the first half, and the match suffers for it. Likewise, Ronda Rousey sells just a little too much for my liking here. That’s not to say her first match should be a total squash, but that even with eye gouging or whatever and all of the other bullshit about this, I simply do not believe Stephanie McMahon could do anything to her, even for the short periods that this match suggests that she could. I understand that sometimes, in order to dance, you have to pay the fiddler, but it is not the sort of thing I love watching.

Compared to the high points of this though, none of that matters too much.

Ronda Rousey looks unbelievable here.

She hits hard, she moves well, everything she executes is clean, she is incredibly genuine and believable feeling, all of that. More impressively than anything, it’s also not as if she is doing this against other greats, but she is showing all of this against someone nearly two decades removed from his prime (2000-2001) and his wife, a non-wrestler at best. It is the sort of thing that it would be totally understandable to fall short at or even fail at, but Ronda is a complete and total success. It both looks and feels great, the ideal debut performance.

At the time, people genuinely talked about this like it was the best professional debut of all time, and it wasn’t insane (even if this is not as great as the Jun Akiyama debut match or performance). Usually, that sort of thing is nuts in retrospect. Like, people in 2016 saying Matt Riddle had the best rookie year ever, or whatever. But it felt reasonable in the moment, and half a decade later, it is still not entirely insane. I disagree, both because Akiyama’s debut match and performance were just better but also because it had less protection for the debutee than this did, but it is not all that far off.

Genuinely, it is a hell of a thing and maybe more than anything else, more than any of her actual great matches to come in 2018-2019, this might be Ronda’s actual legacy in professional wrestling.

Stephanie tries to save Hunter with a rear naked choke, but it’s her mistake, and she immediately pays for it.

Rather than paying someone to train her in the art of grappling and submission wrestling, she ought to have tried striking instead. Ronda Rousey has been knocked out before, but neither of her professional losses was through submission, and she very easily takes her over. Ronda gets the cross armbreaker on, this time with McMahon no longer able to buy even half a second of time with a hands-clasped block. Kurt cuts Hunter off with the ankle lock, and these horrible people finally surrender.

Not just a lovely slice of bullshit, but a real satisfying one too. Whatever problems this has, they’re never so much that they take away from the real thrill of the thing, seeing two truly rotten people brought low and made to suffer like this on the biggest possible stage available.

A wonderful piece of spectacle.

 

The Miz vs. Seth Rollins vs. Finn Balor, WWE WrestleMania 34 (4/8/2018)

This was for The Miz’s WWE Intercontinental Title.

First things first, it is HILARIOUS that Seth Rollins again went for the Game of Thrones entrance aesthetic for WrestleMania, this time with the Ice King stuff. This is an especially funny choice as — while one could write off 2017’s Kingslayer idea as being tied into his match, as bad as it was — there’s not only no connection, but he chooses a character that winds up being absolutely nothing after all that build up. It ties into the hilarity of the extended bit in general, tying himself so concretely to this thing that, once it was over in a year and change, would have lit itself so severely on fire that it would have almost no cultural impact outside of a few phrases and ideas. It is perfect for Seth Rollins, the most empty calories ass wrestler imaginable.

As for the match, it’s actually really good!

Generally speaking, I am not going to be the guy to do an extended 2018 Seth Rollins retrospective. The idea of him as this workhorse WOTY in 2018 always felt not only like total horseshit that only the most empty minded braying hog WWE fans would get into, but also weirdly astroturfed. It always felt to me like they realized the fanfare that people like 2014 Dolph Ziggler or 2016 Miz or even 2017 Roman Reigns got for these string of long and great TV matches and midcard title defenses/programs, and simply tried to graft that onto Seth Rollins. None of it is really stuff I enjoy, both because of the artificial seeming nature of both the idea and so many of the matches he has within it, but also because he is simply not an especially good or interesting professional wrestler, and so it has no real value.

