80s Joshi on Wednesday: Lioness! Mimi! Yukari! Masami! Matsumoto! Ripper!

Volume 3 

9. Devil Masami, Kaoru Matsumoto & Monster Ripper vs. Lioness Asuka, Mimi Hagiwara & Yukari Omori 3/30/82

K: This is the main event of the go home show before the big Monster Ripper vs. Jaguar Yokota WWWA Singles Title match. This made the set mainly for that reason, but it's also nice that it's a good match with Lioness Asuka and Kaoru Matsumoto in, thus fulfilling my rule that there been at least one match from them in 1982 so viewers can track their development.

I wouldn't say the first fall was all Monster, but it almost was. While the other pairings had some back and forth, whenever Monster Ripper was in the ring she was just demolishing everyone and never looked to be in any real danger. This starts right from the beginning when the heels get trapped in the corner and hit with a sequence of running splashes, but when Omori jumps at Monster she just bounces off her like Monster's made of steel. The closest thing we get to Monster looking like she's in trouble - and even then, not really - is one point where she goes for the flying hip attack twice, but Lioness Asuka rolls underneath her the second time so she crashes and lands. I'll also note that whenever anyone gets Monster into a pinning predicament, she immediately just kicks out before the referee can even begin a count.

Kaoru Matsumoto has a decent showing here for the little that's expecting of her. She doesn't have much in the way of offense, but I thought she threw a pretty mean lariat at Asuka early on. And something about the way she walks around the ring just feels like an arrogant strut, and it's not even clear that she's doing a strut.

Mimi Hagiwara was easily the best on her team, no surprise there really. Her and Devil Masami keep up their good chemistry. I think Devil might actually be physically stronger than Monster despite not being as big, Monster at least looked like she had a bit of a struggle lifting Mimi over her head, but for Devil she just goes straight up into the military press like she's picking up a co-operative 6 year old. I have enough recent experience to know the "co-operative" qualifier was very important there. Mimi also does a funny little butterfly suplex move, or at least that's what I'd call it from the set up, but Mimi doesn't go over with Devil for it, she just drops her straight on the mat. Looked painful actually.

Matsumoto gets the most focus in the 2nd fall, kinda makes sense since if they're going to level things up she's the obvious heel to take the pin, so might as well give her some ring time. She gets a bit of work to do with everyone, but we get an AJW 'flew too close to the Sun' finish pretty quickly where she's trapped near the babyface corner, gets hit with move after move until Omori gets the pin as Mimi and Asuka mark the heel corner to prevent a break-up. I like how they incorporate teamwork into tag matches like you probably would do if this were a real sport. Omori gets the win on Matsumoto, starting the most heated feud in AJW history :)

The 3rd fall is just the heels getting revenge for losing the previous fall. Monster Ripper looks especially awesome going on a rampage including having a chair wrapping around Asuka's neck and swinging her around the outside and onto chairs, before Matsumoto gets her on top of the announce table to pose looking all proud of herself. Bit of stolen valour in there. Omori is the victim here and gets taken out. Heels stand tall.

This would have been a better match if the 3rd fall had more to it than just the babyfaces getting demolished. Might have undermined the wider purpose of the match, but I'd say pulling that off while milking a bit more drama out of it would have been the bigger challenge, and more impressive to pull off. But for what it was, this was good stuff.

***¼

MD: I thought Matsumoto was on her way here, even if she was on her way to a different place where she’d eventually get up. She was very good at asserting herself and using her size. Sometimes it was a little rough around the edges but she was additive to the super powered heel team that was Masami and Ripper. Those two were in matching black and despite the size difference, there were times where for a split second, I thought Ripper WAS Masami, solely because she was doing something so vicious and cruel. There was a point where she wrapped a chair around her opponent’s neck and dragged her around ringside and it’s exactly the sort of thing Devil would do.

I honestly think she had not just improved tenfold since her run a couple of years earlier but was actively great at times. Once Mimi hit her cross chop and Ripper didn’t just no sell it, but she dusted herself off like she was Samoa Joe or something. Coolest person in the room. The match started with everyone charging at all three heels pressed into the corner and it worked right until Ripper simply stepped forward and made it work no longer. And she had all of the huge offense like the press slam backbreaker. Devil contributed more than enough too of course.

Mimi continued to stand out on the babyface side. She was not quite an ace but she was very good at this point. I’m going to have to see more out of Asuka especially but I know that’s coming. This was a means to an end to heat up Ripper even more and it certainly achieved that goal even if that came at a slight cost.
 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 5/18 - 5/24 Part 2

AEW Double or Nothing 5/23/26

Jon Moxley vs Kyle O'Reilly

Imagine being Kyle O'Reilly.

Last fall, he'd stared down the biggest villain of the last few years, maybe the greatest warrior of his generation. He fought a monster, perhaps a wounded monster, one with his back against the wall, sure, but a monster nonetheless. 

He fought the monster, defeated the monster, and yet, unlike so many others, he didn't become a monster in the process.

He stayed true to himself. Kyle O'Reilly has grown into a man who cares about his friends, who would rather smile than scowl, who thinks there is still good in this world, that there's something worth fighting for. He lives his life. He stops and smells the flowers. He sees the possible beauty inherent in everyone and everything. He's a breath of fresh air in an increasingly bleak world, someone who can smile backstage and then lock in when the bell rings, but as someone who never forgets what he's fighting for and what he stands for.

And yet, while he was gone, Jon Moxley has somehow turned public opinion back his way. Did he do it by apologizing? Did he do it by hitting bottom and losing everything? Did he do it through the sort of acts that Kyle O'Reilly would consider heroic?

No.

He won. And he won. And he won again. He won the Continental Classic, coming back from a deficit, including overcoming the injury O'Reilly had given him. Maybe his victory over Fletcher was suspect, as Fletcher defeated himself when he couldn't find the Callis Family Screwdriver, but he defeated the "Greatest Tournament Wrestler Ever" in Okada, and then gave a speech full of empty platitudes that the masses (and his own followers who had seemed otherwise on the verge of betraying him) ate up. 

This is Jon Moxley, the man who ended Bryan Danielson, the man who poured bleach down the throat of Kyle's good friend Orange Cassidy, the man who, after losing to Kyle right before the start of the Continental Classic, rushed back into the ring to cruelly and pettily put Kyle himself out of action.

And now only was the crowd seemingly okay with all of that, they were chanting Mox's name just as much as they were chanting Kyle's. 

Imagine being Kyle O'Reilly and hearing those chants. 

You had taken Moxley to the limit a week before, but this time, he didn't quit. 

And why would he? The Moxley from last fall was a man who had felt the walls closing in. This was a Moxley who was breathing air that he hadn't earned, save for through combat, save for by lying to everyone around him, save for by lying to himself most of all. 

Might equals right. The Continental Championship, with its barring of interference, was the ultimate arena to prove might. And thus, Jon Moxley was obviously the most right of all. Just ask Daniel Garcia. He had been at the bottom of his rope, had pushed Mox to the limit, and now he was under his tutelage. Just ask Will Ospreay, who Mox had taken out. Just like he'd taken out Kyle.

Just ask the fans. They'll be more than happy to tell you. They were more than happy to tell Kyle on this night.

It would have been one thing if they booed Kyle and chanted for Mox. It's a New York crowd. We live in dark times. Things happen. Kyle could have looked past that. 

But they chanted for one and then the other, back and forth. They saw Kyle O'Reilly and Jon Moxley as equal, as equally worth their adoration and support. Moral equivalents.

Imagine being Kyle O'Reilly, who came back from his injury and immediately helped his friends win the six-man titles, who now was coming back to take what else he felt he earned. To right a wrong that no one else seemed to care about anymore. Imagine hearing that. Imagine feeling it.

In his previous matches against Moxley, he did everything right and pressed Mox on his weaknesses, on his shattered nerve, capitalized on every mistake.

Here, now, months later, in a world that he never made, in a world that betrayed him and his positive outlook, O'Reilly was a little off his game, all while Mox was drinking deep in the confidence of his own Kool-Aid.

They fought even at first, but when they got to the floor, when O'Reilly finally pried off an advantage and pressed it, Mox managed to get under his skin. The middle finger wasn't about defiance. It was, I think, a momentary admission, a peeling back of a carefully clung mask. O'Reilly had won his battles. None of it had mattered. Mox was winning a much greater war of hearts and minds. 

O'Reilly lost his head, throwing wild kicks. Mox moved and O'Reilly's leg crashed into the post. 

Everything after that was academic. The match ended with both men in simultaneous leglocks. This time, Mox could be bolstered by his own bullshit that he could once again buy into completely. In the face of that, O'Reilly, brave, caring, tough, skilled was only human and what can a human do in the face of an idea, even one that can only exist in an unfair, unearned, decrepit world.

That wasn't enough though. Post-match, Mox stood before O'Reilly, spat out his platitudes, and held out his hand. And O'Reilly, who wants to see the beauty in all of us, took a breath, and let the world sweep him under. It was easier to believe. It was easier to forgive. It was easier to accept. He shook Jon Moxley's hand.

Which leaves me. Here I am, chronicling this story month after month, left to wonder how much longer can I too possibly hold out. You give the devil his due long enough and even a naked, fallen emperor has enough capital to buy himself new clothes. 

Jon Moxley is precariously close to getting away with all of it.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/18 - 5/24 Part 1

AEW Double or Nothing 5/24/26

Darby Allin vs MJF

MD: When you think about MJF's biggest rivals, you think Moxley and Darby and Hangman and Wardlow. Maybe you even think Punk. When I think of Maxwell Jacob Friedman's biggest rival though, there's really only one answer: modern crowds.

They're irony-pilled, celebratory, happy to be there, wanting to see great matches far more than they want to see a specific winner or loser. More often than not (most often, even), they want to chant for their own sake and pop for spots more than they want to get invested in the story being told in the ring, no matter how good it is. The well's been poisoned since the mid-90s by babyfaces who wanted to steal the show in order to get over and heels who walked around cool and uncaring. AEW was built upon the premise that the fans were smarter than pro wrestling, that the wrestling was meant to be smart for the fans, great matches, five stars. Sheet darlings. Excess on top of excess on top of excess. All highs, no lows.

