ACH/AR Fox/Rich Swann vs. Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano/Bobby Fish, PWG Black Cole Sun (12/12/2014)

Ho ho ACH.

This is the ideal PWG opening tag at this point.

It’s not up to the standard of those nutty 2009-10 openers with the likes of the multiple Brandons and LTP and Goodtime and the Cutlers, but for the Song and Dance Era (not my phrase sadly) that’s come into vogue with the departures of Steen and Generico, this is one of the better examples of how to do this. You have your bits, a dance or two, and it’s a fun time. However, they don’t let it ever get in the way and still have this awesome ten or fifteen minute opener.

A bunch of cool stuff, but reined in a lot, on account of the position on the card. A great fireworks show that ends when it’s supposed to, leaves a lot on the table for everyone else, but is still incredibly satisfying in its own right. everyone who can go nuts goes nuts, and thankfully, it’s kind of just a showcase for the trio of high fliers. Fish suffers at the end for trying to steal the Santa hat and show off, as he’s caught immediately on the ropes with Fox’s Lo Mein Pain for the win.

One of the better PWG openers in recent memory and one of the better non-serious PWG matches all decade, as one that has that fun as an addition to an exciting and coherent match instead of as a replacement for one.

***

Dojo Bros vs. Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano, PWG Is Your Body Ready? (6/15/2013)

Because it’s 2013, Roddy and Eddie come out in “LET’S GET WEIRD” tank tops. God bless.

This is idealistic independent wrestling midcard tag work. It’s light and easy and fun as hell. Zero pretense to it at all. It’s different sorts of goofballs, half of them likeable and the other half totally unlikeable but fun in their own ways. Roddy and Eddie are still a top five tag team in the world on talent and chemistry alone, and Big Dust makes a hell of a babyface hot tag. Always wild to see these instances when he decides on maximum effort. He’s no natural athlete, but there’s a charm and a spark to it all that really makes it all work.

And then yes, there are very many cool moves. To quote one of the great shoot interviews ever, involving half of this match, Roddy hits about thirteen of them in a row. Eddie and Roddy do another classic swarm bit on John Boy at the end, ending with the End of Heartache aka the suplex flippy boy for the win.

Classic middle-of-the-card PWG stuff and really classic stuff from any great promotion in or near its peak, which is to say totally inessential, but fun and great all the time. The stuff that makes you want to watch entire shows instead of skipping around for one or two matches.

***

 

Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano vs. Fire Ant/Soldier Ant, CHIKARA Joshimania Night One (12/2/2011)

This was for Nu FIST/Ronin’s CHIKARA Campeonatos Des Parejas.

Fauxhawk era John Boy is particularly upsetting, but FIST vs. Colony delivers in spite of him. Chuck’s practiced with these guys to the point that everything they do together has a little extra polish to it. Chuck’s better against Fire and Soldier than he is against most other wrestlers.

Still, Johnny Gargano is in this match, so it’s got quite the floor on it. CHIKARA had a way of getting the best out of some bad wrestlers though, and this is streamlined as effectively as possible. Dustin also takes most of the load on his shoulders, leaving Gargano with the job of only hitting his little bits and then getting out of there and letting the professionals work.

The match is interesting too because it takes the idea of a match splitting up traditionally into thirds (shine or back and forth or whatever/control work/finishing run) and divides the falls up along those lines. Fake/Nu FIST takes the first fall early through pure chicanery, and it’s a transition to control. That work in command of Soldier Ant lasts for the entire second fall and the second fall only. Soldier Ant cradles Big Dust to even the match up, and Fire Ant’s entry to start the final fall is the start of the finishing run. That’s not the best work they can do (and this is where John Boy kind of hamstrings everyone else around him, because he is clearly not as good as the others), but it picks up in the final moments when Fire Ant makes it a leg selling match. It’s the sort of thing that could have added a lot to the entire match if it was introduced earlier, but it’s still magnificent work.

Big Dust beats the third greatest babyface of all time with the Killer Crab that beat the second once upon a time.

Nothing anybody needs to see, but full transparency, I watched this solely to help with Fire Ant’s top 25 WOTY case so it was entirely worth my time. He’s gonna make it, especially when he can almost single handedly make a John Gargano match outside of a 2013-16 peak (by peak, i mean “not bad actually somehow wtf???”) not total dogshit. The most underrated wrestler of the decade.

