The Colony (Fire Ant/Soldier Ant) vs. Team FIST (Chuck Taylor/Icarus), CHIKARA Aniversario Yang (5/24/2009)

It’s another one of the Black Friday Sale commissions, this time from Eamonn. You too can pay me to write about wrestling matches and/or other media I suppose over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match, and a discussion in the DMs on anything more (or less?) than that. 

(for the record — I feel less gross about this as while Icarus was named in Speaking Out, CHIKARA is dead, and nobody is still booking him and either acting like it never happened or is something that can be moved on from with a quarter-hearted apology post. Even before that, it’s a career that wasn’t going anywhere at all. It’s not the same as the last match with these sorts of problems that I was paid to review.)

This was a Masks vs. Hair match.

It’s the end of a great little few month feud for CHIKARA and the highlight of one of their best years ever. Team FIST of Taylor, Gran Akuma, and Icarus had previously ended the career of poor Worker Ant in February in a match that kept The Colony out of King of Trios, won said King of Trios the next month with a stunning Taylor submission victory over Bryan Danielson, and then spent April in a series of altercations between the teams in which they tried to also unmask the two remaining Colony members. It’s a feud that easily probably could have lasted another few months, but CHIKARA in 2009 was experimenting in a lot of ways and one of them was trying to end a feud like this while it was white hot.

Given how enduringly great this is, it’s hard to fault the decision.

There’s a certain sort of CHIKARA match that I think many of you know if if you’ve watched the promotion for any length of time, or even paid attention to it in a tertiary sort of a way. Matches fought between less experienced wrestlers and colorful characters, typically full of weird little choices and errors both in execution and construction. However, what they lack in a mechanical sense is made up for by an overwhelming sense of heart. For all the weaknesses, they’re still matches with such a strong emotional core, often paying off long running themes and stories in wholly satisfying ways. It’s commonly seen in big matches like the Icarus/Shane Storm 2005 YLC final or apuestas matches like Jigsaw/Icarus, Akuma/Shane Storm, and Tim Donst/Hydra, to name a few. The best and perhaps most widely heralded match of this genre is the famous Fire Ant vs. Vin Gerard match from 2008 Young Lions Cup, in which an unbelievable emotional climax happened, but not without some mechanical faults and real Choices (a Burning Hammer no-sell) thrown in there as well.

This is one of those matches.

I didn’t remember it being like that, but there’s a lot to not love here. Icarus and Soldier Ant opening the match doing fighting spirit spots off of German Suplexes, Icarus like in general, execution throughout that’s hardly perfect outside of all-time great Fire Ant, and a somewhat odd ending as Fire Ant simply repeats the Beach Break again after a kick out to win. There’s also a big piledriver spot off the apron through the table that someone comes back from, which is handled JUST well enough to be fine, but is also the sort of thing I’m just never going to love. Couple that with a CHIKARA crowd that’s always on the border between neat and unbearable landing more on the latter here with the “HOLY POOP” chant (see, they can’t swear!) and rooting on Fire Ant with a cutesy “HE’S ON FIRE” chant.

However, there’s still something about this that still works.

It would be an easy match to dismiss if it wasn’t also so great.

Of course, they play those old CHIKARA hits, and they have very rarely been played as triumphantly as they are here.

To echo the injury to Worker Ant months prior, Taylor takes Soldier Ant out of the match early on with an Awful Waffle off the apron through the table. Fire Ant survives a lot without it ever quite reaching a point of parody, including the low blow that won one of their previous matches as well and Chuck’s Cross Crab that made even the greatest of all time surrender. Soldier Ant is able to come back and just barely make a few key saves, and take out the interfering Akuma. While not my favorite thing, his comeback is largely limited to a few moves and then cutting off Icarus outside with maybe his best dive ever, this absolutely furious saluting elbow suicida. The new Green Ant is joined by a debuting Carpenter Ant to keep Akuma back, and Fire Ant is able to go on yet another roll in the end. Taylor survives one Beach Break, but Fire lands a sliding kick, and hits a second for the win.

Taylor and Icarus sit while they’re shaved bald, and they look like the angriest and most humiliated people in the world in that moment.

It’s perfect.

