Welcome back to the Sermon on the Mat, your weekly one-stop shop for news from the wider world of wrestling beyond the big cable TV monoliths that get all the coverage.
In the news
Check out ThingsandStuff’s FanPost about her experience at a Strong Style Wrestling event on Saturday. I don’t generally cover indies on that level unless they’re streaming, so anybody that wants to write up their local show and drop a post like that, you bet your bottom dollar I’ll link to it here.
Chikara No One’s First and You’re Next (August 21st) results
Doing something a little different here, folks, as my man BryanDanielson’sBeard did me a solid of writing up some quick results and notes to follow up his excellent preview of the show.
Ophidian over Hermit Crab by pinfall with La Magistral. The trainer exposes the naivety of the student.
DUSTIN over Zack Sabre, Jr. by pinfall with a rollup. Both guys firing on all cylinders.
Chuck Taylor™ interrupts a backstage interview and shows that he has every bit of mic skill as his cousin Stokely Hathaway.
Moustache Mountain (Trent Seven & Tyler Bate) over Devastation Corporation (Blaster McMassive & Flex Rumblecrunch) Los Ice Creams (El Hijo del Ice Cream & Ice Cream, Jr.), and N_R_G (Hype Rockwell & Race Jackson) by pinfall with British Bombardment on Blaster McMassive to win the vacant Campeonatos de Parejas.
Team Big Deal (Rick Roland, Sloan Caprice, & The Big Deal) over the United Nations (Juan Francisco de Coronado, Prakash Sabar, & The Proletariat Boar of Moldova). Kind of a warm-up match for King of Trios, but with The Big Deal (who is Hornswoggle, for the uninitiated) an oiled machine and the UN falling apart.
Jakob Hammermeier over Eddie Kingston by referee decision when the War King tripped the Excesivo de Castigo rule with half a dozen backfists. Grueling match, and afterwards Kingston handcuffed Hammermeier and cut his hair. (Rev’s note: Sounds great!)
Team Hallowicked (Frightmare, Hallowicked, Icarus, Kobald, Kodama, “Mr. Touchdown” Mark Angelosetti & Obariyon) over Team Fire Ant (Amasis, Arctic Rescue Ant, Fire Ant, Missile Assault Man, Pinkie Sanchez, Soldier Ant, & Worker Ant) by pinfall with a Colossal Bomb on Missile Assault Man. Chaotic matchup, this one. Good to see so many ants of the past answer the call.
Heidi Lovelace over Princess KimberLee by submission with a Chikara Special. Heidi earns her third point here for a shot at the Grand Championship and proves once and for all she’s as good as her best friend here.
Encore: “Juke Joint” Lucas Calhoun over Wani. A karate-off to start, but Calhoun made short work of Wani.
Thanks again to Beard for being my right hand Chikara man here and remember, you can go catch a replay of the show anytime you like on Chikaratopia.
Freelance Wrestling Big Trouble in Wicker Park (August 26th) card
Alex Ohlson vs. El Chivas Blancas vs. Jake Something vs. “Pretty” Peter Avalon vs. Russian Beast vs. Suge D (Freelance Scramble)
Andras Vidal vs. JJ Garrett
Joey Lynch vs. Mr. 450
Chase Owens vs. Isaias Velazquez
“All Ego” Ethan Page & Kobe Durst vs. Robert “Ego” Anthony & Space Monkey
Chris Castro vs. Matt Knicks (Last Man Standing Match)
Beauty & the Beast (Rob Matter & Stevie Fierce) (c) vs. The N-Words (Acid Jaz & Bryce Benjamin) (Freelance Tag Team Championship TLC Match)
GPA vs Mustafa Ali (c) (Freelance Championship)
Freelance are running their latest show this Friday night and it looks like another excellent card. Joey Lynch makes a well-deserved debut against Mr. 450, a little Bullet Club action comes to Chicago as Chase Owens squares off against former Freelance Champion Isaias Velazquez, Ego vs. Ego continues in tag action, the former Four Star Heroes, Castro and Knicks look to settle their issue in a last man standing, and those are just the top matches without gold on the line!
Bryce Benjamin earned the N-Words a tag title shot with a hard-fought singles victory over tag team champion Stevie Fierce, and Acid Jaz took Rob Matter out in short order to win the rights to name a stipulation, and he chose tables, ladders, and chairs. It’s gonna be a war! And following up on their first-time-ever clash in the six-way at Freelance’s 2nd Anniversary Show, GPA looks to take the Freelance Championship from Mustafa Ali.
I’m gonna have a full recap of this bad boy in next week’s Sermon, and if you wanna catch the action live, Freelance will be hosting another one of their $5 streams on their website, where you can also still grab tickets if you’re in the area and you’d like to see it in person. The stream is hard camera only, but with full commentary and a nice price, it’s a worthwhile package.
