This review was commissioned by Ok_Awesome over on my Ko-fi account.
If you’ve come this far, you probably know the story. Eddie Kingston and Chris Hero have been embroiled in a years long rivalry, both in and out of the ring and kayfabe, that culminates in a loser leaves town match in CZW. After a famous and rather hellacious encounter filled with stiff strikes, blood, and big bombs, Eddie gets a win he’s been seeking for years only to then be immediately fired by Zandig in one of CZW’s most on the nose and well publicized promotional errors ever. By now, all that is the stuff of legend, part of the grand mythos that is the 2000s super indie era, well touted and beloved by myself and many others.
It might surprise you to know that while I have a great attachment and sentiment to these two as individual workers, the Eddie/Hero feud is something I have relatively little first hand experience with. My own love for indies of this era was shaped mainly by the canonical ROH classics and CZW remains a massive blindspot. While I’ve certainly seen this match before, as well as the bookends of their first ever CHIKARA singles match and the final AIW bout, I’m not nearly as immersed in the lore of Hero and Eddie together as so many of my other contemporaries. That knowledge might color your impression of what I’m about to lay out, so I declare it here and beg your indulgence.
With all that said, what really fascinates me about this match is its position in the wider legacies of both Kingston and Hero as individual workers. Call it a side effect of the ongoing Greatest Wrestler Ever discourse, but beyond all the sensory and emotional delights of a match like this, what I came away really chewing on was how much it revealed about who these two were and who they later grew up to be. That being my main takeaway, I think it’s fair to say that this match inspired a more intellectual appreciation than the raw, visceral reaction so many have come to it with before. Don’t get me wrong: this match is great and it rocks for many reasons I’ll ennumerate, but what really stunned me coming out of it is just how much better these two got later on in their careers.
By 2007, both Hero and Kingston had yet to complete their first decade as in-ring performers. It shouldn’t be too much of a wild stretch that two wrestlers as talented as this only got better with time. I do hold that this is true for these two, but a more value neutral assessment I can make here is that they certainly got more organized as wrestlers with time. Age allowed these two the space to refine, the opportunity to milk more from less, and the confidence to let things breathe when necessary.
All those qualities don’t really come through here. That’s not to say that the match is hollow. It’s rife with emotion, it’s practically seething off these two at every single turn. One can see it from how Hero cuts through a sea of security staffers to get at Kingston, or the very audible struggle Kingston puts up throughout the match with his grunts and pained insults. That stuff is real, in every sense of the word, and it’s what invests so much power into this match as it is. But nobody that loves this match–as far as I’ve seen among friends and peers at least–comes away from it talking about structure and thoughtfulness. More often than not, this is pointed as a quality in the match’s favor, as the form of the thing represents how far things have broken down between Kingston and Hero. I could jive with that idea, if it only went a little further with that idea.
As is, we have Kingston and Hero a little caught between worlds. About half of this match is the grotesque fighting that one associates with this pairing. It’s Kingston returning consistently to a simple double handed choke, just simply trying to squeeze the life out of Hero. It’s Hero clawing at an eye or trying to get a boot up to break up those chokes. There’s the beautiful headbutts–both the wild diving one Hero splits both men open with and the subsequent crunching ones in and out of the ring. Hell, it’s even those punches (rarer than I wish they would be in a match like this) that land so well that Hero has to sell his hand on one early in the bout.
These outbursts of violence get broken up with indie bomb throwing that really doesn’t land in this particular match. I can understand Eddie needing a big suplex to cut off Hero’s righteous rage in the opening moments, but as these two get into trading those big moments down the line, something gets lost. The match gets just a little too common for what it’s established and already achieved. Double stomps off the top, trading Germans and cravat suplexes and countering Hero’s Welcomes and all that just doesn’t hit the same emotional notes as all the best stuff in this match. That’s not even getting into the fact that many of those big bombs don’t have the space to breathe in the same way as the source material it’s pulling from. Criticize “King’s Road” Eddie all you want, but he’s at least since shown that he’s capable of crafting the cohesive tone around that particular style in the years since as opposed to including those tropes here where it just doesn’t feel like they really fit. The Eddie here is not the one yet capable of turning the world around on a single chop or conquering the self via a powerbomb. Even Hero’s fire ups from those suplexes–multiple of them in this bout–lack the grandiosity and drama of a Misawa or Kawada stumbling back to their feet before getting struck back down. A real shame given how much genuine fire Hero effectively puts into something simpler like shoot headbutting Eddie down into the dirt on the outside of the ring.
And while we’re on the question of those strikes too, am I crazy to think that they actually got better at that too? I’ll concede the headbutts, those are a wonderful product of the specific chemistry and freedom these two had with each other in the 2000s. But the chops? Eddie’s don’t land with the same thunder here, whereas Hero seems to really be laying them in. And Hero’s elbows would only get crisper and more impactful with time, thigh slap or not.
What the match does have going for it though comes from the energy and ambition of youth. Does the striking get better for these two? Sure. But holy shit, does it still sound wonderful here. I’m especially a fan of Hero’s jabbing punches and every time they turn to the headbutts, it does feel like a real shift in energy. There’s a great moment on the mat where they just crash into each other like mountain rams for several headbutts and that’s the kind of stuff that really makes this match sing. The match also works with the heated emotion of two dudes yet to mellow out with the comfort of a cushy television contract. Hero and Kingston are hungry to prove a point, to each other, themselves, and the crowd at hand. And they pour so much of themselves into this, creating an atmosphere of sheer pettiness that covers the whole thing. Eddie verbalizes this as life and death stakes with threats of “Imma kill you” or challenges “Kill me” and at times they make it feel as if they’re truly operating on that level. Even small moments of spite like Hero kicking at the top of Eddie’s dome with kicks that are equally dismissive and cruel stands out so much. I’ve also already mentioned Hero selling his hand off a punch and that’s exactly what this match captures so well–the need to hurt and come out victorious even at the cost of one’s self.
That’s the kind of action that really thrives in a disorganized product, between two wrestlers still finding themselves. It comes out as a product of discovery and pure expression. I hate you, I must hit, even if I go down with you. What a stunning sentiment, simple when articulated as such but so difficult and complex to achieve, yet down with a natural ease here. Things like that can get sanded away in favor of refinement and it’s a great thing then that we have it preserved here between these two.
Ideally, there’s some perfect balance that exists between ambitious youth and refined experience. I’d say nine times out of ten, that’s just a hypothetical perfection that can’t really be synthesized without great effort and a little bit of luck. This match exists on one side of that hypothetical. Eddie and Hero weren’t yet who they could be, but it’s still pretty great to behold who they were.
Rating: ****¼