Having said all of that, it did at least work at the start, as I really genuinely like this match a lot.

It’s not the most complex thing in the world, your standard WWE triple threat.

Still, all three try really hard, the match doesn’t waste a lot of time if any at all, and they have enough cool little ideas to get them through it in an impressive enough way. It’s the kind of match that I very easily can wind up hating, but that never gave me a chance to. The pace is not blistering and nothing they do is blowing my mind, but it all just sort of comes together in a way that I found really pleasing and satisfying.

Far greater than the sum of its parts.

Rollins hits Balor with a curb stomp into Miz’s back as he tries to pick Miz up in a neat little spot, and then hits Miz with the regular edition Curb Stomp to win the title. It’s the correct call for a finish, if not for a result (Balor is naturally likeable in a way Rollins has never been able to simulate, do the same thing in 2018 with him instead, and it is like 50x better), beating the champion himself instead of the other guy, and allowing zero gripe about how it went. Rollins should never have been the one to get the real rub out of beating Miz for the title definitively in a big spot to end the Miz IC Champion era, but as it is, it’s all very well done and I suppose that is all that you can hope for from this company at this point.

Bad ideas executed well enough that, in the moment, they seem simply okay.

A great version of a very particular kind of WWE bullshit.

***

Cedric Alexander vs. Mustafa Ali, WWE WrestleMania 34 Kickoff (4/8/2018)

This was the finals of a tournament for the WWE Cruiserweight Title.

I mean, yeah, you’re right, imaginary person arguing with me that I often use as either a narrative device and/or something to help me form my arguments when first starting a piece. They do deserve better than the pre-show. They deserve a full hot WrestleMania crowd, a match without the house lights on, all of that. They deserve to have a great match for a better wrestling company than this, and probably could have had an even greater match than this had they run into each other on a 2016 Freelance or AAW show or something. You are absolutely correct, all of these arguments are fair.

However, deserve’s got nothing to do with it, and it’s a real fun match anyways.

Mustafa Ali and Cedric Alexander do as much as they can in a big spot like this, and credit where some credit is due, I guess, they’re not robbed of time here or anything. They still get to do a lot of cool stuff, and both men clearly try super super hard in the only chance they’ll ever have at a singles match in front of a crowd this big. Everything is crisp as hell, the pacing and escalation is handled really well, and as with their match earlier in the year, both men are really gifted at having these babyface matches, doing a lot of cool stuff and ramping up the intensity, but without ever losing the qualities that makes each of them so likeable.

Cedric wins, as he was always going to (this is WWE, The Plan will never be diverted from) with the Lumbar Check.

I liked it. Fuck off.

three boy

Kenny Omega vs. Cody Rhodes, ROH Supercard of Honor XII (4/7/2018)

(photo credit to Scott Lesh Photography.)

I’ve never known what to really do with this match.

The easy take is that this is bad.

I don’t agree, but I get it.

For some reason, they get thirty seven minutes here, and it dooms the match. It’s far too long, far too disorganized for a match that length in the classic Kenny Omega fashion, overusing certain things until they lose value, and really really feels its length by the end. There is so much here that you could cut out without losing too much, and the Bullet Club/Elite melodrama that comes about at the end is, again, total loser stuff. I have respected maybe one or two people ever who I know have cared about this stuff at any point, and while this is not as groan-inducing as it will be half a decade later, it still sucks. Cody and Kenny are not a natural fit, and this match makes it very clear why, as neither is totally capable of building a bridge to the other side. Cody cannot last in a long Kenny style match without a bunch of shortcuts, and while Kenny is actually pretty great at this point at employing those shortcuts, he seemingly cannot bring himself to adapt to what Cody actually is.

The thing is though, it’s not bad.

Bad is a word I would use to describe a match with no redeeming qualities, or a match that gets so terrible and/or offensive in its worst moments that it totally overpowers those positive aspects. I don’t think that’s true here.

