Ian Rotten Was Living In a Devil Town, He Didn't Know It Was a Devil Town

Ian Rotten vs. Homicide NWL 8/2/04 - EPIC

JR: There are two ideas about wrestling that I find myself fixated on. The first is the inherent romance of the idea of professional wrestling: the idea that the world, or some approximation thereof, still has intrepid and conquering heroes, willing to fight for something beyond themselves. The second, and perhaps the inverse to that, or at the very least something that informs that first idea, is that successful wrestlers are broken and jagged people, whose success in wrestling is because they have no other avenues for success. They are people who live outside society.

I’m not sure that Ian fits the first idea, but he certainly fits the latter. He never presents himself as someone with any goal beyond bleeding to put food on his table, but there is a workmanlike joy in that from him in some way. I wonder then if these seemingly rare mat work exhibitions were moments in time that he relished. Rare opportunities for him to show off, to do things that are reserved for performers that other think more technically sound, sleeker, more proficient, more practiced. But like we’ve touched on in almost all of these reviews, there is an earnestness to Ian’s work that sets it apart. The spots that he relies on, the aspects that are revealed as performative only through study, still have a groudedness to them. He ignores the flash that other, showier workers use to keep people invested. He trusts himself, and he trusts that he knows his audiences. He makes no apologies. There is something admirable about it. 

Take, for example, the way Ian (and Homicide, to some extent) uses his head. In a rear mount, Ian digs his chin in to Homicide’s spine. He uses it as a tool, as a way to gain leverage, as a way to press upon his opponent. And because of that, he exposes himself to harm and to danger and often finds himself caught. It’s an encapsulation of his style as a whole, using anything he can to continue to press forward, putting every bit of weight on his opponent. 

In the first match we looked at for this project, in which Ian fought Chris Hero, Phil talked about the palpable sense of dread that Ian’s matches have. There is a wonderful example of it early in this. After both men get back to their feet, and Homicide has control of the arm, Ian pulls them both down. Cide rolls quickly and decisively, as he did earlier to gain advantage, but Ian has learned, and Homicide finds himself rolling directly into contact. He squirms away and goes to the outside and there is the first real breath, the first show of negative space, and it works because of a moment on the mat that feels almost like a near death experience. And Homicide, for his part, despite pointing to his head after the escape to tell us how smart he is, is hesitant to get back in the ring, and even more hesitant to lock back up. He’s a wrestler that doesn’t show fear, that doesn’t beg off, but for a moment he has to regroup, and that is perhaps just as powerful and just as telling.

From here, the match falls in to a familiar rhythm. Ian uses headbutts as another reset button of sorts, creating a clear second act within the match, although not before once again trying to use his head for leverage, digging his forehead in to the back of Homicide's neck. They start to exchange blurry eyed strikes, Homicide on his feet, Ian on his knees. Homicide continues to show hesitation to go back on the mat, and when Ian finally bring Homicide back down, Cide cheats and bites and claws his way to an advantage, all so he can stand back up and strike. It’s strange. While the match itself has some different notes, this almost feels like the touring equivalent of the Joe match we just watched, albeit one that has a definitive finish. Rather than ending during the threatened brawl on the outside, here they continue to swing wildly, and Ian breaks a whiteboard over Homicide’s head in a truly preposterous moment of violence. 

While I think Rotten has a lot of strengths as a worker, I think his genius in this series shows in how clearly he finds breaks and ways to escalate. This match is almost a three act play, with each division acting as both an escalation and a separation. After the whiteboard, even the matwork is more frenzied. A figure four is countered and both men roll off the apron to the floor. When Rotten goes back to the same submission it gets broken with a chair. There is a desperation to the work from both men. Ian tries a double leg takedown from his knees, but ends up in a choke. Homicide starts working the arm again, paying off his work in the early portions. The finishing stretch is mostly lead by Homicide, with him trying and testing various ways to grab Ian’s arm. It is a definitive and rather abrupt finish, and somewhat less clever and decidedly more “wrestling” than what we’ve seen until now. Perhaps had this match taken place in IWA-MS and not NLW, we would’ve seen the Ian we’ve become accustomed to, the one who moves ever forward, even in defeat.

PAS: I always thought of these two guys as mirror images of each other. Pair of guys who started out as Deathmatch wrestlers and brawlers but had this secret skill on the mat and desire to show off. Both guys had training schools, both had cult favorite indy feds which they headlined. In many ways this was like a battle between a DC and Marvel versions of the same superhero, like if Quicksilver and Flash had a race.

I think the crowd was expecting a brawl, and it was cool that they decided instead to hit the mat as hard as they did. I loved how Ian would grab rollups from weird angles, and how vicious Homicide's arm work was. One thing about Ian is that wrestlers seem perfectly willing to violate the unspoken agreements, Homicide really kicks the shit out of Ian's arm in ways that had to ache for weeks, and those headbutts were knocking large parts of Ian's education out of his head. No wonder the IWA-MS payouts were always hinky, that guy couldn't do math after those headshots.

According to Cagematch this is their only singles match, I had never heard of this match before, it had 40 views on Youtube. One thing that is so great about this hobby is mining for lost classics, and this totally counted. This feels like it should have been a legendary rivalry. Like Ian vs. Homicide should have ended in a JAPW vs. IWA-MS War Games match or something, instead we got this one shiny jewel of a match.

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