The owner of the company, for all of his good qualities, tweets out every "This is Awesome" chant. Sometimes a match isn't supposed to be awesome. Sometimes the fans aren't supposed to be awed. Sometimes they're supposed to feel other emotions beside elation for what they're seeing. But that's the measure of success in the company, everything being Awesome. 

And so many of the wrestlers, having grown up in this post-modern environment and having found success in it when maybe they wouldn't be able to find success any other way, don't see this as an issue, don't see it as a problem. They want to pop themselves. They want to pop their buddies. And yeah, they want to pop the crowd. And pop it again. And again and again and again and again and again. Let's face it, it's easier to burn something down than to build it up. It's easier to keep people buzzing so you don't have to pay attention to details and build something that stands on its own.

That makes it all the more impressive then that Max wants something more. He can hang. He can have spotfests. We've seen them, usually to his detriment as a character and a wrestler. He certainly has to survive on a card which is full of these things. He has to deal with crowds that are conditioned by them and by a critical underpinning that rewards them over and over, a perfect circle of spot-driven slop where the true emotion that fueled wrestling for decades is kept secondary, not because of any loss of kayfabe but because of fans', wrestlers', and critics' self-consciousness finally driving them to present a sort of wrestling that makes the spots into the ends instead of the means.

He's reprehensible as a character, yet even in the best of cases, fans pop for his music, shout along with the ring announcer saying his name, and chant for him half the match. He has to constantly jab at them, show vulnerability, avoid being cool, cheat, cower, give them nothing to latch on to because they'll latch onto literally anything they can to stop themselves from feeling something genuine and to instead feel like they're on the inside and cool for watching wrestling. It's like they, much like many, many wrestlers are afraid of looking down, are afraid of falling, but it's in the falling that we let go, that we let ourselves get swept along by the thrilling and wondrous rapids below, that we let ourselves truly feel and experience the joy of professional wrestling.

And all Max wants to do is to make people feel that, to have them react so he can feel it as well, to create that perfect feedback loop of a heel in front of a crowd that lets themselves, even just for one night, hate him, that lets out all of their pent up aggression and frustration at the world in the direction of a sin eater who is willing and able to take it all off their backs. It's the greatest gift any wrestler can give any crowd.

But they sure don't make it easy for him. The world doesn't make it easy for him.

Thankfully, he's up for the challenge, the greatest challenge that there could possibly be for any modern wrestler.

Let's look at how he did it here. 

They stacked the deck. That's the entire point of pro wrestling. You're not supposed to leave things to chance. You're not supposed to go out there and have a great match and let the fans lean one way or another. You stack the deck.

They created value. Darby's reign had value. Fans are getting a great match every week, sometimes two. They don't care about much but they sure as hell care about great matches. They care about great matches more than just about anything.  If Darby survived this, there was going to be another month of them. And Rush was next. I wanted to see Darby vs Rush. I was invested in that. An unstoppable force and an object that gets battered all over the place. Beautiful mayhem.

They created stakes. MJF put his place in history, his legacy, his need to be at the top and remembered (because his character cannot accept any other sort of more human and intimate love or recognition) up against his hair. That's no small thing and his vulnerability over it is everything. He has Hollywood aspirations. It's a heel showing weakness to admit or at least let others allude to the fact he went to Turkey to stop the natural weight of time. Darby forced the issue since he wouldn't accept anything less than MJF's total humiliation. MJF did everything he could to avoid the match being made along those terms. There's nothing cool about that. It's a heel letting himself care as much as possible, both about the title and about his own hair, even if both were entirely for the wrong reasons. That's great character stuff right there. Total investment with nothing for the fans to latch on to and everything to revile. Meanwhile, Darby was fighting off opponent after opponent, often a physical underdog, his own body giving out, giving the fans everything to latch on to.

Even then, they had to go a step forward. This was a PPV crowd, a festive crowd, a New York crowd. Thus the pre-show angle with Foley. MJF came out, got cheap heat (having to use every tool at his disposal) by insulting the Knicks, ran down Foley, and then when Foley stood back up to him, hit him, not cleanly or honorably despite the age and physical differences but with a low blow. Then, when Darby ran out, he ran off. 

When it came time for ring introductions, Max cut off Justin Roberts to make sure that his introduction was as insulting as possible, trying to completely obliterate whatever was left of a homefield (or heel-field advantage). Even then, the fans still shouted M J F. But they cheered more for Darby. And that was no small thing.

The match was worked about as smartly as possible, starting with headlock takeovers and building upon the last month of Darby's matches. Ten years from now when people are watching this for the first time as footage, I'd suggest they go through the entire title run before getting here. 

There were a number of little callbacks and payoffs. Darby has been winning these matches by getting his opponents to get out of their comfort zone and put themselves at risk. He was able to manage it with MJF here, the package pile driver on the stairs hurting MJf almost as much as it did Darby. MJF could have just power bombed him instead but he got lost in the moment. That's the power of Darby. Allin had won matches by hitting the Coffin Drop immediately after an opponent survived the Scorpion, and Max was ready for that, knees up. Likewise, Max has been so dirty and underhanded with low blows, but for the second time in a month, Darby almost won with one. Darby had been using a clutch guillotine to make up for size or speed advantages against his opponents and that's what he used to set Max up for his insane balcony dive. And finally, he had collapsed in the Scorpion very early in the match against Sammy a week or two ago (allowing him to survive the physical lapse) and here it happened deep, deep into the match and was probably what ultimately won it for MJF as much as anything else. 

And of course, they did a great job teasing the top rope tombstone early so that they could pay it off late. Details matter and the match was full of clever ones that were meant to play upon the fans' understanding and push them where they needed to be.

Yet still, they struggled to get there. As the match entered the last third, as Darby was making a big comeback, the fans were chanting for both men. That's when things really threatened to go off the rails. This was an apuestas match, a grudge match, but it was also a title match and sometimes some people feel like at title match needs certain things. This didn't have matwork necessarily, but because the eventual pin mattered so much here, they decided (I imagine Max did but I can't say for sure), at the very worst time possible, when the fans were chanting for both men and losing the plot, to do a roll up exchange. It was fun. It was exciting. The fans enjoyed it. It was the worst thing they could have done at the worst time, something that might have felt inescapable, but really, truly (trust me) was possible to avoid.

Thankfully, through hook or crook, through careful planning or sheer happenstance (I don't know which), Max was more than ready and up to the task to get the fans back aligned for the finishing stretch. Right after the roll-up exchange, MJF ended up at the floor and Darby went for his third dive of the match (the first was redirected, the second hit clean). MJF, in his only (successful) truly underhanded move of the match, pulled the cameraman in front of him to use him as a human shield creating an amazing visual image as Darby careened in. That got the crowd where it needed to be. Details matter. I think, in this case, Max had made it a bit harder for himself with the roll-ups and the subsequent stare-off, but maybe, just maybe, that had just lulled the fans into a false sense of security so that MJF could be devious and reprehensible all the more. What followed was his attempt to go for the clippers and his comeuppance with Darby's massive dive: stage set and deck stacked for the tragic finish of Darby collapsing and MJF taking advantage like a vulture picking at the bones. 

Max is 30 years old. I watch a match like this and I think he has mostly (mostly) won the battle against his own youth and the lack of discipline that comes along with that, against all the easy answers that have plagued so many of his peers, and through them plagued pro wrestling over time. But I watch a match like this and I listen to the crowd, and it's plain and obvious that there's still a greater war ahead of him, a war to convince them that it's in their own interest to let go and feel, to go along for the ride in the moment, to get that perfect, wonderful experience that you can only get from pro wrestling where you cheer a babyface and boo a heel and invest in the story unveiling before you. He lets himself be vulnerable in ways that so many of his predecessors were afraid to. The war is going to be to convince the fans to trust in him and their own hearts and the wonder of pro wrestling and do the same. 

I watch a match like this and I think maybe, just maybe, with time on his side and his own battle already won, it's a war he might well win.

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Found Footage Friday: OMNI 83~! ZBYSZKO~! ORNDORFF~! ARN~! BORNE~! WILDFIRE~! ROOP~! GARVIN~!

GCW Omni 5/15/83

MD: Unfortunately, we're missing the six man which had Hansen and Murdoch teaming, plus a random Killer Brooks vs. Brian Blair match apparently, a testament to how the territory was a bit down and some guys were doing double duty, but we're going to be thankful we got this at all. 

Brett Wayne vs. Joe Lightfoot 

MD: It feels a little much that Lightfoot is a "Chief" too. Not everyone can be a chief. This started as a babyface match and the first thing we hear at the bell is someone shout from the crowd "Now don't you do any bodily harm to one another." which is some beautiful Georgia wrestling right there. And this was a pretty solid babyface exhibition for the first five minutes, headlocks into headscissors, that sort of thing. There was one nice moment where Lightfoot jammed a monkey flip in a way you don't usually see and there was a sense of struggle. That struggle boiled over and Lightfoot got more and more chippy, sneaking in a punch, hitting a chop, and then finally hitting a cheapshot from out of the corner. The fans did not like that. Wayne did not like that. They skidded into roll up exchanges before things could get too heated though and Wayne snuck one out with a jackknife. They more or less made up post match. If this had one or two more minutes for Lightfoot to lean harder heel and be in control, it would have been more memorable but it was a good opener. 

ER: Boy this really did end right when it was picking up steam. Brett Wayne has been one of my favorite "discoveries" of the Omni shows, and his talents admittedly shine brighter when he's in against a guy he won't be/shouldn't be beating. Underdog babyface fire and ability to take heavy thudding beatings are two things that won't be necessary in a face vs. face match with Joe Lightfoot. While I appreciated their work in the opening minutes, some snug headscissors and - importantly - always honest work, it got a lot better when Lightfoot started getting really bothered by someone in the crowd. I don't know exactly who it was but someone was getting under Lightfoot's skin - multiple times including post-match he flapped his hand at someone, telling them to Keep Yapping - and that little shove into being a heel made this temporarily catch fire. The honesty of the exchanges and the firmness of the contact suddenly meant a lot more. I like how they handled a blocked O'Connor roll, Lightfoot holding the ropes and Wayne not rolling back but splatting to his back, legs in the air for a kip up that never came. Lightfoot, picking up on Wayne's landing, pulls an inside cradle that looked like it could have won. The energy and weight for the actual finish was excellent, with Wayne kicking out of a sunset flip and pouncing into a jackknife pin. You watch enough Guerrero/Malenko roll ups sequences - and brother, that is a thing seared into my brain folds - and get used to the visual of the last 20+ years of Divas level copycat versions, and suddenly Brett Wayne shows what the sequence can look like when someone actually wants to win a match. 