Of the thirty seven minutes this goes, like twenty or twenty five of them are genuinely really good, and borderline great.

Chalk it up to force of effort if you want, two big stars trying super hard to have the best match possible, but the first two-thirds of this match are really actually kind of awesome. It’s total Kenny-ism, things coming real early into a long match, a total sure-footed confidence that is mostly earned, a lot of real impressive sequences and crisp bursts of offense. You can see here, in this first moment, the match this could have been. In some universe where Cody wasn’t too much of a coward to do a G1, there is probably an absolutely sick (***1/4) match between these two in Yokohama or K-Hall, with the melodrama cut out, only one or two shortcuts, and the meat of this match preserved. That’s not the world we live in, we never got that match, but there exists a really neat looking window here into a great match that these two could have had, and it’s enough that I cannot say that this is a bad match.

Certainly, it is not great either.

For the people in the back, again, it is way too long, and weighed down significantly by the many many excesses of the thing. There’s too much wrong with it for me to call it great, but fortunately, I don’t think anybody outside of the true blue Elite psychos, who I obviously do not interact much with anyways, would say this.

Ultimately, I find this match actually super interesting, more than I find it especially good or especially bad. I think about this match more as a document, like a great piece of nonfiction or a cinematic oddity, more than I do a wrestling match. Someone somewhere said about movie directors or writers that you can get a decent understanding of them through their hits, but the real keys lie in the bombs. In the same way that this is true, I think the same is true about wrestlers, and it is ALL on display here, the entire movement or cultural moment with The Elite from like 2017 through 2020 or whatever.

This is, at once (and probably also three months later in their eventual New Japan USA rematch in San Francisco), a match with a bunch of great ideas and also a gigantic overreach and misfire.

While it’s probably a stretch to say something like, this is a skeleton key to understanding why Cody Rhodes was probably always going to leave AEW first, or something like that, it is a great explanation of the weird fit that this always was, the total clash of sensibilities and ideas at the heart of it all. We never got and probably never will get to see the ideal version of this — the 22 minute G1 style version — but what we got is maybe even more valuable in a way, a match that flies upwards and gets real close to the sun, before coming careening down into the sea. Charmingly overzealous and alarmingly ambitious, a match that takes such a wild swing and miss that I kind of admire it in retrospect, succeeding against all odds before ultimately collapsing under the immense weight and pressure of those ambitions.

Talk to me again in five or ten years, and that all might just describe the other thing they built together too.

The Briscoes vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi/Jay Lethal, ROH Supercard of Honor XII (4/7/2018)

(photo credit to Scott Lesh Photography.)

This was for Jay and Mark’s ROH World Tag Team Titles.

It’s a real easy success.

Wrestling is often both art and science, but as the success of a match like this shows, sometimes, you can just chalk one up to pure math.

Throw the best tag team of all time in the ring with one of the best wrestlers of the last decade and a reliably good to great wrestler who said tag team has a ton of ring-time with. Give them ten to fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, and just let it go.

It would be much harder for this match to be anything less than great than to actually be great, and this is not a match for hard work exactly.

Which is not a complaint!

Very casually, this is a great match.

It’s pure formula. A classic kind of Briscoes tag, where you get the feeling that despite the positive qualities of both opponents and the chemistry Lethal and Jay Briscoe in particular have together, it could really have been any two people of reasonable skill, and the match would look very much the same. It’s easy to read that as some kind of a negative, but I really do mean it as a positive. It’s a great match that never ever feels like it is trying to be a great match, or that it is trying to be anything at all. This is a match that simply is, and at this point, I find that so appealing.

What they have is the kind of match that stands out to me as the mark of the true greats. A match so easygoing and laid back that lesser talents would crumble under the weight of a total lack of ambition, but in the hands of these four, it still rocks through a natural force of talent.

