Brock Lesnar vs. Finn Balor, WWE Royal Rumble (1/27/2019)

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Universal Title.

For a lot of reasons, this very easily could have not worked, or at least been far lesser than it was.

On paper, there’s no real chance for Finn Balor, putting him in a more forgettable class of Brock Lesnar opponent along with guys like Dean Ambrose, The Wyatt Family, or house-show fancam footage opponents like a Sheamus or Alberto Del Rio. It’s not to say any of these resulted in truly bad matches, but a crucial element for the majority of great Brock Lesnar matches this decade has been the ability to believe that there is a chance, no matter how small or illogical that chance may be. The belief has to exist, and that belief has to come from somewhere beyond just the pure skill and talent of the opposition, which Balor obviously does not lack.

The real thing is that he has not been given the booking for years leading into this that either AJ Styles or Daniel Bryan or, years before this string of matches, CM Punk had forced out of the WWE, establishing that however long the odds may be due to booking quirks, that anything was possible while they were wrestling, as a result of clean (or clean enough) victories over a peak-strength John Cena or other achievements on that level. Balor had a decent month or two of build up to this match and has always been treated by the company as someone worthy of respect, but there are levels to this. Underneath the megastars (Cena, Lesnar, Reigns), there is a tier of smaller more traditionally great bell-to-bell guys (often with storied backgrounds outside of WWE) who can and occasionally have beaten those megastars and who will always be threats to them, and Balor as of when this match happened was not on that tier, instead residing on one that Lesnar had not always treated super well.

So, on paper, it’s an uphill climb.

Fortunately, wrestling matches are not fought on paper, and this match stands as a less-often-remembered example of just what Brock Lesnar can do when he decides it’s time to have a great match.

All of that on paper stuff?

The match immediately acknowledges it, works with it, and becomes stronger for it.

Unlike what happened to bigger names for not rushing Brock at the start, Balor goes right after it. He spams the things he does really well — the John Woo dropkicks, double stomps from different positions, essentially throwing the pointed parts of his body at the problem from a variety of different angles — and within a minute, it may as well have not ever happened. Before too long, Brock Lesnar is again doing Brock Lesnar things.

What really works about this match though is less that it’s perfect Lesnar Formula, an more so that it feels like it’s going to be, before going a very new and super interesting direction with it. Balor is not AJ Styles, Bryan Danielson, CM Punk, or whoever, but because of how the match works out, nobody is asking you to believe that he is. He is not outwitting Lesnar or being tougher or having more technique, the match instead goes in a new direction that casts him in a role that is entirely his own. It’s not the knee of Brock Lesnar that gives the smaller Balor his opening, as it so often is in these matches, nor a real focused attack to chip away, but instead a much realer injury coming about through at least 50% pure luck that stops Lesnar short before he can really lay in a prolonged beating like he usually does.

Balor shoves Lesnar away from him outside, and Brock just so happens to run his lower abdomen into the corner of the announce table.

It’s a real nasty transition, gross enough that whether or not you know about Brock Lesnar’s history with diverticulitis and how it (maybe, but this is pro wrestling, all you need to do is be able to buy the “maybe”) cost him another title in another sport, it looks gross enough to be an immediate and believable hindrance to not only halt what Lesnar was doing but to give Balor a more credible opening than I think anyone could have ever imagined even five minutes before it existed. It’s a little bit luck, but I think the match is better off for going for something more credible like this.

You might not be able to, in an otherwise normal match, believe that Finn Balor could beat Brock Lesnar.

But in this specific match, in this one individual exact scenario, it is completely 00% believable that Finn Balor can beat Brock Lesnar here.

The back half of the match is unbelievably great at doing everything in its power to strengthen and prolong this feeling, all done perfectly by Brock Lesnar individually. The way he escalates his expressions of pain in terms of just vocal and physical reaction are impressive, but the match works with him too. Lesnar can initially throw Balor around but in his attempts to fight through it and make a show of the fact that he’s fine actually, he hurts himself more. Brock goes from being able to reel off the belly to belly to not being able to lift Balor for a German Suplex, and it’s that that gives Balor the opening to actually come back.

Finn’s comeback is then a real delight, again both in how it’s placed and presented in the larger picture of the match itself, but also in how both men handle it. Balor is a ball of energy not only hitting everything perfectly, but moving with a real feeling of victory that contrasts really well with the desperation at the start. Lesnar is just as great here as he was trying to maintain control moments earlier, not only taking these big bumps and selling his ass off in basic mechanical term to make Balor’s offense all look great, but in the way he reacts to it all. Lesnar felt in greater danger against some other guys, but the speed at which the switch flips here from control to panic allows him to really emphasize the panic in his eyes throughout the comeback.

As always, the joy in a Brock Lesnar match like this is the sudden existence of a “you know what, maybe” that didn’t exist there before, no matter how long it’s there.

The maybe here, the belief in the impossible and the opening of a door previously shut, is not as big as the one in a lot of Lesnar matches. However, it being a much harder door to open, it’s maybe just as impressive as any other feat like it.

Like the rest of the match, the way that door violently slams shut is also real different.

Following the Coup de Grace, Lesnar kicks out directly into the Kimura with a body scissors on, with more urgency to his movement and terror in his eyes than maybe any other time he put it on. Balor taps out, and Lesnar hangs on.

Read on paper, this is Brock Lesnar taking all the big stuff in a row, kicking out, and grabbing his hold to win instead of using his big move.

The sort of thing people cry about a whole lot with Lesnar.

However, again, these things do not happen on paper.

Context matters. The larger story matters. Above all, performance — how the wrestlers work with that context and the things they do, both large and small, to execute and enhance that narrative — matters. In the hands of someone lesser, maybe a less believable offensive force than Balor or maybe a Brock Lesnar who didn’t put nearly as much behind his performance as he did in this match, maybe it’s not all that impressive. In the match that happened though, it’s all of that other stuff that makes this the true and genuine victory that it is.

I thought that maybe I had overrated this, but I was wrong. I might have underrated it.

One of the best of the year.

***1/2

Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns, WWE WrestleMania 34 (4/8/2018)

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Universal Title.

Now, obviously, I do not need to tell you that these two have never topped their first match together.

I don’t mean that as an insult.

The first Lesnar/Reigns match is not only one of the best matches of the entire decade, the best wrestling match to happen in maybe the best year for pro wrestling all decade (certainly my favorite), but at worst, a top three WrestleMania main event ever. It’s not only an immense and deeply impressive thing, the wrestling equivalent of not just pulling blood from a stone but genuine actual alchemy, one of the great booking accomplishments of the entire decade. It would be impossible for this to live up to that, and on some level, I respect that it didn’t really even try to be a match like that.

What they do here is, respectfully, less of a match than it is an angle.

I think it’s an awesome angle, to be clear.

Brock Lesnar is ready for Roman Reigns this time, and dominates like ninety percent of the match.

There are clear callbacks to both their previous match and the big Lesnar/Cena match that was also among the best of the decade, and while Reigns is nowhere near as sympathetic or great in that role as Cena, there’s something about it that works. Chalk it up to Lesnar as maybe wrestling’s greatest bully of the twenty first century or chalk it up to Reigns having a gift as a put upon Failed Ace against more physically dominant antagonists, but it just kind of naturally works for me.

Doubly so when the match really flips a switch in its final moments, when Roman kicks out of a fourth F5 and Lesnar literally takes the gloves off, drops a series of audibly stunning punches and elbows to the head, and makes the Golden Boy bleed in front of the world.

Roman makes his one comeback after being split WIDE god damned open, but Lesnar catches a repeat Spear, and hits the fifth or sixth F5, and finally gets the win with it.

On paper, I love this.

The chosen one, with all of these totally fair gripes going into this about Lesnar being a part-timer and being given all these allowances, totally owned now that Lesnar knows exactly how great he is. Not a destruction like Lesnar vs. Cena in 2014, but the sort of match Lesnar never really feels in danger of losing. When Reigns survives more than expected, Lesnar unloads on him like he hasn’t really had to with somebody in years and years, but it never feels like something he cannot do.

It’s a genuinely brutal and vicious beating, but also one that it feels like Roman should have taken a long time ago.

