The Workhorsemen vs. Violence Is Forever Works By Unsettling Your Expectation of a Tag Team Cage Match
The Workhorsemen vs. Violence Is Forever Works By Unsettling Your Expectation of a Tag Team Cage Match
Turns out you can create more space for violence in an indie cage match by leaving the cage entirely.
“Those shirts are white, but let’s see what color they are in 15 minutes.” - Caprice Coleman
This match is a study in how so much of professional wrestling’s pacing and flow is dictated by the space in which it operates. And also blood. But I want to talk about space.
You are, obviously, familiar with the wrestling ring and its function, but let’s begin here anyhow. If wrestling is a sport (and it is a sport – a great one, even), it must be, like every other sport, defined by its field of play. Like a baseball field, football pitch, tennis court, or hockey rink, the wrestling ring is a clearly defined, easily understood object that, through the imposition of rules and the skilled application of physical activity, generates the narrative action of a wrestling match.
To cleanly win a match, in most instances, requires a wrestler to pin or submit their opponent within the confines of a 16’ x 16’ or 20’ by 20’ ring. Those boundaries are clearly demarcated by ropes, which come with their own set of rules, whether it’s a rope break ending a pinfall or submission or an intentional throw over the top rope drawing a disqualification. Fighting outside of these boundaries tends to be illegal beyond a 10- or 20-count.
You know this. You see this every week. You never think about this, and, frankly, you’re not supposed to, but because wrestling exists beyond easy binaries like “real” and “fake” or “legitimate” and “predetermined,” its relationship with the boundaries of the ring is more malleable than, say, baseball’s with its diamond. For starters, there’s no uniform understanding of how long a 10-count should take to administer. Then there is the mere idea of tag team wrestling, which, in adding more wrestlers to the action, makes the uniform wrestling ring feel much smaller than it actually is. Say you do something truly crazy, like erect a steel cage around the ring to prevent a wrestler from running away, or the action from spilling out onto the floor, drawing a hard boundary that one assumes, by virtue of all the steel, no wrestler can breach.
Say you do both of those things.
In the early moments of this match, things proceed as you might expect if you consider modern tag team wrestling’s emphasis on double team moves, and the lack of space accelerating the pace at which momentum shifts between Violence Is Forever and the Workhorsemen. Each shift escalates in violence until, shockingly, Dominic Garrini is rammed through the cage door and sent spilling to the floor. Because this is 2023 and Deadlock Pro Wrestling is not booked for babies, leaving the cage does nothing. The match continues. Garrini bleeds. Everything you might expect from a tag team cage match, whether what comes to mind when you think of tag team cage matches is Kernodle and Slaughter vs. Steamboat and Youngblood, Edge and Christian vs. The Hardy Boyz, or The Young Bucks vs. The Lucha Brothers.
Each of those matches is notable, in part, for what extremes the limiting factor of a steel cage forces the competitors to go to. Here, early, we are shown that the cage is not capable of containing these two teams, that the limits they’re testing is violence rather than space. Every steel cage match asks you to consider the cage as a weapon. This one cuts to the quick. With Dom gushing blood on the floor, JD Drake pops his partner Kevin Ku up against the mesh and drills him, drawing blood there, too. We are playing with and against the expectations one has of a steel cage match, the heels doling out an altogether unique kind of violence that thoroughly answers the question as to which team belongs at the top of DPW.
The problem for the Workhorsemen is that they’re entirely too well aware of it, and in approaching their dismantling of Garrini and Ku like they’re in the Match Beyond section of a WarGames match, they lose sight of the fact that they’re there to win a championship, looking to instead prove that becoming a television tag team hasn’t made them soft. There are a couple of ways Drake and Henry could have gone about proving this, and taking the titles off of VIF with an early black hole slam would have been the most emphatic, a shocking, violent, quick end to DPW’s first cage match.
Instead, they chose to draw things out, and until VIF score the win with a roll-up, there isn’t much, aside from commentary’s noting the potential mistake when it happens, to suggest that the Workhorsemen will regret their mistake aside from the laws that bind professional wrestling together, but we’re already at a point where much of what we expect from a match of this nature has been unsettled.
What I like most about this match is how unnecessary it is to play with genre. Cage matches aren’t necessarily special in and of themselves anymore, but they feel important on the indies, where cage matches are scarce because of the resources they demand, and where the cage itself feels larger and more imposing because the scale of the show is smaller. This is a middle chapter, as both the roll-up finish and the swerve post-match beatdown make clear, but it would have felt special regardless of that, and without toying with the formula.
That they do go beyond expectation makes this one of the best tag matches of the year, and one of the best cage matches in at least the last five years. As an added bonus are so many nice touches here, both unintentional — DPW’s color scheme recalling WCW’s early Halloween Havocs, the 1990 edition playing host to a barnburner of a Steiners/Nasty Boys match — and intentional — Dom taking the Raven/Dreamer chairshot when he’s ziptied to the cage. It’s a nod to everything good and great about heated tag wrestling and cage matches, while managing to be its own thing, too. I’m pretty stoked that this is, as of this month, my new local indie promotion.