Joseph and Colette Discuss Steenerico vs. The Briscoe Brothers
Two great teams who blazed trails together.
Happy Sunday, y’all. I know it’s late, but I drank a lot of Mountain Dew Pitch Black in celebration of Bray Wyatt last night (more on that tomorrow) and that tends to mess with a person who isn’t as used to the toxic shock of Mountain Dew’s sugar and caffeine attack as they used to be.
By now, you’ve had a chance to read our essays about this “Boston Street Fight” between the Briscoes and Kevin Steen/El Generico, so I don’t need to reintroduce the match. We chose to swap this in for the sake of joining others in celebrating the legacy of Jay Briscoe, but it also acts as a preview for next week’s gimmick-and-blood heavy slate of matches, and continues one of the themes of BIG EGG in general, which is to look at material that’s just outside of what’s expected for some of the greatest professional wrestlers in history. I think the conclusions that Joseph and I reached in this conversation and our essays would have been where we landed regardless of the reason we watched it — The Briscoes are more than worthy of the absolute highest praise.
Joseph: The Briscoes vs. Kevin Steen & El Generico Boston Street Fight Fucks
Colette: The [INSERT CITY] Street Fight Is One of Wrestling’s Finest Traditions
Colette Arrand
I can never tell how people will receive these kinds of statements when I make them, so I'll be up front and say that I mean this as a massive compliment: the line my brain drew from this match was to WCW's penchant for tag team street fights in the early and mid 90s, when their divisions focused on teams like the Nasty Boys and Cactus Jack and Maxx Payne -- these nice little bursts of chaos on an otherwise pretty straightforward card, threads merging and diverging until everything comes together for some structured violence at the end. When it comes to the Briscoes and Steenerico, you're totally spoiled for choice on gimmick matches, but you chose this one, which feels more straightforward than a cage match or a ladder war. What drew you to it?
Joseph Anthony Montecillo
First, I think you're absolutely right about the similarity in vibe to those 90s brawl. Knowing that ROH was booked by former ECW employee Gabe Sapolsky also draws a pretty clear line to where a lot of this match takes its inspiration. Simple kind of wild crowd pleaser that would have been right at home on any ECW card. As for what drew me to this match in particular, I think it's because the Ladder War always has received its flowers as the most high profile thing those two teams ever did. It was the (relative) end of their feud in 2007 before The Briscoes switched gears to focus on The Age of the Fall, plus it main evented one of ROH's first pay-per-views. The street fight though, somehow gets lost in the shuffle, simply for being in the shadow of something so noteworthy, and I think that quality-wise, it's right up there with the Ladder War.
Colette Arrand
Yeah, the Ladder War is so famous that it's something even I, who mostly dipped into ROH when I was able to see it live, saw it and appreciated it when it happened. Not this match, though! It reminded me of other Briscoes matches that I've seen live, where Dem Boys fight around the entire arena, bleeding and brawling and doing a bunch of wild, irresponsible shit to their heads, making sure that everybody in the crowd got to see something. When I saw them in Atlanta, Jay did an absurd dive off of a scissor-lift that'd just been hanging out against the wall of this convention center, I assume because the facility managers were too lazy to put it away. Wild shit. But, oddly, I want to talk about someone else in this match first!