Post by Vegas on Sept 4, 2015 0:44:10 GMT -5
An article titled "Why PWG Mattets" I saw about my personal favorite fed PWG:
This past weekend, the standout independent wrestling promotion, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, put on its annual Battle of Los Angeles tournament, perhaps better known as BOLA. For three days, American independent stars, underutilized former WWE talents, a batch of wrestlers from Mexico’s AAA promotion, and an invading party of Europeans competed for a shot at the PWG World Title. Anyone who knows PWG’s stellar track record — or just took a cursory glance at the tournament’s amazing, dream match lineup — could tell you that the tournament was incredible, but the importance of PWG in the 2015 professional wrestling landscape goes far beyond mere match quality.
I’ve missed very few PWG shows since I moved to Los Angeles in 2012. That’s because, from the very first moment I stepped inside the American Legion Post #308 in Reseda, California (a small neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley), I could feel that Pro Wrestling Guerrilla was something far, far different than I’d ever experienced before.
The easiest comparison, the one that’s made most frequently, is to the glory days of ECW, the hyper-violent, often profane brainchild of wrestling mad-genius Paul Heyman. On a surface level, the comparison holds up: like in ECW’s earliest days, PWG is confined to a single area — a single location, even — with an outrageously loyal fan base, a ton of buzz, and a business model propped up by DVD sales. But truthfully, that’s where the similarities end.
While ECW prided itself on stacking the roster with misfits — the talents who weren’t right for bigger, cleaner, more sanitized promotions like WWE (then WWF) and WCW — most of PWG’s recent explosion in popularity can be chalked up to the promotion’s uncanny ability to book and promote talents that are destined for big things in WWE, though they wrestled under other names: Seth Rollins, Daniel Bryan, Adrian Neville, Kalisto, and many more have competed inside the PWG ring. But PWG’s most recent surge in popularity? That can be chalked up to two other names: Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn.
On the indies, Owens and Zayn wrestled as Kevin Steen and El Generico, respectively. As a tag team, they were internet darlings, but as enemies, they became massive — as massive as wrestlers could get on the independent scene at the time (the ascendancy of the Young Bucks has since changed that). But throughout it all, the line on both men — the husky Owens and the skinny-for-a-wrestler, masked Generico — was that as great as they were, they’d never make it to WWE, much less have any serious success in the world’s largest wrestling promotion. Then NXT happened.
NXT is WWE’s developmental territory, operating much like a farm team for the major league, where new-to-the-company talents come in, refine their skills, develop new gimmicks and/or learn how to work in WWE’s house style. Generico was signed to NXT first, then Zayn a few months later, but both had humongous, packed house send-offs at PWG, as fans went to get their last glimpse of both men in such a small arena, before they became mind-blowingly huge stars on the big stage of WWE. Even if it’s the shortest, most undignified run, any time at all spent in WWE raises a wrestler’s stock considerably on the independent scene. But the most impressive, most significant thing is what happened next: Both Owens and Zayn had incredible runs in NXT, and for Owens, on WWE’s main roster as well.
Around this time, people got hip to what PWG was up to: Acting as a type of All-Stars league for the American independent scene, the final stop for the country’s best wrestlers before signing with WWE. For people on the West Coast, who will likely never make it to an Orlando NXT show, the American Legion Hall suddenly became their Full Sail Arena (the home of NXT), a place to see the stars of tomorrow while boosting your wrestling fan cred with that all-powerful three-word phrase “I was there.”
But just like ECW, comparing PWG to NXT also fails on some important levels. The first is where each promotion places their focus. NXT is fantastic, providing a distinctly different flavor from WWE’s main roster in a condensed, one hour, weekly package. But at the end of the day, NXT is still a WWE show, with all that entails, meaning that the focus is never exclusively on wrestling. That isn’t the case in PWG.
