Kevin Steen and Super Dragon Fly Too Close to the Sun

Almost two decades ago, I was a dedicated Total Extreme Wrestling player. This was back when I was in college, half-heartedly following wrestling by occasionally ordering a WWE PPV through their then-new online PPV platform because I had broadband and a spare $15 kicking around. I told nobody I was watching this shit, threw out the Triple H dog tags WWE sent me as a “bonus” in shame, and spun elaborate scenarios in Adam Ryland’s cherished menu-clicker where WCW got everything right in 1997 or promotions I didn’t watch or had never heard of rose up to crush them in real time. 

More than any forums I was on, TEW’s real world mods opened my eyes to a world that existed just outside of WWE’s monopoly, specifically PWG, who bore special merit because a couple of Chris Hero storylines had been transposed into the game’s storyline editor by a fan. Thanks, again, to the free broadband I enjoyed access to in my dorm and the relative inexpensiveness of external hard drives, I decided to branch out from what I knew, downloading massive packs of early PWG, ROH, and CZW, throwing on shows, then finding, to my dismay, that I didn’t much care for them.

I eventually found my way into the indies when Bryan Danielson was fired from WWE and found himself a featured attraction at the Taylortown Trade Center within weeks, which got me into CHIKARA, SHIMMER, and other promotions, just in time for an indie boom that grew large enough to accommodate even my modest aspirations of pretending to be Jim Ross on the weekends, a period of time that I’ll always be incredibly fond of. But when I pitched Indie Month to Joseph, one of the things I wanted to do was revisit the relatively murkier waters of scenes I had dismissed out of hand. Why did I bail so quickly? What did I miss?

Turning on this 2005 Super Dragon/Kevin Steen Guerilla Warfare match, answers to both questions present themselves immediately: I bailed because I hated the commentary and couldn’t rock with low-fi production, and I missed a lot of cool violence. Thankfully the rip I watched on YouTube was the one without commentary, just two dudes beating the shit out of each other in a Jewish Community Center that hasn’t been lit properly for the amount of crowd brawling Steen and Super Dragon have come here to do. 

Neither man gives a fuck about the rental deposit on those chairs, either, sending the crowd scurrying away as they stomp and shove their way through row after row of them. Steen shoves Dragon back so hard that Dragon wipes out at least three rows, early enough — less than 30 seconds into things — that you’re shocked to attention. It’s chaos — the rumble of a crowd trying not to get caught in the crossfire, the sharp, stinging smack of a thrown chair making contact with a human face. Switching over to a version that has commentary, Disco Machine and TARO are quoting Dusty Rhodes lines from a Chris Benoit/Kevin Sullivan match and remarking that the chairs cost $20 apiece. Indie wrestling promotions really knew what they were doing when they offered a no commentary option on their DVDs.

Anyhow, I really love the contrast between Steen’s style of chair violence and Super Dragon’s. Steen throws chairs like Sabu and Terry Funk, which is to say that there’s a lot of high heat on those fuckers, like the chair’s a Super Dragon-seeking missile. Dragon, on the other hand, swings like he’s The Undertaker in full-on “respect my yard” mode, overhead and at terminal velocity — this isn’t just pre-Benoit, as Joseph noted, it’s pre-Chris Nowinski’s publication of Head Games, so the attitude towards head trauma in society at large wasn’t what you’d call “enlightened.” If you’re the kind of fan who can look beyond notably, intentionally unsafe exchanges in wrestling matches, the appeal of this match becomes evident quickly. This is Super Dragon’s yard, and if Kevin Steen wants a piece of it, he’s going to have to endure hell to stake his claim. To counter these headshots, Steen goes for a more full-body approach, utilizing his size to literally throw Super Dragon around, first in shoving him, then by picking him up in a fireman’s carry before throwing him through five rows, wrecking shop like Heisei-era Godzilla crashing through a miniature Tokyo. It’s not enough to stop Dragon, who hates Steen enough that he wills himself to leap over the top rope with a tope onto his opponent just as soon as he’s thrown into the ring for the first time. 

