Long Road Report to Hell 4/4/19 FINAL ACT, Show #4: AIW Slumber Party Massacre

ER: We sadly had to cut out of the MLW tapings at 10 PM (felt like they had enough material to go to 11, and if was going to take an hour to get back to White Eagle). So we missed LA Park, which was amusingly our original reason for even planning this cross country meet-up, when Park/Rush was going to happen. So no Park, but we'd all seen Park more than once in life, and the AIW early show multiman is one of Phil and my favorite things in current wrestling, Tom had never seen one, and we all decided early on in the MLW tapings that we did NOT want to miss than multiman. Yes, we realized in hindsight we should have just camped out at the White Eagle all day I haven't had any liquid since my beer at Bloodsport 6 hours earlier, and my mouth feels gross. Due to lack of options I am forced to buy a pack of gum from the bathroom attendant for $3, but the $3 was worth it. I had mentioned to Phil that I was getting gum on three separate occasions, but once I *had* the gum I never offered him or Tom a piece. Later in the night at 2:30 AM, Phil made me feel like shit for not offering him gum over 4 hours earlier. Even though he never seemed interested any of the times I told him I was getting gum. THAT'S WHERE WE WERE AT AFTER WATCHING 10 STRAIGHT HOURS OF WRESTLING. The whole ride back Tom openly makes fun of the awful Delilah request radio show the driver is listening to, with us openly laughing when she dedicates Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" to a poor lost soul in love. It's a bunch of hacky shlock that feels weird in 2019 and to my delight Tom made sure this was known. As we pulled up and jogged to the entrance we literally heard the sound of nasty chairshots. We knew we made the right choice when we walked in the door.

34. La Familia de Tijuana (Bestia 666/Damian 666) vs. The Young Studs (Bobby Beverly/Eric Ryan)

PAS: We entered the venue to the sounds of chair hitting flesh and the first thing we see is Damian wasting Beverly on the floor with uncalled for chair shots (We missed the first minute or so, including Damian doing the Fuerza hug, but instead of a punch he stabbed Ryan in the head with scissors) This was listed as a Mexican street fight and definitely had that insane Tijuana feeling as all four guys just tried to mangle each other. The match slows for a bit when it gets into the ring, but the finish of Bestia Death Valley Drivering Ryan through a fork door was completely bonkers. Hell of live experience and a crazy start to the show.

TKG: There were a lot of forks in this Mexican street fight. Guys stabbing each other with forks, forks covered door, Familia de Tijuana doing fork assisted headbutts to transition. Is a fork considered to be a particularly Mexican tool? I mean molcajete’s would be more expensive and don’t know if you could safely do molcajete spots. We saw a lot of big brawls Thursday, start to pick up on the little differences. liked way whole match was about transitions being built around wrestling not around props. Also Bestia and Damian always made sure to hold the chairs for other during spots so Young Studs never had to, also if Damian is putting a chair necklace on opponent he’s going to use it like a horse collar to yoke him around.

ER: It was awesome getting to our seats, and hearing Phil mark out more for the Young Studs than he has for anybody else today. You could tell he was excited to be at AIW with Tom because Tom had seen next to none of these guys, some of our favorite current asskickers. Ryan and Beverly are two of those guys and this was an awesome start to the end of our night. I don't always like stabby brawls, but I really liked this because we didn't just linger on gouging or worked stabbing where guys are wailing on each other's foreheads with spikes and yet coming up bloodless. Here every stab attack at a forehead was done specifically to get blood, so the stabs actually came off effectively and kept the action moving. Seeing belt shots on tape always looks nasty, but belt shots live just echo in your ears and seem like the most painful thing. And the first 5 minutes of this was FdT just beating the bricks off the Young Studs, with chairshots, hard shots to the head, tossing them through chairs, headbutts, and all those belt shots. There was minimal downtime (one chair spot took a bit long) and it was fairly one-sided in favor of FdT, but the show starting energy was strong with these guys. Ryan and Beverly come off like a pair of Arns staggering around a WarGames, and that's a vibe that I LOVE in a bloody brawl. Bestia gets a fork bat dragged across his head and comes up bleeding, Damian gives our most violent AARP member performance of the day (of course outside of Severn I'm not sure we saw anybody else past 55), and my god the reactions from all of us when they brought out the fork door. I'm a man who has never considered attaching forks to doors, and it's one of those great deathmatch props where I would happily listen to a podcast that was just a recording of whatever was said while they made the fork door. I actually screamed loudly when the fork door got used, only because I fully expected Ryan to come out of it with forks sticking grossly out of his body. This was really the burst of violence and energy that we needed at this point in our long day. And then before leaving the ring Ryan gigged himself a bunch of times with a fork for the benefits of the camera. And then I remembered "oh right wrestling is gross."

