UWC Toys For Tots '10 Workrate Report

I'm not Johnny Mantel. If you give me a free DVD and ask for my advice, I will provide consultation to your entire promotion for FREE, homeboy. The United Wrestling Coalition has, through unlikely circumstances, become my pet no-budget indy fed. This was their big year-end show to raise money for Toys For Tots, and was apparently an astounding success in that regard. As far as being a good show goes...well, that's why we do this thing.

WHAT WORKED:

-Peter Cross made a really good showing for himself in the first match. I liked his promo a lot. He was tag partners with a masked guy named Shizo, who turned on him a few months back with a vengeance to join his masked brethren in The Secret Society. Unfortunately, he hasn't shown since then. Fortunately, this was the first show where they've really tried to take advantage of the YouTube/DVD format by running a lot of backstage interview segments to hype up matches. So this really felt like Cross was getting some good mileage out of Shizo's inability to make the shows regularly. Up to now, I just thought of Shizo not being at shows as...well...Shizo not being at shows. Now it's an effective part the angle. Cross is pissed that Shizo not only turned on him, but now isn't even man enough to face him, and you get psyched up again to see the eventual Cross vs. Shizo match that you were kinda starting to forget about. Mighty Mo's promo was good, too. Got a few laughs his interactions with Shizo's stand-in, CHIKARA trainee who has yet to actually debut for CHIKARA, Mori Guana. Speaking of Guana, this was a great match, but definitely a step down from last month's tag that I put up here, and it was pretty much down to him. Everyone else looked sharp, especially the faces, with the Unholies laying a beatdown on people and Cross being a strong FIP, and later breaking out a big enzuigiri that may have been the spot of the night. Guana ate stuff well and took his beating - including some nasty chops from The Ripper and a brutal headbutt from Lassiter - like a man, but everything else he did looked like...well, it looked like the first match of a CHIKARA trainee. That frog splah he won with may have been the shittiest frog splash I've ever seen. But everyone else delivered. Oh, and not that I'm really touchy about it myself, but now the The Unholy Alliance are faces, they might want to get that swastika off of Lassiter's forehead. I know it's supposed to be a Manson swastika rather than a Hitler swastika, but still. Although, it did make for an amusing moment in the pre-match interview when Ripper made a Mexican joke, and the guy with the swastika on his head had a "dude, not cool" response.

-Joe Rules fought his wife Taylor Rules in a lumberjack match that was 100% shtick, and that is EXACTLY what that match needed to be given that Joe is the lesser worker, and Taylor ain't exactly Jaguar Yokota. It probably went a little too long, Taylor driving off Devastation LLC by herself near the end wasn't the best idea, and the actual offense was about what you'd expect (read: really bad), but the comedy antics were good, and the lumberjack gimmick - which can be tough to pull off in a meaningful way - was used really well here. They did what they needed to do with this match.

-The 500 lbs. Legion smacks some army men around to demonstrate what he's going to do to Sgt. Slaughter expy Warhead. Then he cuts a promo, and only now do I realize that Legion's gimmick is that he is the actual Biblical Legion. That is a really great gimmick for a fat guy. Unfortunately, the match itself goes below.

-Newly crowned tag champs Blackhearted Justice defended against The Big Unit, a somewhat unlikely tandem of casually-dressed psuedo-intellectual "Textbook" Philly Madison and Ken Patera impersonator Dave Patera. BHJ are a team that have shown me varying degrees of potential in the past, but this was excellent, and definitely the best performance I've seen from them yet. My favorite spot from their two matches against former champs CB4 was Blackheart's belly-to-belly on his larger opponents, and was a little concerned they weren't going to look as good without a big guy to throw. Not the case, as Blackheart got to toss Patera around a lot more and looked good doing it, and in general, they both came off as total pros. They are also crazy over right now, and in a company that doesn't have a lot of main event-level heel singles acts, I feel like they might be able to get away with these guys doing tag title defenses in the main event while Geoffrey Bravo or someone like that gets built up. Big Unit were good foils here, though Madison sometimes comes off like he's trying too hard with his gimmick.

