WALTER vs. Timothy Thatcher, WXW Broken Rulz XVIII (11/17/2018)

(photo credit to GD Photography.)

One of the last pieces of WXW Magic.

Rather than just throw them against each other yet again, in a match up that peaked ten months before this and that virtually everyone seeing this has seen before, WXW instead does some old WXW shit, and gives them reason and purpose.

The match is preceded by a great segment, where Thatcher makes an offhand comment to someone else about WALTER always being elsewhere after he moved to Germany to focus on WXW and Ringkampf, leading to an eventual argument where a whole lot of buried stuff comes up in a real organic way. WALTER always beating Thatcher whenever the match isn’t AMBITION rules, WALTER getting mad about Tim in a t-shirt for their other stable Schadenfreude while he has an RK shirt on before Tim asks why he still wears the Ringkampf logo on his gear while WALTER changed to his solo Ring General deal, WALTER still treating Thatcher like his second in command, all of this. A match gets agreed to, and in two or three minutes, the match immediately means a whole lot more than any other match they’ve ever had, not in spite of the fact that it isn’t for any prize or part of some tournament, but because it’s only now this personal issue.

WXW’s heyday is really more 2016ish through mid 2018, but this is the sort of thing that, at their best, they did better than everyone else, with the match to back it all up.

At first glance, it is classic WALTER vs. Thatcher, with all the sorts of things you expect and want to see out of these two. The hard grappling, the even harder striking, perfect escalation from the ground up, some real tremendous nearfalls and dramatic late match moments, the realism above virtually everything else. The match is great in the ways that it is always great, and given any opportunity moving forward, probably always would be great in the future.

There’s a small change here though between that and the usual, and it makes a significant difference.

Where as every other meeting between these two is a professional sort of a meeting from start to finish, this is not. Beyond just that there is no prize to be won, there’s a difference in tone and feeling. It would be wrong to say a WALTER/Thatcher match never got a little mean or angry before, but it was always in spurts and something that the match kind of had to coax out of the two of them. It was always a competitive kind of anger, the sort that goes away after an immediate moment. The same cannot be said here, as it takes almost nothing for it to come out, and when it’s out, it never goes away. Primarily from WALTER. It’s not just one thing here or there, it’s repeated shots after a rope break, meaner punts to the back than usual, grinding of elbows on the face in moments where that might not have happened six months earlier. Thatcher’s no angel himself, working up throwing closed fists in a rarity, but

It is not the best WALTER vs. Thatcher match, but it’s one of my favorites of the bunch, because this is the only one that feels personal.

Ringkampf does not immediately die. They’ll team through the rest of the year. They’ll have a final dream tag team match about four months after this before it goes away. But this is the sort of match that, effectively, ends the team. You watch this and it’s no surprise that within four months, they’ll never again be tag team partners, because you can watch the team disintegrate in real time here, both because of the argument shown before the match, but also because of how nasty and dirty this gets. No single weapon is used, they’re outside the ring for maybe thirty seconds, but between the performances in the match and between how close they had seemed for the last two years, there’s a spiritual violence here that feels as powerful as anything else.

The most important thing here, and why this match is my second favorite of them all, is that these elements of the match eventually find themselves working together, not only to enhance each other, but to explain how the match unfolds like it does. WALTER’s anger, on top of being a very unattractive quality in the face of both Thatcher’s demeanor and the quality of his arguments leading into the match, also leads to his undoing. He’s a sloppy fighter in the way that he isn’t in virtually any other match, and Thatcher waits him out until he can really get him, and attacks with the sort of energy and babyface fire and intent that you don’t often get to see out of Thatcher nearly enough, for any number of reasons.

Once WALTER slips and begins lashing out, Thatcher finds his openings, and where WALTER’s anger causes him to make mistakes and to act recklessly, Thatcher’s anger makes him a better wrestler.

Following the rare closed fists, the survival of the big WALTER moves, and seeming to move around him at will in the closing moments to really rub the lesson in, Thatcher finally gets him down on the ground. Thatcher turns the usual Fujiwara Armbar into a double chickenwing for the pin, and it feels as much like a victory for technique as it does a pure moral judgment.

