Travicity
11-25-2010, 03:43 PM
EVOLVE ran their sixth event, and final of 2010, this past weekend at the ACE Arena in Union City, NJ. I was in attendance at the show and wanted to share my thoughts on what I thought was easily EVOLVE's strongest effort to date and a great way to close out their freshman year.
Far and away my favorite thing on the entire show was the Jon Moxley-Homicide match and the aftermath that saw Homicide flip out and attack the referee for stopping the match even though Homicide didn't actually submit to Moxley's crossface chickenwing. From there, Moxley came back and started pushing Homicide's buttons about losing the match and the fact that he's going to be suspended after attacking the referee, leading to Homicide brutally tearing Moxley up for upwards of 10 minutes with a fork, a flathead screwdriver, and the ring bell and hammer
. Moxley took a horrific assault, but was laughing and kept running his mouth at Homicide the whole time yet refusing to fight back so that he himself would not be suspended like Homicide. Finally, after 10 minutes of Moxley hurling every mocking insult he could think of at Homicide, and Homicide laying the worst beating I've seen anyone take in years on Moxley, Homicide finally got tired of attacking Moxley and left.
I was just sitting there with the biggest smile on my face watching this, because this was probably one of the greatest things I've seen in years, and easily the best angle Gabe Sapolsky has booked since starting up Dragon Gate USA and EVOLVE. I loved the whole thing because every bit of the angle made sense and worked. Homicide was mad that he lost without ever giving up, and Moxley played mind games with Homicide by using that to get Homicide to continually attack him and let Homicide dig his own grave, while not fighting back at all so his hands were clean and innocent when the suspensions came down. As I was sitting there watching Moxley smile and laugh and continue buying himself a worse beating by continuing to mouth off to Homicide, I couldn't help but be reminded of Raven in the way he played this perfectly formulated mind game and not only didn't mind the pain, but was glad to take it to see his foe destroy himself. It was so sick and twisted and it came off PERFECTLY. I loved every second of it, and I'll say right now that when the DVD comes out, this match and angle is going to be worth the price of the DVD by itself.
And speaking of the match, that was terrific and brutal in its own right as they just fought, and fought, and fought all over the ring, around ringside, and through the crowd. They went out to the floor and right up in front of me on the bleachers where Homicide took a gigantic fan and flung it at Moxley so hard that it broke apart when it hit, and they continued to fight around the building, knocking over even more guardrails, and destroying each other with chairs before finally heading back into the ring where Moxley caught Homicide in the crossface chickenwing until the referee stopped the match. Great match and great angle, and I can't wait to see the next stage of this feud, whether it happens in EVOLVE or Dragon Gate USA.
Also making a big impression on me at this event was the main event of Austin Aries vs Chuck Taylor, with Aries coming out as the "classic" version instead of the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived. Total old school Aries match that was chugging along just fine until Taylor injured himself after taking a dive from Aries on the floor, and when he got back in the ring you could see that his shoulder was visibly dislocated, to the point where there was a lump coming out of his shoulder. Taylor toughed it out and either popped it back in or just shrugged off the pain, but either way you would have never known he was hurt because he continued wrestling the rest of the match as he normally would until Aries tapped him out to the Last Chancery. Taylor had a great showing, and proved in this match that he has what it takes to hang in the main event with a guy the caliber of Aries, and he showed a lot of guts by working through the shoulder injury. Aries worked really hard too, and made a point of putting over Taylor for his guts working through the injury in a postmatch promo.
Speaking of Taylor, he and Johnny Gargano became stablemates in EVOLVE as well as in DGUSA when Larry Dallas (aka the pretty boy guy who has been hanging around with Gargano and Sean Davis) announced that he would now be investing in wrestling and sponsoring wrestlers, and that his first two charges are Taylor and Gargano. I have to give it to Larry, he certainly seemed to know how to work the crowd and deliver a promo, and time will tell what he brings to the table over the long term, but he's a guy I've seen around indy shows forever and he obviously has a real passion for the business, so I'll give him a chance to see if he can work out as an effective mouthpiece since he did all right his first time out.
