The H8 Club (Nick Gage/Justice Pain) vs. Tough Crazy Bastards (Necro Butcher/Toby Klein), CZW High Stakes III (7/9/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Sam G. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was a Fans Bring The Weapons match for Pain and Gage’s CZW Tag Team Titles.

Many deathmatches and/or big brawls have something to say.

So many of the great deathmatches are about generational conflict, like Gage/Tremont or Gage/JWM or Kasai/Takeda, but like a Shuji Ishikawa vs. Masashi Takeda, you can also simply tell a perfect bully vs. underdog story within the environment. There are great tag team deathmatches about outsider underdogs against faces of the promotion, or famously, one of the all-time retirement spectacles. There are so so so so many things that can be done within the framework of extreme violence.

This match has none of those aspirations.

It is pure violence and mayhem and wandering carnage, ninety percent of it seems thought up on the fly based on whatever fan-procured weapons they are around at any given time, and it absolutely fucking rules.

Necro, Toby, Pain, and Gage wander about the New Alhambra for some twenty minutes, destroy almost everything in their path including one of the glass doors coming back inside the building, and almost every bit of it is cool as hell. Not everything is perfect, but it’s one of those matches where the things that go wrong — typically involving Justice Pain on one side of a power move or the other — are even nastier looking than what might have been had they gone right, and so they make the match just a little bit better. There’s a sense of anarchy that the best matches like this have and that this has in spades. Not only in terms of how they seem to just stumble upon things and riff on them in increasingly horrific ways, but also in a lack of bodily control at times. In the best possible way, it feels at times as though things just happen to the people in this match, against their own will, a larger universal force throwing items in the way and making things just a little dirtier and more hateful than usual.

They have the sort of match in which, if I began capturing a spot here or there to post or simply insert into this piece, I would wind up just capturing 75% of the thing or more. Superplexes on cage walls, people hurled into grocery carts, one of the best Necro punch fights of all time, metal filing cabinets smacking off a bare head repeatedly, and what feels like a million other things that hide in the shadows behind the real huge bits.

So many things happen and they all rule.

Nate Hatred returns at the end to destroy Pain and Gage, and after a senton bomb to Nicky under a pile of chairs, Necro gets the pin to give the superteam the titles.

It’s barbaric and wonderful stuff, a deranged fight that hits in the way the best matches like this do, ruling simply because it does. Self-evident, the stuff that makes you hoot and holler and shout in delight in your own home in the wee hours without realizing a noise is leaving your body until it’s already escaped. The sort of shit that makes you lose control of your body, reaching out through the screen and taking it over, even if only for brief moments in reaction to the psychotic nonsense it offers up.

This is not exactly Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher in terms of insane spectacles of violence and mayhem from the summer of 2005 that are so much better watched than read about and that kind of defy the written word, but it’s also not that far off either. Words are bullshit, this is not a match designed to be written about, and I would implore you instead to click x on the window right now, before the end of this sentence, and watch the match instead.

An unbelievably sick match, and to my memory, also only the second best match these teams had against each other.

***1/4

 

Masato Tanaka vs. Nick Gage, AIW Welcome to the Party, Pal (12/28/2018)

Is this great?

No.

They’re older and slower. In retrospect, Gage used the last of his greatness on the 2017 run, specifically the three Matt Tremont deathmatches, and does not have a lot left at any point after that. Tanaka has more to him, in terms of what’s there physically, but has been in decline since the middle of the decade or so. AIW is also, like, not the place where either is going to put in the absolute best effort, some Herculean digging up the effort for one night stuff, and so what you get is far more of a fun thing than a great match. Tanaka elbows, chair shots, crowd brawling, and a general playing of the hits.

Does it still rule?

Yes.

Absolutely it does.

Jonathan Gresham vs. Nick Gage, PBTV Wazzup (11/25/2017)

This was for Gresham’s PBTV (later IWTV) Independent Wrestling Title.

