Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (8/12/2010)

This was the fifth and final match in the Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with the series tied 2-2, and was a Best Two of Three Falls Match.

I am almost never going to say a match is exactly as great as everyone says it is, and this isn’t quite among the best of the decade, but I really do like it a lot.

For as much fun as it can be to have a Big Take, sometimes the common wisdom is what it is for a good reason, and it is simply not worth it. Popular things in wrestling can often really suck, but sometimes, you can look at a wildly popular thing and just completely get it. I write the classics are the classics for a reason usually when discussing age old ideas in terms of wrestling stories, narratives, or match types, but sometimes, it applies to the prevailing sentiment as well.

As much as I liked the cage match and found a lot to love in the other matches in this series, the popular opinion here is also the correct one, and this is very clearly the best match of the bunch, and one of TNA’s best of the decade.

There are a few reasons for that.

First are the ones that are pretty easy to quantify and properly put into words.

Obviously, something this match has over the four previous ones is that it gets to go fifteen to twenty minutes, with sixteen aired, rather than having to cap it off at seven to ten. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but I would also argue that five or six more minutes rarely feels a necessary as when it’s used to bring up a great ten minute match to a really great match of this length, doubly so when it’s exactly enough time to have a three fall match that feels (mostly) fully fleshed out and realized.

The design is also real great.

Nobody overthinks it exactly, you get some classic three fall structure with the bad guys winning first, the comeback in the third fall, and then your big finishing run as most of the third and deciding fall. Again though, it’s the smaller touches where the match really shines. While the cage match was unfortunately the end of that whole story thread about Storm’s bottle and referee bumps and bullshit, this match opting instead to be a pure talent kind of showcase on what was marketed as a big episode of television, there’s still some effective larger stuff at play here, like Storm and Roode getting their first clean win of the series in the first fall, only to blow it in the second by being overconfident shitheels. On top of the larger story, these guys with a long gripe finally doing it fairly only to undermine themselves like classic villains often should, it’s also a great mirror of the series itself, with Beer Money stacking the deck only to get in their own way, and crumble under the pressure in the last moments.

In terms of what happens when, the match also gets it so right.

The sense of escalation on the match is almost entirely perfect, and it encompasses the series too, seeing Beer Money try (and succeed for once) with their own risks and breaking out bigger and bigger moves. It’s not always pretty, Robert Roode’s attempt at a flip dive especially, but the sloppiness kind of benefits the match in those moments, illustrating how wildly out of their wheelhouse they are, both making the match feel more special but also showing in retrospect why the lost, because they were the ones trying to keep up with the Guns, with smaller individual performances working hand in hand with the larger ideas on display. It also almost always feels like the match is moving forward, not only in the sense that they constantly top what just happened, but also in that things that worked earlier often don’t work again, or at least not without a greater effort and additional set up.

Beyond the things that make sense though — the narrative work coming to a head, construction, performance, etc. — the match is also the beneficiary of some things that cannot be planned out or controlled or decided upon beforehand.

Sometimes, magic just pop up in the wrestling world.

More often than not, it’s the difference between the great matches and the really great ones, and that goes double for a company like TNA. The Impact Zone is as hot in the final fall here for the big nearfall as they’ve maybe ever been before, the energy pours forward into the ring, and it ricochets off into the audience, and it’s a special kind of feedback loop that makes everything better. I’ve used the term TNA Magic in the past on this site as a shorthand for things like the Roode/Aries Title vs. Title, for things that maybe shouldn’t work half as well as they do, but through careful effort and tons of energy, the atmosphere and feeling elevates everything on screen. I don’t know if this is quite that, giving two great teams the time and space to achieve does not feel half as intricate as some other examples of TNA Magic, but there’s certainly something to this that cannot be fully accounted for.

The atmosphere is there, the energy elevates an already great match and story, the work supports it, and everything just happens to line up as right as it possibly could given the exact circumstances of the match and series.

I can complain, I suppose.

It’s not perfect.

