Category Archives: Indies

ICYMI: Number 1

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When Andrew arrives at the pearly gates and they evaluate what he did with his life, watching wrestling matches will rack up more hours than any other single task. The guy’s done a lot of DVD miles. Every week he’ll pick one of his favourite matches to share with you. Here’s his first…

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Before the yeses and the nos and the hugs… before the Sierras and the Hotels and the Indias, the Echoes and the Limas and the Deltas… there was, well, there was loads actually.

Between them Bryan Danielson and Tyler Black amassed 15 years worth of matches before signing with the WWE and becoming Daniel Bryan and Seth Rollins respectively. Working for US indie promotions such as IWA: Mid South, PWG and Ring of Honor the two met on a number of occasions; both as opponents and, as is the case here, as team mates.

This week’s match is for the Ring of Honor World Tag Team Championship and features the team of Danielson and Black taking on The American Wolves (Davey Richards and Eddie “not the Olympic ski jumper” Edwards) with Wrestlegasm favourite (and now WWE trainer) Sara Del Rey at ringside.   If you’ve not seen much of Rollins/Black before his SHIELD tenure you should be in for a pleasant surprise, especially when he pulls out the Phoenix Splash and God’s Last Gift.

Hope you enjoy and I’ll be back next week with another match you might not have seen before.

andrew

What you see when you’re not looking – Part Two

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The first ‘What you see when you’re not looking’ post was originally going to include this topic. Then the first turned out to be longer than I expected and I didn’t want to do this point a disservice by tagging it onto the end of something else. So, this is part two – on why wrestling has to stop clinging to the sex industry. 

When we took a step back from blogging and observed without commenting, it became clearer to me just how much the sex industry remains unnecessarily intertwined with the wrestling business. The truth is, we should have cut those apron strings years ago. It’s outdated. It’s harmful to the business as it moves forward and becomes more popular – especially with children – and it’s damaging to the position of women in the industry. WWE is probably cleaner than it’s ever been, but on the independent scene, wrestling’s fixation with the sleazier side is reigning in its potential to be a legitimate and credible form of entertainment. It’s not good enough to say that wrestling is sleazy and always will be. It can change, if promotions are inclined to put the wheels in motion.

For all the rose-tinted harping back to the late 1990s and the 2000s, it was murky. When the American government feel the need to intervene, you know you’re getting something wrong. It was time to start cleaning up wrestling. The government’s concerns largely surrounded health, but wrestling needed an overhaul in every way. The landscape has changed dramatically since I first became a wrestling fan in 1997. It’s changed since we started this blog in 2009. But it’s hit a stumbling block, particularly when it comes to women.

I’m confident we’ll never see a repeat of Trish Stratus barking like a dog on her hands and knees on worldwide television again. I sincerely hope that bra and panties matches have been left in the ‘what were we thinking?’ category of wrestling history. But the connection to the porn industry that hangs around wrestling like a stale smell the day after a party is just one of the reasons I sometimes find it embarrassing to plug it as entertainment to my friends and family and to the young children in my life.

I fully appreciate that not all promotions are looking to be family friendly, although I think they could do a better job at letting families know when a show won’t be for kids. I also acknowledge that being a woman in my early thirties, I’m looking for something very different to what I was searching for when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Your tastes change. You become more discerning. You have a clearer view of what you will and won’t let slide without comment. When I was much younger, when hormones were raging, I was terribly unsure of myself and every conversation felt like it had to be loaded with sniggering innuendo and sexuality. I wasn’t as concerned with women’s place in wrestling. I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t really know how to protest it. I have changed, the world has changed and wrestling has changed. It just needs one last, very easy push to make itself properly current.

Outside the CHIKARA and Shimmer bubble, wrestling still feels sexist. It makes me sad when fans at British wrestling shows are genuinely surprised when the couple of women on the card put on a great match. It’s especially disappointing when they feel the need to point out that they’re ‘Really good, and not just good for girls, either’. WWE has to take some of the responsibility here. For almost everyone it’s the first wrestling they’re exposed to. If their promotion of women involves nothing but one-minute matches and boyfriend or beauty stories, we’re not telling the young people and children watching that women have more to offer. It should be a given, but it isn’t. It just feeds the notion that the female purpose in wrestling is merely decorative. The rest of the responsibility lies with anyone who doesn’t make an effort correct these archaic views.