As much as I love the dive, I think the match would have been better had Steen and Dragon transitioned to the ring for a beat or two. Instead, they immediately return to brawling through chairs with diminishing returns — there are more wrestling contrivances to it, like a countered headlock into the wall of the JCC and Steen going for and selling a senton, and the way you can hear PWG staff constantly imploring the crowd to give Steen and Dragon some space brings us back to the sobering reality that this is a performance, that even the air of uncooperativeness between two wrestlers is, in fact, the product of collaboration. Also, generally speaking, I think that if you’re going to throw shoot headbutts, you may as well do it on the raised, lighted platform erected for the sake of people seeing it. The more they brawl, the less the crowd thunders. By the time Dragon and Steen finally do make it back in the ring to exchange curbstomps, the crowd is exhausted — Dragon has to stomp Steen twice to get a pop.

The more this resembles a wrestling match, the less I enjoy it. In another context I think I’d like the curbstomp exchange, the way Steen teases out the hope that Dragon will tope him through a table until he’s the one suplexing his opponent through it, but a Structured Brawl and its obligatory setpieces are decidedly a comedown after the match’s wild opening. This isn’t a problem unique to Kevin Steen and Super Dragon in this match, but something most matches that are heavy with crowd brawling struggle with. Normally, a walk-and-brawl serves either as a transition from in-ring action to a something more high-concept — think of Terry Funk finding a bottle to break and carve Cactus Jack’s head with, or any number of WWF/WWE spots where a wrestler takes a finisher off of part of the set — or as an excuse to let the Boys Dudley or Nasty suck wind while motioning towards action. Here it sets an early high bar that can’t be met by spots, even when they’re as grisly as Super Dragon double-stomping Steen’s face into a metal chair. 

It’s hard to explain succinctly, but I’ll try: When Steen and Dragon are throwing chairs at each other, all you can see is hate. Whenever they do something more sophisticated, any time you can see the thought that goes into an action, you see less hate. This being wrestling, genuine-seeming hate between opponents is as pleasurable as it is rare. By the time Steen powerbombs Dragon into a mess of thumbtacks, the high of Steen throwing Dragon through as many chairs as he could is in a long-forgotten past. In its stead, we have shades of Mick Foley’s street fights against Triple H and Randy Orton, as well as car-crash sugar rushes that wouldn’t be out of place in an of-the-era TLC match. It isn’t that it’s not good, just that I’ve been here before, and Steen isn’t quite the wrestler he’d become later, better able to modulate his influences into something truly great in front of audiences as intimate as this one and audiences far, far larger. 

There is a chance that my issues with the match would be solved by changes in production. Better commentary, or at least commentary that wouldn’t compel me to turn it off entirely, might fill the space between spots more effectively than the ambient noise of the arena. But at best all a tighter production could do is mask for the fact that Dragon and Steen entered this match with marks to execute and points to get across and way, way too much time to do so. When Steen leaves the ringside area, literally walks up the stairs to the second floor of the building, he says “this isn’t worth putting my fucking life and career up,” which is great heel crybabying except that, 22-minutes into the match, he’s already done so. The camera stays on a shot of the stairwell for a whole-ass minute while fans chat and Super Dragon does whatever he’s doing in the ring. One fan goes “barbed wire,” stepping on what’s going to happen, and another goes “boo” like the interminable minute without Steen in his range of vision has caused him to travel back through time and space to a WCW Worldwide taping at Disney MGM Studios, where he is six years old and has just been told to boo the Super Giant Ninja by a man in a full-body wildcat fursuit. Steen comes back, quite unceremoniously, and picks up a barbwire board that’d been resting just south of the camera’s frame. 

This does get the audience back to their dueling chants for Steen and Dragon, but we’re decidedly under the shadow of Stanford Hardcore, and I’ve seen too much of that style to find myself much awed by the conclusions they reach, in spite of how brutal they are. The closest things come back to the early part of the match’s thrilling sense of unease is when the ring announcer thanks the fans for coming but tells them they’ve got to get out. Steen lies face down on the canvas, handcuffed and perforated after taking a Psycho Driver onto the tacks, staff surrounding him like they don’t know what to do. Super Dragon presumably did not pack the key into the tin of Christmas popcorn he’d conspicuously left at ringside earlier. But then he says that we’ll see you next month, January 7 at 7pm, and the sense that all of this is in fact quite normal settles in once again.

Rating: *** & 1/2