We kick off the show with the House Of Truth taking on the Bravado Brothers in a match between what were two up and coming tag teams, at least until Josh Raymond abruptly left the business. It's too bad, the guy was really talented and he and Able were a great team and I was happy to see them get a regular spot on the roster and a push this year. I didn't ever think of this before, but I was watching this match and realized that the Bravados are kind of like a 2010 version of Dunn & Marcos, especially since they started out as full on jobbers and still haven't really moved up the card, but are starting to get some wins. Maybe they need to start listening to 80s hair metal to get more over. Then again, maybe that's a stupid idea. HoT with a wheelbarrow bulldog for the win.
The second match saw Erick Stevens take on Grizzly Redwood, and I'm pretty sure I saw these two wrestle on a recent HDNet show and thought that Grizzly got way more offense than he should have given the size difference. Grizzly has been locked in an on again, off again war with the Embassy for over a year by this point, and was mostly there to get beat up so his bigger, tougher buddies can come to his rescue. Since I already mentioned that the Bravados remind me of Dunn & Marcos, I was watching this match and realized that Erick Stevens looks like a jacked up Andy Bernard from the Office, and can also envision the real Andy Bernard doing the Choo Choo on that manager guy that stole his girl. Thoughts like that are the reason I should really stop doing DVD reviews first thing in the morning before I've had my coffee. Anyway, Grizzly again avoids the squash loss he should have suffered here and had Stevens on the ropes when Necro Butcher came in and nailed Grizzly with a chair for the DQ. Yep, gotta protect Grizzly, we can't have a guy who's 4'10" and 130 lbs doing jobs to skinny wimps like Erick Stevens.
BUT, it all turns out to be a setup, because Skullkrusher Rasche Brown runs in to make the save, and even though the Jobber Patrol comes out to try and break them up, Rasche and Necro clear them all out and their match, which wasn't supposed to start until later, begins right now. Prince Nana triers to interfere, but Grizzly momentarily gets his heat back by beating him up, and then loses his heat again when Necro Butcher fires him into the ringpost. The fight continues and the Jobber Patrol finally succeeds in herding Necro to the back, so Rasche takes his good buddy Grizzly Redwood and press slams him over the top rope onto Necro in the aisleway. Okay, so no match after all. That's too bad since I thought this was going to be a fun brawl, but if you're Adam Pearce, why would you deliver with A MATCH YOU ADVERTISED when you can do some lame non-match and leave the fans who showed up expecting to see these guys destroy each other feeling ripped off for wasting money on a ticket? Oh that's right, this isn't in New York or on iPPV or HDNet, so Pearce didn't care to book a show worth watching. Or buying.
Next up we have a Pick Six match as (1)Roderick Strong took on (4)Colt Cabana, and this was another great match in the amazing roll that Roderick Strong has been on for over a year now. I think a lot of people see Roderick as a guy who has been kicking around ROH forever but was never a serious consideration for winning the ROH World Title, and he only has it now because they needed someone to transition it from Tyler Black to Davey Richards. While I think there may be an element of truth to that, the fact is that Roderick Strong has come a LONG way in the last couple of years. He's in the best shape of his life and has developed into one of the best workers on the ROH roster, and for a good long time now he's been a guy you can count on to have one of the top two or three matches on any given show. Roderick is also someone who has historically been regarded as one of the worst promos in the company, but has made massive improvements in that department as well. I think that given all the strides he's made over the last couple of years, it's unfair to undersell Roderick like that because I believe that he absolutely deserves to be the champion right now, and doesn't deserve to be seen as the guy who was just in the right place at the right time. As I said earlier, great match that got a little stiff as well, and ended when Truth Martini again interfered behind Roderick's back, clobbering Cabana with the Book Of Truth and allowing Roderick to hit the gutbuster and the Sick Kick (which looked to bust Cabana's mouth open hardway) and get the win.
