The Young Bucks vs. Bryan Danielson/Roderick Strong, PWG DDT4 2009 (5/22/2009)

It’s commission time again. This one comes from Ko-fi contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to watch all sorts of things. People tend to choose wrestling but others have chosen movies or fight scenes before. The current market rate is $5/match, or $5/half hour for a movie (round up, don’t be cheap if you want an 88 minute thing). I tend to do commissions in blocks when enough have built up or when I want a lighter week, but everything gets done in time. If that’s something you’re interested in, make sure I haven’t already written about your chosen match, and head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. 

This was the finals of the DDT4 2009 tournament and for the Bucks’ PWG World Tag Team Titles.

In theory, I like this a whole lot. The bulk of the work here, the raw material, the concept of the thing, it’s all fantastic.

Following their semi-final victory over the Men of Low Moral Fiber, the Reseda faithful totally and completely turned on the Bucks (a better time), and the decision was made in the back for Bryan and Roddy to get real brutal with them to try and win them back. It was suggested in a clip hyperlinked below also that management didn’t want to jump the gun on turning them after only one bad reaction, and so they were essentially forced into a sort of match that would not and could not work.

Per the Bucks’ own accounts of the match as well as those of everyone there and everyone who has ever laid eyes on the thing, it is a notoriously and infamously brutal match. As previously stated, in response to how things went earlier in an attempt to salvage what could be salvaged, Danielson and Strong got borderline for-real violent with the Bucks, turning them into hamburger meat and when they delightfully misinterpreted the Bucks throwing shots back as them being into it, took it even further.

It rocks.

It whips so much God damned ass.

Bryan and Roddy absolutely take them to task and they do it all match. In a year full of some really truly spectacular Bryan Danielson babyface bully performances (going off on Jigsaw in a CHIKARA tag for not elbowing him hard enough immediately comes to mind), it is one of the absolute best. Roderick Strong is not the bully he would become — merely being one of the twenty five to fifty best wrestlers alive instead of a top ten guy — but in a match that asks him to just chop really hard and be casually cruel, he turns in his best performance of the year.

It is a horrific enough beating that, had they lost and if this was a real sport, people would be asking The Young Bucks if they were going to retire. It is hellacious and brutal, but because it is happening two two of the least likeable people in the world, it also never ever gets old. Our Heroes spend fifteen or so minutes hitting these little freaks so hard that it crosses over onto another level. There is violence in wrestling and there is Violence, and this achieves the latter. It is a spectacle. Bryan Danielson throws kicks so hard at both Bucks that, at different points in the match, it feels like they are seeing all of their future and all of their past at the same time. Bryan Danielson kicks Matt Jackson so hard in the face on accident when he falls down before Bryan is done throwing middle kicks that I imagine he can remember being born, and a few minutes later, kicks Nick Jackson so hard outside that he falls out of his chair, bonking his head on the Legion Hall floor, somehow also seeing the next fifteen years of his career at the same time. It is one of the great beatings of the twenty first century.

Relative to where they are at this point, the Bucks are also pretty good here too!

Not every bit of offense is great, you can spot like five to ten things they do here that clearly get cut out over the next year or two before the act reaches its peak form (2011-2014), and Nick cannot help but shout “COME ON!” or “COME ON, BABY!”, but it works. They get fired up and hit harder than usual, take a lot of horrific bumps (like A LOT, there are at least five different bits here where Roddy hurls one of them onto the apron or the lip of the apron, each time with a different thing), all of that.

Mechanically, it’s pretty great in general. Crisp and exciting, not just offering up a lot of cool stuff, but a classic kind of Styles Make Fights match up. Everything Bryan and Roddy get in is violent and mean, and every time the Bucks get anything going, it’s achieved by hurling themselves and/or one another at the problem. The construction is as good as you could ask for, rushing right into it, showing a little fight from the kids before being shut down worse and worse each time. In a vacuum and/or on paper alone, again, it is as perfectly assembled and executed as possible.

In practice and off paper though, there are some big problems here, or at least a handful of mid-level but deeply deeply annoying ones.

