Match A Day 03.10.10: Week 47 - Wrestlers Who Have Something That Can’t Be Taught

Posted by Jake Chambers on 03.10.2010

Some wrestlers work hard, show improvement year after year, and earn the respect of their peers and fans… but I don’t care about them? This week I watch matches featuring some of those wacky wrestlers who have a natural talent for the art of professional wrestling and didn’t have to waste all that time studying!

Previously on Match A Day:

- Wow, was Wrestlemania 25 ever bad! After months of theorizing the demise of modern mainstream pro-wrestling in my old column Wacky Wrestling Theory, I decided to stop letting the big companies tell me how and what I was going to enjoy! Sure, I'll never be able to give up watching WWE, in some way, but I'm certainly no longer going to watch it every week and buy into their hype and bullshit! Nope, from now on I'm just watching one match a day. Classic or recent, but on my own terms and at my own speed!

- I revealed to the MAD readers that I am straight edge, just like our pal CM Punk, and that I never drink alcohol, do drugs or smoke cigarettes. And yes, the cliché is true, that makes me better than you!

- At first when my friend from back home, Eddie, move here to Seoul, South Korea, I thought he just wanted to hang out… but then I discovered he was selling his own experimental new drug called Madness!

- Then, my very first girlfriend in Seoul, Kimberly (not to be confused with that tortuous bitch Suzy who basically kidnapped me earlier this year), contacted me and laid a serious guilt trip on me over her past abortion while asking to ‘borrow' a huge sum of money… therefore I told Eddie I needed in on his Madness business.

- …but I wasn't about to go out onto the streets and start pushing Madness on Korean teenagers. Instead I let him use my apartment as a kind of storage area for the drugs, and so he paid me up front all the money I needed to pay off Kimberly.

And now MAD Week 47 can begin…

Wrestlers Who Have Something That Can't Be Taught

1. RoadDogg & X-pac

These DX stalwarts are popular critic fodder online, yet I found both of them to be the epitome of wrestlers who have something you can't teach, because although they weren't flashy, big personalities or technical wizards, I was always attracted to their performances for one reason or another. They have weird magnetic personalities that you can't develop in any wrestling school, that's for sure.

Match #318 – Sunday, February 14th
Dumpster, Tables Match: D-Generation X vs. Dudley Boyz
[WWF King of the Ring, June 2000]



The beginning, of course, displayed RoadDogg's awesome ability to hype up a crowd. It's one thing to go to wrestling school and train in the moves needed for the physicality inside the ring, but to be able to hold the attention of thousands with only your voice, now that's a skill that they just can't teach in a gym. In fact, I have no idea how some of these guys can do it. I'm sure everyone reading this knows how hard effective public speaking can be, but somehow a guy like RoadDogg goes out there and just whips people into a frenzy while looking totally comfortable and relaxed. I doubt he went to Toastmasters or Drama school, and I highly doubt that they would have helped him for what he does anyways. RoadDogg just has an inherent charm and ability to speak to the crowd, a skill that we all know has taken years to painfully develop for some good wrestlers, and never for others!



Poor X-pac here in the end… at around the 6:45 mark of Part Two, he's confused as to where his girlfriend Torrie is… then when he finds out that she in the ring with the Dudleys, he's all angry. I buy his personality, not as a character, but as what a guy like X-pac would be like in that situation. It's kind of like the acting of Keanu Reeves, he's always a very similar character in his movies yet totally believable as what HE would be like in each scenario, not an interpretation of some studied character. X-pac is a smarmy, jerky, excitable guy, and seems authentic in his performances, not like he's putting on a phony character for the camera. In contrast to Bubba Dudley and his silly, twitching orgasm face from putting a woman through a table, X-pac just comes across as natural to me.

2. Flyin' Brian

Flyin' Brian was one of those guys that probably shouldn't have made it in pro-wrestling long enough to become the legendarily unpredictable character in his later career, yet there was something compelling about this Bengal trunk-ed, puffy mullet-ed, speedy pioneer that made him standout.



Match #319 – Monday, February 15th
Flyin' Brian & Bobby Eaton vs. Ric Flair & Arn Anderson
[WCW Main Event, June 1991]

In a match featuring a lot of brilliant wrestlers (and at least three Flair face-first-falls in less than 10 mintues) I was really focused on the work of Flyin' Brian. Everyone knows the inspired chaos of the ‘Loose Canon' persona, but few recognize just how inspired Pillman was in this babyface, high flying role. Compared to his more successful contemporaries like Sting and Luger, in this match Pillman shows flashes in his aggression and expressions of pure pain that did not seem as strained as the aforementioned world champions. Whereas Pillman was not a ‘pure blood' so to speak, he did have a wildly off-the-charts passion for wrestling that he was able to display in all of his characters, even that cheesy good guy in the tiny trunks!

3. Christian

Christian is a guy who is similar to Brian Pillman in some ways; he started out as a kind of faceless high-flyer, graduated from his first gimmick to work his way up through every role, from good guy to comedy, dramatic villain to a the main event level. This hard work you can admire, but there is still something about his charm in all of these roles that makes it hard to knock him down critically.

Match #320 – Tuesday, February 16th
ECW Title, Ladder Match: Christian vs. Shelton Benjamin
[WWE TLC, December 2009]

In a year where there were just way too many pay-per-view ladder based matches, Christian and Benjamin had little room to make their mark (and frankly really didn't here), yet Christian continues to prove that he has an incredible ability as a ring general. He's able to take guys with little charisma, fame, or prestige like Benjamin, and put them in compelling situations. He did the same with Jack Swagger, Tommy Dreamer, William Regal and even guys like Yoshi Tatsu and Zach Ryder on ECW TV, each one with their own diminishing qualities that have kept them from the full WWE spotlight, and yet Christian made them look like superstars when they shared his ring time.