One of the easiest routes to accepting an up and coming babyface is having them absolutely beaten to shit and falling short. In a vacuum, this is a stellar example of this. A build up where the young hero is 100% in the right in what he has to say, a match where he shows heart, but also a match where he gets his shit entirely beaten in and his skull caved in.

The great problem, of course, is that he didn’t take this three years ago.

Had this been the ending of their first match at WrestleMania 31 (aka Play), I think it really might have done something positive. The well was maybe already poisoned by the worst booked match in the history of wrestling a few months before then, but something about this — the violence of it, the genuine nature of the violence, the cruelness and finality of the defeat — feels like it was what would have really done Roman a favor back then. As it is now, nobody feels an ounce of sympathy. Three years later, he’s beaten The Undertaker at WrestleMania, he had the all-time level bomb against Triple H a year before that (through very little fault of his own), and a hundred other minor offenses you could point at. It is an attempt to right a ship that can no longer be righted in this sense, and it’s genuine shame that it happens entirely to boos for Reigns and cheers for Lesnar.

It is a correct idea, but one done far too late in the game to mean anything. All that will work now is the move that does work, only two and a half years later than this.

Still, I like this a lot.

There’s a classic Brock Lesnar Superfight element to this that works, blood is cool, etc., but I would be dishonest with you if I said I loved this match and thought of it fondly entirely because of what happened bell-to-bell.

Previously here, I have mentioned the former Wrestling With Words slack chat on here.

I have a great appreciation for everyone on there. Not just because it got me back into current wrestling in 2017 or because it was a genuinely useful outlet for me following the death of my father later in 2017, but also because I really enjoy most of the people/robots on there. Sometimes that extends to semi-professional respect for others who write/speak about wrestling (this blog would not exist without them, and at least some element of semi-professional jealousy), and sometimes, it just means that I like somebody on there as a person/poster/wrestling fan.

Among those is one of my two internet sons (at least on a conscious level. at this point, this blog has spawned several posters/blogs that clearly take some inspiration from what I’m doing, and I guess these people are my internet bastard sons or daughters.), who was a gigantic WWE and Roman Reigns fan in the years leading into this, and genuinely believed with his entire heart that this was Roman’s moment. He went dark for this match (in chat speak, this means logging out of the app and/or webpage until the match was over, one of the highest compliments you can pay a match, I did this recently for Roman Reigns vs. Sami Zayn), and following the result, had something close to a complete fandom mental breakdown.

Genuinely, it is one of my favorite moments as a wrestling fan.

Seeing someone go through what I experienced some three years and change prior — the various stages of grief, through to anger — before realizing it is not worth it to support the WWE on a week to week basis, talking them through it, and along with others helping to redirect them to other wrestling (2018 DDT, 2000s Ring of Honor, Peak All Japan, 2010s New Japan) is among my favorite experiences online as a wrestling fan.

I believe that everyone owes it to themselves to pay it forward.

Sometimes that can be applied in a professional sense, sometimes it can be applied to any hobby, and sometimes, that applies to wrestling fandom. There was a guy when I was like thirteen and doing fantasy booking on the WrestleZone forums in the early 2000s who yelled at me to watch old Mid South and 1985-1989 JCP named Big Earl, and I have always remembered that. I think that, generally speaking, we have a responsibility as peoplle to honor the people who maybe five or ten or more years ago in a similar state, pushed them towards great older wrestling, keep that same idea moving forward for the next generation, and it was through this match that I was at least partially able to do that.

This is a great match on its own merits. Absolutely.

However, I will always always always think of this match in terms of the total mental collapse I got to see it create in real time, and the journey that that mental collapse begin. As a result, sort of sneakily, it is one of my favorite matches of the year, or at least one of the first matches that comes to mind when I think of wrestling in 2018.

Brock Lesnar rocks. Roman Reigns rocks. Witnessing your friend and internet son have a mental breakdown also rocks. This match fucking rocked.

***+

Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns vs. Braun Strowman vs. Samoa Joe, WWE SummerSlam (8/20/2017)

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Universal Title.

In the process of covering 2017 on this blog, I had referred to two major Brock Lesnar title matches as being more akin to kaiju battles or kaiju movies than professional wrestling matches. Big gigantic monster fights, over in five to seven minutes, all feeling like these titanic struggles in which the King of the Monsters reasserted his dominion after getting his ass kicked by a rival monster of some notoriety, while occasionally destroying everything in sight. Ought to come in capitalized letters, with the Toho Studios bug at the start, SAMOA JOE VS. BROCK LESNAR (2017, Ishiro Honda), and the like.

Such is not entirely the case here.

That’s not an insult to this match, by any means.

No, the real reason for that is that, despite the insanity of a thousand monster brawl seen in a perfect film like GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (2004), they never quite had the foresight to create something like this.

Even going back to the Universal monsters, your movie monster fights are usually one on one, or eventually form into teams  (Godzilla and pals against some combination of Ghidorah, Gigan, and/or Mecha Godzilla), and at best, your have your non-freak normal humans there on the side somewhere. Villagers hoping Frankenstein’s monster and The Wolf Man destroy each other, or the people in G-FORCE, Monarch, or the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center. There have never been four sides in one of the movies that matches like this more often resemble than anything in the professional wrestling sphere.

In this match though, we get a taste of just what that might look like.

That’s not to say this match is some novel construct, or that it reinvents what a four way match is. There have been matches like this for two decades, more or less, by this point, and your big bumps, finisher trading, saves and nearfalls, etc. that this match has to offer generally fit in with what you’d expect out of one of those matches.

It’s just that it’s hard to remember one that packed in quite as much destructive force, grandiose feeling, and pure concussive power as this did.

Construction wise, it is maybe the most impressive WWE achievement of the year.

Braun Strowman — both individually and as a later one on one challenge to Brock Lesnar — is the focus of this match, and once again in 2017, it goes off perfectly. He dominates Lesnar initially, first taking him out of the match with two powerslams through two announce tables, before tipping a third over on him. When Lesnar returns to the match, he’s never really able to handle Strowman. He never hoists him up for a German Suplex, he never gets the F5 off even when he lifts Braun up for it, and even the Kimura is a non-factor. Secretly, this is one of the greatest build-up matches of all time, asking the sorts of questions and putting the sorts of doubts into place that, as funny as it might seem in retrospect given how the match went and how their future altercations went, made the eventual Brock Lesnar vs. Braun Strowman feel like a must-see event going into it, achieving a kind of Big Fight Feel beforehand that so few matches even come close to.

Both the Samoan Joes are essentially spare pieces here, but neither wrestles or acts like that. As much as this match leans on Braun Strowman theatrics and, later on, Brock Lesnar’s unbelievably babyface performance, it’s Reigns and Joe that hold the thing together. They’re the glue in the sections that don’t benefit from gigantic setpieces, again delivering together as they always did in shorter bursts. Even independent of the fact that they have tremendous utility in largely keeping the two most destructive forces apart for most of the match, this match also benefits so much from the crispness of their offense, the energy and secret bump freak psychosis of Reigns, the raw feeling Samoa Joe puts into every match of note in his 2010s WWE run, and the selling too.

This is far from a match about that, but in the moments when Lesnar is being put on a stretcher and Braun takes a step back to sell exhaustion at the thing he’s just done (and in another great touch, sort of like he’s making sure Brock is actually out of the match before he turns his back on him), there could easily be a gigantic logical gap of where Joe and Roman are even after Braun’s just thrown an office chair at them, but when the camera does focus on them, they’re both so good at selling cumulative damage and the effects of those shots that it isn’t a weakness at all.

Lesnar, of course, is the other major factor here, and as great as the Joes are as glue guys and as incredible as the booking of Braun Strowman is and as well as he lives up to it, this match lives and dies on Brock Lesnar’s performance in a less common role. As the beset upon babyface, a monster encountering not only more challenges than ever before, but one larger one in particular, it is a shockingly sympathetic and mechanically perfect performance from Brock Lesnar that ensures this match’s greatness. The initial surprise and shock at Strowman’s attack is one thing, but the way Lesnar’s comeback goes from pure lizard brained adrenaline to suffering even worse once that goes away is what really makes him one of the all-time greats.

