Rambling On About A Wrestling Match

I’m not really a fan of wrestling. It’s a bit of silly fun, as far as I’m concerned. The testosterone-fueled equivalent of a soap opera. You’ve got plots, drama and iffy acting, combined with near-naked men fighting each other. Yeah, sure, it’s not really a sport, but it’s entertaining. Just requires a suspension of your disbelief. We do it all the time for movies and video games, and wrestling is no different.

Personally, I’m not that into it.

I mean, I’ll watch a wrestling match if I’m told that it’s “cool” or “awesome” or something like that. While I wouldn’t willingly put on a wrestling show, I admit that it’s sometimes enjoyable watching a bunch of muscular, shirtless guys fight.

On the other hand, my brother is a wrestling nerd. I say “nerd” rather than “fan” because he also enjoys wrestling history and has a wealth of knowledge up in his head. Brother is pretty level-headed when it comes to wrestling. He knows it’s all fake and a business at the end of the day.

That being said, brother likes to share cool wrestling matches, and he stays very up to date with current events. He also enjoys showing me a very cherry-picked, cream of the crop selection of matches. So when he told me he’d found an “explosive barbed wire death match”, we kinda had to watch it.

The problem was, he hadn’t watched it first.

Normally, when brother makes his offer to show me cool wrestling matches, he’s seen this stuff in advance. It’s only stuff like the Royal Rumble that he’ll watch with me live. But brother had found a site that was showing the latest AEW show, and it contained this insane match.

AEW is a different wrestling company. While most of us common plebs just watch the WWE shows, AEW is a completely separate company. It’s kinda branded as the show for true wrestling fans. You get wrestlers from all over the place, and it’s supposed to be more serious and more traditional. Less soap-opera-y than other wrestling companies. You’re there for the wrestling specifically, not the stories and tales and grudges that WWE is often known for.

The company is also much newer, and it shows.

Most of the show was alright, I guess.

The show also contained some other matches as well, which we decided to watch first. One was a “royal rumble” sort of match with tag-teams instead of individuals. It was okay. Another was a ladder match. Which, somehow, was only okay. Then there was a sort of movie-esque match in a warehouse. That match was genuinely a bit of fun, but the atmosphere was ruined by the commentators.

The main event though was the ‘explosive barbed wire death match’. No rules either. With a name like that, you expect it to be great. Or at least good.

Except, it wasn’t.

Yes, somehow the ‘explosive barbed wire death match turned out to be mediocre at best. The whole thing seemed cheap and weirdly put together. We were shown some sort of backstory of the two feuding wrestlers, we were told that they’d spent “weeks” putting this together. But what we saw just looked… cheap.

Sure, the barbed wire was there, but it was very plainly set up. Three of the sides of the ring had barged wire wrapped around the ropes. But in each corner, as well as on the floor, they’d gotten the cheapest, crappiest panels and just stapled some (fake) barbed wire onto them. And, honestly, even the explosions seemed cheap. In person, they probably were loud and disorientating. But watching it on a screen, they were just kinda mediocre puffs of smoke and some sparklers. The effect was more like just throwing some firecrackers at someone.

Before you say “but muh budget”, I want to point out that the match before this, set in a tattered old warehouse, looked a billion times better than this match did. You can make low budget stuff look good! They proved so literally five minutes beforehand!

The tone was all wrong.

I’d have happily suspended my disbelief if this was supposed to be a kinda silly, almost light-hearted match. But this wasn’t just the main event, it was part of a massive feud with the current champion. There was this whole strip about how important this match was and how it had all been planned out. It was a title match, after all.

Yet the match played out in such an over the top, comedic way. We had a Tom-and-Jerry style set of antics of “will he touch the wire!” and “will they set off the explosives?” Heck, there was even ‘pocket sand’. I was told I’d be watching a semi-serious title belt match by the show itself.

The ending was the fucking worst.

So, after a ton of fake writhing and moaning and beating the crap out of each other, the champion guy calls in his lackeys. Because he’s the bad guy, and he has a bunch of minions. It’s a super predictable thing, even for a wrestling noob like me. And, of course, the commentators (the ones that aren’t the champion’s bitch) all say “It’s not against the rules so it’s fine.”

Yeah, it’s also predictable as fuck. The lackeys come out and do one of two things: get distracted and taken out in an underdog move; or basically guarantee that the bad guy wins. Normally the latter. And that’s EXACTLY what happens in this match. The lackeys come out, help the champion, give him a weapon and help him win.

But it’s… not smooth at all. The champ hits the challenger with a bat that explodes. But, rather than that being the explosive finale, we still manage to squeeze in a couple more pin falls. THEN the champion wins and keeps the title. But it’s still not over. A siren goes off and the ring is going to explode. So the champion, because he’s the bad guy, knocks out the challenger and handcuffs him, before buggering off.

Suddenly though, someone comes along to try and save the challenger. Rather than, I dunno, trying to drag them away though, they throw themselves over the challenger, like one would over a grenade. Self-sacrifice, just before the ring ‘explodes’.

I have never seen a shittier explosion in my life.

You know what this explosion was? Just some sparklers and smoke, coming from the four corners of the ring. Yet everyone’s running around acting like it’s a legit explosion. It was genuinely really bad, to the point that all I could say was “what the fuck was that shit.”

Thankfully, brother made it up to me by putting on some genuinely good wrestling afterwards. But still, that fight was just so, so bad…