-The Battle Royale and the Title match - the two DVD exclusive parts of the show - were surrounded by some really strong promo work. One of the things I've come to like about Twiggy is that he is great as the local hero at the end of each show talking the crowd into coming to the next one, and Biggie looks really comfortable taking on that role. I'm also a sucker for guys fresh off of a face turn cutting promos where they're actively repentant for past heelishness, so he gave me that, too. Silly Billy and Rudo the Heel making further use of the army men went over very well with me. Billy works a retard gimmick, but plays it as more "childlike" than "retarded", and I think it's a fine performance choice, and Rudo the Heel (who is a face, naturally) probably makes better use of the "white guy pretending to be Mexican" gimmick than El Generico. Joe Rules was great on the stick all night. But the real winner here was Tom Carter. I loved the whole idea that he was trying to "channel" Reckless Youth, but just couldn't make it happen, and his post-match promo was solid gold. In 2011, Raven is still an angry young grunge rocker. He's still a "reckless youth", and it's completely fucking ridiculous. But Carter gets on the mic and says "I'm a 38 year old man with three kids and two mortgages", and it makes me stand up and take notice.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK:

-For the second show in a row, Legion - who can be quite awful - actually did OK for himself in the ring. He throws some good clotheslines and clubbering blows, and it does look impressive when he's toppled over. Unfortunately, this still wasn't a good match. Warhead - who is the promoter of this fed, by the way - looked a lot better eating offense on the last show than he did dishing it out here, and really, cutting a promo where you say "I don't care about your belt" and then beating the champ clean in a non-title match is just shitty.

-I really hate to say this about a DVD that someone sent me for free because they respect my opinions on the pro wrestling, but the battle royale and the UWC Title match - the two DVD exclusive parts of the show - were a disappointment. Neither were terrible, but I couldn't really recommend the DVD to anyone on the strength of those matches. The battle royale started strong with Geoffrey Bravo and Peter Cross - two of the better working guys on the roster - opening up the Royal Rumble-style match, but as more guys entered without any eliminations and the ring started to really fill up, it started to get kinda meandering and dull. Silly Billy and Rudo the Heel - collectively the Short Bus Express - did provide some good comedy antics. Billy's various hats and Rudo going onto the apron expecting to be tagged in were pretty amusing. Also, Billy was crazy over with the audience, and felt like the right guy to win this. But the bulk of the match wasn't terribly interesting.

-Main event was a No DQ three-way with Twiggy Ramirez defending against Biggie Biggs and a back for one night only Reckless Youth. And well, UWC is a family friendly promotion that doesn't do blood or even big foreign object shots, so one kind of wonders how they're going to work a No DQ match. The answer: poorly. And that's a real shame, because I got the sense that without that stip, this would have gone topside. Reckless' "Bently-riding jet-setter who forgot his roots" gimmick was really fun at first, but by now, he kinda comes off as a guy trying too hard to play that role (although his post-match promo definitely redeemed him). But when the bell rings, he's good old Reckless Youth again, and you probably wouldn't notice he's a guy who's been out of commission for the last seven years. I've talked about how much I liked the previous Twiggy/Biggie encounters, and they bring the goods to this match, too (though the porcine Biggie does struggle to take a Reckless Youth monkey flip). But any good the guys in the match did was overwhelmed by the Russo-level overbooking. If you can't bleed, and you can't do big weapon spots, how do you use a No DQ stip? With endless run-ins, apparently. The Twiggy/Biggie/Reckless feud was hot enough to draw a crowd that was pretty damn big for this fed's standards, but they still didn't have enough faith in it to let Twiggy, Biggie, and Reckless handle it themselves, and I think that was a big mistake that pushed what was shaping up to be a quality match into the background. And considering the match wasn't that long, it really didn't even get that far out of the starting gate before run-inpalooza get underway, basically taking the actual competitors out of the second act altogether. It's just frustrating, and while I'm not much of a three-way fan in general, this is one that at least had potential before the mountain of booking collapsed on top of it, and that stinks. So given that the two DVD exclusive parts of the show didn't live up to expectations, and the tag title match, for some reason, had no sound on the DVD version, I just can't recommend this. It's obvious now that UWC trying to go DVD was definitely jumping the gun, a fact that they seem to realize as well. It was a noble experiment, but hopefully they learned a lesson about not putting the cart before the horse from it.