AJ Styles vs. John Cena vs. Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Baron Corbin, WWE Fastlane (3/11/2018)

This was for Styles’ WWE World Heavyweight Title.

Real sneakily, a pretty great match.

We’re not talking match of the year here or anything, it isn’t even the best match to happen on this day, but you have four and a half great wrestlers in a big main event fireworks show and allowed access to all (in 2018 anyways) of the benefits that go with that. It’s hard to go too wrong, and this is not a match that sets out to make waves.

In between all the cool things, laid out to get as much out of them as possible, you have your little narrative developments that help out. Kev and Sami trying to game the system but self destructing because only one guy can win, and also because Shane McMahon can’t stop interfering. AJ and Cena getting back into it a few weeks after their quietly great 2018 rematch, with Cena’s desperation to get into a big WrestleMania match again shining through, as well as the little nugget of Styles surviving something in an Attitude Adjustment through the announce table that he didn’t two weeks ago.

(There’s also whatever Ziggler and Barry Corbin are doing, I guess? Honestly don’t remember. You could edit them out of this match and lose very little and you could edit Corbin out and maybe even gain something.)

Mostly though, it is just a very simple roll out of a bunch of cool stuff. The easiest thing in the world, let talented people riff around for a while with every benefit you can offer them, and more often than not, yeah, it’s going to be a good time. Even the WWE, being the WWE, is not quite able to get in the way of this, even if it never becomes every single inch of what it could be.

Kev gets Cena with the Powerbomb, only for AJ to recover and hit the Phenomenal Forearm to keep the title, blatant striving opportunism once again being thwarted by the forces of relative good.

Genuinely fun piece of car crash bullshit.

three boy

Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, WWE Battleground (7/24/2016)

With these two, nothing is ever really finished.

Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn will never go so much as a year in their WWE runs without bouncing off of each other in some sense, be it as partners, opponents in one-off TV matches designed to fill space with something easy and guaranteed, or years later, doing this in with the roles reversed for the first time ever. For the time being though, this is the end of the feud that’s existed off and on since Owens’ debut, over a year and a half prior.

More importantly, it is both the high point of this feud in the WWE and also the biggest thing that the generationally great babyface Sami Zayn ever gets to do in this company, for whatever reason.

Yet again, it is one of the last great examples of what the WWE is supposed to be.

Two of the best wrestlers in the world, given the benefit of a long and well written and executed feud, making this final match feel so much bigger than it would have been without the benefit of those things. The work of two wrestlers, already among the very best anywhere in the world, enhanced by story and through the process of paring a lot of unnecessary things down and saving the real big stuff for a match like this, where it can mean the most. Great mechanical wrestling combining with all the other stuff, creating something that is not only lizard-brain thrilling, but also enormously satisfying, and that inspires that special feeling that only the best and/or most emotionally perfect pro wrestling can provide.

It’s a great enough match not only to be comfortably one of the best matches of the year, but also to work as a propaganda piece for the entire company.

Of course, a large part of that is bullshit.

Not the ideas themselves, there’s something to the idea about making things mean more (it doesn’t mean you can’t do cool shit or that you have to be boring, which is where that line of thought tends to fly off the rails a lot of the time), but that these two weren’t already doing things like this before. That this, somehow, was something they weren’t already capable of. Their 2011 matches in PWG are the best ones they ever had as a result of blending all of these things together and cutting out a lot of the excess fat that was on their Ring of Honor work together, so it’s not like the idea of removing the unnecessary, doing the biggest and best stuff, and making it mean a whole lot is this new concept to these two.

Still, there’s something special about this. Even if they’d been great enough to have this kind of a match for years before coming to the WWE, the entire package does something to elevate this above most of the rest of their matches, if not quite over that pair of 2011 meetings.

It’s their most accessible and most mainstream match against each other, and if I had compared this series to music in the past — from the Battle of Los Angeles final to being a loud and fast live album to their 2021 series as being new takes on old material — this is the big one. The first major label album, the one with the perfect production quality and mass marketing. This is the one people are likely going to remember in the most widespread sense, the one sticking around a popular consciousness even if it’s not the best one.

To their credit, they absolutely nail it.

Part of that is the story and the set up and all of that, but the thing about this system is that it all falls apart — or at least doesn’t run like it’s supposed to — if the performances aren’t there too. What good is any of this set up and all of these aids that a system like the WWE’s is able to provide if, bell to bell, things just aren’t right? In this match though, especially with Sami Zayn, they nail it. In a purely mechanical sense, I trust we don’t need to spend too much time here on how good they both are. Shots land hard, everything looks pretty great, and the one thing that doesn’t (more later) matters enough that it inarguably winds up elevating the match. This is about more than the purely mechanical though, as always.

First of all, this is the best Kevin Owens performance in his entire WWE run.

Most of those matches blend together, even the great ones. Big Kev isn’t really a Performances Guy, in the sense that very few of them really stand out. He’s straightforward and offense based, Kevin Owens or Steen before him doesn’t offer up a whole lot of small touches. There are exceptions, of course, particularly manic 2010-2011 performances, knee selling work against The Young Bucks, but just that kind of a wrestler. The quality of his work tends to revolve around how much he gets to do and the sort of obstacle he is allowed to be, and that’s why he’s especially great here. The shit talking, the meanness he puts into individual pieces of offense, big bumping, things of that nature.

