Things Used to Be Better. I Used to See Super Dragon Live.

Super Dragon vs. B-Boy MPW 11/3/01

ER: Billed as the SoCal Match of the Year by the title card, it is almost certainly not. Even among Super Dragon's other 2001 MPW matches it would be tough to call this the match of the year: A Low Ki time limit draw, a 2/3 falls match with Rising Son, and a Jardi Frantz match. Jardi might sound like a fake opponent to anyone reading this in 2025, but he was a great indie wrestler in 1999-2003. I had the time of my life during this era of west coast wrestling. I couldn't get enough of it and went to so many shows with friends. Even if I don't think this is what the 2001 SoCal MOTY might have been, this is definitely what a big SoCal indie match looked like in 2001, which was incredibly groundbreaking. I really liked Millennium Pro. Those were some good times. The shows were held at a Jewish Community Center in a nice neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. So, you're in the Valley watching wrestling in a hotel conference room style lit carpeted room and you'd get a bad Hardcore Kidd or Cincinnati Red match and a brilliant Super Dragon match and then you and your friends get to hear Adam Pearce ice out a room with a heavy breathing post-match late 2001 promo stating he was "blown up like the towers".

Our intrepid cameraman is seated next to a soft spoken mother and her little girl who is giggling through a 25 minute long SoCal match of the year. The girl asks her mom for her compact mirror so she can see how loose her tooth is while B-Boy is kicking Dragon across the face, dropkicking him in the back of the head, and throwing vicious crossfaces. Everybody left with loose teeth. B-Boy works over Dragon's leg and it's decent stuff, but everything is more compelling whenever he's stiffing Dragon up, which is most of the runtime. It's weird to see an era where Dragon wasn't the guy working more stiff in a match. B-Boy had an insane offense arsenal and we see it all, done with real energy. His Thousand Oaks Jam was more Bobby Eaton than Psicosis and that's a huge compliment. Crazy distance and a beautiful landing.

They take awhile to set up a cool spot on the floor, but the payoff is worth it to see in a well lit community center: B-Boy tries a reverse splash crucifix bomb off the apron and Dragon reverses it with a Super Calo headscissors that sent him down an aisle surrounded by coral upholstery hotel conference chairs. When Dragon goes for the follow up dive he gets stopped in his tracks deader than dead can be. The whole chain that led to the crucifix bomb was started by Dragon scouting B-Boy's past dive blocks, and didn't count on B-Boy staying diligent to stopping all dives. It was a great bit of layering where every action actually played off previous actions and subverted learned behaviors all within one match. Dragon's blocked dive wasn't his only miss, as he was good at leaving openings with a big miss. His missed phoenix splash was great and led to a strong nearfall.

This got super exciting when it was clear that the crowd was really wanting B-Boy to take this. He starts rocking Dragon with left-right elbow combos and levels him with a clothesline, and these people are living with it. Dragon takes a suplex on his head like Super Dragon would do and fighting spirits to his feet to hit a lariat even more badass than B-Boy's. We've dealt with 25 years of guys aping fighting spirit that they saw on their first puro tape, but this was before ROH even existed, before any kind of super indy style pulling from Japan. Roll your eyes at the masked man's fighting spirit lariat, but you cannot deny the humongous jump-to-their-feet babyface reaction the spot got, completely blowing B-Boy's loud support from just 20 seconds ago out of the water. This was a Super Dragon crowd who started growing loudly into a B-Boy crowd before being firmly turned back into a Super Dragon crowd...but then B-Boy kicked out after a Psycho Driver and the entire crowd shifted right back to being a loud B-Boy crowd. Incredible vibes.

Maybe this was the SoCal match of the year. There were other matches I saw live that I liked more, others I liked more on tape, but I don't remember any of them getting the entire crowd so involved with the ups and downs and the major tide shifts. That's special, and almost surely why it was so fondly remembered by anyone who witnessed it at the time. Still plays as something big today.

Super Dragon vs. Bobby Quance APW 5/24/02

ER: Damn, there I am in the front row of this Gym Wars show with a girlfriend who would not be my girlfriend by June of 2002. I noticed her and my friend Jason before I noticed myself sitting in between them. There couldn't have been 80 people at those Gym Wars shows and we went to a ton of them over a several year period. I didn't even remember seeing this match but here is proof that I did, over half my life ago, in a Hayward garage with 60 or so other people who were all locked in, living in an era before cell phone dominance.

Bobby Quance is basically 10 matches into his short career and is malleable in the best way. This is just 15 sick minutes of Super Dragon manipulating the match into anything he wanted it to be. It starts with nice engaging arm work and armdrag mat wrestling, with Dragon grapevining Quance's arm in cool ways while maneuvering him into pins, Quance coming back when he can with speed. Dragon lets Quance show off a bit, breaking the match open taking a headscissors to the floor to set up a big Bobby tope con giro, then catches a springboard huracanrana back into the ring for 2. That's when Dragon starts trying to shut him down by going after Quance's leg, and it rules. Dragon throws his full weight into a dropkick to the knee and starts kicking at it, then locks in what I can only describe as a very stiff figure 4. You see a submission several thousand times and suddenly you watch a match where you're also watching your 21 year old self watching a match and both versions of you are witnessing a truly great figure 4 leglock. Dragon starts goading Quance into slapping him in the hold and Quance is small enough that he can't quite reach Dragon's face. Quance's effort to make the ropes was great, but not as great as Dragon mocking everyone's applause with dainty hand claps when Quance finally gets the rope break.

Dragon is good at always making it look like he's trying to finish the match, while providing openings for Quance to extend the match. There's a cool Psycho Driver set up where Quance almost rolls through it with a rana, but Dragon blocks his reversal and pulls him back up to hit a beautiful piledriver. When Quance gives the rest of what he has, he limps convincingly through his comeback and hits a back elbow and clothesline much harder than you'd expect he'd be able to hit by looking at him. He gets geared up enough to foolishly try a shooting star press, sees Dragon has moved and lands on his feet...and realizes he would have been better off just missing the shooting star because Dragon never stopped kicking at all sides of his knee. Quance's knee buckles and he's left a sitting duck for Dragon's clothesline, and nobody in the states was throwing better clotheslines than Dragon in 2002. Dragon easily could have ended things there, but he gets in a slick show off move with a spot I do not remember him doing: he rolls over the ropes like he's doing the Misawa feint, but rolls back into the ring in one motion and leaps into a back elbow. So cool. His springboard spinning heel kick lands heavy to the back of Bobby's head, and I love watching my friend Jason put his hands up over his face after Dragon sticks him with the Psycho Driver. What a find, and what luck to have been able to see this kind of wrestling live in 2002 and sitting on my couch in 2025.