Samoa Joe Is the Coolest Wrestler

Bryan Danielson is pretty cool, too...

I’d never seen Samoa Joe in his prime before.

I only knew Joe by reputation, and my glimpses of him in the occasional NXT match and his AEW run to this point were enough to confirm that, yes, this guy was an absolute killer in his prime, especially in a setting like Ring of Honor. I’m not an incurious viewer, but I often find myself easily satisfied by the idea of a wrestler, by their reputation.

That is, admittedly, a very stupid way to approach wrestling, but there’s only so much time in the day and there are so many movies on the Criterion Channel. BIG EGG started with the admission that I hadn’t seen my favorite wrestler’s best match, so I doubt it will shock you to learn that I’ve never been an HonorClub member.

The reason why this is important is because it’s been a while since my first real experience of a wrestler blew me away like Samoa Joe does in this match against Bryan Danielson. When I say “blew me away” I mean that watching this match had me gawking like the kid who yells “BRET!” in that commercial about how cool Bret Hart is. You know that feeling? I mean, it’s the feeling I get when I think about Bret Hart, like the air around them is charged with something — magic or violence, whatever you want to call it.

That’s the way I feel about Samoa Joe right now, the way I haven’t felt about a wrestler since the first time I saw Katsuyori Shibata wrestle. Danielson was one of those guys for me. Bert Hart, too. Kana, Sara Del Rey, Minoru Suzuki, Nobuhiku Takada, Atsushi Onita, Rey Mysterio Jr., Eddy Guerrero, Vader, Bull Nakano, Cactus Jack — I’m not idly listing names; these (and other) wrestlers are people whose work I fell in love with quickly and deeply, who I’ve followed to much further ends than what my (lack of) expertise would otherwise suggest.

Having never had that feeling since wrestling criticism became a profession for me, I hope you’ll indulge me a little here while I gush about how cool Samoa Joe is.

To do that right, I have to say this: there are very few wrestlers in history who can teach you how their opponent works to the level that Bryan Danielson can. I’d put guys like Hart and Flair in that category, as far as mainstream American/Canadian wrestlers are concerned, but with Hart and Flair the thing is that you were working with patterns — think your five moves of doom and your Flair flops. They become clichés, but if you become familiar with the rhythm of a Ric Flair championship match, you quickly come to see how a guy like Sting bends and breaks it, which shows you how a guy like Sting operates.

Bryan Danielson does not have a pattern. Well, that’s not exactly true — by the time he became undeniable as a top name in the industry, he had perfected the Daniel Bryan comeback of hitting a backflip, running the ropes and leveling his opponent with a clothesline. He had the YES! Kicks, he had the corner dropkicks, he had the diving headbutt. You can watch them accumulate over time, from his February 23, 2010 debut on the first episode of NXT to the culmination of the YES! Movement at WrestleMania XXX, four years later. These are pieces of the puzzle that is a main event WWE match and, again, very few people are as good at that kind of wrestling as Danielson was.

In 2004, Bryan Danielson was the puzzle. It’s noted early on that Danielson had wrestled Samoa Joe twice in the past, but that it had been awhile. Early in the match, it feels like Danielson can sense that knowledge gap, and he spends most of what follows trying to sucker Samoa Joe into something he’ll never see coming.

We never find out what that is, but that’s fine — the joy of watching Bryan Danielson in this match is in his attempt to confuse and tire out Joe. As a wrestler, he is relentless in looking for an opening to exploit, some limb to bend, some flesh to strike. He gives himself up to engage in this kind of fight, taking Joe up on tests of strength that he’s going to lose, taking knees to the head and headbutts for doing so, but when he avoids a strike exchange and gets Joe flustered, even doing Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope taunt, you can see his game unfold.

