Segunda Caida

Phil Schneider, Eric Ritz, Matt D, Sebastian, and other friends write about pro wrestling. Follow us @segundacaida

Friday, May 02, 2025

Found Footage Friday: MAKABE~!


MD: Friend of the blog and of every person who holds the grandeur of pro wrestling somewhere in their heart, Daniel Makabe, has been following our dubious lead as of late and blogging about the entirety of his 3-2-1 Battle! run. https://danielgoestocollege.blogspot.com/ He's also posted some matches along the way and recommended a few of them to us to cover for a FFF. It'll be a while before he gets to 2017 and he's coming at things from the inside while we're as outside as can be. But if you ever read our stuff, you're going to want to pop over to his blog to see what he's doing.


Daniel Makabe/Scott Henson/White Tiger vs. Craig Mitchell/Matt Knicks/Kenny Sutra 3-2-1 Battle! 3/10/17

MD: This was one night before the European Rules match below and a testament to the variety at play. I liked how this was regimented to start. If you have a trios match, start with clean individual pairings. We see way too much bleed over in US trios matches and it just seems to defeat the strengths of the form. Here you had Makabe and Sutra with a bit of wrestling to start, Tiger and Knicks picking up the pace, and then Mitchell and Henson having a bit of a hossfight. Granted, the last one was more of a high-basing superheavylightweight bit with headscissors takeovers and what not but you can't complain too much because of Henson's connection to the crowd. 

Things broke down in the home team's favor and then they had a solid transition for the Chicago contingent to takeover, before rolling into an extended finishing stretch after the comeback. In the midst of it Mitchell got to hit three press slams in a row (meaning that they held back his strength spots from that opening exchange for a moment that it'd mean more deeper into the match). Unfortunately for him, his fate was to be crotched hard on the top and stuck there for a while until he could eat a huge super rana from Makabe. They had teased a top rope double team earlier when they were setting up the heat, but were able to pay it off impressively for the finish as Tiger had two guys in an Octopus at once (wish I had a better camera shot on that double stretch). Considering its place on the card, this was big, fun, and firework laden like you'd want.

ER: This started out as guys who didn't really feel familiar with each other and by the end it felt like guys who had been working rec center Rev Pro matches all year. RevPro is a vibe I'm happy I got to experience live and I love when a match brings me back. Get some subpar white bodies in a ring throwing legit suplexes and taking some death bumps and suddenly I'm back in the City of Industry in 2002. I've seen more polished versions of everyone in this match save White Tiger and Kenny Sutra, but I liked this energy and how it kept building. 

Craig Mitchell had a lot of nice stuff. Big belly small butt guy with a crisp standing moonsault, nice elbowdrop/right hand/dropkick, and at one point he gave all the cats this combo press slam/death valley driver one after the other. His Rainmaker looks better than almost every Okada Rainmaker I've seen. Henson was a guy who played to a comedy crowd while doing catboi Kings Road. He elbowed Sutra right in the mouth - I liked how Sutra pawed at his heated up face despite not being one of the cats - and his half nelson suplex to Knicks was fantastic. The half nelson suplex has become such an O'Connor Roll bump that seeing Henson do a more classic Kings Road style is a stand out. I loved the way Knicks' legs flew over his head. 

I first became aware of Makabe because of a match against Timothy Thatcher just a few months after this match, and here he's a guy who seems so different than the guy grappling with Thatcher. Nobody else here wants to try out his matwork (I bet he and Knicks could have worked a fun singles match around it. Knicks is pliable with good faces) but I like seeing him work nice basics combined with RevPro crazy. Nice headlocks and honest in how he handles How A Spot Looks vs. How It Was Supposed To Look, but then stuff like a super frankensteiner and an ambitious missile dropkick/senton aiming for all three of the Chicago boys and getting two of them. The finish is wild as Henson sets up a Meltzer Driver and Dan turns it into a flipping legdrop to the taint and crushing that boy. They call that one the Coal Harbour Hangover. 


Daniel Makabe vs. Kaden Talbain (European Rounds) 3-2-1 Battle! 3/11/17

MD: With wrestling, we take so much for granted. In almost any match you watch in 2025, there will be a dozen things that happen because they're supposed to happen, because they're tropes, because they're expected. The viewers and maybe even the wrestlers don't question why they happen, why they work. They're simply expected. And that's ok. There's a narrative language to pro wrestling and you don't necessarily need to constantly be focused on the etymology of every movement in order to enjoy it. A lot is symbolic and our minds and familiarity bridges the gap.