Women already struggle to get their names on the card in both mainstream and indie wrestling (British and overseas) simply because the impression is that crowds won’t get behind them. When, for example, porn stars or exotic dancers are hired to act as valets, interval entertainment or even makeshift wrestlers, the female wrestlers find themselves competing with both the male talent and the additional bookings. Very rarely are men hired in wrestling because they’ve had a career in the sex industry. You’ll never see a man on the roster overshadowed by someone who works in porn. It’s blatant pandering to dinosaurs of the game and hormone infested young men who have money to burn. Just because the lowest common denominator sells, it doesn’t mean you should sell it. If your wrestling and your stories are good you shouldn’t need porn, and a little social conscience goes an awful long way.

I’m not on a crusade against sex. We’re all grown-ups and we all enjoy our sex lives. I’m not even trying to banish pornography. It’s not my cup of tea, but as long as it isn’t hurting anyone, I don’t subscribe to the idea that it’s universally a terrible thing. Most crucially, I’m not suggesting we rid wrestling of ‘attraction’. It’s a highly visual medium and aesthetics are crucial. Wrestlers, particularly in the mainstream, are hired for their good (or less so) looks to fit who the company wants them to be; just like actors in a TV show. It’s obviously not the only reason talent are hired, but having ‘a look’ that you then shape the stories around – whether appealing to the eye or not – is a fundamental part of wrestling. The irony that I’m writing this post on a website called Wrestlegasm isn’t lost on me. And I’m definitely not ignoring that ultimately wrestling is a load of oiled, half-naked folk rolling around with each other with a story as its backdrop. But there is a stark difference between Dolph Ziggler and AJ Lee kissing on camera to sell their relationship, for example, and sex for the sake of selling sex. The latter is what we need to move away from.

Wrestling, and indie wrestling especially, needs to think carefully about the language it uses, too. You can only pull the Jack Swagger/Zeb Colter trick of being outlandishly politically incorrect if you’re making it absolutely clear that the views your ‘characters’ are peddling are completely unacceptable. Without the caveat of million-dollar TV contracts hanging over your head, there’s little incentive to get that balance right every single time.  It’s not enough just to book women on shows. How they’re treated is important too. On the unregulated and non-televised circuit, women are sometimes on the receiving end of unsavoury sexual banter. Eva Wiseman recently wrote an excellent column in the Observer on lad culture in universities. She talked about how you can find it difficult to remove yourself from derogatory behaviour and language because when you’re in a group where it’s expected, you play along to fit in. It’s the only option. There is an awful lot of that in wrestling. I believe it’s one of the reasons so many people leave wrestling as they grow older.

There’s a great deal of tolerating what was once acceptable and it’s very disappointing. I’d like to see braver booking, cleverer stories and less reliance on the sex industry to raise interest in wrestling products. The gap between the two needs to grow larger. Fans will follow where promoters lead. They just need to have the courage to move forward.

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What you see when you’re not looking

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When you’re removed from a community you see it with different eyes. You spot the stuff you missed before because you were caught up in the same old arguments. Sometimes you observe heartwarming things that you’re proud to be associated with, and sometimes you spot themes that are far less endearing.  The least appealing traits I’ve been watching lately are bad spin and its closest bedfellow, promotion snobbery.

Dara O’Briain has a brilliant segment in one of his stand-up shows about how much he despises music snobs and so-called guilty pleasures. “Music snobbery is the worst kind of snobbery. Oh, you like those noises? Those sounds in your ear? Do you like them? They’re the wrong sounds! You should like these sounds in your ear!” Dara clearly never spent time with wrestling fans. We’re champions at snobbery. We are the worst.

Over the past six months or so I’ve sat back and watched fans make other fans feel bad about their wrestling viewing choices. The barbs seem even more spiteful when that choice is WWE.  During the interval at the WWE show we mentioned in our last post, I checked Twitter to find that people attending indie shows that night were trashing the very event we were watching. Who were they to tell me it was awful? They weren’t even there! We were having a ball.

