The first night of Chikara’s
2015 King of Trios is in the books. As a first time attendee, I can say the
night more than lived up to expectations. There’s no way to do a quickly
written recap can do justice to the night. I highly recommend buying the show
when Chikara makes it available on their website. Here are some quick thoughts on the night as best
as I can remember them.
As with most shows, the
night was split into two halves. The first half of the show was the matches
that had little storyline implications or teams the audience weren’t familiar
with while the second half featured the more invested matches.
United Nations vs. Team Attack
The first match saw United
Nations defeat Team Attack. This made me 0-1 for my predictions. Sean
“X-Pac/123 Kid” Waltman was on commentary and got into a stare down with Prakash
Sabar after the match. Mister Azerbaijan had the pin but elected to let team
captain Juan Francisco de Coronado get the victory for his team. Solid opener
and Team Attack looked good in their debut.
BDK
While Team Attack had a good
showing, it was their British counterparts Team Fight Club Pro that had the
breakout night with their mild upset victory over the BDK.Derek Sabato refereed the match. When
the BDK was at their height in 2010, Sabato was the crooked ref who helped them
win. Before the match, current BDK leader Jakob Hammermeier told Sabato it was
nice to see him again and then gave an exaggerated wink. Fight Club, I think
due to having a tag team called Mustache Mountain, walked in to a crowd that
was polite in welcoming them to the Easton Funplex but walked out with a crowd
fully behind them for the weekend.
Los Ice Creams
If I’d made official
predictions for the tournament, I probably would have picked Crown and Court
(Princess Kimber Lee, Los Ice Creams) to be the most likely to pull off the
biggest upsets and advance to the finals. It’s a good thing I didn’t actually
put any money on my prediction. Crown and Court fought a valiant fight only to
end up losing to the Arcane Horde (The Batiri and Oleg the Usurper). As I said
in my King of Trios preview, fans have really taken to Oleg this season and
were happy to see him advance in the tournament. However Oleg will always be a
murderer and therefore I can’t cheer him. RIP Dragon Dragon. Los Ice Creams
looked better in this match than they normally do. Maybe in a year if they keep
working together Crown and Court may be able to go on a winning streak.
Devastation Corp. vs. bWo
The last match of the first
half was the Devastation Corporation taking on some up and comers calling
themselves the Blue World Order. Dev Corp thought this would be a cakewalk to
the pay window. They were wrong. The bWo proved to enough of a challenge that
the “King of Managers” Sydney Bakabella had to interfere helping Flex
Rumblecrunch get the victory.One
of the highlights of the match was the first time “Hollywood” Nova and Blaster
McMassive were in the ring together. For those not in the now, Nova does a Hulk
Hogan rip-off character and Blaster is a black man. Seeing the two of them face
to face led to a “This is Awkward” chant and Nova bailing out of the ring to
avoid having to fight. After the match the crowd gave the bWo a standing
ovation and chanted, “Please come back.”
Battleborn
The second half of the show
started with Dasher’s Dugout vs. Battleborn. I have Battleborn picked to win
the tournament so I was glad to finally see one of my predictions for the first
round come true. Former Grand Champion, Icarus seemed to take a nasty bump
early in the match and then was hit with a chair to the face allowing
Battleborn to pick up the victory. After the match, Icarus lay on the mat for a
while and the doctor came over to check on him. Hopefully he’s okay and wasn’t
too shaken up. My favorite part of the match was when Battleborn leader Kevin
Condron was on the apron, the crowd had a dueling chant of, “We want Kevin,”
“No we don’t.”I wanted to record
this and make it my ring tone for when Kevin calls me to ask why I haven’t
written a blog in three months.
Airborne!
The Bullet Club defeated the
team of Fire Ant, Worker Ant and Pharaoh Ant. While this match was really good,
I don’t think the Young Bucks threw enough Superkicks for this to really
classify as a Superkick party. I was seated near the Bullet Club’s corner. At
one point, AJ Styles looked at the guys in front of me who were harassing him
and said, “If this wasn’t a PG show, I’d give you the DX chop. I’ve got to be
good.”During the match, AJ went
to do a top rope move and slipped. He blamed the “lucha ropes” for causing the
mistake. After the match, in a bit of retaliation, AJ had the Bucks superkick
the rope.