This match is not about Kevin Owens, but Kevin Owens once again does a stellar job of turning himself into a mountain for the greatest babyface of this century to climb and overcome.

While not quite the storytelling tour de force that his famous NXT Title win against Adrian Neville was or the all-time masterpiece of his 2022 encounter with Johnny Knoxville, it’s the other greatest Sami Zayn performance ever.

The emotional journey Sami guides everyone through, once again, is fantastic. The anger is always there, but it’s more restrained after it cost him in their last pay-per-view meeting. You get ebbs and flows to it, the big hockey fight coming late in the match as a transition to a wild final run instead of right off the bat (this is perhaps the best illustration of the ways in which a system benefits them, and also the sort of thing you can easily argue they may have figured out on their own also), and Zayn has such a terrific mad energy. Moving faster and more frantically, swinging with more erratic movements, but also all in the eyes. The end of the match especially offers up this gigantic chance for an ultra memorable facial sell from Zayn, and as with everything else here, he gets it perfect. It’s not just catching Big Kev after one Helluva and shoving him back for another, it’s the way he shows the gears turning. Not just the act, but the struggle and then the decision behind the act.

Famously, there is one thing here that doesn’t go totally perfect, with Sami Zayn either fucking up the Arabian Moonsault in a way that he never had before or completely losing his mind and almost taking a career-ending header onto the apron.

I side with the former, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter all that much.

This either serves as the greatest happy accident in wrestling all year, or a stroke of genius, the most impressive act of someone getting something wildly dangerous past WWE controls in years and years and years.

Sami Zayn spends the rest of the match, in ways both large and small, selling that right shoulder. It’s either this accident turned into something beautiful or one of the great callbacks of the year, coming mid-match and drawing direct comparisons to Zayn’s inability in 2015 to overcome a hurt arm against John Cena and later against Owens himself in their second Takeover match. It’s not a major thing, Owens never redirects his offense to make it one, but it doesn’t ever have to be. Sami Zayn doing the work himself is enough, transitioning from it being this major impediment, to going wild once that hockey fight spot hits, itself the culmination of a slower punch exchange as a result of the hurt right shoulder. It’s yet another thing to overcome, besides just Kevin Owens himself and all their history, it’s all of his own as well.

That comes into play at the end too, beyond the shoulder. Sami survives the Pop Up Powerbomb this time after almost blowing it like he did last time, only to come back again. Zayn wins with two successive Helluva Kicks, as previously stated, with this wonderful moment in between the two. Questioning if it’s worth it, looking down at Owens again, deciding that it is worth it, and kicking his head off. There’s echoes of NXT and the past, but the realest echo that comes out of this isn’t any of that. It’s what started this all, two promotions away, at FINAL BATTLE 2009. One man holding the other up in a near-embrace, realizing what they’ve done and are about to do, thinking about it, and going forward anyways. The initial act mirrored in what feels like a final conclusion.

For as often as WWE would go to the well with stories about the moral cost of revenge later in the decade, what this match offers up is something so much better. That, yes, there’s something to it, but that the decision ultimately shouldn’t be all that hard. As much as grappling with that cost might fascinate as an intellectual exercise, nothing feels quite as good or correct in this genre of entertainment as revenge, and this is one of the finest displays of that in recent memory.

The simple thing is that a series of evil acts adds up to one hell of a bill, and for once in the WWE, it’s one paid in full. 

At the end, with it finally over, Sami Zayn looks genuinely happy for the first time since December 2014.

It feels good.

Somehow, a main roster WWE presentation manages to present not only something that is this great, but that feels as gratifying as this match and how they manage to tie it all together. A genuine stunner, and if not their greatest match together, arguably their most impressive singular feat comes here, creating something like that in an environment like this, and kicking the old machine back into working condition one last time.

In a better company, the company this used to be ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, this is a starmaking moment. WrestleMania III, SummerSlam 1998, Orton and Foley, The Shield at TLC 2012, whatever. The sort of moment where an undercard program and/or the talent within it wildly overachieve, and everyone knows it. That wasn’t so much the case here, of course. It’s not to say either of these two haven’t had productive careers here, but it’s the sort of match the publicity machine would push for the next several decades if it happened in the past. A match one watches, is in awe of, and is left with zero other thoughts in their head except that this is the best stuff in the company and that this is where the future lies. Not only with this perfect pairing, but with Big Kev as this heel mountain for everyone else, and most of all, with this all-time great babyface Sami Zayn overcoming the sorts of obstacles that a company like the WWE should, theoretically, excel at creating.

That didn’t happen, of course.

Neither of those things happened. Neither for reasons that make any real sense. Sometimes you get a shot at it, do really well, and then for some reason, never again get another one in the same role. Sometimes an insane billionaire hates your face and so you struggle for another year and a half and then spend the rest of your time getting more and more used to portraying a villain, until you then have a modern masterpiece in that role too. Sometimes you get paid the most money to work in a company that at some point, became a heel territory, if only because the people in decision making capacities are no longer in touch with anything human, and have no concept of how to write and/or present protagonists. But that’s what it is. It was always the gamble, you know? Buy the ticket, take the ride.

