2021 Ongoing MOTY List: Mr. Condor, Black Terry, a Junkyard, and a New #1

1. Mr. Condor vs. Black Terry ZONA 23 12/5

PAS: I don't even know what to say about this match. Black Terry is 69 years old, Mr. Condor is - in comparison - a youthful 64, this is a fucking junkyard somewhere in Mexico, and dear god is this one of the wildest fist fights I have ever seen in pro wrestling. These two just absolutely unload on each other with incredible looking rights and lefts, slam each other into the sides of cars, break beer bottles and stab each other with them. The pace of this is incredible. I mean guys this old shouldn't even be able to walk slowly on a treadmill, much less fight at this intensity for this long, especially while spraying blood out their heads. At one point Condor breaks a fucking pane of car safety glass on Terry's head! There are punch exchanges in this match which are as good as any punch exchanges in wrestling history. The finish is slightly unsatisfying but doesn't do much to mitigate the hellstorm which preceded it. Eric and I just did an hour plus podcast on how much we loved Eddie Marlin vs. Tommy Gilbert and old man punchouts and then THIS fucking drops. Just watch it. It is unbelievably great.

MD: I made a mistake in the first seconds of this. Mr. Condor had come down in full regalia that made him look like a younger man. I thought Terry might do the same, so I looked away and took care of something else for a moment. Alerted by the crisp yet moist sound of bone hitting flesh without hesitation or remorse, I glanced back at the screen. In doing so, I immediately realized that I needed to jump back fifteen seconds to watch Terry, and the violence he draped himself with as casually as his red Flash shirt, arrived fists-first. I should have known better. I didn't make that mistake again. For the rest of the match, I didn't look away.

This was about the sights and the sounds and the sensation. Sometimes, looking away wasn't my choice. They occasionally cut wide to the crowd, showing us this outside venue, adorned with a burnt out remnant of a car, raucous, chanting people huddled all around, and clouds of dirt bursting up through the air and into the ring. It was during one of those wide shots where we heard the breaking of glass and the gasps that had followed. Mr. Condor had escalated the situation by breaking a bottle, which we saw very clearly as we returned the action, the action, in this case, being the rending of Black Terry's flesh. Condor followed it up by placing Terry's head upon a chair and bringing another down upon it. As Terry was battered, dust came flying upwards, as if an almost 70 year old rug had been smashed against a wall for the first time in decades.

Terry would come back, winning a strike exchange which was exactly what you might expect it to be: two old, hard men standing their ground with no recoil, no give, not moving an inch as you could see their skin compress from the impact. As Terry got the better of it, Condor reached for another bottle, smashing it. You could feel the immediately changed mood through the screen and on the faces of Terry and all of those around him. Terry found a bottle of his own and it became detente, a necessary deescalation to prevent mutually assured destruction. Bottles discarded, they finally moved back into the ring; destruction would come anyway, at the hands of Condor, his constant need to escalate, and a giant glass plate. By this point, there was blood everywhere, coming off of not just foreheads but shoulders and backs as well.

Terry would win the one exchange in the match that truly mattered, picking up and dropping Condor to set up a submission, but the ravages of a lifetime of this slowed him down and neither could claim an advantage on the hold that would follow. Terry would recover first though, would manage to drop back into a pin, but just as with the leglock he had attempted, no human that had been through what he had, not even the toughest, most reliant 69 year old man alive, could be expected to hold the bridge. All four shoulders ended up on the mat. All four shoulders were counted out together. In the end, nothing was proven between these two men. There was no resolution. But does that mean that nothing mattered? For fifteen minutes, these two withered, gnarled legends showed that they had more life within them still than men half their age. If that doesn't matter then what does?

JR: This match made me think about eye contact in wrestling. Generally, there are two moments that stand out in terms of eye contact, and both are things that I could do with less of. The first is when it is done in order to start or continue some overly choreographed spot, both wrestlers lock eyes and then begin something they discussed backstage at great lengths, like a silent countdown. The second is the mid match staredown, which has now become such an emotional short cut that it tends to lower the stakes rather than heighten them.
 
But here, I think about eye contact in a new way. The majority of this match is two men punching each other in the jaw and in the chest and in the face. And throughout, Mr. Condor stares at Black Terry, looking at him with hate in his heart. The camera is so close. You see him do it. You see which punches hurt, which punches rock him, which punches he braces for. And during each one, he stares at Black Terry. It is riveting in a way that is totally unique.

And again, what can be said about Black Terry that hasn’t already been said here? I feel like we said it earlier in the year with the Marvin match, and I think there is chance, at least upon first watch, that this match is just flat out better. I think that the more Terry I watch from the past few years, the more I think he is the greatest sound maker in wrestling history. He is like Jim Breaks, in that you can listen to a Black Terry match and it elicits a feeling. Of course, Breaks used this gift to make whine and cry and give a crowd someone to hate and laugh at in equal parts. Terry’s grunts and sighs and yells and vocalizations are the edge of suffering. Terry breathing hard and loud while you hear his fist hit bone again and again is like the camera whirr at the beginning of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It makes you queasy with your eyes closed, and if you dare to open them, you see only violence.

There is nothing else like this match this year. It’s the first match I watched and immediately texted people about. It’s something else.

ER: Sometimes there's a match. Sometimes there's a match that's the most anticipated match all month in the group chat, the one. multiple people spent 4 weeks wondering whether that day would be the day that this match would appear in full, wondering if we would get a Christmas bonus drop, reassuring each other that we *usually* get full Zona 23 shows.

Sometimes there's a match. Sometimes there's a match that so perfectly defines a connection formed by two friends over the past 20 years, that Phil Schneider calls me at 9 AM - at least 105 minutes earlier than I have ever fielded a call from Phil Schneider in my life - the day that match finally drops. Sometimes there's a match that makes you answer the phone at 9 AM with total concern, immediately wondering why your friend - who has never called you before the morning fog has broken before in your history together - is calling you on a weekday while you're getting ready for work. Sometimes there's a match that feels so noteworthy that it prompts a phone call reunion between two great friends who met because of pro wrestling, but haven't talked on the phone in at least 5 years. 

Sometimes there's a match. Sometimes there's a match where two AARP eligible men, one who looks like the toughest possible Richie Aprile and one who looks like the coolest most violent Glenn Greenwald, have a fistfight with punch exchanges that you could sincerely, soberly argue are the greatest punch exchanges of any wrestling match in history. Sometimes there's a match where a man who lost his mask to Rey Misterio Jr. 30 years ago throws at minimum 12 different right hands in a dirt lot junkyard that are as fine as any right hand thrown by Lawler, Eaton, or Murdoch. Sometimes there's a match where two grandfathers each drip so much blood out of there heads that it makes you wonder how high the percentage of men this age have lost this much blood and not been on an ambulance within 5 minutes. Sometimes there's a match so stiff, so gleefully violent, a match that's more than its punches; a match where the chairshots are just as painful, where the punches hit so hard that you swear you can see facial swelling minutes in, where you genuinely don't know how far they will take this blood feud and it makes you actually shift in your seat with unblinking eyes wanting to know. 

This is that match. 

2021 MOTY MASTER LIST