But here, with this match, there are no gaps to bridge. There is no air. There are no holes. What there is instead is pressure and leverage and positioning and meaning. Watching a match like this, where so much care is put into not just every hold and counterhold, but every movement of every extremity, makes you a smarter wrestling fan. It makes you think about things you've always just taken for granted. It's a match that triggers an animal part in our heads of a Regal match where he might have enacted a tiny leverage move to get a hold. Or yes, your World of Sport exchanges whether we're talking Saint or Jon Cortez or Clive Myers or whatever else. But this was more dogged, more focused, more single-minded. 

Those matches breathe. This never did. Save for the round breaks, it never came up for air. It kept you immersed in total dedication not just to craft but to pro wrestling physics, a world of joints and limbs and pure causality. To do A will cause B. Moving your leg just so will provide you with the slight positioning to accomplish the thing you need to do in order to do the thing you need to do in order to do the thing you need to do.

It took what was a widespread televised product and turned it inward, increased its potency, took it to its logical conclusion. And you, as a viewer, are no longer following the tides as they come in and out but are instead watching for every tiny bubble, every conscious decision to move a limb, a hand, a finger, for the impact it might have immediately, and down the line.

That is not to say the tides didn't exist. There were broader story elements at play. Makabe was the aggressor in the back half of the first round, with Talbain trying to work out of what I'll call an inner chicken wing with all the up and over tricks (headscissors and otherwise) that we'd become so used to in 50s French Catch a few years later, with Makabe managing to jam him right until his escape right at the end. At the end of the second round, Makabe almost (almost) locked in a butterfly suplex only to run out of time. It was that selfsame hold that Talbain was able to use in the third round to pick up the first fall.

Talbain came out of Makabe's equalizer in the fourth round damaged, that same unfortunate World of Sport feeling you'd sometimes get when someone toppled out of the ring and could barely continue. He then had to survive the final round, managing a clutch rope break that brought forth the same sort of subdued but obvious frustration in Makabe that followed the end of the second and the butterfly suplex that never was. Maybe that's why he transitioned away from holds and into pin attempts, a decision that would ultimately cost him the match. So yes all the small details were counterbalanced by large ones creating something greater than the sum of the whole.

You're left watching a match like this and wondering why we shouldn't hold wrestling to a higher standard when it comes to every tiny detail. If they could do it here over twenty minutes and five rounds, why can't the people we see on TV week in and week out meet them at least half way when it comes to leverage and consequence and meaning. Hitting spots is lazy. Constructing a castle like this has value to the viewer in not just outputs but inputs as well.

Daniel Makabe vs. SARIAN (Seattle Streetfight) 3-2-1 Battle! 4/8/17

MD: It's absolutely nuts to think this was just a month after the European Rules match. It's a big plunder filled, interference marred, wild brawl; punches right from the get go and then escalating weapons all the way through, with some nasty bumps, and just enough blood and guts along the way. 

All that said, there were a few underlying principles that connect the two matches and make it more than it could have been if it was sensation alone. First, every time a weapon gets introduced, there's a consequence to its entry. It almost felt like an X-On-A-Pole match in that regard (transitions tied to the cost of trying to win) because just introducing the weapon created an opening for the opponent. When Makabe tries to use the chair early, SARIAN is able to come back. When SARIAN introduces the skewers, Makabe is able to come back. Likewise the tacks. So on, so forth.

And then, connected with this, there's a ton of anticipation built around each weapon being used. Everything is framed so that it's introduced, built to, utilized, and then shown to be consequential. Makabe, after using the skewers, is momentarily shocked at what he just did and the consequence thereof. They fight around the tacks before bumping into them once or twice. It's that same sense of Onita in an exploding cage death match teasing and teasing and teasing before finally allowing for an explosion. Wrestling IS symbolic and there's no functional difference between a figurative bomb and a literal one in a narrative sense. In both cases, you want to build to it and then show the impact, and they did an amazing job here. It's not necessarily less is more, because this was all over the top, but instead it was more is most, where they squeezed out every bit of drama possible.

It meant that even after the interference and the dismantling of the ring, things still felt weighty and impactful. Makabe had is one last submission attempt while the post (and turnbuckle attached to it) were like the Sword of Damocles was in SARIAN's hand. Eventually the sword fell and Makabe fell shortly thereafter. Again, it's just hard to look at this, even with the little bits of discipline that remain among the chaos and not be amazed at the disparity between the two singles matches this week.


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