(This is a commissioned review! Commissions are always open!)
God, CHIKARA. My friend Robert jokes about how the “real” Ric Flair disappeared sometime around 1994, before his legacy became a target or the man himself became an embarrassment, and that’s kind of how I feel about CHIKARA, a promotion that “closed” on June 3, 2013 and, no matter what the intent was, never truly came back. But here we are at the end of season 20, very near the end of all things CHIKARA, the Sword of Damocles perpetually hanging over the operation’s head on its downward path, hubris at last about to strike down the hero of this particular contest, Mike Quackenbush, celebrating his 25th year in wrestling with this match against Thomas Santell.
Santell’s an interesting guy. someone who worked Raw for a year during one of the show’s most creatively bankrupt stretches, then stuck around the indie circuit forever, eventually reinventing himself as a grappling George McFly. Around this time, he was a featured player at plenty of indie promotions, someone who really benefited from the early IWTV boom. I liked a lot of his work, particularly at Beyond Wrestling, but his gimmick didn’t really do anything for me. Basically a perfect fit for later-days CHIKARA, once my favorite wrestling promotion, but basically alien to me by this point.
Right away, the stakes of the match are made clear, as Sidney Bakabella responds to the question “do you think the title of greatest technical wrestler in the world is on the line here” with a big ol’ “not at all!” Meanwhile, Quack and Santell start things off in a knuckle lock, staying mostly interlockied for the duration of the match. Quack leverages Santell into several pinning combinations, then Santell works things to his advantage by not allowing Quack to progress through his playbook. I wouldn’t say that what they do here is thrilling, but it is very cleverly done technical wrestling, particularly when Santell or Quackenbush have to evade each other’s attempts to take them off their feet by widening their base.
Once things really get rolling, literally, the match ends. Santell catches Quack in a body scissors, Quack muscles him up off the mat, lands a Northern Lights suplex, and Mike Quackenbush is free to spend the rest of his evening not paying his wrestlers very well and podcasting with his Fox News friends.
It’s a good match! Without necessarily trying to prove a point, this reminds me a lot of matches like the famous “no bumps” match between Jerry Lynn and Lance Storm, two very talented wrestlers telling a complete story while intentionally limiting the tools they have at their disposal as if to say that there are, in fact, no limits to professional wrestling. For that to truly sing, you have to care about the wrestlers and their circumstances — if you’re not here to celebrate Mike Quackenbush’s 25th anniversary, this is effectively a demo.
It’s a fairly rote demo, too, as the life is pretty much all but out of ol’ Lightning Mike at this point. I remember him as a much more exuberant figure than he is here — awkward and putting on airs a bit, but not nearly as stiff in his approach to human emotion as he is here, where his attempts at humility look less “aww shucks” and more “magician who has successfully pulled a tablecloth out from under an entire dinner service’s worth of dishes.” Even when he tells Santell that he’d really like to slap him while they’re in the knuckle lock, it feels inauthentic. That was always one of Quack’s weaknesses as a wrestler, but in the work of his I was most fond of, there was enough on the canvas for those faults to be minimized. Here, where he wants you to focus very intently on one thing? Not so much.
Rating: ***