Taking the most popular route is selling out, right? No. It’s just enjoying something that a lot of other people also happen to like. Equally, there are just as many mainstream fans who believe if it’s not on TV it can’t be good. I know, because before I experienced my first indie show almost 10 years ago I used to be one of them. I would encourage everyone to explore beyond their usual boundaries. Hopefully you’ll find something new. If nothing else it gives your favourite promotion some perspective. But if you decide that what you really love is the mainstream, that’s alright too.

In that same section of his show, Dara O’Briain goes on to talk about how infuriating it is that people who dip into the mainstream are forced to call it their guilty pleasure because it’s just not underground enough. The thing is, though, we’re wrestling fans. There is no cool.

A few weeks ago I found myself watching a documentary called Allotment Wars. Bear with me. I watched agog as gentle gardeners sabotaged others’ competition crops, raided plot holders’ sheds and called the police on a youngster who found himself a tenner in rent arrears. A couple of old friends fell out two years ago. You could feel from their interviews that the fight and their continuing rivalry had left them both burning with rage.

Out loud I shouted “What is wrong with these people? None of this actually matters in the grand scheme of life!” I scoffed at their silly bickering over carrot soil and congratulated myself on being too well-adjusted to be involved with a group that deals in such juvenile squabbling. Of course, until I remembered that if there’s one thing that can be desperately uncool, petty and all puffed up with misplaced importance, it’s being a wrestling fan.

The older you get the more people shoot you that ‘Wrestling? Really?’ look. The older you get the more awkward a positive response feels.  None of us got into this big ball of ridiculous to score cool points. I’m trying to avoid a High School Musical moment here, but if we’re all in this together why are we so intent on playing games of one-upmanship?  Who are we trying to impress? It’s weird. Your thing is not better, it’s just different.

The worst byproduct of this behaviour is bad spin.  Bad spin is what bad politicians do. They make themselves look the more progressive option by rubbishing the competition. Most of the time they’ll say nothing about what actually makes them so wonderful. As long as they’ve planted that ’them bad, me better’ message, the job’s done. It’s lazy and transparent.

I hate seeing this tactic in wrestling. Whether it’s tweets from well-meaning fans or promotions themselves, I want a wrestling company to do more to excite me than make hollow claims about being ‘better’ than WWE. I don’t want to hear that your show is superior to another popular thing if you can’t even tell me why. I want to know what sets it apart from the rest and makes it unique amidst a world full of weekend wrestling watching options. Otherwise, it just feels like you’re covering up your failings by clinging on to your opponents’ faults. It turns me off.

We all watch wrestling for different reasons and we switch promotions to alter our experiences. A tiny indie show will never deliver the reliable gloss of Monday Night Raw. Monday Night Raw will never achieve the unpredictable intimacy of a tiny indie show. I don’t want them to out-do each other. I want them to put every ounce of energy into being the best at the very specific brand of wrestling they deliver, whatever that happens to be.

It’s completely possible to love both equally, just like it’s fine to listen to Katy Perry one minute, then jump to that band you saw with 19 other people in an unlicenced indie club. It’s alright if you like the PG era. It’s fine if you also go elsewhere for something more grown up sometimes. If you thought WWE peaked when it was still called WWF, that’s fine. But it peaked in 2002 for you. The kids in the front row right now have no idea what you’re talking about. The Attitude Era is an overpriced vintage t-shirt for them and that’s okay too.

If you were stood at an ice cream stand with a friend and they chose a different flavour to you, you wouldn’t throw their cone in the bin and insist that only your flavour’s worth eating. What you’d probably do is encourage them to grab a spoon and have a taste of yours. Let’s do more of that. Let’s cut each other some slack, understand where opinions start and facts stop, and pass out more sample spoons. The flavour doesn’t matter as long as we’re all having fun. Unless, of course, you want to buy me a TNA sundae. ‘Cause that thing’s gonna need an awful lot of cherries on top!