Independent of any of the wonderful story elements or emotionally satisfying payoffs/developments, they also do a lot right mechanically to enhance what works about it on paper. It’s a match wrestled at a fairly blistering pace and with very few missteps. It’s one of those stunningly confident matches that mostly makes that confidence look earned. There’s very little time wasted at all getting right into it and it’s not a match that ever feels as though they’re trying to fill time until [x]. Fire Ant is particularly great and, you guessed it, a real house of his first name when he’s able to come back. Even before that, there’s a real urgency to the offense of the Team FIST duo, particularly with some of the Taylor vs. Fire Ant exchanges. Their run against each other at the end is particularly urgent and desperate and in spite of the issue with the finishing choice itself, they’re really really tremendous together. (There’s not too much point praising Icarus, but he’s a very capable participant in this and shows why, once upon a time, it was very fun to troll people on a message board by claiming Icarus was better than their favorite wrestler(s).) In general when one looks at this from a little farther back, everyone in this is the best versions of themselves that exists. Two real dirtbags playing it perfectly and making their downfall feel all the more thrilling, and yet another killer performance from all-time great babyface Fire Ant.

Despite all the flaws, like always, it’s one of those matches that just sort of comes together in a perfect moment, creating the best version of itself that could ever exist.

The CHIKARA Magic, in action.

Sometimes you do, in fact, have to hand it to them.

***1/2`

 

Jay Lethal/Adam Cole/TJ Perkins vs. The Colony (Fire, Soldier, & Green Ant), ROH UNITY (4/28/2012)

HOOT AND A HALF.

It’s a pure sprint from start to finish and it all goes off without a hitch. The Colony is an all time great trio, but this is a little different for them, being like a pure Dragon System style mad dash to the finish line.

The three ROH guys get plugged in here and there. They’re fine, they hit their marks, but they could probably be any three competent wrestlers and this match would have been exactly as great as it was. The ROH team tries to play in the format and work as fast and loose as the Colony does, and they just can’t. They get distracted by legal man rules and lose track of things. TJ rolls up Fire Ant at the end, only for Green Ant to sneak in and roll them over, so Fire Ant’s cradle pins TJ Perkins.

It’s played off as close, but on a mechanical ass X’s and O’s level, The Colony have them at the end and always had them. The ROH team hangs in there, but they play a game to which they barely understand the rules and pay for it.

One of the most fun ROH matches of the year, not that anyone will ever or should ever go out of their way to see it besides the deeply disturbed and/or big Colony fans.

***

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,

***

Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw vs. The Colony (Fire Ant & Soldier Ant), CHIKARA Creatures From The Tar Swamp (3/13/2011)

This was for Quack and Jigsaw’s CHIKARA Campeonatos Des Parejas, and accordingly, a best two of three falls match. 

This is the semi main event, but it’s an all time babyface vs. babyface CHIKARA dream tag. Like the other title matches in this reign, it’s a brutally efficient match. Quack gets right into it with Soldier Ant and goes directly into some harder mat stuff, directly putting The Colony in a more sympathetic role, or at least clearly shaping the match with him working directly from above. The first fall is entirely Quackenbush vs. Soldier Ant, which is really interesting and novel. In addition to simply being good as hell, it constantly pushes the story forward. Quack tries to get Solider to go to the ropes or tag out or something to admit defeat, but he hangs tough, and surprises Quack with a chickenwing into a crucifix pin to go 1-0! Quack’s facial selling is again top notch, and pushes the entire thing up just a little bit. He’s pissed, surprised, but also just a little bit impressed. 

He starts the second fall with so much more urgency and a little desperation too. Fire Ant and Jigsaw are able to pick up the pace, and it’s a perfect kind of good guys on good guys action. Super fancy and smooth arm drags and headscissors, constantly trying to top each other, and always getting a little bit rougher. Jigsaw is like Quack here, just a little outmanned at the approach he takes. Quackenbush stays more aggressive when he gets inside again against Soldier Ant. The troop can’t help but making a mistake, akin to blowing the signing bonus on a Dodge Charger, and he tries the same combination that pinned Quack moments ago. Quackenbush is frustrated and desperate, but he’s still the master, and he blocks it a second time into a modification on a Peterson Roll to put it to 1-1, and getting something back from Soldier Ant. 

It’s in the third fall that they get much more serious. Jigsaw brings the intensity too, and we finally get the big Fire Ant vs. Quackenbush exchanges that you (I) came into this really looking forward to. Quacksnbush suffers damage to the left arm, specifically the elbow or forearm, at a point taking a spill outside. He’s smart enough to sell it for the rest of the match despite The Colony being too respectful to ever go for it, and it adds just a little something extra when he has problems with lifting Fire and Soldier because of it. A few really well executed nearfalls and counters get the match just a little further. There’s one really delightful moment where Quackenbush breaks up the CHIKARA Special on Jigsaw by pulling Soldier Ant into the original CHIKARA Special, which just about sums up this delightful little match. Late in the match, Fire Ant finally does aim some of his kicks at the arm, and the refusal to do it earlier makes it mean just a little something extra when he goes for it here. Jigsaw has to carry it after that, but he has a big big one up his sleeve and defeats Fire Ant after an avalanche-style Torture Rack Bomb.