WALTER refuses a handshake or any accord after the pinfall. Thatcher puts the Ringkampf scarf on the mat and tries to wave the big man in, only for WALTER to drop his Ringkampf scarf on the floor and walk away through the crowd.

Not only a great match mechanically and narratively and spiritually and all of that, and a great feeling match at the very end, but the birth of one of the great bits as well. When confronted with adversity and when bested by his partner for the first time (under normal rules) and given the olive branch, WALTER instead drops the symbol of their team on the floor behind him, and walks away.

Thatcher finally wins, and in the process, a Coward is born.

***1/3

Aussie Open vs. Calamari Thatch Kings, PROGRESS Chapter 78 (11/11/2018)

This was for Davis and Fletcher’s PROGRESS Tag Team Titles.

Or, more interestingly, SCHADENFREUDE explodes.

By the strength of talent alone, this turns out for the best, but it easily could have not been great. It easily could have been a match I really didn’t like, but that just so happened to also feature a very good Thatcher performance.

The idea behind the thing is that Fletcher comes in with a taped up knee, and hurts it on a move early on, and they use it to try and harm the tank of the team in Mark Davis. It’s a classic kind of reversal of the expected thing, and while I won’t evoke certain matches spoken up by date alone, it’s the sort of strategy you’d see in a lot of those matches. The problem is that Fletcher is not some great leg seller, and when you add the natural Britishness of the entire thing in (yes, half the match is Australian, but in wrestling terms, Australia is basically Britain II), it very easily could have gone less than ideally.

However, it didn’t!

It’s a delicate thing, the balance the match tries to strike, but they get it just exactly right. The trick is that, while Fletcher’s leg matters, Thatcher and Brookes rarely actually work it over. It’s merely an injury that exists in the match and that they utilize in that far more interesting way previously spoken about. So, while his selling is far from perfect and, to put it lightly, inconsistent, something about Thatcher and Brookes never targeting it makes it go down a hundred times easier. No real punishment has been put on it, so a little hobble or stutter step here or there for a nagging and lingering thing feels right. When no damage is inflicted on it, offensively speaking, it is very easy to simply remember that, sometimes, the human body is just an odd and deceitful little beast.

With that removed, they are free to simply do a lot of cool stuff, and again, they walk this specific tightrope as perfectly as possible, avoiding anything that makes me groan and tune out, which is normally a real problem for like half of all Aussie Open matches. Davis and Thatcher clobber each other, the lanky weird boys do lanky weird boy business, and it just all happens to work. They even get the finish right enough, as rather than asking me to believe either of the champions could ever defeat Timothy Thatcher, they instead come up with a great quick one involving the malnourished children instead.

Brookes finally goes for the knee a little harder at the end, but Fletcher immediately rolls through a Kondo Clutch try into a prawn hold to escape with the upset.

Good wrestling, almost in spite of its natural impulses.

three boy

Timothy Thatcher vs. Minoru Suzuki, OTT 4th Anniversary Show (10/13/2018)

(photo credit to @_janice_janice_ on Twitter)

OTT has had a banner year in 2018.

Truly, maybe one of the best wrestling promotions in the world in 2018. No other company in the world had better hype videos this year than OTT, and it translated into some of the best main event atmosphere anywhere in the world. Maybe that statement is a 2018 YEAR IN LISTS spoiler and maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Part of the reason I don’t know is the same reason that, despite all that praise, virtually every major OTT thing involves at least one person (typically one of two, and occasionally two of two) person I do not want to write about. It has away of effecting some of the wrestling too — although with some of the WALTER matches, not as much as you’d think because of how great he still is — so it isn’t just that I find glorifying it to be distasteful, but this is really the only OTT match I plan on talking about at all.

A fun joke, in the spirit of the [REDACTED] idea, is that OTT never happened and that no Irish wrestling ever existed. As opposed to my Vichy France comments from years back about BTE ass fans or whatever, this is a far more respectable impulse, turning your back entirely on the fervent support of wrestlers and a company that, say idk, provided these monsters some sort of haven, and that you also used to love.

