2025 Ongoing MOTY List: Katchem vs. Shepherd

 

Robert Katchem vs. Big Jake Shepard Painted Red Wrestling 7/14/25

ER: I didn't know a single thing about the Fat Ohio/Michigan Guys Throwing Punches wrestling scene and it feels like the purest vision of Real Pro Wrestling in 2025. This probably gets lumped in with death match wrestling but I think that's reductive. I don't mean that as a slight to death matches, but this has much more in common with a Mid-South street fight than it does with guys cutting themselves open. It's Texas Death Match rules with the 10 count, and as bloody as any death match. But the blood flows freely from the punches being thrown, not from any stabbing or cutting. A match based around punches feels rare to me in 2025, and maybe that's because I hadn't yet been introduced to Big Jake Shepherd. 

Big Jake is someone who simply HAS to be a DEAN~! Guy in the near future. Jake is a big boy, like the mentally ill son Buddy in Slaughterhouse. Is Big Jake the Jerry Blackwell we've needed? When a boy with this body and a fuzzy beard hiding a face that you know looks weird when shaved comes out throwing four kinds of good punches - worked shots, stiff shots, great form on all of them - and yells "I got him bleeding!" as he's punching Katchem in the head and face, I think it's exactly what I have needed. He starts the match with punches, he ends the match with punches, and we need more men like him who are unafraid of The Punch. 

Big Jake and Katchem are both excellent bleeders and I love the bloody progression of this fight. They both know what they're doing with their white shirts, but Big Jake especially gets it: with his white shirt tucked in over his ample stomach, blood patch spreading across it, he is a vision. Katchem beats him senselessly with a water cooler bottle on a stick and Jake takes an unprotected shot to the stomach that I thought was insane. Yeah, it's a big stomach, but while selling the beating Jake leaned back over the apron to purposely expose the most stomach possible before taking that Sparkletts bottle straight to the liver. Jake can absorb some damage but also shows he can rise above that damage and always fight. 

Water cooler bottles are all well and good, but the meat and potatoes of this match were the punches. Speaking of potatoes, Katchem fights his way back into it with a great punch/kick combo where all the shots were potatoes, and it felt like spiritual Ian Rotten shit in the best way. Fight punches with punches and bottles with bottles, and where there are bottles there will be bottle caps. Katchem kicks Jake in the back of the head before curb stomping him into bottle caps. Jake dramatically rises at 9 and hits Katchem with a Bubba Slam into the caps. Knowing that won't be enough and not satisfied with punching the man out, Big Jake cracks Katchem in the face with a paper weight!

Jake hits this man with in the face with a paper weight and Katchem does a great face full of blood crawl to a 9 count, pulling himself up by the ropes. Jake goes back to the paper weight but telegraphs his shot, Katchem ducks the weight and rises with a punch to Jake's jaw, sending himself over at the same time the punch fells big Buddy. Katchem does the bloodiest version of Kawada's One Punch Before Falling Over and the only difference is he's grown his fringe out into a mullet that Kawada was always too cowardly to grow. Neither man can answer the 10 count, because The Punch is King, as it always should be. So long forearms, the freaks remembered we don't need you. 

2025 MOTY MASTER LIST