In the WWE, you can only really ever count on individual moments, and this is one of their better ones in recent memory.

Across every character, role, and promotion, probably the second or third best match they’ve ever had. It’s that great. What’s lost in what they’re not allowed to do or a certain level they’re not quite allowed to hit or the atmosphere of Reseda being removed is made up for a few times over by being one of the last matches to get the full benefit of this setting. The weight of history, a large electric crowd, and that emphasis on emotion and story, for once carried off by two wrestlers who not only can make that sort of a thing feel genuine, but who excel at never letting one aspect of the thing overpower the other.

While not the last time they’ll meet, it does feel like the end of something major, once again.

These two never really got a clear end before. Steen and Generico teaming together on Generico’s way out, showing Kevin Steen’s growth at that time, was a beautiful and unexpected direction, but this is the sort of a match and complete package that feels like the conclusion of that, with everything to follow feeling like some kind of an epilogue.

It ends as it spent most of its time.

Simple, direct, and undeniable.

***3/4

The Miz vs. Cesaro vs. Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, WWE Extreme Rules (5/22/2016)

This was for Miz’s WWE Intercontinental Title.

As a whole this match stands out as a sterling example, again for this 2016 Owens/Zayn feud, of what the WWE can be. At least what it sells itself as. The best wrestlers in the world in front of the largest possible crowds in matches that feel more important as a result of stories told. It’s always been a myth to some extent, but matches like this are responsible for creating and preserving that myth. Because, really, it’s true here. This is what that looks like when properly put into practice.

It’s a special match.

Things like Owens/Zayn and Cesaro/Zayn are always going to work. Owens and Zayn, again, represent this perfect mesh of everything, all the coolest moves and best offensive ideas in the world, combined with one of the great stories of the last decade. Cesaro and Zayn again combine to deliver on one of the great wrestling pairings of the century so far. Even things that are less guaranteed like Owens/Cesaro or The Miz as a whole work really well here, both as a result of meeting the moment, and as a result of a match like this totally understanding what they ought to be.

We’ve talked on here before, you and I, about what an ideal sort of WWE multi-man match looks like. The qualities it has, what it has to do successfully, and what it has to avoid. My favorite ever versions of this are the inaugural Money in the Bank at WrestleMania 21 for adding in generationally cool spots to a perfect mixture, or the 2014 Elimination Chamber for the quality of the ingredients therein, but the matches in this vein that work all have some things in common.

It’s not a complex recipe exactly, but very few have gotten it as right as this match does.

You need different styles of wrestling, like the powerful brawling of Big Kev, cowardice of The Miz, flying of Zayn, or the more scientific power of Cesaro. Different types of characters, such as our two heroes, but also variations on these themes, as you see with Owens and Miz again being vastly different types of antagonists. Big Kev is about dominance, while The Miz is a coward, through and through. Throw them around in different combinations, and play with it. There are a few combinations that we know can work (Owens/Zayn, Cesaro/Owens, Cesaro/Miz), but a match like this can feel pretty special and unique by delivering the other pairings too. We don’t get a lot of Cesaro vs. Zayn on the main roster, but this match has a few big runs with that combination, and it’s electric.

In general, a match like this shines when they don’t overthink it in the back, and it feels like the company gets out of the way of the match itself.

That’s the case here.

The match never forgets that The Miz is a coward. He’s a survivor and wins at the end, but it’s less because of any of his own merits. The moments where he sneaks in and uses his own move, or has help from his wife in setting up a complex scenario to take someone out are great and they would be fine finishes, but the match achieves on a higher level by not letting these moments end the match, and instead giving Miz a win at the end through pure luck. Owens and Zayn opt to keep beating on each other instead, allowing an open window that lets in just enough air to allow Miz to sneak through. Efforts to legitimize Miz in years past have failed (and will fail again) because he is immune to such a thing, but when allowed to be something like this, he’s never felt more genuine and as a result, has never been better.

It’s better to be lucky than good, and he leaves this match feeling like the luckiest man alive.

As a whole, it all comes together perfectly, creating something greater than just the sum of its parts.

This is how it’s all supposed to work. Hand in glove. A perfectly oiled machine. Great wrestling working hand in hand with booking that aids them instead of hindering them for once. A match that not only delivers on the promise of a great bell-to-bell experience, but one that also helps at least three of the four involved (sorry to Cesaro, if someone’s going to gain nothing, it’s probably always going to be him in the WWE). The Miz leaves as an even more detestable coward and Owens and Zayn have their feud brought to an even higher level by the way it plays out. A rare victory for WWE booking, given how much of a part that plays in this being as great as it was.

When all things work as they’re supposed to, this is the result. 

One of the best matches of the year.

***1/2

Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, WWE Payback (5/1/2016)

You will be stunned to find out or remember that, yet again, this match was pretty great.

It’s not their most ambitious outing.

No conclusion is attempted to be gained here, it’s not the start of anything, and really, there isn’t any real goal to it. Their NXT matches were about establishing Kevin Owens as an antagonistic presence, their other 2016 pay-per-view meeting is as close to a conclusion as we’ll get here, and later meetings vary from lazy television writing (a WWE standard, “here’s a pairing that works, give them 10-20 minutes on TV, and it’s less work we have to do” thing in late 2016 and early 2017) to reimagining the feud with the roles reversed in 2021, with goals reversed.