7. Joshua Bishop vs. Dominic Garrini

PAS: Got to give it up to these kids, they came into this match trying to steal the entire weekend and basically pulled it off. Garrini has turned into a hell of a brawler, which is not where I saw his career going. He opens with a jumping knee and a tope, and then they pull out the stuff. They do a pretty nasty version of the Whitmer/Jacobs hockey fight with spikes (where they both do super obviously blade afterwards). Garrini takes the bump of the weekend, getting Awesome bombed off the stage through a door, which was truly harrowing to see live. I am not normally a fan of skewers, but they were used here as a real bit of torture rather than a geekshow trick. The finish was maybe the best shticky I Quit finish I have seen, with Bishop cuffing Garinni to the ring ropes, spraying him with lighter fluid and threatening to burn him up. With the nuts stuff they were doing in this match, I briefly bought them doing some lunatic WING Kanemura finish. What day Garinni had, total psycho.

TKG: This was batshit great brawl and hard to write about this match without full on going Chris Farley fan boy play by play ‘do you remember the time Bishop did...’. This is submit or surrender and does a great job of escalating so everything just keeps on getting worse and worse and both guys go through crazy shit and sell cumulative damage. Garrini has had a crazy day of impressing me and I love the way he chops bishop straight to the throat to set stuff up. This was the second match on the show, which is a crazy match to happen second match on a show.

ER: This is the kind of violent brawl that is exciting and scary in person, the kind of brawl where real and shocking violence really lands well. These guys beat the hell out of each other and after his day I would hate to be Garrini's body on 4/5. This was paced out really nicely and my favorite thing about this was that a lot of violence often felt retaliatory, especially from Garrini's end, and instead of them moving to stunt spots Garrini especially would always have this look of "you just did WHAT to me you fucker? Really?!" And then he would make Bishop pay. He hits a chair erasing tope to start the damn match, and it set an awesome tone. Garrini eats an inverted suplex on the ring apron, and from where I was sitting I assumed we had just seen the most painful powerbomb of the match. Heh. I don't typically like wooden stake spots as they're always a reminder of how people with my natural translucent pale skin and fang-like canines have been eliminated throughout history, but also because they typically seem unnecessarily gross don't always read well enough to make the assumed pain worth it. But here Bishop sticks them right into the side of Garrini's head and his ear, and Garrini has a great fearful anger response to them. His face reads WTF scared, but his instinct is to yank them right out and use the weapon he's been given. The Whitmer/Jacobs spike spot played great, looked nasty, big shot looked good....but my god did I wish they could have found some other way to gig their foreheads than what they both chose to do: lie on the mat, facing away from each other, jabbing their foreheads with a blade repeatedly, like they were angrily trying to force a straw into a Capri Sun. It was the most blatant blading I've ever seen. And what's frustrating is they COULD have incorporated that into the match. It would have been really easy! If they were already committed to bleeding out of their heads, they could have just worked the spikes spot differently. Throw a couple harder shots, get opened up by a spike, go from there. Or shoot, make the blade a spot in the match, act like he had a blade for use as an actual weapon in an I Quit match. You could have even had Garrini blading so obviously AS A SPOT in the match itself! Eric Ryan did that same thing before leaving the ring, just stabbed his forehead with a fork a bunch to show what a savage he is. Bishop could have spiked Garrini, and Garrini could have gotten up screaming, gigging his head to show that it's going to affect him. But rolling over to opposite corners of the ring and then wild arm blading your head in broad daylight? That's so bush. Roll to the floor, cover it SOMEHOW.