Hiroshi Tanahashi is very clearly saving his body for the bigger matches he’s going to have in the next twelve months or so, on every possible level (positioning on the card, company importance, money made, people in attendance). He moves like he will half a decade later all the time, but being Tanahashi, still brings enough charm and turns it up enough in the key moments for it not to matter all that much. You get something like Tanahashi catching the Redneck Kung Fu crane kick and doing a Dragon Screw, and it’s hard to be too let down, you know? The match is incredibly accommodating to him in this state, only asking him to do a few bits, work the in-peril role instead of having to handle a hot tag run, and otherwise be something like a new condiment or fancy herb to spice up a familiar recipe.

That familiar recipe’s as great as always too.

Lethal against the Briscoes is a little different now, with the Briscoes having turned heel and Lethal being booked as a babyface for some reason, and while the roles are backwards, it still just works. The two Jays (1990) maybe secretly and maybe not so secretly have possible the best one on one chemistry in ROH, and the few minutes where it’s just the two of them are fantastic. Counters on counters, but they always feel earned because of their immense history together, combined with all these great miniature teases and payoffs. It’s fantastic stuff, and Jay against Mark is much the same. It all feels so easy, and it all feel so good.

Jay and Mark easily handle it once it becomes an actual tag team affair at the end. Lethal and Tanahashi might be a dream on paper, but in reality, they can barely get it together to do a single successful double team. They cut off the old man, and easily hit Lethal with the Doomsday Device to keep the titles.

Pure formula, but in hands this experienced, skilled, and steady, it is a whole lot of fun to watch them solve this equation one more time.

***

SCU vs. The Young Bucks/Flip Gordon, ROH Supercard of Honor XII (4/7/2018)

(photo credit to Scott Lesh Photography.)

This was a Ladder War for SCUs ROH World Six Man Tag Titles.

On paper, yeah, this is not the sort of thing that I would be looking forward to. In actuality, I am pretty sure it was not a match I looked forward to going into this weekend. I use the qualifier there because, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know if I even knew it was happening going into this particular Mania Weekend.

SCU are older than ever before (as each day rolls into the next, we all are. this is not an insult.), and there’s not a one of them I would call a genuinely great wrestler in 2018. They do not always match up super well with the Bucks, especially at this point. Likewise, Flip Gordon is uniquely offputting, possessing a kind of anti-charm as a wrestler and being an unlikeable weirdo off camera. When you get down to what happened in the match too, there’s a lot of room for error, in between the match going beyond a comfortable like fifteen minutes and also including a weirdly pointless (in that it has no effect on the match really, but also in that it is a dogshit act, and everything the second iteration of the Kingdom does is pointless in this way) Kingdom 2.0 run in.

Again though, man, matches do not happen on paper.

The stuff not factored in there is what matters the most, which is to say, it’s another big 2018 Young Bucks success.

Matt’s back is the big story again, and for the millionth time, it’s handled and executed really well. The selling is great in an X’s and O’s sort of a way, but feels genuine too. It’s all melodramatic of course and flirts with the line into eye-rolling nonsense, but spends far more time on the right side of the line than the wrong one, and it works. The way the match uses the injury also helps a lot, as it simply becomes worse as a natural result of a match like this and the way he wrestles, never becoming the focus, but mattering more than anything else at the end. It’s also handled in a surprisingly smart way by building up Matt taking a big back bump all match, and deploying it at the end for maximum impact when he takes this gigantic spill off a ladder and back-first through a table outside.

It certainly isn’t subtle, but it’s done without a lot of the shouting-in-your-face-that-we’re-doing-Selling-now or histrionics that one might expect from a match like this, which could reasonably be described as a body-injury-focused stunt show.

They also just do a ton of cool and nasty stuff.