However, there is one exception, one very great match to happen in this promotion with nobody who it feels weird to write about or praise, and it is this match.

On paper, it is what it is.

The touring Minoru Suzuki match, and all that comes with it. Some light mat riffing, strike exchanges, offense for the other guy, before Suzuki wins with the Gotch-style Piledriver. Everybody goes home happy.

More often than not, I don’t enjoy this all that much. Or at least I rarely think it results in a great match. It’s a fun time live, seeing the Minoru Suzuki show up close and everything, but it rarely deviates from the routine, and increasingly as Suzuki has opened up to more and more independent dates, the opposition gets worse and worse. It’s a lovely little racket he has going on, putting on anywhere from a D+ to B level effort while barely selling anything from some indie goof before going home. Respect. It just rarely results in anything either great or all that interesting (and generally, those go hand in hand).

Like how no other wrestling happened in Ireland in the 2010s though, this is also the exception to that statement.

It’s pretty great.

The match still is what it is, but the key lies with the performances.

Mostly, it just means that Suzuki obviously has way more respect for Timothy Thatcher than he does for [pick your least favorite U.S. indie nerd, pretend I said them, could single out like 20 guys here conceivably], and it shows. He gives him more of everything. Longer time on the mat early on, without ever truly dominating him. More strikes against him in a more drawn out process. More time at the end, not just immediately getting the Gotch off at the first try. Most of all, just a larger and more pronounced effort.

Timothy Thatcher is, unsurprisingly, even better.

Every sell feels appropriate and perfect, almost every shot rules, and all of his riffing on the mat in the first half is outstanding. Thatcher has a bunch of great small little moments in all areas mentioned above, as you would expect, and for as much as Suzuki does the usual with a little more aplomb and intensity than usual, Thatcher is the reason that this match is great. Above everything else, Thatcher has what every other Suzuki indie opponent feels like they’re lacking, in that he never ever feels like he is excited for be in the ring with him or like it is his honor. Thatcher carries himself like a star too, and so where one thing might feel like a put-on or Suzuki lowering himself by doing it against some C-level local kid on the upswing, when done against Timothy Thatcher, it feels like a much bigger deal. That’s the key, really. Everyone else feels like they’re excited to win the lottery for getting a money mark Suzuki match, but against Timothy Thatcher, it feels like a genuine battle of equals.

Suzuki still wins with the Gotch-style Piledriver, as he always going to.

This one’s about the journey though. It’s not a wholly unfamiliar one, but on the way to an obvious destination, there are just enough new sights and sounds and slight little detours to make it into a far more satisfying trek than usual.

If the country of Ireland only ever got to host one match this decade, I’m glad they made it count.

***1/3

Ringkampf vs. Lucha Brothers, WXW World Tag Team League 2018 Night Two (10/6/2018)

(Photo credit to @thedaytodave on Twitter)

This was part of the 2018 World Tag Team League tournament.

Generally speaking, I do not like the Lucha Brothers.

Rey Fenix, individually, is awesome. I love him as a singles wrestler. He had one of the best matches of 2018 on his own, he’s had one of the best matches of the decade on his own. Penta El 0M is also fine. He is like 90% a Lucha Underground creation, almost all aura and vibes, but he can occasionally wander his way into other great stuff, and the aura and vibes do a whole lot for more casual fans, so whatever, I get it. Combining them makes them both worse, and rounds out the fun edges of both wrestlers. Penta is turned into a babyface and Fenix is less interesting in a team. On top of that, both are fairly stupid wrestlers and putting them together makes it worse. Lucha Bros matches tend to be all about the fireworks, which is not at all bad, but they’re bad at having matches like that as a tag team. These matches tend to be poorly constructed and full of a lot of real silly stuff. They’re not only a bad tag team because they have a lot of bad matches, but because the team itself is a waste of the gifts and talents of the two wrestlers in it.

