5. Sting/Darby Allin vs. Big Bill/Ricky Starks AEW Dynamite 2/7/24
ER: I must be the easiest to surprise person who routinely spends double digit hours per week watching and writing about pro wrestling. Maybe it's my bad memory or the glacial pace I take projects through, but I am frequently surprised by how good the guys I like watching are. Darby Allin has the ability of surprising me more than any of my other modern favorites, a real innovator of shocking and death defying indestructibility. He shouldn't be possible, but he's real and he's incredible. Big Bill catching Darby's tope and in one fluid long motion and turning it into a high swinging Boss Man Slam on the floor just might be the most expertly executed momentous Large Man Rey Mysterioing Darby spots we've ever been gifted. It's a seamless, dangerous, eye popping moment. A Darby Classic, which is a thing I have said a comical amount of times. But Darby is special because he is also good at every other little thing, not just the biggest most incredible wrestling spots of the year. I don't know if anyone in wrestling runs into a boot as well as Darby. I don't know if anyone ever has. He makes it look like a guy getting knocked out by a boot he never saw coming. He does things like that every match. He's incredible, we've all known he's incredible. He is always Must See. He is probably my favorite wrestler and I am routinely surprised by how good my favorite wrestler is...
but I am still in absolute disbelief that Sting is this damn good. I can't be alone here. Sting is fucking 65 years old. What is remarkable, is that I'm pretty sure that 65 years old Sting is my favorite Sting ever. Sting, a legend with several eras and years and runs and matches to be the personal favorite wrestler of millions, has captured my heart so surprisingly in his team with Darby. Sting was a guy I didn't even know existed until I was 10 or 11 years old. We didn't have cable TV and I barely even knew WCW existed. My friend Justin had a Sting wrestling buddy, and he told me it was Sting, but this man was less real to me than Gordon Sumner. To me it just looked like an off brand Ultimate Warrior doll. I did not grow up with Sting as my hero, and by the time I was watching WCW he was just about to become inactive for an entire year. It was an uphill battle getting into Sting as an adult. I've never even gotten too into Sting retroactively. I don't think he would come anywhere close to making a Top 100 Guys list.
But Sting at 65 is a real game changer for me. All it took to get behind Sting, I guess, was the now built in vulnerability of being an old human, combined with a willingness - or a sicko urge - to take a clothesline on the floor the way he did here from Big Bill. Sting has been in his Gypsy Joe era on and off for over a decade and even with his crazy-at-the-time-crazier-in-retrospect run in TNA I still wouldn't have expected his AEW run. It's not the balcony dives, either, even though holy shit the balcony dives right?! Can you imagine even cleaning the gutters on your house when you're 65? My parents used to invite me up to use the pool and BBQ just to spring a surprise gutters check on me before I left. They were probably right to do so, because I wouldn't want to think of my dad climbing around on the roof at 65. So Sting is doing leaps off of his nice but modest Colonial, and folks that is crazy. But more than the great risks from a man whose career looked mostly finished 20 years ago, it's that he just wrestles harder than I can ever remember. I believe in this babyface hero more than I have at any point in my life. I love this babyface with a tastefully redone hairline, who throws his entire body into his punches and back elbows in a way he never did when he was 40. I think his form has gotten better on almost all of his offense. He's like if John Cena came back and did all of his old offense but with harder landings, harder impact, agonizing misses, and real stakes. Sting throws himself into every hit and miss in a way I've never seen from him, and I am finally a Stinger in my 40s.
The finish is a spectacular moment. Of course it is. Darby takes himself and Bill out of the match by Human Backpacking onto him on the apron, navigating his torso like an attacking ape, riding him off the apron through a table, forcing Bill to bump by gouging his thumbs into the big man's eyes like a lonely toymaker. Taz was right to make fun of Big Bill's mint green boots all match, by the way. Sting had a great run with Ricky Starks, who is a wrestler I don't love but one I view as a little better than the other Austin Theories that have been clogging up cards with what people refer to as their Potential. He will at minimum take a nice bump to the floor and I was impressed by his comparative Face Acting restraint in handling an I'm Sorry I Love You moment. The timing on Sting hitting that exposed buckle was a work of Bret Hart or Jerry Lawler level of brilliant timing. Sting's shoulder-only kickout after Starks' spear true perfection. His Scorpion Death drop has never looked heavier or as conquering. I don't know if there's been a more exciting tag team run this decade than Darby Allin and a guy whose biggest year in pro wrestling was the year before Darby Allin existed.
Well the thing about Darby is that he routinely delivers perfect television matches. (I am saying *perfect* -- you see the match, you say "what more could have been done?" nothing: it was exactly the match it needed to be, and in unexpected, original ways -- "stars" are irrelevant in this discourse.) I too am frequently caught by surprise at this, despite the fact I'd count myself as his biggest fan among the many wrestling super-nerds I know. It's just hard to wrap your head around that level of quality and consistency, and in detail in his case especially. And maybe the bigger the fan you are, the deeper you look, the harder it is to wrap your mind around. The mystery of love.
ReplyDeleteAs for Sting, I mean, yeah. Goddamn absurd.