Mad Dog Connelly and 1 Called Manders Warms My Heart a Little

The eternal battle between bullrope jawns and chain jawns rages on.

I’m going to be honest with y’all: wrestling has been kind of depressing for me lately. I don’t have nearly the stamina Joseph has to keep up with match of the year contenders from around the globe, and a confluence of events, discourse, storylines, and general malaise came together in such a way that I’m left watching 1998 episodes of Raw Is War, which is itself not very good, for the reliable dopamine hit that is “Stone Cold” Steve Austin hitting the ring and whooping a little ass. 

Of course, the kind of wrestling I can reliably sink my teeth into is still happening in 2023, just in places where I’m not always looking. St. Louis Anarchy is a promotion I followed regularly in the early 2010s, when Absolute Intense Wrestling featured the SLA-based ACH, Davey Vega, Mat Fitchett, and The Submission Squad of Evan Gelistico, Gary Jay, and Pierre Abernathy on a regular basis. My last match as a play-by-play announcer featured Gelistico and Jay teaming with Briley Pierce to take on Jock Samson, Marion Fontaine, and Tracy Smothers, so I’ve got some love for the crew out there, but I moved to Georgia and fell out of the indies and kinda took the promotions I loved (including AIW) for granted. It happens!

Here we are in 2023, though, and St. Louis Anarchy is home to one of the year’s better brawls, between Mad Dog Connelly and 1 Called Manders. It’s a battle as elemental as any in professional wrestling, a man with a bullrope clashing with a man carrying a big ‘ol length of chain, a chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination that appeals to me on an almost spiritual level. Why this match hasn’t toured around the promotions where Manders isn’t part of The Second Gear Crew yet is beyond me. I am also holding out hope that an enterprising promoter somewhere will have a eureka moment and remember that bullrope jawns and chain jawns are also pretty compelling when they’re tagging together, too. Two great genres of professional wrestler! License to print money! Just floating that out there!

Anyhow, this one is a shortie, 10:30 of rawboned action where the snaps, pops, and thuds of their chops, punches, and kicks are audible even though the ring isn’t mic’d beyond whatever the roaming camera is packing. The first half sees them go at it at about an even keel, hockey fighting at the bell, carrying on through a Cactus clothesline over the top rope, pausing the mud/blood/beer style brawling for the odd gutwrench suplex on the floor. Then they get back in the ring and Manders bites Mad Dog’s foot, which commentary has already noted is pretty filthy. It’s not gross or anything (it’s wrestling! and also surely someone’s kink, and I ain’t out to kinkshame), but it is the moment at which the tone of the match changes, where both men start throwing bombs. 

There is nothing pretty about it, even when Mad Dog is rolling gutwrench suplexes, and that’s what makes this so engaging to me. As impressed as I am with graceful displays of athleticism and as awed as I (sometimes) am with longform matches, here’s a match where one of the high spots is Connelly hitting Manders with a shoulder block off the apron. The quickest path to my heart these days is one paved by simple, effective violence — I didn’t scream loud enough to peak my microphone when it happened, but I could feel my heart warm a bit when Mad Dog rolled Manders from a gutwrench suplex to a nasty-looking gutwrench powerbomb.

Are there bits that annoy me? Sure — I am decidedly past the spot where a wrestler looks on with, to paraphrase Tape Machines Are Rolling, “WHAT WILL IT TAKE????” Face after a kickout, especially in a fight, but unlike what’s en vogue at the moment, it’s not an obvious signal that momentum is about to shift. The second time it happens, Mad Dog collects himself, stomps the shit out of Manders, then executes a gross chokeout out of a reverse neckbreaker setup for the tap. I don’t know what else to say, y’all: Dudes rock.

Rating: ****