The big gripe I’ve always had here though is that, despite the truly wonderful display of brutality from two of my favorite wrestlers ever, there is such a massive disconnect between the match happening and the one being reacted to. The difference between the story told at large, of the Bucks as valiant young babyfaces overcoming this violent attack from two mean-spirited veterans is so wildly different from every other part of this. It isn’t just that the crowd is absolutely losing their shit at the brutality, but reacting in the opposite way to everything intended. We aren’t talking about some vitriolic Royal Rumble 2015 kind of hate, it isn’t overpowering, but the longer the beating goes, the weirder it feels. At no point do they cheer the Bucks on, at several points they cheer louder when they’re cut off, and constantly applaud and hoot and holler at this truly immense public massacre. With a crowd in love with the Bucks, this is one of the better matches in company history. However, you get the opposite of that, and it is simply too at-odds with everything else, as if we are watching one match and hearing the crowd from another. 

It’s also just a little too hard to buy at the end.

Matt and Nick rally, there’s a decent story about a practiced team beating a superteam, and the match is especially good at having them only ever get this brief like thirty second rally at the end to win. One superkick to Bryan, one to Roddy, a double to Bryan, and then More Bang For Your Buck on Bryan to win.

The problem is that I simply do not believe in it.

Problems start before then so it isn’t just the finish, Nick Jackson survives far far too much without the match ever employing the saves that would help them not stretch the believability of the thing, kicking out of a cover after crucifix elbows, surviving the big submissions, all of that. In general though, the match becomes a whole lot too willing to benefit the Bucks, which feels like an incorrect and jarring shift after how horribly they had been beaten to shit for the majority of the match, and how dominant that beating was. It’s like a switch flips suddenly, and while it’s fine enough on paper, I simply do not believe that this was a match the Young Bucks ever would have won clean.

(Like the alternate universe version of this where the crowd likes the Bucks, there’s another even better version of this that comes to mind, where the Bucks do the heel turn at the end of the match, in response to the beating and their inability to do much of anything. You make do with what’s there, you can only work with the tools you have, and all of that, but there’s so much stellar raw material here that one cannot help but think of small shifts or tweaks that would have made the most of this.)

Between the weird disconnect between match and reaction and the gigantic ask that is believing the Bucks in 2009 could actually beat either of these two, let alone this borderline superteam, it is not an idea that I love a whole lot in execution, at least on a larger scale. Luckily, the “Bryan and Roddy beat the shit out of the Bucks for real for 95% of the match” aspect of the thing carries it real real far, leaving all the micro details up to two of the greatest wrestlers of all time, and it gets it much farther than a whole lot of other matches.

If nothing else, a necessary half evil required to, two and a half years later, get to one of my favorite matches of all time.

***1/2

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.

***+

The Golden Lovers vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW Strong Style Evolved (3/25/2018)

The best writing I have ever done, in one form or another, is born out of passion. A belief in the story I am writing about, a deep-seeded love for a wrestler I am writing about, an intellectual fascination with the narrative unfolding in front of my stupid little eyes, and things of that nature.

Perhaps, I am not the best person to write about this with passion.

I am not the world’s biggest Kenny Omega or Kota Ibushi fan. It did not move me all that much when the Golden Lovers reunited. When they formed and when they teamed in DDT, I cared more about HARASHIMA than either Kota or Kenny. When this first started to be teased nearly three years earlier, I cared more about AJ Styles than any of this. Post AJ Styles Bullet Club has been very much Not For Me, and I wish every one and every promotion would respect that.

I do not care, and I probably will never care, about drama between the many different members of The Elite.

Now, certainly, it has been built up incredibly well. There is a weight to this that would not have been there if not for decisions that either New Japan or Kenny and Kota individually made. The times Omega and/or Ibushi have paid tribute to the other in their passing, the Bullet Club civil war, all of that. It means something because everyone involved took the time and care and paid the attention necessary to make it mean something.

Still, I know you.  

(and/or I am imagining you, The Reader, as a voice in my head.)

What you want me to do is be mean to this match. Talk about it being too long, too emotional, talk about how the Young Bucks are unable to be the emotional core of any story as a result of how unlikeable they are, shit in this because nobody in this is a wrestler and/or character worth supporting with the entirety of your heart, or whatever other complaint you have fairly and/or unfairly concocted in your head.

I am not going to do any of that.

This match fucking rules.

