2025 Ongoing MOTY List: Fallen Angel Dies a Texas Death

Hangman Page vs. Christopher Daniels AEW Collision 1/18/25

I stopped getting invested in authority angles a long long time ago, and I can't lie and say I was very excited about this one. But it turns out my mental approach was all wrong, because this was not an authority angle, and watching the match it was clear how unimportant that aspect of the story was. Far more important things were happening here. This was a man's last stand, his last match, a last chance to publicly die on a sword, a last chance to see how FAR he could push things before the inevitable. 

Christopher Daniels is 55 years old and that is a reminder of my own rising age. The first wrestling shirt I ever purchased was a Fallen Angel shirt, acquired at an APW show when I was 18 years old. My wrestling show attendance really kicked into high gear when I was 18. Mike Modest and Christopher Daniels were my favorite wrestlers who I was regularly seeing wrestle live. I felt lucky to see them wrestle so often, and their matches together made me feel like I was seeing something special before everyone else. A few months later, I was wearing my Fallen Angel shirt on my college campus. A stranger pointed me out in passing and said, "Hey, nice shirt!" Months after that, I saw that same person waiting in line to get into ECW's Heat Wave 2000 and struck up a conversation with him and his friends. Those guys (Devin, Jason, Sean) became my best friends. I saw more live wrestling with - and watched more wrestling together in our respective living rooms with - those guys than anyone else in my life. Devin lives in Oregon now so I don't see him much, but Jason and Sean are still my go-to guys to watch wrestling with, live and in my living room. I don't know if that happens if I wasn't wearing that Fallen Angel shirt. 

Tastes change, favorites change. Daniels went on to have a 2,000 match career and now it's over, and he gets to go out having what could be called the best singles match of his career. Isn't that incredible? There's no hyperbole in that statement. Is it possible one of the TNA AJ Styles or Samoa Joe matches is better? Sure. There were two iron man matches in 2005 alone that could be better, and nothing will replace the memories of the two Modest/Daniels singles matches I saw live (and the multiple times I saw them tagging, including the great Modest/Daniels vs. Boyce LeGrande/Robert Thompson match from December 2000). But if any of those matches are better - I am not going to watch all of them before writing this - it is far more meaningful to me to have your last match ever be in the discussion with the greatest matches of your entire 30 year career. That's not just special, it's incredible. 

I don't always connect with the Texas Death stipulation. Sometimes it is killed by slow counts and frequent stopping, all momentum killed so that we can have a 40 second 8 count every other minute. But this was different, because Daniels and Hangman delivered the kind of damage that justified the repeated 10 counts, and gave the match (and each other) necessary breath while making any temporary recovery believable. They stayed within their respective roles the entire time. Nothing was even. Every part of the match reminded you who the fresher, more resilient man was. Watch the way Daniels gets knocked around by Hangman's stronger elbow strikes that were "worth" more than Daniels' strikes. Both men felt like they were selling the other's strikes exactly how they looked, matching the strikes and selling to their roles. But while Daniels was outgunned, it didn't mean he wasn't constantly trying to upset (and anger) Hangman. 

Daniels hits what I would wager, having seen hundreds of Christopher Daniels matches, his greatest ever baseball slide dropkick, firing through the bottom two ropes square into Hangman's chest. There are hundreds more Daniels matches I will never see, so anyone who's seen him do a harder baseball slide dropkick, let me know where it happened. But this was not a match about Daniels hitting a lot of offense, and that's clear when he gets pulled down roughly to the apron the floor attempting a split legged moonsault and is bleeding soon after from a chair edge to the face. I, not realizing how hard they were going to go in this, was appreciating how well Page did a HHH style "my hand is covering the edge of this folding chair back and I'm going to jam it at your face in a way nobody has ever used a weaponized chair before" chairshot and thought this was going to be a professional brawl where they tighten up the important strikes and work some smoke around the rest. Then one minute later Hangman is just slicing Daniels' head open, using barbed wire to saw into him like he was using a cheese wire, and the rest of this was not the professional Good Hand match I had expected. 

I always like when a guy gets choked over the ropes, but it is elevated to impossible levels when the guy getting choked is streaming fresh blood down the bridge of his nose and you can hear it dripping onto the mats below. The Fallen Angel is psychotic. Anyone who has a 30 year wrestling career has to be, but most men you can say that about haven't taken a powerbomb kidneys first through folding chairs, which is just one of several ways they actually shocked me during this match. Taking a fallaway slam on the floor onto those same kidneys right after is some real salt in the wound, and the way Daniels getting flung splatters blood across the mats looked like Hangman experimenting with abstract expressionism. When Daniels gets the top of his head run full speed into a chair, my admiration of Hangman's "worked" chairshot earlier feels silly. 

On commentary, I thought Matt Menard did an excellent job getting over Daniels' blood loss as a hindrance, talking about how it clots in your eyes and can't be wiped away, impairing vision while leaving you feeling depleted. He was so sincere and speaking from experience, that it gave me new perspective on what Daniels was going through. Just as I gained this new perspective, they shocked me again when Daniels gets double stomped through a table. It highlighted the fact that Hangman was not wasting any part of the match trying to finish Daniels off. He understood the rules he was working within, and was a man working like he was actually trying to win, never worrying about going "too far" because his only goal was to keep a man down for a 10 count. 

Daniels: Bloody, mostly defeated, refusing to quit/not knowing when to quit, hits his greatest ever BME. It is his greatest, because it lands as well as any other BME he's ever pulled off, except none of them were executed by a 55 year old man. If you can hit a clean moonsault, with impact, in your mid 50s, then you have miracle knees or are insane. It's almost surely the latter. He does another with Page under a barbed wire board because things hadn't gotten bad enough. Once Hangman survives that, there is nothing more. How can you handle a man standing tall after you have plumbed the depths to give him your worst? Well, you can't. That's when it's over. Daniels sells the Dead Eye like his neck got shoved up to his ears, so painful that it made everyone watching it also pray for Daniels' retirement.  

I thought this was brilliant, emotional, and downright shocking. If this really does turn out to be Daniels' public send off (so far so good, but 55 or no, you can never trust pro wrestlers) then few could ever hope to go out on a higher note. 

2025 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 3/27 - 4/2

ROH 3/30

Eddie Kingston vs Christopher Daniels

MD: There was a lot of reason to question just what the difference between AEW and ROH would be. There's overlaps on the roster. Most of the belts overlap to some degree, especially once AEW introduced trios titles. Calling out the Pure Title and a few different wrestlers didn't quite cut it. From the PPVs alone, you couldn't really tell. They were a bit more "dream match" focused, but it's not like AEW didn't main event Dynamite week before last with a "dream match." We're a month in now and the difference is pretty clear. ROH is for the 5%, those 15K people subscribed to Honor Club, the most focused of the focused, the list-makers and tape traders and match analyzers. It's Tony getting to talk to his own people without any of the constraints or the chains or the pressures of TV. It's him working out of those old battered notebooks in a controlled environment, to have fun, and to share with like minded people.

And it's pretty great. No commercial breaks. No start-of-show constraints. No time marks to hit. A goal, vague, off in the distance, with the next PPV, but very much wrestling for the sake of wrestling. Obviously Eddie Kingston and Christopher Daniels can work in that environment. As much as anything else, this match was there to show that Kingston could take what Daniels threw at him and outright outwrestle him; this presented him as a leveled up challenge to Claudio. I think the commercial breaks force heel control and the build and comeback narrative that comes with that to matter more on AEW TV; it forces things to be less 50-50, but that doesn't mean every match needs to be that way. That doesn't mean that every wrestler needs those sort of structural training wheels and constraints. These two could work in counters and transitions to make the momentum shifts measured and meaningful. In some ways, Kingston is a perfect opponent for Daniels to highlight his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. He hits harder and heavier than he did twenty years ago, age bringing him down to earth and letting him kick the dust up, but Eddie's going to lean into everything and encourage that all the more. So they went out there with no constraints but the goal they were trying to accomplish and went at it and it gave Eddie that extra little push and that extra bit of credibility leading into the PPV. If ROH only exists to give them the freedom to ply their trade and Tony the freedom to create exactly how he wants to create, it's still a pretty worthwhile endeavor if you ask me.

ROH Supercard of Honor 3/31

Claudio Castagnoli vs Eddie Kingston

MD: I'm writing this Monday morning before the Ringer post goes up but I'm certain I can't outwrite Phil on this one. A lot of this writes itself, really, with Eddie, whose best and biggest matches over the last few years have all been about proving himself either against someone who doubted him or against the weight of his own inspirations and history itself, being as Eddie as possible. He wore his pride on his sleeve, congealed it into toughness and intensity, with Claudio's own pride as an athlete and champion and pinnacle of excellence being the perfect contrast. You could write paragraphs about that and they'd be as primal and rousing as the match itself. 

So, let's talk about selling instead. You know who I'm a low vote on? Takeshita. I think he's got amazing physical skills and great charisma but pretty crummy instincts and takes shortcuts. Case in point, when Willie Mack finally hit the Stunner (that he had worked to hit throughout the match, as is the AEW/ROH style - see Eddie's tope suicida here) Takeshita popped up, hit a spot, fell down. I get the arguments about fighting spirit and delayed selling. I'm not so rigid and dogmatic that I don't think that's ever ok, but I do think that there's a cost every time something like that happens. Meaning in pro wrestling is entirely based on selling. Selling isn't just showing showing pain, it's showing consequence and turning physical impact into emotional impact. Wrestling is about creating an expectation in an audience over time and then subverting that expectation when it matters the absolute most. They absolutely nailed that with the one-count kickout of the Neutralizer. It might not be Claudio's primary finisher anymore now that he's been using the swing, that he's been getting wins with the European uppercut, that he's able to use the Ricola Bomb (and presumably the UFO) again, but it's something he gets wins off of, and Eddie kicking out at one sent a bolt of electricity through the crowd. Maybe that's the entire point that makes my misgivings meaningless that Takeshita's pop up after the Stunner didn't matter; the crowd went up with a gasp for Eddie anyway, but when you're creating an immersive experience, consistency over time matters. I guess what I'm saying is "save the most impactful bits of narrative stretching for the main event." It was still a great moment though and one that fit the characters and where they were in the match perfectly. 