However, they meet the two best wrestlers in the world in a tag team match, and none of that matters.

WALTER and Thatcher don’t exactly do the thing that happens with the real great singles matches either Lucha Brother has had, where someone with a stronger will simply forces them into their match and plugs in their stuff around what is always going to happen. There is still a little bit of a Lucha Brothers match somewhere in here that peeks through at a few points, like when we have to watch deeply unnatural things like WALTER taking a Lungblower or Tim Thatcher selling a superkick. However, because this is still such a Ringkampf match at its core, it’s close enough to count.

Ringkampf turns the match into a battle of philosophies, and go about smothering these two and turning all their wonderful and dizzying offense into not only — like those great Fenix singles matches — into a desperate survival tactic, but also into individual statements of their own. You rarely get a match up this different, where the two sides are doing not only entirely different things, but where it would be inconceivable to see a single inch of overlap between the sides. It’s a rare thing this match has going for it, where very casually, every single thing that happens feels like a fight over what kind of a match this can be, and to their credit, they make nearly as much out of that gift as they possibly could.

The flash and the sizzle eventually runs out, and when it does, Tim and WALT are there, in the ways they always have been. Thatcher drags one down into the Fujiwara Armbar, and as WALTER catches the other into a real mother fucker of a Boston Crab, Thatcher rolls his man into a double chickenwing for the win. The old ways, once again, work better than anything else. That’s why they’re the old ways.

A perfect ideological statement just as much as it is a great wrestling match.

***1/4

Ringkampf vs. Jonathan Gresham/Chris Brookes, WXW World Tag Team League 2018 Night One (10/5/2018)

(credit to GD Photography)

This was part of the 2018 World Tag Team League tournament.

Rumor has it, as heard from the fans from the world famous Turbinenhalle, there’s only one Tim Thatcher.

Unsurprisingly, this is very casually kind of a great match.

Ringkampf is put upon by two very different types of annoying guys — tall British wrestling nerd and short American grappling freak with the most pronounced Napoleon complex in the sort — and they spend the match both punishing them and struggling against them in equal measure.

The result is a kind of perfect wrestling.

Deeply annoying twerps going out of their way to aggravate the real stars and are constantly punished for it. WALTER pummels them into dust, Thatcher does the same but also with a series of disgusting joint locks, and the two different types of weird guys eventually find their way to a more even match. They do it through that deeply upsetting combination of luck, nonsense, and actual skill, and at the end of it, Gresham against both Ringkampf member is exactly as great as it always was. Arguably doubly so, now that they adjust for the German audience and no longer ask WALTER and Thatcher to be the pure antagonists.

Following all of the delightful owning of these weird goons, WALTER misfires and wipes out Thatcher. Original CCK manages to keep the big fella out on the floor, and off of the misfire, Gresham gets Timo in the Octopus Stretch and between that, WALTER’s shot, and a series of frantic hammer fists to the side of the face, the worst guys in the world pull off the upset, leaving The Coward with something to answer for.

A deeply upsetting result, but an eminently sensible road there.

***1/4

WALTER vs. Timothy Thatcher, PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2018 Stage Two (9/15/2018)

(as always with PWG, photo credit to Mikey Nolan Photography)

This was a 1st Round match in the 2018 Battle of Los Angeles tournament.

Previously, when discussing WALTER vs. Sammy Guevara on the final PWG show in the famous American Legion #308, I talked at length about the magic of that venue, and even though that Peak PWG period had been over for a few years at that point, the power that the simple location had. We don’t need to get into all of that again, you can just click on that link above, but it comes to mind here.

Because as much as that was a match that was a fitting send off to the building, and as much as it and hundreds of others benefited from that atmosphere, this is just as much a match that I think is hurt from the removal of that atmosphere, especially when you look at what they did earlier in the year in a building with a real lively crowd and a feeling to it. It is specifically the sort of match that would be a hundred times better in Reseda, a classical physical and more grounded riff session that isn’t always a PWG Style Match but that would work in a smaller room like Post #308 and that tended to win over those crowds by the end, but that has none of those advantages in this much larger and nicer venue and in front of a crowd that feels like your ultra PWG style crowd, here for one sort of thing really. The atmosphere is real different, and this is a match seemingly maybe never designed for what it used to be, but one that would have worked so much better in that atmosphere, and the match is real hurt because of that shift, and the lack of what used to surrounded matches like it.

