WALTER vs. Shigehiro Irie, PROGRESS Chapter 81 (12/9/2018)

This was for WALTER’s PROGRESS Title.

Sometimes I can be guilty of overdoing it or gushing a lot about different aspects of a match that I liked a lot. I want to convey all of the reasons why I like something, and a lot of the time, there are a lot of reasons why a match is great. I like to think that I am making a case for something, or if something is already widely known and revered and fairly popular, talking about specific things it did for me, or maybe further detail on the greater aspects of something. I recognize that this is not for everyone and try to edit, but at some point, my voice is my voice, and I would rather lean into that than away from it, even if it makes things longer than is maybe strictly necessary.

Here though, it is very very simple and I do not feel obligated to spend a very long time explaining it.

I like when professional wrestlers hit each other really really god damned hard, and WALTER and Shigehiro Irie spend the majority of this match hitting each other really really god damned hard in the head and face and neck and chest. It is not some masterful display of construction or composition, but man, they hit each other real god damned hard, and I am still exactly stupid enough to really love a match like this, especially when zero attempt at anything more fanciful or grandiose is made.

A simple thrill to be sure, but no less satisfying at its highest points.

***

WALTER vs. Masato Tanaka, FCP Schadenfreude Produce WELTSCHMERZ (12/1/2018)

At the time, I just sort of skipped over this.

Not because I thought it would be bad, this is not a discovery like finding out that the Omega vs. Ibushi vs. Cody match actually rocked, but more so just fatigue. It is late in the year, WALTER has had a ton of great matches and even more good ones, and the WALTER Routine has started to wear upon me by this point in real time. It’s not to say it’s a bad routine or that it hasn’t led to an especially prolific year (if you care about this sort of deep-in-the-process spreadsheet bullshit, only 2014 Ishii and 2015 Roddy have had as many great matches in one year this decade as 2018 WALTER, and there’s still more to watch, although his highs are significantly lower), but that after watching it so often, especially in real time, when I was watching everything and not simply stuff great enough that it inspired me to write about it or that I felt like I needed to when covering the year, it was not the sort of thing I was rushing off to see at the time.

Once more, I’m glad I waited, because this whipped ass.

My initial concern, besides boredom with the WALTER match at the time, was that this would be a dream match. Something along the lines of Hero vs. Tanaka a few years prior, where the talent level made it great, but their lack of commitment to any idea beyond simply trading offense also made it fairly forgettable too.

Fortunately, WALTER jumps Tanaka before the bell, spends the match bullying him, hurling him around the building, beating his ass, refusing to be lifted up or knocked down with any of Tanaka’s strikes for the first two-thirds of the match, and so that is not a fear that ever even comes close to fruition.

WALTER is the perfect opponent for Masato Tanaka here.

He takes the initial thing that was always going to work here, two exceptional offensive wrestlers in the ring together, but immediately uncomplicates the match by reverting to what he’s best at (bully big man for likeable wrestlers to try and take down), and making sure to emphasize the size difference whenever possible. It’s not exactly Awesome/Tanaka here, but some twenty years later, it takes a lot of the same hints, and even borrows some direct bits at the end, like the chair shot no-sell being Tanaka’s transition to the comeback, and Tanaka managing to powerbomb the big guy through a table. It maybe doesn’t go AS far as I would like, as once this really clicked, my expectations got raised pretty high, but on a mid-level indie and considering the age of Tanaka and the money WALTER is like a month away from walking into, it is super super satisfying.

Beyond just all of the cool stuff though, it’s also a match with a pretty great little strategic idea hidden in there.

To stand a chance, Masato Tanaka has to get in there and crowd him. Stand too far away or run in, and WALTER throws the chop or something worse, but if he can get the big man inside of a phone booth, the match completely opens up for Tanaka. Not only because he can throw those famous elbows, but because when WALTER gets rocked by them, Tanaka can lift him up for a few elect bombs. However, the exact moment he tries something with a little more flash and run up, his patented Sliding D, WALTER has the time to think and the space to avoid it, and rolls under it, and Tanaka never has another moment of offense.

WALTER immediately shuts the flurry down with a Powerbomb, before winning with the Fire Thunder Driver, in a neat little choice of finish.

Despite misgivings that I had and that maybe you had at the time, it’s a hell of a match. About as much fun as this could be at this point in time. If you also missed out on this and find yourself interested, give it a whirl.

Both predictable and not, and exceptionally thrilling all the same.

***

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

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

Schadenfreude (WALTER/Mark Davis) vs. STRONGHEARTS (CIMA/T-Hawk), FCP Project Mayhem VII Night Two (9/29/2018)

Clean and simple.

Top heel stable is challenged by exciting foreign team in the midcard, pushed enough to let you know that (a) it is not an easy win, (b) that the outsiders are really great, & (c) that the local villain stable/team is all that much better for getting past them.

One of those matches that has a way of reminding you that the classics are the classics for a reason.

