SATURDAY, APRIL 1
10:00 AM EST: I had early behind-the-scenes access to The Wrestling Revolver “Pancakes & Piledrivers”, a midwest promotion run by AAW Champion Sami Callihan. I got to spend a few hours walking around, watching the crew set up the ring, doing some interviews, talking to wrestlers about their matches, etc. I caught up with Impact Wrestling star Eddie Kingston as we ate some pancakes and streamed the set-up on Facebook Live before the fans were let in. He may, or may not, have been giving away a certain wrestler’s phone number to potentially thousands of people on the internet; this is why I maintain that Eddie has heat with everyone in the business. He’s a gem.
12:00 PM EST: More wrestling shows need pancakes. Sami Callihan is a genius for coming up with the concept for “Pancakes & Piledrivers”, and it’s even more impressive that he got the massive IHOP chain to sponsor the event. Do you know how long it would have taken for the promotion to cook that many pancakes!? I was really looking forward to this show, and it lived up to my anticipation. There was a chaotic five-way early on with Big Mike, ACH, Moose, Dezmond Xavier and Palmer where a literal pancake fight broke out, and Dez jumped off the bleachers. Pretty much every time I see Dez he jumps off something (AAW fans may recall him leaping off the balcony at Bourbon Street last year). Another personal treat was getting to meet Su Yung, one of the best female wrestlers in the world, and watch her perform. Check her out if you’re unfamiliar with her body of work. I don’t know that I could pick the best match of the show. Shane Strickland and Ricochet were excellent, the 10-man AR Fox invitational ladder match was all kinds of insanity, but I might give the edge to a tag team match featuring Pentagon and Fenix taking on Callihan and Brian Cage. Just an awesome show, and most of the wrestlers found a way to incorporate pancakes into their shtick, one way or another.
4:00 PM EST: This is the part where I’m going to rant about how Orlando is a terrible place to host WrestleMania. Sure, you have Disney World and Universal Studios, and it’s great if you want to just hit up the WWE shows and take a cool family vacation. But for the thousands of people trying to get to independent wrestling events, it’s a nightmare. Our villa was 30 minutes from the airport, 25 minutes to the Wrestlecon venue (where half the big shows were taking place), and nearly a full hour from the WWN venue with traffic. We had to leave Pancakes & Piledrivers immediately after the main event just to make it to Ring of Honor on time; spoiler alert: we were still almost an hour late. There were days this week that I was supposed to go to four or five shows, but just ended up going to two or three because every additional event adds another hour-plus of driving to your schedule. I loved the weather, but as someone primarily interested in indie wrestling, I would love to never have WrestleMania in Orlando again.
6:00 PM EST: We made it to Ring of Honor for Supercard of Honor about an hour into the show, which meant missing Adam Cole wrestler. Which is weird, because the dude was just three-time ROH World Champion Adam Cole a month ago, and now he’s wrestling-in-the-opening-block mid-card contender Adam Cole. I’m not going to complain too much though, because the matches we did get to see were excellent. After a week full of high-flying athletes trying to out-do each other with big, flashy spots, the old school Texas Bull Rope match between Cody Rhodes and Jay Lethal was a much-needed breath of fresh air. I enjoy watching Cody get to slowly, methodically work an opponent and manipulate a crowd. Thanks for the tickets by the way, brother. The tag team match between Ospreay, Volador, Dragon Lee and Jay White was one of the best matches of the week, and had everyone in my area hands-on-head marking out for spot after spot. Like I said, there were a LOT of these during the week, but this was the best one.
Chris Daniels and Dalton Castle had a decent match for the world title that ended up kicking it into a new gear by the end, but the crowd never fully got behind it. I’m not sure what they expected though. Everyone loves Daniels, but the story was ultimately in him finally winning the big one against Cole, who was able to turn the crowd completely against him as one of the best heels working today. It wasn’t that people wanted to see Daniels lose, necessarily, but everyone knows how hot Dalton Castle is right now. Every aspect of the gimmick has taken off. Castle vs. Cole would have been a heated match with a clear hero and a clear villain, but Castle vs. Daniels turned lukewarm because either option created a scenario in which a beloved babyface would lose. There’s some speculation that they had to get the title off Cole for contractual reasons, and there’s some speculation that they just wanted to do the Daniels switch for the big anniversary moment and didn’t really think about how it would effect the arguably much bigger WrestleMania weekend show. Either way, from all the fans I talked to, this was kind of a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, both guys worked hard and put on a good match – they deserve all the respect in the world – but what were we really supposed to do?
Okay…the main event. I just took a deep breath and got a few chills in my spine thinking about what I wanted to say. First of all, I’ve been a Hardy Boyz fan for nearly two decades. Who hasn’t? And I firmly believe the Young Bucks are the most talented team on the planet today. I’m a big fan of both teams, I’ve loved watching Matt specifically in his transformation over the past years – a transformation that really began well before the Broken gimmick in Impact Wrestling, when his initial heel character in Ring of Honor took off. This feud has been boiling under the surface all year, with some crazy twists and turns, and the ever-looming prospect of the Hardyz jumping to WWE creating some incredible drama behind all of it. In a lot of ways, the entire Broken run had been leading to this ladder match against the Bucks of Youth; the finale of all finales. And dear god did it ever deliver. I watch so much wrestling – so much quality wrestling – that I admit I’ve become a bit jaded and bored at times as a fan. Those moments where I just get lost in a match, put down my phone, turn off the computer and take it all in…they happen very, very rarely. This was one of those moments. And I can tell you I wasn’t alone, as dozens of people around me who were simultaneously streaming NXT Takeover on their phones during the ROH show started slowly, one by one, shutting them off to stare intently at the ring. Every superkick, every shot from a foreign object, every Twist of Fate, every famous Young Buck move; they built into this amazing crescendo of chaos that had every person in the building on their feet, hands on their head, mouths gaping, ready to take in every single second of what was happening in the ring. THAT is wrestling. That is absolutely the highest praise I can give to any wrestler; to take thousands of people, exhausted and worn out from dozens of hours of wrestling and travel, in absurd Orlando heat, after a long show during a long weekend, with a competing product airing at the same time… Suddenly none of that mattered, because there was a god damn pro wrestling masterpiece happening in the ring between four artists. This was my “WrestleMania Moment”. You always here people in and around the business that have that one moment (usually at WrestleMania) that made them realize definitively that this is what they wanted to be involved with for the rest of their lives; this was my moment. I want the feeling that everyone in that building had, during that match, forever.
