APW TV Workrate Report: 3/12/11

1. Rik Luxury vs. THE DEBUTING Mikey Jay starts us off. Luxury is one of my favorite Bay Area guys, and his manager Markus Mac is actually really good. He's a thick guy wearing a fur coat working a kind of wigger/thug/Suge Knight and he rarely fumbles over words, has some fun goofy slang and invests fully in what he's doing.

Backstage interview with Mikey Jay, and Matt Carlos interrupts!! And does nothing but compliment him! That dude is out of control!

Luxury starts with some headlock work and breaks it with a club to the neck. Crowd is way behind Jay in his debut. Jay is skinny and wears emerald green garbage bag pants with silly lightning bolts on them. This is actually one of the bigger reactions I've ever seen a crowd give to an APW wrestler. On his way to the ring is is hugging girls and he grabs and shakes some poor kid who was just looking for a high 5. Jay is bumped and the crowd is loudly chanting "Mikey Jay". This was a pretty basic "veteran controls debuting rookie" match. Luxury controls with nice punches and forearms, and dumps him with a nasty Saito suplex at one point. Luxury worked real stiff in this one. Jay got some hope spots, hit some nice clubbing forearms, through a nice butterfly suplex, and eventually Matt Carlos comes out and distracts and Jay gets the roll-up upset win. I couldn't really get much of a read on Jay, but he sure seems to have a lot of fans there live, and gets a lot of creepy youtube posts on episodes that he's on (e.g. "mikey j has nice abs" written all skeezed out, clearly typed by a weird old man with one hand, since he didn't use any capitalization. Ewwwww.).

2. Timothy Thatcher vs. Jody Kristofferson with World Of Sport Rules!! They start off with a bunch of forearm exchanges and Thatcher throws really nice forearms and European uppercuts. Jody's weren't shabby either, and he throws a REAL mean knife edge chop. No closed fists so both guys are hitting each other with palm strikes and it looks pretty cool. Nice sequence with Thatcher reversing a backslide into the Thatcher Stretch, with Jody reversing that into a really nice high cradle. First round ends in a draw. 2nd round starts with some cool body scissors matwork reversals, struggling in and out of them, and then Thatcher starts working over the arm, which is something he does really nicely. Has a lot of different arm takedowns and does cool stuff like dropping knees on the arm. Thatcher also escapes a pin by kneeing Kristofferson in the head from the bottom and that rules. Round 2 also ends in a draw.

Round 3 starts with Jody just hitting some arm drags and hip tosses, but eventually hits a spear to win the round. Jody really dives WAY into his spear and it looks pretty awesome, really looks like a good way to end a match. Round 4 is controlled mostly by Jody. Thatcher gets yellow carded trying to gain a cheating advantage, but it doesn't get him very far. Jody throws him around a bit, but he's eventually able to muscle Jody to the ground with a Fujiwara armbar, then deliver elbows to the head before forcing him into an AWESOME looking full nelson pin to win Round 4. Round 5 has a kinda silly German suplex trade off where each guy hits a nasty suplex and screams and then we doing it again. The suplexes looked great, but the shitty Japanese Juniors-ness of it all felt out of place in what had been really awesome stuff so far. Though right after that Thatcher misses a running headbutt and gets German'd into the turnbuckles which looks nasty. Thatcher makes it up at 9 and eventually locks on a REAL tight sleeper, then does a sweet sleeper takeover into the Thatcher Stretch and gets the win.

I wasn't sure the match would work, but it actually worked really great. Jody is starting to get actively good and has come a long way since his debut, and Thatcher is one of my favorite APW guys. They worked real stiff in this and had some cool stuff on the mat, and made the concept work nicely. One of the best APW TV matches I've seen, for sure. Worth checking out.