Joseph and Colette Discuss Eddie Kingston vs. Chris Hero
Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero shake the foundations of the BIG EGG MASTERLIST.
This week, Joseph and I dipped our toes into actual super indie canon, watching Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero go for broke in IWA: Mid-South, the personal and professional hate between the two blooming into something wonderful. Between in the time between my essay and this post, I wound up liking the match a little more than I did, but because I am a woman of honor, I will not be revising my star rating — same thing as when Joseph talked me down the mountain top when I gave the first Volk Han match I ever saw five stars. My essays are a reflection of how I feel in the moment, and it would be dishonest to revise the moment.
The same is not true of the BIG EGG MASTERLIST, which changes every week. This week, for the first time ever, Joseph and I end up moving around several matches on the board to arrive at the ultimate truth of where this Last Man Standing match rates in the annals of pro wrestling history.
Colette Arrand
Also, a bit of housekeeping: As I've been catching up on bonus material (EXTRA BIG EGG and WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST posts alike), I've come to the realization that I may be sending too many emails, so I'm dialing back the number of previews that get sent to subscribers who aren't in the tiers that get those features. If you're a free subscriber, you'll get Joseph's essay, my essay, and the BIG EGG MASTERLIST, which will also include links to premium stuff you're missing, things Joseph and I are doing elsewhere, and so on.
BIG EGG & ELSEWHERE
- The MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST is back, looking at the 2/2/98 episode that had me praising a Disco Inferno match, reveling in a sick Chris Jericho bump, and crowning a new #1 match. All paid subscribers get this, but if you wanna just revel in Nitro, try the MEDIUM EGG tier.
- Joseph will be on Twitch tonight at 9pm EST, doing some Greatest Wrestler Ever research on Yoshiaki Fujiwara. Maybe he'll see my reply to him on Bluesky and crack a couple of Sandman matches too, who knows!
- Joseph wrote about the Kingston/Hero CZW match on his own blog if you'd like some supplemental material to this round of BIG EGG.
- I need to update the product shot in my store, but I have a new zine of wrestling photography available, Flash Pin #2. Unlike the first one, this one is my photographs, taken on everything from a DSLR to a Game Boy, in my travels over a decade and a half of going to shows. It's fun! It's cheap! I'll send you a sticker with purchase! I also talked about the zine on a recent episode of Violent People Radio, waxing sentimental about zines and photography and other stuff with a good crew of people from a great wrestling website.
NEXT TIME
Before he was the ace of the world, Jon Moxley was a sick guy who liked to fight like a dog in the street. As his name took off the indies, he found himself clashing with a kindred spirit in Jimmy Jacobs. Such violence can only be resolved in an I QUIT MATCH! Next time right here on the EGG!
Joseph Montecillo
I would argue that this latest pick is perhaps the most "canonical" of the super indie matches that we've covered so far, especially given all the long history that surrounds the Eddie Kingston vs. Chris Hero rivalry. Most people generally agree their best match happens in 2007 and it's only a question of which. This is my personal choice and I think it's genuinely one of the best matches of the era. I wanted to start off with your main criticism of the match, which is one I've deployed against other matches in the past, which is that an inconsistency of tone between "fight" and "pro wrestling." Can you expound on that a little bit with regards to this match in particular cause I think we saw it in different ways.
Joseph Montecillo
Colette Arrand
First, and I know this is probably obvious to say, had I seen this in or around 2007, I would feel differently. But it’s 2026, and in the vast expanse of time separating us from the time this match took place, I’ve seen a lot of indie and mainstream hardcore matches that are, like this, a melding of many, many disparate styles — a lot of them were likely influenced by this. Second, the match has been on my mind a lot since I posted my essay and I think I might like it a little more because of how successful it is in hybridizing those styles, and because the more I thought about it, the more the barricade sequence at the end felt like a riff on the Cena/Umaga ring destruction stuff that happened a few months prior, and it’s an excellent expansion on the idea of destroying a piece of the ring (or the stuff outside the ring) to torture a guy when you could, theoretically, just win. It helps that Hero actually hates Kingston, whereas Umaga was in a mercenary role against Cena and was pushed to do it by his manager, who cost him the match.
Colette Arrand