The Quest for the Whitest Match in History: Day 2

Izzy, Dixie, & Angel Dust vs. Austin Aries, Roderick Strong, & Jack Evans
ROH - 5/22/2004

This was the debut of the Generation Next gimmick, four guys who would go on to be guilty of extreme whiteness at various points in their careers - Aries co-opting stuff from tapes with no rhyme or reason, Jack Evans being a wigger, Roderick Strong being Paul Hamm, and Alex Shelley doing a tape-watching gimmick in TNA that evolved into a low-budget filmmaker gimmick somehow - but don't stand out as exceptionally white here. To pick up the slack, we have Special K, which, in fairness, was a pretty multi-ethnic group, but a stable of rich kid ravers is a pretty white concept. Also, let's not forget they have Dixie, who first gained notoriety as a white guy doing Southern chickenshit heel shtick against Puerto Ricans in northeast indies.

At this point, I felt that outside of Shelley, the GenNext guys kinda struggled in singles matches, but we were a lot of fun in multi-mans like this. They had enough cool spots and were competent enough heels that they could excel in this setting, but in singles matches, they tended to fall into their various bad habits. Special K were kinda similar in that regard, as aside from Dixie and Lethal, they were guys who really benefited from the team setting, as evidenced by the fact that they broke up, and now they're all gone from the company. Well, I guess we can't blame the team's break-up for Deranged stealing Teddy Hart's car, but you get the idea. Of course, this was a team that used the team gimmick to justify bad habits - which is still probably the most clever booking move Gabe Sapolsky ever pulled off - whereas GenNext used it to hide theirs. And this is a match where those bad habits become apparent - Angel Dust working the match with an injured neck, which he sells early, but forgets about while doing Manami Toyota's rolling pin thingy, which I imagine would be pretty traumatic for a dude with an injured neck, being the most glaring example - but GenNext have a lot of fun stuff to do to keep me interested. Jack Evans uncorks the reverse hurricanrana on a listless Izzy, Strong military presses Izzy back-first into the corner, and Aries spinning elbowdrop looks a lot better when he doesn't take an hour to set it up. They'd all do better stuff later, but this was a fine intro to the gimmick.