Against Mercedes Martinez, Athena Fights Her Future
Against Mercedes Martinez, Athena Fights Her Future
Someday, Athena will rough up her challengers in much the same way Mercedes Martinez did here. Someday, her downfall will be as sweet.
Very few professional wrestlers begin their careers as worldbeaters. Athena, the current ROH Women’s Champion who has been turning heads since she started roughing up her opponents on AEW’s YouTube shows. The GIFs were breathtaking, as were the matches. I am a fan of enhancement matches and think that, at their finest, they reveal the winning wrestler’s strengths — body, moveset, gimmick, whatever. The focus is squarely on the star blows these aspects up and makes you want to see them applied to someone with whom they are on equal footing.
What those squashes revealed is that Athena is utterly fantastic when she’s demolishing someone. She’s strong, she strikes hard, she has one of the best finishing moves in wrestling, and she carries herself with the kind of confidence she was denied in WWE and early in AEW. She has, for so long, been something akin to a best kept secret, someone who just needed a spark to catch fire. She did it on YouTube! Where the people with the worst opinions in the world say is proof that talents like Athena should have languished in the WWE midcard.
Once upon a time, though, she was on the other side of the star/undercard relationship. She was impressive during her time in SHIMMER, but racked up a lot of losses in the beginning, when she was just establishing herself. A three match series against Mercedes Martinez was her turning point. This is the last match in the series. It is, like many conclusions to SHIMMER feuds, delightful in how it works its way through a classic wrestling storyline.
Here, it’s a tale of the talented veteran who can’t beat the scrappy newcomer. In their first match, they wrestled to a double count out, with Mercedes refusing to continue the match. In their second, Athena won by DQ when a frustrated Mercedes attacked her leg with a chair. In both encounters, the theme was that Athena was somehow able to endure everything Martinez threw at her. Martinez started the shoving contest. She used the chair. A long-time veteran of SHIMMER, Martinez was normally an unshakable wrestler. She brutalized Athena in those matches, but could not win. For a wrestler like her, frustration is a major crack in the armor.
It’s hidden so well, though. Mercedes is so cocky in the post-match of the prior two matches, brushing dirt off her shoulder and telling a fan that her assault on Athena was a lot of fun for her. She wrestles like a veteran known for her strikes and high-impact moves, but Athena never gives up, no matter how hard she’s kicked, chopped, or dropped on her head. Athena’s win may be destined, but what she endures before finally turning the tide suggests that one of those deflating “almost but not quite” losses is on the table.
SHIMMER, as always, is too smart for that nonsense. On commentary, Portia Perez hammers home that there is so much distance between Mercedes Martinez and wrestler’s on Athena’s level that she shouldn’t have to wrestle them at all. Put another way, there is enough distance between them that Athena working diligently to defeat a bonafide main eventer elevates her while adding a new dimension to Martinez’s character going forward. One woman gets to revel in the possibilities of their future, the other gets to express vulnerability.
For Athena, it turns out that her future is a lot like Mercedes Martinez’s. Yes, they had a brief feud over the ROH Women’s Championship, but now Athena occupies a similar role in ROH and AEW as the one Martinez functioned in here, which is the confident, overwhelming veteran presence who, rightly or not, believes that they’re breathing different air than their opponent.
The thing is, they’re not wrong. That’s the privilege of having earned your name and reputation. Smart wrestlers and smart bookers can take that and turn it into something so much better than wrestling-grade arrogance — here, it’s the idea of Athena as a wrestler who is, without reservation, on the same level as one of the best wrestlers in the world. You can go anywhere with that, and Athena did, from being a buzzed about and championship winning wrestler on the indies, to her initial push in WWE NXT, to the excitement around her debut in AEW, to her current place in Ring of Honor. That she’s pushing others around the way Martinez once pushed her around is no surprise: she’s earned her name, she’s earned her reputation, and if anybody has to prove anything, it’s to her and not the other way around.