And I really liked the rest of this! It was great! It's filled with tough chairshots, Garrini hitting Bishop in the chest at one point, and Garrini takes an Awesome Bomb off the freaking stage through chairs and a door. That really was the spot of the weekend, and it happened DIRECTLY in front of us. There were only a handful of people closer to that evil, and pro wrestling is just wild. Garrini just got murdered with that powerbomb, but I like that the specific nastiness that an I Quit match could bring, as a big move like that is more likely to KO your opponent, but not necessarily make him quit. Their weapons really played like violent weapons, the chairshots were hard, tacks spot was gross, I even liked the BS interference spot as it lead to Garrini punching the guy on the apron like he was picturing him with a Phil Baroni face, then hitting a fantastic piledriver on the apron. And the finish was incredible, right up at the top with the best I Quit finishes we've had. Bishop handcuffed Garrini to the ringpost, sprayed him with lighter fluid, and then waved a lighter literally inches away from him. And honestly, this finish was so damn effective that IN THAT MOMENT, considering the increased craziness we'd seen from Garrini that day I was thinking that it was entirely plausible that some wacko would agree to get lit on fire because it would give them the most holy shit moment of the biggest week in pro wrestling of the entire year. I literally thought that I was going to witness a guy get let on fire, and I was already thinking about the worst possible outcome of such a spot and was then frantically checking my exit locations so I wouldn't end up trampled at Great White II: Great White Eagle Hall Fire. It was totally plausible that Bishop was going to set Garrini on fire, and that fact alone makes this a super difficult to defeat "finish of the year". Crazy spot to end a crazy fight.

9. To Infinity And Beyond (Cheech/Colin Delaney) vs. The Jollyville Fuck Its (Russ Myer/T-Money) vs The Philly Marino Experience (Marino Tenaglia/Philly Collins) vs. The Production (Derek Director/Eddy Only)

PAS: I absolutely adore AIW multi man tags. They have a ton of guys with a ton of fun stuff who really know how to pace a match like this. Fuck-It's were the standouts, They do their great spot where T-Money airplanes spins Derek Director while Russ punches him in the head. Russ breaks his finger (which he shows our row in gruesome fashion, but he still goes on to do ten crazy things, including his beautiful cannonball. T-Money is slamming and spinebustering and pouncing his way into my heart as well. Everybody was good in this, Cheech and Delaney are very good at making me buy otherwise implausible shit, and the young guys all bumped big and had cool offense. Super excited I got to see one of these live.

TKG: This is exactly how you work this match. A gaggle of tag teams doing double team and tandem moves till no one left standing to break up pinfall. The PME did a bunch of guy blinded performs his signature move on his own teammate comedy spots which I normally think don’t work in this type of match as a joke kinda needs to be built to, and not sure if they worked as comedy but they worked as “this shit is so chaotic that mistakes will happen”, crowd popped for comedy spots as dramatic errors. They also really pulled off a sense of hierarchy which you don’t expect in this kind of clusterfuck spot fest. I hadn’t seen any of these guys before but immediately knew who was the ace champs, who veterans, who underdogs..and what everyone’s role is in those teams so at the point where Cheech and Delaney start doing simultaneous tandem moves on the hoss from both Production and PME you knew where shit was going. Actual sense about who has momentum in a spotfest clusterfuck. This is match I want to see again on tape. I joked at end of season one of LU, that they should bring in Cheech Hernandez or Jesse Hernandez to replace Hotstuff and never explain the switch...but fuck no joke they should have brought in Cheech.