But getting back to Gargano, he joined Larry D's group immediately following his match that saw him defeat Jimmy Jacobs clean as a whistle in the middle of the ring by reversing the Contra Code to a rollup. Another great match, and it seems like Jimmy has kind of taken Gargano under his wing, and the amount of time he's spent interacting with Gargano has done a lot to boost Gargano's profile in EVOLVE. Beating Jimmy clean was a big deal for Gargano, as it was the biggest win I know of that Gargano's ever had. I'm sure the feud is far from over, but that's fine with me because this was a great match that included an innovative spot where Jacobs and Gargano, apparently having been inspired after an evening watching Ultimate X matches, reached up and grabbed onto the metal beams in the low ceiling of the ACE Arena and kicked at each other until Gargano fell and crotched himself on the top rope. This is what I'm talking about when I'm saying what a great mind Jimmy has for the business and the kinds of innovative stuff he's always coming up with because he's so good at thinking outside the box.
Bobby Fish finally scored his first win in EVOLVE, defeating Kyle O'Reilly in a hard fought, back and forth match that saw Fish have to muster every bit of willpower to keep fighting through O'Reilly's stiff offense. This was as much an MMA fight as a wrestling match, since it mostly consisted of them trading kicks and submissions. This was just a great contest where two guys wanted to win so badly that they were throwing everything they had out there and giving it their all to stay alive while trying to put the other man down. The only problem is that you can look at this match in two different ways: on the one hand, Fish showed what a fighter he is by taking a show off to do some soul searching and then came back, dug down deep and gave it his all to finally get his hand raised. On the other hand, he's come up short in matches against Chris Hero, Claudio Castagnoli, and Bryan Danielson, three main event level talents, and now he came back and had to literally have the fight of his life to beat a guy who is pretty low on the EVOLVE totem pole and had already beaten him besides. I get that Fish is starting over from the bottom of the ladder, but I thought after the Danielson match and maintain still that the first win should have come over a top guy. That said, this was an excellent match, probably my second favorite of the evening behind Moxley-Homicide, and I wouldn't mind seeing them go at it again from a sheer workrate perspective.
Silas Young made his return to EVOLVE after not appearing since the first event and defeated Drake Younger, ending Younger's undefeated streak and gaining his own first win in EVOLVE. I like Silas, I think he's a talented guy but he just hasn't been put in the right situation yet where he has the opportunity to click and really get a groove going in a company where he'll get some national exposure. Hopefully this is the company where he'll be able to do that because I think he's been around long enough and worked hard enough to deserve that push.
AR Fox won a four way match against Scott Reed, Tony Nees, and Rich Swann, and this was awesome. I'd only ever seen Swann before and even then I only saw him in a handful of matches, but this match kicked way more ass than I expected it to. I have to give Gabe credit, he's always been great at picking out guys with talent that he thinks he can do something with, and gives them a platform to show what they can do and win over the crowd, and that's what these guys did tonight. There was one scary moment where Fox went for some kind of shooting star press or something to the outside, but undershot the move and just landed on the floor with an audible thump. They picked themselves up and brushed themselves off and finished the match, and I thought this was a lot of fun and wouldn't mind seeing any of them come back.
Unfortunately, Ricochet and Adam Cole didn't quite connect in the same way. They tried, but the crowd just wasn't into this one at all, and that just happens with some crowds. I'm still not totally on board with Ricochet yet, he's very athletic but I don't know that I see what Gabe sees in him, but it's still really early on and he's been booked into a pretty prominent position in DGUSA, which he wouldn't be if Gabe didn't have confidence in him. In any event, regardless of what the crowd thought, they both went out there and worked really hard and I thought had a really solid match.
Finally, Up In Smoke defeated the Super Smash Brothers in a fun, fast paced tag match where Up In Smoke went over to go up to 4-0 as a team and cement themselves as the top team in EVOLVE. I like Cheech and Cloudy and find them very entertaining as characters as well as wrestlers, and I'm happy to see them get put forth as kind of the flag bearers for EVOLVE's tag division. I like that the SSB were brought in to work with them because they're also a solid team with a reputation on the indies, and since EVOLVE is probably a ways away from crowning tag champions, I'm totally into the idea of just bringing in teams from the outside and having Cheech & Cloudy beat them to build them up and really set them up as the best team in the company.
As I said earlier, I thought this was easily EVOLVE's best event to date and if you haven't been going to the shows or watching the DVDs, you've really been missing out becuase this is some great stuff and I'm telling you that if you want to see a quality indy show with nonstop action from start to finish, awesome matches of every style, and a hell of an angle with Homicide and Jon Moxley, then you want to see this DVD when it is released. The ACE Arena is a terrific wrestling venue with a great underground atmosphere that is perfect for this kind of an event, and I'd like to see them run there more regularly in the future. Awesome effort on the part of everyone at EVOLVE, big thumbs up for this one.
