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Last night I went to see the Dragon Gate USA show at the International Centre with a friend. I don’t go to indy shows much anymore but I’m glad I took in this one. I purchased tickets back in March and went weeks without seeing them arrive in the mail so I was a little worried that I’d wind up not being able to see the show. Days before the show, I got assurances both via voicemail and e-mail that they’d have a record of my purchase at the door and they were as good as their word. We got inside and the setup was what one would expect for a better-financed indy wrestling show. The ring was surprisingly well lit and there were gimmick tables where you could buy all manner of Dragon Gate swag. My old buddy Stacey Case was there in his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and pork-pie hat promoting the PFL with shirts and DVDs and, as usual, had no shortage of great stories.

I went into this show largely unfamiliar with the roster and completely ignorant of any storylines. This event was being filmed for future PPV release which I took as a good sign. I won’t go through a move-by-move breakdown of the matches but if you check out DG USA’s YouTube page you can see the kind of action we saw. The guys were small but they were given the time to put on a match and tell a story. The style they work is pretty stiff with lots of chops and kicks, most of which did not need enhancement by slapping their tights or stomping a boot. There were definitely more acrobatic high-spots-per-minute than you’d see on WWE or TNA and there were a few moments when guys wouldn’t sell the beating they took moments prior in order to execute a cool-looking move but I’m getting used to the “universe” where guys can take multiple high-spots and recover. This was, at very least, done consistently throughout the evening.
The crowd was very hot for the show but, at the risk of sounding elitist, some of the chants got on my nerves. Something just seems incredibly dorky to me about chanting “This is awesome” and “This is wrestling.” Everyone at a DG USA is a hardcore mark; breaking the fourth wall like that to assert you’re a dyed-in-the-wool fan just seems redundant and masturbatory to me. I think this comes from the fact that everyone in the crowd wants to either re-live or, if they were too young to have been there, be a part of a fan experience akin to what was seen in the original ECW. If that is going to happen it has to happen organically; you can’t force it by mimicking the three and four-syllable chants. As an aside, and this also applies to the original ECW, I’ve never understood chanting the name of a promotion. It’s not like hockey fans chant “NHL.”

The two workers on the show that really stood out to me were Pac (no relation to Sean Waltman) and Yamato. Pac was definitely the most athletically talented worker on the card. Aside from having springs for legs the acrobatic grace with which he performed his moves just plain stood out. His moves looked natural as opposed to the product of repetition and practice. Yamato was the star of the show to me because he knew how to work as a heel. He appeared to be the leader of a heel faction called Kamikaze USA. Yamato came out with others a few times to beat down the faces and, like a heel, did so only in superior numbers. He worked a tag match with Shingo against Cima and Dragon Kid. In their match he stalled, begged off, took powders, and rarely went on the offence unless double-teaming with Shingo or after Shingo had just worked over their opponent. In an age where nobody wants to “look weak” Yamato seems to understand that being cowardly, underhanded, and devious is what makes a wrestler look strong as a heel and it made their match extremely entertaining and the match of the night to me.

If Dragon Gate USA puts on a show near you it’s definitely worth checking out.

I just finished listening to this week’s episode of Live Audio Wrestling and I have to say that I’m pretty disappointed with how harsh both the hosts of The LAW and the callers all were in regards to Bret Hart and Vince McMahon’s match last night at Wrestlemania 26. Whether or not you liked the involvement of the Hart family members in the match or not is a matter of opinion. I will acknowledge that it made it very crowded at ringside and it would probably have been a better use of everyone’s time to just have the Hart Dynasty stable present. Additionally, I think that having Bruce Hart as the referee was likely lost on the majority of the viewing audience as he’s never been relevant to any WWF/E storylines. The length of the match was called into question, as well. All I’ll say in that regard is that it didn’t feel too long when I was watching it but given that other matches (like CM Punk vs. Rey Mysterio) were likely cut short to make room for it so saying that it went to long is a valid criticism.

My disappointment is in how unkind and boorish many of the opinions were on the “quality” of the match. I was stunned to hear selfish marks complain that Bret “couldn’t do shit” in the ring. The guy is 52 years old and suffered a stroke in 2002, for crying out loud. I’d like to see what any of the detractors are athletically capable of when they’re that age without suffering a stroke. In addition to that, Hart’s “opponent” is 64 years old and not a professional wrestler. What were you marks expecting? This match had one purpose and one purpose alone: catharsis. No other event in wrestling had more lasting repercussions than Survivor Series 1997. It has been referenced, hashed, and re-hashed for over thirteen years. This match gave both the fans and the Hitman character a chance to finally call Vince McMahon’s character to the carpet and give him his just desserts and that’s exactly what happened. Anyone who wanted or expected anything more than what they got last night is seriously in need of a reality check.

I took in this year’s NFL conference championship games with @C_Derksen at his place yesterday. What a great pair of games. The Jets definitely made a game of it but the Colts are just plain better. Peyton Manning still drives me up the wall to watch with his non-stop audibles but I won’t take anything away from the guy on the field. He’s one of the few quarterbacks in the NFL today that can put a clutch drive together and move the ball down the field when he needs to. The talent he’s surrounded with doesn’t hurt, either.

