Mount Rushmore 2.0 (Roderick Strong/Adam Cole/The Young Bucks) vs. Chris Hero/Mike Bailey/Candice LeRae, PWG All Star Weekend 11 Night Two (12/12/2015)

(an explanation for newer readers who didn’t see the way I approached this in 2013 and 2014 – no, it was not a handicap match. Candice had the dead weight she’s already spent a year too long dragging around on the team with them, but given that he contributes basically nothing to the match on top of being an alleged serial rapist, I think you all are gonna me do this.)

(this is also a big one for fans of the “here’s everything wrong with the match, ***” genre.)

This was a GUERRILLA WARFARE match.

It’s supposed to be the big blowoff, and got a lot of praise at the time. I was mystified when I saw the match, especially given the lack of praise to the more recent version of this with Super Dragon in it, and that feeling hasn’t gone away.

Mount Rushmore 2.0 gets what’s coming to them, all the bells and whistles of a big PWG blowoff match. Adam Cole is back. Kyle O’Reilly returns midway through the match to replace the (alleged) rapist. Multiple referee spots, Excalibur gets involved, Rick Knox does a move. Some cool prop work. In the end, the good guys win. Nothing you haven’t seen before, but it retains a certain charm no matter what, especially carried off by many of the best wrestlers alive.

Unfortunately, the way this plays out makes it clear that the magic is gone. That’s not to say they lost it, in some ambiguous and nebulous sort of a way. PWG isn’t what it was, but there are still moments and matches to come over the next year and seven months that are among the best stuff to ever come out of the company.

It is to say that, seemingly, they have forgotten it.

The key in the past to this match working was that feeling of violence permeating everything. A chaotic energy that sweeps up everyone involved in the match. The Young Bucks vs. Appetite For Destruction match four years earlier is one of my favorite matches of all time and perfectly embodies this idea, as well as being the high bar for a match like this. That’s not to say cool shit can’t happen, but there needs to be more to it than that. It’s also not just that Super Dragon and/or Kevin Steen aren’t in this match, because this sort of a match has been great without them in the past too, most notable in recent memory with Candice’s handicap Guerrilla Warfare match against the Young Bucks in 2014 that was also among the best matches of the decade, and the recent match on the second night of the 2015 BOLA. The formula is just kind of forgotten about now, and replaced with something more like a stunt show than the wild and frenzied brawls of the past. If not literally bloodless, certainly more spiritually bloodless than matches like this had been in the past.

Immediately, the differences are clear. The heels never eat that same level of shit early on, their work in control is more cool than it is despicable, and they go through everything a lot too fast to get as much out of it as possible. That even goes for use of the weapons, like things are brought in and used once or twice, and never seen again. While not a match without cool and nasty offense, it seems at some points as if that is the point, rather than using those things to enhance what already existed.

While the match doesn’t have nearly enough in common with the match three months earlier, the one thing it does have in common is that the focus seems in the wrong place. It doesn’t seem quite fair to say Hero, Seedball, and Candice got entirely eaten up, but it felt at all times like the true focus of the match was either on having a Great Match or on letting you know how good and cool the bad guys were. Beyond that, when you combine Kyle’s return being as an active participant, the sex creep also returning, and multiple interference spots, the heels wind up ganged up on for much of the back segment of the match. It’s a fair point to argue this as them getting all that they deserve from all those they’ve wronged, but it’s also only really been a few shows of them wreaking havoc so they’re not at THAT point just yet, I don’t think. Mainly, it removes a sense of catharsis here, because while hard fought, it’s not entirely even or fair.

There’s a thrill in brutal things happening to bad people, but like so much of this match, it never quite feels as earned or as impactful as it should. Or, specifically, as it has in the past.

Excalibur hits a Jackson with the Tiger Driver ’98. The sex pest spears another off the apron, and Roderick and Kyle O’Reilly spill off the apron through a table outside (this part is fine as they have their own issues — also never really settled after this for some reason?). Kikutaro comes to give Hero a thumbtack elbow pad after being attacked earlier, and he hits a thumbtack Rolling Elbow for the win. Largely left out of this run are Candice LeRae and Mike Bailey, the two best babyfaces in the match and in the company. It’s sort of a perfect metaphor for what this and what PWG often feels like it’s becoming at this point. At least they get to contribute to the match though, unlike poor Trevor Lee who’s been shunted down the card and forced into being a heel after his string of losses all year to these guys, without even the payoff of being on the winning team. Hero winning and getting the glory is hardly the end of the world, but this has always been a struggle that felt like it belonged to the younger wrestlers and the underdogs, and robbing them of that moment doesn’t feel right.

The glory goes to one of the more established guys in the company, an announcer, and a sex pest. Like so much of this match, it just feels incorrect.

