Adam Priest and Daniel Makabe Prove That Georgia Is a Workrate State
Adam Priest and Daniel Makabe Prove That Georgia Is a Workrate State
The southeastern United States is still a destination for top tier indie wrestling.
Tyrone, Georgia is about an hour and 40 minutes away from Athens, where I lived for 10 years. ACTION Wrestling has been around for half that, but I never made the trip, which I regret. A few years back, it was something of a meme that the best indie wrestling scene in the United States was in the southeast, where events like the Scenic City Invitational made that argument a legitimate one, whether or not you believed it.
My experience of indie wrestling in the south was nothing like the SCI, or ACTION. It was somewhat inscrutable to me, though plenty of the wrestlers who were part of that conversation — your Jonathan Greshams, Fred Yehis, Slim Js, and Chip Days — would show up at the Norville Rec Center or the chicken auction barn in Royston that had a six-sided ring in it, or the bar on Commerce Road that was a shitkicker establishment large enough to house a steel cage but has since changed its name 40 times and ceased running wrestling, but they were on the same shows as guys like Tim Rice, who, G-d bless, was a fan from church group who wheezed like a stuffed dinosaur when he threw punches but was inducted into the Bullet Club by Luke Gallows and the Bullet Babe anyhow. Y’all, two tag teams named Bad Company feuded over the right to use the song “Bad Company” from the album Bad Company by the band Bad Company once. It was riveting. A goddamn paradise.
When you’re a regular at this sort of thing, you get to talking to some of the regulars, some of the wrestlers, some of the promoters, and at these events, when you’d get to discussing capital-G capital-W Good Wrestling, some of those folks would assert that it wouldn’t work in the state of Georgia, where you could draw a pretty damn good house by promoting David vs. Goliath bible reenactments featuring a Leatherface as Goliath.
But the thing about Georgia is that it is in many ways a cradle of Good Wrestling. Georgia Championship Wrestling, which aired on TBS until 1984 set the standard for wrestling that was the antithesis for what my pal Robert Newsome calls “Vince McMahon Jr.’s cartoon show,” and even after the Briscoe Brothers sold it out to McMahon on Black Saturday, Atlanta was an unbelievably important market for Jim Crockett Promotions and, in turn, World Championship Wrestling. Georgia was a workrate state.
While I was busy picking fights with the likes of Roscoe Ray, ACTION Wrestling was getting started and has grown into a stalwart of IWTV’s constellation of indie promotions. They’ve been around for five years now, which would be an incredible accomplishment without a global pandemic complicating an already fraught industry. This is the main event of their anniversary show, an ACTION Championship match on a mystery show. The crowd is full, and they are into Adam Priest, the champion, who reminds me of the classic, explosive style of technical wrestling that made the super junior wrestling of the 1990s so distinct. His opponent, Daniel Makabe, is also a laser-focused technician, working more towards the submission end of the spectrum, always searching for a hold. It’s a real chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation, made even sweeter for the at-home audience by the commentary of Dylan Hales and John Mosley, who contextualize the match as a sequel of sorts to their match at the Scenic City Invitational in 2021.
It’s a small detail, but those details are what make this match special. Priest and Makabe work the finish of that 2021 match into the middle portion of this one, as Priest counters a Makabe straightjacket pin attempt, which won Makabe the first match, into a cradle of its own. It’s already a good beat — there is a palpable feeling of struggle as both men struggle for position — but the Hales and Mosley, in highlighting their history, take an unadvertised main event give it a sense of progression. It isn’t just a title defense for Adam Priest — he has something to prove.
Makabe makes him work for it, though, gaining control early and choosing to work on Priest’s leg. Again, in the realm of small things, Priest’s selling isn’t just an occasional clutch at the knee. My favorite spot here is a wild piece of business where he hoists Makabe up and launches him to the floor, half stumbling under Makabe’s weight because his leg is banged up. It looks dangerous for both men, like Priest’s leg could buckle under the strain, and his resulting lack of control means that Makabe just gets dumped.
Makabe’s obsession with Priest’s leg continues from there, as he slides a ringside chair — one of those heavy banquet hall jawns — into Priest’s knee with startling accuracy. His focus pays off again when Priest manages to get him over for a German suplex but is unable to maintain a bridge. Still, this and other hope spots plant the seed for Daniel Makabe’s downfall, as Priest’s offense is always high impact, whether it’s something like the suplex, or something as simple as a collision off the ropes.
All he needs is an opening, and Makabe gives him one, growing cockier as the match goes on and making mistakes as a consequence. The big one is a missed King Kong knee drop, which sets Priest up to win the match with a figure four, a bitter pill after working over the champion’s leg for twelve minutes. It’s a decisive submission, Makabe stretching out his frame as much as he can, but it’s cinched in tight and he’s too far away — Adam Priest kicks off ACTION’s fifth year defending his title.
This is a snug, fun title match that ably demonstrates why Daniel Makabe and Adam Priest are two of the best on the indies, and why ACTION is one of the best indies going. I won’t say that it defies conventional wisdom about wrestling in the great state of Georgia, promoters are often wrong about what their audiences can handle, but it’s great to know that there are still promotions in the state actively calling back to its roots. Georgia is still a workrate state, brother. Always has been.
Rating: ****