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The Eve and John Conundrum

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There came a point where I stopped bickering on a regular basis about how disheartened I was with the WWE Divas division. The wound on my forehead, acquired from banging it against a brick wall, would never heal unless I gave it time to scab. Reacting was always tempting. It stuck its middle finger up at me like smoking, sniggering, backpack-wearing teenagers on a school trip to London; beckoning one of the statuesque Queen’s Guards to buckle under the weight of their immature insult. This week, I snatched at that middle finger.

How did we get here? Why was it okay for the WWE’s top babyface to use derogatory language towards a woman, in front of children? We need to backtrack. The WWE is sitting on a goldmine in its Divas division. And yet, they refuse to plumb the depths of that mine to get to the good stuff. For a company so driven by profit, continually looking for the next big thing to keep fans interested, it’s just lazy economics. Why have a portion of your roster largely idle? The merchandising opportunities alone could be worth a fortune. I never understood why there were no LayCool t-shirts, for example.

There is a cycle of indifference at the heart of this problem. When it comes to long storytelling, indie wrestling matches can largely stand alone, and they’re no less enjoyable as a result. In the WWE, we need a sturdy narrative. We need verbal and physical dialogue that lead into the next week. We need peaks and troughs and, more than anything, we need to care about the characters. During the part of a show you care about least, you empty your bladder, or get something to eat, or chat to your mates. Enter the one-minute Divas match.

Give people a reason to care and they’ll stay in their seats. Come up with clever, forward thinking stories and the crowd will engage with the action. Trust that your female roster can perform as well as their male counterparts. Challenge them, and they’ll rise to it. If you work in a professional kitchen as a pot washer and stay a pot washer, you’ll never learn how to cook. But if the head chef gives you the opportunity to step up and be a part of service, you’ll acquire the skills you need to progress. It’s hardly rocket science.

Let the more experienced women bring the others up to their standard. Give them longer matches so they can learn from each other. The Divas aren’t all useless models, as so many like to suggest. The female roster is a mixture of indie graduates and athletes learning-on-the-job, just like the male roster. Beth Phoenix paid her dues in the indies, as did CM Punk. Eve Torres is a jiu jitsu expert learning the craft of pro wrestling as she goes. Dolph Ziggler was an amateur collegiate athlete who didn’t learn how to be a professional wrestler until he went to OVW. Nobody ever refers to Dolph as a model.

The WWE are like those people who buy expensive perfume and only use it on very special occasions. The rest of the time they just leave the bottle sat on their dressing table because it looks pretty. The Beth Phoenix vs Tamina Snuka match at the Elimination Chamber pay-per-view was like a gentle mist of CHANEL No. 5. Why not use it every week? Let’s have the best all the time. Nobody will ever  compliment you on the glass bottle you keep hidden away in your bedroom. Use it! Nobody ever compliments the Divas on staying out of sight. Use them!

At first glance, Eve Torres’s involvement with Zack Ryder and John Cena appears to be a small step forward. It’s a Diva taking centre stage in a big story. But the execution was less a dab of CHANEL parfum and more swamped in Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy eau de toilette. Its lack of class reeked to high heaven.

It is great that they wanted to give Eve a personality. It is great that they turned her heel. It’s great that she mixed with main eventers. It’s bad that they rushed the entire heel turn through in a matter of hours. It’s bad that, yet again, a woman is rarely made a villain in the WWE without her being linked to a man or without being involved in a superficial image issue. It’s so unbelievably boring, lazy and outdated. I wonder why Stephanie McMahon doesn’t make her team come up with something better. The answer I keep avoiding is that she may be her father’s daughter in the worst ways, as well as the best. It stings when your heroine doesn’t seem to represent the things you want her to.

Comparisons have been made between Edge and Eve. Edge did indeed use Vickie Guerrero’s position of power to serve himself. But the big difference there was that they were both the villains. The dramatic entertainment came in them slowly destroying each other. They deserved each other. Which leads us uncomfortably to John Cena.