Let's talk about the leg selling then. Early on, after losing a strike exchange and getting flustered and trying to bring a chair in, Eddie went low to the knee. Claudio powered through this, while selling the damage for the next few minutes and then they moved on from it for the most part. Every match is its own unique story and own unique bit of execution. There are times where that would actually bug me, not for its own sake, but for how it played out within the confines of the match. Sometimes limbwork is done to kill time. Here, it was utilized as an equalizer, a key. Eddie didn't want to win the match with a figure-four. He wanted to win it with the Stretch Plum. He had wanted to submit Jericho with the Stretch Plum and Claudio had stolen that from him. He wanted to knock Claudio out with the backfist. He wanted to drive his skull through the mat with the Northern Lights Driver. Where I have a problem is when the legwork is an end unto itself that is then ignored as they search for another end. Here it was a means, and the means was to open Claudio up to the things Eddie wanted to hit him with, to slow him down but just enough that Claudio couldn't power straight through Eddie's preferred attacks. It provided Eddie for opportunities to chip away at Claudio how he wanted and because of his overt decision not to stay on the leg, Claudio was able to shake that one set of pain off as he was rattled by shots to his head and body. The selling was consummate to the limited attack (and Claudio's own usage of his leg) and when it was time to move on from it, no one watching the match closely had reason to outright wonder why Claudio wasn't limping anymore. They were too busy watching Claudio fighting for his life to stay in the match and keep his title in the face of Eddie's broader assault instead.

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Found Footage Friday: SUPER BOY~! LA PARKA~! SHOCKER~! DANIELSON~! MODEST~! MORGAN~! DANIELS~! CAPITAN~! JUVI~! DRAKE~!

ER: What an amazing surprise for me this week, when Phil found a YouTube channel that's been uploading West coast indies from the early 2000s, an era that is hardly represented online and was often never even released, and an era where my friends and I went to a lot of live West coast indy wrestling shows. We very easily found three different matches from three shows I attended in Spring-Summer 2002, none of which I've been able to see since watching them live. 2002 was a really great year to be a wrestling fan. I'm lucky to get the excuse to relive some wrestling memories experienced by a 21 year old college senior, half my lifetime ago. 

LA Park/Shocker vs Super Boy/Capitan de Oro FMLL 03/23/02

MD: This is about as 2002 DVDVR a match as you can get. Two fat guys that could go: base, bump, stooge, fly, and in Super Boy's case flip, against two of the very best and most stylized in the world in Park and Shocker. I've seen a bunch of Shocker from a few years earlier and plenty of old man Shocker but I've never quite found the rosetta stone match that shows me what drove him all the way to the top of the old 500s. This gives you a lot of little elements: a great strike, a great bump, the charisma and presence, the signature elbow drop, but the match as a whole is more fun than anything else. Park is at the height of his groin utilization, which is crowd-pleasing and opponent-infuriating and a fine enough sort of thing to do for this indy against these opponents in front of this crowd, but it's not quite the Park you'd hope for. That's not to say he doesn't hit a dive and doesn't take some stuff, and it's certainly not to say that it's not great when Super Boy is trying to match him step for step. It's fun when Super Boy and Capitan de Oro are working together. It's fun when they're basing for Shocker's stuff. It's fun when Park and Shocker hit some tandem stuff and the synchronous frog splashes at the end. There's never really any drama but there's not a moment where this isn't enjoyable nonetheless.

ER: I think Matt is really really underrating this match. This was the kind of big action match that played perfectly to the flea market audience, and watching it now I couldn't believe it was even better than I remembered. Honestly, it was way better than I remembered. This was at Franks & Sons indoor flea market, a flea market where I bought Homies figurines, Desert Storm trading cards, a new Vader WCW Toymakers action figure for $2, and several lucha tapes. We watched those tapes in my boy Jason's RV, which we drove down to LA to see a bunch of wrestling shows. We had a TV hooked up in the RV so we could play No Mercy and watch tapes, so the tapes I bought were: the La Parka vs. Hijo del Santo Super Libre show, the Nicho vs. Hijo del Santo mask vs. mask show, and the 2001 IWRG show with the Dr. Cerebro vs. Hijo del Santo mask vs. mask match. Man, Santo had a really great 2001 that we celebrated while parked at a Wal-Mart. While we were lingering around waiting for this show to start, my friend Devin pointed out "a dork in a La Parka mask" who had just walked in. Of course it was La Parka. He was wearing Sergio Valente jeans, a tucked in mint green polo, and his mask. He was the main draw that got us excited for this show. A king. 

But yeah, this is the kind of match you'd talk about several times on a 7 hour drive back from LA. I didn't even know this match was taped, and my handsome visage shows up really early in this, because Super Boy hit a big fatass tope that crushed the plastic chairs in front of me and landed him directly on my leg. My bright yellow Kawada shirt looks incredible. I am holding a digital camera that used floppy disks. Super Boy leans into me and I pat him on the chest, as commentary says that Super Boy landed in the lap of a lucky fan. A 20 years later reminder that I was once a Lucky Fan. Super Boy was a real marvel here. He was a more of a tape trading legend than anything, a cult star, but he moves, has the build, and has the timing of young Super Porky, with some of the greatest punches in lucha history. He's so awesome in all of this: hitting a big standing splash/standing moonsault combo, missing a big middle buckle moonsault, hitting a crazy late rotation swanton, cutting off Park by punching him in the face every time Park disrespectfully pelvic thrusts he or Oro, the previously mentioned tope into my lap, and he draws great flea market heat with a shirt removal that draws "Put it on!" chants. He looks like a total badass punching and slapping Park around through the whole match, any time Park started treating things as a joke. It all builds to Super Boy slapping the hell out of Park in the corner, then a great Park skeleton glove removal before he chopped the hell out of SB. 

La Parka was an absolute rock star, the kind of hard working, constantly entertaining house show performance that I've been lucky to see various versions of several times. His dancing is used to hilarious effect, tea bagging Oro to dance his way out of a sunset flip, backing Super Boy into the corner with sexually threatening humps, even break dancing! But the guy takes some Psicosis level bumps on a show held in a curtained off corner of a large warehouse. He takes his nasty upside down turnbuckle bump and takes a gross bump after getting crotched up top. He hits a big top rope splash and a gorgeous tornillo to cap off a fantastic dive train, while also throwing stiff strikes with Super Boy the whole match. It's a killer Park performance. Shocker and Oro have several standout moments of their own. Shocker was still so fast in 2002 and I thought he looked great here. I love his rolling elbowdrops and high headscissors armdrags, his flipping clothesline bump is a favorite, and his running boot looked BattlArts level. There's this awesome sequence of he and Super Boy going at it fast, peaked by Park throwing SB off the top with a nearly straight down arm drag, hitting a missile dropkick, and then crashing both of them through several plastic chairs with a tope con giro. Oro was going to get outshined by three mega stars, but he also hit some of the most high impact corner clotheslines I've ever seen, and he'd be a guy who would have really stood out on most shows I've attended. 

Trust me on this one, not the almost always reliable and usually trustworthy Matt. This match is a gem. Plus, how much of a treat is seeing a match again for the first time in 20 years, and it actually surpassing your memory? 

Michael Modest/Donovan Morgan vs. Juventud Guerrera/Tommy Drake Pro Wrestling Iron 5/31/02

MD: You come for Juvi but you stay for Michael Modest being a beast. He trained both Morgan and Drake and he was really laying things in on him at times. You did get an exchange between Morgan and Juvi and Juvi working the apron and having fun after the hot tag with Modest, but this was about Drake taking a beating. Modest had some pretty out there stuff, again because he probably needed it to stand out but he made it all look fairly grisly which is all the more impressive when you're doing headstand ranas in the corner or taking physics-defying head first bumps into the corner. For the most part, it was Morgan that had all of the over the top moves and while he hit them well and it was part of his deal in getting over, there wasn't that same urgency and aggression and chip on his shoulder that Modest had. Drake had a nice Russian Leg Sweep that he used a couple of times and some good scrapping when angry but some of the rest of his stuff looked a little loose. I don't think he had been wrestling for all that long at this point. The best part of this whole thing might have been early on where Drake wanted Morgan to charge off the ropes at him and Morgan just punched him in the face and cheesed a big smile. I don't think Juvi was super interested in taking most of this stuff but he was happy to come in now and again to hit some things. 

ER: I don't know if I've ever seen any Pro Wrestling Iron online before. I liked these guys. I briefly hosted a wrestling interview show at my college radio station, KSUN, that served as a Pro Wrestling Iron showcase: It was called The Iron Hour, and I interviewed Modest for the first show. Modest and Donovan Morgan were NOAH regulars at this point, which had lead to their bad split with APW. Infamous Sleaze Roland Alexander thought he should have a cut of their NOAH earnings and they split, taking several members of the roster with them (many of whom had been trained by Modest and/or Morgan). That caused Roland to go hard after Bryan Danielson and make him the new APW head trainer (which was a short, very fun era that we cover down in the match down below). Modest told me in that interview that Misawa respected workers who had their own school/promotion, so the PWI school was started partially to gain respect of the legend. It was also awesome that Modest took Misawa's advice so literally that he blew up the promotion after being the highest touted homegrown star who split with a large chunk of the roster. This is a good time to remember that Roland Alexander sent a wrestling school bill to the parents of a dead trainee, so Modest and Morgan laughing and leaving is a great thing. They also each had a 4 year strong run in NOAH, when it was my favorite fed in the world, and that rules.