He isn’t just moving slower, but he’s breathing heavier too. Lesnar drops down after just about everything that happens and struggling to even exist in the match near the very end, reacting to other people more than going out and getting his own shot like he usually does. It not only stands as this phenomenal show of selling, but as a perfect babyface performance. It isn’t just a sympathetic show of damage taken, but an ultra likeable show of guts and courage in response to that, carried off individually by Lesnar in a way that feels real and genuine, rather than phony, as something similar to this involving one of the other wrestlers in this match once did about a year and a half prior.

The composition is not entirely perfect, but I mean that less in terms of construction and more in terms of pure timing. Brock Lesnar’s return to the match whips so much ass, and by the time the match ends, a little too much time has passed, allowing the match to return from that feeling of complete frenzy and chaos back into something normal, a regular professional wrestling match. With heavy hitters like these and quality construction even in these moments, it still results in one of the year’s best matches, but it is not the one hundred percent most airproof version of the thing that it could be.

It simply, tragically, has to settle instead for being one of the best matches of the year.

Lesnar finally reels off the F5 on Roman Reigns, and rather than Samoa Joe (a force already defeated recently) or Braun Strowman (a force who there is clear money in seeing Lesnar fight individually, no matter the quality of the eventual match), Reigns is the one who loses to Lesnar. Even this winds up working better long term than one might immediately imagine, a clear show of that, while Reigns is a better wrestler than Strowman and in his physical prime, unlike Samoa Joe, what he lacks at this point in his career is down to pure will and raw killer instinct, and until that develops, he belongs to Brock Lesnar.

The ultimate proof of that lies in the fact that, even though it is technically the first time Reigns has ever lost to Lesnar — avoiding that result in their WrestleMania 31 and Fastlane 2016 meetings — it feels like another of many.

What we have is a match that not only makes anything you invested in it worthwhile, one that delivers roughly a year’s worth of thrills, and also one that sells a future match up on top of everything else. It’s a match that is almost as versatile as it is powerful, the ultimate monster fight in a year on the WWE main roster that is largely defined by these sorts of matches. Everything that happens kicks ass, a new monster emerges and asks a few real hard questions about the reigning monarch that aren’t answered just yet, but in the end, the King of the Monsters rises to the challenge once again, even if it is the narrowest victory he’s had in a fight since probably 2010.

The year’s greatest chunk of WWE bullshit.

***1/2

Brock Lesnar vs. Samoa Joe, WWE Great Balls of Fire (7/9/2017)

This was for Lesnar’s WWE Universal Title.

Is this a perfect match? I don’t know. I guess not.

There could be — and if memory serves, there were — people who were disappointed with this for any number of reasons, but typically all falling under the umbrella of being mad at a match because of everything it isn’t. That’s not always an invalid stance to take, but it’s usually best reserved for match ups with a history of success in one form that’s now been abandoned for something worse. As it is, it’s something I try not to do, and a tact that has always felt especially silly with this match, as despite all it isn’t. there’s so much that this match is that I’d much rather talk about it on those terms.

It’s definitely not, you know, what someone might have conjured up in their mind’s eye in 2003 or 2004 when both men were, in their primacy, first emerging as these dominant forces. It’s only six minutes, you don’t really get any sort of big dramatic nearfall, it’s not a match that aims for anything like that or that has any aspirations to be that sort of a contest, although it almost definitely could be.

Samoa Joe isn’t what he was then in a physical sense, Brock Lesnar is a different sort of wrestler for any number of reasons, and instead, they have a match that feels like the best case scenario for these two in 2017.

This match is so more physical and desperate, dirtier and grimier, and with a panic in its eyes at all times. Brock Lesnar matches always feel like fights to some degree, but there’s a difference between a long reigning fighting champion in a gimme defense and this match, which has the feeling of that same champion being dragged into the muck and into the filth. This is a match, spiritually speaking, with dirt and blood dug way up underneath its fingernails. Joe gets the jump on the champion, spends the match throwing him and shoving him and trying to choke him out. Brock Lesnar tries his throws, but Joe operates in SUCH a unique way as a Lesnar opponent, not only putting Brock’s back to the wall in a more believable way than anyone has since Brock first took the torch three years earlier, but shoving and maneuvering out of the big Lesnar suplex set ups in a way that nobody else in WWE is doing. It’s a series of little motions that doesn’t mean a whole lot in terms of how the match unfolds, but it lends the match an increased air of legitimacy. Likewise, the way Brock keeps fighting the choke and making Joe switch between hands and turning this into this weird battle over hand speed is SUCH a cool little thing.

Beyond just being a little grimy and real Earthy, it’s also a match that manages to feel genuinely massive in its own right.

Once again, the real skeleton key to understanding these 2017 and 2018 Brock Lesnar matches does not lie in the realm of professional wrestling, but in another artform, one far sillier and cooler than professional wrestling. Brock Lesnar matches are more like Godzilla movies and fights than wrestling matches sometimes, and even more than Goldberg — who fit stylistically more than narratively, always someone who felt like was destined to lose to Lesnar in the end — Samoa Joe is the perfect opponent for this era of Lesnar fights. Whereas Roman Reigns is something like Mechagodzilla (or later, Destoroyah), Samoa Joe stands out to me clearly as the Gigan of the bunch. He doesn’t draw actual blood, but in a period in which Lesnar is largely unchallenged or at least not challenged like THIS — the 2017-2018 Lesnar reigns very much representing his imperial period a la late 1960s through mid 1970s Godzilla — in some time. He’s different enough on the face of things to make this feel like a real super fight, but it’s the way the fight goes that really cements that feeling.

Joe rushes Lesnar with a Uranage through a table outside, keeps him on edge, and even survives the big German Suplex flurries without losing himself. Joe stays steady, keeps his head, keeps his head not only up but still focused in the same direction with which he started the match, and keeps going for the choke. It’s a wonderful approach to a Brock Lesnar match, someone not only getting him at the start, but having a strategy that is so obviously a correct and winning strategy. Lesnar survives, of course, he’s the main character in this story and the center of the promotion, but it feels less like he’s definitively conquered this latest challenge, and moreso that he’s just found enough of an opening to hang on, feeling the most like a real babyface champion that Lesnar’s felt like since 2003.

Joe leans on the same attack one time too many, but beautifully, the mistake is never apparent until the very end. Each attempt at the choke gets further and further, so there’s never any obvious sign that Joe should have stepped except in retrospect. Brock gets to the ropes once, powers into a Sidewalk Slam, but it’s on the third time when Joe finally gets him off his feet in the Choke that Lesnar finally gets out of the hold and throws Joe off in the most meaningful way possible.

Lesnar just barely slips free of Joe’s hands, and fires off a motherfucker on an F5 to win.

Read on paper, it’s a classic definitive Brock Lesnar win. Some Germans, eats a little bit of the opponent’s offense, a little struggle, and then hits his move to take it home in six minutes. Wrestling matches are not conducted on paper though, this match is superlative for all of the things that happen in between and surrounding those big highlights. Despite every sensational bomb chucked out here, the devil remains in the details, and these two are just as a tremendous with the details as they are with the heavier artillery. It’s why this was a dream match for so long to begin with, and it’s why, despite the form this took, it’s still such a great match in the first place.

A wonderful wonderful thing, and even moreso than Lesnar/Goldberg at WrestleMania, one of the year’s most sensational and uplifting hoots.

***1/4

Goldberg vs. Brock Lesnar, WWE WrestleMania 33 (4/2/2017)

This was for Goldberg’s WWE Universal Title.

Many people have written many things about this match before now. Most of them are true. Instead of trying to walk over old ground and act like I’m the one who paved it or cleared all the branches and leaves off the path in the first place, I will instead talk about something else entirely that this match brings to mind.

I love kaiju movies. Or at least, I’ve come to love them in the last few years.

