AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends): Week of 7/11 - 7/17

AEW Dark Elevation 7/11

JD Drake vs. Dante Martin

MD: Once Phil realized I was watching AEW fairly regularly, he looped me in that we'd be doing the FFOD. I'm not sure if these would be the exact five I'd pick or not. The blog's always been high on Darby but he ends up in a lot of matches I only half want to see on paper, for instance. He always makes them good and it's good for me, but I'd probably have dropped a guy like Drake or Serpentico in there. Past catching Rampage Saturday morning like it's the Power Hour, the webshows are the most enjoyable AEW experience. There are no commercial breaks to drive the layout of the match (which helps as much as it hurts, but still...). Elevation has a generally hot crowd since they're the opening matches. Dark has a studio audience which hits a nostalgia sweet spot and allows for different interactions, and lets Taz and Excalibur goof off on commentary. We went decades without a lot of things, but one of those things was enhancement matches/squashes, which, for a lot of us, was such a part of our youth. There's nothing more limiting than to watch pro wrestling only by seeking out the very best stuff in the most conventional sense. If you're always chasing five star matches, you miss out on so much. Watching Emi Sakura drag and position a young wrestler around a ring or watching House of Black just maul some guys has its own level of enjoyment. 

And the same's true with mid-card matches where either guy could win, where the stakes are fairly low, where it's wrestling to cover TV time and build up rankings and to put something extra in front of the crowd and to keep reps going. It's the WCW Prime Moo Match of the week or a Worldwide Main Event or Lord Alfred and Sean Mooney talking us through a Prime Time match with Heenan and Monsoon bridging things through the commercial break. Yeah, it gets a little much to see endless permeations of the Wingmen or the Factory vs the Dark Order or Best Friends, but it's all good stuff and no one's making you watch it. Do it at your convenience. 

A match like this, with Dante and Drake just hits that sweet spot. Dante's endlessly talented, endlessly innovative, surprisingly good at selling and reacting for his age, and he'll always bring something interesting to an enhancement match. Put him in there against another flyer and you'll get something spectacular. Put him in there against one of the best bases in the company like Drake and you'll get something borderline great. The opening exchange had Drake shrug off Dante's attempts and Dante have to escalate, to go higher, faster, more offbeat to chip away at him. When he finally nailed the backflip off of Drake's shoulder to hit the springboard arm drag and get Drake down, it felt like a big earned moment. They would hit spots rapid fire but then do something to slow things down and let it sink in, like when Drake walked away to cut off the dive and draw boos. The big transition to Drake taking over wasn't just his big lift up whack to the apron, but a very clever duck as Dante was sliding out to put him out of position so he could capitalize. 

Drake is a guy who can do a ton of things contrary to his size and look but knows how to highlight his opponent by doing just as much as he should do but no more. Here, a lot of that was being in the right place at the right time for Dante, being able to turn it up when the match called for it, and being able to hit something impressive out of nowhere, like his lightning-fast dropkick cut off, to shut Dante down when he was picking up speed. Most of his heat segment was just him leaning on Dante with stomps and shots in the corner. He'd give Dante some quick shots back or a chance at rope running, but then would just crush him with a suplex or that aforementioned dropkick. Dante, to his credit, would go flying in response and then give the camera a great shot of him draped over the rope and on dream street. At times, things may have seemed just a little collaborative, like when they were working for the Superplex position in the corner, but it was really Dante setting things up so he could get in a counter. He wasn't helping; he was working for his next chance. Meanwhile, because of the size differential, he had to work three times harder to get an opening, low kicks, a flip from one side of the apron to the other, a kick up, a bounding leap off the ropes; Dante may have had to work three times harder but he's capable of working even two times harder than that. Primarily, he had to survive, had to keep moving, and had to draw Drake in for mistakes. All it took was one or two and Dante was able to soar high and capitalize. It was nice to see Drake and Henry get to go up against Mox and Danielson a few months ago as JTTS, but it's even better still to see him get ten minutes in a match like this against a talent like Dante where they can highlight each other even if it's on a much smaller stage. When you have a good flyer vs a good big man, often times both can stretch to do more complex and advanced things than they normally might be able to, while still having the underlying story and pacing to keep things ground and not making it feel like it's flown off into a world of excess.