There isn’t quite enough WALTER vs. T-Hawk to go around, which is to say that this match does not feature multiple minutes of two of the best choppers currently wrestling (hello Roderick Strong and Go Shiozaki, the reasons I cannot simply claim these are the two best) trading as hard as they possibly can, but there’s just enough to count. The focus is more on further establishing young Dunkzilla has having some heavy leather himself, and letting CIMA shine too (you want to dance, better pay the fiddler), but in a tight enough sub-fifteen minute package, they impressively find enough time for all of that, before the big man gets his win.

If Fight Club Pro was a promotion with television, I would praise this as their best television style match of the year.

***

Schadenfreude (WALTER/Chris Brookes/Aussie Open) vs. Meiko Satomura/Omari/Mustache Mountain, FCP Project Mayhem VII Night One (9/28/2018)

(Photo credit to Oli Sandler.)

A pet match of mine.

When I first watched it, whenever it was days or weeks after the fact that this show became released, it blew me away, as the sort of match that I REALLY missed seeing in wrestling, and specifically independent wrestling (more on that later). I sung its praises anywhere that I could, although in 2018, that largely meant a far less followed Twitter account and the old oft-mentioned Slack Chat. It turned out nobody ever liked this quite as much as I did and for years, once I figured out I would do this whole 2010s project, I had this chalked down in my mind as one of the matches that couldn’t possibly be as great as I remembered.

That’s true, in a sense.

It is not as great as I remember, but it is close, and I still absolutely love this match.

During the time that I got really into independent wrestling for the first time, and for a few years after that, there were an abundance of matches like this, longer multi-man tags revolving around a big heel stable. Primarily, I mean in my dear Peak CHIKARA (2005-11) with the Kings of Wrestling and the BDK, but also a lot in a few other promotions. Ring of Honor had Generation Next and The Embassy and others, FIP had DP Associates, IWA Mid-South had a bunch of lovely thrown together heel teams, and PWG had The Dynasty (we can forget 25% of that) and others, peaking in later years with the first iteration of Mount Rushmore.

The easy thing to say here is that this is a great approximation of that, a mimic that mostly gets it but not entirely, but that would be a lie, because this match (along with a lot of the other Schadenfreude stuff) really does appear to get it.

Somehow, a British promotion gets it almost entirely right, save for the ending.

It’s a relatively long, around twenty minutes or so, eight person tag that manages to always keep it moving, but also constantly building the heat, and doing so without ever getting dull for a second. There’s a clear hierarchy to it as well, with each person playing a clear role, all of which makes it real easy to keep interesting with all the different combinations of people to throw out there. The heels are gross and worth rooting against, and with the obvious exception who is never asked to be anything more than a guy who hits hard, the babyfaces are all likeable and worth cheering. There are two or three different heel control segments, but each of them feels distinct, and the match manages the ultra-impressive balancing act of having each one lasting exactly as long as feels necessary, and with each fake hot tag getting enough time to breathe so that each cut off feels both impressive and also upsetting, in the right way.

The individual performances are also all tremendous. Nobody lets this match down, even guys like Fletcher and Omari and the pervert who I do not normally love. FCP’s ring mic work is second to none in the country and helps them out, but the match also puts everyone in the best positions to succeed. Brookes gets to be a high level weasel, Fletcher a stooge, WALTER and Davis get to bully smaller wrestlers, Omari gets mostly beaten up, and Bate and especially Meiko Satomura get to come back and whip ass. The latter provides the best stuff of the match off of her hot tag, and especially in the few moments she fights WALTER. The big man, clearly on his way out of the indies, does not get a long run against Meiko and so he does not have to sell for her a whole lot, but their few moments together are positively electric, as a result of both the build in the match to them finally fighting, but also the natural reaction at this point to the match.

Unfortunately, they get in their own way at the end, as Timothy Thatcher intercepts Meiko off the top with an uppercut for the disqualification, right as the match was beginning to ascend to an even higher level, proving that even when miracles do occur, you simply cannot trust the British.

Despite all of that, one of my favorites of the era, and sneakily, one of the better matches of the entire BritWres boom. It is not exactly My Kind of Wrestling, but outside of a match where a Roderick Strong or Chris Hero shows up, it is the closest a British match has come to being something I could point at and go, “yes, that’s it, that’s what I want to see“.

My favorite 2010 CHIKARA match of 2018.

***1/3

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.

***+

WALTER vs. JD Drake, EVOLVE 110 (8/11/2018)

Neither of these two tend to do their best work in type vs. type matches, both guy that come to mind with the phrase “styles make fights” (which for the uninitiated, is more to say that it is a difference in styles that makes fights interesting, rather than throwing the same types of fighters at each other), but sometimes, it is just hard to overcome talent. JD Drake is not yet what he would become in the 2020s (or, if you would like to be more negative, what he would become when fighting smaller antagonists) and you wish this maybe happened two or three years later as it is not quite a great match for the reasons listed above, but it was still a really fun and objectively good match that a lot of people probably might like even more than me.

Or rather, when WALTER and JD Drake run at each other and swing those ham hocks as hard as possible into each other’s chests in all different ways, another phrase comes to mind, and it is a much harder one to deny.

BIG MEATY MAN SLAPPING MEAT.

A wonderful series of sounds on display, with a few cool moves thrown in there too.