During the pandemic, specifically in August 2020, I got a little drunk and as money was, at the time, practically raining from the heavens above onto me in larger quantities than I knew what to do with after paying months’ of rent in advance and buying groceries and stockpiling my asthma medication from sketchy overseas online retailers(American insurance rocks, it’s the reason I started accepting commissions in the first place), I started to get a little weird with it. Expensive craft beers, new furniture, a rowing machine for me home, even investing some of it into stocks on a low level, you name it. A few weeks earlier, I’d bought a blu ray player a few weeks prior, but I didn’t have the collection I have now as a full on Physical Media Pervert, really only having THE FOG (1980) (which started my collection as a result of it not actually being for sale on any VOD service, so thanks for that on top of being one of my favorite movies), CASINO, and a box set of the first seven FAST & FURIOUS movies. Some would call it a perfect collection.

At some point, I got a little bit drunk, and I bought the full Criterion Collection Godzilla box set.

In retrospect, I have no idea why I did this.

I hadn’t seen a Godzilla movie since the summer of 2014 when the U.S. remake was released (I was just barely not homeless at the time, as 2014 YEAR IN LISTS fans will recall, so I never actually saw it in theaters but you bet I pirated that bad boy) and when Netflix released a lot of the old ones for a month or two to promote them. There was no great love in my heart for these movies, although like any sensible human being, I had a distinct sort of gut feeling that they were objectively cool and good things. I had a GAMERA DVD as a teenager, but I left it at a friend’s house in high school and never got it back before he went to college and I moved away, so it’s not like a thing I’d rewatched a whole lot.

When the set arrived, I began one of my infamous projects and set about watching every Godzilla movie, and also the offshoots, like the Mothra and Rodan movies, and I fell ass over tea kettle in love with this stupid shit. I have hard opinions about the Godzilla series (people are too hard on 1970s Godzilla, GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH and GHIDORAH: THE THREE HEADED MONSTER are actually better than the original, FINAL WARS actually rocks). I have encouraged other people to watch these movies, on and offline. I gleefully talk with friends on the internet about the Godzilla villain canon. I’ve spent money for blu-ray releases of 90s and 00s Godzilla double packs, I have a Gamera steelbook box set (this rocks) and a Rebirth of Mothra triple pack from the 1990s (this sucks). I would kill almost any one of you for a non-bootleg blu ray version of GODZILLA VS. BIOLANTE.

I love these movies so much. Something about them just immediately appealed to me, combining a deeply whacky sort of nonsense with a kind of professional wrestling approach to building the major fights, as well as a professional wrestling approach to canon (some of it is incredibly important, some of it does not exist and never happened, even if it is happening essentially for the third or fourth time). I love that it essentially operates as this little wrestling promotion itself, based around one central figure, with a rotating cast of major and minor characters, often recast and redesigned and with all different twists and turns. I love that every time someone new is behind the writing of the thing, there can be either a wildly new vision, or as seen in the Heisei series from 1984 through 1995, a genuinely stunning level of contuinuity. The original GODZILLA is rightly respected as an unimpeachable classic, a Great Movie, and so the clicking didn’t happen so much with that one as it did with the others, because early into becoming a Movie Guy, that one stood out to me as something I was supposed to like and appreciate and revere. Somewhere around the Anguirus vs. Godzilla fight in the follow up, when I loved this and all of these supposedly goofier and less serious successors almost just as much as the original classic, it clicked for me that, oh, I actually genuinely love this shit, wow.

So anyways, this match is sort of like all of that.

Two different sorts of unstoppable forces come at each other, in a third match where the King of the Monsters has had his ass summarily handed to him two times in a row, only to rise up when it matters the most, beat the ass of his greatest threat, and reclaim his throne. A canon history that mostly matters but not entirely. Fireworks and grandeur and an insane man reacting to everything on the floor in the broadest ways possible. Goldberg is no great villain, he is no King Ghidorah or Gigan, but likewise, Brock Lesnar is no great hero himself, their struggle coming closer to one of the earlier or later films than any of the whacky 70s ones.

Brock Lesnar defeats the one great remaining foe, it would appear, and leaves not only with the title again, but looking more unstoppable than ever before.

It is all beautiful.

You can talk about the mechanics of this match, but they are very simple and honestly not worth going too deep into. Brock’s initial revenge spam fails, but he breaks out a rare piece of hyperathleticism by dodging Goldberg’s spear, crowds him with all the Germans, and wins with the F5 on the second pass at it. If you really needed to know the X’s and O’s of this one, hey, there you go. It rocks, and it rocks in a way that I don’t think written word entirely does credit to. It is not a match for bloggers or for star ratings, it is a spectacle in the purest sense, and it whips so much god damned ass.

There are a hundred words I could write about this match and that others have written about this match. Very little of it matters. Professional wrestling is never entirely art nor is it ever entirely science, and a match like this has a way of making that exceptionally clear, leaning far more towards the former than the latter, and at the same time, veering entirely off of that spectrum and wildly into the air, never to return, much like Jet Jaguar.

A beautiful match that can be summed up in a thousand different ways, but perhaps no more efficient one than a firm and a heart “hell yeah, dude”.

*** but also ***** but also star ratings are fake and this match makes that clearer than most

Roman Reigns vs. Rey Mysterio, WWE Smackdown (6/18/2021)

This was a Hell in a Cell match for Reigns’ WWE Universal Title.

Remember that awesome Rey Mysterio vs. Brock Lesnar match?

No, not the all-time classic from December 2003. Not the five minute hoot of the year candidate from October 2002 either. I mean the oft-forgotten weird little six or seven minute deal from Survivor Series 2019. Rey goes after a big ol’ planet eater of a heel champion in response for them victimizing his ultra-victimizable son and with the power of more anger than he’s felt in years and some classic Dad Strength, and gets real far with it before physical realities set back in. Rey is then absolutely destroyed, paid back in his own coin, and that’s just as much fun.

This is basically that, but a little longer and inside Hell in a Cell.

Roman Reigns isn’t quite Brock Lesnar — neither in just the raw cheat code that Lesnar is as a person or how he’s been presented for years — so it’s one hundred percent fine that Rey whips Roman’s ass for a little longer. It’s a delightful novelty to see Rey someone just beat the hell out of someone by itself, and they do a great job of making it interesting beyond that. Having Rey use a fire extinguisher and hurl a toolbox at Roman’s heat and abuse him with a chair in ways both novel (the old Mochizuki style running kick to the back of a guy sitting on the apron, but with Rey doing a chair-aided dropkick instead) is not only a great way for Rey to get away with a longer beating of the company’s top guy, but also makes this a more interesting Hell in a Cell than the men on roster have gotten to have in a real long time. As a result of Rey’s anger (and Roman’s later responses to it), it feels like a match that really warrants the Cell. Barring that, it’s at least a different kind of a Hell in a Cell match, conducted with weapons beyond the WWE stock picks (kendo stick/chair/table), and a lot more immediate intensity than usual.

On the other end of the match, Rey absolutely dies.

Roman gives him the swings into the steel best utilized by a different Samoan Joe, but also hurls him off the cage over and over. The ending here is fairly well known, as Rey’s in-ring flurry is snuffed out, and Roman powerbombs him over the top and into the wall of the Cell in the wildest Cell spot in some time, but Roman’s offense is full of a bunch of nasty nasty nasty stuff like that. It’s some truly awesome and horrifying stuff, as this sort of a thing demands.

Following that all-time great spot, Roman grabs a front choke on a barely conscious Mysterio for the win.

Not a surprise by any means that two great wrestlers met up for a match this great, but it’s something I’m a little surprised hasn’t received more acclaim than it has. It’s the sort of Roman Reigns match that — save the big highlights against Bryan — people seemed to have been praying for all throughout his heel run. Minimal dialogue, an increase in real-feeling violence and hostility throughout, a lack of outside interference, and beautifully efficient. I have to imagine this getting bumped to free TV meant a lot of people paid less attention to it, but it shouldn’t. Like the free TV Hell in a Cell gems of 1998, this is one of the easiest and most fun watches in all of wrestling.

The best Roman Reigns match of the year that isn’t against the single greatest wrestler of all time (only a top twenty or thirty level guy instead).

***1/4

Roman Reigns vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Smackdown (4/30/2021)

This was for Reigns’ WWE Universal Title, with the caveat that Bryan would be BANISHED from Smackdown if he lost. It’s not quite title vs. career, as the WWE is always afraid of such classical old pro wrestling ideas and always coats them in bullshit corporate speak, but fuck that. It’s title vs. career.

