On Falling in Love With Wrestling: Sara Del Rey vs. Claudio Castagnoli
Revisiting an old favorite through a new lens: how effective heel work makes it possible to fall in love with the babyface.
A few weeks ago, I started watching The Queen of Villains, the Netflix series about Dump Matsumoto. After teasing you with the image of Matsumoto at her peak, the show flashes back to Kaoru Matsumoto’s childhood and how she fell in love with joshi. The details are a little skewed for the sake of narrative, but after seeing the Beauty Pair wrestle, she falls hard for wrestling’s grand, sweeping narratives of good vs. evil, perseverance in the face of hardship, and so on, the trials of Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda serving to distract from an altogether miserable home life. What could possibly be more noble than to pursue that path herself?
As a child who slipped away from my own problems by watching WCW Saturday Night, I implicitly understood the draw, and was surprised to see it rendered so well in a TV show. But this isn’t an essay about falling in love with wrestling as a child — it’s about falling in love with wrestling as an adult who theoretically knows the tricks and is in on the con, about being ringside for something special and going wide-eyed with awe and emerging from the experience changed somehow, as the rookie Matsumoto is when her training partner Chigusa Nagayo goes off script in a match against Jaguar Yokota — she’s faltered many times in her journey to pro wrestling stardom and has more failures to come, but she sees the fire in Chigusa’s eyes and is, at least for the duration of the match, renewed.
This is a long walk to go on for a match that took place in the ECW Arena in the summer of 2011, for a promotion that I loved fiercely at the time and have been derisive of in years since, but as I’ve written before, I was there for this match, front row, after three days of driving and three nights of wrestling, tired and gross from the road, and I don’t think I’ll ever be more in love with wrestling than I was that night, screaming at the top of my lungs for the Queen of Wrestling, calling Claudio Castagnoli a soft egg in German that I’d picked up from his YouTube channel.
Based on bullshit metrics like its two Cagematch ratings, low YouTube view counts compared to the crazy numbers other matches featuring women wrestling men were getting at the time, and one of my old pieces with its hyperspeed GIFs being at the top of Google some 10 years after I wrote it, this match has somewhat slipped into obscurity, eclipsed by Eddie Kingston’s shattering promo about his High Noon match against Mike Quackenbush and the legacy of Larry Sweeney. It feels weird calling this match a hidden gem, but I’ll go ahead and do so. It’s a great match, a tried and true struggle between a bully and someone who has had enough of their shit. You don’t need to understand the machinations of the BDK or the crumbling of Castagnoli and Del Rey’s relationship over her entry into the 12 Large Summit to understand this dynamic, and it’s not what I remember about it now.
Every time I’ve written about this match, I’ve placed my focus on Del Rey’s performance, but this time the performance that really speaks to me is Castagnoli’s. He’s utterly detestable here, opening things by slapping Del Rey for refusing to lie down, that you can’t help but thrill to Sara’s hot start, kicking away at Claudio until Tursas, the behemoth on the outside, sweeps her leg and distracts her. When Castagnoli is in control, he is methodical and ruthless. He’s an incredible wrestler, but this isn’t a wrestling match to him — he’s disciplining a subordinate. As such, everything he does is as petty as it is painful — he throws her by the hair, punches her in the stomach, making her and the audience marinate in in the potential for violence with every blow. Del Rey is a strong woman, maybe the strongest in the American scene at the time, but Claudio’s a physical freak of nature — if he hits you, you’re going down; if he wants to throw you, he will. The ease with which he picks Del Rey up for a gutwrench suplex is absolutely stunning. When he pins her after the suplex by palming her face like a basketball, you want, with every fiber in your body, for this dickhead to get what’s coming to him.
It does, of course, because while Castagnoli is unarguably the strongest wrestler in CHIKARA and arguably the best wrestler on the roster, the years he’s spent as the leader of a pack of goons has made him sloppy. He looks annoyed with Del Rey fights back, but as he thinks victory is a foregone conclusion, he’s constantly giving up too much space — sometimes that leads to Del Rey surprising him with a roll-up, and sometimes it lets her fire in a desperation forearm. Crucially, midway through the match, it means she gets out of the way of a shoulder tackle in the corner, sending Castagnoli into the turnbuckle and to the floor. Combined with all of the match-opening shoulder kicks she scored earlier, Castagnoli now has a weakness.
She quickly exploits it, kicking Castagnoli’s arm and taking Tursas out with a cannonball. To give you a sense of the damage, Castagnoli fails to catch Del Rey on a flying crossbody. To give you a sense of the urgency of the moment, Del Rey latches on to Castagnoli’s arm on the kickout and rolls into a cross armbreaker. It will take more than this to beat him, but from here on out Castagnoli is down an arm. To me, the most fascinating character choice of the match is that when his arm goes limp, Claudio doesn’t get any more urgent to finish the match than he was before — his motivation remains unchanged: he just wants to embarrass Sara Del Rey. The one time anything like real doubt creeps onto his face is after Del Rey kicks out of the UFO. In his disbelief, he gives Del Rey time to get to her feet and see him coming on a charging uppercut attempt, which she easily ducks and counters with a series of capo kicks, the third of which is prefaced with Del Rey’s scream of “CLAUDIO,” which I have felt in my bones for 13 years.
The genius of this moment is that while it is the match’s climax, it is not the moment at which the momentum shifts irrevocably in Del Rey’s favor. It’s a hope spot, Del Rey going for the cross armbreaker again, only for Claudio to muscle her up onto his shoulder and drop her onto the canvas … at which point she regains the cross armbreaker, which Claudio escapes by getting his foot on the ropes. From here, it’s all Castagnoli — he catches Del Rey with a lariat as she’s charging at him, is stunned by the two count, and then gets mad. This is, you remember, a match about giving a stupid bully his comeuppance, and Claudio gets very stupid, pulling a finished Del Rey off the mat after a Ricola Bomb, doing so again after an uppercut, and getting caught in the decisive roll up while telling the fans that he’s not finished with Del Rey just yet. It turns out that he is.
It may seem ridiculous, but so much of my life as it stands shakes out the way it does because I was at this match. I’m not longer in contact with the people I went to the show with and I doubt even 25% of the people I met and/or worked with during my time in AIW remember me, but in the afterglow of this match and weekend, I knew I had to find my way into indie wrestling somehow, and I did. Writing about my physical experience of it got me into the PhD program at UGA, and I’ve told this story a trillion times now, so I’ll stop here except to say that it’s wild that I’d find a reflection of this moment years later in a show about one of wrestling’s greatest villains. Maybe you had to be there to know it, but for one night in 2011, Claudio Castagnoli was one of wrestling’s greatest villains. I was, and I’ve got the shaky early cameraphone shots to prove it.
Rating: **** & 3/4