If you want to, you can talk about this match on a character level, or something deeper.

You can talk about Omega’s reluctance to deal with the Young Bucks early on. You could talk about Matt Jackson being the more committed of the two Bucks to opposing Omega’s new team, down to being the one to wear the weightlifting belt that Cody Rhodes gifted him while Nick did not. You could discuss the slow transition from Omega wanting to do this sportingly to him joining Kota Ibushi’s side by the end and purely wanting to win. You could spend a lot of time discussing Matt Jackson’s back injury, the way that he sells it very well in a purely mechanical sense but also never once feels likeable in that role.

Again, I am not interested.

What works about this match, more than any character work, is the immaculate construction and performance of the thing as an exceptional firework display.

It is astonishingly surefooted, crisp as hell, and almost always correct. They set up a bunch of big things and pay them off perfectly. Every single Big Idea the match sets up goes the same way. Matt Jackson’s selling of his continually injured back is as great as anyone could have ever reasonably anticipated. Maybe not every solitary inch of the thing works, but in a larger sense, it is such an accomplishment. Big and dramatic, just thematically correct enough in terms of preserving the coolest stuff not only for the biggest moments, but also for the match’s later moments, all of that. Despite every entirely fair criticism, this is a match that gets as much as possible out of every single major moment and/or idea that it offers up.

Kenny and Ibushi beat Matt with the Golden Trigger.

Pure unbridled ambition, and even if it does not land quite as well with me as it did at the time or as it does with the target audience at the moment, like the best Omega stuff in 2017 and 2018, I am just a little too impressed with all that it does right to focus on the smaller things that it does wrong. In short, the greatest compliment that I can pay this match is that, despite every valid reason for this to be the kind of match that I hate, I simply wasn’t ever able to go all the way there.

I will stand in true and firm opposition to the real genuine freaks about this match, but in a more general sense, it is almost totally undeniable.

***2/3

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

Great match.

okay thanks.

***

Kazuchika Okada/Tomohiro Ishii vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW Down Under Tour – Adelaide (2/16/2018)

This is part of an otherwise forgettable and thus forgotten tour of Australia in between the New Beginning shows and the March line up, standing out in part because it‘s a fairly new match up, the Bucks not running across Big Tom all that much, but also because despite this being an environment where they could have mailed it in, and where many other wrestlers did, it’s just a great match.

It‘s not perfect, of course. 

They run into the problems that most Bucks matches in front of English speaking crowds do at this point, which is that they get face pops for reasons I‘ve never understood despite being most viscerally despicable and disingenuous wrestlers on this level anywhere in the world, and unfortunately, wrestle to that. (Honestly, I blame the crowds a thousand times more than I blame them. No use fighting the current when it might not even work, and what not.) It is not quite possible to believe they can really take it to Big Tom straight up one on one, that Matt should be trading elbows with him even at the start of the match, a million other things they do when working for those positive reactions and betraying their greatest quality. Mostly though, it’s just offputting to see these God damned cretins and hear positive reactions to the whole routine. 

However, the problem is less in-your-face here and in other matches like this, as Okada and Ishii also work as crowd favorites. The problem is a lot more apparent in matches where the Bucks are designated as the only good guys, but when a match simply is, and simply allows you to choose between two sides (Okada is only a little more likeable, but a thousand times more interesting), it narratively works a lot better. The match also pulls out of the skid a little bit by, at least on a macro level, presenting them as simply not quite able to do it long term against the heavier shots of the CHAOS Top Team (v2). 

Mostly though, the match is great in the easiest way that a match can be great.

Four good wrestles have the benefit of a rare match up and a hot crowd and simply unload the offensive reservoirs for twenty minutes.

It‘s the ideal kind of B-show or house show main event tag. 

Light, breezy, and fun, never even slightly ambitious, but carried off by people who still clearly care about the quality of the thing. I rag on three-quarters of this match a fair amount, but there is a real skill to matches like this and it is something I find real impressive when done correctly. It‘s not easy to have a big great epic, of course, but I think reigning it in and still delivering a pretty great match that leaves everyone fairly satisfied can be just as impressive, and maybe even more impressive. 

A pocket level fireworks show.