ER: This was definitely the match Phil was most excited to see today, and it was hard for me to not be as excited as he was. Enthusiasm is infectious, and I think we've written some of our most enthusiastic reviews of the past couple years about AIW multimans. It's a real testament to what these guys have done that we spent more time saying "we should leave soon, I do NOT want to miss the AIW 10 man" and not "I do NOT want to miss Shinjiro Otani's first US match in 16 years, against EDDIE KINGSTON". We wanted this match, and this match gave us exactly what we wanted. Phil had been talking up AIW multimans all day to Tom and it's great when you hype something up and then watch it deliver on the hype. And goddamn did this deliver on the hype. Every one of these matches makes me like all these guys even more. I can now easily say that Jollyville is my favorite tag team in the world, Colin Delaney looked like a guy people should be talking about as a top 50 guy, Cheech/Delaney are a great tag team that can take big spots and seamlessly work in some complicated do-si-do cooperative spots without making them look stupid, Eddy Only is damn fearless with his body and does some wild offense and just as wild bumping, Derek Director keeps getting better and is great at landing hard with his body (he had an awesome cannonball and took The Pounce like a brave psycho, Big T-Money had a major coming out party for me, he and Russ are both so damn good. This had every damn thing I wanted. I love Nasty Russ' punches, loved we got to see the airplane spin punch, and love how he would only shake out his fist after a couple of the punches to really sell that sometimes you can land a punch on a sweet spot and other times you get your wrist bent weird. The flying is nuts as we get some big dives: Tenaglia stars the whole match by falling off the top rope onto Delaney), Russ hits a moonsault to the floor but gets caught lawndart style by the group and then Collins crashes onto him, T-Money hits a big man flip dive, all great. And that's the thing, every damn move in the match looked great! The powerbombs were brutal, great attention was paid to punches, DDT's looked vertebrae crushing, Delaney hit a couple cool cutter variations that looked real neck wrenching, kicks to the stomach looked good, just a super snug match with bodies getting run into bodies really hard. Everything was laid out really well so the whole thing flowed and had people constantly moving in and out of action with no break in pace, with a couple of very nice saves that extended the action into an increasingly violent finish. Cheech/Delaney have cool combos that are snapped off well, building nicely to something that would convincingly finish a killer match like this. This three matches really had us on an improbably joyous pro wrestling high, quite a miracle in our literal 11th hour of wrestling.

25. Shinjiro Otani vs. Eddie Kingston

PAS: Otani is a guy who clearly means a ton to Kingston and you could tell it was big deal for him to face off with him. This was very much a Zero-One style of match, which is a type of Puro I really miss. Simple, hard hitting, and focused on selling and facial expressions, like Hash said, it's about the eyes. It the type of thing Kingston does as good as anyone ever, and Otani stepped up and matched his intensity. Awesome selling by both guys, Kingston sells the initial Otani chop like it briefly stopped his heart, and Otani did some cool knee selling like he was working out a leg cramp. Would have liked to see this go a bit longer, but otherwise this delivered it's on paper promise.

ER: Once Rush/Park was taken from us, this was really the main singles match that kept our interest in doing the trip. Both are obviously group favorites and it's one of those great pairings that none of us had thought about before. Kingston is supposedly gone from wrestling this year and his year really has felt like an awesome retirement tour. The problem is, retirement tour Kingston has been some of my absolute favorite damn wrestling of the past decade. So can we just talk him into being About to Retire Kingston for a couple more years? Just do one of those Cher extended world tour retirement tours? And this is great, which makes it even more bittersweet. I think this match could have not lived up to our personal expectations, but it totally did. It's a unique situation as it's not often you get to see a match worked as both Legends Match and Dream Match. So you get greatest hits spots teased out, like the Stones playing the Start Me Up riff to a bunch of different parts of the arena to ramp up the excitement. Otani does this for the facewash kicks, really grinding the toe of his boot on Kingston's cheek while getting the crowd louder and louder, still doing really stiff kicks and scrapes, but then throwing in a few genuinely funny comedy spots when he kept booting his seconds Takeda and H. Suzuki into the front row with the facewash follow through. It's a heartwarmingly violent way to do a signature spot, which is fun when it happens. But while there were legend spots, both played like they were in their prime, and looked it. The stand and trade had a legends feel to it, with Otani riling up Kingston with shots but then paying for it when Kingston crushes him with a hardest-of-the-day rolling elbow or a wicked backfist. Kingston going after Otani's knee was some of the absolute best stuff we saw all day; every time Kingston would kick his knee out it looked like he was trying to hobble him, and Otani sold it by crumbling convincingly with each one. Kingston working a kneebar and a really snug STF was great, the holds looked painful and Otani sold them as dangerous and painful, scrambling to ropes knowing they were a threat. But he punished Kingston back and Kingston was great selling Otani's biggest stuff. Kingston dumped him on his shoulder with a nasty German and I loved Kingston's woozy pain afterwards. Otani is an old dude who has been wrestling a long damn time, but his lariat still looks like a lariat that should finish a match. That's awesome from a guy who was a cruiserweight legend for so long. This was compact but told a great short match story, managed to be a modern match while feeling nostalgic. Would have been a great capper to our long day...