It’s the sort of thing that it feels like has been building up for years, and the match that really should have main evented WrestleMania instead of some spiritually bloodless three way, if only because of what it ultimately represented. I won’t pretend this is some first time fork in the road for the company, it’s a decision that they made over six years ago at this point, even if it never quite took, because as always, they chose incorrectly at the time. It is, however, the last ever chance to take that other path that will ever present itself and a clear statement of fact in a year that became largely about the WWE redefining what it was after the last decade. One last instance of burning a bridge, having just crossed it. Roman wins definitively, or Daniel Bryan is gone.

Unfortunately, it’s not a stipulation that the match itself truly does justice to, offering up a simple great match that happens to have Bryan’s career on the line, instead of ever quite feeling like a match where Bryan is fighting for more than just the match.

Beyond just that it’s held on free television, it’s been so heavily rumored and basically confirmed forever that Bryan was thinking about not re-signing and then so close to deadlines that it became obvious he was, in fact, not going to sign a new contract. He’s spent his last months already very much as someone leaving, taking losses that have partially diminished his stature, failing to win the Royal Rumble, and losing in the main event of WrestleMania in the previously noted dickless triple threat match. They already even had a big title match on pay-per-view (a better match than this and one that I would have much rather just been Bryan’s farewell). As such, a good amount of the drama of the thing is removed from it, with the outcome already being pretty much assured going in, as well as Bryan not exactly having the most momentum in the world. Put that on top of what the presentation in The Thunderdome takes away from any sort of real authenticity to wrestling matches in general (although perhaps it is fitting that Roman’s victory over Bryan finally comes within an environment totally devoid of any true human reaction), and it’s far from the ideal climate for a match as scintillating on paper as ROMAN REIGNS VS. DANIEL BRYAN, TITLE VS. WWE CAREER.

So, there’s a ceiling on this thing before the bell rings.

It’s also not as good as Fastlane.

I significantly prefer a longer *and* more successfully focused affair that saw a long game successfully break down the juggernaut. This is a match with some attempted work on the arm, but save for one big vanity sell at the end that many people (myself included) remembered more than the rest, Roman’s arm selling isn’t nearly as great as his leg selling nor his arm selling the previous month. It also never quite has those moments of jeopardy for Reigns in the way that Bryan had in their pay-per-view encounter, removing those moments of pure satisfaction at Bryan’s plan working, on top of how perfect the mechanical elements of it were. Satisfaction alone doesn’t make one match better than another, but their previous meeting not only saw a more satisfying affair, but a more interesting story as well.

However, it’s still one of the best matches of the year, and a perfect sort of thing for Bryan to go out with.

The greatest professional wrestler of all time does what he always does with as great of an opponent as Roman Reigns. After spending time patting around up there and figuring out the dimensions and make up of the box they’re in, he finds a way to pry it open, and deliver in spite of every reason that they shouldn’t be able to.

Bryan, once again, is the best babyface in the world in a big situation like this. The rush at the beginning is perfect, his selling from underneath was ideal, and nobody in wrestling has the comebacks Bryan does, mixing violence and desperation perfectly. There’s an element to these Bryan comebacks against Reigns in 2021 that strike this beautiful balance between wanting to see him kick this fucker’s ass and also knowing he can be cut off at any moment by a bigger and stronger guy. It’s a perfect kind of a babyface territory, being able to believably kick ass, but also always fighting uphill. It’s a needle to thread in between those two edges, and very few throughout wrestling history have ever done it better, if there are even any to list.

The match is constructed perfectly to get the most out of Bryan at every moment, one last time. Kicking ass, taking these huge bumps, eliciting sympathy (even theoretically, with a fake crowd responding to it), and crafting this airtight closing stretch that Roman’s sometimes struggled with against others. In a modern WWE atmosphere that doesn’t allow one of the great bleeders in wrestling history to show that off and in a Thunderdome setting that allows for no sort of organic reaction nor energy, it’s as great a display of all the different things Bryan can do as anything else. Above all, it’s so unbelievably charming and fun that once again — and in the last opportunity to do so — Bryan has once again transformed something of the WWE’s entirely into a showcase of his own greatness.

Roman Reigns is in this match too, and he is perfectly good in it.

That’s not fair, truly. But it’s not fair to be a good wrestler in the ring against Daniel Bryan sometimes. His work in control is as good as it can be. His punches are great, his big power spots are lovely. His arm selling could use work, although I wouldn’t quite call it bad. Above all, he’s despicable. While his in-ring as a heel isn’t up to par with his best and most consistent work as a babyface in 2016-2017, he continues to be an absolutely perfect villain for Daniel Bryan, creating one of those sorts of perfect match ups. As an antagonist, there is no more perfect match up for Reigns, as Bryan not only naturally accentuates all of Reigns’ positives, but makes him work consistently harder in and out of story, exerting the natural pressure of being the best of all time, and making Reigns show up in a way he doesn’t always seem to against the Edges or Drew McIntyres of the WWE. All the best things Reigns does in this aren’t all that special, instead they’re things magnified by what Bryan is able to do and the way Reigns is able to act around Bryan.

As a match, it comes down to the classic gap between the two.

At this point in their careers, Bryan needs to have the best match possible to beat Roman Reigns, and he simply doesn’t.

Unfortunately, Bryan’s work on the arm doesn’t have the work on the leg to pair with it like he did at Fastlane. He runs in more at the start and isn’t able to quite get in Reigns’ head the same way. Bryan’s work pushes Reigns once again further than anyone else is able to get him, outside of a Brock Lesnar, but Reigns finally manages to learn something in the end. The Spear fails him where it didn’t before, but Reigns adjusts and applies the front choke with his good arm primarily and not the bad, and the foregone conclusion come true.

Roman Reigns keeps the title.

Daniel Bryan is gone.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

I don’t know if it’s the right move. Given that they failed to convince Bryan to stay, it’s not the wrong one. There’s something still that rubs me a little wrong about it, with nobody on the horizon to beat Roman after this, and using perhaps his greatest foe to enhance him instead of recognizing the opportunity this always was. Had he been built for someone like Big E or someone else getting their Bryan moment, then it would be hard to say too much against it. If it’s just for Lesnar again, or God forbid as a hunch tells me, Seth Rollins ending a year and a half long title reign, then it’s yet another waste. Not only of Daniel Bryan and not only of Roman Reigns, but ultimately, of them together, and all this match up could have been.

Time will tell, ultimately (and I reserve the right to add an epilogue onto this, should that last hunch be correct), but something about this still can’t help but feel a little bit wasteful, given all that this could have been in the moment, or more importantly, all that this should have been years before.

As I watched this match again and then struggled for a while to come up with something to say about it that wasn’t just entirely hysterics about Bryan’s departure and my frustrations with the lack of a destination in mind with the Roman Reigns heel schtick, I kept going back to one of my old favorite little phrases.

I write “buy the ticket, take the ride” all the time, or at least I used to.

It’s one of my favorite expressions, up there with “pound of flesh” or “spiritually correct” or whatever else you, The Reader, may feel leaping to the forefront of your mind at this very moment. I’ve tried to use it less, as I do any time I sort of get conscious about something like that. You never want to lean on any one turn of a phrase, you know? Don’t force these things. Anyways, it’s the sort of phrase with enough room for interpretation that it can mean whatever you imagine it means, and can be fit into a lot of things. Some believe that it expresses this idea of being in over your head but proceeding anyways, because it’s the most interesting option. No way out but through, and that sort of a thing. Given that its original author stated that he had no sympathy for the devil before saying the line, I’ve always read it with that idea in mind, that overall feeling that you knew what this was when we began and so you shouldn’t be able to claim surprise. To me, it means that you go through with the thing anyways, despite knowing. It means, at least when using it to discuss wrestling matches or things of that nature, that you know what you’re signing up for beforehand, and accept the consequences. You signed up for a thing, you chose to do this knowing what it entailed, and it is time to go through with it.