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Far and away my favorite thing on the entire show was the Jon Moxley-Homicide match and the aftermath that saw Homicide flip out and attack the referee for stopping the match even though Homicide didn't actually submit to Moxley's crossface chickenwing. From there, Moxley came back and started pushing Homicide's buttons about losing the match and the fact that he's going to be suspended after attacking the referee, leading to Homicide brutally tearing Moxley up for upwards of 10 minutes with a fork, a flathead screwdriver, and the ring bell and hammer
. Moxley took a horrific assault, but was laughing and kept running his mouth at Homicide the whole time yet refusing to fight back so that he himself would not be suspended like Homicide. Finally, after 10 minutes of Moxley hurling every mocking insult he could think of at Homicide, and Homicide laying the worst beating I've seen anyone take in years on Moxley, Homicide finally got tired of attacking Moxley and left.
I was just sitting there with the biggest smile on my face watching this, because this was probably one of the greatest things I've seen in years, and easily the best angle Gabe Sapolsky has booked since starting up Dragon Gate USA and EVOLVE. I loved the whole thing because every bit of the angle made sense and worked. Homicide was mad that he lost without ever giving up, and Moxley played mind games with Homicide by using that to get Homicide to continually attack him and let Homicide dig his own grave, while not fighting back at all so his hands were clean and innocent when the suspensions came down. As I was sitting there watching Moxley smile and laugh and continue buying himself a worse beating by continuing to mouth off to Homicide, I couldn't help but be reminded of Raven in the way he played this perfectly formulated mind game and not only didn't mind the pain, but was glad to take it to see his foe destroy himself. It was so sick and twisted and it came off PERFECTLY. I loved every second of it, and I'll say right now that when the DVD comes out, this match and angle is going to be worth the price of the DVD by itself.
And speaking of the match, that was terrific and brutal in its own right as they just fought, and fought, and fought all over the ring, around ringside, and through the crowd. They went out to the floor and right up in front of me on the bleachers where Homicide took a gigantic fan and flung it at Moxley so hard that it broke apart when it hit, and they continued to fight around the building, knocking over even more guardrails, and destroying each other with chairs before finally heading back into the ring where Moxley caught Homicide in the crossface chickenwing until the referee stopped the match. Great match and great angle, and I can't wait to see the next stage of this feud, whether it happens in EVOLVE or Dragon Gate USA.
Also making a big impression on me at this event was the main event of Austin Aries vs Chuck Taylor, with Aries coming out as the "classic" version instead of the Greatest Man Who Ever Lived. Total old school Aries match that was chugging along just fine until Taylor injured himself after taking a dive from Aries on the floor, and when he got back in the ring you could see that his shoulder was visibly dislocated, to the point where there was a lump coming out of his shoulder. Taylor toughed it out and either popped it back in or just shrugged off the pain, but either way you would have never known he was hurt because he continued wrestling the rest of the match as he normally would until Aries tapped him out to the Last Chancery. Taylor had a great showing, and proved in this match that he has what it takes to hang in the main event with a guy the caliber of Aries, and he showed a lot of guts by working through the shoulder injury. Aries worked really hard too, and made a point of putting over Taylor for his guts working through the injury in a postmatch promo.
Speaking of Taylor, he and Johnny Gargano became stablemates in EVOLVE as well as in DGUSA when Larry Dallas (aka the pretty boy guy who has been hanging around with Gargano and Sean Davis) announced that he would now be investing in wrestling and sponsoring wrestlers, and that his first two charges are Taylor and Gargano. I have to give it to Larry, he certainly seemed to know how to work the crowd and deliver a promo, and time will tell what he brings to the table over the long term, but he's a guy I've seen around indy shows forever and he obviously has a real passion for the business, so I'll give him a chance to see if he can work out as an effective mouthpiece since he did all right his first time out.
But getting back to Gargano, he joined Larry D's group immediately following his match that saw him defeat Jimmy Jacobs clean as a whistle in the middle of the ring by reversing the Contra Code to a rollup. Another great match, and it seems like Jimmy has kind of taken Gargano under his wing, and the amount of time he's spent interacting with Gargano has done a lot to boost Gargano's profile in EVOLVE. Beating Jimmy clean was a big deal for Gargano, as it was the biggest win I know of that Gargano's ever had. I'm sure the feud is far from over, but that's fine with me because this was a great match that included an innovative spot where Jacobs and Gargano, apparently having been inspired after an evening watching Ultimate X matches, reached up and grabbed onto the metal beams in the low ceiling of the ACE Arena and kicked at each other until Gargano fell and crotched himself on the top rope. This is what I'm talking about when I'm saying what a great mind Jimmy has for the business and the kinds of innovative stuff he's always coming up with because he's so good at thinking outside the box.