TKG: I ended up unexpectedly going to the MSG ROH/NJ and enjoyed it despite not being much a fan of either current ROH or current NJ and maybe at one point I’ll write about that show. But you watch current NJ style which is built on guys always working as though they are building for a marathon…it’s great watching this instead. This Choshu style “these guys are aiming for a win from the start” just charismatic as fuck guys coming out trying to hit hard and win a match is a path I like and miss. Kingston sells being hit hard as well as anyone can. Post match Kingston does essentially one of those Ian Rotten works Tommy Gilbert and then explains to audience why Gilbert is a legend and hero to him. Kingston has enough charisma and connection with crowd to be able to pull off that speech.

Scott Steiner vs. Swoggle

PAS: I suggested we leave after Kingston vs. Otani and it would have been an unbeatable wrestling experience if we had. This was OK, I guess. Steiner still has a great sleazebag charisma and I was amused at him coming out to Short People. The Cabana Man Dan stuff seemed unnecessary and an excuse to drag the match out a bit.

TKG: Scott Steiner looks old...so old, he looks 5 years older than exclusively sold at Cracker Barrel gospel album era Kenny Rogers. Steiner does some amusing old man bullying mic work and gets PA guy to play Randy Newman’s ‘short people’ he then talks about song and how we all sympathize with narrator of song which is why ‘we made it #1 on top 40’. I mean this is a nerd audience where sure bunch of guys could talk Randy Newman deep cut and Bulgarian exclusive releases but may have been total 3 guys in building who’s record buys contributed to top 40 record placement in 76.

ER: Let me say that while Phil did *technically* suggest we leave after the Otani match, it was never actually brought up as a serious proposition. None of us ever asked if he was serious, we just kind of laughed as somehow two of us at 12:30 AM weren't thinking of leaving a show early. I think if Phil would have asked seriously, or asked another time or two, he could have gotten some support on that idea. And what is a drag, is this whole thing felt like something that could actually work, except every time I started thinking that (and we're talking from the moment we saw this match was announced) that no matter how good the bullshit surrounding this match was - and this match was going to have some major bullshit to pad the time out justify the fly-ins - no matter how good the bullshit was, it was never going to work for one big reason: Swoggle is not good at pro wrestling in almost any way. When people do "most overrated" lists, his name never pops up on them, and sure there are going to be built in complications with Swoggle matches, but damn has he gotten a ton of opportunities with nothing worthwhile to show. This is a guy who was paired with Finlay for 5 years and I'm not sure any of their tags would make it past FUN on a Finlay C&A. When you're paired with a top 5 blog favorite and have zero meaningful matches during that span, you're just not good. The WeeLC gets a lot of praise, but is thoroughly unimpressive because of the awful performance of Swoggle. He was too young to grow up around traditional vaudeville act midget wrestlers, and he physically can't do the style of wrestling on the shows he gets booked on, so none of it works. And yet he's been as much as part of AIW over the past several years as any other wrestler, so I understand his presence on this card. But he's just not good. He was on a gazillion Mania weekend matches, nobody cared about them the moment they were over, and while I'm ecstatic that the guy is getting so many pay days, he is never going to be a part of a card I'll be excited about. Just like I have a running list of guys I would watch against anybody (Necro, Finlay, Kingston, etc.), Swoggle is a guy who wouldn't be interesting against ANY of those guys. This was never going to work, no matter how well any of it worked.

