Drew Gulak is Standing in the Wake of Our Pain

Drew Gulak vs. Zach Sabre Jr. CZW 4/10/11 - FUN

PAS: This was a chance to check out both of these guys in their earliest incarnations, and Sabre looked 14 years old. Sabre was really just a WOS tribute act at this point, but those are fun spots and Gulak was a good foil. This was really hard mat wrestling like later Gulak matches and I had no idea CZW was running this stuff this early. I liked how frustrated Gulak got and how he gritted his teeth and tried to grind Sabre down. This didn't have the polish of the their later matches against each other, but it had the same DNA and I enjoyed checking in.

ER: Phil told me earlier that this looked like high school versions of Sabre and Gulak doing their best Sabre/Gulak match, and I thought "What? It's less than 10 years ago, it's not like they were in their teens." And then I turned this on and it looked like two 15 year old brothers with dorky ass teen sports bowl cuts that just got picked up by their mom from soccer practice. I don't know if this was good - if I saw two different guys have this same exact match in 2020 I probably wouldn't bother to write it up - but it was fun seeing them working out the kind of match they would both be great at just a few years later. Gulak looked a lot better than Sabre. Gulak really didn't wrestle that differently than any other time I've seen him. Sabre really looked like a backyarder who somehow only had access to World of Sport, who was doing his best to mimic what he had seen. Every sequence he did here he can do a lot tighter today, and Gulak did a great job at actually making this stuff look like he couldn't prevent some of this stuff from happening. Some sections of submission set-ups looked good, but full sections didn't. I liked Gulak's palm strikes to Sabre's body, but down the home stretch they did these hand slap headbutt trade off sequence that looked absolutely silly. But it was fun seeing the bones of this style, before it was a style being done great on the indies.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE DREW GULAK