This was another wrestling show we took the RV to. I'm not sure why we all hopped in the RV for this one, as the show was in Ukiah, a small town about 2 hours north of San Francisco. I grew up an hour north of SF, and Ukiah in 2022 is like my small town of Healdsburg was in 1992. It's the closest feeling to being in the midwest that you can get out here, but it's a charming place with some good diners and a great movie theater. Ukiah used to be an AWA town in the early 60s with Red Bastien as one of the top attractions, and I believe Shire promoted there in the 70s, but all small town stuff. Maybe we took the RV because we were bringing enough people that it made sense not to take two cars, but I'm not sure it made more sense to drive a huge gas guzzling RV. We probably just thought it would be fun to drive the RV up the gorgeous stretch of 101 (nothing but scenic views from Healdsburg to Ukiah) to the Ukiah fair. This show was held at the fair and I remember walking around the midway before and after the show. 2 Cold Scorpio was originally advertised for the main event but was replaced by Juvy. The posters all around the fairgrounds had him listed and pictured as Flash Funk, and I'd love to meet the hypothetical wrestling fan who would not have attended this show, but then saw they had the WWF space pimp from 5 years prior on the show and that forced their hand. The Vets Hall type building on a fairgrounds property is a classic wrestling venue, but one of my biggest memories of the show was how cold the building got as the night went on, and how loud the crickets got. If the temperature and some of the matches are leaving the crowd cold, and instead of silence you only have the loud sound of crickets? Tough optics. 

I don't remember a lot about this match, other than thinking Juvy didn't seem motivated to actually get in the ring for more than a couple minutes, and that my buddy Devin called Drake "Tommy Mistake", which got no reaction and lead to all of us clowning him for probably way too many months. Drake was Modest and Morgan's top student, and was a really new wrestler at this point (I'm not sure he even had 10 matches). He eventually went on one of the coolest NOAH tours ever. Seriously, look Tommy Drake up on cagematch and check his NOAH tour. In a promotion that ran tons of tags and trios, for some reason Drake got to work 8 singles matches on his 16 NOAH shows, ALL against different opponents. Japanese crowds got to see Tommy Drake singles matches against Morishima, Rikio, Ikeda, Taue, Honda, Inoue, Saito, and they got to see him BEAT Aoyagi. My new handheld white whale is going to be Tommy Drake, 20 matches into his career, pulling out a win against one of the toughest SOBS in a promotion of tough SOBs. 

The match lines up pretty much with my memory, even though I wouldn't have been able to tell you any details of the match before watching it again, if that makes sense. I remember the vibes. Modest and Morgan worked over Drake for most of the match, Juvy coming in twice and never doing too much more than very fast rope running. There were a lot of people in the crowd who wanted to see Juvy, but instead they saw a lot of Tommy Drake. And that's fine! Modest and Morgan were a good team and had a tight act by this point. Modest knew how to get a reaction from NOAH crowds and kept that shtick for his stateside gigs, looking like a cool jacked Jerry Tarkanian. There's no wrestler more responsible for getting me into local indy wrestling than Mike Modest, my favorite live wrestler of the era. He hit like a truck, and I loved that early spot where a couple shoulderblocks don't budge Drake, so he feints a third and then just throws an elbow smash. His rope flip rana (that later became far more famous as the Stratus-faction) is a move that shouldn't look good, but somehow Modest makes it look good. I liked how he used it successfully, then had it blocked to set up a Drake top rope clothesline, and then later used it to flip Donovan onto Drake. His torpedo bump into the turnbuckle was always one of the great signature bumps, one which he said he stole from Ray Stevens (even though we don't have any matches showing Stevens doing that bump). I loved his short elbowdrop and his kicks to Drake's back, and loved how Donovan worked him over with suplexes. Morgan's snap suplex -> fisherman's buster -> fisherman's neckbreaker is a cool combo and he snapped all of them off nicely. Juvy was exciting when he was in, but it was for maybe two total minutes of a 15 minute match, if we're being generous. 

Bryan Danielson vs. Christopher Daniels APW 7/6/02

MD: All of Danielson's stuff looked really good here. That's my biggest takeaway. This didn't go much longer than ten minutes, but everything looks great: the forearms, the step through/up and over out of the Greco-Roman knucklelock, the all time great missile dropkick, the front chancery suplex, the belly to back off the top. It's all smooth and impactful. Daniels gets credit too because he portrayed a chip on his shoulder in this one. It's hard to fault 2002 Daniels for all the STO/Downward Spiral/Complete Shot/inverted bulldog/etc. stuff. I don't think any of it works quite as well as the time he just grabs Danielson's head and tosses him down, but it was part of the appeal and part of what made him stand out at the time. I was on the wrong coast for this one, but I know 19-20 year old me watching NECW and Chaotic Wrestling and whatever other indy I had access to would have been all for everything he did. It was a little much at times, but less so in a ten minute match than it would have been in a twenty minute match. And hey, some of it, like the Blue Thunder Bomb was super impactful and really worked. The issue is that when everything a guy does is out of the norm and a little over the top, nothing ends up standing out too much. You end up with an overall impression of the guy with all the cool moves but it take you out of a match as much as it potentially adds to it.

ER: This show was at the Napa fairgrounds as part of the Napa county fair. I took a nice sunny afternoon drive out to Napa and stopped for an It's-It at a gas station on my way in, walked around the fair, then met up with friends for the show. All of the seating was in the grandstands, like we were about to watch a demolition derby, with the wrestlers all playing to our grandstand side and the dirt arena behind them. Justin Roberts did ring announcing and showed off his comedy chops to the crowd, getting booed for his novice and outdated Beavis & Butthead and Andy Kaufman impressions. His "Thank you very much" was tantamount to everyone thinking they can say "Here's Johnny" and have a Nicholson impression. The show was really fun, and unnecessarily stacked. The main event was a midgets match which was the only real draw on the show. This was a free admission show at the fair. You pay to get into the fair, but the wrestling was a free attraction. I remember noted deceased bag of shit Roland Alexander bragging repeatedly about drawing "several thousand people" to this APW show and bitch, most of those people just wanted to get a funnel cake and throw up on the fucking Gravitron. Like he thought a Super Dragon vs. Jardi Frantz hair vs. mask match was going to draw anything but some dork like me eating an ice cream. During that match I remember a lady getting up to leave, and a friend yelling out "You're going to miss the midgets!" and her replying "I'm obviously coming back for the midgets!" I don't think she was talking about making it back for the Tony Kozina match.

This was pretty much the exact kind of pro wrestling I wanted to see in 2002. This was the new style that Danielson was helping to pioneer and I was here for it, literally. Some of it hasn't aged well, but most of the things that haven't aged well are Christopher Daniels "I fall down with you" offense that became the basis for most of the worst Edge offense. It's a style we evolved from but damn if I don't still love a lot of this. Check out Danielson's amazing step over to Fujiwara, a sequence I don't think I've seen someone do so well, or at all. I thought he was swinging his leg over Daniels' head to set up a victory roll, and instead he just swings it straight over and drops down hard into that Fujiwara. Watching Danielson matches from 20 years ago gives the same gift as watching AJ Styles matches from Wildside, as you can see a lot of the physical movement is still similar (maybe a bit slower, but just slightly different) but a lot of the offense is completely different. At one point Danielson threw three right hand punches like I never remember seeing him throw punches before, then turns into an STO. Later, he hits this amazing missile dropkick where he ran up the turnbuckles and spun around in midair to hit the kick. I don't think any of the slick rope artists like Fenix, Freelance, or Gran Metalik could hit it any better. The crowd gets into this as they packed a lot of action and bumps into a tight runtime, and they got really loud when Danielson hit a big top rope headbutt, then got up and ran full steam into a huge spinning Blue Thunder Bomb. The top rope jumping back suplex was a great finish, and the match had a shocking amount of risk and hard bumps for something that was going to be absolutely blown out of the water reaction-wise 10 minutes later by two mildly trained midget wrestlers. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death Part 1 2/28-3/6

Big week this week so we are breaking it up, with the second half (and PPV) coming on Wednesday


AEW Dynamite 3/2

Bryan Danielson vs. Christopher Daniels

MD: I get that Khan was excited about the ROH deal and probably couldn't keep it quiet long (and surprises help with ratings, certainly) but it probably would have been better to do this after the PPV. Still, AEW is good at doing a lot of things at once in a single match and the post-match accomplished what it had to here. As for the match itself, past some Danielson control and (maybe, if you believe Tony and JR and I'm not sure I do) back focus in the middle, it really did feel like a 2002 ROH tribute. It started with the handshake and stayed pretty back and forth with pin exchanges and strike exchanges and counters and what you'd expect. Danielson is still 2022 Danielson though, so he had that underlying aggression and made sure to slip in the confident flourishes, and in turn let Daniels clown him in response (which drew some respectable Fallen Angel chants). He also pulled at the face multiple times, first in response to getting clowned and later to counter the second Iconoclasm attempt, proper heeling which made proceedings more interesting than they might have been. The big critique against Daniels over the years is that his stuff always looked too smooth and too clean to the point where it seemed artificial and he's aged like fine wine in that regard. I haven't seen his stuff in years but wear and tear of a hard career has made him rougher around the edges and given him a welcome grit. I can't say this didn't overall feel just a little out of place, especially so close to the big Mox vs. Danielson match but Bryan kept it just nuanced enough to make it work.

AEW Rampage 3/4

Darby Allin vs. Sammy Guevara vs. Andrade

MD: This was a three-way and it had some of the problems you'd expect a three-way to have, but a lot of that was tempered by picture perfect execution and timing that fostered the illusion and the underlying characters at play. Darby and Sammy started out aligned against Andrade, which came into play throughout a majority, though not all, of the match. The numbers game won out early, until someone actually tried to win and Sammy and Darby broke ranks against one another. Andrade was out of the ring for a bit too long here (the cardinal sin of these matches). I think he could have gotten away with it if he returned to playing up his start-of-the-match instinct to leave the ring and not face uneven odds. Instead of coming off as opportunistic, however, he visibly (in the corner of the screen just mulling about) sold that early offense almost too much.

Regardless, the payoff was him coming in for a big tower of doom spot, made unique by Sammy holding Darby up on the top rope while waiting for the superplex. I can't say I 100% bought this because I can't remember Sammy doing a lingering superplex like this to begin with, but Darby does have a tendency to try the upside down knee counter when up for a normal suplex and the spot was cool enough visually that I could sort of go for it. I liked the thematic consistency of Andrade's heat (returning to the 1 on 2 motif during the break), where he dropped one wrestler over the ropes and the second over the turnbuckle and the first back over the guardrail and used his belt for good measure. They came back by forcing a 2 on 1 strike exchange, which made Andrade look like a star. The double flip moonsault, in general, might be the single worst move in all of wrestling but it sort of worked here considering he was targeting one person with the first moonsault and a second with the second. It popped the announcers at least.