Often, it’s about the WWE being the WWE. This evil backwards monolith that almost always gets some element of the thing wrong, even in the process of trying to get it right. Never understanding why things worked, stifling them, trying to repurpose them to serve far less interesting aims, treating you as a viewer with a sort of contempt, that sort of a thing. Sometimes things break loose, but one should never expect them. I write the phrase in regards to the many times the WWE seems to go out of its way to be as cruel and heartbreaking as possible, in response to those who imagine this to be a bug and not a feature. Kofi Kingston has the hyperemotional title win at WrestleMania that meant so much to so many, only to eventually get nuked in ten seconds by Brock Lesnar? Big E being abruptly cut off in a similar fashion? Any number of things, including my own personal experience with this sort of a stupid belief and then heartbreak, there it is. There you go, believing in something, when you should have known full well by this point not to do something like that. Point at the sign at the front of the bus. This is the company you’re watching and it is what they do.

I say all of that to say that very few have made it a better ride than Bryan Danielson does.

Few others make it worth the ride, in spite of how it so often comes to an end.

That’s not just because he’s the greatest wrestler of all time, but it is one of the more impressive things I can think of about Bryan Danielson. In fact, being able to do that is part of why he’s the greatest wrestler of all time. Even in a bullshit environment like this, Daniel Bryan is able to have matches like this when few others can. Daniel Bryan is able to create environments like this when few others again. To instill that belief in spite of everything the human brain tells you about why something is impossible. You can write all of the unoriginal gutless tripe you’d like about Bryan’s talents being wasted, as if he wasn’t still very clearly among the world’s most skilled, talented, and productive wrestlers from 2010 through spring 2021, but truly, it is an achievement, and one beyond simply having a hundred workrate epics, I think. Daniel Bryan is the greatest wrestler of all time for more reasons than just this ability, but the most impressive one still might just be that in spite of everything else, he was still able to get me to buy in and get that ticket, time after time after time.

If Daniel Bryan had to leave — and he did not, it is one of the great ball drops in recent wrestling history, and could easily prove to be one of the great ones ever — it is only fitting that it takes place in a match like this, losing to his polar opposite once and for all in a match that forces everyone to put on paper who they are, what they believed in, and where they stood on the greatest wrestler of all time.

Roman Reigns finally defeats Daniel Bryan, and in the process, does the thing all of the best WWE texts do, and making the implied into the explicitly stated. Bryan makes Roman Reigns into a good enough wrestler — and more importantly a smart enough wrestler — that he’s able to really and truly beat him. It’s the best version of Roman Reigns in a kayfabe sense that’s ever existed. He’s spent this heel run imitating tropes from gangster films, but in this match, he comes the closest he’s ever come to the best one there’s ever been. Removed of his greatest and most definitive enemy, something about Reigns has been missing ever since when removed from that sort of a friction. Conquering the world once and for all and losing a major piece of himself in the process. Roman Reigns looks out at Lake Tahoe. Cut to the past.

If not the best version of this match up, it’s still one with an honesty that I really respect.

More than any other match in recent memory, it’s a match that completely spells out the ideology of the promotion holding it. Only in WWE can a story about a smaller working class hero against a corporately chosen and protected super-athlete end with the latter learning the game of the former and adjusting enough to win clean. It simply is what it is. Bryan did as much as anyone could for eleven years to change that, but 2021 was a year of pure revanchism in the WWE, and this spelled it out as plainly and perfectly as anything else could. A villain territory, through and through.

In the end, the house wins.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Daniel Bryan made it more interesting than all but a few names ever in wrestling history. It’s not a park removed of any and all attractions at this point, but removed of the greatest wrestler both of all time and currently working, it’s one that I’m not nearly as excited to return to any time soon and that hasn’t been quite the same without him.

Not the best match of 2021 nor the best WWE match of 2021, but in so many ways from the departures to the cuts to everything with NXT (a show initially built around Daniel Bryan, even in a prior format) to the core message that nobody truly matters but a select five or six people tops, perhaps the definitive WWE match of 2021.

***1/2

Roman Reigns vs. Cesaro, WWE WrestleMania Backlash (5/16/2021)

Another of the Black Friday Sale commissions, this time coming from Oregano Jackson. If you’d like to pay me to watch a wrestling match and write about it, feel free to go visit over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match, and as always, hit the DMs if you’ve got interests besides just that. 

This was for Reigns’ WWE Universal Title.

Neither man is bad in this.

It’s a great match, basically.

That is to say that on a performance level, it’s as great as it can be given all of the many things working against it, from build up to the Thunderdome, to some of the choices made in constructing the thing. It’s a match with a lower ceiling than they deserve and definitely the least of their three major singles matches together,

The Cesaro of 2021 is not the Cesaro who was once the Wrestler of the Year, or a multiple time top five guy. That just isn’t him anymore. Somewhere around late 2016 or early 2017, he wound up broken into one of those WWE guys. Good and reliable, but rarely great, because what’s the point? Cesaro got injured a few times going wild to try and earn something, was one of the best wrestlers in the company for many years in a row, but wasn’t ever going to get there. I’ve written about it before with Ambrose and Ziggler and the like, but Cesaro’s in that same category too. If the only reward for effort is an eventual injury that costs you money and standing, what’s the point? If nothing changes, no matter how hard one works, why work any harder than you have to?

In the first third of 2021, Cesaro seemed to show some hunger for the first time in a while, resulting in a string of great matches leading up to this match. It’s a nice little thing to give him this match as a reward for that, but the match never once seems like more than that. While Cesaro works hard in this match and is great in this match, it’s hard to pull it off on just a few months, after being held at a certain level for so long. Bryan had Roman in a similar spot here, a long main event title match conducted in this uncanny valley Hellmouth of a venue, but it was easier to buy in there because Bryan had been treated as someone to be taken seriously in main event matches for most of the last decade, on top of also being a much better wrestler at this point, especially as a pure babyface.

There’s a much better match within them, as seen in their 2015 and 2017 sub-twenty minute television slugfests instead.

They do what they can though.

Twenty seven minutes aren’t necessary when fifteen to twenty would serve them just as well (and did in the past), but it’s mostly used fine enough. Cesaro accidentally hurting his right arm was a cute little nod to the way stupid little circumstances have always derailed his greater ambitions in the past, and while I’ve never liked the idea of a right arm attack (why force someone to use their bad arm for a comeback when they have an entirely different arm? work the right for a Southpaw, maybe, but otherwise it just adds a complication), Cesaro’s selling of it is always very good. Not exemplary, but he communicates well enough that it’s a major hinderance, and so it never feels like time’s wasted in that regard. Time is wasted though in first giving Roman a non-arm control segment, then having him target the arm for a second, again seeming to complicate things beyond the purely necessary. The latter is great, Roman being especially gleeful at taking apart a limb on one of these guys yet again. The former is fine, but unnecessary, one of those things that stands out when one looks at something and asks “why did [x] happen?”.

The final third of the match also doesn’t quite seem to be all that it can be, while still checking off every box.

Cesaro sells his arm admirably when reeling off several of the coolest things he can do, and Roman has some great counters and explosive offense himself. At no point does it really feel like Cesaro has a real chance, and that comes just as much from the rush into this feud before Cesaro could build up a LOT of momentum again as it does from the fact that not having won much in recent years, there’s not a lot of main event level credible Cesaro offense to create nearfalls out of.

In short, there’s never a moment created in which Roman’s victory doesn’t feel inevitable, and not even in a fun and crushing sort of a way. There’s no sense of hope and then heartbreak, it just is what it is. So much of this match felt like going through the motions (both men have exceedingly good motions), and the finish wind ups reflecting that. The thing that was always going to happen is the thing that does happen, without a single moment in which that didn’t feel totally assured. While not quite a match you could set a clock to, it is a match that feels like a match someone might say that about.

Roman wins with the front guillotine, and even in an arena full of people on screens that may not even be real, it feels particularly quiet.

The real accomplishment of the match, in the end, is drawing attention yet again to just how great Bryan Danielson is. Not only for having better matches in 2021 with each man than this under the same circumstances, but for how well he was able to make something like the setting fade into the background and for how well he was able to tie the other man’s approach into something more coherent and interesting than this ever quite became. Instead of running against every limitation and sometimes even moving that ceiling up an inch or two through force of will, this was a match that wound up kind of just clarifying what those limitations were.

