The [INSERT CITY] Street Fight Is One of Wrestling's Finest Traditions

Kevin Steen. El Generico. Mark and Jay Briscoe. When you think of these four men, you think of Boston, Massachusetts. Tea parties, massacres, candy beans, the Bruins, the Celtics, the bar from that TV show, the Red Sox, Matt Damon, the Afflecks, racism, the Whalbergs, Paul Revere, Kevin Steen, El Generico, the Briscoe Brothers — Boston, baby.

So far as terms of art go, the [INSERT CITY] Street Fight is one of my favorites in professional wrestling. It’s something of a lost one, too, employed mostly by World Championship Wrestling before the dawn of the new World order to let you know that, no, the Nasty Boys would not be wrestling with Harlem Heat, they’d be brawling to a suspiciously placed concession or souvenir stand where a clubberin’ would take place, trail of carnage behind them documented via split-screens and haphazard edits from one end of the arena to the other, announcers crying breathlessly as the involved parties bumped and brawled their way through the crowd to their destination.

This is basic, elemental professional wrestling, right down to pandering to the hometown crowd. It is comfort food, basically, the peak of “hide the negatives, highlight the positives” pro wrestling booking, only here, in Boston, it’s a fight between four men with nothing to hide. The end result is a great match that left me with a lot of things that make me feel kind of petty to complain about, but they’ve stuck with me enough through this week’s viewings to make them seem relevant.

Mostly what I don’t like about this match comes down to presentation. It is such a stupid thing to care about, I know, but this match is patterned off of WCW tag brawls, I am a big WCW tag brawl fan, and I absolutely do care about things like the announce team’s role in keeping chaos in focus, which is completely abandoned within the first minutes of the brawl when both of them go “this is unsanctioned, it could get dangerous for us, bye!” allowing around 20 minutes or so of violent-but-not-dangerously-so brawling to go unaccompanied by narrative handholding.

I can see an argument for this heightening the drama or not really mattering or whatever, but Ring of Honor doesn’t have a ton of money in the bank at this point, and even less on screen, so the action spools out with choppy edits, suspect lighting, and a lack of technical trickery, like WCW’s reliably mediocre but still workable picture-in-picture, to stitch together two very different brawls into one cogent story.

Like I said, this is minor. It annoys me to the point that I’m glad I’ve never wed myself to a star ratings scale, but the [INSERT CITY] Street Fight is structured like a closing zipper, two distinct threads merging into one, and while The Briscoes, Steen, and Generico don’t need help to get it done, the lack of narrative scaffolding knocks this just outside of first tier ROH/Briscoes/Steenerico content for me because it exists just outside of the context of the rest of the feud. That’s probably not important if you love ROH or have seen this feud, but Briscoes/Steenerico is a feud that’s a pretty easy reach when someone new to wrestling — the sport itself or things beyond WWE — is asking for something good to watch. I am lazy. I don’t want to explain things. I just want you to watch these dudes fight and bleed and do crazy shit to each other.

“Just outside of first tier ROH” is still spectacular, though. If things aren’t aligned just right for me to put this in front of my friend Cary or whoever, so be it, but odds are that if you’re reading this newsletter you’ll do just fine. “Generational talent” is a phrase that gets thrown around too often, but that’s just what you have here. In Generico, you have one of the most versatile, professional wrestlers of all time. In Steen, you have one of the best brawlers of his generation, someone who is as heads-up in his ability to read a crowd and the match before him as an Austin, Foley, or Funk. And in The Briscoes, you have the greatest tag team of all time.

I mean that phrase in earnest. There just isn’t another tag team like The Briscoes. The length and quality of their run is unmatched. The way they stamped it out just outside the mainstream is unique. The way they’ve insinuated themselves as central figures to the stories of all but a couple of this generation’s very best tag teams (The Usos, The New Day, and The Bar come to mind, your WWE tag teams who rose above WWE’s general disdain for tag team wrestling) — the only team that can make a similar claim is The Young Bucks, and I just like The Briscoes more.

A lot more, actually, which is hardly a slight on The Bucks so much as its an acknowledgement that The Briscoes excel at aspects of their craft across generations, whether it’s straight Southern tag stuff, violent brawls, singles features, Attitude Era car wreck spectacle, and basically every iteration of tag team wrestling you can think of. They carried all of that forward and evolved it while working in places most most people weren’t watching, and they continued to evolve while others got rich after either learning from or aping them. If you think of phrases like “greatest of all time” like I do, as a level and not something to be won or lost, there isn’t a single team at that level that they couldn’t tear the house down with, because they just understand what makes tag team wrestling work, at an elemental level, and unlike most of those teams, neither Mark nor Jay ever saw themselves as being above the form.

How does that play into this match? Well, funnily enough given my complaining about the lack of commentary, that’s set up in the opening moments of this match, when it’s noted that the Briscoes/Steenerico feud has been “touring the ROH territory.” There is a cage match coming up in Hartford for the ROH Tag Team Championships. There is the Ladder War in the future. There’s a 2/3 falls match, and some straight tag team matches, and each and every one of those matches carries different expectations, has a different structure, and must cater to both the live audience and ROH’s customer base, who were buying DVDs of these shows because it was 2007 — YouTube wasn’t monetized, streaming didn’t exist, and ROH wasn’t on PPV.

This is something of a lost match now because of how time contextualizes things — if you only have time for one match between these two teams, it’s going to be the Ladder War — but it’s crazy how these four men wrestled a match that’d end a tag team feud any other night with the pretext that it was merely momentum for a title match later that week. It takes talent to make a match feel like it’s a conclusive encounter to begin with — to do that and push things forward? The old masters of professional wrestling didn’t do that when feud blowoffs took place off camera at the Onmi or the Spectrum.

And then there’s the cutters — Mark’s brilliant one over the rail to a crowing Kevin Steen, but mostly Generico’s to Mark. The cutter is the most done-to-death move in professional wrestling, and it has almost nothing to do with Randy Orton and almost everything to do with this spot, which foreshadows the later Ladder War match between the two. There are bits about this spot that you’ve seen 1,000 times now that spring from this, whether its the surprise cutter itself or the ref holding the ladder so the wrestler can do something cool.

Only the referee isn’t holding the ladder so that Mark can hit a Froggy Bow, he’s doing it because Mark ordered him to and is, after 20 minutes of crazed, frenzied brawling, a man with a killer instinct who knows he has a chance to win. And Generico’s cutter? I haven’t seen every ladder match of the era, but the mid-2000s were a time when a clumsy Twist of Fate off of a ladder was something to behold, and now here’s something that feels new and violent, even though it will soon feature in the offense of every single professional wrestler in the United States of America who weighs less than 220lbs, except, curiously, Generico himself.

ROH (thanks for GIFing this, Joseph)

You can see the seams of this spot, stemming from the fact that the ladder is broken enough that Mark tells the ref to steady the ladder, but this whole thing is just part of the fabric of so much high spot wrestling now. The referee just goes into position if he’s needed. Sammy Guevara or Darby Allin or Cody Rhodes or whoever fling themselves across the ring and take out their mid-ladder opponent with a graceful, easy cutter that looks as practiced as it does spectacular. And it is both of those things, repeated over and over and over again until you come here, to its origins, on a DVD of a house show featuring a match from the middle of a feud with a very high profile conclusion. A lot of you have seen the players before, but maybe haven’t seen the game. That’s kinda how influence works.