Bobby Fish finally scored his first win in EVOLVE, defeating Kyle O'Reilly in a hard fought, back and forth match that saw Fish have to muster every bit of willpower to keep fighting through O'Reilly's stiff offense. This was as much an MMA fight as a wrestling match, since it mostly consisted of them trading kicks and submissions. This was just a great contest where two guys wanted to win so badly that they were throwing everything they had out there and giving it their all to stay alive while trying to put the other man down. The only problem is that you can look at this match in two different ways: on the one hand, Fish showed what a fighter he is by taking a show off to do some soul searching and then came back, dug down deep and gave it his all to finally get his hand raised. On the other hand, he's come up short in matches against Chris Hero, Claudio Castagnoli, and Bryan Danielson, three main event level talents, and now he came back and had to literally have the fight of his life to beat a guy who is pretty low on the EVOLVE totem pole and had already beaten him besides. I get that Fish is starting over from the bottom of the ladder, but I thought after the Danielson match and maintain still that the first win should have come over a top guy. That said, this was an excellent match, probably my second favorite of the evening behind Moxley-Homicide, and I wouldn't mind seeing them go at it again from a sheer workrate perspective.
Silas Young made his return to EVOLVE after not appearing since the first event and defeated Drake Younger, ending Younger's undefeated streak and gaining his own first win in EVOLVE. I like Silas, I think he's a talented guy but he just hasn't been put in the right situation yet where he has the opportunity to click and really get a groove going in a company where he'll get some national exposure. Hopefully this is the company where he'll be able to do that because I think he's been around long enough and worked hard enough to deserve that push.
AR Fox won a four way match against Scott Reed, Tony Nees, and Rich Swann, and this was awesome. I'd only ever seen Swann before and even then I only saw him in a handful of matches, but this match kicked way more ass than I expected it to. I have to give Gabe credit, he's always been great at picking out guys with talent that he thinks he can do something with, and gives them a platform to show what they can do and win over the crowd, and that's what these guys did tonight. There was one scary moment where Fox went for some kind of shooting star press or something to the outside, but undershot the move and just landed on the floor with an audible thump. They picked themselves up and brushed themselves off and finished the match, and I thought this was a lot of fun and wouldn't mind seeing any of them come back.
Unfortunately, Ricochet and Adam Cole didn't quite connect in the same way. They tried, but the crowd just wasn't into this one at all, and that just happens with some crowds. I'm still not totally on board with Ricochet yet, he's very athletic but I don't know that I see what Gabe sees in him, but it's still really early on and he's been booked into a pretty prominent position in DGUSA, which he wouldn't be if Gabe didn't have confidence in him. In any event, regardless of what the crowd thought, they both went out there and worked really hard and I thought had a really solid match.
Finally, Up In Smoke defeated the Super Smash Brothers in a fun, fast paced tag match where Up In Smoke went over to go up to 4-0 as a team and cement themselves as the top team in EVOLVE. I like Cheech and Cloudy and find them very entertaining as characters as well as wrestlers, and I'm happy to see them get put forth as kind of the flag bearers for EVOLVE's tag division. I like that the SSB were brought in to work with them because they're also a solid team with a reputation on the indies, and since EVOLVE is probably a ways away from crowning tag champions, I'm totally into the idea of just bringing in teams from the outside and having Cheech & Cloudy beat them to build them up and really set them up as the best team in the company.
As I said earlier, I thought this was easily EVOLVE's best event to date and if you haven't been going to the shows or watching the DVDs, you've really been missing out becuase this is some great stuff and I'm telling you that if you want to see a quality indy show with nonstop action from start to finish, awesome matches of every style, and a hell of an angle with Homicide and Jon Moxley, then you want to see this DVD when it is released. The ACE Arena is a terrific wrestling venue with a great underground atmosphere that is perfect for this kind of an event, and I'd like to see them run there more regularly in the future. Awesome effort on the part of everyone at EVOLVE, big thumbs up for this one.
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