So many times in these reviews, things don’t age as well as I would have hoped. It’s sort of how it goes. This is the rare reversal of that, the match that’s even better than I remembered. A real epic, but done so efficiently. Virtually no fat on this thing. What isn’t essential to the story is simply just incredibly cool, and it’s this beautiful little pocket epic. The CHIKARA fan’s answer to The Steiners vs. Sting and Lex Luger.

***1/2

BDK (Claudio Castagnoli & Tursas) vs. The Colony (Fire Ant & Soldier Ant), CHIKARA Clutch of Doom (2/20/2011)

The Colony looks both for revenge from the big losses to the BDK in the spring of 2010, and also for their third point towards a title match against Quackenbush and Jigsaw. 

This is the most fearsome BDK combination possible, so our heroes simply go for it. Why not go for it? They catch them by surprise but in their failure to immediately wrap it up, Tursas and Claudio can recover and begin to tear them apart. Tursas will always remain an unfinished project, but his size already accomplishes half of the distance he has to travel. Everything he does is legitimate and fairly mean because he’s so much bigger and taller than everyone else. When he’s not in there, the best wrestler in the company can do his part, so the control segment isn’t bad at all. 

It’s become sort of a joke among a few friends that Fire Ant is the greatest of a generation, but genuinely, he is one of the best babyfaces of his time, and his hot tag is no different here. He’s crisp, he does cool things, and he once again earns the name he has. He works with such an energy and fervor, and he does it constantly. He’s one of the easiest wrestlers to support in the history of independent wrestling. There are very few better babyfaces, and if you were ever paying attention, the success he’s had without the mask isn’t at all a surprise. As good as Soldier Ant vs. Tursas is, the real joy of this match is that it’s one of the only chances we ever had to see Claudio against Fire Ant for any substantial measure of time. Fire Ant is the best babyface of his generational group, and Castagnoli is the greatest base in wrestling history that I’ve ever seen. It’s a match made in heaven, and it’s absolutely nuts that they never got to have a singles match. 

This is less a proper epic though, and more of a set up for Claudio’s final match the next month against Eddie Kingston. When some of those little BDK scamps get involved to try and screw The Colony over yet again, Eddie Kingston makes his way down. Jakob Hammermaier walks into the Backfist to the Future outside, and in his surprise, Castagnoli turns around into a crossbody from Fire Ant. It’s just enough to keep him down for a three count. Fire Ant gets a big upset, The Colony gets both a little something back and a shot at the titles again, and it’s a little bonus to try and re-educate fans that anything can win a match in the right spot.

***

Mike Quackenbush/Jigsaw/Fire Ant/Soldier Ant vs. Hallowicked/Team FIST/Amasis, DGUSA Enter the Dragon (7/25/2009)

There is at least one great match on this show, as the CHIKARA multi man doesn’t miss at this point. 2009 is arguably the peak of CHIKARA as a roster, if not as a creative endeavor, so everyone in this can go. Yes, everyone. Sleep on all-time level dirtbag Icarus at your own peril. This is a perfect showcase, and a great bit as CHIKARA steals the show away from a troupe of guys that made their bones working matches like this. A fast and inventive formula tag that always stays exciting. CHIKARA did a lot of these in 2003-5 before their guys were really ready and a few more in recent memory before that crop is ready, but this is the time where they absolutely nailed it. Every person in this match is doing unique stuff relative to everyone else in the match, and it feels like the winners win for a reason. Jigsaw and Hallowicked know each other well enough to even each other out. The two teams even each other out, so nobody can use teamwork in and of itself to really get an edge. Quackenbush has the experience edge on everyone though and keeps doing these tricky things that nobody else can or directing traffic for his side in a way that nobody on the oddball heel team is doing. The best DG tags aren’t just incredible spotfests, they’re actually moving forward with something, and this is CHIKARA’s best take on it. Real frantic dive train at the end to cap off a great end run, ending when Jigsaw hits Icarus with the Jig & Tonic to win.

This show was meant to showcase the best wrestling in the world in front of a new crowd (which seems like a comical thing to call 2009 Dragon Gate, but I’ll allow it) and wittingly or not, this match made sure that happened. 

***1/4