I can’t remember the last time I was as into a game as much as I was into the Saints against the Vikings. I’ll cop to schadenfreude and admit that I spend the whole game hoping that Brett Favre would blow it for his team and end the season on a downer. To be completely honest, until the final interception, Favre played as well yesterday as he did in any of his career performances that earned him MVP accolades. Had the coin toss gone the other way I have no doubt that the Vikings would have won. That being said, fate is cruel and overtime coin tosses are part of the deal. I sincerely hope that this is the end of Favre’s NFL shenanigans. I have absolutely no problem with older players making a living. If a player in his autumn years can get a team to believe in him and pay him based more on past achievements than future potential then more power to him. What I have issue with is the way in which he manipulated three franchises over the course of the last two seasons to get his way. His behaviour should be the definitive case for a player being compelled to sit out of the league for an entire season after announcing his retirement.

Being a San Diego Chargers fan is becoming painful. After an unimpressive start to the season they racked up eleven regular season wins in a row and earned a bye in the first round of the playoffs only to have their offence completely shit the bed in the second half of yesterday’s playoff game against the New York Jets. I don’t want to write a long and detailed diatribe as, quite frankly, it’s too frustrating to live through again. All aspects of the team failed in the second half except for the defense. Although the scoreboard shows that the defense gave up two touchdowns in the second half I only blame them for one. Any time your quarterback throws an interception in your own red zone you can hardly expect the defense to respond with a full stop. Yes, they gave up the 53-yard run late in the game but, mentally, that team had already checked out by that point.

Nate Kaeding missed two easy field goals. There’s no analysis required here. If he’d made either one of them, all other things being equal, it would have at least given them an opportunity to win on overtime. I’m really surprised that a guy who had made over 60 field goals in a row from within 40 yards missed twice from that range.

The coaching failed, as well, coming out in the second half. New York visibly demonstrated in the opening moments of the second half that they had made adjustments and found a way to win. San Diego looked uninspired and lost.

What was the most frustrating moment for me to watch was Shaun Phillips’ idiotic head butt which netted a 15 yard personal foul penalty. There are very few aspects of a game of football that are completely under your control but a lack of discipline like this is bush-league. This was not a case of two guys not ratcheting down their intensity milliseconds after the whistle, this was a knuckle-head intentionally walking over to his opponent and throwing a head butt long after the play was over. Pointless. Meaningless. Stupid. The San Diego Chargers that walked on the field yesterday in the third quarter were a team that deserved to lose and that’s precisely what they did.

Like Odysseus returning from his quest, Bret Hart returned to WWE television last night and was the guest host on Raw. Like they say, never say never. I still don’t fully understand the guest host gimmick as these guest hosts are all over the map in terms of what their actual function on the show is. Some are clueless celebrities there to shill their latest movie while others seem to have booking power that supersedes the storyline head honcho. At the very least, having an established spot for a guest to come in offered up a reason for Bret Hart to return to Raw with a role for him to assume. They definitely didn’t beat around the bush and had Bret come out after a brief WWE career highlight package that ended at Survivor Series in 1997. Given the way he was misused in WCW it’s probably best that it stopped there.

Bret came out in skater shorts, running shoes, a gimmicked leather jacket, and aviator shades. I thought that this made him look a little cartoonish. The guy looked great considering he’s 52 and had a stroke but having him come out in clothes that gimmicked made him look older because it contrasted so starkly to what he looked like wearing the same outfit 10 years ago. Wearing a Hitman t-shirt and a Hitman-emblazoned leather jacket made him look like a mark for himself to me.

Hart addressed the crowd and was articulate and showed very minimal signs of his stroke. There was a slightly noticeable droop on the left side of his face but unless you were really watching for it you couldn’t really tell. Hart cut the kind of promo that a retuning hero should, putting himself and the fans over. I laughed when he mentioned that they were in the same building where he had won King of the Ring and brought up that Lawler jumped him that night. Next, Bret called out Shawn Michaels and they did a “tense” confrontation that ended in them “burying the hatchet” in regards to Montreal and shook hands. Michaels then turned to leave, paused, and did so at a distance that teased a super-kick but he wound up turning around and hugging Hart. Well staged, I thought. Hart then called out Vince McMahon to no response from Vince.

The next time we saw Hart he was in a room adorned with Hitman memorabilia and Chris Jericho came in asking him to screw over Triple-H and Shawn Michaels later that night in their match with he and The Big Show for the tag titles. Jericho played the smarmy heel well and played up Bret and his past intertwining. Bret took the “high road” and told Jericho that he had to win his match on his own. As entertaining as the interaction between Hart and Jericho was, this segment reiterated how ambiguous the role of the “guest host” is. Why would Bret, as a “host”, be able to order a match to end when it was clearly established in other unrelated vignettes that Vince was the man in charge? I hate things like this that make it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief.

Hart isn’t seen again until the final segment in which he finally is able to confront McMahon face-to-face in the ring. Again, I struggled to suspend my disbelief as the announcers were putting this over as the first time Hart and McMahon have confronted each other on this issue. Even a casual fan that only takes in what’s put on television would know that Hart returned at least twice within the past few years to help produce a DVD set of his career and to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Strange. I have to admit that this segment “got me.” It looked like they were taking the high road with McMahon and Bret shaking hands but then, out of nowhere, McMahon kicked Hart in the groin. Hart sold it hard and the show ended with McMahon walking away in disgust. Kudos to the announcers for remaining quiet and just letting this segment play out.

At the time I thought “that’s it?” but, upon immediate reflection, I think that’s what the segment was supposed to do. Based on the rumours I’ve heard & read, Hart’s involvement is going to culminate at WrestleMania and the seeds were definitely sown tonight for future interaction between Hart and McMahon. While I was watching Raw I definitely thought, as I was watching, that they didn’t have enough segments with Hart but again, upon reflection, he was advertised as the “guest host”, not as a returning member of the roster. The table has definitely been set and it will be compelling to see how they proceed.