Brian Blair vs. Chick Donovan 

MD: Blair came off as straightlaced and sound, a bit of a competent babyface bully on the mat. Chick preened and stalled to start. When they finally locked up, he tried to screw around with Blair. Blair showed him why that wasn't a good idea, clearly out wrestling him. He worked a hammerlock for a while and you got the sense he could do whatever he wanted with him. Eventually Chick got a few cheapshots in and took over. Blair was maybe a little less interesting working from underneath but his comeback was good with a leapfront, a huge forearm that knocked Chick into the ropes, and then catching him with a sleeper on the way back. Not only did he whack him to wake him up, but he did it with a second rope kneedrop to the back of his head as Chick was seated but unconscious, which was a great bit.

ER: Chick Donovan must have been poured into that coat OR bought it when he was less shredded because he is forced to enlist the referee just to help him out of it. Even with an extra man, it is still a full production. I've never seen a man take so long to get out of a jacket. Love the pack of women in the crowd screaming for Chick. Dude looks great, like the middle step of Jeff Jarrett evolving into Flair, and he wrestles like the best possible Jarrett. Chick was great bumping around for Blair and the bumping was made even better because Chick had no problem hitting a stiff back elbow or other stiff cheap shot, gain nothing from it, and then go back to bumping. I thought Joe Lightfoot had a nice kneedrop in the opener, but Blair had a gorgeous kneedrop that looked Harley Race level. I was still thinking about it when Blair smothered Chick with a sleeper to win, and was not expecting Blair to hit an even cooler kneedrop after the match. Matt's right, it's a great bit to put someone to sleep and then hit a move to wake them up, and I cannot say I have ever seen someone hit a kneedrop off the middle turnbuckle to a seated opponent. Blair's kneedrop has to be precise for the bit, but also seems insanely dangerous to even attempt. Blair leaps several feet away to perfectly place a pointed knee to Chick's cerebellum, snapping Donovan awake. 

Ron Garvin vs. Bob Roop 

MD: First time I caught this it was on a bus home from DC and I fell asleep a bunch. I don't think that's fair to the match but it's also not too surprising as a lot of this was Roop armwork and some of it was more compelling than others. Him actually chipping away at the arm was compelling because of how Garvin fought back. He was always threatening to throw a right hand and there were some bits, like Garvin having his foot caught and jumping over multiple trip attempts that I loved.

All of the hope spots were so good too. Garvin was fighting with one arm. Sometimes it meant he just got one punch and that was enough. Sometimes it meant he got Roop on the apron and could clubber until Roop draped his other arm over the top. Sometimes it meant a flurry of right handed punches followed up by a huge headbutt. The comeback was a headbutt to the groin and man did he ever thrash Roop after that, including the Garvin stomp. Fans were very much into all of it and it led to a fun finishing stretch where he tossed Roop off the top and when Roop tried it to him, he rolled him up. Maybe this got a little long in the tooth at times, but maybe they needed that for the comeback to work as well as it did? I don't fault the match for me being tired on a Thursday afternoon. 

ER: This was a slow burn that went up in hot flames the moment they wanted it to. For the first 12-13 minutes, Roop methodically worked over Garvin's arm in the kind of way that would potentially put you asleep after a long day at work, but was rewarding to someone watching with a fresh cup of coffee. Roop is Shooter Ned Beatty and all his arm work was honest and tough, jamming his shoulder into hard surfaces and not letting it go, working like Regal without the flash. Garvin endured and sold expertly throughout the long control, and the sudden payoff was incredible. Was the payoff even better because of the slow burn? I thought so, and loved how suddenly and explosively it came, with a Garvin headbutt that sends Roop backpedaling all the way to the other side of the ring, where Garvin stalks to meet him with a kick right to the face. Garvin's high kick is such a cool piece of offense that no other brawler used. When you had a great punching babyface - or any brawler outside of Takayama - they were never working kicks into their punching attacks. 

But if you want to talk about great punching wrestlers, we must discuss ALL of Roop's punches. How about his overhand right to back Garvin up, fanning out his hand after because he knew how fucking good it looked? His head movement to miss Garvin's response. His falling hammer fist into Garvin's throat, the punches in mount while holding onto the back of Garvin's head, every straight right to the head directly at the hard cam, busting Garvin open and leading to an even bigger comeback. Nobody talks about Roop as a great puncher but it's all here. He sets up the biggest comeback possible, the Garvin Stomp and big followup elbowdrop getting a big reaction, but nowhere near as big as Garvin biting Roop on the face after. Garvin is back raking and striking Roop all over the ring and we should all love how much Bob Roop absolutely refuses to fix his singlet after the left strap first falls, then is pulled down by Garvin. Roop works the rest of the match with his singlet falling off and I can't see that kind of stooging happening today. 

Tommy Rich/Ray Candy vs. Arn Anderson/Matt Borne (w/ Precious Paul Ellering)

MD: This was the one match on the card we had clipped already, but we did only have a few minutes of it and as best as I can tell this is our first full Anderson/Borne arena match.  Bleached Blonde Borne is a weird look for a guy who had so many looks. I really did love this though. It's a wonderful match. Rich's shine where he's ducking things and throwing fists and Arn and Borne are flying all over the place for him while the fans go nuts and "ooh!" for every punch is perfect pro wrestling.

It's amazing how good Arn was already, the way he moved his hands or looked at what was going on. He just got it so naturally. Such rich and vivid reactions to everything. None of it felt fabricated or overwrought. He had grown up a wrestling fan and I think he understood so intimately what connected with him and how not to play at a wrestler but to inhabit the character of one completely.

This had double heat on Candy where they were able to manage through quick switches and either riding him or clubbering away, tagging whenever he started to comeback. It was very effective because of the dissonance. You wouldn't think they'd be able to keep him down but they did it through hook or crook. Then there was a heat on Rich to finish it, with hope spots and all, before he got a roll up out of nowhere with Arn already celebrating on the apron since he thought they were doing great. Really good stuff all around and I like how unconventional the structure was overall. 

ER: Great stuff, great look at Destruction Inc, which happened when Borne was a better version of Arn than Arn. Young old man Arn and Borne working fully in sync, going after Candy and cutting him off, Wildfire raging on the apron for the hot tag, it's the perfect use of everyone. The Tommy stuff was a great way to start, Borne and Arn feeding perfectly for his wild fire, the way Arn and Borne moved into and fell away from Rich was electric. It's been said that wrestlers today are far better athletes but I don't understand that at all. The movement seen from ab-less 1983 wrestlers was such a better use of motion than anything in modern wrestling. Every strike led to a big recoil, selling happening constantly, everyone great at occupying themselves while feeding. 

When it's time for Destruction Inc to cut off Candy, Borne and Arn work the mat with him like they're specifically trying to gas Candy out, making him work through scrambles and pushing him to a pace he would never be able to handle. It's great psychology and a great way to use Candy, forcing him to be a tired monster swinging at two men who don't look like they'd be so fast. Paul is cheating from the floor, and I love how Candy falls when Paul grabs his leg from the floor, a real crashing wave that looked like a man actually thrown off balance by an unexpected full leg grab. Destruction are so good at keeping the ring cut off and the heat strong. Several moments stood out, but I loved one of Candy's big attempts to fight his way to Rich. Candy was punching at Borne while back elbowing Arn on the apron to escape their corner, and as Borne goes down from a punch he scissors Candy's leg as he's falling. When Rich finally tagged in it was a great as expected...but I did not expect them to then work a heat segment cutting off Rich! Great little twist, could have watched another 10 minutes of it. 

Paul Orndorff vs. Larry Zbyszko

MD: Larry's so great here. People complain about the stalling. People are, of course, fools. He doesn't do a lot of it here, but he does complain and grumble and get frustrated by everything. In college, my roommate, who did not like wrestling in the least, had to put up with us watching Nitro, and at one point Larry, on commentary, said "It hurts to live." and he loved that turn of phrase. Well, Larry sells life. He sells absolutely everything. And he's so damn active about it. If he takes a bump, he then flails his legs and slaps his arm against the mat and walks it off like he has ants in his pants. Early on he stumbles into so many different stooging scenarios. My favorite is him dropping down on his stomach, then on his back, which you never see, and then hitting a clunky front dropkick (Erik Watts level) as Orndorff catches himself on the rope, making Larry eat the bump. It's beautiful stuff.  

The transition has Larry sidestepping and Orndorff careening out. We don't see the bump into the guardrail but we hear it and it sounds nasty. Larry plays king of the mountain, of sorts, after that, heading out to the apron to lay shots in until Orndorff pulls the leg out. Larry gets up first and catches him on the way back in. He cuts him off one or two times like that but Orndorff is persistent and Larry is playing vulnerable. Orndorff has very stilted, staccato style attacks. Big sweeping stuff that doesn't really feel chained together. Drumbeat attacks so the last row can see (and hear). 

Larry, of course takes a beating. In the ring, out, onto the announce table, until he can shove Orndorff into the ref from the outside and then pin him with his foot stuck in the ropes.  That's a fake finish though as Tommy Rich comes out to tell the ref and they restart the match. Orndorff sells the leg from having had it caught in the ropes and Larry targets it, Orndorff fighting back on one leg really well. Larry keeps wanting the figure four but he wants it too badly and gets rolled up for his trouble. Fun match. Fascinating to watch both of these guys do their thing.

ER: I love these looks at Zbyszko, who looks and works almost like a normal size Buddy Rose in these environments. I love the way Larry moves, love how he feeds, love how he throws kicks and punches with similar to so many French Catch workers but perfectly distilled into a southern setting. Anytime the mics pick up Orndorff yelling about Zbyszko he sounds like Boomhauer because he hasn't yet had his New York Training. Zbyszko is so good at selling befuddlement while working out of holds. When he tries to push off and Orndorff holds onto a headlock, our Ordinary People couple in their same front row center seats actually have a rare small exchange, Jane Fonda pointing something out about the exchange while Donald Sutherland stares forward, emotionless. They are Georgia's two biggest wrestling fans and their demeanor never rises above that of a pair ordered to be there as part of some creative court mandated punishment. 