I’m not going to say this isn’t a great match though. It is. The stunts are wild, the action is cool, and if scatterbrained, it is at least a match that doesn’t waste my time like these matches sometimes can (and will in the future). There’s nothing I hate about it and a lot to like. While I can’t help but look at the match and see what it used to be and what this version specifically is not, for what it is, it’s pretty great. It’s just that what it is, this time, isn’t my favorite thing in the world and what it used to be just may be.

An end of an era for PWG, but given how this match went, it’s clear that that era has been over for some time already.

***

The Young Bucks vs. Candice LeRae, PWG ELEVEN (7/26/2014)

This was a Guerrilla Warfare match for the PWG Tag Team Titles.

It’s an incredible match and among the best of the year.

I wouldn’t be writing a word about it if it wasn’t.

For any newer readers, my policy on these sorts of Speaking Out cases is simple. If I can avoid it, I don’t really even want to engage. Putting someone on a list if I can’t help it, covering a match if it’s genuinely one of the best in the year and also somewhat important. Like, there’s a big WALTER series that I’m not going to be able to avoid writing about. And obviously there is a degree of bad. Quackenbush being an abusive shithead or enabling behavior from a ZSJ or Ospreay is disgusting, but not the sort of thing where I feel like I don’t ever want to draw new eyes to anyone’s work if I can help it. I don’t think I even have that kind of a power, but you never know, right? So it’s not worth it.

This is undeniable though.

Super fortunately and much like prior meetings, the alleged serial rapist has virtually nothing to do with this being so great.

From the start, this story has been about Candice LeRae. It was one of the best matches of 2013 when the feud began and she refused to back down from Mount Rushmore. She came close in a tag, won in a six man, and got robbed against Adam Cole for the PWG Title. The other part of her tag team is a hanger on. Not simply in this feud, but in general. His career was dead before he was able to leech off of Candice, which is what still makes this feel just a lot gross even if he’s barely in this in any meaningful way and could be replaced by almost anyone else.

All the same, there’s not a part of this that doesn’t whip ass.

It’s the best Young Bucks match in two and a half years, since the Appetite for Destruction classic, and it works for many of the same reasons. That sense of chaos, their incredible minds for laying out matches like this, and the thrill of seeing these boys finally eat shit again. Super thankfully, most of that comes at the hands of Candice. They also handle the divide perfectly, as Candice is always faster and sometimes smarter, but it takes way more for her to get going and far less for her to be shut down.

She’s also shut down in some horrific ways, leading to one of the best and most memorable blade jobs in independent wrestling history, and of the entire decade. To echo the match that started the feud, Candice shoves [a ghost?] out of the way when Nick Jackson puts on a Jordan with thumbtacks glued to the sole. Candice once again opts to be the hero and take it on herself instead of turning back, leading to the god damned GUSHER.

Muta who?

The match is also, yet again, far less grandiose and overblown than you’d think given that it’s a Young Bucks match. I don’t think it’s over twenty minutes. It’s very simple. They’re mean and then they pay for it and the cycle goes on. It’s far from some Southern tag, but it also never even begins to stretch into a territory of a match that needs to end sometime soon. It reaches the apex and then that’s it. The match ends at its peak, and that’s probably not something that should be praised because it’s how this is supposed to work, but so often these sorts of matches just don’t. I can’t honestly call it a morality tale because of the other half of the winning team, but it does feel incredibly good when the Bucks finally gets what’s coming to them and when Candice finally gets the prize she’s deserved for so long.

In the end, Candice rises up after the all-time level gusher, and fights back. A thumbtack assisted Ballplex finally finishes one of these little perverts off and Candice is somehow able to win both tag titles entirely by herself.

It’s a weird match to watch, it’s something I would never ever RECOMMEND in a million years because of all the baggage, but it holds it up. It holds up if you can handle it. The involvement of a fourth party is incredibly minimal, it’s all about Candice’s revenge and Candice’s shining moment.

It’s why it worked so well then, it’s why it still works so well now, in spite of everything working against it.

***3/4

Kevin Steen/The Young Bucks vs. Drake Younger/World’s Cutest Tag Team, PWG All Star Weekend X Night Two (12/21/2013)

An incredibly canceled match.

For whatever reason, I find it much easier to draw the line with a guy like Younger who sucks as a human being still, but never crossed quite THAT line, so all praise of his professional work still feels acceptable to me. With the other guy on this team though, yeah, no, it’s incredibly distasteful. Spreading Q-Anon and similarly minded conspiracy theories and being a MAGA dipshit is bad. It’s real bad, full stop, but I’m of the opinion that bad thoughts are worse than bad actions and the third member of the team is much more in the camp of the latter, so to continue a similar trend, we’re just not going to bring him up.

Or, I was going to do that. This is a little harder now, because he’s a much bigger part of this than he was of the October tag title match, getting isolated for the match’s big face-in-peril run for some reason, and getting an equal share of big offense. If I wrote this in March 2020 and not March 2021, I likely would have talked for more than a sentence (this one) about how it’s one of his best performances ever and how he held up his end until the two better wrestlers could get in. Fuck doing more than that.