If anything, this is the most like their independent work as we ever get in WWE. There’s something of the 2011 Battle of Los Angeles final to it, in pace if not so much in quality or result. A pure god damner, something closer to a sprint than their more drawn out and emotive classics. Less ambitious, but with far less opportunity for any of that to fall short. The goals here are simply to elongate the issue with a big match, and then to also have a pretty great match on top of it.

For these two, these are exceptionally low bars, but ones that they take gigantic leaps over all the same.

Had one seen these two before the WWE, nothing here is surprising. They play the old hits, but do it at a breakneck pace that their NXT meetings in 2015 clearly sought to avoid. It’s not to say this is without form or focus either, because one of the great gifts of these two individually and together is the ability to have these frantic and exciting matches, but without losing any of the things that create such great pro wrestling. Owens is a detestable slimeball, and Zayn turns in yet another stellar babyface performance, all heart and guts, even at his own detriment.

Zayn once again gets too caught up in revenge, and Owens has no such hang up. Sami pours it on once he’s in a position to get revenge on Kevin Owens for all he’s done in the last seventeen months, but runs into one (1) kick to stop him right at the finish line. Big Kev lunges from there into the Pop Up Powerbomb, and he gets the win. This time, not by technical knock out or by pure referee stoppage, but completely fairly, creating maybe the biggest heartbreak of all.

Great wrestling. A great match, obviously, but such a stellar chunk of professional wrestling on top of that.

Pure and simple, honest, and productive. It’s complete bullshit to say WWE helped or refined this in any real way, at least with this match, but the matches these two had on pay-per-view in 2016 stand out as a kind of best case scenario for independent heroes coming to the WWE. Given a large chunk of time to shine, rarely impeded by anything too silly, and on occasion, working towards a truly sensational blow-off. The machine rarely runs like this anymore, even if they’re intent on once again disassembling it as quickly as possible and scattering the parts to the wind once that’s over. Being in the middle of the prior process though, it once again just feels extremely right, an example of how great this can be when works like it’s supposed to.

It is the least surprising thing in the world, after all I’ve written about these two before, that I once again really loved this. It is one of wrestling’s most perfect marriages and even a match like this, a “shut up and play the hits” version of the match to acclimate WWE audiences to everything that this is, was something that I really loved.

Once more, they can play all the hits that they would like. Loud, fast, casual, intense, jazz, piano, acoustic, whatever, few other combinations have the repertoire together that Big Kev and Sami do, and it is a joy to see them play together every time they get the chance.

***1/4

Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn vs. The Miz vs. Dolph Ziggler vs. Stardust vs. Zack Ryder vs. Sin Cara II, WWE WrestleMania 32 (4/3/2016)

This was a ladder match for Big Kev’s WWE Intercontinental Title.

I’ve always had a weakness for a decent enough version of this match. Part of that is because it’s clearly WWE’s attempt at a make-good for all the wrestlers that they know are good or great enough to be on the biggest show of the year (and on the main card, not some battle royal or pre-show thing) but that they’re too lazy and/or inept to really come up for anything else for. There’s something especially depressing about the implied “hey sorry, maybe next time” that comes with a match like this that always makes me real sympathetic towards something like this on a WrestleMania.

Also I like cool spots and these matches are a parade of some very cool spots.

I could write a little bit here about the mix of styles and characters that makes matches like these work at a high-ish level when all goes right, and that’s not something that’s absent here. You have your coward type, your fighter who is pretending to be tough but is also kind of a coward in Big Kev, a few great likeable white meat babyfaces, a total weirdo, things like that.

Honestly though, the trick here is that for the first time in one of these, two of the wildest ladder match wrestlers of the last decade are unleashed in a match like this in the WWE, and Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn do a whole bunch of really remarkable and totally outrageous stuff, while also largely being the focus of the match as a story. Some of it is new, but mostly, they’re just bigger and more fantastic and impressive versions of the stuff from something like the Ladder War like eight and a half years earlier.

All match long, our favorite duo are constantly sniping at each other. Delightfully, even in moments when one is out of the frame, they just can never really help themselves. Owens constantly goes after Sami, like he’s trying to pre-empt the sort of thing he instinctually knows is going to happen. In doing so, he turns a paranoid feeling into an absolute guarantee, as wrestling’s greatest vicious cycle continues, with neither man knowing quite how to close it or possessing the desire to close it.

Kevin Owens nearly makes it to the end, only for Zayn to reappear, and take him entirely out of the match with another one of their classic ladder spots.

This match isn’t JUST about Kev and Sami, there’s some other fun stuff. The polka dot ladder, a great Ziggler run in the middle, one big and sensational dive out of Sin Cara II. Everyone gets the chance to do something, and outside of the awful Stardust gimmick, there’s not really a truly weak link here.

The Miz is just about to sneak away with it, but gets exactly cocky enough without anyone to watch his back for Zack Ryder to take him out and get the title.

