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.