Now it's time for the match I was most looking forward to on this show as the American Wolves faced off against Generation Me, formerly known as the Young Bucks. I don't think I need to explain why I was looking forward to this match, but I found it a bit unique since the Bucks, or Generation Me, or whatever you want to call them had just left ROH about six months earlier and while I was happy to see them come in and work the Wolves one more time, I don't think it had that "oh my god, the Bucks are coming back!" feel that it would have had given another year for absence to make the heart grow fonder. GenMe (which I'll call them for the purposes of this match) cut a promo before the match establishing themselves as heels by disowning their old names and saying they've been stealing the show on national television for months now. Davey Richards responds by questioning their sexuality and says that they're in his hometown of St Louis, and then hands the mic to Eddie Edwards who tells them that the hunt is on. This match was as awesome as you would have expected, building to a closing sequence where both teams were hitting each other with their finishes and kicking out and then just destroying each other with superkicks (a sequence I like to call the Mike Epsenhart Special) and then they had an awesome finish where GenMe went for More Bang For Your Buck on Davey, but Eddie caught Jeremy Buck coming off the top with the 450 and pulled him up into a powerbomb position and held him while Davey recovered and kicked Max Buck off the top rope, then went up himself and gave Jeremy a top rope lungblower, setting Jeremy right up for the Achilles Lock and Jeremy tapped out. AWESOME closing sequence there. Davey cut a promo after the match saying he has a problem: he appreciates everyone calling him the Best In The World, but Eddie makes the team complete and tells the crowd to give it up for the most underrated guy in the business. Crowd starts chanting Eddie's name, and then Davey continued to say that no matter what the promoters want you to buy into, the Wolves are the best tag team in the world and Davey's already had hard fought matches with Kenny Omega on two occasions, and when they come back to St Louis he wants Omega again so they can steal the show one more time. That sounds great to me, and I definitely got the impression they were building to a third bout between the two. The first two matches were amazing, so I say when Omega's recovered from the ankle injury, put it together , make it the main event, and give them 45-50 minutes.
We move on to the first of two six man tag matches tonight as Austin Aries and the All Night Express take on ROH World Champion Tyler Black, Jerry Lynn, and Delirious. Aries tries to cut his usual, long winded, prematch promo, but gets cut off by the babyfaces' entrance. This being an angry occasion, Delirious is wearing the Poison Red outfit tonight, and indeed the babyfaces rush the ring and attack the heels to jump start the match. To bring you up to speed on the various issues involved in this match, Delirious wanted to get his hands on Aries because Aries tried to permanently injure Delirious by dropping him throat-first on the guard rail with a double axhandle, Savage-Steamboat style. Lynn wanted to get his hands on Kenny King after King and Titus tried to end his career with a spike piledriver on an episode of HDNet. Tyler Black was there because he had been feuding with Aries for about 6000 years and someone must have really wanted to run that feud even further into the ground than it already had been.
Okay, so I've been saying in some of my recent DVD reviews that I don't think the ROH titles had been defended nearly enough during a certain someone's time as booker, but another gripe I had about that period was how often the ROH World Champion was not only not defending the title, but was often stuck into meaningless, midcard tag matches. I think if Austin Aries and Tyler Black spent as much time defending the ROH World Title as they did in six man tags, the title scene would have been a lot more interesting. Aries and his guys have the same six man tag they always have and Delirious pins Aries with an inside cradle. I don't know if I was supposed to care about this or not, but if I was then it didn't work. Postmatch brawl breaks out and Aries kidnaps Daizee in the confusion, and then Kevin Steen (who is challenging Tyler for the ROH World Title the following evening) runs in and attacks Tyler and puts him in the Crippler Crossface, but then El Generico runs in and attacks Steen, leading us into...
...the Steen-Generico rematch from Death Before Dishonor VIII as these two battle it out in what the fans in New York this weekend were chanting Match Of The Year at. No doubt about it, there was no other feud in ROH that was as personal and emotional as Steen and Generico, and they absolutely deserved to go on last at Final Battle. But we're still months away from there at this point, and just then Generico was looking to avenge his loss to Steen at DBD8 and maybe stop his momentum leading into Steen's title shot while he was at it. One of the things I liked about this feud, as opposed to something like Aries-Tyler that would put me to sleep, is that Steen & Generico always managed to keep things interesting and not keep rehashing what they had already done with each other. The heat and the violence kept building, and building, and building through the feud until they got to the Fight Without Honor last weekend, and they threw such a sense of realism into it that isn't there with a lot of feuds these days. There was a fan sitting front row wearing a Generico mask, and at one point Generico was beating Steen up in front of him and the fan was going nuts, but then later in the match Steen had Generico in trouble and brought him back over to the fan and was yelling "This is your hero?" at the fan while he was choking Generico and tearing at his face right in front of the fan. Great crowd interactions there, I like that a lot because it gets the fans feeling connected to what's going on instead of the wrestlers ignoring the crowd to the point where they're almost in a fishbowl with the audience on the outside.