It’s a nice little result. A feel good victory, and like a lot of the match itself, a kind of make-good to the company a solid four years late after how horribly they fucked him once upon a time. Given how well things turned out for the guy after his WWE tenure eventually ended, it doesn’t feel QUITE as good as it’s no longer like this one bright little moment, but it’s still nice. More importantly, it’s a nice moment that comes largely from out of nowhere, this one little glimmer on an otherwise deeply depressing event that shows that somewhere deep down there, there’s some knowledge of how this thing is supposed to work, or at least how it can work.

Unfortunately this Kev/Sami ladder match with a feel good result doesn’t result in Super Dragon’s return, but given how much this match got right, you can only ever expect so much from this company.

The match of the night, for whatever that matters on a show like this.

***

Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, WWE Smackdown (7/2/2021)

This was a Last Man Standing match.

I has originally watched this live, or at least, as it aired originally. Like any good 2000s indie wrestling freak, you drop Kev and Sami against each other in a gimmick match in front of me, and I’m gonna put my eyes on it. It was a match I liked a fair amount at the time, but I liked this much more on rewatch.

Part of that is the way WWE TV wrestling is always a little better when you watch it after the fact. This way, you don’t experience the commercials as they happen, become more removed from any booking decisions or WWE-isms that are always so distracting in the moment, and have the time to let things sit a little more. I’ve also found that on a rewatch of something, I pick up things that I either missed the first time, or that were able to blend in on a live watch. It’s sort of the point of this whole endeavor, that I do not always trust my immediate thoughts and need to go back and dig around. Watching something is different than watching something and then articulating my thoughts in a format like this. Writing about things can bring new things out of the old brain socket, either in positive or negative ways.

The other part is that, not wanting to deal with Peacock commercials (I’m not paying more than $5 a month for that, a wholly reasonable price for the wrestling library and sitcom catalog), I just did a simple search and found this in Italian instead on one of the internet’s oldest and worst streaming sites.

I cannot recommend this enough.

With horrible WWE commentary removed, one can focus simply on the wrestling itself, or at least not have it drowned out by the most inane shit in the entire world.

Once again, these two killed it.

Both in some newer ways and in those old ones that still feel so comfortable.

Certain things about their 2021 matches are different from the others. Some in obvious ways that are barely even worth discussing, and some more interesting ones, like filling in gaps between big spots better than in other gimmick matches (I mostly mean their 2012 ROH ones here), or the way Zayn begs off and bumps and sells more in a heelish kind of a way, playing for something lower than sympathy and engagement. Despite only happening upon the version of this with Big Kev as the protagonist in 2021, elements of this have always been elements of their matches together though. Role changes aside, everything generally still works for all the same reasons they always did. They’re two maniac bump freaks with an easy big vs. small dynamic. Change roles, motivations, the offense they’re allowed to use, but that core element is going to remain and it is almost always going to be a ton of fun.

Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

Hell, this isn’t even their first Last Man Standing match together.

In this match, you get the sorts of things you were always going to get. Superkicks, the corner Exploder, Zayn’s failed through the turnbuckles DDT, the Half and Half on the apron, Big Kev’s powerbombs, all of it. You also get the callbacks to their previous matches at this point, with Zayn insisting on the double Helluva Kicks, and Owens’ emphatic win with the Powerbomb on the apron that started all this down in NXT. There aren’t any surprises here. It’s something I complained about in the past with these two. There’s a sameness to the routine that can especially slip into the proceedings in their lesser WWE matches together.

At this point though, I simply no longer care all that much. With a match that has as much to offer in between those old hits as this does, I’m a lot more forgiving. In addition to that, further removed from their 2011 PWG and 2016 WWE peaks against each other and compared to the rest of wrestling in 2021, something like this is something I appreciate a whole lot more. There’s always a danger of this becoming real old again, but in short two or three match bursts like this after years apart, it’s a wonderfully charming sort of a thing.

Even if they’re shutting up and playing the hits, there’s no other combination in the WWE that has the repertoire that these two have together.

There’s a nostalgia to it, to be sure, but that doesn’t take away how nice these things are to experience again whenever we get the chance to. I loved them when they first came out, and hearing them again just really makes me feel good. I love the way they’ve changed them for this environment, playing them a different way and with different instruments, but always maintaining the core of what they are. The tempo might change, but there’s a soul to the thing that remains the same as it ever was. It’s a beautiful and a heartwarming thing, to see that something about this still works and can work pretty much no matter what.

I’ve found that with the truly great songs, I’m willing to listen to just about every new version of them that comes out. Live, Spotify sessions, slightly different, doesn’t matter. The real great ones preserve something about the original, and that something, be it the lyrics or the music or just one specific riff, still works as well as it always did. A different version of the thing I love, but one that’s still just close enough to that original thing that I loved that I can’t help but find some charm in it.

(Am I saying this is pro wrestling’s “Jazz No Children”? Not a hard no.)

This is one of my all-time favorites, and I cannot wait to hear it played again in the future.

***1/4

Daniel Bryan vs. Cesaro vs. Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn vs. Jey Uso vs. Baron Corbin, WWE Elimination Chamber (2/21/2021)

This was an Elimination Chamber match, with the winner challenging Reigns later on.