Down the stretch, they paid off a lot of what had been happening in the match and took the characters to logical conclusions (including a revenge belt shot on Andrade). Sammy hit a coast-to-coast on Andrade while Darby was diving for him. Darby stole Sammy's dive by shooting in from off screen as only he can to nail Andrade on the outside. They had the quick pin exchanges you'd expect from the two of them and then ultimately went to a choreographed-but-you'd-hardly-know-it finishing stretch of dodges and shots and bombs before Darby got Sammy out of the way after the GTH but not far enough out of the way that he couldn't come back in and steal back the win that Darby had already almost stolen. There were a lot of moving parts here but I think it worked more than not given the impossible hill to climb that any three-way match has. That doesn't mean it didn't have a contrived spot or two but when the spots are executed so well by people who can manage nearly impossible things, the laws of physics bend just a little to provide a crutch to your tottering suspension of disbelief. So it wobbles under its own weight but never entirely falls.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 1/6/21

What Worked

-I was initially down on the opening 8 man tag, finding at odd how much of a backseat The Acclaimed took the entire match. I thought they showed a lot of presence in their Dynamite debut and had kind of assumed they'd be treating them big. So it felt odd when they were such afterthoughts here, at the expense of talking about how Frankie Kazarian hadn't lost a step the entire match. But I admittedly got into the story after the match, with Kazarian's promo. I like a retirement or team breaks up storyline, and while it's true I haven't been excited for a Daniels/Kazarian match since 2001, I think the role of old gunslingers can be suitable to a lot of late career wrestlers. I have a soft spot for wrestlers playing that role, and I like the addition of them breaking up after their next loss. It's something that could supplement the in-ring. The match itself was fun enough, if way too one-sided for SCU/Bucks. I kind of talk out both sides of my mouth, as I have complained about AEW matches worked too competitively, but I think this would have been better if it was more even. I think SCU winning but having to work hard to beat Acclaim/Hybrid2 would have felt like even more stakes going into a much bigger match against the Bucks. It would be more like Rocky taking too much of a beating in a tune-up fight. Bucks had some nice dives, Kazarian worked hard in the match to give the angle some weight, and it kept a good pace. 

-Snoop Dogg at nearly 50 looks so cool in the Doggystyle hoodie. This guy is going to look cool forever and then cool as a corpse. He looked terrible up on that top rope, but who cares, Snoop went off the top rope. We can't all be Federline. 

-Shida/Abadon was nicely laid out, even if it wasn't quite good? Shida has charisma for sure, but her wrestling can be a real mess. She comes off uncoordinated during a lot of spots, and has timing issues, but she has the kind charisma that plays well off of a horror movie Kamala. Abadon bites at Shida's thigh and neck, and works like an ugly bruiser character from the 50s. Shida's incoordination comes out when she is doing more complicated roll ups and timing things with multiple people, and that really didn't come up until the very end here. She mostly sold a beating, brick walled for a couple Abadon clotheslines, and her fighting through things is where her charisma works. So the match played to their strengths without actually being great in-ring. 

-I didn't love the main event - too much Omega goofiness and it could have used an editor - but it was the first time since Fenix got dropped on his head that he looked like he knew which direction he was going in the ring. It was a good main event performance (could have used less melodrama) and had a nice mix of him hitting his great flying offense (dug his double springboard dropkick into wild tope con giro that almost went over the guardrail), and he's great at taking Omega's offense. Fenix will get tossed hard on Germans and lean into v triggers, and he did that all match. Omega takes a reverse rana in a way that looks devastating, but I couldn't tell you the last time a rana that looks like someone is getting spiked on their head was anything more than a "shocking" kickout. We'll see where the pinfall controversy goes, but I don't know if I need another Omega main event epic with Fenix. Fenix is doing well at working big match drama into his bigger singles, but I don't like Omega's specific brand of drama. Maybe I would like a Fenix/Omega sprint more? 

What Didn't Work

-Wardlow/Hager felt like they should have accomplished more with the time they got, felt like the middle was a little time killing. I liked Hager's takedowns and some of the early matwork, and I think would have preferred things stay that way. It feels like a fresher way for bigger guys to work a match these days. But eventually Hager took a nice bump off the apron into the guardrail, and I liked Wardlow's three suplex and slams and a couple other throws. But this didn't quite get to the level that I think it could have. 

-I thought Sydal/Rhodes went WAY too long and felt like they were throwing out way too much. Cody was really flavorless here and he was responsible for a lot of the drag. There was early clumsiness, and Cody felt so...in the way through much of this. Sydal hit a nice meteora to the ramp and a nice dive, but Cody kept taking this thing in such uninteresting directions. The Sydal crossbody with a clumsy Cody roll through into leg work just seemed like somebody throwing dumb sequences at the wall. I hate that thing Cody does where he bumps the same direction his opponent is already bumping, so has to do this stupid jog like when a car is waiting for you to finish crossing the street, just to be able to bump somewhere there isn't a body. He did that kind of thing a lot here. This had bad energy despite not being dull, it just went too long and never hit the level it thought it was at. 

-I do not like Jericho on commentary. It is way too much, and he sounds like a drunk guy rambling over everyone half the time. It's like having two JR's out there, which is two too many. During Inner Circle matches? Fine. During entire broadcasts? Please, no. No more. 

-A Bullet Club revival, famous hand sign included, is not going to be the thing to excite me. I am sure that it excites many other people, and that's fine by me. Is this something people are excited about? Jericho was acting excited. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 12/16/20

What Worked

-My WCW muscle memory kicked in when the snow started falling after Cody's win, and I actually said "Glacier" aloud, to myself. 

-I actually really liked The Acclaim's rap AND Kazarian's rap before their match. Honestly, the raps probably made me enjoy the match more than I should have. I don't think the match was very good, but the wrestling on this show has been dreadful so...I thought Christopher Daniels's jabs looked really good?

-Diamante decided to have her whole butt hanging out of her trunks so that seems like it works? 

-Omega/Janela was about as dumb as it gets, nothing but stunt spots segueing into stunt spots with no flow to them. BUT the stunt spots look good so fuck it, need to populate the top side of this write up a bit. Janela's tope looked good and Omega plastered himself into the guardrail a couple times, Janela took a bulldog face first on a chair, got hilariously into place for an Omega top con hilo, etc. Every spot was a restart, but the landings looked sick enough and Don Callis on house mic commentary was great. This is the best Omega's V Trigger knees have looked in lord knows when, really looked like he was going to cave in Janela's face with them. After seeing those 1/2 speed knees he through past Moxley's head last week I was thinking Omega had lost his speed, but I really loved the aggression he used to wreck Janela. 

What Didn't Work

-Opening trios was pretty disjointed and didn't have any kind of flow to it. It slowed down at weird times and never felt like it had any kind of consistent (or good) pace to it. NOAH knew how to throw six random guys into a trios and have a nice high floor, but this had very little going for it. It's great that Alex Reynolds is confirmed Alive after definitely not being knocked out cold, and Hangman had a couple nice lariats (including one that Kassidy bumped onto the side of his head). But a lot of this had bumps that felt a little too disconnected from the offense they were supposed to be taking, and it never came together in a meaningful way. 

-I think there is a potentially good Cody/Angelico match, but this was not that match. I'm not into match layouts where one guy does his stuff, and then the other guy decides to stop taking offense and start doing all of his own offense. I liked the Angelico wrist control do-si-do arm drags but didn't love much else. Neither was great at taking the other's offense, and that's going to hurt a match that's nothing but guys taking turns on offense. Angelico is good at taking headstand plants on cutters or DDTs, but the way he just stands there waiting to take something never looks good. Cody had kind of a similar thing where he would just stand there waiting for Angelico to run into his offense, and it all sucked brother. 

-Lance Archer interrupting Eddie Kingston's Airing of Grievances like 30 seconds in while wearing the shittiest ripped and distressed jeans I have ever seen is a big damn heel move

-I like when Butcher wears his butcher's apron, but why is Blade out there in one? Wearing his dirty jeans, t shirt, and apron he just looks like a Whole Foods burrito bar employee at the end of his shift. 

-12 man had the same problems the other matches have had so far, real weird energy and a lot of people on a different page. Jericho/Pillman stuff was decent, and I loved Jericho's straight right hands more than anything else in the match (other than Sammy Guevara's awesome folded over his knees sell of a Trent kick), and that's because most of the match didn't work. When you have a match like this and a bunch of guys who have never been in a match with 11 other people, you're going to have a bunch of people getting in each other's way. There were several guys who didn't look ready for prime time (not sure I've ever seen a sloppier slingshot legdrop than whatever it was Griff Garrison did), but I did laugh a bunch when Jake Hager - on the apron for most of the match - finally got in the ring. Not only did he trip over the ropes, but then he hit one of the ugliest, sloppy "F10" finishers I've seen, just a lazy spin that basically resulted in Garrison being dropped in a weak body slam. That's what gets a pin? Total mess. 

-You give me Ivelisse in a tag match and I'm going to want to see that trademark unprofessional Ivelisse work. But this was mostly just Diamante and Swole going through some rehearsed sequences, some of which looked good, some of which looked like a couple people standing around counting out their steps. It's hard to get any kind of heat or maintain much interest when it feels like the in ring is just going through the motions. This whole damn show has felt like it's going through the motions. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 11/25/20

What Worked

-I liked most of Hangman vs. Silver, good way to start off the show. Silver is a fun guy to feature, a compact power pack who was really good at cutting off Page. One of my least favorite things in Page matches is how unnecessarily complicated some of his offense is, and how it is never reversed. I liked how Silver cut off a lot of signature offense, like hitting a rana to counter the rope flip lariat. It made Page approach things differently and made for a more satisfying story. Silver has a low center of gravity and can use it in cool ways, like dropping low to the ground to do a quick go behind and snap German suplex. I wish Page had treated Silver's kicks a little more seriously, as it felt like we were building to something really cool when Silver was kicking away at Page, not letting him up, dodging right when he needed to, landing a big hooking kick to the jaw, but Page kinda just stood up and beat him anyway. Also, Silver doesn't need to do the half gainer flip bump every time he takes a clothesline. He did it three times here and you really don't need to be doing the same signature bump three times in three minutes. However, he also planted Page with a brainbuster and took a nice high backdrop bump, and there was more than enough here to make it work. 