While the match pulled it off and while a lot of modern CMLL proves it can absolutely done in fifteen or sixteen minutes, I would always prefer my three fall matches to be a little longer, especially with the middle fall here being just a little bit rushed. I also wish the series didn’t blow off the bloodier and grittier elements of the feud in the cage and leave this as a prestige wrestling style Great Match. Getting into more minute stuff, I also wish Skull & Bones wasn’t done three times in the match, less because I don’t think it’s a good move or that it should never be survived, but simply that I found it less exciting to end the match and series with the move that had already won one fall and also that was the big final nearfall of the match. The match is otherwise really great at escalation, so that stood out a lot too.

Mostly though, I’m just not interested in complaining, or at least not that loudly or for more than the above paragraph to tell you why I’m not calling it quite an all-decade level match. These issues are still there, of course, but there’s so much more on one side of the ledger than the other.

I just liked this too much.

The match is too endearing, too great, too uplifting as an overall package, and above all, too much of a great example of all that this can very easily be given something close to the bare minimum of time and effort and basic respect for real easy principles. They let the two best team in the company loose for five weeks, especially at the end when it mattered most, got out of the way (say what you will about TNA, but throughout most of their history, the tag division has largely always been a safe haven from some of the wilder ideas), and it absolutely worked.

It was always going to, and if everything ever lines up again like this either here or somewhere else in terms of talent, chemistry, and opportunity, it probably always will.

***1/3

 

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (8/5/2010)

This was the fourth match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 2-1 and was an Ultimate X Match.

A fun fourth, if a weird one.

Speaking in terms of the narrative first, which had been the strength of the first three matches in the series, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of connection between this and the others.

It’s as if the bottle shot payoff maybe came too soon, as this is purely and simply a wrestling match. It’s another gimmick match and for the fourth time this year, the Guns again succeed at turning the idea of the match into its own story, but that’s it. As part of the series, it feels kind of out of order. Following three matches with a clear line through them, it feels like this was actually supposed to be the first match in the series, not only because it’s fairly ordinary on a larger scope level but also because of the bells, whistles, narrative function, and desperation at times on display in the cage match.

That being said, this match is also a little bit behind the eight ball in a way that is absolutely nobody’s fault either.

With wrestling being what it is, or really any dramatic artform being what it is, this fourth meeting is somewhat limited by those structures being what they are, and the basic media literacy of most people watching it, unless they’re brand brand brand new here.

You can buy a sweep more than you can buy a series like this ending in four, I think. If you get this far, everybody knows that the series will end on the fifth match, so it’s harder to really get really involved in the one match in the series that feels like an absolute gimme. It’s nobody’s fault, I’m not really sure what you can do to avoid short of oversaturating the market with Best of [X] series that fail to go to the final match, and that probably isn’t worth it. Ultimately, it is what it is, and it’s the problem every penultimate match in an official series like this tends to have.

All they can really do is to do their best with the fourth match, and they do.

The thing I appreciate the most about this match is the honesty of it, especially as it relates to the Ultimate X stipulation, and the way that yet another Guns match this year found an interesting way to take a match that’s usually a pure fireworks show and find something in the material to dig a lot deeper on.

Many other promotions would use this to try and do a tired “opponent adapts to the specialty of the other side” bit (something the cage match very impressively sidesteps and turns around), but given the physical limitations of Beer Money in a match like this as well as how high the bar has been raised for these matches over the previous seven years of TNA putting them on, my favorite thing about this match was the futility of Beer Money’s attempts to adapt.

No point exists in this match where the Guns seem out of control of the match. Even in the first half when they’re going back and forth, before trying to climb (a great approach, given the size and style of Storm and Roode, giving them a reason to not spend all match doing that sort of thing), it’s even. The fight is for distance and even when that distance finally happens, Beer Money feels like they’re spending time trying to stop the climb more than trying to get there themselves. It’s successful, to their credit, as they use their size to repeatedly pull them down when they try to cross on the wires because they can reach up higher where someone like the Bucks or a Sonjay Dutt or Petey William might not be able to in more standard Ultimate X matches, but ultimately, pure defense only goes so far.

It’s when Beer Money finally goes up and tries to win that they immediately lose.

Bobby Roode tries to balance rather than inch across with his hands, using the truss above the wires to grab onto and walk across with his feet on the wires. Sabin’s much much much faster though, the all-time expert in the match, and kicks his feet off to crotch him down on the wires there, before pulling the X down.