Sick apron bumps, lots of wild ladder ideas, the works. Flip Gordon almost dies a few times, which is about as good as it gets with him, and the older SCU guys primarily just stick to things that they do really well. Not everything goes right — and in fact, there’s a fair amount that just goes wrong — but when it doesn’t work out perfectly, it is still always brutal. Sometimes, even cooler looking and more violent feeling and more memorable than what a spot was originally going to be, like Flip almost falling off the ringpost before a flip dive and just like half turning into into them, or Sky overshooting a slingshot cutter on the apron and landing on his back on the floor while still hitting the cutter. There is more than one way for something to whip ass, and most of the big ideas in this match wind up whipping ass in one of those ways.

Daniels sends Matt careening off a ladder outside through a table with one of the Kingdom members also on it, and gets the belt down to retain for his group

For sure, a big dumb fireworks display and one with some real easy to see problems, but one with enough connective tissue and cool enough lights and sounds that I still like it a whole lot.

***+

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.

***

Johnny Gargano vs. Tommaso Ciampa, WWE NXT Takeover New Orleans (4/7/2018)

This was an Unsanctioned Match, in which if Gargano won, he would be reinstated to the NXT roster.

As with the previous Takeover’s big Gargano main event, affectionately known as John Boy’s Jerk Off Party among the members of the oft-referenced Slack chat (due to me repeatedly referring to it as “John Boy’s little jerk off party” until capital letters came into play and it gained an official name), I know what you want out of me out of this spiritual successor.

What you want is something mean. Maybe long and maybe short, but definitely mean.

Being John Boy’s Tear Jerker and all, you would like to read another thing about a big NXT match with ~emotions~ that makes sure you knows how emotional it is at all times and feels phony as a result, as compared to (slightly) more restrained big payoffs like Zayn/Neville or Bayley/Sasha in the past. Big faces, constantly. Everything is the biggest. Bullshit Shawn Michaelsism where every feeling is at a 15 out of 10, the idea of playing to the back row taking to an embarrassing extreme, every little thing yelled about on commentary with the most annoying man in the world and his cohorts literally saying [x spot] is a metaphor because you are too dumb to think of anything for yourself, everything we think about with this brand from 2019 to the present or so. You’d like to read about this as patient zero for everything that went wrong with NXT.

You might also want me to talk about it being far too long, an incredible twenty or twenty five minute brawl shoved into a thirty seven minute and forced to make up that time through any number of ways, from things that should not be kicked out of (top rope Project Ciampa), things that could easily be cut out, classic WWE style pauses long after they’re necessary, all of that. Maybe a bit about how, with a little (a lot) of blood, I could really really really get into this on a much higher level. The crutches used to great effect here also clearly come from a planted fan, maybe the most obvious plant in recent wrestling history. Maybe, you would also like to hear about how the triumph at the end of it doesn’t work out all that well for me, because I find Johnny Gargano to be a weirdly offputting presence, and it is not enough simply to want to see a despicable heel eat shit, you also need to want to see somebody succeed to create those truly great payoffs, as NXT had done in the past with its two greatest protagonists.

I know that’s what you want. Two thousand words, seventeen hundred of them negative, frothing at the mouth, all of that. I understand my audience, or at least a significant part of it.

TOUGH SHIT.

Yes, most of that is true, if not all of it.

Honestly, there’s a lot wrong with this, as listed above, and it was and is still (although not as much) real alienating to have never loved it. This isn’t a new thought on this site exactly, but again, there is no more frustrating feeling than not liking a match as much as everyone else. To hate something is freeing in a way. You are free to froth at the mouth, write at length about a thing, all of that. It’s an animating sort of a feeling, a call to action. The act of still liking something a lot though, but being kind of stunned at how much more people liked it than you did — especially if those people are people you otherwise share most opinions with — is a truly confusing one. There’s a guilt, I’ve found, that comes with complaining. You don’t really want to, because you did still enjoy it a lot, but something eats at you about the amount of praise it gets relative to things you liked way more. It is easy to deal with I don’t get it, while I don’t get it to this extent is a far more baffling thing. It has a way of gnawing away at a match of this caliber, something truly great being always slightly tinged by the way you felt compared to the way everyone else feels.