While NXT features video packages, extended and frequent promos, backstage vignettes and ongoing storylines — all the things WWE excelled at, allowing them to become the global powerhouse they are today — PWG dances with the one that brought them. Part of this is a matter of necessity. PWG only runs shows about once every six-to-eight weeks or so, and has no exclusive roster, which means that in between shows, any of their regulars could get signed by another promotion, preventing their next trip to Reseda. Without that continuity, without the money and facilities to throw behind the production of a WWE-style show, PWG has to focus on wrestling.
And that’s totally fine. More than fine, even. Reason being that wrestling is what the hardcore fans that attend PWG want the most, and it’s where PWG and the talents they book, best excel. It’s wrestling in its purest form: You go in, you sit down, and two men (sometimes a woman) come out to fight one another. You don’t need to know anything about them – the announcer will tell you their names, and the wrestlers themselves, through their actions, will tell you who to cheer and who to boo. It’s a stunning display of all that’s best in professional wrestling, and I’ve yet to bring anyone there — wrestling fan and novice alike — that wasn’t blown away and completely taken in by it.
The talent, the perception of PWG’s place in the wrestling landscape, the focus on wrestling, the quality of the wrestling — these are all components of PWG’s success and importance, but they’re neither the biggest nor the most important ones. No, the most significant, most special and most amazing thing about PWG is this: The sense of community contained inside American Legion Post #308.
I can’t lie to you. It gets gross inside the American Legion Hall, especially during the summer months. I was there for all three nights of BOLA, and I don’t think I ever stopped sweating. But that insufferable heat, the excited, hot, screaming bodies surrounding you, the measly four rows of chairs surrounding the ring, the standing-room-only capacity, the wrestlers who chat you up and sell you t-shirts before and after the show, and those heavenly $12 pitchers of beer all combine to make an atmosphere that is, without hyperbole, magical.
PWG has become cool — exceptionally cool — with wrestlers like Rey Mysterio, Konnan, and Victoria in attendance this past weekend, and celebrity couple Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara attending shows earlier this year. For some underground, independent promotions, becoming this hip could be the death knell, as the show became more about being seen than seeing the wrestling. Shockingly, however, PWG has resisted this transformation, and I chalk it up to one thing: the fans.
I had friends in from out of town for BOLA this past weekend, and both of them were blown away by the same thing that bowled me over about PWG: How absolutely kind, gracious, sincere and considerate everyone at PWG is. This is a place where you can put a chapstick on a chair to save it for your friend and no one is going to give you flack about it. A place where if the beer line extends in front of the ring and a match has started, the folks in line crouch down to make sure you can see. It’s a hot, sticky, loud atmosphere with a lot of booze flowing — an atmosphere that could easily turn mean, but miraculously, never does.
Obviously, PWG has a leg up on NXT’s Full Sail arena because you can drink while you scream at the wrestlers, but that isn’t the only thing that it has over WWE’s yellow brand. As often happens when you run a wrestling show in front of the same crowd — as happened with ECW in the ’90s — NXT has cultivated a very specific type of fan. That NXT audience, while rabid and supportive, is also prone to making its own entertainment, choosing to cheer against heroes and for villains and, most damagingly, to participate in chants that are less about the action in the ring and more about the audience themselves. This doesn’t happen in PWG.
Yes, there are some jokey chants in PWG, and you’ll never find a wrestling crowd of any size without someone who wants to be the comedian, but the American Legion Hall breeds a different type of fan, a better type of fan. The crowd is self-regulating, shouting down people who try to make the show about them and not the wrestlers in the ring literally suffering for your entertainment. Despite the fact that PWG has become hip, has become an identifier for a certain type of wrestling fan, has become the place to see the WWE stars of tomorrow, has become an event where you might sit next to someone famous, everyone there is still in attendance for one reason, the most important reason: to watch wrestling.
PWG is the best. It’s not just my favorite wrestling to go watch, it’s my favorite thing to go do, period, full stop. If you can make it out to Reseda for a show, I can’t possibly recommend it enough, but even if you can’t, you should absolutely pick up some of their DVDs, which do an amazing job of capturing the totally unique, amazing energy of the live shows.