***

 

Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. The Colony (Fire, Soldier, & Green Ant), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Three (4/17/2011)

This was the finals of the 2011 King of Trios tournament.

To get it out of the way first, the booking is not ideal. This isn’t entirely a “The Colony won too late” bit, because I understand some of those calls. The Colony weren’t a trio when King of Trios 2009 happened, and 2010’s BDK victory was necessary. The big one is that they should have won in 2008, given how colossal of a failure the big Lince Dorado push ultimately was. There’s also the issue of Claudio’s absence ruling the BDK out of the finals, and leaving Nu FIST as the only other heel act that’s halfway established and good enough to be a worthy foe for this moment. That presents the biggest issue of all, which is that this is a settled issue and has been for two years.

This isn’t a match without tense moments and a few dramatic twists and turns, but The Colony doesn’t have to get revenge on these guys like they do the BDK. That’s a wrong yet to be righted. This is a wrong that’s been righted before. It’s hard to muster up the same emotion, given that that entire element just about telegraphs the result. Given that and the idea that winning of King of Trios hardly feels like the same sort of accomplishment in 2011 that it would have years earlier, this doesn’t feel quite as big as I think they wanted it to.

Now that every problem with this match has been laid bare, this is a great match!

There are four great wrestlers in this match, one good one, and one bad one, and the other five are talented enough and helped out enough by clever layout that they don’t let John Boy drag the entire ship down with him while he fails to swim in deeper waters. Green Ant’s bad arm plays a part, and he’s already good enough to care about it for the duration of the match. Fire Ant The callbacks to the 2009 matches don’t quite hit their mark for the reasons discussed earlier, but they don’t waste a lot of time here and the big nearfalls wake up this graveyard of a crowd. It’s enough to cast any real doubt onto this thing, but they’re enough to make this good as hell along the way to what very obviously comes to pass. Icarus gets beaten with the mother of all Ant Hills.

It’s the third best ever FIST/Colony match ever to this point, at best, but it does everything it needs to do. Not the moment it should have been,

***

Team FIST (Icarus/Chuck Taylor/Johnny Gargano) vs. Team Osaka Pro (Daisuke Harada/Atsushi Kotoge/Ultimate Spider Jr.), CHIKARA King of Trios 2011 Night Two (4/16/2011)

This was a quarterfinal match in the 2011 King of Trios tournament. 

Good and simple storytelling. Harada and Kotoge (yes, they were Osaka Pro before they were NOAH!) impressed on their CHIKARA trips in 2010, making it all the way to the semi finals in the 2010 King of Trios, along with fellow Osaka -> NOAH traveler Tadasuke, before losing to FIST rivals The Colony. On their way there, they embarrassed the then FIST trio of Icarus, Taylor, and Gran Akuma. Months later, Akuma would be ex-communicated and replaced by John Boy here. 

The match doesn’t exactly do an expert job of working to that, outside of Ultimate Spider Jr. being worked over for a long period. It’s more of a pure spotfest, but that fits in with the skillsets of two-thirds of the match, Icarus and Big Dust notwithstanding. Everyone’s pretty great at that though, and the match could have been far worse than it was, if say, they allowed Johnny Gargano to do more than a few things. He’s pretty terrible in this, easily outworked by Spider Jr. and just about everyone else in the match and on the show, but he’s not allowed to affect this much, and the match carries him up with it like a small boat.

They get into a really delightful fireworks show at the end, before one of CHIKARA’s strongest attributes rears its head for the finish. Companies with less respect for details might use a match like this to try and legitimize John Boy with a clean win at the end of it all, to send everyone away happy, no matter that a heel team was winning. Instead, Chuck Taylor cuts off the flashing lights and loud noises by slingshotting through the ropes and rolling up Spider with a handful of tights to steal it. Great stuff. Tease out something everyone can be happy with it, and rip it away. This isn’t about cool stuff, this is about good and evil, and this particular sort of lower tier hatefully banal brand of evil has only grown stronger since the last meeting. Nu FIST, like Team FIST before them, are not to be admired or legitimized in any way. Actual skill is secondary to the fact that they are a rotten group of young men. They cheat because it’s easy, and do harm when they can, solely because they can. 

You’ll get everything you want some day, but it’s not coming in the quarterfinals. 

A great little match, and more importantly, a really great display of tournament wrestling.

***