For the first time in my life, I became a Powerbomb TV/IWTV subscriber to watch this match. There are very few thing that I remember in my life from late August through mid December of 2017. A few wrestling matches, a few days at work, a few days in real life outside of that (folks, it is bad if you reply to a girl you just started seeing’s invitation to Thanksgiving with her family with “no thanks”, and had my father not passed in August (hence the memory gaps), I don’t know that I could have ever gotten away with it), but for some reason, the memory of this weekend off and the decision to pay to watch this specific match is one that sticks around the old brain hole.

(And also a Nick Gage match the next day, but we don’t need to talk about that.)

It is not an especially great match.

Gresham goes after Nicky’s arm, and while the selling of Gage is functional, it is not great. Between two of 2017’s best wrestlers (spoilers for THE YEAR IN LISTS, sorry but not actually sorry, learn to parse the exact tones of my praise for specific wrestlers so that you can predict these things months out), they are not quite able to build a fully functional bridge. However, the attempts to build this doomed bridge are a lot of fun. Nicky trying to sell the arm, Gresham trying to brawl, and all things in between.

Nicky gets counted out when Gresham dives off a tope into a sleeper and bolts inside at the count of nine.

It’s a hard thing to say if they had a better one in them, if they were holding back on a small show in the bullshit little CHIKARA venue, or what. I don’t really know, and neither do you. My immediate gut response is to say that this was a replacement match for the scheduled Gresham vs. Fleisch match for a reason, that nobody would have ever booked this as the sole draw for a show unless they had no other choice. My gut, as it is more often than not, is correct, but that isn’t to insult anything that happened here. If not a great match, it was a deeply entertaining one, and one that I found impossible to ever look away from.

You can say what you’d like here, it is certainly not a great match, nor the greatest stylistic fit, but I really like what they did all the same.

Despite everything, it killed a weekend night for me at a point in my life in which I really needed something to kill a weekend night, and so not only am I unable to offer up any criticism here from a real emotional place, but I also have a real soft spot for this exact and specific match.

 

Nick Gage vs. Darby Allin, GCW Line in the Sand (11/11/2017)

Photo credit to Burning Hammer Photography.

What seems like maybe a weirder match on paper works out as perfectly as it possibly could, at least on a smaller show like this.

The trick, shockingly, is that the match is something like ninety percent Nick Gage just destroying this little freak. Darby gets him a little frazzled early on with arm drags and the like, only for Gage to then begin destroying the arm with some chairs and work outside. Darby’s comebacks are both brief and exciting, always showing how hurt the arm is while also expressing a frantic desperation both in the way he moves around and in terms of what he does. Gage is not a natural arm worker and gives it up midway through, but given that Allin sells it pretty well and given that it’s a way for Nicky to riff around in fun ways like taping Darby Allin to a steel chair by both the arm and chest, and doing Anderson-esque hammerlock spots onto/through multiple chairs, it’s hardly time wasted either.

It’s also home to one of my favorite spots of the year.

Nick Gage vs. Darby Allin, GCW Line in the Sand (11/11/2017) pic.twitter.com/Nn1VeQ9E8b

— CCR Pounder (@ElHijoDelSimon) November 10, 2022

Balcony dives are largely routine at this point, but this is one of the best since AR Fox’s over a year earlier at Beyond Wrestling, succeeding not only because of the idea of the thing, but because of the angle at which Allin hurls himself and the way the camera captures it perfectly in motion. Allin’s big height dives usually become Coffin Drop variations, but this is just a classic version, hurling himself out with complete and total recklessness. It’s not one of the five wildest things Darby’s ever done to his own body and/or using his body as a projectile, but it’s one of my favorites.

Wonderfully, it is also the only way he’s ever able to get any sort of real sustained run against Gage going forward, knocking the wind out of him for a few minutes by hurling himself off of a ledge at him.

Unfortunately for Darby, and fortunately for everybody else, Darby has no real way of beating Gage despite that. He lands some bombs, tries some cradles, but it’s Nick Gage. That shit doesn’t work, and as soon as he’s able to grab a hold of this little twerp again, it’s over. Darby Allin gets hurled through a door in the corner at high velocity, and Gage beats him with the Piledriver.