A great match in a mechanical sense, but because of some of the choices made putting it together and the circumstances under which it was performed under, all we’re left with is the purely mechanical.

***

Seth Rollins vs. THE FIEND, WWE Hell in a Cell (10/6/2019)

More of those Black Friday Sale commissions. This one comes courtesy of AndoCommando, whose greatest wish is to see me in pain. You too can pay me to watch and write about wrestling matches or other things, over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. Ideally you have higher ambitions than to just make me watch bad stuff, but hey, dealers choice. That’s $5 per match and more if you’d like to discuss that in the DMs. 

This was a Hell in a Cell match for Rollins’ WWE Universal Title.

During this whole process, I’ve realized that I have a sort of set idea about what someone gets if they pay me. I want to hit over 500 words at least, and really expand upon everything I mean. Sometimes those words don’t always come, but if they start to flow, I just sort of see where they wander off towards. Even if it’s something I hate like this and that leaves me feeling insulted by the end, I always keep in mind that someone paid for this, and generally speaking, people deserve what they pay for. It’s not like either of these two abused a teenager or anything, you know?

Before I write about this “match”, I want to talk about the WWE and the way I consume it, and my reaction to this in the moment.

Ever since 2017 or so — save a six or seven month run in 2018 when 205 Live was often something worth watching live — I’ve consumed the WWE just like I would New Japan or Takeshita-era DDT or something like that. A company with a lot of talent, but whose booking frustrates me and whose lesser shows are rarely worth a start-to-finish watch. Cherry pick what looks decent or what’s received acclaim from people you trust, but it’s really about the monthly big shows. I’ve only ever watched WWE pay-per-views live, and I’ve typically gone over to my cousin’s to do so. We have some beers and a pizza, it’s a fun time. He’s a bigger WWE fan than I can ever be and pays for the stream, so it’s also just a little bit anthropological on top of allowing me to watch with slightly less guilt (I mean, I still have a Peacock sub that I regularly forget to cancel, but that’s mostly for sitcoms. I tell myself this to make it okay).

Unless a show is entirely useless, I go over there for just about every pay-per-view and it’s a good time.

This was a real bad one.

Bad enough that even my cousin hated it, and bad enough that I walked the few blocks home, got online, and set about making every one of the people I regularly interact with online watch this match. Called it THE ENCOUNTER, described it in detail, and just hounded people until they also experienced it. Typically, a burden shared is also a burden lessened, but that’s not the case here. The load never felt any lighter, it didn’t un-watch the match. Really, I thought it was just phenomenally terrible and I wanted other people to suffer too. That saying about a burden is about real labor with an aim to accomplish something. As it pertains to parasocial relationships, if I suffer through a great ordeal, I kind of want everyone else to suffer through the same thing.

Here and now, I’ve joined a select and probably damned group of people to have watched this match twice.

I would appreciate it if everyone reading this joined the same club.

It’s still one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. None of it’s any better. It hasn’t been rendered quaint by worse things to follow in the way that some NXT matches have. Everything that sucked about this initially and immediately will always suck about it. The action is pedestrian, the booking is atrocious, and the acting is embarrassing.

However, one thing I’m always fearful of being in this space is unoriginal and this match has been discussed to death.

So, actually, fuck this.

I don’t know that you need me to break it down for you when everyone knew from the moment it started to go downhill how bad this is. Better writers than me have detailed it with gifs and videos to break it down like it’s the Zapruder film (do I think the CIA did this? hard to say), and there are countless articles elsewhere on the internet about the myriad of ways in which it’s bad, stupid, and a total failure. All of the no-selling is bad, the attempt at a horror movie finish after the match  complete with blood packet like THE FIEND ripped Seth’s jaw off or something, and especially the maudlin display where the ref pleads with Seth not to use the sledgehammer as well on top of all the other steel objects to the head (gotta pay the fiddler, nobody dances for free) before a fucking Hell in a Cell match is stopped. It’s all bad, and it’s all bad in the ways you’ve always known it was bad.

Nothing that I have to say about this match is new, and I doubt very little than any of it is interesting.

What I’m left thinking about is how this whole exercise had a way of revealing people and what it is that they really wanted.

Some of you could have and did spend money on good matches. Matches that, I imagine, you wanted to know what I thought of and wanted to see me go into detail on. I appreciate that. Not only the money, but the implicit show of respect that comes with it. Times are not especially easy, although there are many far worse off than I am, and I could use it, but I’m far more comfortable doing something to earn it. This is one of the things that I’m best at and so this is my solution. I think it’s a fair trade, and it’s allowed me to mostly not pay for Christmas presents for the people in my life that I love and appreciate while also doing something I greatly enjoy.

Some of you had some weird requests though, and didn’t leave this process looking all that good. The sort of commissions that either greatly upset me or deeply confused me, that caused me to immediately raise my eyebrows, deaden my eyes, and sigh deeply. This is right near the top of that list.

Really though, I don’t know what the point of me writing about this is.

Whether intended or not, it feels a lot like being asked to dance for my money, doing something I really don’t want to do. “You want money to write? Here, write about some terrible matches!” Ask for video of me running into a wall or falling down the stairs instead maybe. It’s a much quicker thing, and fundamentally, a more honest version of what’s really going on. I know there’s an audience out there just for negative reviews, but it’s not really the sort of thing I enjoy doing when it comes to something THIS bad. I try my best to synthesize between the heart and the head, and sometimes that turns out angry and negative. I would much rather write 2500 words about something I loved, or loved most of, than write 1000 words about something like this. (the ideal, of course, is sub-500 words about something i sort of hated but that a lot of people really loved.)

Truly, I have absolutely nothing to add to the conversation about this match that hasn’t already been said over and over and over and over and over again. No turn of phrase, no secret meaning to unlock, there’s nothing here for me to latch onto in a way that I find interesting or valuable. Nothing I have to say about it is new or offers any unique insight. There is nothing of value here. No good deed is commemorated here, etc. I had just opened this blog when the match happened, and there’s a reason I didn’t write about it at the time.

It stinks, it’s rotten, and everything bad that’s happened to the WWE and the world at large sort of feels like reaping what was sown by allowing something like this. There. It’s the concept of entropy as a professional wrestling match.

This is a terrible match, but you all already knew that.

Outside of being paid to discuss a sexual abuser who is still active in wrestling, this is the most offended I’ve been at one of these yet.

 

 

Roman Reigns vs. Daniel Bryan, WWE Fastlane (3/21/2021)

(My strongest immediate urge is just to write “it’s good” and then drop a rating and post it. I am not doing that. But it’s worth mentioning, as it will amuse several people.)

It’s part of the Black Friday Sale commissions, this time from Oregano Jackson. You too can pay me to watch wrestling matches and write about them, over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, and not by harassing me for months online. (It’s quite funny, as I was always going to write about 2021 stuff anyways, but if you need it now, you need it now, I guess.) That’s $5  per match, or if you want something else, like a full show or a series, DM me and we can sort something else. 

This was for Roman’s WWE Universal Title.

It’s not QUITE the ideal Bryan vs. Roman Reigns match.

That sort of of ideal sees Bryan as our conquering hero against a physically dominant corporate champion. Our Hero chips away at the dominant champion and eventually overcomes him through a combination of grit and intelligence, the perfect babyface. Something like Ric Flair vs. Vader or Eddie Guerrero vs. Brock Lesnar, but through Bryan’s more violent lens. It would also not feel the need to be half an hour and would end without too much bullshit, and end with the right result. The 2013 television match comes close to this in spirit, although Roman isn’t Roman just yet and there’s still a little bullshit at the end, even if not to the extent that it’s present at the end of this match.

We don’t have the ideal Bryan vs. Roman Reigns match.

We never will.

There are a few reasons for that. Bryan was never again beating one of WWE’s anointed ones after 2014, like it was one of the only true hard laws in the WWE moving forward. “This thing is never to happen again” as part of a promotional style guide. Couple that with Bryan maybe leaving at the end of the contract in a month and change, and the key element that I imagine elevates this from one of the best matches of the year and of the decade so far to one of the best matches of all time is simply just not one that these two will ever be allowed to play with. This also being the WWE in 2021, there’s a lot of bullshit. Not enough to outright ruin the match, as it largely comes in the closing moments Enough to put a lower ceiling on the match than it deserves at the very end, as it gets in the way of their story reaching a truly natural conclusion in this match one way or the other.