The Bucks hang in there, control a little bit, but fuck around a little too much, get caught playing a little too much one on one, and can‘t do it long term. Little Kazu takes Matt’s horrible little chin off his body with the Rainmaker for the win. 

Not all that serious, not all that ambitious, and a lot of fun as a result.

***

The Young Bucks vs. Best Friends, ROH Honor Reigns Supreme (2/9/2018)

This was for the Bucks ROH Tag Team Titles.

Great bits about this match:

• Colt Cabana mentions our collective alma mater, Western Michigan University, on commentary
• …

rating: horse emoji 

Roppongi 3K vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XII (1/4/2018)

This was for SHO and YOH’s IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Titles.

While not on the level of the Bucks/Roppongi Vice series from 2017, even in the shorter-than-usual Tokyo Dome undercard version of the thing, there’s still a whole lot to love here.

Roppongi 3K do not become the sort of team New Japan clearly wants it to be. While both are good wrestlers, neither of them Has It in that sort of way. SHO has a match or two as a singles that might suggest he could Have It, but half a decade later, nothing else has ever really materialized in that direction. They never become a team like Apollo 55 or the Time Splitters or whomever that you can both (a) build the division around & (b) use to soft-launch a future junior singles star. The former is tried, and does not go especially well in the future, being one of many signs of New Japan’s decline (along with the boneheaded decision to turn SHO into a dull Bullet Club heel, but these are other issues for other times), but the point is that SHO and YOH are both simply good, and that is that, and it represents a clear decline for a junior tag division that had been on a fairly hot streak since the Motor City Machine Guns vs. Apollo 55 rivalry in 2009.

However, as with the match in which they won the titles, it is very hard to divine any of that from this individual match.

Part of that, to be fair, is the natural benefit of a situation like this. Limited to something like fifteen minutes, they really just have to throw out some fireworks and don’t hang around long enough to get bogged down too deep in any of the many types of bullshit that junior heavyweights can get bogged down in (see the very bad junior title four way later on this show for an example of that).

The other part of it is that in 2018, albeit largely unintentionally up until ALL IN, The Young Bucks have one of the greatest versions in wrestling history of what sports fans (or maybe people in passing? hard to know other peoples’ brains.) know as the contract year, performing up to the ceiling of and occasionally beyond your abilities at the most advantageous possible time to do so.

2018 sees the best version of the Bucks we’ve seen since their 2011-2013 peak, and the sort of run that, at the time, I thought they would never really do again, having coasted on reputation for a large part of the previous several years. That’s not to say they are great in the same way, as their 2018 work is largely more focused and refined and, shockingly, thoughtful rather than being a showcase of the absolutely manic as their peak was, but they are great in a consistent and loud way in 2018 in a way they weren’t for a few years before, and in a way that they definitely haven’t been since. It’s on display in their first outing of the year here, because as good as SHO and YOH can be, this is very clearly just their talents and their stuff shoved into a 2018 Young Bucks match.

Narratively, as with most of their great matches in 2018, it is surprisingly interesting.

R3K start hot, before the Bucks luck out and YOH hurts his back landing on a flip dive. There’s a clear line from last year to this match with the way they worked over Romero’s back in that series, only for it to go wrong this year. Matt Jackson injures his own back, and that instead becomes the story of the match, and most of the Bucks’ year.

It’s a big swing here and one that I think mostly hits. Maybe not an out of the park home run, but a solid RBI or something. There’s an argument you could make that the antagonist should not be the one with the more sympathetic and pronounced injury and I would often tend to agree, but with the Bucks, I think it works. Partially, that’s because this is the start of a face turn so there’s a point to it, not just taking the match away from the kids, but actually doing something with a longer term point. Specifically though, it works for me because they are just so deeply and naturally unlikeable that at no point do I ever really feel sympathy for Matt Jackson. Had they been able to do that, it would have really felt sort of insidious, but as they are these despicable little monsters, there is no possibility of that feeling ever emerging.

Of course, it also works simply because it is really God damned good.

The selling of both is real good, made better by both bumps being genuinely real nasty in their own rights. YOH isn’t asked to spend the match dying, given that the focus shifts, but it never feels like he’s forgotten it (meaning that the ending still works), and Matt Jackson is genuinely a revelation as a back seller. It’s not always perfect and definitely not subtle, nothing the Bucks have ever done could be described that way, but it is good and effective and feels genuine.

