TWE The Night Before 8/5/21

Tank vs. Ron Bass Jr.

PAS: This delivered what it promised. Bass is a huge guy with a great looking old school wrestler gut and it is fun to watch Tank have to work from beneath. Bass knocks him down a couple of times with shoulder blocks, Tank responds with a cuff to the ear, and then pulls the rope down when Bass charges him. They brawl on the floor and it is a slugfest from there, not everything lands clean, but that raggedness is what I liked about it. Finish was the kind of thing which put over both guys, Tank gets the win, but it looked like Bass was stunned rather then stopped.

ER: With no hyperbole, this might have been the match I was most looking forward to seeing SCI weekend. Two behemoths colliding is always going to be my favorite thing, and starting a weekend of wrestling with the Reverend shouting at us about Tank is a great start. I love Tank wrestling in his 2017 retirement shirt, feels perfectly professional wrestling. Tank is older and slower, so has to be crafty with the shockingly larger Bass. He can't budge him with his body, shoulderblocks don't make a dent, so he tricks Bass with a low bridge to send him tumbling to the floor. And then the striking starts. Tank throws some blistering right hands, and Bass is great at being the giant man falling all through a small building. Bass is huge so it's great seeing him against parts of the building for size/scale comparisons, and he's a great big man at falling into support poles and walls. Once it's a fight Tank is relentless with chops and punches, loved his combo to the body and face. Bass brings big clubbing and great presence, and while I'm bummed we didn't get a bunch of avalanches or standing splashes, the finish was killer. They have a big punch out, then clonk their melons a few times, then Tank just blasts Bass with a spinning backfist. A Saito suplex doesn't get much air (how could it?) but the backfist to the mouth with the low back suplex is enough to barely keep Bass down for a 3. I love how the finish looked, and loved the psychology of Bass still being in the match if the ref had been a split second later to the count. 

Nick King vs. Erron Wade

PAS: Nick King is a guy we enjoyed in the UWFI Contenders series, and he was a lot of fun here as well. Wade is doing a hyped up Karate guy gimmick with Matt Griffin as his coach, and had some nifty stuff as well. I really liked King's early mat control and his suplexes. Wade had a great spin kick to the head, and his finishing submission was nice stuff. They both got to show out a bit, but it didn't overstay its welcome, just what you want from the second match on the card.

ER: It's kind of hard to judge this as a match, as it was clearly two guys being given 5 minutes to show off some cool shit, and it feels like 5 minutes of guys pulling off some cool shit without actually being structured around much of a match. It's a quick showcase of some of what each guy has to offer, and would have made a cool 30 second highlight reel. King has real explosiveness and I wish we got that in more of a match, but he takes a big bump to the floor and shows off some impressive strength when he pulls Wade into a German suplex (also his safety green boots and trunks looked cool under a black light). Wade looks like he punches a damn hole through King's chest with a shotgun dropkick, and an earlier seated dropkick looked really good too. Wrestling needs more guys with brutal dropkicks. King fired out of the corner with a big lariat after taking that shotgun dropkick, and I wish that dropkick would have had more time to settle in, but that's not what this was supposed to be. Wade's armbar win surprised me, and this match did what it was supposed to do: Show off a couple cool things in the arsenal of two new guys.  

11. Daniel Makabe vs. Damyan Tangra

PAS: Very fun Makabe style match with Tangra hanging with Makabe on the mat, which isn't easy to do. You see a lot of guys with cool mat offense, but I was really into how slick the mat defense was by both guys, with some really sick looking reversals from the bottom by both. Somehow Makabe turned a scissors kick takedown by Tangra into an STF, and Tangra had this counter to an STF counter later in the match where he some how transitioned into a reverse STF which caused me to rewind multiple times to figure it out. I am not a fan of strike standoffs, but I did like how both guys mixed in different stuff instead of just forearming and staring, I am always going to dig going to the body, and there were some nice kidney shots here. Finish was awesome with Makabe eating ground and pound until he slapped on a triangle choke where he jams his fist into Tangra's carotid artery. I mean who even thinks of crazy shit like that, much less pulls it off?

ER: Probably the most technical soccer hooligan fight I've seen. This match was heavy on reversals, and yet it was clearly not one of the awful modern "this match is only planned out reversals". The reversals here all looked great because they looked like actual reversals of offense, not planned reversals. It's an important difference that I feel is getting missed. There were some moments here where it looked like Makabe was baiting Tangra into throwing something out there, and Makabe had so many interesting counters to Tangra that he really came off like an amazing three steps ahead wrestler. Makabe comes off like someone who really analyzes his opponent and works out reversals to match each opponent. Yes, obviously that is how pro wrestling works, but Makabe makes them feel like his wrestling character is a guy who is doing all of this tape watching in advance, and that is another small but very important distinction with him. 

I loved him reversing Tangra's rolling body scissors, knowing immediately which leg of Tangra's to grab and roll into a kneebar to trap the leg before moving into an STF. Both guys know how to work really compelling STFs offensively and defensively: Tangra locks his forearm straight across Makabe's throat and goes for the kill, while Makabe's STF has him hooking his arm around Tangra's throat and it always looks like he's using the STF to set up something as a surprise. But that's kind of the trick with Makabe, as he has so many directions he can go that you never know what the killshot is going to be. I like how Makabe telegraphed a few things, sometimes to sucker in Tangra, other times because he was just telegraphing them. Tangra was smart at picking these up, loved him thrust kicking Makabe's arm on a punch or dodging out of a charge so that Makabe Psychosis's himself in the ropes. 

