Phil Schneider, Eric Ritz, Matt D, Sebastian, and other friends write about pro wrestling. Follow us @segundacaida
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Ring of Honor on Destination America 9/23/15 Review
1. Silas Young vs. Michael Elgin
Elgin hasn't been on TV in awhile so he goes over pretty strong on Silas here, but Silas is more of a regular so might have been nice to give him more. Although when he did get more his stuff looked kind of weak, including an incredibly goofy slingshot double foot stomp...thing, that doesn't really look like it touches Elgin. But Young at least takes Elgin's stuff nicely, especially a massive powerbomb on the floor into the guardrail. Kevin Kelly was doing his horrible style of announcing, where he doesn't so much do play-by-play as he does just yell out random nouns that he sees. When Young went for a backbreaker on Elgin, Kelly just yelled "Surgically repaired KNEE of SILAS!" Not anything about the backbreaker, just decided to point out Young's knee, which had nothing to do with any part of the match. It's like he spends 80% of the match looking elsewhere, and then occasionally looks up and points out the first object he notices. Maybe it's some sort of creative writing thought exercise? Needed more underlying homosexual shame and rage, like the other Silas Young matches.
2. Caprice Coleman vs. ACH
Well this didn't do a whole lot for me. All thigh slaps all the time. Just a buncha slappy sounds with legs extended in kick like motions. Legs not touching opponent's bodies, but slappy sounds happening anyway. If a superkick missed in Philadelphia, would it still make a slapping sound? Always. Always.
This started out not very good, and by the end I was on board. Jay started with Okada and it's not shocking that Okada had bad looking strikes, but Jay looked like he was holding waaaaay back. No clue what was going on here because a few minutes later he's beating the hell out of Trent. Maybe Jay was just being a slow starter, because by the end he's tossing out headbutts and big lariats and looking like a monster. But if this match works, and eventually it does, it's because Mark was absolutely on fire throughout the entirety of this. I couldn't take my eyes off that crazy caveman. Yeah Trent can take a big bump and Goto threw a nice spinning heel kick in the corner, but this was the Mark Brisco show. All of Mark's palm strikes looked great, he flung himself into offense, all his combos looked cool while also looking like he was just making them up as he went. He looked awesome, one of my favorite Mark performances. And after Jay's stumble early with Okada, he went out on a wild note just killing Baretta. Briscoes make everything better.
This week's show went by quick, even if looking back I didn't love a lot about it. That's...good, right? All worth it for Mark Briscoe.
MLJ: Puebla Hotshot: Negro Casas, Barbaro Cavernario, Kamaitachi vs Dragon Lee, Maximo, Blue Panther
2015-9-28 @ Arena Puebla
Negro Casas, Barbaro Cavernario, Kamaitachi vs Dragon Lee, Maximo, Blue Panther
1:15:00 in
I'm messing up my schedule for the next couple of weeks (again) in order to hotshot this. It was from the Monday Puebla show this week and I was higher on it than most of the comments I saw live, comments that I'll get to and that I think were fair and don't even disagree with. Two hundred-plus matches into this project, I've learned some things about myself and my own proclivities, however, and this is a good match to look at for the sake of generalities.
First and foremost, the match was a disappointment. Of course it was. On paper, this is one of the best trios matches that CMLL can put on right now. Unfortunately, it was put on with no real stakes, no major program to build to (though maybe they'll run Casas vs Maximo again?), in front of a really sparse crowd, and on a stilted 2 hour show. They played around with the pairings so that other than a far too brief opening exchange (more on that in a moment) we didn't really get Blue Panther vs Negro Casas, and there wasn't the sort of spotfest destruction we've come to expect from Kamaitachi vs Dragon Lee. There wasn't even a lot of standout character moments between Cavernario and Maximo (though there was a promising moment between Cavernario and Kamaitachi). It was a match that, in another setting, should have been spectacular. That said, for a match without much of a primera and with a rushed I do think it was very solid and I want to talk about why I feel that way.
I'm very forgiving on CMLL trios matches in general. I think that has to do with what I look for in wrestling. A lot of people want brilliant matwork or lightning fast sequence in a primera or spectacular dives and spots in a tercera, and I like that stuff too, but it's a means to an end for me, not the end in and of itself. I'm into this for the build up and the pay off. That can come in a number of forms in these trios matches. It can be in the primera as an escalating series of mat exchanges or rope-running sequences leading to the tecnicos gaining advantage and picking up the fall. Alternative, the pressure could start building that way leading to an underhanded rudo swarm. It can be in the segunda, with a beatdown stemming from either the start of the match or the end of the primera and culminating with a big tecnico comeback. Or, it can be in the tercera, with the whole match building to a specific pairing, the dives clearing the ring of the tertiary luchadores so that the match can end on its real focus.
That's the part of the journey I love, and the best matches give us multiple iterations. That's something I've noticed watching 90s footage relative to now. They'd often give us a really complete primera (for isntance one with escalating tecnico shine), a really complete segunda (with a long beatdown), and then a comeback into a really complete tercera, with a lot of action, a lot of cuts off, and a finishing stretch which highlighted an ongoing feud and paid off the emotion of the entire match.
Rarely now do matches get room to breathe in all of those ways. Personally, if a match is only going to breathe in one, however, I want it to be the beatdown. I think this speaks to my background in wrestling. I love southern tag matches. I love that heat building and building, with hope spots and cut offs, with false tags and ref distraction and cheating heels and overzealous babyfaces. Lucha is generally broader than that, with its own tropes more focused on widescale momentum shifts, but wrestling is wrestling and there are more commonalities than differences.
