Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero: The Mad King's Road Runs Through Memphis Into Illinois
Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero have two major singles matches in 2007 that are often pointed to as the best of their rivalry. In April, the two have a hard-hitting slugfest Loser Leaves Town match in CZW that I found to be a little more myth than reality. In that match, Eddie and Hero unload the clip, but find themselves just a little too often resting on the sort of back and forth momentum shifts that dissipate tension in pro wrestling matches. It's a match with many visceral delights including some gross headbutts, great punches, and blood, but also lacks some of the finer details that make matches a little more timeless. It's tonally inconsistent and lacks a structure that can really hold all the disparate details they bring to the table together. Still a great match, don't get me wrong, but one that falls short of the classic status often ascribed to it.
Then there's this bout from later in the year.
As with many sequels, Kingston and Hero build on their previous work by going bigger. While the runtimes are only separated by a few seconds, where Eddie and Hero go for a rather direct series of strike offs and building bombs in CZW, here they opt for a much more sprawling affair. This is an all out brawl, spilling right out of the locker room into the gathered fans before finally making its way into the ring. Beyond the use of the venue, the Last Man Standing stipulation offer Kingston and Hero more toys to play with here, and they deliver on the expected violence and gimmickry with chairs, tables, and even a section of the ringside barricade.
One might be forgiven in thinking that the more is more approach could lead to these exacerbating the issues of their last match. More options means an even greater opportunity for tonal whiplash, the gimmickry potentially lending itself to even less structure. The footage reveals something else entirely and it's in this bout that I feel Hero and Eddie craft their most gruesome and most wholly satisfying work together ever. In going bigger, they gain intensity while also finding room to play this match even smarter than before.
The action here reads like a love letter to the varied influences that both men have pulled from throughout their long careers. The opening brawl on the floor ties most obviously back to ECW, but the wildness they achieve here has more in common with something like the famed Memphis brawls in empty arenas or concession stands. Hero and Eddie eschew setting up big set pieces early to instead focus on the immediacy of their surroundings. They grab at chairs, toss each other into the concrete wall, and brawl around a table and a trash can filled with glass bottles that fittingly shatters into the ground. Beyond that too, there's the immediacy of the body. There are very few wrestling moves in this early section, and it importantly never feels like a "your turn, my turn" exchange in the way their other work can drift towards. Instead, everything is fought for with fingers dug deep into eye sockets or hands wrapped tight around throats with a malicious evil. When Eddie threatens to choke the life out of Hero with his bare hands, knowing the genuine animosity that had built up between these two in this time, it's hard not to take him at his word.
The match shifts to a different register when it enters the ring. Here, we get a little more of the bomb throwing one might expect from the indies at this time as well as the creative weapon one would want from this stipulation. Where Kingston and Hero excel is in making that feel like a natural escalation of what came before. The transition between the two segments is about as seamless as it could get with just enough of the rough-around-the-edges violence being retained during this segment to make up for a clumsy miscalculation like Hero's chair-assisted avalanche Hero's Welcome. At that point, it would have been better to just brain him with the chair as Hero threatened to do to begin with.
And yet, isn't it easy to forgive when we get so much else that just rocks with those chairs? Hero's chair-assisted Boston Crab is a nasty visual that especially stands out as a creative use of a wrestling staple. Then, there's the inexplicable wonder of That Chair Throw.
Colette wrote lovingly about a similar moment in a Terry Funk and Barry Windham match in Puerto Rico. Instead of the brilliant cool of Windham though, this is just pure damage. Steel against skull, barring the Higuchis and Fujiwaras of the world, steel always wins. Love how Eddie stumbles through the impact, still clawing to the ropes for leverage as so many of his great heroes did in the decades before. Everyone at Smart Mark Video knew this was the money shot too, it gets the multiple angle replay treatment at the end of the bout.
Even beyond the gimmickry though, these two never lose sight for just the meanest, most cruel things they can do to each other. Hero's especially got it out for Kingston's hand in this, stomping it in with bone crunching viciousness. The hand doesn't become a central theme of the match the way it might in a latter-day Kingston bout, but Hero does enough damage to it that it still lingers in some of the matches quieter moments and makes it believable when Kingston's strikes don't out and out drop Hero. There's also the bloody nose that Eddie sustains about halfway through the runtime that seems to bring about an added pettiness to Hero's offense. Hero takes to smacking at Eddie, egging him on verbally, really laying on the punishment in ways both big and small.
And hell, the stuff they do that's big works so much better here than it did previously too.
If there's anything Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero can agree on, it's their shared love of 90s All Japan and that influence finds its way into all of their matches. Where in April, they cycled through the suplexes, pop ups, and counters with the breezy cynicism one might see from lesser imitators today, in this Last Man Standing they tap into the true goddamn spirit of the source material. When Hero absolutely spikes Eddie with that overhead cravat throw, it's as gruesome as any bump that Kawada or Misawa took at their peaks, and Eddie's pained struggle to get to his feet after might be one of the most fiery displays of genuine goddamn fighting spirit one is likely to see. Even Hero's own pop ups come across smarter in this match with so many of the moments that see him landing on his feet feeling more incidental and a consequence of momentum than any selfish need to be seen as stronger than he is.
The match is also smarter about laying out the weight of individual action taken. So much of that rests on the selling (genuine hurt?) that both men convey throughout the match, but they structure certain spots in ways that feel momentous as well. The finishing stretch gets built around Hero introducing a segment of the barricade into the match, and it's a choice that spells his undoing in a few ways. One moment in particular that stands out is Hero trapping Eddie in the corner with a guardrail. After cursing each other out, Eddie overpowers Hero and drives him to the other end of the ring, a reversal of fortune that would continue all the way to the finish. The match ends with Hero eating a series of gross backdrops, and looking progressively more fucked up with each, a stark contrast to Kingston's determination to get to his feet. By the time, Eddie backdrops him onto the barricade, I'm left screaming, and when the count runs out on Hero, I'm left stunned at how brilliantly timed it all is. There was no getting worse than that and it's the perfect way for them to get out of there.
It's a perfect synthesis of these two, and the influences they draw from as well. In so many ways, one of the great displays of the 2000s super indie blending of styles. Memphis, ECW, 90s All Japan, all find their place here, each finding its own weight and immense consequence in the hands of the two of the greatest to ever do it.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? I don't remember Kawada hitting that backdrop into a piece of the barricade in the ring or Misawa ramming a table into the other man's gut. The answer is clear.
Rating: ****1/2