The Unbreakable Three Way Is the Very Best of a Flawed Format
Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles vs. Christopher Daniels rules, flaws and all, but is the highpoint of an awful format.
I was 18 or 19 the first (and last) time I saw the Unbreakable three way, and while I cannot find the specific post on the board I posted on where I went into detail about my distaste for this legendary TNA match, I can tell you the following things: I gave it ** & 1/2 and made hating on it kind of my thing for a couple of weeks. I know why I didn’t like the match — too many flips; not a fan of three ways; didn’t happen in WWE, WCW, ECW, or AJW — but look: it is a God-given right for wrestling fans in their late teens to say dumb shit, and it’s also a God-given right for wrestling fans in their mid-30s to hold true to those flimsy arguments until they are called to account for them 17 years later on their wrestling newsletter.
One of my opinions back then was that Christopher Daniels sucked. That’s not true, obviously, but I am not a fan of his, and going back to the tape on his most famous match, even with Joseph hyping him up on the Twitch stream we did together, did not make me any more fond of him than I already was. I think my issue with him is that his character work kinda peaks at “Dennis Hopper analog in WaterWorld: A Live Sea War Spectacular.” In theory, it’s sick as hell that Daniels actually was the villain in Universal’s WaterWorld stunt show for awhile, but in practice I feel like I’m being forced to watch the third most interesting guy in his D&D group do cosplay. I know he’s an important wrestler, I know he’s influential, but even here, capably stooging for the unstoppable force that is AJ Styles and the immovable object that is Samoa Joe, I mostly want to push him to the side. The peak of his stooging is in the opening minutes of the match, where his jealousy over Styles’ status (already a two-time triple crown champion just three years into TNA’s existence) and Joe’s game changing dominance (this is his second loss in TNA, though they keep up the “unbeaten” pretense for awhile as he mostly squashes guys around his big PPV matches) leads him to run his mouth until the two take turns one-upping each other at his expense, chopping and kicking the Fallen Angel until he rolls out of the ring.
The match doesn’t “pick up” from there, but when it’s Styles and Joe in the ring early, there’s a desperation to the action that isn’t quite there when Daniels is one of the focal points. I don’t think this is his fault as much as it is the fate of most wrestlers who lose a hyped triple threat match. There are two paths of interest here, and neither of them are the continuation of a six-month title reign in a division built in the image of WCW’s Cruiserweight Championship — if you aren’t going with the guy whose thing is that he hasn’t been pinned or submitted, that leaves one true loser, and while I imagine there was more mystery around the whole thing in 2005 than there is nearly 20 years later, watch the early “Daniels is out of the pool now” exchange between Styles and Joe, its quick roll-ups by AJ and submission work by Joe, and tell me there’s not an edge to it. It’s less showy, I think, a little less constructed feeling watching Joe level Styles with a kick in the corner than, say, Daniels getting involved and switching targets like he’s hitting the toggle opponent button in a PS2-era SmackDown! game.
Again, this isn’t his fault: wrestling is a combat sport, or a simulation of one, and most combat sports are 1 vs. 1 affairs. One of the most incredible things about wrestling is how often it’s successfully cheated that convention — imagine a world without tag team matches! — but for the most part that “cheating” is still within the understood limits of a fair fight: tag team, trios, War Games, Survivor Series, whatever, it’s one team vs. one team, with the additional rules and tactics inherent to the addition of more wrestlers causing a different, thrilling friction between parties. Triple threat matches — and you can scale that up to however many people you want involved in a scramble, and throw in as many gimmicks as you like — typically don’t work for me like that. They bend the fictional constructs undergirding the action of a wrestling match too much, to the point that it’s like the end of The Matrix where Neo wakes up from being shot to death and starts seeing in code. The Unbreakable three way is a massive leap forward for the form, a big league version of what the three wrestlers in it and their cohort on the indies had been pushing towards since ECW (and to a lesser extent WCW) popularized the form with more plodding efforts, but it doesn’t overcome those limitations, instead functioning as the best of a very flawed form.
There are moments, however, when everything is so fluid that I buy in entirely. Those are mostly explosions of Samoa Joe violence — Styles shooting Daniels off into a uranage hits much differently than the sort of fun-but-convoluted tandem offense that Daniels and Styles get up to when everyone is in the ring. Daniels is at his most dickish when he’s interrupting big momentum builds, particularly when he bull-ruses Joe out of the ring, dropkicks him through the ropes, and follows up with a springboard moonsault to the floor. The highlight reel stuff from here is truly spectacular, though I can hear my dipshit self chiming in from 2007 about how Joe and Daniels get a good look at Styles hitting his springboard shooting star press, or how much more effective it’d be for Styles to just break up a submission by kicking Joe in the face, but I’ve softened a lot on that sort of thing in this match, in part because I want to enjoy the time I spend watching wrestling, but also because the matches that’ve followed these three down this particular rabbit hole have exacerbated those issues.
It helps, again, that there’s a real urgency to everything Styles does. When he eats shit in this match, he does so huge. When he does something foolish, like breaking up a choke with a Spiral Tap (Tenay and West, who are an incredible commentary duo, do a great job in saying that Styles had to do it because nothing else had enough force to break the clutch, though it’d be a wrestling first if a simple boot to the face didn’t break the hold), he at least immediately goes for a pin. Styles works for TNA until 2014, so it’s kind of wild that by 2005 he ostensibly has nothing left to prove, speedrunning a Hall of Fame resume in the weekly-PPV era, but you’d never know that from watching him wrestle. This is a statement match for him (and Joe, and Daniels, and the X Division), and every move he throws is maximum impact, every bump tuned to impart maximum devastation. Like, watch the way he sells a Samoa Joe back senton towards the end — Joe’s a heavy dude, your sell of him throwing his weight on you doesn’t need to impart a sense of legitimacy, but the way Styles curls up and rocks on the mat makes it seem like Joe’s senton is as brutal as being shot in the belly.
When Daniels brings the X Division Title into the ring, the match grinds to a halt for a moment, Daniels and Joe doing too much posturing around it, the referee making matters worse. For what feels like the first time in the match, you can hear everybody sucking wind, exhausted after working such a breakneck pace, which is no sin except that it’s also the sound of gears turning, everyone trying to piece together what comes next. Even West and Tenay end up meandering a bit here, until Styles hits his insane moonsault/Scorpion Death Drop combo, which snaps brings things back into focus for them and the crowd, but not Joe, who talks through the finish of the match at Cena Volume while he’s got Daniels in an STF. Styles, again, refocuses things with something spectacular, a torture rack on Joe that he turns into an incredibly forceful FU — maybe his 20th move in this match that would be an effective finisher for someone working on television today. He wrestles this whole match like a man possessed, who knows that the next move could be the one that wins the match, and with a winded Joe on the outside, a perfect bridging counter to Daniels’ Angels Wings finish is what does it — simple, understated pro wrestling after 22-minutes of fireworks.
Casting aside the opinions of my teenage self, this match is a ton of fun. It’s not my favorite match on the show (Sabu vs. Abyss is shockingly fun, with the ECW guys up and down the card in rare form a few months after One Night Stand), but it is the best match on what is almost certainly the best TNA show I’ve ever seen. I have issues with it, but they’re not even particularly unique to this match — people forget spots, referee involvement goes awry, and when those things happen here the drag is minimal. Whether or not it’s the best match in TNA history or one of the best matches of 2005 is immaterial — it’s an unquestionably huge match, whose construction and aura have left fingerprints on 20 years of wrestling, the sort of match whose 20th anniversary next year would necessitate a deep dive from an outlet capable of scoring interviews with WWE and AEW talent, if such an outlet exists. The people who saw this match in 2005 and thought they’d seen the future were correct, for good and for ill, and for once TNA’s cute ad copy wasn’t just for show: the X Division really was about “no limits,” in the ring or on the card. Flaws and all, the Unbreakable three way isn’t just an exceptional triple threat match, it’s an exceptional wrestling match, full stop.
Rating: ****