Otherwise in a more mechanical sense , it’s the fireworks show you want. Huge bumps from everybody, big attacks, stellar escalation, all of that. It’s not perfect. SHO and YOH aren’t great at throwing elbows, you can lob off a minute or two at points, all of that, whatever. But for the most part, it just works. Novel ideas, a few neat little callbacks to the Roppongi Vice feud and match finishes, before superior firepower wins out.

Nick Jackson takes the lead, and following the Meltzer Driver, he gets the hurt YOH into the Sharpshooter and wins the titles for the ten millionth time.

Imperfect, but great and alarmingly interesting. Far more than the sum of its parts.

***

The Young Bucks vs. Roppongi Vice, NJPW G1 Special in the USA Night Two (7/2/2017)

This was for the Bucks’ IWGP Junior Tag Team Titles.

In classic New Japan fashion, this is the Big One. The match that it feels like all of their matches in 2017 have been building towards, and that they’ve probably bookmarked at least since those initial matches in 2015 when just about everyone who laid eyes on them agreed that these teams had a whole lot of chemistry. As always, the classic estimation and the classic pro wrestling booking philosophy proves correct. Find a pairing that works entirely on its own, cool it off for a little bit, and then come back with some real material to help them out. Give them a story like 2017’s, a few matches to build some themes up, and throw the Big One out there. It works, it works for the millionth time, and provided the talent and story and feeling is there, this is the sort of thing that will probably always work.

Naturally, there are some issues here. A Young Bucks match is probably never going to be what I’d consider perfect.

There’s a few too many kickouts, and I specifically mean kickouts, not nearfalls. People kick out of some stuff that shouldn’t be kicked out of, forgetting that the utility of the save in a tag team match is to allow for big awesome moves like a Piledriver on the apron or the Inverted More Bang For Your Buck or the Strong Zero without having to hurt the move or the match’s credibility by having anyone survive that under their own power. The finish is also not THE BEST, as they go to the Sharpshooter bit after a Meltzer Driver in the ring, only without Romero having a hurt back now, so it’s simply a lesser move following up a gigantic one and doesn’t make half as much narrative sense as it did the month before.

Really though, the largest one is simply a matter of setting. While the Bucks wrestle this match correctly for the most part, leaning into how naturally unlikeable they are and working as the shit-eating goons they are in New Japan rather than totally embracing the stomach churning heroics of their other U.S. work, it is still a match wrestled in front of an American crowd that loves them. The Bucks never totally embrace that, unlike in ROH or PWG, this would be a much worse match than it is, but it’s still odd, and it leads to odder reactions, and a very strange feeling, a different flavor of that disconcerting feeling at seeing the widespread embrace of The Elite act on their spring ’17 European tour, or something similar.

It’s still very much a match about injuries to the opponents and the underdog story of Rocky Romero, but it’s reacted to in the building as if this is a pure face vs. face contest. It’s a kind of willful ignorance not only of the stories told in the promotion they’ve paid to see, but of the reality taking place in front of their eyes. It’s one thing in PWG or ROH when the Bucks play into this, but it’s a hundred times more bizarre when they do nearly everything right, save a few big kickouts, and the crowd simply refuses to do what, to me and most people with good brains, seems like the clear and obvious right thing.

Beyond the moral rot of these California sickos though, the match is as good as it possibly can be.

What works before between these two works once again here, only now there’s significantly more of it and it gets to be significantly bigger.

Speaking in a mechanical sense and talking about the construction of the thing itself, that goes for every part of the match. The “more” here is distributed pretty evenly across the terrain of the match. More means a longer shine for the challengers at the start, a longer control segment, a longer finishing run. The “bigger” part is something they make so much out of, not only going at it in the dumb fun way, doing the biggest spots that they possibly can when given the time and stage to make the most of them, but also leaning on the history of this match up recently to create moments in the match that feel bigger, independent of the level of fireworks that the match puts forward, such as Rocky’s last stand or Trent continuing to level up.

In terms of the story told, it’s their biggest effort yet too, using the larger platform to tell a more grandiose version of the story told in the last two matches, bringing this to a pretty satisfying conclusion, if not the best possible one.

