Pro Wrestling Outsider

Both the hype video and the commentary team of Mike Tenay and Don West pour all of their effort into reinforcing what everyone watching already knows:  This is the single biggest and most important match in TNA history.  It’s a classic clash between the homegrown badass hyped up as an unstoppable killer and the new outside superstar signee.  A genuine superfight.  Angle was perhaps the largest bona fide modern wrestling star to sign with the company up to that point; neither a relic of the 90s nor a WWE midcarder who never quite got his due, but a beloved former world champion.  And on paper, Joe, a hero of the underground who had yet to become a world champion in TNA, was the perfect foil for him.

TNA fully realized what they had.  They capitalized on the already existing hype with a pretty strong build.  Angle’s first appearance on the October 19th TNA Impact involved him directly attacking Joe and busting him open with a headbutt.  Things didn’t de-escalate from there, with open hostilities between the two of them continuing on Impact.  The match was set for the main event of Genesis.  No titles were on the line, just Joe’s 17 month long undefeated streak and Angle’s pride as a competitor.  Angle cites making Samoa Joe bleed as a point of pride and Joe does not take this lightly.  This may or may not be important to the match itself!

The day comes. The crowd is raucous.  Tenay and West are shouting like few others can.  Both men make their entrances.  The people are loud for Joe but they LOSE IT for Kurt Angle.  The bell finally rings.  They lock up.  After they broke, the crowd started chanting “THIS IS AWESOME”.  The crowd had already decided that this match was going to be incredible.  The hype was real.  Everyone thought that this was TNA’s Moment.

That’s cool for TNA and all, but this also means that Angle and Joe had a big order to fill.

And they did!

Now, I don’t think the match shifted the globe itself on its axis like those behind the hype machine may have wanted it to, but it IS great.  More importantly, I think it’s great in a few key ways that a lot of these big superfights that came before and have come since are not.  

This is not the lengthy evenly matched epic you might expect, nor is it a mostly mat-based affair focused primarily on either man’s submission holds.  Angle and Joe don’t milk crowd reactions with staredowns and/or shtick, either.  This is a tight, concise thirteen and a half minute match built almost entirely around two core ideas.

The first of these ideas is blood, so we’re already off to a great start.  Joe gets Angle on the outside, catches him with the suicide elbow, and then rams his head into the steps.  One great blade job later and Joe has gotten his revenge for Angle making him bleed.  He works the cut, too, and really gets it flowing.  Angle does a fantastic job of selling both the head injury and the blood loss.

Joe capitalizes on this with some strong and dominant-looking work on top.  It’s punctuated by a couple fiery Angle comebacks that are cut off in extremely sudden fashion as Joe continues beating him down, making Angle fully pay the price for exposing his mortality.

A tornado DDT from Angle off the top rope gives Angle the opening he needs and kicks the match into a more evenly matched gear.  After eating some suplexes, Joe executes a beautiful arm drag counter to the Olympic Slam, knees Angle in the corner, and then hits the Muscle Buster.  Angle’s out at two.  Joe then tries to lock in the Coquina Clutch.  In a series of moves that directly mirror what immediately came before, Angle counters the clutch, hits the Olympic Slam, and now Joe’s out at two.  As Angle goes through his signature “hitting the next level” routine of dropping the straps and locking in the ankle lock, the second main idea of this match comes into focus: Neither man is going to beat the other with their power moves.  They’re going to have to make their opponent tap out.  

And both men know it.

The finish is centered entirely around this idea.  Angle’s first attempt at the ankle lock is countered with a leg kick that leads to Joe locking in the Coquina Clutch.  The visual of a bloody Angle being choked out by Joe is striking.  He counters this by grabbing Joe’s ankle and the intense pain leads to Joe breaking his hold as Angle locks his in once again.  Joe sells the threat and pain of the ankle lock beautifully.

A rolling counter gets Joe out of the lock, but Angle avoids an attempted shoulder block in the corner, hits the post, and walks into one more Olympic Slam.  Angle pulls the straps up… and then drops them again.  He locks in the ankle lock one Joe’s wounded ankle one more time and grapevines the leg.  Joe reaches for the ropes… but Angle pulls him away and he taps.  After everything Joe punished Angle with, after everything he withstood, after all of the months of him going undefeated?  The ankle lock really feels like the silver bullet that took him down.  It’s the missing answer to the previously unsolvable equation.  It goes a long way toward making Angle’s arrival feel like it truly has changed everything.

This match is a triumph for both men, who put on great performances.  Moreover, it’s a triumph for simple great wrestling storytelling.  They very well could have emptied the full magazine here and shoved every idea they had into one match, but they didn’t.  Instead, they went for a match that was centered around the stories set up in the build.  With the blood early on, they gave Joe his vengeance and cemented him as a serious threat to a former world champion.  With the struggle around the submissions, they established that Joe could be beaten but that Angle had been pushed further than he’d ever been before to do so.  It’s fundamentally compelling stuff that puts it ahead of many of these hotly anticipated matches by actually having something to say about the wrestlers themselves.

This simplicity is both one of this match’s greatest strengths as well as one of its weaknesses.  The main thing holding this match back from being one of my favorites is that they don’t go for anything truly groundbreaking, emotionally gripping, or awe-inspiring here.  The foundations here are solid stuff, but not more than that.  It feels surprisingly unambitious for such an important match.  The match also feels less like a complete package on its own and more like a “part one” to a longer series.  Angle’s win is far from a fluke, but after the pain Joe inflicted on him, it doesn’t feel as definitive as it maybe could have.  Indeed, the post-match immediately teases the future of the feud with Joe asking for a handshake and a rematch, Angle refusing, and Joe saying they’d have to “do this the hard way”.

Even still, these caveats don’t “hurt” the match so much as make it less great.  And in turn, I’ve seen superfights like this with far greater ambitions fall flat on their faces.  I’ll take a match with lower ambitions but fantastic execution over those spectacular failures any day.

This is a great example of a match that perhaps didn’t try to be all it “could have been”… and yet maybe ended up being better for it.

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