-When Lee Johnson makes it onto Dynamite, you know you're getting a nice squad match, because he always takes the best beatings in squash matches. I need to seek out some of his Dark matches to see how he does with actual offense, because I like the way he bumps for lariats and other big offense. He doesn't take intentionally athletic feather soft bumps, his bumps look like he is being hurt. He made that lariat on the floor look brutal, and I don't think Will Hobbs has a very brutal lariat. 

-I do like that AEW is the kind of fed that makes mention about how cool it is that Jericho and Chris Daniels are meeting for the very first time. That's always cool to me when two guys who have been in wrestling for so long finally cross paths in the ring, like Buddy Rose facing Kerry von Erich in WWF. And let me tell you, if this was the year 1999 or 2000, I could not tell you just how over the moon excited I would be to see a Jericho/Daniels match. But this 2020 version is probably about as good as could reasonably expected. Jake Hager was my favorite guy here, and Hager might be THEE guy that I am absolutely never excited to see on my TV screen who can actually deliver something cool. He always gets an "oh sheesh this guy?" reaction from me, but I can't deny how much I enjoy Hager's meathead mouth breathing style. The best part of this was when Hager was driving his knee right into Danielses' back while throwing fists right into the ribs. It looked nasty as hell. 

-The gear AND choreography of the Omega Sweepers has improved every week. It's really satisfying to watch performers get better at their craft in real time. Moxley beatdown was strong. I want Moxley to wreck this guy. 

-Shida/Anna Jay was better than I expected, mainly because Jay doesn't even have 20 career matches work. Obviously there are going to be some glitches, so I'm more impressed with the things she can pull off naturally. She is really strong at making up the difference when selling strikes, like when Shida threw a dropkick that landed a little low and Jay sold her jaw convincingly. She goes to the jaw/mouth sell a bit much, did it right before that dropkick when missing a charge into the buckles, but it's a strong looking sell so hats off. I liked a lot of the ways she would counter Shida offense, like blocking the running apron knee with a downward strike, and especially her shifting weight at the last minute to land on Shida after a vertical suplex. I thought it was just a bad looking suplex at first, but I love a reversal that actually makes it look like the move wasn't pulled off quite right. Reversals in 2020 wrestling are so clean that they usually don't look like they're reversing anything. This looked like Shida tried to do a suplex and wasn't expecting Jay's weight shift. The nearfall kickout by Shida was perfectly timed, actually got me to buy into Jay sneaking away with the upset. 

-Fenix running into Blade's awesome powerslam, that works.

What Didn't Work

-Taz dropping silly shooty comments like "creative has nothing for me" or "wish me luck in my future endeavors" does nothing for me. Taz does not come off threatening to me at this point, and there are too many guys on the roster who could have locked in a better looking submission. Cody's burn about Taz's son (Hook!) training with Cody and not Taz was strong. 

-I feel bad for all the people who have strongly backed Rusev and have been gifted Miro. 

-I love Jack Evans and would rather see him on Dynamite than any number of other less interesting flippers that have been featured. But it's also really weird to give Top Flight a big Dynamite match last week ago, a match that got them buzz and made a big impression, to then bring Evans and Angelico back to Dynamite just to beat Top Flight. I don't think the match worked as a match, as all of these AEW flyer vs. flyer matches feel so same-y. I don't think Top Flight does much of anything that comes off natural, can't adjust on the fly; They can either do long semi-complicated sequences that end with something dumb like kicking Angelico in the arm, or they do weird things like adjust their several feet while rope running. It all comes off like guys just running through some spots that don't always feel like they belong to the same match. I did like the way Angelico went after Daunte's leg, thought his roll throughs to trap Daunte in leg locks and holds looked super cool and felt like old IWRG bleeding into AEW. Also, it is supremely annoying to give these guys names like Darius and Daunte, because there is no way I'm going to remember which one is fucking Daunte and which is Darius. Air Wolf I can remember, but Darius Martin? 

-I didn't think Fenix and PAC looked good as a team. They're two guys who, from their styles, seem like they would complement each other nicely, but their set ups felt long and things missed the mark. But I thought Butcher and the Blade looked good as heel opposition, thought Butcher looked great as a fist swinging bully, thought Blade worked some nice sequences with Fenix and especially loved Fenix aborting a flying attack off the top, jumping past Blade, and running hard into a great snap powerslam. But the match overall felt scattered and like it would have been a real mess without Butcher and Blade. 

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 9/2/20

What Worked

-I tuned in late and missed a Chuck Taylor match. That works.

-The 8 man tag was fine, I guess. I would rather see most of these guys in an 8 man rather than in a traditional tag, so that's a plus. You'd think some of the spot set up would be a little less meh, but a lot of the stuff looked good. I thought this was a good Isiah Kassidy performance, really dug his middle rope springboard rana and thought he was slick at getting up for some pretty complicated double teams, and his partner Quen bumped big for a Jungle Boy lariat. Kazarian's springboard legdrop still lands well, Luchasaurus still looks like a goof doing anything, but this was fine.

-Loved Jericho/Janela, with Jericho beating the blood out of Janela while Cassidy looked on. Janela stood in there and took his beating to put over someone else's match, and Jericho really stiffed him up. Janela looked good in a multiman last week, but I like him getting roughed up by short knees and hard punches even more. Jericho was really clonking him in the temple with big fists, then worked over a cut with more punches as Janela bled. Hell yeah.

-Kingston came out and immediately out-talked and ran right over Taz and Jake Roberts. The in ring schmozz after was entertaining, tons of guys took painful bumps over the top and off the apron to the floor, Shawn Spears was throwing potatoes, Kingston was weirdly paired off with Billy Gunn for a long time, and it kind of lost steam after coming back from break. Still, a fun schmozz, and Brian Cage is a goof for going after Kingston with a flimsy superkick. This guy ran you down, and you run up to fight him with a bad superkick? What a goof.

What Didn't Work 

-Omega/Page/FTR came off like guys who being naught because they drink beerz and say swearz. They all came off like dinks. It didn't make me more interested in whatever wrestling they're building to.

-I didn't even realize Serena Deeb was even wrestling, so it was cool to see her, even if she looks more like Selina Majors/Bambi now. Thunder Rosa is someone with strong execution, who always needs to get her shit in, so you knew that whatever story is being told in the first half of a match will not matter at all. So I really liked the pre-commercial part of the match, dug Deeb slamming Rosa's knee into the mat and dropping her with a neckbreaker over the middle rope. A lot of Rosa's stuff looked good, but a match worked around Rosa selling a leg would have been much more interesting that Rosa roaring back like Deeb hadn't ever been in control. Her dropkick to Deeb's chest in the ropes looked good, she had a hard backfist, dug the battles over a backslide, and the Thunder Driver looked painful. But I can never get into her matches where she takes moves until it's time for her moves.

-Can't call that go home segment with Moxley beating up Mark Sterling. I don't know if I've heard a quieter AEW crowd. I would have called MJF bloodying up Moxley afterwards a win, but AEW already has done WAY cooler bloody builds for TWO other matches on this PPV. You aren't going to beat the blood that has been spilled between Hardy and Sammy, and this MJF segment played almost exactly like Jericho beating up and bloodying Janela not one hour before. Except Jericho wasn't yelling like a doofus into the camera. Bloody angles are cool! But this just came off like them building every singles match nearly exactly the same. MJF is a much better wrestler than a talker. The talking just doesn't come off naturally for me.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 7/8/20

What Worked

-The big tag scramble delivered exactly what I wanted from it, with some fun unexpected double team chemistry from Young Bucks and FTR. Lucha Bros. are a team I was really tired of (well, I got really tired of Pentagon not showing up to work, but Fenix always had the chance to impress) but they've been really strong in AEW, and they had some inventive runs in a match filled with inventive runs. Dax Harwood (I still can't get over how fake their real names sound compared to their fake WWE names) was a real sticky piece of glue here, and a match like this desperately needs glue. The sequence where he got his ass kicked around by Lucha Bros. was masterful, and included a fantastic spit take in the middle. Butcher was really the only one who looked a page behind here, but a quick 8 man doesn't really seem like the right environment for him to shine. Everyone else was on it doggone it, and there was some slick business. Fenix hit a freaking flip piledriver to the floor into the rest of the match participants and it's wild to me how naturally they set up that spot - a spot that sounds so overblown that I wouldn't have guessed it would even approach working - and make it look more natural than Marq Quen made an enziguiri look. Loved the modern twist on the old Arn spot where Blade ducked his way out of a YB superkick right into a Dax DDT, and we got a sick powerplex with a big splash AND a swanton. This was fun as hell.

-Didn't like the match at all, but Christopher Daniels hit this super cool tope on Brodie Lee that looked like he was going to keep floating farther out. Lee caught him up high and it gave this illusion that Daniels was flying out into deep water, and they both crashed the barricade a few feet into the crowd.

-Main event was great, has to be my favorite Orange Cassidy singles match I've seen. Jericho was really good at flying around for Cassidy's high speed offense, and OC came off aggressively wild. He hit bigger than he typically hits, and his misses were just as big. The opening hands in pocket stuff was all really quick and looked impressive, and I dug how after 20 seconds of that he took them out and hit a real crash and burn tope, then punched Jericho around ringside with long right hands. We got more good barricade work from both guys (the night was full of guys flying impressively into barricades), and I liked how the momentum shifted throughout. Cassidy was good at falling hard for Jericho's offense, and Jericho worked fast and landed hard. Cassidy had this huge miss off a flying forearm and skidded across the mat and out of the ring like a skipped stone. Building a match out of big misses is pretty cool when the guys are missing big, and OC takes a big bump from the apron to the barricade, Jericho misses the springboard shoulderblock to the floor allowing OC to wipe out the Elite with a moonsault. All the misses felt like they built logically to a bigger moment. Now I didn't love the fighting from the knees and the kickouts got a little overkill, but I also can't deny that some of these kickouts were hot. I truly thought Cassidy was going to pin Jericho when he hit that satellite DDT, and that's when I knew they had me hooked. Plus Aubrey Edwards slid expertly through a lot of orange juice to enthusiastically count the pin. This was one of the stronger main events in Dynamite history.