This was another awesome brawl between these two where, as I said earlier, they continued to up the ante every time out. Generico hit a tornado DDT on Steen on the entrance ramp, but Steen came back with a moonsault and a nasty looking pump handle/half nelson suplex that I'd never seen before. Generico tried for the top rope brainbuster but Steen blocked and hit a top rope fisherman's buster instead. Generico hit a regular brainbuster but couldn't get the win, so he hit a pair of half and half suplexes and went for the top rope brainbuster again, but Steen blocked so Generico just hit a running Yakuza kick that sent Steen to the floor. Generico tried his leaping DDT through the ropes on the floor but Steen hit him with a chair and got himself disqualified. Colt Cabana tried to make the save but Steen hit him with a chair and then used a chain to choke the referee, but Generico made the save and ran Steen off, chasing him through the crowd and putting him on a table so Generico could climb up on a scaffolding used by production and dove off, onto Steen and through the table. My initial reaction was that we're once again ripping off the fans with a shitty non-finish, but that was a pretty sweet spot with the scaffold and it introduced the chain which would be used for the Double Chain Match at Glory By Honor IX, so I'll let it go.
This all brings us to our main event, as the ROH World Tag Team Champions, the Kings Of Wrestling, team with Sara Del Rey to take on the Briscoes and Amazing Kong. We're all familiar with the long-running rivalry between the Briscoes and the KOW, and Del Rey and Kong have had a rivalry of their own, and most recently faced off in New York City shortly after Kong's TNA release when Del Rey used Chris Hero's golden elbow pad to knock Kong out and get a cheap victory. This is Kong's first appearance since that match in New York, and even though ROH spoils the finish to this match the second you put the DVD in because the background on the menu screen shows Kong and the Briscoes raising their arms in victory, but for the sake of this review, I'll humor ROH and just smile and nod. Also, as Dave Prazak noted before the match, this is the first time that women are wrestling in the main event of a Ring Of Honor show, and I think that's a pretty cool milestone. Maybe with the recent re-emphasis on women's wrestling in ROH, I think it'd be cool to do something like the Lita-Trish Stratus feud of 2004 where they spend months and months building up a super heated feud between two of the girls and then have them blow off their feud in a singles match in the main event of an ROH show. I'm not saying have them main event Final Battle or anything like that but I definitely think it would work as the main event of maybe a Wrestlemania weekend show or something.
But getting to the match, Sara and Kong start off but Sara immediately tags out to Hero, who decides he doesn't want any part of Kong so he tags Claudio, who lays in a couple of heavy shots and then tags in Sara, but Kong quickly recovers and starts rolling over Sara but Sara quickly bails out of the ring and then it turns into a big brawl on the floor. Then it heads back into the ring and the brawl continues there with Kong joining in with the Briscoes to hit a three-person version of the football tackle on the Kings. After that it finally settled down into a standard heat segment with the Kings and Sara working over Mark Briscoe, and it was pretty unique to see Sara get in there and get physical with the guys. I know she's worked against men in the past, but I think it really gets her over as a killer to see her get in there and do real damage on someone of the Briscoes' caliber and puts her out there as the real deal. Finally Briscoe made the hot tag to Kong and Sara tried to run and tag out but both Hero and Claudio jumped off the apron and left Sara to fend for herself. Kong started destroying her so Hero and Claudio finally came in to help but Kong started plowing through all three of them. Finally everyone wound up fighting in the ring and Hero KILLED Kong with a rolling elbow but Kong kicked out and hit a rolling elbow of her own, a spinning backfist, then the Briscoes hit a powerbomb/neckbreaker finisher to set up a second rope splash by Kong, but Claudio and Sara ran in to make the save. The fight spilled back out to the floor and Kong hit a dive off the apron onto the KOW and Sara, getting a huge pop from the crowd. Kings hit a Doomsday Device of their own and went for KRS-ONE on Jay, but Mark ran in and tackled Claudio, allowing Jay to victory roll Hero and get the win. This match kicked ass, not only was it totally on the level we've come to expect from the Briscoes and Kings Of Wrestling, but it was a lot of fun to see Kong and Sara get in there and go at it with the guys and actually see the guys sell for them and make both girls look like major ass kickers. Awesome stuff, even if we knew what the finish was going to be as soon as we loaded the DVD.
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If you're someone who has to pick and choose which ROH DVDs you want to buy, this is definitely one you're going to want to put on your list because there were no less than three awesome matches in the main event, Steen vs Generico, and Wolves vs GenMe. It was not without crap, such as the monthly Aries/ANX six man and the Skullkrusher/Necro bait-and-switch, but if you can look past that (and the fact that on the second night of a three night tour with all ROH champions appearing, we still have a grand total of zero title defenses), this show featured some terrific wrestling and is well worth spending money to see.
Next time around we'll wrap up our Midwest tour in Chicago Ridge with Salvation, featuring Tyler Black vs Kevin Steen and several matches in the Tag Wars 2010 tournament! For more information on Ring Of Honor, check out www.rohwrestling.com.
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