This past weekend, the standout independent wrestling promotion, Pro Wrestling Guerrilla, put on its annual Battle of Los Angeles tournament, perhaps better known as BOLA. For three days, American independent stars, underutilized former WWE talents, a batch of wrestlers from Mexico’s AAA promotion, and an invading party of Europeans competed for a shot at the PWG World Title. Anyone who knows PWG’s stellar track record — or just took a cursory glance at the tournament’s amazing, dream match lineup — could tell you that the tournament was incredible, but the importance of PWG in the 2015 professional wrestling landscape goes far beyond mere match quality.
I’ve missed very few PWG shows since I moved to Los Angeles in 2012. That’s because, from the very first moment I stepped inside the American Legion Post #308 in Reseda, California (a small neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley), I could feel that Pro Wrestling Guerrilla was something far, far different than I’d ever experienced before.
The easiest comparison, the one that’s made most frequently, is to the glory days of ECW, the hyper-violent, often profane brainchild of wrestling mad-genius Paul Heyman. On a surface level, the comparison holds up: like in ECW’s earliest days, PWG is confined to a single area — a single location, even — with an outrageously loyal fan base, a ton of buzz, and a business model propped up by DVD sales. But truthfully, that’s where the similarities end.
While ECW prided itself on stacking the roster with misfits — the talents who weren’t right for bigger, cleaner, more sanitized promotions like WWE (then WWF) and WCW — most of PWG’s recent explosion in popularity can be chalked up to the promotion’s uncanny ability to book and promote talents that are destined for big things in WWE, though they wrestled under other names: Seth Rollins, Daniel Bryan, Adrian Neville, Kalisto, and many more have competed inside the PWG ring. But PWG’s most recent surge in popularity? That can be chalked up to two other names: Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn.
On the indies, Owens and Zayn wrestled as Kevin Steen and El Generico, respectively. As a tag team, they were internet darlings, but as enemies, they became massive — as massive as wrestlers could get on the independent scene at the time (the ascendancy of the Young Bucks has since changed that). But throughout it all, the line on both men — the husky Owens and the skinny-for-a-wrestler, masked Generico — was that as great as they were, they’d never make it to WWE, much less have any serious success in the world’s largest wrestling promotion. Then NXT happened.
NXT is WWE’s developmental territory, operating much like a farm team for the major league, where new-to-the-company talents come in, refine their skills, develop new gimmicks and/or learn how to work in WWE’s house style. Generico was signed to NXT first, then Zayn a few months later, but both had humongous, packed house send-offs at PWG, as fans went to get their last glimpse of both men in such a small arena, before they became mind-blowingly huge stars on the big stage of WWE. Even if it’s the shortest, most undignified run, any time at all spent in WWE raises a wrestler’s stock considerably on the independent scene. But the most impressive, most significant thing is what happened next: Both Owens and Zayn had incredible runs in NXT, and for Owens, on WWE’s main roster as well.
Around this time, people got hip to what PWG was up to: Acting as a type of All-Stars league for the American independent scene, the final stop for the country’s best wrestlers before signing with WWE. For people on the West Coast, who will likely never make it to an Orlando NXT show, the American Legion Hall suddenly became their Full Sail Arena (the home of NXT), a place to see the stars of tomorrow while boosting your wrestling fan cred with that all-powerful three-word phrase “I was there.”
But just like ECW, comparing PWG to NXT also fails on some important levels. The first is where each promotion places their focus. NXT is fantastic, providing a distinctly different flavor from WWE’s main roster in a condensed, one hour, weekly package. But at the end of the day, NXT is still a WWE show, with all that entails, meaning that the focus is never exclusively on wrestling. That isn’t the case in PWG.