The ideal b-show main event, in which the top guy is challenged in a fun new way, even put into some jeopardy, but that doesn’t waste a lot of time in answering the questions raised throughout the match. Everything you know is reaffirmed, Darby leaves looking better than he did coming in, and there’s a sick little match that comes out of it too.

Incredibly fun.

***

The Faces of Fear vs. Nick Gage/Jimmy Lloyd, BLP Darkest Timeline Phase Two (10/21/2017)

I don’t go to a lot of wrestling shows.

Now certainly, I used to. I am filled with tales of 2000s ROH and IWA Mid South wrestling shows. I made it a point to go to most of the AEW shows in Chicago and Michigan during the run where CM Punk was with the company. I’ve gone to a lot of WWE shows in Chicago and in Grand Rapids. In college, I went to one (1) wrestling show, when ROH held a TV taping at Wings Stadium in scenic Kalamazoo, Michigan. But for the most part, I do not anymore. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we do not get a lot of wrestling shows here. We had an indie in 2019 or early 2020 featuring old IWA-MS standout Josh Abercrombie that was maybe twenty minutes away from my apartment, but it was February or so and when it came time, I simply could not summon up the energy to go out into the world and go to it.

I say all of that to say that, for whatever reason (I had never seen Nick Gage in person, I don’t know if that’s it entirely, I think the idea of Nick Gage, Meng, and The Barbarian in the ring at the same time also really really really appealed to me at a time that I needed some distractions) in October 2017, I went to Indiana with my cousin and went to this show. On the ride there, I watched a lot of college football on my phone, in the days before Youtube TV cost like sixty five dollars. It was a real treat for me as, since 2016, I hadn’t gotten to see a whole lot of college football outside of PAC 12 or Mountain West After Dark games as a result of my job at the time, and wouldn’t again regularly until 2020. Nothing all that interesting happened in the world save the joy of my alma mater succeeding (eat one Eastern Michigan), it’s not like we got the 2013 Iron Bowl here, but it was a nice experience.

Outside of one double shift where I became really good friends with a guy, and the genuinely mortifying experience of going into work still drunk in early December 2017, this is one of the only things that I remember in my life between the end of August 2017 and mid December 2017.

This is not a great match.

One can decide for themselves if it matters that a 2017 meeting between Nick Gage and the Faces of Fear was not great. It was a neat little brawl that would not be out of place on a 1997 episode of WCW Saturday Night, both for how simple it was and how restrained it was. Nick Gage surprisingly beat Barb with a mere DDT, while Meng was busy outside intercepting a Lloyd dive into the Tongan Death Grip, which is also a finish that feels one hundred percent in line with a WCW C-show.

This will not end up on an end of the year list.

It does, however, absolutely rule and stands out as one of my favorite little weird live experiences ever, and I did and do really love it.

 

Matt Tremont vs. Nick Gage, GCW Nick Gage Invitational 2 (9/16/2017)

Photo credit to Burning Hammer Photography.

This was the finals of the Nick Gage Invitational, a cinderblock canvas deathmatch, as well as being for Tremont’s GCW World Title.

As with their last meeting, it is tremendous in every way that a match can be.

First of all, independent of the booking of the thing or the action of the match itself, the stipulation of a cinder block canvas alone adds so much to this match. It’s never been done in the United States before, supposedly, and it just looks SO unbelievably cool. Barbed wire instead of ropes, Caribbean spider webs, different cages and scaffolds, there are so many ways that advance death match set ups can make a match feel bigger before anything even happens, and while it’s hard to say any one of those is the absolute best (for overall timelessness and reliability, I have to side with NRBW), the cinder block canvas ticks every box. It’s both interesting to look at, and impossible to deny mentally, even beyond going through glass or being brained with something, a totally different sort of feeling going into a match. 