But the bullshit worked. Steiner comes out looking leathery as hell but he still has his kind Steiner eyes. Nobody talks about the Kind Steiner Eyes! But they're an important part of his act. Not many people know, but their WCW theme was originally "Steiner Eyes" and they got scared people would mock their sensitivity so they changed it to "Steiner Line". But look at those tender Scotty Steiner eyes. They're not cloudy or distant like other older roids guys. He can still be a major asshole, but he still has relatably kind eyes which give his asshole rants more personality. He's not a sad old guy, he's an old guy who is scarier because he doesn't look crazy which means he's actively choosing to be mean. There's a "Roided Up Athlete" tree that branches into "crazy" "surprisingly well" adjusted" "sad" and all points in between. Having Steiner show up doesn't feel exploitative because those eyes show he's still a functioning human. Tom mentioned he looks like an older Kenny Rogers from when Kenny Rogers already looked old, but I think it's important that Steiner hasn't had a facelift that completely sapped the warmth from his eyes. Kenny lost that warmth, Robert Mitchum lost that warmth, Bronson just kept getting weirdly smoother, Burt Reynolds lost that warmth, but Steiner kept his normal face and retained that eye connection. And the way he wears shades for the bulk of his appearances makes them oddly even more powerful, showing that Steiner essentially realizes his tender eyes are barely slightly less powerful than Gambit's. We've never had any scary "Scott Steiner pilled up" moments like we've had with many of his peers, and I've enjoyed his actual ring work as recently as a year or so ago in Impact. Steiner milks this fucker for as long as possible and if he had an even slightly more competent opponent, I think this would have worked. Steiner gets a lot of stick work - which I'm sure most in the crowd wanted more than anything else in this match - and demands to come out to his REAL theme music, which turns out to be Randy Newman's "Short People". It's a fun gag, but Steiner makes it so much funnier than the gag should be. He suddenly turns into Davy Jones doing a reading for a Time Life AM Gold infomercial. "Yeah that's right. You remember this song? This song takes me back. Takes me back to a simpler time, where Americans' hatred of little people but love of strolling bouncy upbeats rocketed this song up the charts to #1." And it kept getting more blue and more violent and more hostile, and honestly Steiner on the stick was probably enough to keep this in the "what worked". The wrestling was fine, Steiner threw a little guy around a bit and Swoggle did a good enough dazed sell after a tough weapons shot. If Steiner had broken the laws of time and space and done a Frankensteiner on Swoggle, this would have made List.

Colt Cabana/Space Monkey vs. Ethan Page/Maxwell Jacob Friedman

PAS: The stuff were Cabana acts like he is MJF's dad seems vaguely Anti-Semitic to me. They don't really look anything alike. Page and MJF's shtick is best used as seasoning, and we got big glopping handfuls of it in this match and all over the weekend.

TKG: The joke here is that Cabana and MJF are both Jewish thus must be father/son. I mean I watch dunking booth insult clown videos, so I’m ok with racial phenotype jokes...and maybe you could have pulled that bit off in Ohio or Utah but this is a Jersey/NY wrestling audience where there were 30 other Jewish looking guys in my section alone. I thought Space Monkey looked good on the Family Reunion show, here he looked like a guy with nice gear.

ER: Earlier in the show two presumably very nice girls sat a seat down from me. I think I weirdly recognized them (maybe they were sitting hard camera side for an MLW taping meaning I saw them for 5 episodes of TV) and one of them had on a boss custom Dan Severn sweatshirt. The other one had leaned over to ask me "Has Colt wrestled yet?" "Who?" "Colt Cabana?" "Ughh he's on this card?" I hope I didn't come off rude, it was just a reflex. So I knew we were getting a Colt Cabana match, and now we were paying the piper and at MINIMUM we can be thankful that the other "guys whose brand of comedy I don't care for" were all shoved into one match. We saw Page honing his comedy chops to start our day, and nothing that happened during our day made him any more funny here. MJF is a guy I've enjoyed in matches, but I don't love a lot of his shtick and think a lot of his comedy can be hack. And his comedy has kind of haunted us all damn day. Space Monkey is an unfortunate bystander here, as I think his stock had raised a bit earlier in the day within our group, here he was the guy unfortunately lumped in with a three-way comedy bit that he couldn't participate in. But he at least stood out with big bumps and sold all of the work done on his tail about as well as you can sell tail work. You sell tail work, you lean into a couple of back elbows, you're going to be the best guy here.

Nick Gage vs. Mance Warner

PAS: This was pretty much a lesser version of the Warner match we saw at MLW, and it is always going to be tough to follow that Bishop vs. Garinni match with a lesser plunder brawl. I would have liked this if it was more of a savage fight, but Gage matches are almost good-natured now.