Gold Rush Pro Wrestling Golden Thrones Tournament (August 27th)
Brittany Wonder & Virgil Flynn vs. Kikyo & Synn (Golden Thrones Tournament)
Adam Thornstowe & Christina Von Eerie vs. El Chupacabra & Shotzi Blackheart (Golden Thrones Tournament)
Kaka Meng & Samara vs. Ruby Raze & Tyler Bateman (Golden Thrones Tournament)
Alexander G. Bernard & Kimberly Diamond vs. JR Kratos & Nicole Savoy (Golden Thrones Tournament)
Boyce LeGrande vs. Mr. Prime Time (c) (Gold Rush Pro Wrestling Championship)
Gold Rush are having a mixed tag tournament featuring some pretty hot talent to crown the King and Queen of Gold Rush, and like most of their shows, they’re going to stream for free on YouTube, so if you’re free at 6:30PM Pacific time on Saturday night, tune in and give it a shot. Or, better yet, if you’re in the vicinity of Pacifica, California, go buy a ticket and check it out in person!
“Crazy” Mary Dobson vs. LuFisto
You’ve heard she’s coming to NXT full-time and while I’m not at all sure whether or not she’s the subject of that Sanity video, I am sure that this match (courtesy of the fine folks at AIW) against veteran LuFisto is worth checking out.
New Heavenly Bodies (Desirable Dustin & Gigolo Justin) vs. Team IOU (Kerry Awful & Nick Iggy)
I keep pushing Team IOU on you guys and with good reason— they’re great! Here they are wrestling the New Heavenly Bodies (who are also pretty swell, but I’ve seen rather less of them) in the first round of Tier 1’s tournament to crown their first ever tag team champions. Enjoy!
John Silver vs. Matt Riddle
The good folks over at Beyond Wrestling were nice enough to share this match for free, so who am I to tell them no? It’s the Bro, after all. If you haven’t yet jumped on the Bro train, give it a watch.
Tommy End
“Kain, this Tommy End fellow that’s reported to be coming to NXT– who is he, and why should I care?” is not a question I have actually been asked, but it is a question I’m answering right here and now!
Tommy End’s wrestling style is informed by his youth spent training kickboxing and Pencak Silat, among other martial arts. As a Dutch youth watching New Japan and WCW, he saw these as the next best thing to getting into pro wrestling, and was quite successful in many of them. As such, his wrestling is mostly strike oriented, built around stiff kicks and knees, chaining them into numerous deadly combinations. But he’s not all strikes, no sir, nobody that was trained in the professional grappling arts by the likes of Chris Hero, Johnny Kidd, and “Lightning” Mike Quackenbush could be. Logically enough, he’s also got an arsenal of suplexes and submission maneuvers to call on. He’ll fit right in with the likes of Shinsuke Nakamura and Samoa Joe, believe you me.
He’s also a well-established tag team man, having held at least six tag team championships as one-half of the Sumerian Death Squad alongside partner Michael Dante. Dante’s power game augmented End’s striking in a big way, and they had as big a bag of tag team maneuvers as any team out there.
Character-wise, you can expect a lot of occult imagery and darkness, real King Diamond heavy metal stuff, inverted crosses and pentagrams. His Twitter background at press time is Aleister Crowley, you may be starting to get the idea. He’s been known to intimate that he’s the reincarnation of Enki, the Sumerian God of Creation. All this is spurred and informed by his father’s time in a cult and his own childhood fear of and then fascination with the darkness. Not territory that a lot of folks are mining, and he does it well.
Alright, sounds great. Where do I check this guy out?
Well, he’s done about half a dozen Evolve shows, so if you wanna open your wallet for some guaranteed top shelf stuff, you can pick up Evolve 53, where he and Chris Hero had one of the best tag matches (indeed, one of the best matches I’ve seen all year, period) against Sami Callihan and Zack Sabre, Jr., or Evolve 67, hot off the presses with his excellent match against Matt Riddle.
If you’re not looking to crack your wallet open quite that far, you can go ahead and buy yourself a month of Demand Progress and check out all his work in Progress, with excellent matches against the likes of Dave Mastiff, Roderick Strong, Marty Scurll, and Chris Hero.
Or, if your pockets are as dusty as mine are, you can just check out the free matches I’m going to link right here.
vs. Bryan “Daniel Bryan” Danielson, wXw AMBITION (July 4th, 2010)
vs. AR Fox, CZW Best of the Best XII (April 13th, 2012)
vs. Kris Travis, HXC Wrestling Another Dark Night (April 6th, 2014)
vs. Eddie Dennis, Progress World Cup (June 29th, 2014)
vs. Jigsaw and Joe Hendry, RISE: The Violence Party Underground (May 9th, 2015)
vs. Tristan “Clement Petiot” Archer, ICWA Revolution 7 (May 23rd, 2015)
As always…
Remember folks, no matter what type of wrestling you like, no matter how down you feel about the state of WWE, TNA, ROH, or any other “big-time” pro wrestling, there’s something out there for you. There’s a pro wrestling product that can hit you in the right spot and make you love wrestling like you thought you’d never be able to love it again. It’s there, I promise. You just gotta reach out and find it, and that, my friends, is what the Sermon on the Mat is all about.
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The post Sermon on the Mat (August 24th, 2016): Profiling Tommy End, Chikara results, Freelance Big Trouble in Wicker Park and more! appeared first on TJF.