It's not always productive to view wrestling this way, but sometimes I watch a guy and think, "why doesn't anyone do this now?" I never actually know what those things might be, what things will get my attention. I don't always have a set criteria for Preferred Execution. It can be something simple or something complicated that someone makes look simple. Often it is concerning a common sequence done in a way that is so far removed from modern interpretations that it feels almost completely foreign. Here, it was the way Larry handled a dropdown/dropkick exchange, specifically the way he moved and got into position. He did two dropdowns then missed a dropkick, but it was this incredibly fast, incredibly tight work of clownery, and again I must compare Larry Zbyszko of all people to French Catch workers who he has surely never heard of in his life. His first dropdown was stomach down, but he took a back bump into his second one, and when he sprang up for the (missed) dropkick he did a flat back bump dropkick that made the whole sequence felt like it was evolving organically to the payoff of the specific way he fell.  

I loved the way he fought underneath, like trying to break a cravat with a hair pull that got him punished much worse, Orndorff dropping the hole and elbowing him in the nose before snapmaring him into a fistdrop. When it was Larry's time for control, he threw these great kicks while holding the ropes and keeping Orndorff in ring ropes purgatory, almost whipping his leg into Orndorff's body. Zbyszko does offense with his entire body, and that's the kind of thing I watch and think "athleticism". Using your whole body in the service of making all your actions more impactful. When I watch modern wrestling I predominately see athleticism used so frequently in the service of just getting into position for offense that all feels like wasted energy. No energy in this match felt wasted, even Larry reeling on his feet like a goofball for Orndorff's fire. 

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80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jaguar! Jumbo!

Volume 3

8. Jaguar Yokota vs. Jumbo Hori 3/30/82

K: This is a strange match because it’s worked like an international friendly before the World Cup. For those not familiar with soccer/football, a friendly is a game which isn’t part of any competition and the outcome doesn’t really matter. The main reason why they happen in international football is the teams don’t play/train together regularly, so it’s really for them to get some practice and try some new things without worrying about losing the game too much.

The purpose of this match in kayfabe is Jaguar getting to wrestle a much larger opponent as like a practice run for the Monster Ripper match. But in reality, they only work like that half the time. We do see it in that we got to see Jaguar pull out a few rarer moves/holds, but also she seems to get mad and vicious a bit too much if this is the story they’re going for. It probably did make the match better that she did that, even if it did undermine the narrative a bit. The real probably actually is doing a match with this narrative and having it go to a 30 minute draw. 30 minutes is just too long for a match where they’re just feeling each other out/getting warmed up for Monster. This might have worked better if it had a 15 minute time limit or something, or they just dropped that warm-up angle and just made it a regular heated match with Jumbo really wanting to make a name for herself by stealing a win on the champion. That would have been fine. But if anything Jaguar felt more determined to get a win that Jumbo did.

There was a very good crowd reaction cut where Jumbo hit Jaguar with that reverse FU move where she just launches her from up high onto the mat. He looked startled that that is even allowed.

**1/2 

MD: I don’t know about this one. They certainly worked hard and were aggressive. Things got heated quickly with Yokota pulling hair and trying to dismantle Hori, though it was all within some reason. For instance, Hori had a damaged shoulder and it wasn’t until Yokota was more desperate down the stretch that she started in on it. Instead through most of the match, she went for the legs. Even then, that wasn’t her first gambit. She bounded through almost immediately and tried to avoid Hori. Hori was able to catch her and toss her about a bit. 

That’s when things spilled to the floor and Yokota managed to toss Hori into some furniture. Then came the legwork. Some of it was very cool, such as Yokota’s short leg scissors, but she just couldn’t do enough damage and Hori was able to bound back to her feet to hit a Russian Leg Sweep. Then when, Yokota tried to toss her into the announce table, thinking, maybe, that she was bigger than she was (or her heart was big but her body wasn’t), Hori just jammed it and tossed Yokota in instead. That was just a momentary setback for Yokota landed on her feet (mostly) off of another fireman’s carry toss and used a legscissor to take her down. She finally got the figure four then, and Hori finally sold. 

You know, for about a minute on the floor before she came back in and did some rope running and absolutely crushed Yokota with her lifting twist bearing slam and a power bomb. Yokota turned the second bomb into a rana for a nearfall and then went in on the shoulder, far more desperate. She came close, maybe, with cobra twists and what not, but things ended up skitting to a time limit draw of desperate pins. Good fight but not very good consequence especially since there was some big stuff in here. I think maybe just don’t make the whole match about legwork if the leg won’t be sold for more than a few seconds? They hadn’t quite worked that bit out yet.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/11 - 5/17 Part 3

AEW Supercard of Honor 5/15/26

Survival of the Fittest: Athena vs Billie Starkz vs Maya World vs Yuka Sakazaki vs Trish Adora vs Zayda Steel

Chapter 1: Zayda Steel

When opportunity knocks, Zayda Steel answers the door. She bet on herself, left the possibility of artificial glitz and glamour to rekindle her love for Pro Wrestling and start back at the bottom. Hard work is rewarded and she found herself under Christopher Daniels' tutelage. She lost a proving ground match to Athena back in April but found herself with a second chance, defeating Hyan to take the injured Persephone's spot in Survival of the Fittest. 

The match itself began with Athena and Billie at odds, Billie not wanting to tow the line. After a bit of shoving, Athena dragged Billie out to the floor by her hair to try to get her back on the right page, her page. Zayda saw opportunity knocking once again and she, Maya, and Trish surrounded the two of them. Athena tossed Billie into Zayda and ducked Maya and Trish's blows. 

Later on, opportunity would present itself again. Athena had survived the onslaught of Maya, Yuka, and Trish and was standing dominant in the ring. Zayda, throwing caution to the wind, slipped in with a chair and tossed it right at the champion's face. With some effort she lodged it in the corner. Maybe it took her just a bit too long, as Athena was able to reverse the subsequent corner whip. Zayda crashed hard and Athena pinned her, feet on the ropes. There would be other opportunities, other days, and Zayda would be there, ready and waiting.

Chapter 2 - Trish Adora

Trish Adora made her own opportunities. After crashing into Maya when Athena ducked, she sat out, watching Billie and Yuka criss-cross and rope-run against Athena and Billie. She asserted herself when the moment was right, chip on her shoulder, power coursing through her, and took out Billie and Zayda with a double spear. 

After Zayda was eliminated, Athena tried to continue on with the chair on Yuka. Maya may have been the one to come in with a Kendo Stick to break it up, but it was Trish who snatched it from her and flexed and stretched with it, beating Maya first with the stick and then with a chair. 

While she was busy with Maya and Billie was fighting with Yuka, Athena set up a lego set of chairs on the floor. Satisfied with her construction and feeling far more animosity towards Maya than Trish, Athena suggested a fortuitous alliance, Athena and Trish leaning down hard on Maya. But Athena doesn't have allies, she has minions, and Trish Adora is no one's minion. Refusing to let Athena berate her on the apron, Trish fired off on the champion and chokeslammed her through her own chair tower. 

Billie, initially at a loss, became enraged and targeted Trish. She had set up a table and had been working to put Yuka through it, but now she turned her all of her attention to hefting Trish up onto the announce desk and putting her through the other table. Trish fought her off, smashing Billie with a Death Valley Driver onto an announce desk that did, much like Trish herself, simply did not break. 

Back in the ring, Trish went for the kill on Yuka, throwing the Lariat Tubman at her. Yuka ducked and it hit a stumbling, still recovering Athena with the lariat instead. Trish went to capitalize but Yuka caught her with the Merry-Go-Round and pinned her. Trish had been a force in the match. She had the champion beat and it was only due to an interloper that she didn't have her pinned and eliminated too. There's more on the bone there. Athena needs challengers, and Trish, like always, has a point to prove and the strength, skill, attitude, and wherewithal to back it up.

Chapter 3 - Yuka Sakazaki

Yuka drifted through the match, the smile on her face tempered by a grit of her teeth. When everyone surrounded Athena early, it was Yuka who picked her moment and came off the apron to actually get her. She fought evenly against both Athena and Billie as the match went on. After Billie failed to put Trish through the table, Yuka successfully managed to put Athena through it, not just insult to injury after getting chokeslammed into the chairs, but injury to injury as well. 

When Trish hit the Lariat Tubman on Athena, Yuka could have hung back and let Athena get eliminated from the match, ensuring a new champion, but that's not how Yuka operates. She meets the challenge before her. She is a creature of action and motion, of life itself. Athena had tossed a trash can into the ring and despite Athena pleading and begging Yuka not to do it, Yuka struck true. Yuka may be good natured, but she wasn't about to have the wool pulled over her eyes. Instead, she took trashcan in hand and maneuvered to the apron, hitting her magical girl splash with the can. Again, Athena was saved, this time by Billie.

Thus ambushed, her moment lost, Yuka quickly fell to Billie's Avalanche Starfall cradle facebuster. But as she went to the back, she knew that she had the champ all but beaten and that she could hold her head high.

Chapter 4 - Billie Starkz

Which brings us back again to Billie. Billie, Billie, Billie. Twice rebelled against Athena, twice defeated. Inaugural TV champion, lost the belt. Made it to the finals for the inaugural Pure champion, lost. 22 years old and woefully lost. A new college graduate, but forever a MIT Student. 

Her defiance here was feckless and quickly subsumed. Her fire? It came and went. She fought hard against Yuka, only to get swept under and choked in the ropes. She was infuriated by Trish's action and went right at her, only to be dropped onto the announce desk with a Death Valley Driver. She saved Athena with a chair, but those chair shots seemed to lack a certain amount of heart. 

After eliminating Yuka, it was now two-on-one against Maya. Athena was hurting so maybe Maya had a chance, but Billie was able to come out on top in their exchange with a Destroyer. That meant when Athena did make it back into the ring, two kendo sticks in hand, things looked very bad indeed for Maya. Athena tossed one to Billie, dark master to apprentice. But where Billie's heart is clouded, Maya's is pure, and she fought back, right to the point where she was jousting with Billie on the top, chairs draped upon the mat beneath them. Athena went to strike Maya. Maya moved. Billie got cracked and then crushed with a powerbomb off the top. 

Maybe there's a light off in the distance. Maybe there's a path towards it. But for Billie Starkz, it seems so very far off.