What Didn't Work

-The more Marq Quen appears on TV and the less Kip Sabian appears, it might have revealed that Quen is worse than Sabian. Quen really dragged that tag match down, just a guy who constantly looks out of place and constantly requires a lot of moving parts just to get close enough to hit anything. There was an embarrassing early sequence that made nobody involved look good, where Quen was standing in the middle of the ring like a goof while Omega and Page crossed the ring around him, hitting him every time they passed and ending with him doing a handstand out of Omega's rocker dropper. Every second of it looked horrible, and little did I know that it was the first of several spots where Quen would stand in one place while Page and Omega bounced off him. Quen is working this match like the worst possible 1/6 scale Mabel. Page really busted ass to make this match happen, and the sequences with he and Kassidy were the parts that worked. Kassidy really lands with his dropkicks (his baseball slide to send Page crashing into the crowd looked great) and Page really flung himself into things to make them work. But Omega has been wildly inconsistent in AEW and Quen looked out of position for most of this match. Watch your back, Kip!

-Janela really tried to die on a couple bumps but Lance Archer looked like garbage in that match. First, it was silly to have them go 50/50 for so long. Janela wasn't throwing strikes that looked like they should stop Archer, and Archer isn't very good at selling strikes, so that was a terrible match. But Archer is also really bad about doing things to occupy himself while waiting to take a move, or getting into position way early to take a move. There's wrestling, and there's dancing, and Archer was doing a whole bunch of bad dancing. When Janela hit him in the gut from the apron, Archer just stood there bent at the waist, arms resting on the middle rope, waiting for Janela to leap over him. then the second Janela did, Archer immediately turns around and waits in position, middle of the ring, for Janela to go for a headscissors. Archer literally turned around and just held his arms out waiting to take a headscissors. Dancers know how to anticipate movement much better, and wrestlers are supposed to give some kind of idea that they don't know what move they are taking before the guy performing the move even attempts it. Janela crashed hard over the barricades on a spot where Archer basically lost his grip and didn't throw him, and I was happy when Janela splatted him with a heavy ass senton off the top.

-Not sure how I feel about Taz bringing back the FTW title, but it's also cool that Taz still has his belt from 23 years ago. Does the new guy wearing an old belt ever get a guy over? No weirdo is ever going to pretend that the Million Dollar Belt was the thing that made Austin. Also, because of Taz, I thought FTW meant Fuck the World up until maybe 7 or 8 years ago. Every time I would see something at a baseball game like "SF Giants FTW!!!" I just thought they were putting out the image of the Giants just waving double middle fingers to everyone.

-Pretty bad already to run a big multiman tag match after the really great multiman match from 20 minutes earlier, but a really bad idea when it seemed like half the guys were working this at 2/3 speed. They couldn't have done what the earlier match did, but some of the guys worked here like they thought nobody would be watching (I don't follow AEW quarter hours, maybe Dark Order is a real channel changer). Plus, putting half the match during a commercial break wasn't going to help them get more eyeballs. Daniels had a nice showing, Grayson seemed off in spots, Romero kept taking ugly bumps that made Grayson seem even more off, Brodie Lee felt like one of six guys in the match, Kazarian looked ridiculous working 50/50 with Lee...it just wasn't very good.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 6/24/20

What Worked

-AEW realized that nobody in the fed knows how to catch a dive, so I appreciate they made a match into a lumberjack just so 18 guys would be standing close together to catch someone. The set up was clumsy as hell, but it's smart to recognize your weaknesses.

-Super smart usage of Shida, just a quick running high knee and nice falcon arrow and then leaping aggressively into the crowd to smack Penelope around. Shida is someone who fucks up everyone's timing in every AEW match I've seen her in, so quick squashes to build to bigger matches is brilliant.

-Lee/Cabana vs. Janela/Kiss was certainly a pleasant surprise. They kept a hot pace for 8 minutes, and I cannot believe that this is the first actual non-battle royal that Kiss has been in over the entire Dynamite run. He came off like a real star in this one, if not a main eventer than someone who should clearly be a featured attraction every couple of weeks. He and Janela had a lot of chemistry as a team and I liked their quick tandem flying and the way they would run into big Brodie boots or screens. There was really only one hinky spot (where Cabana held up on a roaring elbow and Kiss bumped a little early for it), but most of this was fun fun fun.

-FTR/SCU was a hot tag that started falling apart a bit down the stretch, but I think they mostly did a good job at going home when things started slipping. I think this got good during the picture in picture break right after they did the tandem suplexes over the top to the floor, and thought Hardwood was especially strong with his cutoff punches. I think SCU's double team work was surprisingly more  solid, but I don't really care about FTR as a "double team" kind of tag team, I prefer them more as a cutoff tag team. So it was a complementary pairing with a strong progression. I dug SCU coming back with Daniels' slingshot elbow and Kazarian's big legdrop, and how it lead to FTR taking over later when Kazarian missed with an even bigger legdrop. Even a couple things that missed (like a Daniels flying knee that missed the mark) looked good after Wheeler took a nasty bump ricocheting off the ropes. Don't love FTR cutting gassed post-match in ring promos, but it's at least unique to them and so for now I'll appreciate it as a feature.

-Nice Cage squash. Jon Cruz is the right kind of ragdoll bumper that makes someone like Cage shine, getting insane height on a flapjack and crumpling nicely on everything. I dig Cage's bicep curl spot, feels like something an awesome juiced bodybuilder should be doing. Press slams and bicep curls, fuck yeah. There just needs to be a bodybuilder wrestler who bases every piece of offense on his regular gym set.

-Hardy/Santana was a good pairing and I liked seeing all the cool ways Santana would bump wildly for Hardy. In the opening couple minutes alone he was flying to the floor, all around ringside, and into the barricade. His cutoff work was simple and I liked how he would mix quick reversals in with just choking and stomping away at Hardy in the corner. The flip reversal out of the Side Effect was something I hadn't seen, and I like that it didn't come off fluidly; it came off like Hardy was going through with the move as planned and was genuinely surprised at Santana's reversal. After seeing the abomination that was Wardlow/Luchasaurus and how they kept anticipating every single move a split second (or more) too early, this kind of surprise struggle was awesome to see. I'm into 45 year old Hardy busting ass and keeping up with quick guys like Santana, and dig that he's pulling it off.

-Fine segment to close out the show, really loved how they kept building to the moment where it looked like Jericho was going to pop Cassidy. The through the crowd brawl was real good (also why the fuck are there so many people there in the crowd?? Who are they??), loved the hotshot Jericho took on a railing and especially loved how cool Orange Cassidy looks while bleeding all over himself out of the ear. It's almost like blood automatically makes nearly every wrestling situation better? Jericho's bump was cool, still no clue why so many people were there, but this was a good way to close out the show.


What Didn't Work

-Wardlow/Luchasaurus was a shitty version of a shitty Keith Lee/Dijakovic match, the kind of match that could have been good had they just done shoulderblocks and clotheslines, and instead derailed in hilarious fashion once they decided to pepper in a ton of slo mo dancing. The strike exchanges were all terrible, with Wardlow throwing slow punches from a mile away and both doing pillow soft slo mo Frye/Takayama strikes. Luchasaurus kept showing too much of his hand on bumps, clearly prepping for bumps that never quite matched up to the move Wardlow was delivering. And by the time the match devolved into Luchasaurus doing his embarrassing DDR exchanges it become one of the saddest matches I've seen on Dynamite. Literally every one of Luchasaurus dance exchanges looked like he was throwing them for the first time, without practicing, and without making sure that he could make any of it look good. And none of it looked good. It arguably peaked with him hitting the slowest legsweep I've ever seen, with Wardlow then taking a flat back bump after getting slowly legswept in the shins. Incredible. Luchasaurus whiffed on every strike that was supposed to be caught, thigh slapped when kicks didn't connect, and made sure every single kick he threw looked like a giant pile of triceratops shit. The flying off the stage was a minor bright spot, full props for Marko getting launched like that, but the set up for all of the big spots was so clunky and unnatural  and not a good enough reason to work an entire lumberjack match just to use them as a base. This was a real sad way to start a show.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 5/13/20

What Worked

-I laughed when Fenix ran out and hit a leaping Bruce Lee kick to the back of Orange Cassidy's head.

-MJF squash was a bright spot, loved how Lee Johnson bumped around for MJF (including really hitting his back on the apron while bumping to the floor) and loved things like MJF's stiff arm clothesline and his killer shoulder breaker finisher. MJF bringing a shoulder breaker back to prominence will go a long way towards making me a fan of MJF.


What Didn't Work

-The opening tag was at least brisk, even if a lot of things looked off. Luchasaurus needs to drop all strike combos (even though I get it, he basically has a similar size and skillset to Lance Archer so he has to come up with some different stuff to set him apart) but they always look dorky. Jungle Boy had a couple cool moments and Taylor's awful waffle is a nice finisher, and this was a perfectly fine short tag involving people I don't much care for.

-At this point I just feel bad when I see that a women's 4 way is happening, because I'm never excited to just dump all over the women's division and say shitty things about their sequences that ALWAYS get sloppier and sloppier as every minute passes. It's always the same, every time, where I start out thinking "Okay this isn't bad this is kinda working okay I liked that..." and then every minute goes by, and things start getting messed up, and then I say "why do they keep running these same 4 women in matches against each other where they have no chemistry, no in ring communication, no rapport of any kind." I'm starting to think Shida is the MAJOR problem here, as she really just derails every one of these matches. Not only does a lot of her offense look terrible, but her sequences are almost always designed to result in awkward wait times and awkward collisions. She waits awkwardly for offense, then she's like a scared rabbit who runs headlong into traffic and just panics. Statlander was already bumping to the floor, and here's Shida throwing Baker right out on top of Statlander - literally any other part of the ring would have been fine - and Baker has to completely alter her bump just because Shida had to rush the sequence. Why did Shida have to rush? Why, to get into position several seconds early to take a missile dropkick. Every spot Shida is involved in requires the other participants to slow down and stand still, it's unbearable. Statlander has a lot to like about her, and she really tries to put over some of this bad offense (like her almost going full scorpion off a DDT) but there is always at minimum one strength spot that winds up looking completely compromised, and at this point maybe she should just accept she is not great at strength spots. The interactions between her and Baker were fun, Ford at least tries and always seems to get hung out to dry in these matches. Baker is a great personality who needs to drop some of the shittier parts of her offense (that slingblade is brutally bad) and stick to clawing at mouths and noses. Just STAHHHHP leaving them out there to work through a commercial break, literally every one of these things has fallen apart after just a few minutes. Either the ability isn't there, or they're biting off more than they can chew.