Despite the very obvious math, the ideal version of this match never got to exist. Chalk it up to not knowing how to do that math, chalk it up to not wanting to do that math, whatever. The outcome is the same, something obvious, but never quite done as it should have been.

What we do have is this match, which is at least the best version of Bryan vs. Roman Reigns.

First of all, it is the most ideologically and narratively correct version of this match.

Roman Reigns is not a particularly likeable wrestler. The failing of the 2015 match was first  that he wasn’t great enough to have that match and not be obviously dwarfed by the greatest of all time, but also that he was never likeable enough for the match to really work in the way it was supposed to. Here, as both a more experienced wrestler and a clear villain, the match avoids each of those problems.

He’s perfect as this sort of physically dominant meathead heel. A novel sort of top guy for WWE where he’s not a particularly smart wrestler, but the character has some more layers to it. He’s capable of getting offended at little things in a fascinating sort of way, but doesn’t change much about the way he wrestles. One of the more interesting things about Roman as a heel is that while he’s capable of slowing things down, he’s not suddenly a cerebral heel despite carrying himself in that sort of a way in interviews and angles. He’s a perfect contrast for Daniel Bryan in every way that everybody always seemed to suspect he could be. As a colder character, it’s a perfect contrast with Bryan’s more honest and open working class hero. As what he’s always been in the ring, they have their same natural chemistry, but now with a more fitting story. The clash in wrestling ideology is largely the same, Bryan trying to chop a tree down and Roman trying to bludgeon the little guy away. The difference here is that the natural instinct to go with the more genuine feeling and more relatable underdog isn’t tempered by anything at all.

It’s the best version of the match partially because, at least in a story sense, it’s the most honest version of this match.

This is also their best match yet on a purely mechanical level.

Roman as a heel, to me, has struggled a lot of times to control a match in interesting ways. It’s the biggest hole in the act, the physicality of the Head of the Table deal at its best moments giving way to routine WWE heel work that feels at odds with those moments of more genuine violence. The middle of a Roman match can be great, but it can just as easily be the sort of thing that I recognize as hypercompetent, but also just completely tune out for. Roman Reigns doesn’t struggle much at all with that in this match. He’s meaner consistently, drops in a few really great little touches (a small moment that stands out is Roman initially trying to push up on the mat, before rolling over, so that his bad arm was the furthest away from Bryan’s reach), his shit talk feels more genuine and less like something some failed screenwriter wrote for him, and the match struggles less to fill space. This is a match that goes as long as many of those matches, but that never once struggles to fill time or that ever lacks the feeling that the match is moving forward.

That’s because Daniel Bryan is in this match, and once again, delivers an absolute virtuoso performance.

About once a year in the back leg of his WWE run, Bryan would have a match in which he would deliver a performance so great that it felt like he had something to prove. AJ Styles in 2018, Kofi in 2019, Drew Gulak in 2020, and this. Matches in which it seems that he set out to remind everyone who in the hell he still is, who the greatest ever is, and who the best wrestler in the world still can be. This is one of those matches, nothing all that out of the ordinary, but with so much put into every facet of it. Little faces early on when he’s taunting Roman about needing to go to the ropes and being scared of getting on the ground, the ground work itself, the extra aggression behind every shot, the sympathetic selling, and especially the comebacks. The major thing I took away from this on a second watch is that I’m not sure I’ve seen a better Steamboat Rule (always be fighting back, nobody wants to cheer someone who isn’t putting up a fight) adherence than Bryan in this match. Little shots thrown in before getting cut off, tries at takedowns, on top of the usual hope spots. What I like isn’t just that he does it, but that each attempt feels both so desperate and so heated.

This match is also the home of yet another perfect Bryan two-pronged attack. Not quite the shell game of Bryan against another great Samoan, but something layered and far more interesting than usual (another departure from Fastlane 2015 that makes sense, as Bryan now very deliberately has his style of attack). As one does in wrestling a bigger man, Bryan initially targets the leg. Later on, he targets the arm, and is able to be far more successful in this attack. That opens up the option to then also go back to the leg here and there, creating this really beautiful barrage at one point in Bryan’s comeback where he kicks out the leg to set Roman up for the kicks to the chest, and then the kicks to the hurt arm on top of it.

Between that and Bryan’s submission work starting to pay off more and more, while Roman is wholly incapable of hanging with Bryan in a match like this, unable to reel off his bombs. Even when Roman goes to his trusty ground and pound out of the submission, Bryan’s finally ready with a counter. When the bullshit comes in, enforcer Edge becomes the referee after one is knocked down, and Jey Uso interferes, Bryan’s even able to push past that. He survives the Spear where he couldn’t six years earlier, and gets back to having Roman on the mat, now with everything removed. It’s a wonderful series of responses that this match is able to bring out of me. Going from a desperate sort of a hope to watching with wide eyes in the moment and thinking, truly, that Bryan actually had him.

While not THE best Bryan babyface performance in his entire WWE run (one of the Orton matches or first win over The Shield), it is up there with the best work he’s ever done in this role. It’s the sort of wrestling I love the most, someone working hard and overcoming something significant through a combination of skill and tenacity. I think Bryan is the best wrestler of all time, and a match like this — specifically the way he approaches his attack in it — is a stellar example of why.

The moments in which Roman can’t escape the holds or the two-pronged striking attack and Bryan gets this look in his eyes are among the most triumphant anywhere in wrestling. It’s not only that an all-time great babyface is succeeding against a great villain, but that the way they went about it only served to amplify that feeling. Hard work pays off, as Bryan exposes, deconstructs, and proves his superiority over yet another one of these sorts of wrestlers. Bryan finds his way into the Yes Lock yet again. After trying for the better part of a decade to get Reigns in this position and never quite being able to, Bryan has it, and Roman taps out.

It’s perfect.

It’s the easiest story in wrestling, told by two of the best wrestlers alive and led by the greatest of all time.

Had Daniel Bryan won, it wouldn’t just be the match of the year, but potentially the prohibitive Match of the Decade favorite moving forward.

Of course, one then notices that little logo bug in the right hand corner.

There was no referee to see it, nor an enforcer in the right position or in the right mind to count it. Edge hits Bryan with a chair to break the hold and again on the mat (with one for Roman in between the two), before leaving. Roman is able to get an arm over, and a referee now miraculously appears to count the three, after not a one was to be found for that entire Bryan run of offense or every time he had his finishing hold applied. You never want to ascribe planning when a lack of care or attention is just as probable, but like so many funny little things when it comes to Bryan and the main event, it’s hard not to pick something like that out and see it as something else.

I wish this was Bryan’s last match, in retrospect.

It doesn’t get any more perfect than this, at least not in terms of what’s possible in 2021 WWE.

What we have here is a story that, largely, sums up Bryan’s experience here. Despite the odds, Bryan puts on a masterful performance and forces a WWE main event match to once again bend to his will and become a Daniel Bryan sort of a match. After all that and all the successful work, Bryan gets screwed once again by a referee or two, one of WWE’s favorite sons helping out another (Edge always gets a pass here weirdly, but make no mistake about it. The Seth Rollins of his generation.) to try and keep Bryan out of their club, and that’s that. A ride taken as far as it can go, ending with one of the only matches in which a moral victory feels even a little bit real and meaningful. It’s still bullshit, but what I like so much about this match as a potential ending compared to the actual one Bryan got is that here, at least there’s no pretense that it isn’t bullshit.

It’s not quite the end for Bryan in the WWE, but it feels like it. They’ll need to put their own sheen and coat of paint over it, of course. Buy the ticket, take the ride. However, more than the rematch and more than WrestleMania, this feels like the real end of the Daniel Bryan story in a lot of ways. It certainly feels like the most honest one.

A great match, and the best of WWE’s entire no-fans run. Had this had the energy of a live audience, it might be the match of the year in spite of everything anyways.

It’s a shame nobody ever asked me to review it before now!

***3/4