Building on how cool the setting of the match in a smaller sense looks, it is also once again outstanding in a larger sense, going beyond the set up of the ring to the way the show feels in the venue itself. The atmosphere in Game Changer World in little old Howell, New Jersey is genuinely unbelievable and helps so much. There’s an atmosphere in this building that few other U.S. deathmatch venues have matched, and that I don’t think has existed indoors (outdoors a la Tournament of Death or some KOTDMs is a totally different feeling and is almost always cool when the match works) since CZW stopped running the Arena. It’s already dark and dingy in a way that has a lot of character, but at the end of a deathmatch tournament with spooky dust in the air, added to by every cinder block bump coughing up dust too and everything all broken apart, there is this extra sort of feeling in the air. It wouldn’t make a bad match good, but in the case of this match, already genuinely exceptional, it only amplifies what’s already there.

Once again, like in June, it is not just a match reliant on what happens, the physicality and the big gross spots, but it’s one set up incredibly well through simple booking.

While the tournament booking hasn’t been as genius as June’s was — Tremont beating two guys from Gage’s era and Gage beating two younger deathmatch wrestlers — this match has their previous work going for it, the benefit of Tremont defending the title throughout the tournament, as well as one lovely little wrinkle that didn’t come out of somebody’s pen somewhere. Matt Tremont had announced beforehand that this would be his last deathmatch tournament, and would start to wind down, giving this some real stakes. It hinders the story between the two long-term, I think (as it maybe should have always been Tremont officially taking the torch from Gage, not that he hadn’t had it since like 2011-12 anyways, and it winds up turning into Gage becoming The Man again despite this feud really being the last gasp of him being able to deliver physically on the level he can deliver as a pure presence), but it does mean that this match — for his title, in his last shot at the big tournament, on top of the stakes the first match already set up — feels as big as a deathmatch can feel. 

Of course, none of that means half as much as the actual match itself, and it just to happens that that is also out of this world great. 

Gage and Tremont benefit so much not just from the more measured approach that this match demands, building the initial basic slams and suplexes on the cinder blocks super well and treating them like major moments within the match, but also simply from the existence of the stipulation itself. In the same way that there was just something different about looking at the cinder block canvas before the match, there is just something different about seeing people slammed and thrown onto god damned cinder blocks. Deathmatch wrestling has always benefited from feeling more genuine than other wrestling, in the sense that you know some of this simply is a real reaction to horrible pain, and this match is one of the most extreme versions of that I’ve ever experienced. The best matches like these not only strike this horribly authentic tone, but become unforgettable experiences in and of themselves, and this match is certainly one of the best of them. 

It is also just a beautifully assembled match, beyond the brutality. 

The stipulation forces them into a different kind of match than anything else on the card, or on the U.S. deathmatch scene in some time. It’s not to say this match is exactly sparse with the violence but there are really only three (3) major major spots, and there isn’t a lot of filler here. It’s not a match that I would call especially thoughtful, but it is measured, even if that comes out of necessity more than artistic choice, with the human body really not being able to take like twenty plus bumps on the cinder blocks. It is an artistic choice though to not linger on too long with anything else though, and it’s one that gets the most out of everything this match has to offer. 

Over the course of this match, there are three distinct sections, between the early light tube war en lieu of going to the blocks, moves on the blocks themselves, and then the last third when the toll begins to show. Each of these feels distinct and leads perfectly to the next section, while increasing not only the level of violence and brutality, but the desperation and sense of feeling to their movements as well. The familiar light tube bits go into the less familiar cinder block works, and there’s something delightful about that. Something we know to warm us up for something we don’t. 

When the match really flips the switch in the last third, with the three afrorementioned huge spots, they not only get so much out of all three, but each of them is a genuine motherfucker and they work in the same way as the three sections of the match itself. You can only ever ascribe so much intent and meaning, but it’s shockingly perfect the way this match happens to divide itself out, not only into these sections, but into the bits within this last one individually. 

