Wrestling Forever
Pro wrestling is the King of Sport, and All In and All Out reminded me of that
A man stood in the middle of the ring at the United Center on Sunday night, covered in his own blood, defeated but not broken, at the end of a long and illustrious reign with a championship that needed him to have that kind of reign to establish it. Wrestling is not his only job, although he is, especially after Sunday, one of the biggest stars in the world at present. His “vanilla1” job has him working for an architecture firm in New Jersey. He doesn’t need to take flat back bumps once a week, cut himself open, or jump recklessly into throngs of people who may or may not be equipped to catch him to live a prosperous life.
Orange Cassidy, however, is a pro wrestler at heart.
People who get into wrestling as a career don’t do it because it’s stable. While All Elite Wrestling has provided a second lucrative platform for wrestlers in this country, the odds of making it from initial training to cable television are long, unless you happen to be plucked out of failing at your sport in college for a spot in Vince McMahon’s and Paul Levesque’s2 Performance Center, where they will teach you how to be a wrestler poorly and hastily no matter how much your heart was set on it as a young’un. Even then, that Performance Center’s hit rate is generally not nearly as good as starting out on the indie circuit.
But people who get into wrestling as fans know the biggest high in the world comes from emotionally cathartic wrestling moments. Highspots. Slick finishes. Betrayals. Rescues. When a wrestling show really drives its hand into your chest and pulls out your heart, you thank the performers for the opportunity as they shout KA LI MA. Wrestlers aren’t the best actors by far; if they were, they’d be acting. The thing about it is even the jockiest jocks want emotional release, and while it’s possible in real sport, well, it’s all real. It’s all a shoot. You can’t manipulate those moments the way you can in a worked environment. Even if you do get a moment like that in a shoot sport, like, you’re still leaving things to chance. The more control that actual humans have in making the thing happen, the finer-tuned the reaction can be. It’s not saying more direction is better, but the guided hand with the right amount of trust in the principals oftentimes leads to sublime results.
AEW had the unenviable task that they brought upon themselves by scheduling a London pay-per-view event one week before one of their four quarterly standard shows. They hyped All In as potentially the biggest wrestling show ever, a transparent shot across the bow of their competition, whose chairman McMahon often inflated the ticket sales and actual attendances of shows like WrestleMania III to have more people there than actually had butts parked in seats. I’m not sure if Tony Khan is prone to lying about actual figures, but judging from my seat across the pond, well, there were hella people at Wembley Stadium on August 27.
The logistical hurdles of producing two shows of that magnitude were always going to be hard to overcome, but it wouldn’t be impossible. One could be forgiven if they thought that maybe they’d plumb one show’s worth of matches and moments from both cards combined and called it a success because of the sheer magnitude of people who saw them. Again, packing that many human beings into one place to watch wrestling is a feat no matter what the mitigating or aggravating circumstances are.
But the thing was that each show was a jam-packed spectacle in its own individual right. All In had the high water mark on the MJF/Adam Cole story…
…but it also had the last televised professional wrestling match of CM Punk in AEW3, the utter madness of Stadium Stampede, Sting doing Sting things, and, even though neither match was explicitly “my thing,” Saraya and Will Ospreay getting to have big moments in front of their home crowd. Even if All Out was the afterthought that it looked like it would be, one would be forgiven if they thought the week was a success as is.
But then All Out happened, and it might have eclipsed All In in terms of actual quality. It’s all subjective, of course. Even among mainstream thought, what is considered “good” can be a topic that causes literal fistfights. Still, it was hard to argue with the Chicago crowd this past Sunday night. From the first bout through the bittersweet conclusion of the main event, they were at the tops of their lungs the whole night and for good reason. There were more MJF and Cole antics. Two big meaty men slappin’ meat matches had the crowd enthralled. Luchasaurus kicked the living shit out of Darby Allin. Konosuke Takeshita staked his claim as a top dog by beating Kenny Omega. Katsuyori Shibata and Bryan Danielson worked in back-to-back matches when five years ago, it looked like neither guy would be able merely to live with the quality of life deserving for a human being.
And it all culminated in the only match that could have main evented the show, even if Punk didn’t get himself fired. The build around the match dipped into the metatextual because Cassidy always found himself at the center of target practice he didn’t ask for. Blowhards like Jim Cornette and Vince Russo, relics of an olden time, moments frozen in history as anomalous to the oeuvre of professional wrestling on the whole, yelled that he was a “cosplayer,” whatever the fuck that meant, or that he was too small, or that he “didn’t attract casuals,” or that his gimmick “exposed the business.” It’s been four years since AEW has been a thing, and three since they decided to give a stage to Cassidy. People still snipe at him despite being one of the most popular guys in the company. It’s weird how much oxygen successful entities give haters and losers just because the ramshackle fourth estate this business has thinks giving these very haters and losers a megaphone counts as journalism.
With that in mind, and with the long-term story being told, that Cassidy was defending that International Championship week-in and week-out, accruing bumps and bruises along the way, his “backpack getting heavier” each time, the story was never that a win was going to validate him or his title reign. Anyone with a braincell would tell you his reign had already been validated, through the multiple title defenses, victories over “legit” superstars, a main event slot at the second most prestigious pay-per-view on the calendar. It was about more than a result. It was about rising to an occasion, proving he belonged.
He did. Sometimes, everyone knows a fact before it’s revealed to the world, but you like seeing it proven, because the person proving it does so entertainingly, viscerally, cathartically. Sometimes, he’s not going to “win” but while the result is important in wrestling - and I wouldn’t doubt that Cassidy will get his win back from Jon Moxley down the line - sometimes the win is secondary. Cassidy was the last one in the ring Sunday. He was the one soaking in the ovation from the crowd.
You don’t get moments like that in other entertainment media. Sure, they have other things to offer, but wrestling has that instant feedback after a bloody war, it’s unique and indescribable, but every fan knows what it is and how euphoric it can be. It’s why pro wrestling undeniably is the King of Sport and the King of Entertainment. Nothing comes close for those who understand. Those who don’t? It’s okay. I blame Vince McMahon’s ghettoization of it for driving away a greater audience, but no matter what any of those glazed over talking heads say, wrestling does not need to be popular to be satisfying.
And if the 10,000+ people at the United Center and the various souls at home were the only ones who felt that deep connection to Orange Cassidy, the architect who is the best fucking wrestler in the world, on Sunday night, hey, that’s our gain and your loss. Nothing personal.
Vanilla job is the term sex workers use to describe employment that doesn’t involve them getting naked and erotic for still photos or video. Wrestlers and porn actors share more in common than you might think.
Paul Levesque, better known to the masses as Triple H.
Not planned to be, but I’m not covering that here. This is not The Wrestling Blog. I’m done with those days. Done.