TKG: I liked this match way more than Phil. The MLW match was a match between two bigger than life cartoon characters while somehow one of the coolest stories of last decade is Nick Gage becoming the kind of Post World War II local babyface who does car commercials that Bob Mould talks about. And yes, I realize that he works Ohio and Illinois and crowd has that same connection with him but Gage in Jersey feels like local act from guy that people go to church with and watch son play varsity basketball. Did Annie Social/Roxxie Cotton ever work outside of Philly? That was an act that I think you need to spend time in Philly to connect with. Anyways this was Big Daddy Lafonce Latham v big city outsider in reverse. I also really dug how little in the way of props these guys used vis a vis the Mexican death match, and submit or surrender match. This was an arena tour brawl with just one chair getting set up and one door.

ER: I think this would have looked better if it was the only brawl we saw today. I could see this being the brawl main event of ONE show we were seeing and us walking away talking about it, but this was at least the FOURTH match like this we'd seen at this point today. Gary Jay/Jake Parnell, Garrini/Bishop, Mance/Sami, and half the matches we'd seen on this card already. It had a lot of stiff competition over the prior 12 hours. I think this was honestly really good, it just came towards the very end of a long day. This was good, and the aggression felt high, Mance fell into chairs, they did a headbutt exchange that were probably the two best headbutts we saw today, and it really feels like we're not giving enough credit to the shit kicking that took place here. This will be a match that looks better removed from our circumstance. I watched this back because I was curious how it held up removed and on tape, and it still retained the live intensity while working stronger as a brawl. You see  Mance absolutely crack Gage with a hook while Gage was climbing the stage, and it's going to have legs. Mance takes a nasty vertical suplex across chair backs and gets tossed off the stage in fun manner by plowing through a couple fans. Gage breaks out cool shit like a fallaway slam off the middle rope and a great pop up elbow drop off the middle rope that landed flush. There were nasty yakuza kicks, more nasty bumps, hard lariats to the throat, hard lariats to the back of the head, bad landing powerbombs, just a ton of stuff you'd love to see in a brawl. I'm also reminded of how much I always love The Duke, this guy is a fun Alex Jones type loud mouth second, and he always makes it into the ring at one point to get absolutely annihilated. Here he eats a full force Nick Gage chairshot to the top of the head like this was 1999 or something. Maybe it had one too many stand and trade sections, but this is something that held up really great on rewatch for me, and something I have to admit may have suffered live due to my growling stomach and aching dogs. Jesus I felt both young and old at all of these shows today.

Tom Lawlor vs. Matthew Justice vs. PB Smooth vs. Tim Donst

TKG: So I haven’t seen Tim Donst in forever…When I last saw him he was working babyface guy with amateur high school background and now he is working guy who peaked in high school still trying to live off glory of four touchdowns at Polk High. He is wearing boots and elbow pads held together by duct tape and really looks like JT Jobber gone to seed. Apparently, he had cancer and then started working as heel who used “ohh my cancer” as equivalent of heel manager interference spots. And he is able to project all the detestable parts of Kevin James sad sack characters without any of the endearing stuff. Next level Kevin Owens. This of course is Wrestlemania weekend and an audience full of guys who are wasting the money for their children’s childcare and family heating bill on seeing 4 days of wrestling….so Donst’s hatable sad sack who makes poor life decisions is somewhat more sympathetic than he would be with a regular audience that only spent $20 on a show. Doesn’t matter, it is deep in the night and an audience that’s pretty burned out by this point and so this is match with a million crazy dives, stunts, and bumps and Donst getting back of his head opened up really nastily that all played to crickets.

PAS: This was really a victim of them running so late at night. It wasn't a great match, but it was ambitious, and its ambition wasn't rewarded by a burned out crowd. Justice hit like a half a dozen dives, Donst took a nasty bump which opened up his head. Lawlor was throwing people. It was crazy stuff, but not as crazy as either of the opening two matches, and no one in this was as over as Gage was in his match.  Lawlor winning was a nice moment, but they probably should have made a different match order decision, or worked this differently.