Tremont gets knocked off the top through a table outside, in a spot that is familiar and relatively routine, but done with such force, a bump taken so brutally, that it still feels like a big deal. The second of the three sees Gage superplex Tremont on the cinder blocks alone (and whatever glass is left over from the first section), in a genuinely gruesome and disgusting bump. Like the cinder block bumps in the middle of the match — all slams and basic suplexes — it is not an especially spectacular move independent of the specific setting of this match, but within these confines, it feels like something that could have been a legitimate match ender itself. 

Lastly, in the sequence that ends the contest, Gage goes for a Frankensteiner through a truly rare weapon in A FUCKING WINE RACK OF LIGHT TUBES, but Tremont does what Gage did in the semi-finals and Superbombs him down through it and pulls the win out of thin air. 

It’s not only a visually spectacular finish, but it’s both what Gage did in the semi-final to pull a win out of thin air and a clear callback to how their first match ended, with Gage pulling a sunset bomb off of a ladder out of his ass to just barely win. There’s some easy and terrific symbolism there too, now with Tremont adapting Gage’s tactic into something far more spectacular.

Tremont not only shows the evolution of the style through simply defeating Nick Gage this time, but also in how he does it.

An even better match than their first together. This is the opposite of the first match in some ways, as it’s much more austere and restrained, as far as a 2017 deathmatch might go, but that’s necessitated by the stipulation, and really benefited the match given that we already saw a super wild version of this, now getting to live in a more thoughtfully brutal version of the match as Tremont finally gets his win.

Gage and Tremont live up to their initial meeting, and in my opinion just barely manage to top it as a result of the unique nature of a match like this as compared to simply a really really great version of a more common deathmatch. In the process, they have maybe not just the year’s best deathmatch, but possibly the best one of the entire decade as well.

***3/4

 

Nick Gage vs. Ciclope, GCW Nick Gage Invitational 2 (9/16/2017)

This was a 1st Round match in the Nick Gage Invitational.

First things first, this match just whips ass. It whips so much God damned ass, a perfect kind of first round deathmatch tournament match that, if not for another Nick Gage match earlier in the year, would be the best of its kind in some time.

While there doesn’t appear to be any real stipulation, they’re armed with some light tubes and razor boards (and a carpet strip board never used — the real saddest statement possible, suck my dick “baby shoes, never worn”), a fishing pole, and some other oddities and make nearly full use of all of it. You get your usual cool light tube spots, Gage’s running seated boot through a light tube bundle in the corner is one of the best deathmatch signature spots in history, they bleed a lot, and everything on the razor boards walks that perfect line between gruesome and cool as hell. The fishing pole spot from the attached image is cool as hell, of course, but clearly shows the difference between Gage and so many other wrestlers, as he senses the spot is taking too long to set up, drops it to go back and clobber Ciclope over the head with a chair, before going back to it. Not the biggest change in the world, but the exact sort of thing that fills in the gaps sensibly between the big setpieces.

Even the big no-sell spots they do here are genuinely electric and come from things that you could see violent psychopaths experienced in matches like these to shrug off to make a point. It all works, even if it is not the most unhinged and deranged match that either could have.

Secondly, it is a match of perfect function as well.

As the start of Gage’s run through a tournament bearing his name, hoping to go two for two in GCW’s big deathmatch tournaments to totally and completely cement his comeback, it’s a lovely match that effectively serves as a recap of everything he went through at Tournament of Survival in June at the beginning of a story that branches out from that. He’s met with a new challenge, another deathmatch wrestler who wasn’t around like this when he went away. The match spends exactly enough time establishing both that (a) Ciclope is a worthy challenge & (b) that Nick Gage is still the man, and each feels as important as the other, especially given how the rest of this show turns out.

There’s a question and answer here, a challenge and then the response.

Beautiful professional wrestling.

***

Nick Gage vs. Matt Tremont, GCW Tournament of Survival 2 (6/3/2017)

This was the finals of the Tournament of Survival 2, and it was a No Rope Barbed Wire match.