Or rather, it is a match that’s hurt because it feels like there is a lack of any atmosphere.

WALTER and Timothy Thatcher, during their time together and as frequent opponents as maybe the two best wrestlers alive and certainly on the independents (2017-2018), wrestled in WXW, PROGRESS, and now PWG. They will have an EVOLVE match like a year after this, deep into Sub-Developmental Era EVOLVE, but this is the match that, despite the logo, feels like their actual EVOLVE match. Conducted in a beautiful but spiritually hollow venue, the crowd blacked out Gabe style, a general sense that this does not matter truly, and received to what feels like near-silence.

Something about it feels off.

The feeling that comes to mind is nothing from wrestling, but another thing from real sports. Watching PWG at the Globe has the same feeling as typing Los Angeles Chargers or Las Vegas Raiders. The brain simply rejects it, and my first instinct is to never do it. There is something manufactured and produced about it. For people from Ohio, maybe a little like watching the first few Baltimore Ravens seasons, except I don’t have any anger about it or feeling like I, personally, have been cheated, because there was nothing anyone could have done to stop it. It’s all the trademarks and hallmarks in a setting that has none of the same energy to it at all, and that feels like everything else. These feel less like PWG shows and more like prehistoric Prestige Wrestling or West Coast Pro ones, there is a spiritual incorrectness to all of it.

These things do not belong together.

However, you can’t say that about WALTER and Timothy Thatcher, who even in a weird match that drives the disconnect home like nothing else has since the move to The Globe, find their way into delivering some of that spiritually correct professional wrestling.

WALTER and Thatcher might not have stuff that tends to make all of their matches great — the environment and importance of the PROGRESS main event, the narrative might of their WXW work, the stylistic difference of their AMBITION matches — but spending eighteen minutes riffing around is good enough. I don’t say that about a lot of pairings, but not a lot of other pairings are this good at everything they choose to do. Hard grappling, harder striking, stellar transitions, fantastic reactions to everything, and a clear eye towards the vague technique vs. power idea behind every match they have, which everything always seems to come back to.

Once again — and as should be expected from a company as uncreative and unoriginal and intent on simply playing someone else’s hot hand as post-peak PWG — the power wins out. WALTER keeps throwing Thatcher off of him and into the ground, and eventually wins with one of his many Lariats.

This is definitely not the WALTER vs. Thatcher match from 2018 I would recommend, probably not even the second best (wait until November), but with wrestlers this great, any time it happens, it’s worth it. Even the first show of a quadruple shot ass 2000s IWA Mid-South version of WALTER vs. Thatcher, bouncing ideas off of each other in a match nobody will remember compared to the other stuff, still has a whole lot of value.

Put the two best wrestlers in the world in a ring together for eighteen minutes, and bizarre and offputting atmosphere or not that also forces one to think about the impermanence of all things in general, it’s gonna be worth the time.

***1/4

 

Ringkampf vs. Shingo Takagi/Ilja Dragunov, PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2018 Stage One (9/14/2018)

(as with almost all PWG photography, credit to Mikey Nolan Photography.)

Hell yeah, dude.

Shingo Takagi, more or less, gets plugged into a WXW tag from two weeks prior that I would have talked about if not for Reasons, and while he is not the most natural fit in the world, opting for action above all else while the other three tend to favor a slower build and will occasionally get down on the ground even if that is not the favorite approach of the PWG semi faithful, the match still winds up whipping a lot of ass through a kind of sheer force of talent and force of will.

It never totally comes together as all that it could be.

However, given the astonishingly high ceiling implicit in the parentheses behind all it could be, I am perfectly happy with all that it is.

