Mount Rushmore 2.0 (Roderick Strong/Adam Cole/The Young Bucks) vs. Chris Hero/Mike Bailey/Candice LeRae, PWG All Star Weekend 11 Night Two (12/12/2015)

(an explanation for newer readers who didn’t see the way I approached this in 2013 and 2014 – no, it was not a handicap match. Candice had the dead weight she’s already spent a year too long dragging around on the team with them, but given that he contributes basically nothing to the match on top of being an alleged serial rapist, I think you all are gonna me do this.)

(this is also a big one for fans of the “here’s everything wrong with the match, ***” genre.)

This was a GUERRILLA WARFARE match.

It’s supposed to be the big blowoff, and got a lot of praise at the time. I was mystified when I saw the match, especially given the lack of praise to the more recent version of this with Super Dragon in it, and that feeling hasn’t gone away.

Mount Rushmore 2.0 gets what’s coming to them, all the bells and whistles of a big PWG blowoff match. Adam Cole is back. Kyle O’Reilly returns midway through the match to replace the (alleged) rapist. Multiple referee spots, Excalibur gets involved, Rick Knox does a move. Some cool prop work. In the end, the good guys win. Nothing you haven’t seen before, but it retains a certain charm no matter what, especially carried off by many of the best wrestlers alive.

Unfortunately, the way this plays out makes it clear that the magic is gone. That’s not to say they lost it, in some ambiguous and nebulous sort of a way. PWG isn’t what it was, but there are still moments and matches to come over the next year and seven months that are among the best stuff to ever come out of the company.

It is to say that, seemingly, they have forgotten it.

The key in the past to this match working was that feeling of violence permeating everything. A chaotic energy that sweeps up everyone involved in the match. The Young Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction match four years earlier is one of my favorite matches of all time and perfectly embodies this idea, as well as being the high bar for a match like this. That’s not to say cool shit can’t happen, but there needs to be more to it than that. It’s also not just that Super Dragon and/or Kevin Steen aren’t in this match, because this sort of a match has been great without them in the past too, most notable in recent memory with Candice’s handicap Guerrilla Warfare match against the Young Bucks in 2014 that was also among the best matches of the decade, and the recent match on the second night of the 2015 BOLA. The formula is just kind of forgotten about now, and replaced with something more like a stunt show than the wild and frenzied brawls of the past. If not literally bloodless, certainly more spiritually bloodless than matches like this had been in the past.

Immediately, the differences are clear. The heels never eat that same level of shit early on, their work in control is more cool than it is despicable, and they go through everything a lot too fast to get as much out of it as possible. That even goes for use of the weapons, like things are brought in and used once or twice, and never seen again. While not a match without cool and nasty offense, it seems at some points as if that is the point, rather than using those things to enhance what already existed.

While the match doesn’t have nearly enough in common with the match three months earlier, the one thing it does have in common is that the focus seems in the wrong place. It doesn’t seem quite fair to say Hero, Seedball, and Candice got entirely eaten up, but it felt at all times like the true focus of the match was either on having a Great Match or on letting you know how good and cool the bad guys were. Beyond that, when you combine Kyle’s return being as an active participant, the sex creep also returning, and multiple interference spots, the heels wind up ganged up on for much of the back segment of the match. It’s a fair point to argue this as them getting all that they deserve from all those they’ve wronged, but it’s also only really been a few shows of them wreaking havoc so they’re not at THAT point just yet, I don’t think. Mainly, it removes a sense of catharsis here, because while hard fought, it’s not entirely even or fair.

There’s a thrill in brutal things happening to bad people, but like so much of this match, it never quite feels as earned or as impactful as it should. Or, specifically, as it has in the past.

Excalibur hits a Jackson with the Tiger Driver ’98. The sex pest spears another off the apron, and Roderick and Kyle O’Reilly spill off the apron through a table outside (this part is fine as they have their own issues — also never really settled after this for some reason?). Kikutaro comes to give Hero a thumbtack elbow pad after being attacked earlier, and he hits a thumbtack Rolling Elbow for the win. Largely left out of this run are Candice LeRae and Mike Bailey, the two best babyfaces in the match and in the company. It’s sort of a perfect metaphor for what this and what PWG often feels like it’s becoming at this point. At least they get to contribute to the match though, unlike poor Trevor Lee who’s been shunted down the card and forced into being a heel after his string of losses all year to these guys, without even the payoff of being on the winning team. Hero winning and getting the glory is hardly the end of the world, but this has always been a struggle that felt like it belonged to the younger wrestlers and the underdogs, and robbing them of that moment doesn’t feel right.

The glory goes to one of the more established guys in the company, an announcer, and a sex pest. Like so much of this match, it just feels incorrect.

I’m not going to say this isn’t a great match though. It is. The stunts are wild, the action is cool, and if scatterbrained, it is at least a match that doesn’t waste my time like these matches sometimes can (and will in the future). There’s nothing I hate about it and a lot to like. While I can’t help but look at the match and see what it used to be and what this version specifically is not, for what it is, it’s pretty great. It’s just that what it is, this time, isn’t my favorite thing in the world and what it used to be just may be.

