AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 10/19 - 10/25

ROH TV 10/22/26

Lee Moriarty vs Mance Warner

MD: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." is a quote attributed to Orson Welles, though we only have second-hand evidence he ever said it.

It is counter-intuitive, of course. If you can do absolutely anything then you can be as creative as possible, right? There are a few ways to look at it. For me, when talking about pro wrestling, creativity is a means and not an end. Innovation is a means and not an end. Creativity and innovation are not intrinsically good (I know, that's counter-intuitive too). What are the wrestlers trying to accomplish? For those who are just trying to be creative and innovative for the sake of being creative and innovative, even if it is to stand out, then very often, it comes at a cost. The end product is less primal, less resonant, less focused. The limitations of the form, norms, rules, expectations, consistent boundaries from match to match and show to show, all not only provides fans a grounding point so they can value things in a unified experience, but also force a sort of contained, constrained, distilled, concentrated sort of creativity. They give the wrestlers something to push off of instead of just things to tear down. 

It's true for any match. It's especially true for tag team wrestling, which is so often why I'm frustrated by the Young Bucks, who lean hard into an unbridled sort of deconstructive creativity at the expense of the all of those time-tested and straightforward tricks and tools that come from leaning hard into the enforced rules of tag team wrestling. Having a permissive Rick Knox in all of their matches leaves so much opportunity for heat, build, payoff (denial! denial is such an important part of tag team wrestling) on the table. With a little more time and care, they could still have their cake and eat it too. Instead, they gorge themselves on all the cake they can eat. It's spectacular, often delicious, but man are those calories ever emptier than they could be. If every match can become a tornado tag at any point, what's the value of the rules in the first place?

But yes, even more than tag team wrestling, there is the Pure Rules division of ROH. Three rope breaks. One punch. Twenty-count on the floor. Three judges. A sixty minute time-limit (probably about thirty minutes too long, maybe even forty minutes too long for a televised/PPV product, but that's beside the point; you DO want the judges to come into play now and again or why are they even there, right?). 

The rules are an opportunity. The rules allow different, unique stories to be told. They give wrestlers a jumping off point to be creative and allow that creativity to matter more. How can you work the rope breaks into a match? How can you work the punch or lack of such into a match (that's a big one for this match)? If things matter differently in Pure Rules matches, how can you use that distinction to be more creative, not less so?

Which brings us to Mance Warner. Lee Moriarty has an a very long reign as pure champ and while plenty of his matches play into the rules in clever ways, I've seen a few where a wrestler just comes in and wrestles like they might normally. It becomes more of a throwaway match in that case, one that leaves so much on the table. Those matches end up as Lee Moriarty showcases because he's playing with the rules while his opponent is just there for the ride.

Mance Warner was not going to leave a single scrap on the table. A match is an opportunity. It's a chance to show the world what you can do, to make people care about you, remember you, want to see more of you. A gimmick match, and the Pure Rules are, in their own way, a gimmick (just like Dax Harwood would claim a tag team match to be), is a chance to highlight what makes a wrestler special with some unconventional limitations. 

The fact that Warner is an unconventional wrestler, a roughneck, wildman brawler and scrapper, means that to put him in this sort of a dignified, technical, scientific environment creates an immediate fish out of water, Country Mouse/City Mouse dissonance. That's unquestionably interesting, and Mance knows it's interesting. He leaned hard into it in promos and social media. Mance mastered the rule book. He was ready to bend it and twist it and engage with it in every way possible to win. 

That meant, for once, a Pure Rules Title defense became not a Lee Moriarty showcase, but instead a Mance Warner showcase. The power of limitations. The openness to be creative in the face of them, not in spite of them but because of them.

There are a couple of ways to look at Pure Rules matches (and they don't have to be mutually exclusive). Are you interested in the technique at play, the mechanics, the tricked out submissions, the counters? Or are you interested in the characters, how they interface with each other, the rules, the possibilities? Again, it's not either/or but this match was so fascinating for the latter.

Moriarty got Warner into a cross armbreaker shortly after the bell rung. Mance paused, hesitated. Did he blow one of his rope breaks so early? Did he stay in the hold too long and potentially find a solution that didn't cost him one but instead weakened him for the rest of the match? That's interesting! He picked the rope break, but the fact he hesitated beforehand was just as fascinating as his decision. That's the sort of storytelling that you get from pro wrestling matches themselves and not just the angles or build to them (again, not either/or). It's human. In that moment, you saw into the character's soul. 

Where Mance (the character) succeeded the most were those places where he could bring forth his own style and dance around rules and conventions (pushing off of them to create an emotional effect instead of just ignoring them to do whatever he wanted). That might be spitting on his hands before a double knucklelock challenge, or, memorably, slipping Lee's foot over the rope on a pin attempt in a way that the ref couldn't see the slip, only the result, to force Lee to burn a rope break. We've seen similar things (rope breaks on illegal rope-assisted holds that counted, something that I didn't like nearly as much as this since they went against the spirit of the rules instead of playing towards them), but this was the sort of thing a canny wrestler out of his element might get away with one time. 

Lee's reaction was great too since he represented order and consistency and competence and here was this bumpkin (affectionate from me, not from Lee) coming in to create chaos in his orderly pro wrestling. Likewise with the spitting in the hands; Lee responded with a wristlock, patting Mance's hand against the mat to clean it off. It was a dance of character and personality and that's the best sort of pro wrestling dance imaginable.

By dancing this dance, by leaning into his own canniness and roughness, Mance kept Lee on his toes. He might throw a forearm or he might drop him down into a crossface. Lee couldn't know what to expect next. The problem was that it wasn't a dance he could dance forever. He mounted the top rope with Lee under him and while he realized he couldn't throw a punch (or didn't want to sacrifice his one punch in that moment), the weighing of the possibilities threw him off and Lee was able to literally throw him headfirst into the post. 

That changed the dynamics of the match. In fact, it introduced an entirely new element to a Pure Rules match. Mance Warner came back to the ring a bloody mess. Theoretically, it was more a Mance Warner match now, but maybe not when the blood was only flowing from one person. Lee controlled (all the way to forcing Lance to blow a rope break by biting the ropes to get out of a straitjacket-like hold). Mance came back. 

I think, ultimately, he got a little too out over his skis. He started using a chair in clever ways as a way to take off some of the leverage, as a way to get an extra bound. At some point, I think for Mance, blood running down his face, rope-breaks disappearing, it no longer became about beating Moriarty but instead about showing him all the things he could do. That very sort of creativity that can create for worse matches! But here it was all in character and made for a better one. Why? Because in the end, it cost Mance. Maybe it helped him force Lee to blow all of his rope breaks. Maybe it allowed him to last longer than should have been possible with the pure champ, but he blew all his breaks too, and all else equal, Lee was going to tie him up in the ropes, not the other way around.

All that means to me though, is that if Mance gets even one more chance against Lee, maybe, just maybe, he gets the balance right. And isn't THAT idea interesting! Isn't pro wrestling great?