Super Cena! Our hero. Children’s charity worker. Fighting the good fight, day and night. The role model. Setting the moral compass for kids everywhere. All this is what makes Monday night so upsetting. They made John Cena ‘that guy’. A lad. The most insufferable kind of man. Baseball cap on backwards, swigging cheap beer from a plastic cup, double-fist-bumping their buddies, bromancing about town and engaging in ‘the banter’. The kind of nauseating, testosterone charged chatter that some men partake in when they’re in the company of other men. The kind of banter where rape jokes are hilarious. The banter that allowed the offensive and now defunct UniLad website to operate. The lad culture that makes young rugby teams write lists of tour rules that allow cheating on girlfriends to go unreported.

With the language John Cena used towards Eve on Monday night, with his ‘skank juice’ and disease slurs, he aligned himself with ‘those guys’. The vocabulary made him sound about as eloquent as a Jersey Shore cast member. Yes, Eve was the villain, and yes, she revealed herself to be self-serving. But Cena’s reaction, while grinning, popping his Rise Above Hate t-shirt at the camera, and encouraging ‘hoeski’ chants, was hypocritical and confusingly out of character.

Much has been made this week of John Cena’s association with the Be a Star anti-bullying campaign. The initiative is a tricky concept to negotiate for a product based on people bullying each other. But it’s always seemed similar to the ‘don’t try this at home’ videos to me. They tell kids that any bullying they see on TV just isn’t cool in real life and explain that the bullies are mean characters.

The problem with John Cena is not only that he’s the number one good guy. There’s also such an extremely fine line between John Cena the character and John Cena the person, that any lapse of grace in either incarnation damages him somewhere. It’s not an easy place to be, but it’s the price paid for never being the bad guy, on-screen and in life. His choice of insults can’t just be put down to the script. WWE and its performers have to start accepting that they offer a unique, hybrid form of entertainment. It’s neither fiction nor reality and if John Cena is to set the example, he has to do it all the time.  They can’t ignore the impact his words might have on one sector of the audience to briefly win favour with ‘the lads’. Usually he thrives on not being over with that crowd.

In 15 minutes of television, all this succeeded in doing was making me wonder if by simply watching WWE programming, I’m trying to push a square peg through a round hole. Maybe this stuff just isn’t made for me. But I don’t want to give up on it. It’s easy to say ‘just leave it behind and concentrate on the indies.’ And I do watch and love a lot of indie wrestling. But they’re two very different entities. Both WWE and the indies offer things the other can’t, and when it comes down to it, I want to be around when the WWE’s penny finally drops.

Report From The Fort: Best Match (Andrew’s picks)

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We were struggling to narrow down our award to just one match. One of the many things we enjoy about wrestling is that it’s so varied, and there are many contenders for best match, all for different reasons. As such we have picked two matches each, both of which meant a lot to us for different reasons. Rae will be posting hers shortly, but in the meantime…

Winner: Sara Del Rey vs KANA (CHIKARA’s Klunk In Love: Oct 8, 2011)

We’ve declared our undying affection for Sara Del Rey on the blog before, and those affections are indeed unwaning. Not only one of the best female wrestlers in the world, she is arguably one of the best wrestlers in the world full stop. Other than the all female promotion SHIMMER, possibly no company has done more to reward Del Rey’s skill than CHIKARA. In a company featuring wrestling ice creams, temporally displaced Egyptian snake gods and evil (yet devilishly attractive) insect overlords, something as petty as human gender is unlikely to be an issue to success.

When I first took it upon myself to introduce Rae to CHIKARA, one of the matches I showed her was a 2007 bout between Icarus, Gran Akuma & Brodie Lee and Cheech, Cloudy & Sara Del Rey. I don’t think it would be an overestimation to say that Del Rey played a pivotal role in her indoctrination, inspiring not only a love for indie wrestling, but also a typically insightful post on intergender wrestling

KANA on the otherhand, is maybe less known to a wider audience, although 2011 was undoubtedly her “breakthrough” year in the west, with a successful tour of the US taking in CHIKARA and SHIMMER. Having trained and shared a room together early on on their careers, the idea of the two wrestling each other was thought of by many as a dream match.

Then...