-I know we can't push every team all the time, but I was hoping for more of a showing against Omega/Hardy than Santana and Ortiz got. This felt structured as an Omega/Hardy showcase, and I cannot think of many guys who need less of a showcase than those two.

-I'm an inconsistent motherfucker, as I get so sick of seeing Omega work these long competitive matches with people who shouldn't be so competitive, and yet I actually wanted to see at least 5 minutes out of Jericho/Pineapple Pete. I've been hearing Jericho amusingly call this guy out in the crowd for a couple months, I wanted a little bit of a payoff. I didn't need to see Pete beat Jericho, or even come close to beating Jericho, but for whatever reason I wanted an actual WCW Saturday Night, Winner Never in Doubt, 5 minute match. 90 seconds of Pineapple Pete isn't going to cut it. WCW knew how to do fun matches where the winner was never in doubt for a second, and AEW can't get that same tone.

-Daniels looked really slow in the main event, and why shouldn't he? He's still wrestling the exact same style with the exact same moves as 20 years ago. But this was the first time I've actually been alarmed at how slow he was running the ropes. Daniels would have stood out as slow if he was opening an All Japan show teaming with Haruka Eigen against Momota and Rusher. Lee still has the worst gear in the biz, non-Tamina division. Can anyone actually explain what his gear is supposed to mean? It looks like a day camp crafts project where all the kids learned how to draw scars.

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AEW Dynamite Workrate Report 3/4/20

What Worked

-AEW should utilize the 8 man format more, because the opening match was a very fun use of several guys I don't really love. Colt Cabana was given the spotlight in his debut, getting the opening run, playing hammy apron guy, and then getting the finish run hot tag. But everyone else really held this together and made good use of the 10 minute runtime. Evil Uno is a goof but his plays to his role well, and Dark Order feel appropriately represented with him directing traffic. Their group beatdowns and orchestrated attacks are good enough, and they all bump well. Cabana at least had a nice pair of back elbows and nice headscissors, but SCU had a really polished performance. Kazarian was the standout with a great fiery hot tag (probably my favorite section of the match) with him running in hard on everything, hitting an especially impressive straight arm lariat and a great flying forearm. There was a cool stacked attack with Daniels hitting a slingshot elbow, Kazarian hitting a slingshot legdrop, and Scorpio hitting a slingshot splash, cool old man Kaientai stuff. There was weirdness, like SCU's Lambda Lambda Lambda rap entrance, or John Silver/Alex Reynolds being under masks for some reason but still referred to as John Silver and Alex Reynolds. But who cares because Stu Grayson looked like he crushed his shoulder taking a Cassandro bump straight into the ringpost. Well timed, nicely paced multiman.

-Big Swole squash was what it should have been, and the wind up punch finish should be played in every single hype package and commercial.

-Great Hager squash, started easy with a couple nice slams from Hager, but jumped up a level with a nice QT comeback before getting put down. QT is a fun job match babyface in the same vein as Bob Cook, where he'll throw a couple nice worked punches in before getting absolutely worked over. That's a good guy to have on a roster. Post match big brawl was good too, and while Hangman's drinking gimmick is as dumb, and his clothes scream "Guy who hangs around rodeos but can't ride a horse", he at least hit Hager with a big clothesline and Hager bumped it on the leg of a chair.

-Main event was a great segment, and another superstar performance from Darby Allin. Moxley got taken out and strangled in the concession area, so Darby was left to defend himself in a handicap match against Jericho and Guevara. The latter are great at stalling and delaying a beating, allowing openings for comebacks by cockiness, and Darby is obviously someone who is going to be great at quick comebacks. Guevara bumps all over for the cause, Darby hits the Coffin Drop onto all of the Inner Circle, really flattens Guevara with a senton, and topes right into a Judas Effect. You knew he'd be great at being outnumbered, and he didn't disappoint.


What Didn't Work

-Opening segment felt like an absolute eternity to me. The scars looks like cool Jack Pierce monster makeup, but this felt way more like a dragged out Raw opening segment than the typically more efficient AEW promo segments.

-That was too much of a Chuck Taylor match and somehow not much of a PAC match. PAC just went 32 minutes with Omega, he did not need to give a big rub to Chuck Taylor the next week with several close nearfalls.

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AEW Double or Nothing 5/25/19

This wasn't a show I was particularly excited about. I imagine we are low voters on a bunch of the guys on this show, but Dustin Rhodes is an all time favorite, and the show is a big deal for sure.

Christopher Daniels/Scorpio Sky/Frankie Kazarian vs. T-Hawk/El Linderman/CIMA

PAS: This was what you would expect for a opening six man tag. I hadn't seen the SCU team in years and they seem to have kept all of their athleticism, pretty impressive that old man Daniels can still look so smooth, although smoothness isn't something I care a ton about. Strong Hearts was fine, I liked Hawk's chops and Linderman's deadlift German suplexes, but if you are going to bring in OWE guys, they really should have bought in the crazy Chinese Shaolin Monks rather then just second tier Dragons Gate guys. Fine but ultimately forgettable.

Dr. Britt Baker DMD vs. Kylie Rae vs. Nyla Rose vs. Awesome Kong

PAS: This was pretty bad and way too long. Awesome Kong was a cool surprise, but didn't look ready for in ring work and spent most of the match hanging outside. Rae doing her Gillberg version of Bayley was probably the most bush league thing on this show (either that or Cody's sledgehammer stuff). I am not sure there are enough non-WWE women to make a real division, this wasn't a good start, and I am not interested in seeing any of these ladies again.

Best Friends vs. Angelico/Jack Evans

PAS: I think it is a mistake for a fed basically main evented by the Young Bucks to have so many B-Team Bucks running around: SCU, both these teams, Lucha Brothers, Super Smash Brothers. They really need some teams who don't work the same style. You can't have 10 versions of the Rockers, you need a Twin Towers or Demolition. This is my semi-annual attempt to watch a Chuck Taylor match and get it, and I still don't. He hits some spots OK, but there are parts where he can't run the ropes and his forearms and kicks look terrible. Trent was mechanically fine, if uninteresting. Angelico is still Angelico, some of his stuff looks cool, the double teams with Evans are nifty, and then he throws a punch. Evans is still awesome, his body is made of jello, and he flips like crazy. His moonsault to the floor was one of the crazier spots of the night. Didn't care for this, it was a worse version of Bucks vs. Lucha Brothers and I didn't love that either.

Aja Kong/Yuka Sakazaki/Emi Sakura vs. Hikaru Shida/Riho/Ryo Mizunami

PAS: This was a fun showcase for all six ladies. Everyone got a chance to run through their stuff, and a lot of it looked pretty good. Sakazaki's magical girl shtick is pretty creepy, there already is a pervert constituency among Joshi fans and that seems to lean way into it. Aja is still a beast and definitely stood out, I especially liked any time she faced off with Mizunami, as I am always going to dig a big gal punch out. Shida got the big with with the knee, and I think a version of her 2018 singles with Aja would get over pretty big.

Dustin Rhodes vs. Cody

PAS: Opening part of this match was just OK, Cody doesn't really have good looking offense and some of the spots felt more cute then impactful. I loved the set up for the Dustin blade job, with Dustin setting up the nut kick, Cody removing the second turnbuckle to block it, and and Cody drop toe holding Dustin into the exposed buckle. That Dustin blade job was an all timer, it looked liked Strawberry Fanta was coming out of a fountain soda machine. I liked Cody's knuckle punches to the cut, and the figure four spot was really well executed. The punch exchange at the end of the match actually felt like a fist fight between brothers, and I loved the Code Red. I thought the ending was a bit anti-climactic, but man what a performance by Dustin. It was all bleeding, selling and emotion. It is up there with some of the best last ride, old man matches I have ever seen, and last ride old man matches are some of my favorite types.

Young Bucks vs. Lucha Brothers

PAS: Pretty much what you would expect, there were a couple of nice storyline moments, with the Bucks being a little rusty due to their long layoff, and the very end of the match with the work on Matt's arm. Still most of the match was running through a million headdrop finishers for 2.9 counts. Fenix had a couple of amazing moments of high flying, including a rope trick on both Bucks which looked great. But this was everything turned up to 10, and my eyes eventually just glassed over with the nearfalls. This kind of match is clearly going to be a showcase for this promotion, and I think it will keep me from really investing in it.

Kenny Omega vs. Chris Jericho

PAS: I wasn't coming into this match expecting to like it, and ended up kind of loving it. Omega is pretty much a poster boy for maximalist wrestling, but this was a match built around two guys stiffing each other with shots to the face and head. There were a couple of big spots which were done really well and sold really well, the double stomp with the table was kidney mushing, and I liked the surprise of Omega getting backdropped through the table. I loved how Jericho took all of his normally loose 2000s offense and made it eye socket crunching, those code breakers looked like they were going to shove Omega's cheekbone through his teeth. The broken nose really added to the match too, and Omega sold the shots like Gerald McClellan, it felt like we were watching him get beaten to death in the ring. Really liked the back elbow KO finish too, great performance by both guys, and one of the most surprising matches in years.