Independent of what happens in the match, I want to first begin this by praising GCW for the incredible booking of this tournament. It’s maybe the best booked deathmatch tournament ever in terms of this one story and building this one meeting, and while that isn’t the absolute highest bar in the world, it’s still something that is (a) so impressive & (b) helps this match so much before the bell even rings.

As previously discussed, this show marks Nick Gage’s return from prison, and in his first two matches of the tournament, he’d gone through a wrestler in Jimmy Lloyd hailed as the future and an import in Masashi Takeda hailed as arguably the best deathmatch wrestler in the world right now. It’s a story of reclamation, the one time God Of This Shit earning the throne and the crown back against some of the people who have stepped up in his absence. In the finals, Gage gets Matt Tremont, who inarguably is THE GUY who has stepped up in that absence. Tremont himself has publicly asked for the match for years, worn his admiration for Gage on his sleeve from day one, and for years now, has been the leading deathmatch wrestler in the country and, like Takeda, arguably the entire world. If Nick Gage wants the crown back, well, Matt Tremont’s the one wearing it. If he wants the throne back, Matt Tremont is sitting in it.

Nick Gage isn’t the only one whose run through the tournament has been with a clear narrative in mind though. Tremont beat Zandig in the first round and MASADA in the second (MASADA ain’t exactly Justice Pain or Drake Younger or Wifebeater here, but given how few deathmatch legends are still around, a guy who ran CZW for that long and has won as many tournaments and titles as he has will suffice), with a clear message on running through the past of deathmatch wrestling once and for all. It’s not exactly new for Tremont, whose greatest match to date in my opinion was a passing of the torch that came nearly six years prior against one of Gage’s generational peers. However, a win over Gage, the wrestler who he has explicitly idolized above all others, the act itself a symbol of a wrestler being more in the past than the present, reaffirms once again that the answer to the age old question of “WHOSE THE MAN” (as the t-shirts say) might not be the one Gage wants to hear.

Before the bell even rings, it is an absolute mother fucker of a story.

Gage vs. Tremont is already so rich and so juicy, but the promotion does it as much credit as possible by not only making it into this big tournament final in a name stipulation like NRBW, but makes the most of it not only with these parallel builds through the tournament, each effectively making clear statements on what the match means, but also wasting absolutely zero time. First day back, you wanted Matt Tremont vs. Nick Gage, you’ve wanted it for seven years, here you go.

It just so happens that once the bell rings, not only is none of that magic lost, but it turns out there is so much more between them as opponents in reality than maybe one could have ever even imagined on paper.

If you’ve watched a lot of deathmatch wrestling before, it becomes harder and harder to be blown away or really impressed by things continually. So much of the style is a raising of the bar of violence and brutality. You watch for a while, and things just stop being quite so impressive. It can become disillusioning sometimes, when you read or hear or see newer fans freaking out to spots you’ve seen a million times before. I’ll admit I’ve been kind of a curmudgeon about this before, particularly in 2018, when everyone online seemed to discover Masashi Takeda at once and go nuts for things he’d been doing for nearly a decade. It’s a hard thing to vocalize sometimes without coming off like kind of an asshole, but it’s the nature of being a fan of this kind of wrestling sometimes, you know? I’ve got a high bar here, and a lot of matches — while great in a way I won’t deny — rarely leave me with any feelings beyond that.

The ones that do, even all these years in, are real special.  

Nick Gage vs. Matt Tremont, and its sequel, are such matches.

The match is an immense bloodbath, and so much more than just that. There are flaws you can pick up on, it’s maybe a little long in the middle and the finish is not even like the tenth biggest, coolest, or nastiest thing in the match. These are all fair criticisms, and I do not care at all. It’s so great that I don’t even mind that this is effectively a No Ropes Barbed Wire match in name only, being way more about the light tube skyscrapers and the weapons at ringside. The match is so great that it doesn’t matter AT ALL, and I am usually so particular about a thing like that.

Like the booking of the match itself, Gage and Tremont waste zero time getting to it at the start.