Samoa Joe is 270-pounds. He can strike, he can wrestle, and he’s got speed. Over the course of his record-setting Ring of Honor World Championship reign he’s defended it against a murderer’s row of international talent, raising the belt’s prestige to the point that it was considered a world title by many, even if ROH was a cult product. He is a man at the height of his powers, largely unbeaten except for a couple of recent flash pinfalls that never really come into play here.

In other words, he is unfuckwithable.

Bryan Danielson loves to fuck with people, so what you get here is this incredible cat and mouse game where the momentum doesn’t so much swing back and forth as it does inches, at least until the end. There’s no real heel here, unless I’m completely incapable of reading Ring of Honor, so that kind of competition is the story. What you learn as it unspools is that Samoa Joe can keep up with Danielson on the mat, standing up, and in the air, and that, unlike other men of his size, he has the stamina to see those things through to a victory.

Watching Samoa Joe do this is breathtaking. Early, he takes Danielson to the mat with a knuckle lock and uses his control to drive his knee into Danielson’s head. Those two motions seem incongruous to each other, but here it’s Joe doing something unexpected, going for a bomb where someone else might have stomped the hands. Joe wrestles the match like this, hitting Danielson with an array of bombs until Danielson manages to find a hole in Joe’s armor and punch his way through. The single leg crab he puts Danielson in, knee ground into the back of his head, should have been stolen by some guy on the grapplefuck scene by now.

Through the peaks and valleys of this 40-minute match, Samoa Joe never loses himself or consents to fight Bryan Danielson’s match. The action is his and he knows it — look at his sneer! He’s a man in the middle of a historic championship run, simultaneously aware of that history and unburdened by it. Eighteen years later, this vibe is what WWE books its championship to — Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns are their own wrestlers, but between the end of the Hulkamania Era and whatever we’re calling this stretch of time, WWE completely lost the handle on booking dynastic runs for their generational talent. This reign is the torch lighting the way, and Samoa Joe is its torchbearer.

Samoa Joe is 25 when he wrestles this match. He’s been wrestling for five years or so. He knows that he’s the baddest man in wrestling, and he likes backing it up. You can do anything with a wrestler like this. Here, against another such wrestler, you are party to watching two men for whom the “feeling out process” is eternal, two guys capable of finding new flaws in their opponent every time they meet eyes. You try weird things, like punching someone with both fists at once, when you’re never done searching for weakness.

The openings Joe finds are just bigger. His Ole kicks warp the metal sheeting on the guardrail. He hits Danielson with monstrous leg sweeps and enzuguris. After surviving a Regalplex and the Cattle Mutilation, Joe finds his opening. Danielson kicks out of a massive lariat, but Joe is up and looking at the crowd. He looks exhausted. He is exhausted, but the look on his face says that he could go all night, if necessary. When Danielson rallies and puts him in Cattle Mutilation for the second time, Joe struggles to the ropes, but the way he almost hops to the break suggests a measure of control over the situation.

And that’s what he has. Having survived Danielson’s best shots twice, he catches his challenger with a kick, followed by the same knees he opened the match with. Danielson can’t mount an effective comeback, eats two more knees, and is choked out. When the bell rang and I let out a long sigh, I realized I’d been holding my breath for a minute or two.

I think what I’m struck by is how modern this feels. In 2005, even with wrestlers with legitimate collegiate wrestling or MMA backgrounds, Joe’s transition from kneeing Danielson in the face to choking him out feels new, of pace with the kind of thrilling finish you’d see in an MMA bout. Joe’s choke is his finish, but unlike, say, Kurt Angle or Ken Shamrock’s ankle lock, it does not rely on narrative-length limbwork to be effective. Bryan Danielson finds himself engulfed by Samoa Joe, surrounded as Joe’s knees are driven into his head, then Joe changes positions, hooks the choke, and walks away champion.

It isn’t pretty. It isn’t cinematic. But it is different. It’s cool. Samoa Joe is cool. There’s 645 days of this? I’m gonna need Tony Khan to open the doors of the HonorClub, right now.