Canadian NINJAS vs. MsCHIF and Cheerleader Melissa Is Meat and Potatoes Tag Wrestling

A superteam. Tag team specialists. This plays out exactly as it should, and that's a good thing.

SHIMMER

But here’s the thing: meat and potatoes are pretty fucking delicious. It is, I am coming to realize, a staple of SHIMMER Women Athletes, something I didn’t realize back when this and CHIKARA were it for me and the American indies. 

When Joseph and I spoke about last week’s matchup between Sara Del Ray and Amazing Kong, I said that it’d realized one of my fears for this month’s project, which is that what felt impossibly important to me when I was really learning what wrestling was would end up smaller by comparison to everything I’ve come to watch since. That’s true, to some extent – SHIMMER is an incredibly special wrestling project, but I’m better able to contextualize it now, and I don’t necessarily think of “smaller” as a pejorative term. 

Something I’ve really come to appreciate as I’ve grown older in professional wrestling is territory era television shows. After talking with Joseph, I put on an episode of Georgia Championship Wrestling, the one dealing with Ole Anderson’s betrayal of Dusty Rhodes at the Omni. It was clipped down to the details relevant to that event, but within those 26 minutes there was an entire universe spinning out of Ole’s actions: the reformation of the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, the rekindling of his friendship with Ivan Koloff, the disappointment of babyfaces like Stan Hansen and Kevin Sullivan, and all of the friendships, hatreds, and championships criss-crossing through those connections. But at the root of all of this was nothing more complicated than the fact that Ole Anderson was a jerk, and, more than that, a man who so loved being a jerk that he was able to pretend to not be one for a whole year, just to fuck with the American Dream. 

This is meat and potatoes wrestling at its peak. Here, in the main event of SHIMMER Volume 29, the stakes aren’t quite so high (I’m a sentimental person, so I’ll place friendship over championships), but there is a similar kind of narrative threadweaving on a smaller scale, as the NINJAs are the new tag champs, going up against the superteam of SHIMMER Champion MsCHIF and arguable ace of the promotion Cheerleader Melissa. Running through this is the beginning of Nicole Matthews’ build as a capable singles threat, as she’d just taken a competitive loss to Melissa and went to a time limit draw against Daizee Haze, losing the no time limit rematch.

Superteams are a staple of professional wrestling. In WWE, they mostly function as a cheap means of building heat towards a WrestleMania match between the WWE Champion and his challenger, a kind of hedged bet against the fans choosing sides, attempting to build a kind of will-they-won’t-they tension at the expense of the tag division, whose champions are usually obliterated along the way. In the NWA, it’s just taken as a matter of fact that big time main eventers will be drawn towards each other, either in a formal faction like the Four Horsemen or more loosely, like Dusty Rhodes’ network of friends that included Magnum T.A., Nikita Koloff, the Road Warriors, and others. Rising tide, lifted boats, etc.

In SHIMMER, MsCHIF and Cheerleader Melissa are a superteam with some experience together, but the NINJAs have been teaming together since 2007, one of the promotion’s real success stories as a true, homegrown tag team. How do these two dynamics collide? 

Evenly, which is exactly how it should work.

The result is your classic encounter between a pair of stooge heels and their seemingly overmatched opponents. The NINJAs find themselves overwhelmed by MsCHIF and Melissa, but they’re reliably able to find a shortcut and maintain a slight advantage, needling the two throughout the match until things escalate to the closing stretch, where Matthews and Perez run interference to the point that referee Bryce Remsberg loses control just when things seem to point to a title change. They hit their Funky Cold Medina superkick/German suplex combo and hang on to the belts, surviving the storm.

Like I said up top, this is meat and potatoes wrestling in the most classic sense, meaning it’s quite good. This is something the American independents were especially good at before transitioning briefly to PWG-style supercards in the early 2010s,. before the WWE Performance Center disrupted that business model.

 It’s always tempting to look beyond wrestling’s influence on these promotions (see CHIKARA and comic books), but the true strength of the independents of the era is that the wrestlers and bookers at the helm of the very best promotions were devotees of a wide array of professional wrestling. Joseph has mentioned this before – the best workers in the world cherrypicking the best parts of what had come before and synthesizing it into something that felt modern while remaining true to decades of proven success, rather than chasing something that will be immediately forgotten (like Debra managing The Rock before WrestleMania X7 to the detriment of other key members of the roster (like Kurt Angle). 

It is good to learn from this style of wrestling. I certainly did, both in watching promotions like SHIMMER a decade ago, and in paying attention when I worked for promotions that followed a similar ethos. It’s been awhile since I revisited my roots, but the last time I did was AIW’s JLIT tournament in 2014, which featured Dave Prazak on commentary. I distinctly remember two things from that weekend: Buff Bagwell taking belly shots at the post-show party, and listening to Prazak and AIW co-owner Chandler Biggins bullshitting about Herb Abrams’ UWF, where Bagwell wrestled as The Handsome Stranger. 

It was a long, sprawling conversation about Herb Abrams and TV wrestling and Bagwell, something Prazak probably doesn’t remember, just two extremely smart promoters talking about a product I never found particularly interesting with a fondness and eye for detail that I am still envious of. When you take that kind of attention and apply it to four of the best wrestlers in the world at what they do, good things are bound to happen. Here, it’s an early 90s TV tag main event, something that wouldn’t be out of place on a Dangerous Alliance era episode of Saturday Night. It’s not what you point to as a statement match for any of the parties involved, but it’s a damn sight better than nearly everything else happening in wrestling at the time.