An end of an era for PWG, but given how this match went, it’s clear that that era has been over for some time already.

***

Mount Rushmore 2.0 (Super Dragon/The Young Bucks) vs. Biff Busick/Trevor Lee/Andrew Everett, PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2015 Stage Two (8/29/2015)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match.

Undeniably, a hard banger.

At the same time, it’s something of a disappointment as well.

First though, the positives, because there are so many. Biff Busick is a god damned maniac, and Trevor Lee and Andrew Everett are capable of some tremendous feats. The Young Bucks are completely in their element in a match like this, largely abandoning the schtick they’ve started to lean on more and more in 2015, and getting back to the basics of doing a bunch of reckless cool shit. Once again, their best work of the year comes in a big PWG brawl in which they’re paired against other absolute maniacs and in which they deliver a startlingly efficient and relentlessly brutal stunt show. Few were ever better at a thing like this than the Bucks, and although this isn’t among the very best versions of this match, it’s still the best version of them that exists.

Super Dragon is on a completely different level than anyone else, and despite complications that hurt the match, he is the reason why this is as great as it is.

Even as a diminished version of what he was in his last go around (perhaps the greatest version of Super Dragon to ever exist is the one we got in two matches in 2011 & 2012), Super Dragon brings what nobody else on the independents can. He’s a genuine star, a God in this building, and one of the last of the Old Ones from the golden age of the independents. AJ Styles and Roderick Strong and Chris Hero nail one or two of those points, but not all three, and neither is capable of the level of violence that Super Dragon is, or the general feeling he evokes in his environment. It’s a testament to the power of not seeing something for a while that Super Dragon feels as special as he did a decade earlier in his return to the ring, even as the match clearly takes a toll on him. For all that I dislike about the match, one thing they get near completely right (the lack of completion is for allowing Rick Knox offense on Dragon, something that works for the Bucks, but not the big bad) is the way that Super Dragon always feels like a force of nature. Our three heroes are able to cut off and punish the Young Bucks for their constant transgressions, but Super Dragon is always there, and only Biff Busick ever has any concept of how to handle him.

A great thing about the Super Dragon aura, and specifically how he conducts himself, is that when someone can get him in a lasting and meaningful way, it feels like a big deal. Even small things manage to feel like a victory with a guy like Super Dragon, so an Andrew Everett hurricanrana here or there feels significant. If that feels significant, the run that Busick goes on against Dragon in the climactic third of the match feels like a major deal. It’s the one time a company outside of Beyond seems to have gotten what seemed, to me, to be plainly obvious about Biff Busick’s potential as a top level indie babyface. The runs that the oddball team of Our Heroes go on in the end are also a delight, and the fact that they happen on Super Dragon make them a far more impressive show of these guys finally managing to get on the same page. There’s not nearly enough of Super Dragon in this match, as he clearly gets fucked up again after Busick hurls him into a ladder in the corner and then he takes a gross header following a Trevor Lee/Biff Busick Everest German & European Uppercut team up, but what he contributes before such a moment is invaluable. A rising tide lifts all boats, and with his famous surfboarding adventure, Super Dragon raises the tide much higher than usual.

As they do, The Young Bucks take out Andrew Everett and Trevor Lee. Great wrestlers never quite suited for an environment like this. It was also Biff Busick and two guys. Biff might have had a real chance if he had the foes that the Bucks used to have. Kevin Steen or Drake Younger or even a Candice LeRae. He doesn’t though, and he is alone. Like Candice two years ago against Cole and the Bucks in her breakout babyface performance, as if laughing while saying the executioner is very good and she has only a little neck, Biff stands up in the face of it.

This time, the executioner is even better.

The Bucks hold the ring after Busick eats the thumbtack shoe double superkick. Super Dragon double stomps his head onto the seat of a chair like old times, and a wholly unnecessary and wonderful springboard assist on the Psycho Driver spells the end for Our Heroes.

Unfortunately, the major weakness of the match is that Our Heroes are not actually the heroes and/or the central focus of the match.  The Young Bucks are never supposed to be cool or appreciated. They are viscerally disgusting creatures, absolute cretins damned by God, and anyone who cheers for them belongs on some kind of a list. In this match, they seem to finally stop fighting it at all and because Super Dragon is impossible to hate, they give everyone what they want, at the expense of the other team. It’s an incredible act, but only when it works like it’s supposed to, and this is largely the end of that. All progress is lost, and save Busick’s flurry at the very end before his demise, it becomes simply a beatdown and a showcase for the coolest stuff the heels can think up, now fully embraced by the monsters populating the American Legion. In this moment, the match loses something significant.

The match is not alone, though, because so do The Young Bucks at this moment.

Or rather, it is this moment that reveals that something has been lost.