The early contest light tube smashing dick measuring contest goes as you’d expect, with both men covered from head to toe in blood within a few minutes, and it gives the rest of the match a much grander feel, especially after much of the tournament had been more restrained in terms of a real high level bloodletting before this match. Beyond just the visual of the thing, the first like two-thirds of this are unbelievably well done. Two all-time masters of the craft use tubes and chairs and a barbed wire bat or two to have a match that, in construction and spirit, is not all that different from a classic Battle of the Titans epic, just that they’re using gigantic tubes of glass and not just hard elbows or punches, which Gage and Tremont have to offer up as well.

Once again, the trick here and with other truly exceptional deathmatches is the same as the trick with something like a Pure Rules match or something with real complex and wild high flying spots too. It is not about these accoutrements themselves, although it’s not like these matches are ever great just because of stories or on charisma and presence by themselves either. It’s that the match itself has something real to say or works in some other way independent of the things that happen. In this case, there is a clear and engaging story told between two ultra charismatic guys in there, a foundation laid before any of these big moments come into play.

It’s just that these big spots are mostly unbelievably cool also.

Gage bursts ahead at the start, having a slightly easier tournament after his opening match compared to Tremont’s, and having nearly seven years’ worth of built up frustration and energy to air out. However, as the match drags on — and especially when Gage challenges him, particularly when loudly asking who the man is, in a great little feature — Tremont emerges and makes Nicky really fight for it for the first time in a long time. It’s not to call it ring rust, but one of these men has been regularly wrestling for seven years and one hasn’t, and that comes into play after an initial rush, culminating in the moment gif’d above.

Through three quarters of the match, it is perfect wrestling.

The last quarter of the match is unfortunately not as great as all before it.

In that last twenty five percent or so, there is a lull for certain, and the finish of Gage baiting Tremont up a ladder to hit a sunset bomb off of it is, as previously mentioned, not something that feels like the biggest finish this match could have had. It’s also not quite as economical and efficient as the rest of the match, with set up required rather than everything else in the match that felt like two killers simply reacting to their surroundings. You can argue it’s the only way Gage can win at this point, and I don’t hate that, but that doesn’t make it better exactly. To go with what I had written about the Gage/Tremont match that opened the show, it’s more of a period than an exclamation point, and one done in regular typeface after three-quarters of the match was in bold and all caps.

Still.

Everything else in this match is so immense and eye catching and fascinating, and feels so huge and important that these are reasons why this isn’t clearly the best match of the year, and instead is only one of them.

Along with its sequel, one of the great deathmatches not just of the year or decade, but in American deathmatch history. One for the record books, in addition to any half decent recollection of 2017’s greatest chunks of pro wrestling.

***1/2

 

Nick Gage vs. Masashi Takeda, GCW Tournament of Survival 2 (6/3/2017)

This was a semi-final match in the Tournament of Survival 2, and it was a light tube death match.

It’s not great.

Part of that is, of course, expectations.

Takeda is one of a few possible answers for deathmatch wrestler of the 2010s that I wouldn’t immediately roll my eyes at and argue with (the others being Matt Tremont and Nick Gage), seeing as he has one of the greatest deathmatches of the decade and is great for the entire decade. Nick Gage, of course, is one of the best of all time at this, and so one has certain expectations here that maybe aren’t totally met, in the sense that this is simply a real good match and, at best, is the third best match on the show.

Part of that is also that it’s a deathmatch tournament show and these are not often (read: rarely) packed from top to bottom with absolute heaters. The final is a big deal, Gage is clearly being saved for that, and this can’t be a total knife through butter like the first Gage match of the show, and so they simply have a nice nine to ten minute match.

It is a super fun nine to ten minute match though!

Gage and Takeda so some real nasty stuff with the light tubes, and the story of the night continues as Gage gets put through it by a newer force he hasn’t experienced before on his way back to the top. Takeda doesn’t get into full on Takeda maniac mode with him, here in the middle of a show in an absolute pit in New Jersey, but there’s enough here to still make it a real fun little match.