While NXT features video packages, extended and frequent promos, backstage vignettes and ongoing storylines — all the things WWE excelled at, allowing them to become the global powerhouse they are today — PWG dances with the one that brought them. Part of this is a matter of necessity. PWG only runs shows about once every six-to-eight weeks or so, and has no exclusive roster, which means that in between shows, any of their regulars could get signed by another promotion, preventing their next trip to Reseda. Without that continuity, without the money and facilities to throw behind the production of a WWE-style show, PWG has to focus on wrestling.
And that’s totally fine. More than fine, even. Reason being that wrestling is what the hardcore fans that attend PWG want the most, and it’s where PWG and the talents they book, best excel. It’s wrestling in its purest form: You go in, you sit down, and two men (sometimes a woman) come out to fight one another. You don’t need to know anything about them – the announcer will tell you their names, and the wrestlers themselves, through their actions, will tell you who to cheer and who to boo. It’s a stunning display of all that’s best in professional wrestling, and I’ve yet to bring anyone there — wrestling fan and novice alike — that wasn’t blown away and completely taken in by it.
The talent, the perception of PWG’s place in the wrestling landscape, the focus on wrestling, the quality of the wrestling — these are all components of PWG’s success and importance, but they’re neither the biggest nor the most important ones. No, the most significant, most special and most amazing thing about PWG is this: The sense of community contained inside American Legion Post #308.
I can’t lie to you. It gets gross inside the American Legion Hall, especially during the summer months. I was there for all three nights of BOLA, and I don’t think I ever stopped sweating. But that insufferable heat, the excited, hot, screaming bodies surrounding you, the measly four rows of chairs surrounding the ring, the standing-room-only capacity, the wrestlers who chat you up and sell you t-shirts before and after the show, and those heavenly $12 pitchers of beer all combine to make an atmosphere that is, without hyperbole, magical.
PWG has become cool — exceptionally cool — with wrestlers like Rey Mysterio, Konnan, and Victoria in attendance this past weekend, and celebrity couple Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara attending shows earlier this year. For some underground, independent promotions, becoming this hip could be the death knell, as the show became more about being seen than seeing the wrestling. Shockingly, however, PWG has resisted this transformation, and I chalk it up to one thing: the fans.
I had friends in from out of town for BOLA this past weekend, and both of them were blown away by the same thing that bowled me over about PWG: How absolutely kind, gracious, sincere and considerate everyone at PWG is. This is a place where you can put a chapstick on a chair to save it for your friend and no one is going to give you flack about it. A place where if the beer line extends in front of the ring and a match has started, the folks in line crouch down to make sure you can see. It’s a hot, sticky, loud atmosphere with a lot of booze flowing — an atmosphere that could easily turn mean, but miraculously, never does.
Obviously, PWG has a leg up on NXT’s Full Sail arena because you can drink while you scream at the wrestlers, but that isn’t the only thing that it has over WWE’s yellow brand. As often happens when you run a wrestling show in front of the same crowd — as happened with ECW in the ’90s — NXT has cultivated a very specific type of fan. That NXT audience, while rabid and supportive, is also prone to making its own entertainment, choosing to cheer against heroes and for villains and, most damagingly, to participate in chants that are less about the action in the ring and more about the audience themselves. This doesn’t happen in PWG.
Yes, there are some jokey chants in PWG, and you’ll never find a wrestling crowd of any size without someone who wants to be the comedian, but the American Legion Hall breeds a different type of fan, a better type of fan. The crowd is self-regulating, shouting down people who try to make the show about them and not the wrestlers in the ring literally suffering for your entertainment. Despite the fact that PWG has become hip, has become an identifier for a certain type of wrestling fan, has become the place to see the WWE stars of tomorrow, has become an event where you might sit next to someone famous, everyone there is still in attendance for one reason, the most important reason: to watch wrestling.
PWG is the best. It’s not just my favorite wrestling to go watch, it’s my favorite thing to go do, period, full stop. If you can make it out to Reseda for a show, I can’t possibly recommend it enough, but even if you can’t, you should absolutely pick up some of their DVDs, which do an amazing job of capturing the totally unique, amazing energy of the live shows.
