AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 11/18 - 11/24 (Part 2)

AEW Full Gear 11/23/24

MJF vs Roderick Strong

MD: I have a soft spot for AEW. No big surprise. I write about it every week, right? Part of why is that it really made me care about modern American wrestling again. And the thing about caring is that you get invested. And sometimes that investment takes you good places and sometimes it doesn't, but it's always better than not caring at all. 

I can't think of a moment in the last couple of years where I was more invested than the very start of the MJF vs Ospreay All In match. I had been watching MJF's American Title run, vs Oku, vs Templario. I wrote about them even. I had also seen Ospreay a bit and wrote about him. I wrote about the Danielson match and the crowd that seemed to be high on the fumes of the spots instead of fully engaged in the actual narrative of the match. I thought long and hard about how to get around that, how to tap into something old and primal, how to deny the crowd something they wanted for as long as possible until the pressure built up and the exhilaration could boil over. Between how MJF was wrestling and the code that I thought I had cracked (and I thought maybe he had too), I was incredibly invested on how MJF was going to wrestle the match. That's kind of unique when you think about it. We don't often consume art focused on the artistic choices in the moment. Maybe people who went to see Megapolis really were invested on whether Coppola would go this way or that, or people ready to listen to a new album of their favorite band would want it to lean towards one sound instead of another, but it feels kind of rare to me, very much a wrestling thing, and very much for the people like me who are very, very invested in it in a certain way.

So I sat there watching alongside so many other people around the world in real time and I saw the entrances and I waited for the moment the bell would ring. He just had to do one thing. Instead of rushing forward, he had to dart out, had to stall and stall and stall some more and deny the home country crowd everything they wanted (and felt entitled to get) from Ospreay. Then he could force a mistake and use every dirty trick in the book to deny it some more. Because he had already proven he could hang in the hour long match, there was real hope he'd have the freedom to do it. I was as invested in a performance as I had been in a very long time and boy did my heart ever sink when Max rushed forward instead of backwards. He went the wrong way! Both literally and figuratively. And they had a perfectly fine Ospreay "all the hits" sort of match, though one that couldn't live up to the hour long match they'd already have, and it set up Garcia's return and Ospreay's victory and it was fine. Perfectly fine. And I was pretty miserable about it all I have to admit. Max had the chance to get the most heat imaginable in front of the biggest crowd with the biggest stakes and they just went another way with it. I thought the subsequent Garcia match was pretty good. He shouldn't have worked it the way that I wanted him to work the Ospreay match and he didn't.

Which brings us to this. Look, I'm not saying I'm not at all invested in Max still. Yes, I was disappointed once, but I think his heart is in the right place and he's as well-positioned as anyone to champion so many lost elements of pro wrestling, the stuff that can really manipulate minds and move hearts that makes it such a special and unique art form. Sometimes maybe he can't get out of his own way in his own perceived need to protect himself as a drawing act, to compete with all of the other six star players on the card in the eyes of fans that he doesn't trust to take leaps of faith with him, and maybe, just maybe, he himself doesn't believe in the power of pro wrestling quite enough. Because when you see some of these crowds and how they react, how they've been conditioned to react over the last couple of decades, sometimes it's real hard to have faith and work towards something deeper and more meaningful when there's easy candy and empty sensation always within reach.

I've got my own thoughts about the Cole program and the eventual match to come, but the Strong match sort of worked within a vacuum from that. The dynamics were easier to work out. Strong is a cleaner babyface here, a guy who is trying to help out his friend against a scumbag heel. He's coming in hot, wanting to get his hands on Max, maybe even wanting to spare his friend from getting his hands dirty (because they are dirty enough - no, that's me reading in what I'd in the story; it's not what's been on screen). Strong's out to end the threat of Max once and for all, for the good of all. Max is doing everything he can to avoid such a fate and to wound Cole as much as he can in the process (and then to rub his finger in the wound if he can).

To be honest, I was more invested in Fletcher vs Ospreay because I thought maybe, just maybe, Fletcher would be the one to crack the code (I now believe the code is uncrackable because Will Ospreay, the human being, will not allow it to be cracked; I was disappointed in the match but less so in Fletcher who shows such promise for the year to come). So I came into MJF vs Strong with an open mind. And I have to say, Max absolutely outdid himself. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (because why would I, right? Just one guy), but I came out of the match actually kind of proud of Max's performance. Which again, is just a sign of being invested in this stuff. I can't think of another match where I came out feeling proud of any wrestler like this though, so on some whimsical level, I guess it's worth noting.

In the Garcia match, it didn't make sense for Max not to engage. He wanted revenge for what happened at All In (even if that was revenge from Garcia for something else). Here, he didn't want to fight Strong, not really, certainly not on his terms, so when the bell rang, he rolled right out, stalled, and started to run him (and New Jersey) down on the mic. That would help to set up the finish but also worked to at least partially turn a crowd geographically inclined to root for Max against him. Roddy cut it off with a shot and Max, instead of engaging, retreated. He went up the ramp and was chased back down only for Roddy to miss a strike against the post, allowing him to start working Roddy's hand over it. 

What followed was a nice little early match heat, Max dismantling the hand, playing to the crowd in the most irritating ways possible, and keeping Roddy in a hold. Here, he did a beautiful Bockwinkelian rendition of telling Roddy that the crowd didn't care about him, which got them clapping Roddy up. It was appreciated, let me tell you. Yes, the crowd still traded chants, but I think they would have been far more for Max otherwise (part of that is the problem of the story where Cole prematurely betrayed him while the fans were still trusting him, but I'm not going to get into that). He did a masterful job at giving Roddy every chance to keep the crowd behind him. 

Roddy eventually came back with a backbreaker out of nowhere and he started tearing apart Max's spine. Max shifted his offense from the hand-focus to just whatever might work here, but he ultimately got swept under. Roddy hit the End of Heartache, but instead of kicking out, Max got his foot on the rope, protecting the move, infuriating the fans, making sure he didn't seem tough but instead sneaky and tricky and savvy. Everything right, again and again. It all built to Roddy hitting the Sick Kick. Instead of going for the pin, however, he (infuriated himself) needed to put Max away for good with another End of Heartache. That let Max reverse and hit his Brainbuster finisher. Roddy got his hand over him (again protecting Roddy) but Max turned it into the Salt of the Earth for the win. 

I'm going to reiterate, everything right. It was some beautiful pro wrestling. Roddy absolutely did his part, from the first shot when Max had the mic all the way to the momentary lapse where he didn't go for the pin after the Sick Kick, but this was Max embodying all of the outwardly selfish but truly (secretly) selfless qualities of a classic heel. I'm still kind of dreading the eventual Cole match because I have no idea how they can square the circle on the story so long as Cole's acting like a justified babyface and trying to "cool face" promo through it. But after this match, I'm willing to give Max a chance to at least try.