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Low-Ki Advent Calendar Night 15: TNA Trios Match

Low-Ki/Elix Skipper/Christopher Daniels vs. Amazing Red/SAT's NWA TNA 12/18/02 - EPIC

PAS: This match has probably more sketchy moments then almost any match I have rated EPIC. There are some really preposterous SAT triple teams, ridiculous even in the context of ridiculous SAT triple teams. There were punch exchanges between Joel Maximo and Elix Skipper and no one wants to see that, plus the whole thing was set up by Daniels, Skipper and Ki forming Sports Entertainment Xtreme (SEX, get it, SEX, like FUCKING) a Vince Russo run stable. Still with all of that hamstring it, they still put together a raucous six man with an absolutely nuclear crowd (TNA never should have left Nashville.) Don West even stands on the announcers table to start a "Let's Go Red" chant. This is star making performance for Red as he is worked over by the SEX crew (fucking Russo) and while we don't get a matrix minute, Red and Ki really have some great chemistry and there a some really great near falls and reversals by Red.  They time the near falls perfectly and I buy Red getting the upset a bunch of times, before he is killed with a second rope Ki Krusher. This should have led to something great, but I am sure it led to Russo worked shoot nonsense (looking it up, Jarrett beats all three of SEX the next week, and  AJ Styles turns and Dusty comes out, next week has Russo cutting a promo on making David Arquette champion and Mr. Wrestling 3 unmasking as Nikita Koloff, SAT's and Red never wrestle SEX again.)


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE LOW-KI

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ROH at UMBC 10/12/18

TKG: So I haven’t been to an ROH show since maybe Sinclair maybe earlier. But a couple guys at bar had gone to All In (my favorite story being asking Blue Meanie at Meet and Greet if he had any of his merch in XXL and him responding “Of course all I have is 2XL and up” and they were talking about going to ROH in Baltimore and a couple more guys were down for it, and I was like “sure”. We kind of got lost stumbling around UMBC for a while but got there a little way into the Jeff Cobb v ROH trainee match

Jeff Cobb vs. trainee

TKG: This was surprisingly back and forth. The trainee had a second who you expected was the manager who was going to eat a bunch of suplexes after match and didn’t. I was told that was trainee’s tag partner who was legit injured. Not sure why he was out there.

Briscoes vs. Beer City Bouncer/Bryan Milonas

TKG: Also thought this was going to be worked less evenly. Briscoes still have that kind of Sabu/Sandman aura of anything can happen. Mark did a kick through ropes, chairs were thrown in air, guys were thrown into guardrails and there was a tower suplex spot. But this was mostly really impressive showcase for Mark and Jay’s selling as they really made you believe in the Bouncer/Milonakas team and made you buy into idea that any moment all hell could break lose.

Marty Scurll vs. Hurricane

TKG: Last two matches had no real face/heel structure and then this one which was advertised on paper as hero v villain and they could have theoretically worked as Hurricane heel v Scurrl face but….Scurrll is super over with crowd and was going to get cheered for everything and any move done against him was going to be booed. First four minutes I thought they were going to go with a Hurricane heel v Scurll face dynamic with Helms working over Scurrl in a cloverleaf. But then it Scurrl just went to his stuff. Scurll was also a guy who had a real Sabu/Sandman what the fuck is he going to do feel when I first saw him on tape but here he was just a guy running through his stuff some heelish (match died whenever Scurll slapped on a hold), some faceish, some just there…till a shmozz finish. Post match, Hurricane’s mask is stolen and Helm’s makes sad-contemplative-and then-serious-Command Bolshoi-with-mask-off face.

Summe Sakai and____________vs. ____________&_____________

TKG: I think Sumie Sakai’s tag partner may have been an Adam Cole girlfriend, cousin or sister or just facially looked like Cole as audience yelled “Adam Cole Baby” whenever she hit a move. I think her belly ring may have snagged the woman who speared her which was kind of interesting but this felt like it went way too long. I went to find the Brothers Cooke during this and we talked wrestling and they’re both still hilarious. No intermission, I swear ROH used to have intermissions.

They do a backstage interview segment with Bubba Ray hosted by Caprice Coleman. Always liked Coleman, is he no longer wrestling? He kind of did more bug out eye selling off Ray’s mic work then necessary but fine interview segment.

Bully Ray vs. Jonathan Gresham

TKG: I had mostly seen early niche grappling Gresham and on way to show talked about this match not making any sense on paper. I’ve no memory of ever seeing Bubba work a mat exchange. But it ended up easily being my favorite match on show. Bubba comes out takes the mic and does less profane but more obese Joel Gertner mic work. He calls out audience talking about how there is no one with any athletic experience in the crowd, challenging people to fight him, mocked fans inability to hit him with streamers and talking about how proud he is of his New York heritage, mocks the Orioles does more about the greatness of New York, when Gresham comes out he points out that supposed fan favorite got no standing ovation and cheers (of course leading to crowd standing and cheering), don’t anyone say Tracy Sucks, don’t call me Paula, etc mic work and it was great. The women's match may have been face v heel but not sure, this was first one on show where it was really clear and Bubba doing essentially Dirty White Boy’s “I’m from New York” act but without any of DWB’s big brawling spots made for a really fun match. I have no idea how this will play out on tape but live this was the match of the night. Bubba brought a table in ring which got knocked over and forgotten for a big chunk of match, no one chants for wanting tables at this point and I was super looking forward to idea of match with table in ring where never gets used. Eventually set up and you get the PE in WCW, guy brings table in ring to eat a spot on table. But outside of that no real big bumping a couple chair shots , just match structure, selling and cool setting up of face offense and comebacks. Gresham with dropkicks, an octopus, sleeperhold and chair stuff was perfectly at home in this match too. Gresham not niche guy but well rounded in way wouldn’t be out of place working fired up babyface opposite no knee pads Budro.

Cody Rhodes/Team Macktion vs. So-Cal Uncensored

TKG: SCU started with some “I hate the locals “ mic work which was absurd to do after the Bubba match where entire match was built around I’m from New York City. Rhodes and Kazarian are apparently co-owners of a cigar company and both wear wearing shirts advertising it and they did a bit at beginning of match where they cut an insincere commercial shocked to see the other in matching shirt and talking about the cigar company they owned together. In the 90s I remember wrestlers telling me about how Jimmy Valiant was a genius because he understood the money in wrestling wasn’t in the gate but in the merch sales, and he wouldn’t want to work main events but instead the last match before the intermission to increase merch sales and would make sure to work a gimmick he was selling at his merch table into the match. He understood that better than anyone not named Vince Sr or Jr. With internet on demand sales, you don’t need to actually spend the time hawking wares at table and can work a semi main. The Gabe by way of Heyman booking is you work this spotfest multiperson match at end of show to send crowd home happy and enthusiastic. PE v Eliminators, Chilly Willy, Balls v Baldies, Smackdown Six, SAT v. XL/Devine Storm, Special K, Second City Saints v Generation Next, etc. This was that although worked in the semi-main. Christopher Daniels was kind of a known quantity in 2002, felt like a guy from a veteran of earlier generation as opposed to rest of ROH guys who were experimenting and trying to find themselves work out something new. Everyone felt like that here or maybe less like that and more like I was watching a solid workrate sprint between Riggs, Kidman, and Riggs v Riggs, Riggs, and Kidman. Both a throwback style and match that was less of a “HOLY SHIT I have never seen that before” and more like an AJPW old man wrestling match/or Russo era WWF where it was all built on pops for signature spots. It was interesting, nothing was missed that I noticed, Cody & Kazarian had more presence than I expected and fans left it happy. Some un-masked white guy named Savion came out with a belt and started filibustering about how he’s beaten everyone and deserves respect.

Jay Lethal vs. Silas Young

TKG: This was a fine title match with challenger coming out confident, champ takes control with wrestling, challenger responds to wrestling with putting up dukes and wanting fisticuffs instead, some ringside brawling, champ continues to control with wrestling, challenger keeps on threatening dukes, they do a I have a reversal of your reversal segment, than heel takes over for a big run, face champ tries finisher and build finish run. I dug this. The “reversal to reversal segment” never became as corny as those things can become. That’s a segment that normally goes about three minutes longer and it didn’t. Segment that often ends in a standoff restart and it didn’t do that either. It ended right where it should have with heel control. For a match where heel challenges fisticuffs, I never bought that it would happen. But this won the crowd back after the 6 man. Post-match Cody came out to challenge for the title and was interrupted by Kenny King who did the same speech as Savion about all the people he had beaten and how he was deserving of title. I haven’t seen King since maybe a Jeff Peterson memorial and he was really good at doing this bit and kind of stupid to have Savion who isn’t as good stumbling over the same talking points earlier on the show. Cody then did a Tommy Dreamer, Triple HHH, Ian Rotten post show state of the biz thanking fans for coming, “we do this all for you, and this company that means so much to us” speech. Cody was surprisingly endearing at that speech. He moves really well from smarmy to Eddie Marlin sincere and then back and then back again.

Overall fun show with both Bubba v Gresham and Lethal v Young being things I would be interested in revisiting.

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Low-Ki Shoulda Been Called Don Robbery

Low-Ki/Elix Skipper/Christopher Daniels/Vince Russo v. The Road Warriors/Dusty Rhodes/Jeff Jarrett NWA-TNA 1/15/03 -GREAT

PAS: This is a WAR 8 man if I have ever seen one, and it ending up being a pretty entertaining southern tag. Ki, Skipper and Daniels spent the first part of the match pinballing for the Road Warriors, and they do a great job of it. Animal catches a Ki springboard mid air and plants him with a Liger Bomb which was totally awesome looking. You can tell Ki got a kick out of bumping around for the LOD. SEX gets the advantage due to some Russo cheap shots (which he is terrible at, his punches and chokes are awful, what a nothing turd that dude is) and they work over Jarrett, getting the crowd hyped up (Nashville TNA crowds smoked the Orlando crowd) for a Dusty Rhodes hot tag, all three XXX dudes take wild bumps for the bionic elbow. Just before Dusty gets his hands on Russo, Mr. Wrestling 4 comes in and hits Dusty with a chain, distracted ref counts the pin and the bad guys are victorious. Mr. Wrestling 4 unmasks as Nikita Koloff, which is something I have no memory. Heel Russo managed early 2000s Nikita seems like something you would dream after eating too much spicy thai food.  Pretty great example of the value of wrestling formula, get a hot crowd, build to a hot tag and have a couple of good wrestlers on each side and you can pretty much fill in the rest.

Complete and Accurate Low-Ki

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