...and now

That they were having a match at all was great news. That CHIKARA had the courage and the belief (not only in the wrestlers but also the fans) to make this match the main event of one of their shows gives an indication of just how highly they are thought of. And that faith was more than rewarded with what was easily my match of the year. Not just for the quality of the match (which was amazing) but also in what it stands for. In a year in which the female division in the WWE has often dropped down to levels that can only be described as “risible,” it’s important to remember that there is excellent female wrestling out there.

From SHIMMER’s continued successes to CHIKARA’s Joshimania weekend, from Anarchy Championship Wrestling’s gender-neutral shows to the growing popularity of Quebec’s NCW Femme Fatales, from the UK’s Pro Wrestling EVE to their Japanese partners in Ice Ribbon, there is more female wrestling of a quality that puts many male wrestlers to shame than ever before. Yes this stuff is harder to access than WWE or TNA, and yes you might have to brace yourself for accusations of slightly ulterior motives (believe me, I know) but you will be rewarded with some of the best wrestling that’s out there at the moment… from wrestlers who are possessed of dedication, talent, determination and, coincidentally, ovaries.

Skip to about 4 minutes in the following video for a clip from the match

Winner: Mike Quackenbush vs Eddie Kingston (CHIKARA’s High Noon: Nov 13, 2011)

I’ll be writing more about how much I enjoyed CHIKARA’s first ever iPPV later, but this match is one of the reason’s why the show worked so well. I know I’m coming across as an unabashed fanboy, but one of the thing’s CHIKARA do so well is create emotion through stories and this match, the culmination of their 12 Large Summit tournament, was no excecption.

The tournament was held throughout the 2011 season to finally crown the inaugural CHIKARA Grand Champion, and was dedicated to the memory of CHIKARA alumni Larry Sweeney who took his own life early in the year after a long history of mental illness. In one corner was Mike Quackenbush: founder and head trainer at CHIKARA, and one of the most talented technical wrestlers currently in the US. In the opposite corner was Eddie Kingston: one of my favourite wrestlers and a close personal friend of Larry Sweeney. Kingston is by no means a technical wizard, but he is an amazing brawler, and his promos are second to none – including this gem he released in the run up to the show…

That promo would probably be enough to earn this award by itself to be honest, but the match more than lived up to it. With nearfall after nearfall, a teased Quackenbush heel turn, and the entire roster surrounding the ring by the time the final bell was rung, it was an amazing match, and an honour to get to watch live. I realise this might sound like hyperbole, but it’s true – I genuinely felt like part of something special watching live from my bedroom over in the UK that night, and it’s thanks to moments like this that I love wrestling. Thank you CHIKARA

A Song for Whoever: CHIKARA High Noon Special Edition

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Boss Lady Rae: CHIKARA fans generally fall into two camps – those who can go to the shows, and those who clamour for DVDs the second they’re released. We all love each other dearly, but the envy generated by the DVD dwellers gives off enough heat to melt an ice rink. Trust me. I’m one of them. My King of Trios envy might just be what’s responsible for the whole polar ice cap situation. When Andrew gave me a sampler DVD a couple of years ago and suggested I watch it, I never thought I would love it like I do. Actually, what he really said was “No pressure, but if you don’t like this I may sob like a baby!” I didn’t make him cry.

On Sunday night, something shifted. CHIKARA’s first live iPPV, High Noon, brought us all together. I don’t know how it felt at the venue, but it felt pretty special to those of us watching online. Everyone in the arena in Philadelphia watched the same show at the same time as fans around the world. It made a difference I wasn’t expecting. I was definitely excited at the prospect of watching CHIKARA live, but what I hadn’t anticipated was the sense of community that permeated my laptop screen. If being a wrestling fan means being part of one big dysfunctional family, being a CHIKARA fan is like joining a special sub-division of cousins with a secret key to the entrance. Except, all you need to do to get a copy of that key is ask someone for it. They’ll share it with you and welcome you into the fold.