The Guns put it to 2-2 at the end of a match that, to its credit, never once tried to pretend that anything else was all that possible.

Another hit, different in its own way relative to other Ultimate X matches, although one that disappointingly feels more disconnected from the series at large than the previous four matches.

***

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/29/2010)

This was the third match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 2-0 and was a Steel Cage Match.

If there’s a tragedy about this match, it’s that it’s the only cage match they ever had.

Beer Money are not the Midnights or the Andersons and the Machine Guns are not the Rock & Roll Express, but it’s the same basic principle that makes this work, I think. A stronger and bigger classical heel team beating up on likeable cool moves junior heavyweight babyfaces in a cage, the stipulation itself putting the latter up against the wall by robbing them of a lot of what they do best, limiting the space in Shelley and Sabin’s pace and space attack.

The match just naturally works in this tried and true way.

Unfortunately, it is under ten minutes, and while they get so much right, it also feels like it’s really only scratching the surface of what this really could have been, given ten more minutes on pay-per-view. Like the other matches in the Best of Five, it’s a great look at what could have been, had this not been condensed into five weeks and had TNA utilized this division a lot more properly during the three years or so that they had both teams together at the same time.

Like (most of) the other matches in the series though too, it’s still great.

As opposed to the street fight — and more like the ladder match — while sparser than I would like, they still find a way to shove a lot in there in a real pleasing way.

Narratively, again, the thing is a slam dunk. Your basic cage match heel/face story, as written about near the start of this piece, plays out just as you’d want, and the little touches sprinkled in around the action are once again a delight. The hot start from the Guns with their own trick now of entering from the crowd over the top of the cage, the little turns and adjustments, and especially the finish, where Storm’s glass bottle shot finally falls short when they see it coming and he hits Roode with it instead. It’s a great little payoff within the larger story, a piece of bullshit finally coming up and the end of a match that Storm and Roode picked to stop the ability of the Guns to do certain things backfiring when the confined space means it’s harder for them to hide and set up this trick than it was in the last two matches, when the action was spread out more.

Similar to the ladder match, the match is yet again real smart about these quieter ways in which the stipulation matters and influences the match. Not only in the obvious story of the match — Beer Money trying to hinder the Guns but underestimating them as pure fliers, along with it removing the space to do their bullshit at the same time — but in smaller ways too. Something like Roode being busted open early because of the cage (arguably backwards given how these matches tend to go, sympathy on Our Heroes and what not, but I like it as an immediate show of the heels finally getting what they have coming to them, and a visual shorthand for the idea that they might have underestimated the Guns) stands out, but also in the payoffs at the end, as the Guns adapt to use the cage to hit their fancier stuff, which stands in contrast to how the cage winds up hindering Beer Money.

After two bigger gimmick matches for the Machine Guns this year based around being more skilled with the tools provided by the stipulation, it’s not only an interesting change to see them now have to adapt and succeed but also something that leaves them stronger than how they came in.

Speaking of the match more on the surface, it also just rocks.

Yet again, these teams are capable of a billion cool things and this match packs them into both the tightest and most cohesive package yet. You get the formula tag element missing in the last two, which they’re great at together, but also bigger spots with the cage, and a greater feeling of importance with Roode spending the match dripping blood onto everyone and everything around him. Outside of the length of the match, it’s just about everything I would want from these teams in a cage.

In the end, the beer bottle finally misfires when Sabin ducks it to put an already damaged Roode in the way, this time taking him out rather than Storm bailing him out with it as he did the last two weeks. Storm finally gets caught alone, and after the Skull & Bones, the Guns finally put one up on the board to not only stay alive in the series, but to finally get to pick the rules for the fourth match.

The best in the series yet, both cool and interesting. Not quite underrated, the big praise for a match in this series is where it belongs, but given how many other widely praised TNA matches do nothing for me, I’ve always been a little surprised at how this one tends to slip under the radar.

A real overachievement, and TNA’s best cage match of the year.

***1/4

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/22/2010)

This was the second match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, with Beer Money up 1-0 and was a Street Fight.

It’s the clear least of the bunch.