Four of the best wrestlers alive spend twenty plus minutes walloping the hell out of each other in a bunch of different combinations. With the gift of retrospect, it is clear that WALTER vs. Shingo Takagi will happen elsewhere on this weekend of shows given that we only get a tease here, but it is as fun as you imagine. The real surprise is that Thatcher vs. Takagi is also unbelievably fun, as Thatcher wrestles a more striking-based match than usual, and keeps up with Takagi not only in style, but in a kind of hard-nosed and ultra stubborn spirit as well.

As for the Ilja stuff, at this point, you know what you get.

No new ground is broken here, in terms of him against Thatcher and definitely not against WALTER, but it‘s all about as great as you would expect. 

The best thing the match really does is creating a feeling that this is all build up to create challengers and/or later-in-the-tournament opponents for WALTER, and the match feeling as if a Shingo/Dragunov win is assured, only to then switch it all at the last moment.

Ilja keeps finding his way out of the Fujiwara Armbar of our hero Tim Thatcher, only for Thatcher to adjust a last one into a double chickenwing on Dragunov for the upset.

The best PWG x Fortune Dream collab of 2018.

***+

Jonathan Gresham vs. Timothy Thatcher, NOVA Pro Harlem Nights (7/28/2018)

A long awaited rematch, nearly four years in the making.

Sadly, it is in NOVA Pro, a future punchline ass indie fed that is beneath both wrestlers at this point in their careers (one regularly on ROH television, the other in demand all across the country and Europe), and so it does not really get to be the sequel that their 2014 Beyond Wrestling match probably deserved. That match was one for the absolute maniacs, a show conducted by two wrestlers who needed to have a great match, whereas this is something a lot lighter, despite retaining many of the same qualities.

In terms of the raw mechanics, I feel like it almost doesn’t even need to be said at this point, but yeah man, Thatcher and Gresham are great at everything. The grappling is some of the best on the indies, managing to be smooth, tight, and mean all at once. The striking is all ideal, the selling — particularly once Thatcher has his leg hurt about halfway in — is all phenomenal, and they do a few things in the closing moments that I genuinely never would have expected. The performances are what elevates this match above simply the idea of what it is on paper, as you would expect from two of the very best wrestlers in the world.

While not being the year’s outright best version of an IWA Mid-South midcard version of a match — which is to say less than it could be, guys clearly trying to deliver something of quality without using their best stuff or risking their bodies too much on a smaller show in front of a smaller crowd, but still genuinely very good to great — it is still absolutely that kind of a match. As always, any match in this vein that is successful is something that I find deeply impressive. Not just anyone can have a great match when they aim for the stars, great is great is great, but it feels easier to me as a viewer to achieve something spectacular when you are throwing it all out there in a highly ambitious effort, with zero restraint. Succeeding and having a great match when simply riffing it out, or filling space, or any other phrase you would like to use to functionally denote the same kind of a thing, is something that I find maybe even more impressive. 

It’s always the casual shows of power that get me, you know?

Truly, this is a match about power.

Like their first match, despite never getting anywhere near in depth as that match, so much of this is about Gresham slowly getting to Thatcher, and succeeding in the end.

Gresham cannot even move Thatcher for long swaths of the time, either through attempts at takedowns or chopping him down. It’s played for some laughs here more than it was before, and it genuinely works. Thatcher is an outstanding straight man, and while not playing a full on stooge heel, Gresham eating a little shit is always a little fun on account of how serious he is most of the time as a protagonist. It also makes it just a little more satisfying when Gresham begins to break him down when the knee work pans out successfully, all of the smug eye rolling and Jimming the camera making it just a little easier to root against Thatcher (if you are capable of such a thing, I guess. I am not, so I am just assuming.).

The real impressive stuff comes at the very end.

Jonathan Gresham eventually gets the big guy out and turns a tope onto his back into a Rear Naked Choke. Thatcher super impressively holds him there while getting onto the apron and climbing through the ropes, but when Gresham grapevines a leg around Thatcher’s damaged left thigh and knee Holly Holm style, he collapses in it. Unable to get back up because of the knee and the Octopus finally again displaying the qualities that name is supposed to suggest, Thatcher’s size has no value anymore. On the ground, anybody can get choked out, and when Thatcher passes out, Gresham pulls off the upset.