On top of the fact that High Noon made me ultimate totes emosh (I’ve been dying to type that somewhere), how wonderful it was to be able to watch a pay-per-view live and at a sensible time of the day. North Americans won’t understand why this is so important at all, but High Noon started at 9pm (UK time) and I was in bed before midnight. Admittedly, I spent an hour staring at the ceiling trying to absorb the main event and wondering how long my hair would have to grow before I could execute Jacob Hammermeier’s bitchin’ side-pony. But I was asleep before the time I’m usually getting up from a pre-show nap for a WWE PPV and I didn’t have to book a day off work to recover from the up-all-night hangover. Everyone’s a winner! Well, apart from Australians, who had to get up a few hours earlier. They’ll manage.

In honour of this lovely group people I’m proud to be associated with, here’s my carefully selected tune. (I’m definitely going soft in my old age!)

Sidekick Andrew: Last Sunday marked the 6 year anniversary of the death of Eddie Guerrero. Rather fittingly, it was also the date that Eddie Kingston became the first CHIKARA grand champion. Rae has already written how great an experience it was for us in the UK to be able to join in and watch live, and I echo her sentiments exactly. Hell, Rae will tell you I’m a flint-hearted northerner who doesn’t do emotion, but even I had something in my throat during the main event. I don’t think I’ve seen a more emotional title match aftermath since Wrestlemania XX. OK, it might be soured slightly by the Benoit connection in retrospect, but seeing two friends that happy in the ring showing true emotion is pretty rare in wrestling

Or at least it is unless you watch Eddie Kingston’s work. Like Guerrero, Kingston has fought through personal demons throughout his life. Like Guerrero, Kingston has never hidden his faults and flaws. Most importantly, like Guerrero, Kingston has never lost his love and passion for wrestling. I’ve spoken before of how much I love Kingston’s promos. The way he can make you believe every word he says. The way he can mix real life and the “fake” world of wrestling with such skill and passion. Every single time… I know for a fact that this promo in particular sold a number of High Noon purchases…

Now I am admittedly biased as Eddie Kingston is one of my favourite wrestlers. Yes I love his promos, but I also love his brawling wrestling style and the way he sells moves like they actually hurt rather than “wrestling hurt”. Kingston has been a mainstay of CHIKARA (which just happens to be my favourite promotion) and was part of one of my favourite matches ever. All in all, I’m pretty much an unabashed Eddie Kingston fan and as such I love the fact that he was the winner in the biggest match in CHIKARA history, and the fact that I got to see it live means a lot to me. Thank you CHIKARA, and thank you Eddie. This one’s for you…

A Song for Whoever: Sheamus & the dreaded “IWC” Edition

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Boss Lady Rae: Do you know what a girl can never have enough of? Red lipstick, tea and crushes. I’m currently madly in love with a fictional character in a novel I’m reading. Yeah. Really. It’s becoming a problem. And I, my friends, am the queen of wrestling crushes. They come and go like the tide, but while they last they’re magnificent and delicious. Some, once fully bedded in, never really leave. This blog has been nothing if not an ode to my unflinching love for CM Punk and Matt Striker. Other crushes fluctuate depending on what their character’s doing. See the various posts in which I fall in and out of love with Mr. Cena..

This latest one is a biggie though. I’ve been rather fond of this person for some time, even when he was severely out of favour and his broken friendship with old-school crush HHH was on the rocks. The moment that took it from passing, inappropriate staring to “Oh my God, you’re making my heart ache” was at Night of Champions. There I was commenting to Andrew about how smart Christian always looks in ‘people clothes’ when the room started spinning and………….

To quote Andrew, “Sheamus is a man who suits wearing clothes,” which would sound ludicrous in every other form of entertainment. To wrestling fans, it makes perfect sense. It also helps than in real life he’s a thoroughly nice chap.  My heart is aflutter. This one’s for you, Sheamus. Let’s talk Celtic heritage some time.

Sidekick Andrew: One thing that we have noticed more and more here in the Wrestlegasm Bunker as we monitor internet communiques from throughout the world is that you lot don’t half like a moan. Seriously, after every episode of Smackdown, Raw (especially Raw!) or WWE PPV Twitter and Tumblr explode with impotent rage.