ER: This was a shame honestly, as these guys busted their ass. I'm not sure what would have had to be done to successfully win over a bunch of exhausted bodies at the end of a big wrestling day. It's tough to maintain that because wrestling fans have the gas tanks of manatees. These guys had a killer fight and you could tell they wanted to have a great match for the crowd. They had a LOT of great stuff over a 12 hour period that they had to top and it was a losing battle, but these guys didn't disgrace themselves a bit. This was a hard working performance that did have flaws, but also would have gotten a better reaction in a more conventional setting. Matthew Justice especially had a killer performance. It must be at least a little nerve wracking to be watching your friends have crazy wrestling matches all day, 12+ hours of watching guys kill themselves to stand out early in the Mania week, and all day you know that you gotta go into the title match of the last match on the last show of the night. It's a heavy spot to be in and he really performed admirably as fed champ. He was hitting dives into ever part of the crowd and flying off the apron, really coming off like a guy who is going to be a big indy name. Justice kind of comes off like a more indy scum Seth Rollins, but I mean that in a good way. PB Smooth is really raw, but raw giants are a fucking cool thing in wrestling. Justice bumps big and takes wildman vicious spills into chairs, commits fully to dives, really came off like a big deal. It's cool seeing a 6'9" guy throw someone and land giant elbow smashes. Smooth is open minded and tries cool things that you don't see a ton from guys his size and it's always neat to see a big guy come up through the indies. Donst I think has a the most consistently empty gas tank, but he falls into some pretty perilous stuff here and gets cut open in an ugly spot. That's at least a positive contribution to all this. Lawlor took some big spills too, and that's why this whole thing was a shame, these guys really were busting their tailbones and even with a couple of too long prop set up spots there was still a ton of chaos happening here to make me enjoy it.


PAS: The first four matches on this show were the most fun four match run I can remember seeing live. Show dipped after that, but hard to call the AIW Wrestlemania weekend debut anything less then a huge success. Great to see one of my favorite feds hit such a home run on their biggest stage.

ER: The first half of this show was definitely better than the last half, but I think the violent stuff in the second half actually worked real nicely on tape, and the 1st half held up even better. The first hour of this show is probably the best run of wrestling we saw all day, though the best consecutive hour of Bloodsport would have to be the best competition for that honor. This was still overall an excellent show that was worth staying out late and learning an old guy badge of honor to attend. This show lands 4 different matches on our 2019 Ongoing MOTY List, and that makes it a no doubt show of the year candidate no matter how unfunny we find Colt Cabana.

ER: So we get dumped out into the street tired and hungry at 2 AM, and I say we walk back to our place. It's almost a 1 mile walk. Phil and I had a lovely walk earlier that day before our first show, so, so long ago. I'd like to think that in our properly tailored pants and my black peacoat and his nice overcoat, that we looked like a couple of cool character actor detectives having a walk and talk about a case on some shitty canceled CBS detective show. Jersey City PD. I was even having coffee out of a styrofoam cup while walking and talking! We looked great. But Phil didn't want to get jumped in an alley. He has something to live for now because he has a baby boy. He told me I only wanted to walk because I have nothing to live for. Tom had been watching wrestling for so long that he lost all measure of distance knowledge. "So how long would it be if we walked?" "We could make it 17 minutes walking brisk." "17 minutes so like two blocks? Three blocks?" "Two blocks in 17 minutes? No, like a mile." Phil has been mugged before so I said "It's like people sitting next to Flair because he was already in one plane crash and what are the odds of another. What are the odds of you getting mugged twice, Phil?" "I have been mugged twice." "What are the odds of you getting mugged three times, Phil?" I am not a monster or idiot so I agree to a Lyft, and of course we get the first Lyft driver in my history of using them who is a total bum. She said she was a couple minutes away and soon we had been standing there 10 minutes while everybody else standing near us for 2 blocks was long since picked up. She kept telling Phil she was 2 minutes away while her icon wasn't moving. She finally showed up and had a ton of excuses that seemed like plot holes. I think Phil said it was the only negative review he's ever given. We stumble back into our home with the cruelly steep stairs that our 2 AM legs can barely handle. Phil finds 2 leftover slices of pizza. Phil wordlessly dives into one of them and holds the other out to me. I say "Well what if that's Rachel's or Chelsea's that they were saving..." and while I was being thoughtful he silently held it out to Tom who silently grabbed it and immediately ate. I was left with no 2 AM 10 minutes before bed pizza - arguably the greatest of the pizzas - all because I was thoughtful. Nice guys finish last, kids. Day was totally worth it.