AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 6/9 - 6/15

AEW Dynamite/Collision 6/11/25

Kyle Fletcher vs. Anthony Bowens

MD: We'll get to match itself down below as it was very good but elephant in the room time first. Despite having developed a slew of great heels, AEW has a young babyface problem. We'll leave HOOK aside other than noting that he's not necessarily in a different/more developed spot than he was a couple of years ago. Maybe he's in the midst of a shift after walking away from ringside a few weeks ago. Maybe it doesn't even matter if he's just an attraction. 

And we'll just talk about Daniel Garcia briefly since I wrote about it before. He won the TNT title and then instead of defending it on a weekly basis against any heel that they could throw at him, he was immediately tossed into matches with Briscoe (twice given the C2), Shibata, etc. on the way to a feud with Adam Cole. This is when he was developing his old school babyface routine and trying to connect to the crowd. You can't outbabyface Mark Briscoe easily. Completely short-circuited the connection. 

Ok, Bowens time. I could just write a snarky tweet about how he's 95 DDP and how Billy Gunn is either Maxx Muscle or the Diamond Doll, but I don't want snark. I want the guy to succeed. He has everything in the world on his side except for height and for a babyface who can work from underneath, that doesn't really matter. From the outside in, the other thing he's lacking is confidence. Because why else would he hide behind so, so many gimmicks. He's got the Jane's Addiction song, the nickname Pride of Professional Wrestling, the American Gladiators half chest gear, the Mollywop finisher name, the scissoring, the five tools bit, and the "Five Tools, one rule, Prove. Me. Wrong" catchphrase. And yes, the worst of all, Billy Gunn to steal his big moments (and whether he means to or not, he actually does) and to make him look even smaller. He's working hard, putting himself out there, doing a ton of media and highlighting on social media that he's doing it. But the screaming catch phrase laden promos aren't it. 

Maybe they would be if he was a guy who was unlikable and had to push past it, but that's not Bowens! Listen to him in an interview. Watch some of the stuff he does on his own. He's incredibly human and relatable. It's the same issue as Adam Cole, where Cole's likability doesn't transfer at all into his character. With Cole, it's because he plays things as too cool and refuses to show vulnerability, refuses to be himself. With Bowens, I do think it might be a confidence thing. If he just talked to the fans instead of shouting catch phrases at them, if he just told them how he was feeling, I think they'd go along for the ride. They want to like him. He calls out to be liked. He's sympathetic and gets how to work as a babyface well. He just needs to be himself and not sixteen gimmicks.

And to me, that's not on him. How Garcia was presented is not on Garcia. It's on the booking. It's top down. It's not enough to make good matches every week. It's not enough to put guys in positions where they can have four star TV matches. That's not good enough. AEW is where the best wrestle but the wrestling isn't enough. There has to be a strategic plan, three months, six months, nine months. It's not enough for a match to have a story behind it and a destination to a different match later on. It needs to make people feel something. Young babyfaces are investments. You have to pay into them. You have to pay them off over time. You have to build the ladder so that they can climb it. The pillars weren't built in a day. Neither was Magnum TA or Mistico. It takes extra work. It means living less in the moment and more over time creatively. Maybe it's less fun for a booker/matchmaker. It's taking your medicine. But it's necessary if any of this is going to work. I'm a firm, firm believer that things can and do matter. I believe that in the ring, wrestlers can build a match and create meaning and not just sensation. I believe that over time with booking too. Where is a Willow going to be in nine months? Where is Bandido going to be in nine months? Where will Hobbs be in nine months? Maybe you can't do it for everyone and maybe everyone can't make it through the glass ceiling, but in year six, great wrestling matches aren't going to do it alone. There are diminishing returns without strategy and purpose to underpin them.

Wrestlers can come up with their own ideas. They can be sent out there to succeed or to fail, to get over with the crowd or to lose them, but at the end of the day, it has to be a top down approach with a plan behind it. Bottom up can create a spark but top down needs to fan the flames and give kindling to the fire. Danielson is already gone. Guys like Joe and Cope can only last so much longer. There are only so many new people to bring in given the state of the indies. The heels need babyfaces that, even if they aren't bullet proof, are still resilient. 

