Lee Moriarty & PB Smooth vs. Darius Lockhart & Suge D (Enjoy Wrestling Striking Distance 2/17/22)

Match Reviews

Featured image by AJ Smalls

As the next installment to the Moriarty/Lockhart rivalry, I was looking forward to seeing this but still found myself quite surprised by how good it was. This isn’t some all out barn burner, in fact most of it centers around stooging and more comedic spots, and that’s kind of why I love it. A central aspect to a lot of classic tag team wrestling that I feel occasionally gets lost is a sense of comedy that flows organically from the characters and narrative being told, instead of through some heavy handed and occasionally obnoxious attempts at “humor.”

This is a match that gets the balance of humor right. The majority of it comes from Lockhart & Suge stooging for the babyface team. Specifically, both men’s interactions with PB Smooth are the absolute highlight of the babyface shine. From Suge’s determination to try to shoulder tackle Smooth to Lockhart’s out right refusal to engage and tagging out, there’s a lot of fun stuff built around Smooth’s size and power here. It also means that when Lockhart finally gets the advantage for the heel team by taking out Smooth’s leg, it feels like a much bigger accomplishment given what they had to overcome.

I love that the tag structured the eventual Moriarty/Lockhart interaction around the hot tag, so that the match really explodes into a new gear when those two finally get to touch again. The segment between those two doesn’t last long but it makes one clamor for that rematch sooner rather than later.

We get a weird finish here that almost feels like it’s kind of edited and cobbled together (I couldn’t tell for sure), and that does knock some wind out of this match’s sails. Even before that though, the match was already starting to fall apart in the finishing stretch but that’s not enough to detract from the strength of the first half for me. The odd finish is also helped by being immediately followed by a hot angle seeing Lockhart pushing for the rematch with Lee. All in all, a pretty successful match in terms of heating up that rematch, while retaining some incredibly enjoyable (hehe) qualities on its own.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *