The Team ROH vs. Team CZW Cage of Death Match Is a Careful Balancing Act
The Team ROH vs. Team CZW Cage of Death Match Is a Careful Balancing Act
Wild to think that 11 dudes beating the shit out of each other is an exercise in deftly measured steps forward, but that's wrestling, baby.
Like most great WarGames cage matches, the ROH vs. CZW Cage of Death match from Death Before Dishonor IV is built on skillfully hidden balance. The match is ordered chaos, the rules constructed to create a reliable flow of heat segments and hot tags, setting the table for “the match beyond,” a final sudden death period that the viewer is welcome to interpret as the result of a carefully laid out strategy on the part of both teams, who’ve presumably picked the weak link on the opposing side and have spent the match targeting him, or as an over-the-top clusterfuck of violence and spite.
At their best, WarGames cage matches are a bit of both. This match is WarGames at its best.
It works hard to establish that Ring of Honor and Combat Zone Wrestling are on essentially equal footing. Cage of Death is a CZW staple. Death Before Dishonor is a Ring of Honor event. The red and black ROH ring is surrounded by the yellow and black CZW cage. This table is set in Philadelphia, PA, a stronghold for both promotions. The crowd is in favor of ROH, but there is a vocal CZW contingent. It’s quite a scene, one of the greatest indie wrestling crowds I’ve ever seen. Maybe the best. But in all of this balance, neither side finds themselves with an advantage.
WarGames has one baked in, though: the coin toss. In this, ROH is represented by J.J. Dillon, wearing his Four Horseman road jacket and calling heads, which is what he gets. This is a twist for the format. Most WarGames cages cook by giving the heels the benefit of the rolling man advantage — extended babyface shines are fun, but it’s much more fun to see the faces in peril get saved, struggle, and get saved again. It’s kind of wild that a feud you can boil down to traditional wrestling vs. modern ultraviolence ends with a match that works against the traditional structure of WarGames, but it’s all part of the plan.
The attention to detail in this match is close to perfect. This is true from jump, as Samoa Joe enters the ring to his theme music and Claudio Castagnoli enters the ring to CZW’s there. ROH doesn’t have a theme song, but it sets a tone: the men fighting on ROH’s behalf may believe themselves superior to CZW, but they aren’t a unified front like Chris Hero’s assembled crew of misfits and freaks who are tired of being told that what they do isn’t wrestling.
This plays out incredibly during the first half of the match if you contrast the dynamic that exists between Bryan Danielson and Samoa Joe to the one between Chris Hero and Eddie Kingston.
When Bryan Danielson hits the ring as ROH’s third man, he feigns a temporary alliance with Samoa Joe, who will soon challenge for Danielson’s ROH World Championship. They work together in concert, building momentum off of each other with strikes and double team moves, until Danielson calls for a Muscle Buster on Hero. When Joe picks Hero up to deliver one, Danielson takes out Joe’s leg and knocks him out of the match, putting ROH at a permanent disadvantage, shifting the match back to a more traditional WarGames rhythm in the process. He has chosen his championship over his team, and isn’t the least bit remorseful.
To Chris Hero, there is nothing more important to winning this match, and to that end his fifth man is someone with whom he has an eternal beef: Eddie Kingston. Do the two get along? Absolutely not, but they have pride in themselves and maybe a bit of a chip on their shoulders because they aren’t seen as “good enough” for ROH, so they put up a more or less united front and do their damdest to win.
Balance, y’all.
Something that all of that balance effectively buries is that Team CZW are technically the underdogs. They never once stop being heels, but they are outgunned by Ring of Honor on paper and fight like they have nothing to lose. Does Claudio cower from Samoa Joe? Yes. Does Chris Hero wrestle like a stooge? Absolutely. But the story leading into this match, at least so far as Jim Cornette’s firebrand promos about “garbage wrestling” that were a feature of this build are concerned, is that CZW cannot, under any circumstances, hang with a company that is effectively playing big brother.