Chapter 5 - Maya World

This left Athena and Maya. While she is, in her own way, an apprentice to Athena, Maya's never been a minion. Instead, she's become the possible heir apparent that Billie no longer is, the Final Girl who might be able to not just survive the horror story that is Athena, but to be the one to actually end it. If Billie is looking for a light, Maya glows all on her own, a light to combat Athena's darkness.

But she wasn't going to be able to defeat it here, not in a match like this. Up until this point, the threat to Athena had been the numbers, the unpredictability. There could well be a final encounter between Athena and an ascendant Maya, but not on this night and not in this way. 

That's not to say she didn't account extremely well for herself. She did. She turned the tide very quickly. Athena had used every weapon imaginable (save maybe for the ladder that she and Billie had set up in the ring), leaving her just her own precious belt left. Maya ducked it and took over with a nasty DDT on the apron. She hit her Reinera slam but couldn't put Athena away. Then she went for the ankle lock. 

Athena can sometime be craven, can often be underhanded, but she was no quitter. Billie, holding a white towel, on the other hand, is prone to being overcome by emotion, and she had so much to feel here: the sting of defeat and disappointment, the further sting of her defiance once again deferred, her honest care and affection towards Athena, no matter how she treated her. Put all those together, and she had every reason to throw in the towel. Athena wouldn't let her though, not just stopping her but altogether dragging Billie into the ring.

That was the distraction Athena needed, and one giant O-Face from the top of the ladder later, Maya, her own brightness temporarily extinguished, was staring up at the lights, and Athena had survived another day.

Chapter 6 - Athena

Diamante rushed out to help Athena celebrate. They browbeat Billie, though not with any real malice or seriousness. As things stood, it was all well past the point of that. For the most part, Billie had come through. 

More than that, through hook and crook, Athena had come through. She had defended her kingdom, had stood strong in the face of maybe her greatest challenge. The numbers were against her, and yes, at times she hid behind Billie, but at others, she faced three people down at once, running from corner to corner to inflict damage and pounding her chest in victory after the fact. 

That led to her getting a chair thrown at her face by Zayda, of course, and in truth, she had terrible luck (hubris?) with the weapons in the match. Every time she tried to escalate, furiously kicking the set-up chair out of the corner to use it as a weapon (that organic, alive element of unpredictability that Athena brings to her matches that almost no one else in wrestling can match), setting up the chair tower, the table (well, that was Billie who set it up), bringing in the trash can, trying to use the belt... it all backfired on her. She survived, but only because Yuka saved her once and Billie the second time. 

Were she just a queen, she might fall to circumstance like this: a plot, a conspiracy, the odds being against her, but she's more than that. She's the forever champion, the fallen goddess. Someday she will fall, someday she must, and yes, her own hubris might be a large part of it, but it will have to be both epic, and this war was epic, and personal and intimate, in all the ways that this was not. 

As a match, it was smartly put together, mostly solved the multi-person problem of people just laying around (in part, by eliminating Zayda relatively early so that the numbers were off and Athena could either be convalescing or setting up contraptions to be used later), and was extremely character driven. 

As a story, it call came together fairly well, leaving much on the table in the best way. Yuka, Maya, and especially Trish all have a claim for the future. Billie's tension percolates all the more as she desperately grasps at light now even further beyond her grasp. 

As a defense, it is another giant notch upon the largest belt in wrestling, as Athena shakes the dust of her peers off and marches ever towards the greatest legacies still left before her. 

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/11 - 5/17 Part 2

AEW Collision 5/16/26

Darby Allin vs Sammy Guevara

MD: There's a peace to be found in inevitability. The character of Darby Allin is careening towards destruction and he feels better than he's ever felt in his life. His body cannot sustain this pace. He cannot last. It's not suicidal tendencies. It's the universe falling into its proper place. He is champion. He will defend that title at every opportunity. In this, he has purpose. He will fight as hard as humanly possible. He will drag his opponents down into the depths with him. He will survive right until he won't. There is no place for doubt. There is no place for questioning. There's barely any place for thought. It's not nihilism. It is nirvana.

That's why, upon entering the ring as his music played, he bowed his head towards the mat. It wasn't exhaustion, save maybe for the exhilarated exhaustion of a job well down. It was peace. Perhaps it was a shallow sort of peace, one without true introspection, but it was peace nonetheless, and a peace associated with having climbed the highest of mountains, achieved the greatest of goals, a sort of peace that very few could contest.

Which is why he did not see coming Sammy Guevara boot crashing straight down upon his head.

....

And that's all I got. Sorry guys. I don't think I was feeling this one. I caught this a day later. Lots of wrestling this weekend. That meant I had already seen both the insane swanton off a ladder through a table, and then the very interesting spot of Darby passing out during the Scorpion. 

What I didn't realize, because you can never realize much from clips, was that they were basically how the match started. After curb stomping Darby, Sammy beat him a bit more, cut him off a bit, and put him through the table. About a minute later, Darby had gotten Sammy into the Scorpion Deathlock and passed out. And then maybe half a minute later, Darby was back on the top rope and Sammy pushed him off.

Darby IS the exception to every rule. He IS the cockroach that will survive the apocalypse. On some level this does make sense in context, a greater context of not just the match but his entire reign, hell, his entire life. 

But I'm not at all sure this maximized the dramatic tension (in fact, I'm pretty sure it didn't). After this, Sammy stayed on Darby but Darby kept trying to come back. Some of the cutoffs were quite good like Sammy hitting a cutter on Darby as he tried for a tope. It made some sense given who and what Darby is and the overall hierarchy at play, and to a lesser extent the fact that Sammy was fooling around a bit, but just because something can be waved away on paper doesn't mean that it will work for everyone in the moment. While I'm usually drawn in by Darby's bumping, selling, and desperate attempts to fight back, I think this one had lost me and didn't quite get me back.

You know what could have gotten me back though? If I saw something brilliant in the character of Sammy Guevara, something I could latch on to. He was cocky. He hit his stuff. He went right after Darby to start. 

But who is he? Is he the guy who despite being a pro wrestler in a kayfabe world is still desperate to get that 5* rating from Dave? That's kind of interesting in its own way so long as he's the only one like that and he plays into it as a character and not as the guy behind the character. That he sees himself as an artist and that his art isn't appreciated due to cronyism and lack of opportunity and being screwed. THAT could be interesting in its own way so long as he stayed fully immersed in a fictional world. 

Or is he the guy who was supposed to be someone at 26 in 2019 and now is looking around at 32 having seen his peers and even those younger than him pass him by, someone who realizes that despite the swagger, despite the mustache, despite still calling himself a pillar in a world where the other pillars have long since stopped, that he's running out of chances. That's interesting. It could create a sort of wretching, wretched desperation, one that either he hides behind a mask or behind self-delusion. 

No, he's not either of those things. He's not much of anything. The problem is that sort of character has to permeate through literally everything he does. You have to feel it dragging itself out of the screen and crawling down your throat. It has to make you uncomfortable, not in the way an overt horror character makes you uncomfortable, but in the way something far more real, something that reeks of disappointment and failure, might make you uncomfortable. That could be compelling, massively compelling, but it would mean that Sammy would have to be incredibly self-aware, incredibly vulnerable, incredibly brave.

And there aren't many wrestlers today that brave. I don't fault him for taking half measures and playing at playing at something instead of embracing it. Who the hell wants to embrace failure as a path to success? But this is pro wrestling and counter-intuitively, that's a path, and I don't see all that many other paths for Sammy anymore. He's pasted over his old workrate stylings with a patina of smarmy stooging to try to keep up with a changing world, but the entire endeavor lacks soul and verisimilitude. 

If he could somehow pull it off, maybe we might feel uncomfortable in a good way, in a compelling way, when we see Sammy Guevara wrestle. 

Instead, we're just uncomfortable in a bad way, all the more so when he takes a massive bump or hits a massive spot. 

With Darby, it is serene. With Sammy, it is jejune. Worse than that, it is mundane. 

In every way that Darby Allin is found, Sammy Guevara is lost.

He worked hard. He hit clean. He'll get some stars. 

But he won't find what he's looking for.

Not like this.

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Super Dragon and the Greatest Match Ever to Happen in Pacifica, CA

Super Dragon/Spanky vs. Jardi Frantz/Bobby Quance APW 5/11/02 - EPIC

ER: I was at this show. Terra Nova Hight School in Pacifica. It was top to bottom one of the best wrestling shows I've been to, and I've been to a ton of great wrestling shows in my life. I was 21, there with friends, and the show was loaded. A small four man title tournament meant we got two good Robert Thompson matches and two good American Dragon matches, the latter being their arm work main event. Three great singles matches, a strong undercard, but this tag was the match we were talking about on the drive home. This tag match is the best match of the dozen or so shows APW ran in Pacifica in the late 90s/early 00s, many of which I attended. I wish I remember the Excalibur vs. James Watkins match. I'm sure it had a great clothesline. Cheerleader Melissa and Sara Del Rey in a trios? That was probably good too. Chad Collyer worked American Dragon in the first or second match of the night, and after his match I saw him sitting up in the bleachers watching the show. I went up and sat with him, asking him a bunch of annoying questions, so I don't remember much about those two matches. 

I doesn't matter, nothing on this card can compare to this tag. Only one match in Pacifica APW history comes close and that is the Westside Playaz (Robert Thompson/Boyce LeGrande) vs. Jardi Frantz/Vinny Massaro match from 5/6/00. That one is not far off, but this match clears it. Two of the greatest all time APW tag matches. APW even ran a tag team tournament show in Pacifica now that I think about it. The people of Pacifica demanded to be treated as a Tag Team Territory. You need to run a strong tag match at your Pacifica show in 2002 if you run one at all, and you don't even need to make the rest of the card good. This card was good, but had it been garbage we would have still spent the drive home talking exclusively about this match. On paper, it was exactly what my friends and I wanted to see in wrestling. It was a dream. Our special West Coast version of the burgeoning super indy dream match. That it actually delivered on the on-paper promise was what made us true believers. 

Every man enters separately. The first sounds we hear are "Down With the Sickness" because Bobby Quance is inspired by no other man. It feels impossible that nobody else in indy wrestling history would have used Disturbed's nu metal classic as an entrance theme, but Bobby Quance was somehow the only wrestler who had the vision. Jardi comes out in a kimono to Hayabusa's theme, which is some tremendous weeb cosplay after going one on NOAH tour a year earlier.  Spanky continues the rib of coming out to songs with long or constant instrumental intros, coming out to the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" with an intro long enough to make more than one adult man yell "get to the fucking ring already." These guys were all about their bullshit and nothing was going to stop them. 