But Makabe is proud and keeps flexin' his way to that Flexen right hand, also throwing some nasty cupper hands to Tangra's ear/neck/jaw. The finish stretch was incredible as I had no idea who was pulling away with this. When Makabe maneuvered his way out of a sub and somehow worked Tangra into a nasty tombstone, I thought for sure that was it. But the actual finish ruled even more, with Makabe trapping Tangra in a triangle choke. But we've also seen Tangra escape a triangle, a couple STFs, and more, so - ever the showman - Makabe holds the triangle, flips Tangra's hair out of the way so everyone can see what he's about to do, and jams his fist into Tangra's carotid. Right first into the neck, left hand gripping the right wrist for maximum pressure, brilliant. The Carotid Fist feels like an untapped wrestling submission. It feels like a move that would have made Wild Red Riggins a huge 60s territory draw and been on the cover of lurid wrestling magazines.  

Brett Ison vs. Lutha X

PAS: This didn't work for me at all. They started this as almost a kickboxing fight, which is a cool idea, but nothing landed hard enough to make it compelling. There were some stiff shots mixed in by both guys throughout but not consistently. Eventually they gave up the attempts to do something different and just had a US indy match complete with forearm and stare exchanges, and a 1/2 speed All Japan 2.9 count finish. This was a miss. 

ER: This didn't offend me as much as it offended Phil, but I agree wholeheartedly with the lack of consistency being a problem. This felt like several different matches in one, and I think the match would have worked if they had chosen one and stuck to it. The UWFI stuff at the beginning did not look good, coming off like sparring or half speed practice. If those shots were all making solid contact live, it sure wasn't reading that way through the screen. This was at its most interesting as they gradually upped the stiffness, as Lutha X had some excellent selling off some brutal Ison elbows. Ison really rocked Lutha's jaw and Lutha had several different great staggers to get back to his feet, stumble to the ropes for support, fall fist first into Ison's face, and I liked how all of that looked and felt. But the match felt longer than its 15 minutes because it never felt like they were sticking to a thread. It felt like we had unconscious restarts after every couple sequences, and I did not love the pop up suplex finish. Ison falling onto Lutha for the pin looked like some great timing, but great timing after a sequence I grew tired of years ago only goes so far. 

Jaden Newman vs. Kyle Matthews

PAS:  Matthews is a southern wrestling maestro who has been one of the better traditional US mat wrestlers of the 21st century. There were a bunch of nifty moments of mat work which were the highlights of this match. I loved him countering Newman's fancy multiple kip ups by just dropping down with a side headlock, and he also had a really nice surfboard. This got a bit indy wrestling at the end with a bunch of elbow exchanges, superkicks and 2.9 near falls. I did like Matthews sick kick on the ring apron and he took a brutal bump on a springboard stroke to the floor, it looked like he divoted his forehead. Newman was fine, hanging with Matthews on the mat, but I think some of the bad parts of this match might have been his idea. 

ER: Up above I talked about how organic the reversals in Makabe/Tangra happened, and bemoaned our current state of "reversals" wrestling where you can barely tell what is being reversed. You can barely tell what is being reversed because you can see the move was never supposed to hit, the move was only thrown with the intention of it being reversed as part of the "real" spot. A lot of this, was that. I hate the kind of wrestling where someone kicks someone in the face and that kick to the face allows that person to spin around with a backfist, which allows that person to spin into another kick. It makes 80% of the offense look like trash because nothing is being absorbed, everything is just making people spin into their own offense. A lot of offense here looked actually good, some of the strikes looked like they were really rocking each other, but none of it had a chance to settle in. Nothing was treated as damaging, everything was only done in service to the reversal. Newman has a lot of offense that seems to do far more damage to him than his opponent, but since he hardly sells his opponent's offense I guess it doesn't make sense to sell spiking himself on a meteora or whipping his head into the floor going over the top to on a stupid botched apron move. They established pretty early that moves don't matter, only the reversal of the reversal of the spinning reversal of that move, and it only felt more egregious the longer they went on. 

Arik Royal vs. Graham Bell

PAS: Fun heavyweight slugfest which got cut off by an angle setting up a future match. Royal has great looking offense, including a killer looking black hole slam backbreaker which should have been his finisher. Bell looked fine too, I liked his senton to Royal's back. It didn't really have a conclusion which kind of kept this from anything more then fun. 

ER: This did end in a big schmozz angle (which was impossible to see any of because the ringside cameraman filmed it like he was recording a competitive game of ping pong), but we still got a lot of match before it turned into an angle. The best parts of this were the slugfest portions, as Royal has a cool array of chops, body shots, and uppercuts, and it never once turned into boring stand and trade. Bell would throw heavy kicks, Royal would hold his side while throwing a fist. Bell is a big guy but doesn't totally work like a guy with size, and doesn't really have lifting power. But Royal is great at making the best of Bell's offense, including catching a pretty crazy rana to the floor (paid off nicely later on when Royal caught a rana and planted Bell with a powerbomb). Royal's tackles are one of my favorite things in wrestling, here he does a diving tackle to knock Bell to the floor, and later after taking a hard cannonball - and to cutoff a second cannonball - he upends Bell with a nice explosion out of the corner. The big schmozz happens when Bell gets knocked into the referee (I really liked ref Kim's bump into the ropes, looked like her head whipped back into the top rope), but we still got 10 minutes and a lot of cool stuff. This whole thing was worked at a real fast pace, and they got a lot of bang out of their 10 minutes before the angle. 

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