It is not an especially high bar to clear, but one of the best matches in NOVA Pro history.

***

Daniel Makabe vs. Timothy Thatcher, 3-2-1 BATTLE! Hot Wet Seattle Summer 2 (7/13/2018)

Nearly one year following the breakout hit, Thatcher returns to 3-2-1 BATTLE!.

While their first match has a place in history, at least in our weird little corner of this thing, and their third match is, to me, clearly the best one, this second meeting has always been my favorite.

In the year since Makabe’s star making underdog victory, he’s become a real rotten little prick, as discussed previously. Everything Thatcher gave to him a year ago feels like something Tim ought to regret a year later, inadvertently legitimizing this cretin by not taking him seriously enough and giving him a notch on the belt that nobody else in the territory has. When Thatcher comes out to applause, and looks bemused and just a little satisfied at the reaction — and if you are dumb enough to have ever called/still call Thatcher dull or uncharismatic or something, look at the small way he reacts here compared with his palpable anger a year prior — the feeling it creates (maybe in the room, definitely in me) is why both he and this match is so great.

To me, that’s the heart of this specific one.

As great as both men can be in the roles they occupied a year ago as underdog homegrown and dismissive outsider respectively, what this has over that match is not only a year more experience for two wrestlers in their artistic primes, but that this time, both Thatcher and Makabe are in roles that feel so much more natural to me. Makabe is a good protagonist, but as a smug genius, he has always felt most at home. Thatcher is a remarkable villain, but almost all of my favorite Thatcher work sees him as this oddly charming sort of working class hero.

Mechanically speaking, this match succeeds where it always will.

Daniel Makabe and Timothy Thatcher are both masters at this sort of a match, and I don’t just mean in terms of tight holds, cool escapes, and fancy counters and transitions. There is a genuine skill, beyond just doing impressive individual things, at having a match like this while still having something to say beyond simply asking to look at all these neat tricks. Going back and forth, while never losing the rhythm and the narrative spark. It doesn’t look like a lot of other wrestling that people often think of as having clear roles, obvious focus, and a larger narrative concept, but they have a way of emphasizing the things that matter with every twist and turn. It is just kind of a bonus that they also have a thousand interesting and less-seen things to offer up to spruce the thing up.

However, what this match really has going in its favor, just like the original, is how good it feels.

The key to this match’s narrative success lies in Makabe’s transition to control as much as any other individual pat of the match.

When he goes up and over Tim in the corner, chop blocks him to send him into the middle buckle chin-first, and then throws an elbow to the neck to begin his attack on Thatcher’s neck and shoulders, there’s nothing dishonest about it. He did not suddenly become a total grifter as an antagonist. The same skill is there that let him pull off the upset a year ago, it’s just that this time, he is such an annoying little worm and a colossal asshole about it, in large part because it worked when it did a year prior.

One of my favorite devices to use when discussing Makabe is to bring up IWA Mid-South era Chris Hero as the easiest comparison. I do it because it is the closest example I can find that I think a lot of the readership has some experience with that explains how I often feel about Makabe, a wrestler doing a lot of things I admire and want to see and that I find interesting, but also not always doing things I love.

This is perhaps the most like IWA-MS (or CHIKARA, to be honest) Chris Hero that Makabe has ever been.

It’s not just that he does one very specific Hero style set-up to a back senton, but the entire tone of the thing at large. Technical as hell, with a direct focus, but never quite able to maintain control like he wants or is used to. Embarrassed at times, a smarmy shitheel who you naturally want to see punished, but succeeding mostly fairly. At the same time, whenever he does so, it feels insulting in a special way. Daniel does not talk nearly as much shit, but it’s a rare gift for wrestlers like this, to make gains achieved through totally honest means never ever feel like they should be applauded, to see one of the fanciest techniques you’ve ever seen, but then still want to see the other guy beat the shit out of them anyways.