WWE used to have a guy like this (until he went and committed some horrendous crimes) and Christian has slipped very well into this role in 2009, which is particularly impressive because he was not groomed for it (in my opinion) but basically forced into that position as penance for going to TNA. While Christian is often going to be shoved into these ladder matches for no reason, I would personally love to see what he and Benjamin could have done on pay-per-view in a straight singles match, where I'm sure in this day and age when ladder matches are done-and-done they would have been more successful at stealing the show.

4. Masato Tanaka

Anyone who saw his series of matches against Mike Awesome in ECW knows how fantastic Masato Tanaka can be. He is a death match wrestler the caliber of Atushi Onita mixed with the strong style ferocity of Kenta Kobashi. The man is basically the franchise of Zero-1 in Japan based solely on his presence on the roster.

Match #321 – Wednesday, February 17th
Masato Tanka vs. Hirooki Goto
[New Japan Destruction, November 2009]

Once he starts to gain the advantage around the 7:00 mark of Part One, you can really see how his natural riveting confidence helps him to make the match with the capable, yet younger Goto, turn into a true athletic encounter.



In Part Two you will see another display Tanaka's Cylon-like ability to come back from the dead. I don't know what wrestling school you can go to learn how to absorb insane amounts of punishment and still look fresh.



5. Colt Cabana

Why the WWE let this guy go I'll never understand! The smile on his face when he's in the ring shows his pure love of pro-wrestling like a firm handshake is coming through the TV screen to welcome you into the man's home. I don't know if Colt would make a good comedian, but he certainly takes to comedy wrestling with an ease that I've rarely ever seen. And I don't mean being a funny wrestling character, like Santino or Owen Hart, but Colt actually puts humor into the flow of the match. And then when he turns up the dial to serious, it never seems forced. How he learned to do this, I'll never understand as well!

Match #322 – Thursday, February 18th
Elimination Match: Colt Cabana, Necro Butcher, Grizzly Redwood & Brent Albright vs. Jimmy Rave, Bison Smith, Joey Ryan & Claudio Castagnoli
[ROH Death Before Dishonor VII: Night One, July 2009]

Here Colt spearheads a team against the (thankfully) renewed Embassy in a match that is more than 30 minutes of wrestling yet really doesn't do much to highlight the best qualities of Cabana. His strength is in singles action, in my opinion. Surprisingly, the most compelling part of this match was watching the tiny Grizzly Redwood struggle in isolation against most of the bad guy team. In the end, Colt is robbed of victory by shenanigans from Prince Nana and Joey Ryan, but that damn infectious smile continues to shine!



6. Bryce Remsburg

Bryce is a CHIKARA referee, and a good one, but what I am really blown away by is this man's natural ability as a commentator! I was shocked when I realized that frantic and wildly excited wail was coming from the seeming diminutive Remsburg. Now, he has easily become one of the top commentators in the industry, as his passion for the good wrestling in CHIKARA comes across so vibrantly that it makes me think everything I'm seeing is just that much better. Commentating seems to be one of the most difficult things in the pro-wrestling business to develop (just look at the horrible job Chris Hero does on the ROH DVDs these days in comparison, as his canned excited is the antithesis of Remsburg, and sounds like he's trying to be quiet when he gets excited because his parents are sleeping in the next room, or something), yet some people like Roddy Piper, Mr. Perfect, JBL, and now Bryce Remsburg, all have an inborn ability to convey personality through their verbal interpretation of wrestling maneuvers.

In this episode of the CHIKARA Podcast-A-Go-Go, you get to see Bryce display his superior refereeing skills in the first match clip, and here some of his impassioned commentary during today's match of the day.

Match #323 – Friday, February 19th
Claudio Castagnoli vs. Eddie Kingston
[CHIKARA Anniversario Yang, May 2009]



7. Kurt Angle

Who on earth has more natural gifts for pro-wrestling than Kurt Angle? The man should have been a bust, he was a collegiate wrestler who looked like a stiff in his first few outings; he certainly didn't seem to match what was going on around him. Yet, with little training and no experience as a dramatist, Angle went on to redefine modern professional wrestling and now basically stands as a symbol for the ultimate, all around wrestler. Like one of his closest contemporaries, The Rock, neither of them really seemed to click right off the bat, yet Angle did not grow up with an appreciation for the craft of professional wrestling nor did he have The Rock's political connections that gave Miavia more leeway for failure. Angle had a more remarkable quick rise to stardom than even Goldberg who was hardly a critical favorite, had the entire billion dollar WCW machine working overtime to get him over, and certainly showed the personality of a former athlete, and not the flair for entertainment of Angle.

Match #324 – Saturday, February 20th
TNA World Title Match: AJ Style vs. Kurt Angle
[TNA Impact!, January 2010]

Here was the ‘historic' main event of the first ever head-to-head with RAW Hogan/Bischoff produced TNA Impact episode, and not surprisingly, in good old WCW fashion, they were giving away the main event of the next pay-per-view. While I stand by all that I said about Kurt, and his specialness still shines through here, this match was a lot of the same things we've seen from Kurt recently; the multiple finisher kick-outs, the Ankle Lock reversals, the digging deep for the moonsault bit, but then again, Kurt was working against stream with AJ Styles (more on that next week).

This was just a short list of some, ‘wrestlers who have something that can't be taught.' Check out my Twitter account this week where I will be adding some more names to that list! Join in the fun!

Oh… and if you thought I forgot about my little ‘drug-dealing' saga this week, well, sorry but there's little to report. I paid off a happy Kimberly and haven't heard from her since. Eddie has been back and forth a few times, but nothing inconvenient. I haven't had any run-ins with people buying, or high on, Madness. So all-in-all, it's been a pretty quiet week… knock on wood!