I thought this match had a good beatdown, one that got enough time and led to a solid comeback (though not an ideal one). I don't love how they went into it. Casas and Panther had really just started to show their maestro wares when the rudos swarmed. That can work, even so early in a match, but it has to be the right situation. I think Ingobernables' title matches are a good situation, for instance, because they're spitting in the face of title match tradition when they do it. Here, it felt more due to time constraints, or because in 2015, for most trios matches, something has to give. You just can't have a complete primera, complete segunda, and complete tercera. I suppose the card has to have variety and this was only second from the top.
No matter how they got into it, it was a good beatdown. Casas, Cavernario, and Kamaitachi are great at keeping things moving and engaging. There was even a little cut-off-the-ring face in peril section on Panther, who's someone skilled enough to pull that off. It took me a long time to really figure out the tendency for these, but so long as there's just one rudo in the ring, they can play to a hot tag instead of just cycling tecnicos in and out. It's a subtle difference but it works. Usually it lasts for a few minutes focusing on one tecnico and sort of provides the best of both worlds. Once he's sufficiently beaten down without having made the tag, they cycle him out and start the double teaming in more force since they have the numbers game. That's exactly what they did here and I think it was effective and compelling, even if there weren't a lot of big spots or moments.
I can't say I liked the comeback quite as much, but some of that was down to familiarity. I made two real comments while watching this (and it's nice that CMLL on Youtube or Claro lets a number of us watch this at once. It adds to the sense of community), the first being that they really needed to let the beatdown go for a while (and they did) and the second being that I really didn't want the comeback to be centered around Maximo's butt stop spot (where a rudo runs into his ass as he runs up to the second rope). It's fine once and a while but Maximo goes to that well far too often. Well, that's what they did. I think it made the crowd happy, that, the Dragon Lee dive that followed, and the tercera which was heavily focused on Maximo's spots, but there were a number of more interesting ways they could have gone with it.
And that's the most damning thing about the match. It could have been more interesting. It should have been more interesting. Still, I'm glad I watched it and I'm glad I watched it live. There's something primal about the ebb and flow, the build up and the payoff, the beatdown and the comeback that really draws me to trios matches, even the disposable ones. There's something broad and mythic about it, and even a match that doesn't live up to its promise can tap into that just by the nature of its structure. Plus, while this was paint-by-numbers, it was some of the best paint CMLL has to offer and numbers that almost always come through.
Another 2/3 Falls Portland tag, requested by Pete who was nice enough to donate to my co-worker Jan's cause.
Last Portland match we watched saw Dynamite looking like a fairground demolition derby speed dealer, here he looks more like the sergeant at arms for the Creativity Alliance. He has a bulked up body, Bic'd head and red lightning bolt tights (ohhhh so close to having two little lightning bolts right next to each other), but it was another fine Dynamite performance. His work with Hennig was real good, especially once he started with the leaping headbutts. He hits his perfect middle rope knee drop, really probably has the greatest flying kneedrop in pro wrestling, and here it actually wins a fall! That was wonderful. I've seen plenty of matches where he hits this skull crushing knee drop, far and away the most violent thing on the whole card, and it gets a two count. Here he launches into camera frame with a middle rope kneedrop right into Hennig's stomach, really looks like Hennig is going to start coughing up blood. And - as it should - it ends a fall.
Assassin was a real revelation here, again. I did some digging and realized it was likely not Jody Hamilton, but more likely David Sierra. That would make sense as Assassin is super spry in both these matches, really flies into moves at a crazy speed. I doubt a 45 year old could be moving like this...but I've also never thought "Cuban Assassin? Oh yeah, super fast bumper." But I've also never seen Sierra when he was 23, so maybe he had a young masked deathwish. I am more used to differently enjoyable chubby bullshit artist Sierra. Either way 1983 Assassin was awesome.
We really don't get a whole lot of Buddy in this, which is disappointing. We do get him during the smart/unique/horrible finish. I didn't really understand what happened during the finish, or more what was *supposed* to happen. Depending on what was supposed to happen it was either executed perfectly, or one of the worst ways to end a match. It started awesome. Assassin grabbed Buddy in a waistlock, with Buddy ducking just in time to allow a Dynamite missile dropkick to nail Assassin right on the point of the chin. It looked brutal. So Buddy locked Assassin in a waistlock after dumping Dynamite, then Hennig hit his own dropkick. I assumed Buddy would then German suplex Assassin, but instead he just fell backwards and awkwardly lay there with his legs in the air while Assassin lay on top of him. So, either Buddy was supposed to act knocked out, which is kind of a good finish even if it looked awkward...or it was supposed to be a "both men get their shoulders counted down" and instead it was just Assassin lying on Buddy. It looked weird. I don't get it.
Sandy Barr, like he does, looked like a dental lab technician showing up for work.
Also, one of the announcers had a call that made me laugh just because it was such a failure and he still kept committing to finishing the horrible train of thought. Hennig launched Dynamite into the buckles and the announcer went "THAT'LL reset your...uh...clock...back to uhm...daylight savings time...or whatever." I love how he started out excited for his declaration and by the end, just one sentence later, he just kind of loathed it.
Thank you again PETE for the donation! You're awesome.
