AEW Five Fingers of Death 4/1 - 4/7 Part 2

ROH Supercard of Honor 4/5/24

Eddie Kingston vs Mark Briscoe

MD: What happens when a man bolstered by a dream comes across another man with a dream bigger than his own? Eddie Kingston has done everything right, has done his best, has done anyone's best, despite all of the odds and the weight of the world shifted against him. He met his heroes and fought their scion, the last remnant of an age of kings. He overcame the personification of every argument against him, a Swiss nightmare that had haunted him for a decade. He slipped, stuttered, stammered, but regain his footing and climbed, one impossible victory after the next, to create an American Triple Crown, defeating his brother in blood to do so. And then he defended it against his the representation of everything he was not to gain respect and to drink from an empty well. 

And yet.

Here, across the ring from him, was another brother, one in blood and spirit, a man who had lost a brother of his own but and only saw his faith redoubled in the process. This was a man who had come up short in his challenges, who had lost his opportunities. And eleven years to the day of his brother's triumph, he had obtained yet one more, the opportunity of a lifetime, maybe the opportunity of two lifetimes. 

And Eddie, for all that he had learned, for all that he had gained, for all that he had become, resented it. It wasn't fair. He had fought so hard, had pushed so far, had proven his own worth against absolute paragons, and yet there was a man more worthy in the ring, a man whose story was more valid. 

Eddie fought like a man possessed. Briscoe had an early advantage by taking big risks, but risks have consequences. In this case, it was a chair left in the ring. It had taken him to great heights and by means of a chokeslam, it brought him low as well. Blood followed and Eddie pressed his advantage. Briscoe's comebacks were big, huge, meaningful, dramatic. These were not hope spots, they were plunges of faith. But Eddie's cutoffs were monstrous. 

On some primal, bestial level, Eddie understood. For Briscoe's story to worthy of subsuming his own, it would have to be tested. It was tested in blood and pain and violence. For the triumph to be worthy of the moment, it would have to be earned. If Briscoe was to fall short, then that was proof that his story was not as meaningful as Eddie's. This was nature. This was life and death. This was pro wrestling.

So Eddie kept firing on, through Briscoe's hulk up, through Briscoe surviving the Uraken, through an exploder to the floor and Mark barely beating the count. But Briscoe kept coming, kept charging forward, refused to stay down. On this night, his story was simply better, something real, something genuine, something that came from the heart, something that no factory could ever produce. That was the only sort of story that could subsume Eddie's own. 

What could Eddie do when fate was no longer on his side? If he couldn't be the hero glorified in victory, then at least he could be the dragon that made the victory worthwhile. And he was. And it was. And even in defeat, his legend will only grow for it. 

AEW Dynamite 4/3/24

Bryan Danielson vs Lance Archer

MD: This is beneath the Kingston vs Briscoe match which is the draw this week and everyone's exhausted from Mania weekend anyway so I can sneak all sorts of stuff in here without repercussion. I rewatched both Ospreay vs Hobbs and Danielson vs Archer because there's no real way to cover the latter without factoring in the former. The two matches are a paired set with the meeting on the ramp bridging the two. Both Dynasty opponents were facing giants. Hobbs and Archer are very different giants with different skillsets, but giants nonetheless.

I am going to make an analogy. It is just an analogy. It is not any sort of direct judgment. It's just a way to try to get at something I was feeling and that I have felt for a long time. It's because sometimes entirely unrelated gets invented and becomes prevalent and it allows you for a good point of comparison to help understand or describe something else. That's all. So you know when you read an article that is either partially or completely written by AI? You see the hallmarks whether it's specific language or structure, whether it's too much background information or a sort of soulless generalization. By now, after the year we just had, we can recognize it almost immediately. It takes you out of whatever you're reading, casts doubt on the entire publication, makes you want to just skip down to whatever new piece of information the article purported to offer. 

That's the feeling I get sometimes out of a lot of this stuff. It's not necessarily the same (because this is an analogy) but I recognize it and it takes me out of the moment. I'd argue that there are maybe three big changes to wrestling over the last forty years. One is about what the audience wanted, going from caring most about the destination to caring most about the journey. They went from wanting to see the babyface vanquish the heel (admittedly with their cheers potentially powering the babyface) to wanting to see a great match and get the rep to say they were there live to see it. Wrestling went from mostly called in the ring to thoroughly planned. As a side effect of the first two, most TV wrestling now is a series of spots, one after the other, with very little connective tissue as opposed to a lot of connective tissue and steady progression leading to spots. It went from a 70/30 shift one way to a 30/70 shift the other (if not 20/80 or more). Pro wrestling isn't match, but maybe, just maybe, it is balance.

Ospreay vs Hobbs was a carefully connected series of spots. The transitions were understated and usually implicit, based on Hobbs missing a move or Ospreay taking advantage of a little bit of space. Occasionally you'd get Hobbs playing to the crowd or arguing with the ref. Mostly though, it was spot after spot, artfully orchestrated and executed sequence after sequence. Archer vs Danielson was much closer to 60/40. Archer ambushed him from the start, leaned on him. Danielson would try to fire back, would get kicks in, would create some motion. Archer would shut him down. The hope spots were just that. Some of Archer's big offense was clearly set up and thought through. But it all flowed with a general sense of organic meanness and violence and perseverance driving it, up front and center, pushing things forward, not an afterthought to fit into the margins but the central impetus of the match. It all built towards a real comeback, until Danielson finally chipped away at Archer through skill and persistence until he brought him down to a size where knees could fly into faces. 

Wrestling is being pushed more and more into rewarding one outcome over the other, but then you stop and see that the one of the only people getting actual heat through his ringwork is Christian, that the fans get behind Dustin in a way slightly different from how they get behind anyone else, that there's so much more to analyze and examine in Danielson's matches even without ever seeing the strings that are hanging and visible all over the place with so many others. Progress is possible, perhaps even necessary, but there's a way to walk a line so that immersion isn't lost. Maybe, in 2024, that's only true if you're one of the greatest of all time, however.