The Bucks do what they always do at the start, and try to go after Rocky. They’re a little too obvious and/or confident about it now though, and with their hand on full display, Trent helps out and it doesn’t work. They still have to earn their control, but this time, they take the story to its logical conclusion. Rather than hurting Trent slightly and working Rocky over to take out the weak link, or focusing entirely on Rocky to cut out the middle man, they instead focus entirely on Trent’s back. His hot tag falls short because of it, and it’s now Rocky who has to save the day not only late in the match, but for the entire back half, again taking the familiar match up in a fun new direction.

Not only is it a newer approach to the match, but in the Big One here, they have more time with which to work on it and have the room to get a lot more brutal with it. On an individual performance level, Trent’s selling is genuinely stellar, far beyond what I thought he had in him, working both in a mechanical and emotional sense. Everything he does to express the pain is good, but he’s also SO likeable while he’s doing it. It’s a really great performance that ticks off almost every box I’d want a singles babyface to be able to tick off, on top of how well it serves the story of the match, and also the story coming out of it. The Rocky underdog story of the match was something, but with Trent’s incoming move to heavyweight, this match is so great at making Trent’s growth feel like such a big deal, not only fighting through this, but nearly pulling it off, and never actually losing the match.

The fireworks show eventually begins, and it is a spectacular one. Both in terms of what they’re doing, but in classic Bucks in California fashion, in terms of how well it’s laid out. It’s not totally seamless, but things generally build and move from thing to thing really well, and the escalation is just about perfect. Teases and cut offs, different and bigger versions of the moves we see all the time.

Most notably, in the later stages, the Bucks level up the Meltzer Driver into a La Escalera version, the HERB MELTZER DRIVER, and as the biggest possible spot, the match effectively ends there.

Romero is done inside the ring, and although Trent again tries to defend him, he no longer can. It’s a beautiful end to this nearly year long story about Rocky Romero being the weak link, coming full circle to Romero having now wrestled his heart out, but the Bucks having wrestled a perfect match, and so it didn’t work, only for Trent to stand up for him anyways. The transition from the Wrestle Kingdom match showing it wasn’t just Trent’s team when they seemed on the verge of a split to, in the final match of the 2017 trilogy, showing that Romero was the weaker link, but the emphasis was on the “-er” there, and that Trent stood up for him when he counted anyways, which is a heartwarming ending to a team that was initially founded on the back of Trent being a bad friend to somebody else. A real gross double superkick to the back takes our hero out, and the Meltzer Driver into the Sharpshooter wins again.

It’s the best regular Young Bucks tag in a few years, and at a time when it looked like the old machine might not ever work like it did in its prime, the mechanics having forgotten exactly how to run it. A phenomenal show of what is still there and what can still be achieved when most other environmental factors were right, and looking into an arguable career year for the Bucks in 2018, a show of how this can work again moving forward, with these gigantic feeling Bucks matches combining big themes and these sorts of unbelievable fireworks displays.

***1/2

Roppongi Vice vs. The Young Bucks, NJPW DOMINION 6.11 (6/11/2017)

This was for Trent and Rocky’s IWGP Junior Tag Team Titles.

It’s great again.

Speaking in terms of what these matches have always done well, going back to some of the initial 2015 matches, there is against just a fantastic chemistry that exists between these teams. Something has to go wrong in order for a Young Bucks vs. RPG Vice match to miss at this point in time (that is to say, not counting the AEW work), and on big New Japan shows like this when limited to fifteen minutes or less, these teams do not miss. I mean that in a metaphorical way, but also in a mechanical way as well. Everything about this match, in senses both vague and concrete, does what you would want it to.

This match is tight and efficient, packing in a ton of nasty bumps and cool spots, managing not only to live up to what this match’s role is on the card (fireworks) on a show like this, but delivering something a little juicier than just that as yet another installment into the genuinely and shockingly good Rocky Romero story that New Japan’s been telling since the end of 2016.

After their match in the Tokyo Dome, it became apparent that simply relying on Rocky Romero to be the weak link and let Roppongi Vice down, even forcing Rocky in at the end by hurting Baretta, would no longer work. It’s not that Rocky rose up and kicked their asses exactly, but the plan of making it so Trent couldn’t bail Rocky out again fell short when Trent was tougher than they thought and when Rocky still had just enough to grab a flash cradle at the end. A narrow loss, but for a match they seemed so sure about, a loss is a loss is a loss all the same.