Wonderfully, Thatcher lives up to the other end of that statement and then some.

Thatcher makes his comeback, beats Makabe’s ass, and does so in such a satisfying way. It’s not only that he he hits super hard and that it all looks and sounds perfect and comes in a real smooth order of succession, but there are these specific moments of pure joy when he simply decides that something will not be happening to him. First, when Makabe goes into the seated Cattle Mutilation that always works, only for Thatcher to gut it out and power his way out. Secondly, near the very end when Makabe puts together a motherfucker of a flurry to attack the head and neck, only for Thatcher to kick out right into the Fujiwara Armbar for the win.

It’s typically the sort of spot that does very little for me, the sudden kickout into a hold. However, this is pro wrestling. It is as much art as it is science, there are no hard rules, and when Thatcher does it to Makabe, it is absolutely perfect, the clear correct choice, and one of the most satisfying conclusions possible.

Revenge for an underdog victory has rarely ever felt so good.

Not the one hundred percent obvious best they can do, but that would come at the end of the trilogy. As it is, the ideal wrestling sequel, offering up something totally different, but that felt like a clear advancement and improvement on everything before, while also simply being a slightly better wrestling match.

***1/4

 

Ringkampf vs. EYFBO, Beyond Solid Gold (5/26/2018)

Styles make fights.

You’ve heard and read it a million times before, but the thing in parenthesis there, or that often gets left out of the idea is that styles make fights interesting. It is not to say, of course, that there aren’t a bunch of great type vs. type matches in the annals of wrestling history, but more often than not, it’s the difference that gives things a lot more flavor, or in the case of EYFBO, that tends to result in their best work.

Generally speaking, save for a match the year prior against the best tag team of all time, Santana and Ortiz are not my favorites.

It certainly isn’t that I think they were a bad tag team or anything, but so much of their offense feels like double teams for the sake of doing double teams. A lot of stuff that leaves me asking if [x step] really needed to be involved in the move, three different turns to get to the same place when a straight line or one turn might have gotten them there all the same, that sort of a thing.

This works though, and it is largely because of how different they are.

Weirdly, it turns out when all of that half-contrived dependent-on-double-team offense gets turned onto independent wrestling’s resident superteam and the defending YIL Tag Team of the Year, on top of simply two wrestlers larger and heavier than them, it all works much better. It not only feels a little more desperate, but it feels necessary to their survival, and goes down a lot smoother. Ortiz occasionally slips up and feels like he’s going through motions, there are still a few moments where they get a little overly complex which are only given a bigger spotlight given how Ringkampf usually wrestles, but for the most part — and especially with Santana’s genuinely really good hot tag — it all comes together.

Also, it is just nice to see Ringkampf be Ringkampf again.

2018 is not quite what 2017 was for the boys, both in that I do not believe they will repeat their crown and that they do not have quite the same quantity nor quality of tag team work as they did the year before. In the moments like this that they do have though, there are few doing it as good as they are, and zero that I would say with any sort of conviction are actually better.

WALTER and Thatcher are not really bullies here so much as stoic and aloof outsiders reacting to not-entirely-serious homegrowns in the way that they always will, but the hostility and casual meanness are still present. It is a delight. Not just to see and hear them smack the hell out of Santana and Ortiz over and over again, but the way they react to them facially (Thatcher has one exceptional moment after a less than serious feeling Ortiz splash, where he both shows the pain at the splash itself and his frustration that it hurt at all, real Kawada style expression of both the physical and mental damage), and the steady cruelty of their cut offs is so wonderful to see again.

A lovely moral lesson winds up being told in at the end also, as EYFBO maybe has something, but tries a little too much, gets cut off by the big man when trying the Sweet Sweeper, and beat by the simplest thing in the world off of a simple inside cradle by Timothy Thatcher.

Given how rarely EYFBO/Fake LAX/Proud n’ Powerful matches tend to do much of anything for me, a deeply impressive achievement.

three boy