I wrote a few paragraphs back about how The Young Bucks are especially in their environment in a match like this, both in this moment in 2015, and in a historical sense. This does, however, feel markedly different from all the previous Young Bucks matches like this, and feels like a clear demarcation between Peak Young Bucks (2011-2014) and everything that comes after.

Primarily, it’s because this is the first time the Bucks have stepped into what is undeniably Their Element, but not delivered in quite the same way. That is to say, it’s a PWG garbage brawl with all of the surface level positive qualities that bring out the best in them, only without the element that often elevated those matches in the past to another level. In this match, The Young Bucks fail to eat shit. It happens maybe once or twice, but they never take the beating that they deserve and that always made previous version of this so unbelievably thrilling. Beyond that, they’re now the ones serving up the shit, but still acting in the same way, only for a crowd now urging them on, having turned bad themselves. Removed of the thing that’s elevated matches like this in the past and replaced by something worse and far grosser feeling, it’s simply a wonderful stunt show without the catharsis of seeing these guys beaten nearly to death and finally paying the yearly price for all their crimes. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it is inarguably a worse thing.

It’s hard to argue with the actual booking of the thing though. Mount Rushmore 1.0 went over strong for two or three months before being beaten for the first time. Between Trevor Lee’s debut on TV for TNA and Biff Busick’s upcoming departure for the Orlando retirement community, it’s hard to argue this should have gone another way. The shame is in how they went about it, in forgetting that The Young Bucks are never supposed to be cool, and in making the opposition look so much lesser before the end of the match.

I’ve often written about Pro Wrestling Guerrilla as the Obama-era independent, and as that era starts to wane, it’s appropriate now that even the old specialty doesn’t work quite as well as it used to.

And yet, it still absolutely rules in the end. Unlike many Young Bucks matches in recent years that are great in spite of the style they’re worked in, this is the opposite. A wonderful match, whose only upsetting qualities come from the approach taken in the end and in the way in which they forget themselves. Even then, it all goes down a little smoother in a match like this and doubly so when it’s Super Dragon in there with everyone, conducting yet another beautiful show of violence in his last (to date) ever opportunity at a match like this.

In spite of the flaws, a much better top to bottom match than the more acclaimed Mount Rushmore 2.0 match several months later. Only one of these matches in 2015 deserves the acclaim, and obviously, it’s the one with an all-time ass kicker conducting his final symphony.

***1/2

 

Trevor Lee/Andrew Everett vs. The Young Bucks, PWG Mystery Vortex III (6/26/2015)

This was for Lee and Everett’s PWG Tag Team Titles.

As a match, it’s a lot of fun.

The Young Bucks get a little too much into the schtick and by playing to the crowd’s cheers instead of turning them back like they used to, they sort of undercut the entire thing. However, Lee and Everett are explosive and exciting and energetic enough to keep things just barely correct. A bit heavy first half cedes the floor to a wild and frenetic second, and it’s a really good time. It’s unfortunate that Lee and Everett have run into this sudden ceiling in PWG, it genuinely really goddamned bums me out, but the match itself is a great little quasi banger.

Roderick Strong interferes For Some Reason, hitting Lee with a Sick Kick en route to the Meltzer Driver, giving the Bucks the titles back once again.

***

 

Of course, this is hardly about the match.

 

It’s a thing of beauty.

Every description of it is wonderful.

Roddy and the Bucks lay waste to Lee, Everett, and Rick Knox. Fucking Super Dragon returns. Candice and a rapist try and make a difference, and they get destroyed. John Boy tries to save his lady and eats shit. Super Dragon does every Psycho Driver variant he knows every time someone gets up. Roderick Strong sits on the turnbuckle drinking a pitcher of beer and rooting them on. Biff Busick tries to fight Super Dragon, but gets cut off by the Bucks. Mike Bailey knocks Roderick off the turnbuckle, spilling his beer, until he’s stopped too and Roderick hits him with the mostly empty pitcher. They all begin selling shirts, as Roderick shouts at everyone to suck his dick. It’s wild and rowdy and violent and completely unpredictable.

It’s almost perfect.

Like with the match, the crowd hurts it because they can’t stop chanting for the Bucks and for Super Dragon. It’s a testament to Roderick Strong that there’s never even a hint of that in his direction, but they just adore the others.

It’s hard to get the most out of a big heel beatdown when the crowd is cheering for it. It’s also hard to blame the crowd because god damn, Super Dragon is back! He’s the coolest, and it rules to see him do anything. Nobody even gets in a shot on them during this too, so like, why would you cheer for them? It’s the old NWO problem, which will eventually become a repeat problem in Young Bucks angles throughout their career. At least this time, they’re doing it with people who aren’t unbelievably lame.

Issues aside, it just whips too much ass. Super Dragon is too magnetic, Roderick Strong is too great of a dirtbag, and the Bucks simply aren’t capable of ruining it. Mount Rushmore 2.0 won’t be Mount Rushmore 1.0 from bell to bell, but they’ve got this angle, and that’s enough.

Second only to the original Super Dragon return in 2011 as PWG’s best angle of the decade.