Robert and Colette Discuss Claudio Castagnoli vs. Sara Del Rey
Two pals reminisce about CHIKARA and maybe come to some kind of point on a wrestling match.
Hello! As you’re reading this, I am probably recovering from surgery. Stoked that it’s over, will be even more stoked when I’m recovered, etc. etc. Thank you all once more for your support and patience! As a reward, here’s this conversation between myself and Robert Newsome, whose essay on Del Rey/Castagnoli is one of the best things I’ve had the pleasure of publishing in some time! Robert and I are at this point old friends, old enough that the timeline we establish at the end of this piece is wrong. I think the way it happened was that someone on Twitter linked the two of us together as people who wrote (too) long, (much too) considerate essays about wrestling a month before I moved to Athens, then moved to Athens, then started going to local shows with him, Irving West, and Andey Ripley, the four of us the scourges of the Nowell Rec Center, the chicken auction barn that had a six-sided ring in it, the VFW Hall where Cody Hall went through the ceiling, that country bar in Athens that changed names 400 times — basically anywhere that had wrestling. Beyond being one of my best friends, he’s one of the smartest people I know on the subject of pro wrestling, and I didn’t get to publish him nearly enough at Fanfyte — I hope you enjoyed his essay! Read the goddamn Atomic Elbow already!
Up Next: see/saw’s Evan Minsker joins BIG EGG to discuss Dragon Lee vs. Shingo Takagi!
Colette Arrand
It feels kind of stupid talking about how important CHIKARA was/is as a promotion given how it ended and how badly scattered on the winds what you and I experienced of it are now, but I do want to start there. This was a very hot time for CHIKARA — they were on the verge of their first iPPV and were beginning to receive mainstream media attention in a way that I don't recall bigger indies like PWG or ROH ever receiving — but as it so turns out this period of time is the peak, followed by, in my opinion, a very sharp decline. You mention a lot of CHIKARA's quirks in your essay — I happen to know, from knowing you, that a lot of them were a part of their draw at the time. Was that part of why you chose to look back at this match, or was it something else?
Robert Newsome
I haven't published an issue of my 'zine in a while, and I think a lot of that has to do with trying to figure out how to approach talking about CHIKARA, which was my intent because I was GOING to publish something on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the CHIKARA post-shutdown return. At the rate I'm going, I may have something ready for the eleventh anniversary, but I don't know. I say that not as a mechanism for self-promotion but because that process put CHIKARA on my brain. And in thinking about my favorite moments from that promotion's best years... it's weird, because if you asked me to list them, I don't know if this match would come up, but there's something about it that keeps sticking in my mind. So when you asked me, I was, of course, just going to write about "Wildfire" Tommy Rich again, but also I wanted to revisit this one to see if my memory of it matched the historical record.
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