Given the names on there, and given that Cesaro and Daniel Bryan both work in this match for over half an hour, it’s not a surprise that this is a hit. Even without a crowd in attendance, you can trust these guys. Part of that is because guys like Bryan, Cesaro, and Zayn are among the better and more productive pandemic-era WWE workers, but also because like so many other things in wrestling, Elimination Chamber matches just tend to be better when Bryan gets his hands on one of them. While not on the level of either the Bryan-centric 2019 or 2014 Elimination Chamber matches (the latter being the greatest Chamber match ever), it’s great for many of the same reasons.

While you can narrow it down to simply “a great match built largely about Daniel Bryan, in which he once more reaffirms his greatness”, what works about this match is also what works so well about pretty much every successful big multi-man match in WWE history.

The best Royal Rumbles are the ones to try and do different things. The best Money in the Bank ladder matches (or ladder matches in general) are the ones the become more than simply a collection of spots. A key element to the success of matches like this is that they achieve a higher level of creativity than other matches like it, and do more with their environment — figuratively or literally — to create something that stands out both in the moment and after the fact.

Using the surroundings in the Elimination Chamber isn’t exactly new. Rob Van Dam famously tried to do the Lord’s work in the very first match of its kind back in 2002. The pods themselves became weapons in an all-timer of a Chamber match in 2003, and a trend seemed to begin that all the best versions of this match used the environment in enthralling, violent, and constructive ways. In recent years though, particularly as the WWE put padding on the floor in one of their classic attempts to both have their cake and eat it at the same time (THE MOST DANGEROUS MATCH IN THE WORLD SATAN’S VACATION HOME IN HELL YOU MIGHT DIE IF YOU COMPETE IN THIS MATCH but also we made it safer :). yw.), these matches all started to run together.

This is not a match with that problem. You get three or four different and great top of the pod spots and Sami Zayn and Cesaro both climb real high on the wall. Zayn is also delightfully throttled around the inside of a pod when he tries to refuse to get out. One of the better uses of the Chamber in recent memory also comes when Uso is able to shove the door to the Chamber shut on Owens’ arm by the entrance after Sami Zayn has been eliminated, trapping him there for several superkicks in a row to eliminate him.

That’s the other thing about this match, and matches like it that excel.

On top of just Bryan, you have a number of unique personalities and stories to tell with them. The result is that while this is largely about Daniel Bryan and succeeds primarily on the back of both the story of his struggle and through his performance in the execution of that story, it’s also made interesting by all the other players in this match. The other protagonists of the story being different from Bryan in the admirable powerhouse Cesaro and straightforward shitkicker in Big Kev. His opposition being split between a coward in Zayn, a cruder and less refined big man in Corbin, and the aforementioned more opportunistic Jey Uso. They all act in unique ways and do unique things, many enhancing the impact that the other wrestlers in the match go on to have.

Zayn’s failure to do the opportunistic thing right and mostly eating shit because Owens sees him coming a mile away — having accidentally taught him most of these behaviors — makes Jey Uso’s tactics later in the match into a more impressive thing. He’s able to pull his trick on Owens where Zayn failed, and able to lie in the weeds and hit Cesaro at the exact right moment too, moments whose difficulty feels enhanced as a result of the failure of both Zayn and Corbin. Similarly, Corbin’s failure to stampede through the match on power alone lends credibility to Cesaro for getting farther with the same approach.

Last and perhaps most obviously, good characters and similarly endearing wrestlers like Owens and Cesaro falling victim to the bullshit attacks of Jey Uso makes it all the more rewarding when Daniel Bryan not only doesn’t fall victim to those tactics, but perseveres and overcomes.

The best matches like this can have a lot of different threads like this has, but they tend to succeed because there’s one constant thread running throughout, a focus on one man in particular, and this is no exception.

It’s doubly effective when said man is the greatest professional wrestler of all time.

This match belongs to Daniel Bryan. It’s not to say it’s a one man show, as all five others in this match contribute something, but this match succeeds because of Bryan’s performance. That ranges from the macro elements like his match-long selling of a small knee injury early on that grows bigger and more severe to micro level ones, like how great he is at everything mechanically. In a year like Bryan had in 2021 with all the different things he got to do, it’s hard to say something like this was his best performance (not even sure it’s top five!), but given how crucial he was to this and given what a great little package this wound up being, it’s among his most impressive.

In the end, Uso’s splash beats Cesaro after Uso snuck in once Cesaro had done real damage to Danielson’s leg, but Bryan survives it right after that. One off the pods eats Bryan’s knee, which one might imagine is a THE GAMBIT-style set up for another segment, but thrillingly, it is not. Bryan simply crawls up, guts through it, and takes Jey’s head off with the Busaiku Knee Strike for the win.

A lovely ending.

It’s not a dramatic ending, exactly, but I find this far more appropriate. It’s not 2014, it’s not 2019 for Kofi, none of that. Bryan is the best wrestler in the match, the best wrestler in the world, and despite the work of better wrestlers, Uso wasn’t able to take advantage. This is a match about Bryan overcoming, but not one in which he was the underdog. Surviving the bullshit and then winning as quickly as possible isn’t just the sort of learned behavior you’d expect from a guy with Bryan’s history, but also the most correct approach for the here and the now.