While I was there in attendance, I have no memory of chanting SUPER HOMO at Super Dragon and don't believe it's a chant I would have participated in. However, I recognize that it was a very loud chant, and with only 200-300 people in attendance any loud chant would require many participants. There is no video footage that confirms me doing or not doing the chant, but this was 25 years ago and we were all still collectively processing 9/11, so who's to say who did what at Terra Nova that night. I also don't remember Spanky working shtick around throwing his pubes at Jardi so some things just get lost to time and memory.

Jardi Frantz is now a well kept secret; a mostly forgotten wrestler only thought of by those who were there or those who memorized DVDVR 500s. I was there for basically his entire west coast APW run. He had evolved into a pretty great wrestler by 2002, a real slimeball who was surprisingly tough. A babyface only be default. His matwork was really strong and he got a lot of quick leverage over Spanky. This was during an era where APW was pushing all of their graduates to do real wrestling training and all matches had focused matwork. It was a great era. It's an era that should exist in full on tape and yet is the most unreleased great indy wrestling of the era. The Dragon/Quance matwork was an excellent example of their matwork ethos, worked like snug World of Sport, less flash more weight. Quance used his speed for leverage and rolled Dragon into a crucifix that had strong physics. Dragon had a stunning camel clutch application where he forced Quance into a full nelson and maneuvered that painfully into a heavy weight camel clutch. I wish he held it instead of quickly moving to a Gedo Clutch, I wanted to see him twist Bobby. All the matwork was tough.  

Things really took off when Spanky and Super Dragon fully cut Quance off. That was when they got everyone's attention. A lot of people in 2026 probably don't know the name Bobby Quance, but he was a super fast learner who looked like the next West Coast super worker from go. This was less than 10 matches into his career and he hung impressively with the rest of the very advanced guys in the match, and he was a good and right fit getting cut off. He played great from under and Dragon is best when he's sadistically going after someone. Dragon had an amazing back elbow cut off that started it all. A back elbow that would have played in 1983 Georgia. Spanky slid a fast loud kick into Quance's face and catapulted him into one of those Super Dragon chops that sends an echoing snap through a building. Spanky's pinfall attempts are as painful as his offense, every pin a stump puller, stretching this boy's ligaments. When Dragon did a springboard kneedrop onto Quance's stretched out torso and cleanly rolled through to the far side ropes to talk shit, everyone in Pacifica knew they were seeing greatness. Imagine Hayabusa with the attitude of Deranged. Sounds like the best wrestler ever. 

Jardi was great as the veteran Kings Road partner teaming with the guy who was 100% taking the pin. He gets a lot of impact on his basics, even if he doesn't look like a guy who would have hard bodyslams or heavyweight biels, a legdrop with unexpected impact from long slender legs. Spanky and Dragon bump big for Jardi's shine, Spanky going over the top to the floor on a missed charge while Dragon wraps himself around the ringpost. Jardi's running senton over the ringpost into them had the same energy as 1997 Juvy. Quance's shooting star press over the ringpost into them had energy that wasn't even imagined five years before. I remember being blown away the first time I saw someone do a standing shooting star, or Kidman doing his shooting star press off the ring apron. Quance, pro for a few months, shoots himself into brave new pro wrestling possibilities. It's as if several dozen people saw Blitzkrieg and decided to become wrestlers so they could invent more dangerous versions of flipping onto someone, acolytes forming over three years. 

Super Dragon was the best at taking Bobby Quance's offense. Quance wasn't around long, but he fought Super Dragon a lot during his run. Dragon was the SUWA to Quance's Dragon Kid. They're doing 1997 Rey vs. Juvy with their own spin and they're really great at it. Dragon is Juvy, decapitating Quance's Rey with a downward angled springboard spinning heel kick to the back of the head, catching and folding on Quance's springboard huracanrana. What takes it beyond, is neither Rey nor Juvy were as vicious as Super Dragon, and that viciousness ramps up to a big finish involving Dragon ragdolling Quance multiple times. There's a wild sequence where Quance is murdered by a cradled brainbuster, Jardi hits a 450 splash on Spanky that Dragon breaks up with a top rope double stomp, Quance gets whipped into a pair of brutal Burning Lariats, it's all just monstrous. 

I wonder how many other people went to the Taco Bell near the beach that is designed like a surf shack. That's a thing you used to do in Pacifica after seeing some of the best wrestling of your life. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

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Found Footage Friday: APACHE~! SKAYDE~! HECHICERO~! RAYO~! FIERA~! LUCERO~! SANGRE~! ULTIMO~! ATLANTIS~!

Gran Apache vs. Skayde DTU 4/18/10

MD: We're all happy that Black Terry, Jr. is posting matches. He's posted this one here and on Facebook, so give him clicks:  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1681600072845956. Here we got up close and personal for a super enjoyable encounter. Apache was able to keep up with Skyde on the mat the whole way through and had a bunch of thunking power moves, while also bringing multiple dropkicks, a moonsault attempt in the middle, and then the two dives at the end. There was something a little clunky about him at times. When he went over for the rolling Boston crab set up for a rowboat, he had a hard time getting over, but it never felt collaborative. It just added to the grit, and, in my mind, set up the finish where while he took Skyde out, he was spent from the effort he put in on the dives and couldn't beat the count either. 

What made this jump off the screen, however, was how sharp the holds were. They were so good at unlocking holds with little shots and bits of positioning: a twist of the arm one way so as to twist it another, a cradle that wasn't meant to be a pin but to set up the next hold, a transition from a kickout right into the next thing. For the most part Apache pressed the advantage. He had bit of a size, came off as an all arounder. Where he stumbled was not accounting for the fact that one side of the ring happened to have barbed wire all over it and he careened into it on rope running. Later on, there was a bit of added drama that for him to get a rope break on a hold, he'd have to grab the ropes on that side of the ring. It didn't play into the match too much past that but it created a more interesting environment for them to joust in.

While the crowd groaned a bit at the finish, they had no reason to complain with the action up til then. Apparently BT, Jr. is going to be posting every Monday so we'll have lots to look at over time. 

PAS: The 2010's period when Black Terry Jr. was just releasing incredible indy lucha every week (and we would get new FUTEN shows) was one of the most rewarding periods of my pro-wrestling fandom. IWRG and the smaller lucha promotions were just on fire, awesome cool matches every week with guys like Black Terry, Negro Navarro, Dr. Cerebro and many more just killing it. Lots of that stuff has been only sporadically available in recent years, and I am pretty sure this is a match which is completely new. Apache is a guy who dipped into that 2010s indy lucha world, but wasn't a mainstay, so it is especially neat to get to see him stretch, and more Skayde is also always a treat. This is a match which just fulfilled expectations, I came in expecting great looking Llave, some cool exchanges and a little Apache high flying and it just checked the boxes. My expectations are pretty high for this stuff, and while it didn't exceed them, just hitting them is pretty great.  

ER: Had I been there live this is something I still would be thinking about. Black Terry Jr. is back and puts you in the front row of lost lucha libre like few. Phil isn't exaggerating about how much the original BTJ handhelds meant to his fandom, I remember all the excited phone calls and texts about every single new upload, leading down the Black Terry rabbit hole, documenting some of the coolest lucha that had mostly to that point gone unseen by all but the most dedicated lucha heads. I don't think I've ever seen Gran Apache in any of BTJ's handhelds, and the sight of Apache in an environment like this looks totally foreign to me. It's beautiful. Live, seeing two old guys (well, 50 and 45, youthful for our brand of lucha) working llave and the hardest fucking mat possible, it's the thing I want from my lucha. We see them fully up close rolling through exchanges, Apache rolling through leg locks that get tighter with each roll, going through what feels like a 12 step process to knot up Skayde's legs. Apache's llave somehow looks more graceful while Skayde's moves more heavily. I don't mean that as an insult to Skayde's work, I thought the heaviness added to the pendulum swings of his llave, his floating majistral looking like an act of magic physics rather than fast Quackenbush precision. Skayde's single legs and cinched in crabs looked ligament tearing, and Apache is wise to just start slapping and punching him the longer we go. 

Apache's punches and slaps were one of the first things that got me into actual lucha libre, believe it or not. I was mostly familiar with lucha through WCW, and Psychosis/Rey/Juvy matches from Japan or ECW. When my family finally got cable TV in the year 2000 it wasn't long before I found Galavision, and discovered Gran Apache slapping the shit out of Oscar Sevilla in his little Sears portrait matador suit. I was fully onboard the Apache express from one match, and here every punch and slap to Skayde brought me back to those first ones I saw. I never got to see Apache live (I saw Skayde once, during a period where he had gained weight and got outshone by a 60 year old Solar) and the sound of his strikes live must have been incredible. 

7 minutes into this I yelled "There's barbed wire in there?!" to my living room, as BT Jr. had kept that angle hidden. There's a whole side of the ring with barbed wire around the ropes and while these men mostly stay away from the wire, Apache does accidentally hit it once and yelps loudly, a hilarious camera reveal. It also leads to my actual favorite shot, late in the match, as Apache punches Skayde in the face. The afternoon sun glows behind them and The Barbed Wire Side of the Ring looms in the foreground unused, the kind of lucha vision only seen in outdoor tent lucha. Now that BTJ is back, who knows how many more similar visions we will see. We'll write about every one. 

Caifan Rockero I vs. Rey Hechicero 2/13/09

MD: Likewise, Rob's gone through a channel posting a ton of things and pried out what seems to be new or lost or recovered, perfect for us. And for us, it doesn't get too much more perfect than an incredibly blurry match between Caifan and Hechicero from 09. I'm pretty certain AEW fans have no idea how old Hechicero is and how long he's been doing this. I saw my share of his stuff back when I first started getting into lucha, including an apuestas match with Caifan from a year after this one, so this is like going home in some ways.