Cornette comes out at the end to gloat about CZW getting their asses whipped, but at that point he’s a heel who is about to reveal himself, so who cares what he thinks — Team CZW comes out of this looking pretty damn good. The parts making up the whole don’t like each other but stick together, and ROH’s win depends on the miracle that is Homicide bailing out the company, not by rallying around the flag, but by breaking out the silverware.
Ring of Honor isn’t a united front. Danielson’s betrayal of Samoa Joe is one thing, but more than that there’s Jim Cornette, one of wrestling’s greatest snakes, double crossing Homicide after being delivered a victory that he needed more than any other in a long-career built upon victories he needed to save his reputation. Team CZW loses the battle, but had the war continued it’s likely that their invasion would have succeeded, all of ROH’s big guns pointed at each other, the BJ Whitmers and Adam Pierces of the world only able to do so much for a cause that has no basis in pride.
In other words, it’s great, managing to tell the kind of multifaceted story wrestling fans want to believe possible from their medium of choice while brimming with innovative offense whose echo can still be heard so many years later. Is it perfect? Technically not, as Homicide’s earth-shattering entrance is a cheat on Cornette’s part, giving ROH six men and the final entrant, but if you’re able to get past the crowd reaction to his entry and the purposeful chaos of the match, the justification for this move is right there: Jim Cornette is a cheat, and he’s never claimed to be anything but that. He’s a traditionalist, but he’s traditionally on the side of the men doing the most harm. Here, he crushes the aspirations of Team CZW and whips Homicide for advocating for Low Ki’s reinstatement when asked what he wants for being the MVP of the match.
If this match has any wrong notes, they work the way wrong notes work in jazz, which is to say that they somehow make the composition stronger. Who gives a shit if Necro Butcher goes for a pinfall before everybody is in the ring — you think a guy with a name like “Necro Butcher” cares? You think it’s funny that a Philly fan throws a roll of toilet paper into the ring? That roll of toilet paper goes through hell, smeared across blood and thumbtacks and barbwire and bootheels, the mirror universe equivalent of a thrown drink connecting with the face of a millionaire nWo member.
This iteration of the Cage of Death is a fireworks display, welcoming fans to ooh and ahh at bits like Samoa Joe punting a garbage can at Claudio Castagnoli’s face while saving all of the really brutal stuff for the end of the match. That’s classic WarGames, and if this isn’t at the top of the list, it’s because nobody here is fighting to close the distance estrangement puts between a father and son. That Dusty/Dustin angle is, at its peak, my favorite thing wrestling has ever produced, the last triumphant yell of the kind of wrestling the 1990s were about to bury forever.
Team ROH vs. Team CZW has a similarly charged story, it’s just that you’re supposed to cheer for the meritocracy. I don’t. I can’t. I’m with the freaks, with their cravats and bad hair and shiny Puerto Rican pants. Up against Ring of Honor’s very best, they acquit themselves well. It is their lot to be embarrassed in the end, but if their goal is to prove that they are better than ROH, they get the next best thing, which is proof that they’re just as good.
If this is a battle for the soul of independent professional wrestling, nobody wins. Zoom out far enough and you can see that battle playing itself out long term, in kayfabe and reality. Jim Cornette declaring who is and isn’t fit for a push in the mainstream, often incorrectly. Wrestlers like Eddie Kingston making it to TV to find that his adversaries from this match, this era, still don’t think he’s good enough to hang. This is supposed to be the end of a conflict, but it isn’t. It’s a lightning in a bottle moment that gathers together the million disparate threads that go into making wrestling such a fascinating exercise and manages to tap all of them.
The battle is over, but the war is not. Old grudges are made to be rekindled, one wrong look can reignite a long dormant beef. It’s the most human story imaginable, a hole men who hate one another dig together, find themselves trapped in, and continue digging. They’ll never get out, but the thing is, they don’t want to.