Not the greatest Chamber, but perhaps the one that best communicates the ways in which matches like this can succeed.

A match focusing on the greatest wrestler of all time will rarely ever fall short, but with the help of several other similarly superlative talents, air-tight construction, and the sort of performance where Bryan seems intent on reminding people who and what he is, this still stands among the better versions of this match there’s ever been.

***1/4

Sami Zayn vs. Kevin Owens, WWE NXT Takeover Rival (2/11/2015)

This was for Zayn’s NXT Title.

It’s more of an angle than a match but WHAT AN ANGLE.

The whole idea is that Sami Zayn isn’t totally recovered from the apron Powerbomb that ended a Takeover two months prior (this is a major move in WWE land, you either have to go with it or make up an insane theory that NXT robs independent wrestlers of their powers). He’s angry enough to take the match and enough to hold his own, but he’s so far from 100% that it doesn’t last and he can never win as a result.

As one of the greatest babyfaces to ever live, few have ever been better suited to this sort of doomed effort than Sami Zayn has.

To his credit, Kevin Owens is incredible here. He’s a guy I’ve been down on in recent years as a result of being the sort of guy who learns how little in the WWE is worth breaking your body for, especially once you’re established and making real money. It’s the sort of thing that sucks but that, were you in the same position, it’s hard to imagine not coming to the same conclusion about. Here though, none of that is present. He’s active in an urgent way, he’s mean in a way that doesn’t feel like someone going through the motions while you’re told on commentary that he’s mean. His facial expressions are perfect. He abuses the body and the neck and the head, it’s just this perfect attack.

Zayn is even better in response.

Early on, the urgency and desperation to this frantic babyface attack is absolutely perfect too. He’s so visibly angry and it comes through the screen, both because the story is simple that everyone can get it and also because Sami is unbelievably great at projecting both the frustration with the situation, the sense of heartbreak, and also the urgency that comes with so badly wanting to kick this guy’s ass. When the match turns and it’s clear that Zayn came back far too early, he’s even better at selling the damage. Few more wrestlers have ever existed who can play sympathetic as well as Zayn, and he’s near his best in this match. The wobbling, the inability to lift the bigger Owens, and the moments when he’s able to fight through this. It’s all completely perfect, as good a babyface performance as NXT has ever seen.

What makes this as a match and as an angle is that it’s never even close to being enough.

Zayn has this wonderful and beautiful flurry, a thing of fist pumping along at home beauty, but he’s so messed up that he can’t run for the Helluva Kick. He can’t do it. He can barely fight, but he can’t end the match. Owens recovers with a gross pop up Powerbomb, and while Zayn kicking out feels like a big deal, it doesn’t change much of anything. Owens just keeps doing the move, managing it three more times in a row, until the referee stops the match to hand him the title.

2015 sees a lot of repeated themes across all promotions, and while this wasn’t exactly Tanahashi/Styles, it was a great and exciting take on the Doomed Effort genre and another stellar entry into one of the longest running feuds in wrestling.

Another incredible little slice of pro wrestling, naturally only capable of coming out of NXT when nobody important is watching.

***

Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, WWE WrestleMania 37 Night Two (4/11/2021)

Alright, listen.

It’s not Steen Wolf. It’s not whatever pay per view it was in summer 2016 where these guys had an absolute barnburner. It’s not even Final Battle. All the same, it’s very cool to see them wrestle each other at WrestleMania. Logan Paul is involved and holy shit whatever, but it’s the WWE, you know. Gotta pay the fiddler one way or another, even if it happens after the match.

And thank god they did, because this was actually a ton of fun!

It’s a pure and total bombfest, playing all of the old hits that they’re allowed to play. Huge gross apron spots, Exploders into the corner, Helluva Kick spots, all of it. Add in some new wrinkles like their first ever match with Zayn working from anywhere near above, some of the newer stuff Owens has started doing as a babyface in the WWE. There’s even a great callback to that memorable 2016 pay per view match, but now with Zayn’s mania causing him to lose instead of the reversal as it was then. One Helluva isn’t enough, but when he tries the second, Big Kev is able to cut him off now, and wins with the Stunner. No complaints. Again, perfect can’t be the enemy of great, or at least where pro wrestling (especially in the WWE) is concerned.

It’ll never be what it was, but this was just so much fun, and such a nice thing to see happen, as was Big Kev then beating up Logan Paul after the match.

As far as WrestleMania slots go, “your old indie favorites get a feel-good win/moment/match” is a hell of a thing to have developed across these two nights between Cesaro’s win and performance and an endearing thing like this.

***

The Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen/El Generico, PWG DDT4 2013 (1/12/2013)

This was the finals of the PWG DDT4 tournament and for the PWG World Tag Team Titles.

More importantly than all of that, it’s El Generico’s final independent match.

This isn’t quit the OBAMA ERA INDIE FED flag waver that Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction is, but it’s so high up there. The reunion of the best babyface of his era with an old bully so as to take on new bullies, making up with the past without resolving anything just yet. A loss to the new evil, but a moral victory that makes it not matter all that much in the end, because it all feels so good and drops on your chest with the force of a megaton bomb. As good of a representation of the company as anything else, unfiltered PWG MAGIC.