Being entirely fair, it seem like a lot of that is out of their control. It’s not especially long, and they have neither the benefits of the blood and violence or even just intensity befitting of a street fight (which given the matches all four have had throughout their career, feels like something that could have been achieved with great ease) nor doing a bunch of cool stunts that would make up for that. It’s a match lost somewhere in the middle of either version of this a great match, possessing few enough qualities from either side that it is instead simply very good.

Clearly, it’s a very horrible curse to simply have a very good match on free television in between a great one the previous week and three great ones to follow in the next three consecutive weeks.

A horrible burden.

Still, there’s a fair amount to like.

While unable to fully live up to the potential of the gimmick, they at least get the spirit right, and it’s the correct amount of escalation and evolution from the previous week, especially when the Guns start the match real mad. Likewise, the continuation of the thread from the last match of the Guns being screwed because of a ref bump and Storm stealing the match with the beer bottle to the head, this time just leading to a pinfall to go 2-0 is another positive, rather than paying it off in the second match. And, you know, while it’s clearly not what it could be, it’s still a match with some pretty cool highlight reel bits to show off.

It’s just that on this particular episode, it just so happened that the great match one can easily see given past and future work and the raw material of these teams together got squeezed just hard enough in between all the various sides that a mere very good match wound up happening instead.

The least of the five, something of a victim of its environment and all they couldn’t do, and still a real easy match to like.

 

Motor City Machine Guns vs. Beer Money, TNA Impact (7/15/2010)

This was the first match in a Best of Five Series for Shelley and Sabin’s TNA World Tag Team Titles, and was a Ladder Match.

A decade plus removed from this real celebrated series, the finale is the one that tends to get most of the acclaim (not wrongfully so), but truthfully, every match of the five is pretty good at worst.

Even this, one of the lesser of the five matches if memory serves, is something I find real impressive.

Primarily, I’m impressed the the balancing act that this has to pull off.

The obvious thing is that, yeah sure, it has to be a good to great match because the point of this series is at least 50% to deliver good wrestling on television for the next five weeks. The trickier part is though that this is a five match series (or if you want to play like we don’t know, at the very least, three matches in three consecutive weeks), and you have to balance (a) having a good match period, (b) having a good ladder match that doesn’t feel so obviously held back for TV, & (c) a combination of both that still leaves a lot left over for the next two to four matches to follow.

It’s a tricky act, but the match does all of it.

Firstly, it’s just a really good match.

Nobody is going to tell you this is a ground breaking ladder match, it’s nowhere near even the best of the year, but there’s enough here to work. Like a lot of the TNA television gimmick stuff that’s great, it reminds me of the entire “he gets on base” scene from MONEYBALL. Not fancy, not always pretty, but it succeeds. There’s enough cool stuff to matter, a few things that even thirteen years later and counting feel real current, and the match has a certain grounded nature to it too.

You get your highlight reel moments of course, but there’s also always this feeling that someone’s either trying to win or to use this exact moment to set up a victory in the moment after.

At the same time, it’s pretty interesting below the surface too.

Much like the Young Bucks Ultimate X match earlier in the year, the Guns again impress in the way that it feel like the stipulations in these matches matter and that they’re the masters of these matches. Beer Money almost always pays for it when they try to set things up with the ladders, rarely succeed at using them in general, and when Shelley and Sabin come back, it’s usually because they know how to wield these things and to use the current ladder set-ups both more effectively and in a more inventive way than Beer Money.

Narratively in a larger sense too, the match does a great job in that classic sort of simple and effective TNA way. 

After years of not being able to get over the hump, Shelley and Sabin finally win the titles, only to be confronted with this springing out of a controversial call. In the first match, they clearly prove themselves as better than Storm and Roode only to lose on some real bullshit. It’s the exact correct call here, having them prove pretty clearly that it wasn’t a fluke, only to now be the ones being far more overtly robbed.

The referee gets knocked down, and Sabin pulls the contract down (the winner would get to decide the stipulation for the next match in the series), but with nobody to see it, James Storm breaks a beer bottle over the back of his head, steals the contract, and waves it in the face of the referee when he gets up. Beer Money goes up 1-0.

Easier to forget than the later highlights of the series, but an impressive opening to one of the more celebrated tag series of the decade.

three boy