They go almost 30 and it feels like a series of a hundred mostly disconnected exchanges, each one interesting and experimental in its own right. They're all full of struggle. For a lot of it, Caifan is the aggressor and Hechicero has to get out of something, though he has his share of hefting Caifan up as well. Sometimes it's clear what they're going for and it works beautifully. Sometimes you're left to wonder. There's a shoulder breaker Hechicero does twenty minutes in where I'm not sure if that's what he meant to start with. Other times, though, the struggle is wonderful. When Hechicero went for a tapitia, he only got it after slamming Caifan's head into the mat a few times in a way that I'm not sure I've ever quite seen; simple but it worked very well within the sequence. Caifan hit his arm cradle suplex twice. There was a bit more of a sense of build for the second one, but you still wonder about him having to go to the well in such a long match like that.

They did escalate to rope running but then they'd take it back down. So much as there was a narrative, it was one of increasing exhaustion and damage over time. You believed it because they were doing so much. The moves did get bigger to a degree, more off the top, for instance. When Hechicero finally stunned Caifan enough to get the hold he really wanted, it felt more like him outlasting Caifan than anything else. I wouldn't call this particularly focused, but it was certainly imaginative and fun. 

Atlantis/Rayo De Jalisco Jr./Ultimo Dragon vs. La Fiera/Sangre Chicana/Charles Lucero 9/6/92 Plaza De Toros Monumental

MD: Lucero was a replacement for Tugboat Tyler. They didn't even update the graphics. But he's part of what made this fun. We've seen the rest of these guys go at it, and yeah, I'll always be glad to see Chicana and Fiera, but a relatively young (relative to a lot of the footage we have of him fifteen years later) Lucero in the mix was novel.

A lot of this is the rudos stooging all over the place, Lucero pretending Atlantis fouled him, Fiera having Ultimo run over his back, everyone playing into Rayo's act. Again, some of the novelty is seeing Lucero feed into it. Eventually Chicana punches Rayo in the skull while he has a hold on and the rudos take over. Atlantis comes back with a chair on Chicana and it feels a little unwarranted maybe but who knows what these guys were up to otherwise. The tonal shift is especially weird as they go into everyone-in-a-headlock-at-once and la estella and a celebratory finishing bit for the tecnicos but hey, we're not going to complain too much about mean Atlantis chairshots. This too, like everything else this week, was fun. 

ER: I love when 15 minutes of VHS tape trader quality lucha shows up, talk about a trip back. There's always something new to observe, always somebody who stands out that you weren't thinking about earlier that week, month, or year. Charles Lucero was someone I didn't know about until his matches with Hechicero, Rayo a lot of people didn't know about until he was older and lazier and up his own ass (complimentary, and pejoratively) and here they're both a perfect set of rivals. In the primera there's this great early moment where Rayo is teasing his matador attacks on Chicana, before just rushing past him to double hammer fist Lucero off the ropes to the floor, just swinging that Mexican Polish Hammer into his chest. His misdirections to throw off Lucero's timing are wildly entertaining. I enjoyed old conceited Rayo but whenever I see the stop-start routines done in younger Rayo speed it feels like some of the best lucha trickster work we have. La Fiera was also a standout, because early 90s Fiera is always going to be a standout, and here he was especially gifted at making 1992 Ultimo Dragon's offense sing. Great pairing, an accompanist who knew how to make a guy feel like a star.  

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Belief (AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/11 - 5/17 Part 1)

AEW Dynamite 5/13/26

Darby Allin vs Konosuke Takeshita

MD: Wrestling isn't about being real.

It's about being true.

And the engine of truth is belief.

Darby Allin is the rare sort of wrestler that makes us believe. It's in the name, definitional, right? A huge aspect of belief is making our suspension of disbelief as easy as possible. If our disbelief isn't suspended, we spend all of our time looking at the strings, thinking about how the trick is done, feeling like we're smarter than what we're watching, focusing more on the craft than the narrative unveiling before us. 

And that can be ok, especially on a second watch, but it's a level of distance, a level of disconnect. 

With Darby matches, we don't have to worry about it. Our disbelief is suspended. There are plenty of ways to accomplish it. I'll talk about some more when I get to Takeshita. But Darby? He does it the hard way. Maybe you could call it the hardcore way. He crashes and burns again and again in order to keep our eye on the ball, so that we stay focused, so that we don't blink. 

He takes hellacious bumps, not just at the hands of his opponents, but at his own hands, utilizing his own body as his deadliest weapon, making the diabolically brave and foolish calculation that whatever his opponent might take, he can take just a little more. He sells it all, grasping, crawling, scraping, writhing, and it feels like the sort of trick he can only do once, to blow himself up so that he can express that pain to the world and draw every viewer in. Except he does it again and again and again.

And over time, that builds up a second sort of belief, the belief that he can survive it all. Endless kickouts are a problem with all modern wrestling, but not with Darby, because Darby is the exception that proves the rule. With him, it never feels excessive, because he lives and breathes a different sort of more tangible excess, and it makes us believe that you just can't keep him down for three seconds. What's three seconds in the face of everything else he gets up from?

Then there's Konosuke. If Darby is reaction, then Takeshita is action, the other side of belief. He towers over opponents, has precise technique, moves with such ease and explosiveness. Darby Allin survives explosions. Konosuke Takeshita is the explosion. 

When he hits Darby with a German Suplex off the top and holds the bridge, it's a seemingly impossible physical act made believable, plausible, immersive, by his presence, how he carries himself, and that little extra bit of we know about him, the fact that he wrote his thesis on the German Suplex. 

In that regard, they're two sides of the same coin, both able to make the impossible seem possible and the possible seem incredible. 

There's another aspect of belief, however. That presence of Takeshita? It's partially because the character of Konosuke Takeshita believes in himself completely. He believes that he is the Alpha. He believes that he is a World Champion waiting to happen. He believes that he is better than Okada. He believes that he can beat Darby; he did so once before after all.

I'm not convinced that Ciampa believed that, that Brody King believed that, that Kevin Knight believed that, not deep down. PAC wasn't a rational actor to begin with, so let's leave him out of this. Knight wrestled conservatively, right until he couldn't. Ciampa compensated with a wild streak, Brody with a bestial streak. They overcompensated, overstretched.

Takeshita did not overstretch. He did not take foolhardy chances. When Darby tried to throw himself at Takeshita, Takeshita stood firm and swatted him down. He had answers for everything Darby tried and Darby had so few answers for the problem of Takeshita. Too big. Too strong. Too sure. Darby moved out of the way causing Takeshita to crash knee first into the stairs. Takeshita brushed himself off and took back over. Darby cleverly vaulted over him and then kicked out that selfsame knee and locked in a guillotine like he did with Knight. Takeshita just hefted him up and escaped. Too much.

Darby does outlast his opponents. He sends them both through the meat grinder and he comes out of it, sinew hanging off of bone to match his painted up face, more in his element, more able to survive. But he outlasts them another way as well. He breaks their spirit by surviving all of their best offense, their best attempt to put him down; by kicking out again and again. 

Eventually, Takeshita (being too much) finally did hit that power drive knee. And Darby kicked out. Takeshita was not shaken. He had other tools in his arsenal. Or maybe he'd just slam his knee into Darby's skull until his head was no longer attached to his shoulders. He had options. 

Don Callis, however, did not have that same sort of faith. He had been provided the Dynamite Diamond Ring before the match, an extra piece of insurance from an MJF who does not quite believe in himself enough to put his hair upon the line, not unless he has absolutely no other choice. Once Darby kicked out of the knee, Callis' belief in Takeshita was shaken and he enacted Plan B. Clon rushed to ringside to distract the ref. Callis gave Takeshita the ring. 

In doing so, he did far more harm than good. Takeshita refused to use the ring, for to be forced to need it would shatter his confidence in himself. And he was momentarily distracted in getting rid of it, which helped to let Darby recover.

There was a bigger issue at play though. He realized in that moment that Callis did not believe in him nearly as much as he believed in himself. Darby may have been able to survive up until that point, but he couldn't crack Takeshita's armor, armor forged through faith and confidence, through belief. 

Callis did that hard work for him. 

And Takeshita, instead of pressing on, went back to the well, back to the stairs on the outside even though the gambit had failed before. Thus shaken, he fell to the same overcompensating, overstretching, of Darby's previous opponents. Darby reversed things, and Takeshita ate a Scorpion Death Drop onto the stairs because of it.

The beginning of the end.

Belief is everything. Wrestling is not just a series of loosely connected spots. It is action and reaction. It is a building built over time. The cement that holds it all together is belief. Sometimes it is created by bumps, selling, execution; sometimes by confidence, presence, body language; and sometimes by the characters' belief in themselves and how that shapes a narrative and touches our hearts out in the crowd or through a screen.

You may think that what makes Darby Allin great is the daring, the bumping, or even the selling, but those are just the means. You may think what makes Takeshita great is his execution, his intensity; even, I suppose, simply his moves, but those too are just the means. 

Darby and Takeshita are great because they are so good at getting us to believe.

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80s Joshi on Wednesday: Devil! Ripper! Jumbo! Mimi!

Volume 3

6. Devil Masami & Monster Ripper vs. Jumbo Hori & Mimi Hagiwara March 1982 

MD: My biggest takeaway here is that all four of these women had improved quite a bit from 79-80. But my bigger takeaway from this and the disc overall so far is that Mimi has gotten very good. Generally, I think of her selling and emoting and we saw a ton of that in the Devil’s singles, but this was more about her taking stuff in the moment and dishing it back out. She matches up very well with Devil. Meanwhile, while not quite as improved, Hori is still much better at working her size and asserting herself.

The combination of the two, combined with a house style which has shifted to more even wrestling and not just chaotic heels steamrolling people, gave this a much different feel than it would have gotten a couple of years before. Ripper wasn’t nearly as protected, though she was a bit on the finish, managing to clothesline both Mimi and Hori before they ducked and got her back (that drew Devil in with the stick to end the match). Mimi had a lot of clutch roll ups out of nowhere while Hori was able to just ragdoll Devil at times. We didn’t get a Hori vs Ripper match up though the match seemed to build to it. They had a singles eventually  but we don’t have it on tape. Devil did take over in the second fall and it was by smashing Mimi in the head with a chair a few times; it didn’t matter how assertive the babyfaces were in the face of that. I’m not sure this one ever really settled down but it each fall had a nice, exciting, sprinty feel to it, at least. And it’s convinced me that I’m right about how far Hagiwara has come and the fact she probably doesn’t get enough credit.

K: 2/3 falls main event tag match. Pretty common on AJW TV at this time.