Once more, Kevin Steen vs. The Young Bucks is a perfect match up. El Generico vs. The Young Bucks is right up there. Steen can’t help but jumping them at the start and forcing his sort of match on them, again dragging El Generico into one of his messes. Reuniting with Kevin Steen doesn’t mean changing the dynamic. It’s far far too late in the game for that. He is what he is, El Generico makes peace with it, and runs headfirst into it with him. But it’s been a year since this sort of thing really worked like it used to. Steen’s taken out when they slip in a belt shot and Generico once again has to do it on his own.

It’s classic formula stuff, but never loses the desperate and frantic nature that they start with. Steen’s hot tag is perfect, but they wind up right where they were the last time they met in PWG at the 2009 Battle of Los Angeles. Steen is helpless against the repeated single and double Supericks. El Generico winds up in the same spot, but he’s able to fight it. He’s also able to kick out of More Bang For Your Buck, because he’s a superhero and because it’s also not that great of a finish. Rick Knox goes on to get involved, and the match even finds a way to produce the only acceptable BRAINBUSTAHHHHH kick out ever by way of no referee being there initially, Knox running down, Knox being pulled out and then superkicking Matt Jackson, before going back in for the count then kicked out of. Should the move eever be kicked out of? Hey, probably not. But it’s his last match and they went above and beyond to still protect it, so it works. Matt comes back inside and they try the Package Piledriver fed into the Brainbuster, only for Matt to block the Brainbuster into a cradle to win.

It’s not a great finish.

I don’t really even like it all that much. I like the idea of it. The Young Bucks are always just barely tough enough to always remain slippery. It’s the core part of their entire deal, it’s a great concept. Not sure a Package Piledriver is the right move to use before a spot like that, as the result is no-selling a fucking piledriver, but like any minor issues with this, its heart is in the right place enough that it’s not worth expending emotional energy getting hot and bothered about. They get so so so so much right here, even carried by a great wind as it is, that it’s not worth moaning about .08% of a thing.

Most importantly, it’s a fucking heartbreaker. I’ve never hated The Young Bucks more than in that moment, so it’s impossible to ay the idea didn’t totally and completely work. It’s a thing they could only pull off with a wrestler and character like El Generico.

After the match, El Generico says farewell. First to Kevin Steen, who initially refuses the handshake in his frustration with another big loss, before coming back and doing the right thing in the last chance he’ll ever have to do so. It’s one of the biggest pops in PWG history, and like so much of this, it just feels good.

A fitting end to the long Young Bucks vs. Kevin Steen issue, even if the match was hardly about him in the end. More importantly, a fitting end to the story of Kevin Steen and El Generico. It’s another loss to the Young Bucks, but this time, nothing comes after. Nothing follows the hug, it’s Generico having his moment and Kevin Steen finally being okay with El Generico having his moment. It’s something like growth. They didn’t win, but they at least had this last night to finish all of that, and can part now from a much better place than they would have coming into this show. Imagine if PWG had stories though.

Following that, El Generico says goodbye to the world. The speech itself isn’t online for free on its own, but it comes at the end of this wonderful El Generico tribute video someone made following the release of this show.

It’s a big loss. As big of a loss as the indies have ever had, full stop. Generico might not have been Bryan Danielson or CM Punk or Samoa Joe, but there’s never been a babyface as consistently good and pure as El Generico. That matters a whole lot. There are a million good wrestlers, maybe a hundred great ones, but few ever as wholly likeable as El Generico, especially on a consistent level. I have loved wrestlers and specific babyface types in these roles again since Generico, but never quite so much. If you want to call one of those monolithic superworkers Ric Flair relative to their surroundings, you can feel free to do so. In that case, El Generico is Sting. Slowly but surely, he inches his way into everyone’s heart, and for the last two or three years, he’s been both the conscience and emotional core of independent wrestling in an irreplaceable way.

It’s a void that’s been empty in independent wrestling ever since this show and it’s one very unlikely to ever be filled again, for many different reasons.

Some people call this the end of PWG’s peak. I won’t go that far. So many of the hallmarks still remain, there is still so much great work to come. Kevin Steen becoming a babyface and people like Candice and pre-Q Drake sticking around and being elevated means that there is at least some emotional core to get behind and not this immediate degeneration into the soulless athletic masturbation that the company’s largely become since the end of 2015. But losing the very best wrestler in company history is still a hell of a thing.

I avoid standing out on a limb a lot on here because the entire idea of this series is reevaluation of things I love, but I will stand out on least stable limb in the world and say that El Generico is the best wrestler in the history of the promotion.

God damn.

I’ve seen it probably five to ten times already. It’s one of those snappy matches to go to that always livens me up a little. It’s frantic, it’s emotional, it packs a hell of a punch on every level that pro wrestling is supposed to, and there’s stunningly little fat on it. Up there with the 2011 DDT4 finals against Steen and Tozawa as the best non-gimmick Young Bucks match ever to this point, and when it’s all said and done, it might still be number one. The ending’s sad, but all endings are.

It is an emotional juggernaut the likes of which professional wrestling had rarely ever inflicted upon me.

Every time I see this match, it happens all over again.

Once more, it was a pleasure.

****