Kingston & Hallowicked
The story during the
Nightmare Warriors vs. Snake Pit was former Grand Champion Eddie Kingston trash
talking current Grand Champion Hallowicked. This was a brutal match that saw
“The Last of a Dying Breed” Kingston working with his team only to end up on
the losing end. After the match, Hallowicked and Frightmare tried to get
Soldier Ant to become a full-fledged member of their team. Soldier eventually
pulled off his mask revealing another mask that was a hybrid of his camouflage
look mixed with the style of Hallowicked and Frightmare’s masks.
Swamp Monster!
The main event saw the
Gentleman’s Club square off against Team AAA. Aerostar entered with a flamethrower.
Gentleman’s Club captain Chuck Taylor suggested if Aerostar gets to use a
flamethrower, Chuck should get to use a gun. A wild a crazy match, which is
pretty much a given when on one side of the ring is a dragon and the other side
features a swamp monster. The finish came after Colonel Doc Angus and Orange
Cassidy tried to interfere to help the Gentleman’s Club only for Drago to mist
Cassidy and Team AAA getting the victory shortly thereafter.
That was just night one.
Can’t wait to see what nights two and three have in store as well as the fan
conclave. I’m predicting come Monday, I will be sleeping all day in an attempt
to recoup from the weekend. Check out more pics on Facebook!
No doubt that March 21, 2001 changed the course of
history forever. It's the night that WCW, a wrestling company rich in
history, was bought by its competitor, Vincent Kennedy McMahon. I had
been in Dallas for the week and was away from the computer and had no idea this
was going down. We arrived back home Monday afternoon and I logged in to
the usual wrestling sites I frequented. They were all reporting that
Vince had bought WCW. I couldn't believe it. I knew the company was
likely going to be sold, but the last I'd heard Eric Bischoff and some
investors were interested.
I must admit I marked out a bit when Monday Nitro
opened and fans were greeted by McMahon who made the announcement that he'd
bought the company. It was one of the most surreal moments in wrestling
history. What would this mean for the future of the business? Were
the WCW guys and gals going to all go to the WWF? No one knew for sure.
As both shows chugged along and WCW put on matches
like Scott Steiner vs. Booker T for the heavyweight title and Ric Flair vs.
Sting the anticipation grew. It all came to ahead when Shane McMahon
showed up in Panama City Beach where Nitro was broadcasting from. He and
Vince sparred via satellite and Shane laid it out that WCW had been sold to a
McMahon, but Not Vince. Shane had somehow bought the company out from
under Vince's nose.
This immediately took the focus off the pending WCW
vs. WWF war in my opinion and became more about the McMahon family feud.
Things escalated when ECW returned only under the ownership of Stephanie
McMahon. So while the initial announcement and Vince appearing on Nitro
was an awesome memory, the rest of the booking for the invasion angle feel
flat. It had some moments as you can go back and read in some of the
other Raw Memories blogs.
Honorable mention: The kid is good! Photo courtesy: WWE
Honorable Mention:
I'm not sure how I let this one slip under my radar, but I did. I had
forgotten about the Lightning Kid's match on Raw that made him a house hold
name until Chad brought it up on a recent From the Rafters Radio show.
Lightning Kid (aka Sean Waltman) had been a star in Global Wrestling
Federation and was now wrestling in the WWF. Kid looked just like a kid.
He was about 21 years old at the time and looked like he weighed about
160 pounds soaking wet. To say he was not the a typical WWF meat head
wrestler would be the understatement of the year.
But out of no where the Kid pinned a cocky and confident Razor Ramon.
It was a huge upset; one that earned the Kid a new moniker. He
became the 1-2-3 Kid and soon gained confidence and started climbing the ranks
of the WWF. Of course he would eventually become Syxx in WCW and X-Pac
when he returned to the WWF and joined Degeneration X. Had it not been
for that initial match back in 1993 in the early days of Raw, who knows what
would have become of the Lightning Kid...