The thing is more that, half a decade later, I don’t really care all that much. Yeah, I am never going to love this, but I also get the feeling that a good chunk of the people who really loved this at the time also don’t quite feel the same way, so whatever.

In spite of every major flaw against it, I cannot tell you that this didn’t rock also.

Composition and execution wise, and looking at it independent of all of the things they just were not allowed to do or that they were maybe forced into on some institutional type of level, the shit is just very strong. The construction is almost perfect. There’s never a moment in this where I think that the biggest thing or the coolest thing in the match has already happened. In terms of the performances. Likewise, speaking of the performances individually, I think they do so much well. Ciampa is never at all likeable or admirable and Gargano does a best he can to run the other way away from that. A thirty seven minute move-based blowoff match would go in a lot of different bad directions, but Gargano always gets his part right. He starts angry, stays desperate, and always feels like he’s really trying to get revenge.

For whatever other directions the thing winds up taking, when it gets down to the two of them, it works.

Gargano avoids the fake out plead for forgiveness, this being an imitation Generico/Steen and all, and goes into an STF GargaNo Escape, now using Ciampa’s discarded knee brace, and gets the win. As much as grappling with the moral cost of revenge might fascinate as an intellectual exercise, nothing feels quite as good or correct in this genre of entertainment as revenge does, and above every sequel and would-be successor to this match, that’s what this really has to offer. 

John Boy’s Tear Jerker might not move me to that, but given what it is — everything that it could have been, everything later attempts became — it’s still very very impressive. If not my match of the year, or really even close, a totally undeniable miracle the likes of which this brand would probably never touch again in a main event, and also never quite recover from.

Not the high point of NXT exactly, but the clear point in retrospect, or at least somewhere near that point, at which the wave finally broke.

***1/6

Andrade Almas vs. Aleister Black, WWE NXT Takeover New Orleans (4/7/2018)

This was for Almas’ NXT Title.

It was a cool match.

Yeah, you can talk about more here, I guess.

Should you be so inclined, you could discuss the decent booking of having this be Al Black’s debut match a year prior, and now done in a much bigger spot, showing the growth of both men. You could also discuss the genuinely very good narrative quality of Almas and Zelina Vega repeating all of the pieces of quality bullshit that have worked since they started their alliance, these well worn routines, only now falling short in the biggest moment. You could also go in the opposite direction and discuss the futility of Almas trying to work on the arm of Al Black, who has never ever been the sort of wrestler to pay attention to things like that, and it being a blatant display of filler, and how even in a match like this that I think comes closer to the heart of what NXT was once than anything else, they cannot help but artificially extend something. You could do all of that, and if I cared a little more or if I was just a little less impressed by the high points of this match, I might do such a thing.

I don’t though and I was, so I will not be doing any of that.

This was just a match full of some really cool stuff, and nowhere near enough bad stuff and/or frustrating enough stuff to counteract any of it. Black is good and bad at what he’s always been, and Almas goes absolutely wild in a big spot to make up for every small weakness in the match. Unbelievable crispness, new counters he’s never shown before, and a real sense for the moment that not everybody just naturally has. It’s not some virtuoso performance, it’s not the best performance of his career, but it’s absolutely the performance of someone who knows he’s about to be promoted to a bigger stage, is long (long long long long) overdue, and is intent on showing the world why exactly that is. It’s among his more impressive works in the WWE.

Black dodges Zelina off the top on the second or third try, and when Almas finally messes up and catches her, the tactic turns on them, and Al Black hits the spooky devil kick to win the title.

On a show with two different great matches hurt by significant bloat, it’s nice to see an example of what this show used to feature far more often, a simple accentuation of every potential positive, as two wrestlers who are by no means some guaranteed great match up having their work elevated by a hot environment and snappy design.

three boy