Ian Rotten Came Knocking At The Door, I Let Him In for A While

Ian Rotten vs. Chris Hero IWA-MS 5/4/02 -EPIC

JR: Late last year, Phil Schneider approached me about working together to write up all the Ian Rotten matwork matches, known colloquially as “methlab battlearts”. I jumped at the opportunity, for Phil remains an inspiration of mine. My wrestling writing, and truthfully, the entire way I watch wrestling, would be very different without him. It was a task that got pushed back, as we both have our own things, and life sometimes gets in the way. But tonight it starts! This is the first write up in what will surely be a long project, spanning many, many matches. I have no idea when it will end. Off the top of my head, I can think of about 6 or 7 matches I would safely categorize as MLBA, I’m sure there are more, but that will require us both sifting through a few years worth of Ian Rotten matches. I don’t really look forward to this. That’s a lie. I do look forward to it, just not to the time it will take.

But that is a problem for future JR. And future Phil S. Tonight, our problem is watching Ian Rotten fight Chris Hero in 2002 in Dayton, OH.

There are 37 people at this match. I know this because I watched a match from a few months later that had 24 people in the audience and they commented on the crowd size of the two shows. The matches starts with a clean break and some solid tie up work. Hero is game, and this is before he became obsessed with World of Sport, or at the very least before he let that obsession work its way into his matches. But at the very least, Hero is someone who has a pretty innate understanding of leverage and is someone who doesn’t shy away from contact, which makes him a great opponent here.

I have no idea if Rotten has ever watched WoS, but more so than any BattleArts wrestler, his performance in the early portion of this match reminds me of Jim Breaks. Not in the world necessarily, but in how vocal he is. Ian has an understanding of his audience, what their expectations are and how well they can follow a narrative. By having a match that is so out of the ordinary for both participants, he knows and understands that he has to guide them a bit more, and he does this but yelling and whining and cursing and hollering any time there is a level change or a moment of resolution in the work. It creates clear rhythm that the audience can follow and enjoy, like how the audience knows and understands when a jazz solo ends.

The other major strength of Ian’s work in this match is the sheer weight of everything he does. Not in a metaphorical sense, I mean that every hold that he has Hero in he makes look as though he is truly pressing upon him. There is a wariness to participating in constant contact with someone, and Ian understands that. He may move slower than some others, or have to visibly think through the steps to do something in a way that other, more technically adept wrestlers do not, but he makes an effort to always be touching and pressing and falling and laying on Hero. He forces the issue in ways that other performers do not. Often, technical wrestling can almost come across as no different than a high flying match in structure; fast paced reversals followed by a break as the two competitors circle around and pace, waiting for their polite applause. Here, Ian and Hero are always forcing the other to confront them and their actual, physical forms.

All of that is a somewhat overly confusing way of saying that this match just features Rotten and Hero hitting each other very hard. They exchange headbutts that knock the every present bandage from Rotten’s forehead. Ian hits an uppercut and later a crossface that both land with a thud that is harrowing, like watching someone on a bike collide with a mailbox. Hero’s strikes are equally hard, but are almost all in retaliation. There is a natural quality to them, kicking and screaming and flailing while on his back, desperate to avoid Ian grabbing his knee and ankle and just mangling them over and over.

It’s interesting to see how Ian’s understanding of the layout and rhythm of deathmatches infers how he works here, specifically in regards to the use of props, for lack of a better term. While there are no weapons or elaborate death match machine set ups or anything of the like, Ian manages to get huge amounts of mileage out of small and simple things that act almost as act breaks. The end of the first portion of the match is symbolized by Ian's forehead bandage coming off, whereas the finishing stretch is marked by Hero having to tape his knee while a tired and desperate Ian lunges for it over and over, eventually leaving himself open for a counter attack. One could watch this and see these transitions and moments being instead barbed wire bats or panes of glass, and the match makes roughly the same amount of sense. While I tend to think this word is meaningless, there is a universality to the structure here that allows Ian to consistently remain in control and never find himself out of book in any meaningful way.

This match is wonderful. One of my favorite matches ever is the Satanico/Sangre Chicana match from 89, and the work in the second half of this almost is a matwork equivalent, where everything looks desperate and wild and subsequently more real. Watching this match is watching two people struggle in the mud, concussed and angry, hoping that by some stroke of luck the next thing they try will land true.

PAS: This project is going to be a challenge for me, because JR is such a talented, thorough writer, I am going to get his reviews, and struggle try to find something interesting to say which isn’t just going over points that he made better.

JR talked a lot about the vocalization in this match, and it is really powerful and makes the whole thing almost uncomfortable to watch. There are 37 people in the audience, so you aren’t going to hear traditional crowd reactions, instead you hear people just expressing shock, “Fucking Christ”, “Shit”. It really adds to force of headbutt or forearm when some guy in the audience seems disgusted by the whole thing. This is a death match promotion, Ian Rotten is normally going through panes of glass, but the crowd seems way more appalled by a hammer fist to a knee then anything with barbed wire or lightubes (and it is a great fucking Hammer fist, these guys were throwing heaters).

Both wrestlers were really vocal too, cursing at each other, shrieking in pain, mumbling under their breath. There is a lot of over the top vocal selling in wrestling these days, but in a performative way, nothing felt performative here. At one-point Hero’s shriek gets really high pitched, it is the kind of shriek I made when I dislocated my kneecap playing Rugby, or you will hear on the pickup court when someone shreds an Achilles, it didn’t feel like selling, it felt like two guys taking it much too far. I loved how fast Ian tapped out too, it felt like both guys tendons were slowly ripping througout the entire match, if you tore a tendon in your knee, you wouldn’t gut it out and make tough guy faces, you would scream, tap and go to the hospital. The lack of traditional wrestling selling in this match really made it special, it unnerved me, it isn’t the way a wrestling match is supposed to work, it isn’t how wrestlers are supposed to react to holds and it makes the whole thing seem wrong. It has been a while since I watched any of this stuff, and even with grappling being a much more prevalent thing in independent wrestling these days (They weren’t running Bloodsport and Ambition shows in 2002), this felt wholly alien, a completely separate bit of horror.