The purpose of the first fall seems to be developing the feud between Devil Masami and Mimi Hagiwara. Not that Monster & Jumbo don't contribute anything, but there's no real big moment from them, although part of that might be when they're all brawling on the outside the camera is following Devil & Mimi fighting a lot more often. Even compared to their last singles things feel a bit more frantic in how they're throwing themselves at each other desperate to gain the upper hand. It's a good vibe. Things look pretty dangerous when Mimi hits her special backdrop and looks like she almost drops Devil on the back of her head, and then straight afterward picks Devil up for what looked like a very low piledriver. Devil sells it extremely well or is legitimately knocked loopy...

I actually think it is Devil just selling really well though, as she's still acting like she's been knocked loopy in the 2nd fall, however takes a perfect bump for a Mimi punch which, if I can break kayfabe a little, obviously wasn't hard enough to actually put her on her ass. Very good Devil performance here.

This second fall is when we switch to showcasing Monster Ripper a bit. The moment she tags in for the first time, she shoves Mimi and Mimi goes so far flying backwards the crowd audibly gasps. Great bump, but also very effective in the wider context as this gets over that Monster is superhuman strong and we should be very worried about the babyfaces in this match, but also future matches Monster's gonna be in on this tour. Monster also gets to throw around and suplex Jumbo Hori when they're paired, which you don't see often.

Mimi gets hit with a big backbreaker and it's her turn to still be selling when the 3rd fall starts. Devil hits a nice Jumbo Tsuruta style running knee, I've heard that she was one of the few AJW wrestlers to watch men's wrestling, so that might have been evidence of it. She also looks really good crush Mimi's throat with her shin and then dragging her across the match in that position so she's in the heel corner. I've seen that move from Yumi Ikeshita before, but the not the dragging across the mat escalated version. 

There's no 'big' moment to point to here, but Mimi's selling in this whole section is very good. She looked exhausted and struggling to just hang on and survive. Even her elegant rollups still have an element of 'just acting on instinct' in them. Melancholy is in the air. She's doing a lot of work here and it's not that much of a problem that Jumbo Hori, hasn't really done much. She hits a couple of cool looking powerbombs in this 3rd fall but other than that her tagging in feels like just parts where Mimi can get a break. 

One of those matches that’s clearly good, if not entirely satisfying, but you’re definitely wanting more. But of course I would say that wouldn’t I? 

***1/2
  

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/4 - 5/10

ROH TV 5/7/26

The Infantry vs Eddie Kingston/Ortiz

MD: I don't get a lot of chance to talk about the Infantry. I'd like to talk about the Infantry. I'm going to talk about the Infantry. 

If you asked me my take on Bravo and Dean in 2023, I'd tell you that they had a real WCW C-Show vibe to them, that sort of Men At Work or Disorderly Conduct feel. Mean Mike and Tough Tom. Nothing wrong with that. My kind of thing. Good hands. Guys you want on a card. Guys who could put over people you want to push and make them look good in a five minute or seven minute or ten minute match, whatever time you had to fill. A good team, but a low ceiling as high energy babyfaces who could engage the crowd early in the night and do their job well. 

They have come so far from that point and I'd argue without a ton of machinery behind them. You want me to liken them to someone now? I'd compare them to DDP, someone who put in the work, honed his act, got better and better, and ultimately was undeniable. Obviously, they're not entirely (definitionally) undeniable yet, but no one that takes the time, seeks them out, and pays attention would think of denying them. Right now, I don't see a ceiling except for the imagination of bookers. 

They're an incredibly alive, immersive, engaged act. Constant movement, constant working (their opponents in the ring and on the apron, the ref, the camera, the crowd, each other, other members of STP at ringside), constant jawing, constant innovation. They keep adding to the act. That could be anything from Ishin Gundan style clubbering in the corner to Dean utilizing the Bronco Buster to Bravo sitting on the apron and talking to the camera or playing to Christyan XO at ringside. Bravo has fun strikes, and I think his crossover punch looks a good as almost anything else in AEW/ROH. 

And they manage all of this while leaning into the strengths of tag team wrestling instead of just letting it fall to excess and become a structureless mess. 

Look at the Eddie/Ortiz match. Ortiz scrapped with them early, but they managed a blind tag and took over on him. They cut off the ring in about six different ways: Dean knocked Ortiz from a neutral corner into the Infantry's with a European uppercut. When Ortiz tried to proactively fight his way out, they caught him and started the tandem clubbering. That drew Eddie in and when the ref pulled him back, they Dean took the initiative to choke Ortiz into the ropes with his foot. He tagged right before Ortiz could start to fight back and Bravo cut him off. 

Ortiz was great here, constantly fighting back and looking for opportunities. When Bravo put him up in the tree of woe so he could throw punches, Ortiz proved himself to be anything but helpless and started biting Bravo's hand. Bravo in turn, stomped away. That drew Eddie and Dean took advantage. Eddie chased Dean around ringside, Bravo ambushed him, and they both attacked Ortiz. This is just great tag team wrestling, great heeling, using the rules as something to push off of to create a compelling narrative instead of running from them in the name of "creativity." The things they were doing here were far more creative than most endless bomb spotfests, because it was all creative within meaningful boundaries. 

From there, it's more cutting off the ring. Bravo shot off with Garvin stomps to Ortiz' extremities, but each one drove him back towards Dean in the corner. Dean came in, worked a hold. Ortiz fought up, got some hope, got cut off to Eddie's chagrin, and they took back control in their corner. That meant a tandem whip in, the Carlie Crossover punch, and Dean adding insult to injury while Bravo talked to the camera. They're just an incredibly complete, multi-faceted act at this point. 

After drawing in Eddie one last time, the match made it to the hot tag, but only after making Ortiz really earn it. The belly-to-back suplex he got just opened the door; he still had to dodge one last attempt to cut the ring in half and roll his way to the corner. Things broke down accordingly. Eddie cleaned house, trapped Dean and then both in the corner with his Kobashi chops (stooging; another facet to the act), and Ortiz got some revenge with a spinebuster and tandem Russian Leg Sweep/STO.

They transitioned quickly from comeback to finishing stretch by breaking up a Doomsday Device attempt and then took it home sharply, focused, avoiding sixteen false finishes and going with a banana peel instead. They hit a powerplex, which I'm not sure I've ever seen them do. Ortiz broke up Boot Camp, Eddit got his exploder, Ortiz snuck out a a drive forward pin, and they cycled into the post-match with STP going on the assault and Mance Warner making the save, building to the next thing.

Really good, focused, character-driven, technically sound, dynamic tag team wrestling that was built upon all the fundamentals of building up pressure and letting it all boil over that the art form is all about. They could have had a similar match a couple of years ago, but it wouldn't have had the same over the top confidence that makes them stand out so much now. It's the combination of the two, the substance and the style, that makes the Infantry special. People may not always consciously notice the substance, but it's there as strongly as any other team in the company, and they've picked their own stylized lane when it comes to laying sizzle on top of it, the chip on their shoulder driving an aggression that sticks with you as a viewer. You could slot them anywhere on the card and they'd deliver. 

Between Eddie's frustration on the apron, Ortiz playing his role extremely well, and the Infantry owning every aspect of this match, this reminded me of an entirely different sort of WCW match, something like Horsemen vs Rich/Morton where it was still a TV match, still niche, still relatively low stakes, but where some of us still remember it very fondly.

AEW Dynamite 5/6/26

Kevin Knight vs Darby Allin

MD: This was a solid and clever progression from the previous couple of weeks. It started out as a babyface title match, and rarely do 2026 title matches really feel like traditional NWA style title matches in the build. This did. They began by wrestling. There's something really refreshing about that. It was character-driven too. Darby's dangerous on the mat, but Knight is dojo trained. He saw how Darby kept luring people or dragging them into endless escalation, into mutually assured destruction. Darby is, as previously noted, a cockroach, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. He survives the escalation when others cannot. That's how he wins.

For most of the match, Knight was ready for it and he kept his head. That meant sticking to wrestling for as long as possible. The problem, of course, is that Knight didn't get to fully decide. Darby is a proactive, engaged competitor, a champion, one who feels like he is fighting for his life. Where Knight slipped was when he let Darby control the pace. That's when they crashed into one another with flying clotheslines, when they started rope running only for Darby to change things up again and go to striking instead. In that regard, it really felt like a world title match, like a game of human chess.

Still, Knight showed restraint and maturity. Darby has a need for excess, a need to push things farther. It's how he wins but it's also how he feels alive. Kevin Knight? He feels plenty alive all the time. He's doing fine. He's living his best life while Darby's living the only life possible for him. So when he dropkicked Darby out of the ring, he didn't go diving after him. He took a beat, took a breath, slid out and kept control. Very smart pro wrestling.

Darby is, however, a raging river, and even the strongest dam can only hold off against the rapids for so long. Knight took every opportunity but Darby kept coming. He tried to go after the leg, but Darby would have no part in it. He tried to control the pace, but there was only so much he, or anyone else, could do.  Eventually, Knight could put up with no more. Darby positioned him into a chair on the floor like he'd done with previous opponents. Knight avoided their fate (usually a missile dropkick from the top downwards), but Darby ended up in the perfect position for an insane Knight aerial attack, and Knight couldn't refuse. 

The subsequent clothesline from the top over the announce table was spectacular but also clearly a strategic mistake. Knight came out of it worse off, hobbled. Darby was prone, but Knight was a half step slow in taking advantage. He followed up with the Coast to Coast dropkick that had previously taken out Darby (at least that's what they tell us), but despite that and the UFO that followed it, he couldn't cover Darby in time due to the injured leg. When Darby rolled away on a second attempt, Knight had no choice but to follow and he walked right into a trap: Darby kicked out the leg and got the guillotine that eventually set him up to win.

Overall, another strong title defense driven by Darby's penchant for escalation and his opponent having to weigh the cost/benefit of keeping up or pulling back. Knight had managed well right until he didn't. I'll be honest that I would have been happier if the finish was set up by Knight coming up short with the Coast to Coast due to the injury. There's a tendency for AEW to overdo finishes here. Knight wiping out on the Coast to Coast would have been just as dramatic as him hitting two huge moves but not being able to capitalize and would have gotten over the consequence of what happened even more. That's a nitpick though. Overall, this, like the previous two matches and the PAC match that followed was very good. Hell of a title run so far.

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