That said, I actually thought this was a really good wrestling match. Fletcher is amazing. He has incredible instincts. But most of all, he sells everything that happens emotionally. He started this off by being a jerk to both Bowens and Gunn but the second Bowens turned it back on him he lost his cool and rushed in so that Bowens could outwrestle him and make him stooge. Then he came right back with meanness and frustration over the indignity that he faced. He is developing that Buddy Rose quality of looking like an absolute fool when he's backpedaling but then able to flip a switch and be completely brutal on offense.

And that's even when he teases things as well. There was a moment where he played on the apron power bomb from a few weeks ago, teasing it on Bowens right in front of Cole. That cruel mental distraction, that streak of viciousness towards both Bowens and Cole meant that Bowens was able to fire back. Fletcher's eyes went off the ball for a moment because he tried to do as much physical and emotional harm as possible. Incredibly rich piece of character work there serving multiple purposes at once and even playing on the real world backlash from the previous spot. Fletcher does multiple things like that almost every match, taking his time, being as present as anyone in wrestling, having it all lead to comeuppance. 

And of course Bowens, wanting to prove himself and come back after his last loss against Okada, knowing that Fletcher was someone opposed to him in so many ways,  wanting to put himself in TNT title contention with Cole at ringside, kept pushing, kept driving for his finisher. I wouldn't say that the finish protected him enough honestly. Archer got his hands on Gunn and that distracted Bowens so that he ate a clean pin loss after a move. That's a case where at least Fletcher could have gotten his feet up on the ropes maybe (that sort of finish helps both him and Bowens). But if it leads to Bowens losing Gunn, the most harmful of all of his gimmicks (because he steals those big pops/moments and towers over him), maybe that's a step in the right direction. And steps are needed because AEW can't afford to give up on such key parts of its future. 

ROH TV 6/12/25

Bandido vs. Mansoor (Proving Ground) 

MD: I was talking with a friend the other day and we were noting the move away from wrestling as a morality play, from being more about good vs evil. At some point along the way, wrestling went from being about more universal human issues and just became about itself. That's almost entirely WWE's fault and a side effect of WWE losing competition in the early 2000s. As a monopoly it was able to turn inwards. Punk's Pipe Bomb and Bryan Danielson vs the Authority were more about wrestling nerds getting more of a say against the established norms than anything more human and universal like Dusty vs Flair, Hogan vs Dibiase, or Austin vs McMahon. The snake has come to eat its own tail. AEW plays with notions of friendship a bit more but so much of it is still about wrestling as wrestling as opposed to wrestling as a lens through which (even simple) social issues and tensions can be explored and played out. (As an aside, that's why some of Hangman's journey is so powerful, because so many people in the 2020s can relate to the anxiousness ingrained in the character).

Despite this match being a bandit-themed luchador against a male model, I thought it tapped into the notion of good vs evil pretty well. Maybe it's a stretch to call Mansoor evil, but he certainly represented vanity and arrogance, quick to preen and pose at every opportunity. Moreover, he was seconded by Mason Madden, Johnny TV, AND Taya, and they interfered again and again and again throughout. Even though they may have come off as clever and talented, they made sure to portray themselves as scheming and underhanded. At no point did they try to get the crowd on their side. They knew their roles and played them exactly as they should, allowing for Bandido to shine heroically against all odds. 

In this case, driven by the interference and on top of it, that meant overcoming Mansoor's targeting of his back. Bandido had to power through a double arm stretch, had to overcome his own pain when he couldn't suplex Mansoor, had to survive a late match backstabber. The villains, fueled not by Bandido's inner strength but by their own weakness of character, cheated too much and too brazenly and overstretched, being caught by Ref Aubrey and sent to the back (Mansoor acted as if their removal physically hurt him which was a great bit of emotional selling). Left in a fair fight, even if he was damaged, Bandido pushed on and persevered, good triumphing over bad. Not every match has to work along those lines but it's primal stuff and it's sure nice to see it play out now and again.