Not one for the cherry pickers, but a solid little thing from a pairing that only ever got to do this once one on one.

Nick Gage vs. Jimmy Lloyd, GCW Tournament of Survival 2 (6/3/2017)

This was a 1st Round match in the Tournament of Survival 2 match, and it was a Destruction Derby deathmatch, which effectively means nothing outside of that there’s a thumbtack ball bat somewhere in there, and is one of those deathmatch tournament stipulations that effectively just means “do whatever” (the best kind).

More importantly than anything, this match marks the formal return of Nick Gage to deathmatch wrestling.

That’s not to say the brief little 2015 run didn’t count, as it featured one of the decade’s greatest deathmatches.

However, this is the one that sticks.

Gage makes his return from a second stint away in this match, sticks around, and this is the run where he breaks through as more than just a deathmatch great, but with the entire character. MDK as a whole thing, weirdo non-deathmatch stuff like Bloodsport or Style Battle or weird little spot matches against non deathmatch wrestlers, GCW expanding while largely built around Gage in the latter years of the decade, Dark Side of the Ring, the AEW match, all of that. It’s this run.

This show is a formal reintroduction of one of the all-time greats, and it starts very specifically with this match, which effectively makes that re-establishment into the only thing it has any interest in him.

Immediately, it feels special in a way deathmatch wrestling in the U.S. hasn’t in a while.

The real shame here, if there’s one to be found, is the perfect fit of wrestler, time, place, and location that this and these other 2017 GCW shows reveals. GCW will do fine at the Showboat and other places, but GAME CHANGER WORLD in Howell, New Jersey is the perfect location for wrestling like this. It has this rectangular set up that reminds me of the Lincoln Center in Highland, Indiana, where many of the best IWA Mid-South shows ever took place, but is darker and cloudier and grimier in a way that really fits Game Changer Wrestling here, at the peak of their artistic powers (in that it was still mostly just deathmatch and hardcore wrestling without too much nostalgia bullshit or attempts to appeal to people beyond the absolute freaks). You rarely get a venue and a promotion that seem perfect for each other like this, every show held here benefits from this environment, and Nick Gage matches maybe benefit more than anybody else’s. It’s unfortunate we didn’t have years and years of this environment, but we do at least have matches and shows like this to look back on.

Anyways, there’s a match here too, and it is fantastic.

What work so well about this match — and the tournament at large — is this complete and total knowledge of what it should be, arguably needs to be, and a single minded commitment to the thing that not only rules the most, but that feels the best.

Jimmy Lloyd tries to shoot the devil in the back with a light tube shot before the bell, misses (in that it is nowhere near enough to even register for Gage, and maybe even wakes him up, to make it even worse on the Different Boy), and spends the next eight minutes paying for it. There’s not a lick of offense in that time. Not a one. Most matches and promotions would mess this up by having him get a shot in or maybe one big kickout and a brief flurry, something that can work and has in the past (like Gage vs. Dysfunction from the 2003 King of the Death Matches, for example), but that isn’t at all right for this match. Instead, Nick Gage destroys him for the entire match. He destroys him in so many different ways and in so many different parts of the building. He’s using chairs, throwing them through chairs, breaking all different sorts of light tube bits on his head, using the water jug on a stick (and swinging it so hard he breaks the stick in a first), the pizza cutter, the glass pane, and really seeming like he’s trying to utilize every single piece of equipment provided, even turning sillier weapons like light tubes connecting two hula hoops into something horribly violent when he puts it around Lloyd and tackles through the circle of light tubes to get him that way.

Following this truly beautiful display of violence for eight minutes, Gage ends a match about making a point by going above and beyond for the finish, choosing to end the sentence with an exclamation point rather than a period, piledriving poor Jimmy Lloyd off the middle rope and through a pane of glass for the win.

As impactful of a return match as there’s been in recent memory, a perfect opening match for one of my favorite deathmatch tournaments of the decade (and maybe all time), and one of the great squashes in wrestling all decade.

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