Colt hands off a kid to a lucky fan!
Despite having lived in St. Louis for a few years now, I hadn’t made it out to see either PWCS Wrestling or STL Anarchy Wrestling before going to their Mega Ticket event this past Sunday. I’ve always meant to, but, y’know, I have to go outside, which means I have to put on pants AND shoes… I was motivated to go out this time because Colt Cabana, Grado, and Kikutaro were there filming for Colt’s latest Wrestling Road Diaries movie, “Wrestling Road Diaries 3: Funny Equals Money”. If you haven’t seen his first two movies, they’re both really great documentaries about the life of a pro wrestler, the first focusing on a trip with him and Daniel Bryan (after he had signed a contract with WWE, but before he actually started wrestling for them) and the second one was about a trip Colt took with Domino Cliff Compton and The Big L.G. (Luke Gallows) where they wrestle through small towns and talk about life after WWE.
Even though I was drawn to the PWCS & STL Anarchy show by the big names I recognized, the whole show was great from top to bottom. A couple of standout matches were The Viking War Party vs. The Troy Athletic club in a tag team match, and the St. Louis Anarchy Championship match with Gary Jay defending his title against Zakk Sawyers. Gary took an especially brutal suicide dive into the brick wall of the Knights of Columbus hall that I was glad to see him walk away from.
I was glad I got to see Grado wrestle in person, because I had only seen him on Impact Wrestling before this and his humor didn’t translate to tv as well as seeing it in person. I’m not sure if it’s just being a part of the crowd, or not having the announcers talk over him when he was on TV, but he was hilarious in person. For example, in the middle of the match a kid yelled “Grado sucks” and Grado managed to wrestle the next few minutes while constantly giving the kid a mean ass look.
I’d seen Kikutaro on Chikara’s King of Trios 2012, so I knew to expect his Looney Toons-esque wrestling style. For one thing, he wrestled in slow motion while the audience chanted “thiiiiiiissss iiiiiissss aaaawweeeesssooooommmmeee” along with it. His opponent, Pierre Abernathy, kept up with the shenanigans (maybe tomfoolery is a better descriptor), putting Kikutaro in a sleeper hold and then grabbing a pillow and blanket out from under the ring to put him to bed and pin him. It was all pretty funny and the audience ate it up except for one old guy behind me who was flipping out and shouting that they were “making a mockery of wrestling”. It was more like a parody of wrestling, and while it was a bit out of place between two non-comedy matches, it was still pretty damn entertaining.
Having heard Colt Cabana many times on his podcast, it was great to see him wrestle in person. The story going into his match was really good with his opponent, Jeremy “The Rebel” Wyatt, telling Colt that he knew Colt was only there to sell merchandise, so if he laid down for the pin he could get back to his table quicker. Colt lied down (first on his stomach before Jeremy yelled at him to roll over) but when Jeremy went for the pin, Colt rolled him up for a pin of his own. Wyatt kicked out and it went on from there. I think out of the three “Funny” men, Colt did the best job of working comedy spots into his match without requiring his opponent to look like a fool or stretching the suspension of disbelief. One highlight occurred halfway through the match when Colt was stumbling through the crowd to get away from Wyatt and just “happened” to fall over onto two guys who were heckling him the entire match, knocking over their drink and drenching them in sweat. It was funny to me, anyway, probably not so much for them.
The main event though was really great, featuring KC Karrington, Pierre Abernathy, Evan Gellistico, and Adam Caster (Chaos Nation) facing off against Steven Kennedy, Mat Fitchett, Davey Vega, and Jake Dirden (The Resurgence) for the PWCS championship trophy. I don’t regularly follow the promotion so I don’t know all the history leading up to it, but both teams really brought it in this match, and let even the uneducated wrestling viewer like myself know how much the trophy meant to them.
Davey Richards was also advertised, but he wasn’t at the show and they never mentioned him either, which seemed a little strange. You’d think if a wrestler no showed they’d at least announce it at the start. The general talk amongst the fans in attendance suggested that this wasn’t the first time Davey had no showed though, and no one seemed too upset about it.
Anyway, it was a great show and I’m definitely going to be checking out both STL Anarchy and PWCS Wrestling in the future. Yay wrestling!
He was suplexed for a pin near the guy who died for your sins!