For whatever reason, this one really really bothered me.

It might be that he had a bigger part and that the match asked way more of him and that the relative success in that role makes me feel incredibly gross in the moments watching this when I’m like, “oh wow, that was good!” It might be the combination of said alleged rapist and also Drake Younger’s issues in the same match, even when I’m usually much more able to separate Drake from those things, because again I find words different than deeds. If I had to really try and nail it down, I would say that the reason the Tag Title match in October didn’t make me feel so weird for praising it is because it’s all Candice in that match. It’s about further legitimizing her whereas this is about the entire act. A more equal focus hammers home how gross it all is. I think I’m This serial rapist using an all-time great female wrestler in the history of independent wrestling to get himself back over again while carrying on the way he has, and using this act to really re-launch his career after he failed on his own merits before the few months preceding this. It’s one of the grossest things in the last decade. It always made me feel weird at the time because it was so obviously this sub-mediocre talent taking advantage of a potential superstar, and it’s a thousand times grosser in retrospect.

The major failing of this match on rewatch isn’t just not being as airtight as other Mt. Rushmore six man tags before it, but it’s also that it relies more heavily on emotional connection, which has been destroyed forever for two-thirds of the people in this match. The reason the BOLA six man stood out so much to me is the same reason that this one falls short, that I simply don’t want to see two-thirds of the people on the winning side of this succeed, and the match devotes itself to that goal.

That all being said, there’s still SO MUCH to love here. The Mount Rushmore side of this is flawless. Kevin Steen is a force of nature. The Young Bucks are psychotic and are a perfect match up for Candice and a great one for Drake. The babyface side is pretty good too, especially mechanically. Beyond that, Drake is a lunatic in the best ways and Candice continues to be the third or fourth best babyface throughout all of professional wrestling at this point. There’s a big dramatic finishing run that’s laid out perfectly given that the two most beloved figures in the company are in this match trying to combat Mount Rushmore. We get pitifully little of Kevin Steen vs. Candice LeRae, but it’s probably a smart political maneuver by Steen there. In the end, after Candice takes the Bucks out, and Steen runs through the other two, Drake is able to roll up Steen for his biggest victory in PWG yet.

I could never tell anyone to watch this, and for a match that I was head over heels for once upon a time, it’s a significant drop off. But I still can’t tell you that this isn’t a really great match.

At a certain point though, fuck that. The next one of these that I put time and energy into writing about is the famous blood one.

***1/4

 

 

The Young Bucks vs. Candice LeRae, PWG Matt Rushmore (10/19/2013)

This was for the Bucks’ PWG World Tag Team Titles.

I think this is a way around this that both amuses me personally and which also represents the reality of the team, save for maybe three pieces of offense in this match delivered by a shapeless void. I don’t intend on covering this team much, I originally only intended on covering the big famous 2014 Guerrilla Warfare match, but when I watched this back just for myself to see if it was as great as I had it down as on paper, holy shit, it was. Absolutely incredible match and performance by the three human beings involved in this match. The Bucks against Candice is as great of a pairing as the Bucks vs. Steen was, for both the same reasons (allows the Bucks to be as despicable as possible, provides a great contrast) and for wholly different ones (the Bucks now as bullies instead of cheap shotting preening little fucks).

Candice is a wrecking ball, a pure ball of energy unlike all but a very select few in PWG history. A maniac bumper, but also so fluid and smooth on her big high flying spots. One of the most sympathetic figures in US indie wrestling history, and it’s only like 50% because of the gender difference. It’s sympathetic selling, deranged bumping, and this sort of unteachable natural underdog fire. Candice only does a few things offensively, but they’re all just absolutely wild, and brings the best out of guys as deranged as the Bucks. Let different types of unhinged wrestlers loose on each other with an obvious story and in front of the hottest regular crowd in the country and, yep, you guessed it, it’s that Reseda Magic.

In the end, Candice’s wonderful manic performance lacks the help it needs to accomplish anything. She is an absolute lunatic, but so are the Bucks. She’s always working basically by herself, and the Bucks have never ever been by themselves before. Math is easy. Candice comes so close to doing it all on her own, only for the exact right amount of bullshit to happen. Once again, the balance struck is perfect. Candice is robbed of the win herself, but in the end, the Bucks manage to get the win entirely fairly following that. You feel robbed, but not in the most obvious sort of way, it’s all about what could have been. The worst sort of anger. A top rope Poison Rana gets caught by the other Jackson underneath, and she’s easy bait for the Cutler Driver and then More Bang For Your Buck for the win.

For obvious reasons, I cannot ever ask anyone to watch this match.

But provided your brain is like mine and you’re able to still watch matches back given certain events (this may become harder later in the decade, it’s relatively easy here because the source of those feelings is essentially a piece of furniture for all he adds to this match), this one is absolutely stellar.

***1/2