A shift in thinking is required, and what’s what this match displays

Following an early run where Trent shows further growth by kicking ass, and succeeding in the double dive where he got hurt horribly in a miss in their last match, the Bucks grow up a little, top waiting for a mistake, and get proactive about the thing. Rather than simply rely on Rocky Romero to be weaker, they instead make him the weak link through force and action, attacking Romero’s back and forcing Trent to go it alone as the legal men. It’s an inversion of what they tried at the Tokyo Dome, now making it so that Rocky will be unable to help Trent rather than trying to make it so big strong Trent can’t help Rocky Romero when it counts the most.

Nobody will want to hear this, and I am sure not suggesting The Young Bucks are the fucking Holy Demon Army out here or anything, but it’s the exact sort of big brain deep strategy shit everyone goes absolutely wild for when talking about those mid 1990s All Japan tag epics. I’m not saying this match is exactly as great, but talking about this specific sort of a thing, it’s done just as well here.

(If not better! Rocky Romero sure isn’t out there in Osaka Jo weeping his ass off instead of trying to fight through it! Stop throwing rocks at me and tying my limbs to four different horses!)

The finishing third or so of the match is about as great as you’d expect, given that this is still a match that, in classic New Japan fashion, is building to the one where they go absolutely stupid nuts. Trent’s got some great stuff, but he’s unable to help Rocky like he was before now that Rocky’s actually hurt. The roll up that worked in January fails in June, and after the Indietaker, Romero gives up to the Sharpshooter, and the bad guys ruin the dream.

It’s another hit from these two.

Unlike so much of the Young Bucks work on American soil, it’s yet another one of these New Japan matches where the routine works like it’s supposed to and like it used to. Arrogant little shitheels, cast in the right position for their skills and talents, and delivering the exact sort of match they’re great at. Despicable and so talented, against an overmatched team, succeeding mostly fairly but in a wholly unlikeable way. This still isn’t the peak of the Bucks in 2017, but another example of how much better they are here — in New Japan, on a New Japan undercard, and against Roppongi Vice — than they are anywhere else at this point.

Still not the best they can do, but as this series turns into one of those classical New Japan Series, it’s a hell of a set up for the upcoming Big One.

***

 

The Young Bucks vs. War Machine, PWG Game Over Man (4/21/2017)

As with most PWG shows, photo credit goes to Mikey Nolan Photography.

This is almost a great match.

Really.

They have a clear physical chemistry together and they have some really cool ideas, both for sick reversals, cool transitions, and a few really hot nearfalls. The way the Bucks win — although frustrating for reasons the next part will detail — obeys the basic logic of the match too, which is that War Machine can hurl and batter these nerds and that they have to be real slippery to pull it off. There is a lot in this match to like, and had they had something like this match either in New Japan or in 2014 or 2015, before the Bucks went entirely off the deep end and forgot what actually made the act so great, this is probably an incredible match instead of a match with a few incredible parts.

Sadly, this happens in 2017 and it happens in Reseda, and so you get what you get.

The problem is that, once again, it is The Young Bucks Show. Instead of a War Machine vs. Young Bucks match, it feels like while the offense will be different, they are cogs thrown into this thing. Instead of the clear way this match ought to go with the big guys eventually murdering these corny little twerps, a match that they spend the first third of the match seemingly working towards, it eventually becomes a story in which they are the heroes (despite being the villains earlier in the match), in which they are tough enough to kick out of War Machine’s finish and then succeed cleanly, and the most annoying people in the world succeed to thunderous applause.

It’s not only a deeply frustrating thing to see on every level (both in the sense that such talented wrestlers insist on playing against type for the back half of a match but also in the general confusion of how anyone could look at these guys and watch them wrestle and go “yes, these are my heroes”), but also sort of wasteful in its own way by throwing out what they spend time initially saying the story is at the start, and why Bucks matches like this are really so frustrating. If you’re going to be the heroes, entirely commit to the bit. Do one thing, entirely, with your entire heart, or fuck off.

Not quite a great match, but another fascinating study.