“Gah! I can’t BELIEVE Christian lost the title this soon! I’m never watching again!”

“FFS Why would you bring Punk back this early! Just so he can job to HHH no doubt! I hate this company!”

“2 Sin Caras! How stupid do they think we are? FIRE RUSSO LOL!”

Look, to paraphrase Bill Hicks: I’m not here to tell you how to live your lives. You’re grown men and women with a pretty solid grasp on logic (for the most part anyway). I would like to make a suggestion if possible. It’s a pretty radical solution that doesn’t seem to have occurred to a lot of people so I think it bears printing here. Ready?

IF YOU DON’T ENJOY THE WWE OUTPUT THEN DON’T WATCH IT

I know… I know. It sounds crazy but bear with me. The WWE isn’t going to change its product just because a bunch of people on the internet complain about it every week in tweets, blogs and podcasts. You know why? Because to complain about it you must have watched it already, and that’s all they want. I’m sure they’d prefer you enjoyed their shows but I can guarantee they’d be more devastated if you watched illegally and loved it than paid and hated it.

There are so many alternatives out there to the WWE if you still need a wrestling fix, although sometimes a clean break can be a good idea too. There’s a mass of Indie companies putting out great quality wrestling with storylines far less insulting than most the WWE trot out. Yes, there’s a bit more effort involved in seeking out these companies, but I personally think it’s worth it.

Now, I’m also aware we’re in a recession and that’s why Rae doesn’t pay (or feed) me anymore. Luckily I’m content to survive eating the lichen growing in my small, windowless cell in a far corner of the Bunker, nose in the air like a Bisto kid sighing everytime Rae orders a kebab from KoVan. However, the beauty of living in the digital age is the ready availability of free content we can all instantly access from our desks, laps and phones. Pop over to YouTube, search for CHIKARA, SHIMMER, PWG, ABSOLUTE INTENSE WRESTLING, ANARCHY CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING, NJPW, SMASH or any number of wrestling promotions and you find a plethora of free matches, highlight videos and promos to introduce you… for FREE!

Discover the thrill of watching matches with wrestlers before they reach FCW and the WWE! (Evan Bourne, CM Punk, Daniel Bryan and that new Swiss/Italian fella in FCW are all good examples of this) Marvel at women’s matches with women who can wrestle, and are given more than a perfunctory 5 minute time slot to do so! (Keep this to yourself, but some promotions don’t even segregate the male and female members of the roster, leaving the women to be treated as they should be: as just another wrestler)

For the record, I should point out that neither Rae or myself hate the WWE or it’s current programming, although we’ll happily admit there are some things we don’t like. I don’t get round to watching Raw as often as I could which might explain it, but Smackdown is still pretty consistent, and Superstars provides a fun hour of “wrestling” every week. I’ve no idea what TNA is like nowadays because I don’t like it and therefore don’t watch it (see? The system works!)

I don’t expect many to take me up on this, there’s a familiarity and comfort in watching the same shows each week. And as I said earlier, people do take a quite perverse enjoyment in watching something they will be able to complain about. But as long as you know there is an alternative, then at least you have a choice…

So this week’s Song For Whoever is dedicated to everyone who has flooded my timeline with the same complaints week after week after week while still tuning in and contributing to the viewing figures.

Only kidding, you knows I loves you really.

IN AUDIO: Me and Tennessee

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A few days ago I mentioned that an article I’d written had been published in the new Fair to Flair Quarterly, which you should definitely buy. (Click here) The theme for this issue was Live Events, and my piece was written on an indie show I saw in Tennessee a few years ago. I found it emotional to write. The people, places and the event it details were and still are very important to me, both personally and as part of my ‘wrestling fandom’.

The version you’ll read in the Quarterly, however, is quite heavily abridged. While it had to be cut for the journal, it’s important to me that the full, unabridged version is available too. I wanted to do something a little different, so I’ve recorded a reading of my original piece. You can listen by clicking on the media player below. For those who can’t get the file to play, who don’t have time to listen or who just don’t like the sound of my voice, I may upload a downloadable text version to this post within the next few days.

Enjoy!