A Tale of Two Matches

Another Taker match? snooooooze Photo Credit: WWE.com

Both WWE and All Elite Wrestling announced matches for upcoming supercards today, the former for its latest Saudi Fuck Money show, Saudi Super Showdown, and the latter for its formal debut as a company, Double or Nothing. One match will resonate with more people, obviously, so it might seem unfair to compare the two, but when time has created enough distance between the present and those two shows, the other one will seem far more important to the advancement of the art of wrestling. I'll start with WWE's first:

The #Undertaker and @Goldberg are set to clash for the first time ever on June 7 at #WWESSD! https://t.co/cwL3Iq82ct

— WWE (@WWE) May 13, 2019

This match would've done NUMBERS in like 2003, and it might have even been good. But now? Well, stranger things have happened, but Taker is broken down and Goldberg's story ending at WrestleMania 33 felt right. Now, AEW's offering:

#AEW#DoubleOrNothing
Sat, May 25th #LasVegas@MGMGrand#GardenArena
Aja Kong, Yuka Sakazaki, Emi Sakura vs Hikaru Shida, Riho, Ryo Mizunami#AEWDoNpic.twitter.com/7oweOR5jvs

— All Elite Wrestling (@AEWrestling) May 13, 2019

To a good portion of people watching Double or Nothing, only Aja Kong might be recognizable. Chances are that at best, non-joshi fans will look at this graphic and only see three names they recognize (Kong, Emi Sakura, Hikaru Shida). Certainly, I'd need primers on the other three wrestlers, but that's not the point here. People will tune into Double or Nothing to see Chris Jericho vs. Kenny Omega or the Rhodes Brothers imploding or what have you.

Once upon a time, people tuned into an Extreme Championship Wrestling pay-per-view to see Sabu vs. Taz and Raven vs. either Terry Funk, Stevie Richards, or The Sandman. Six guys whom most Americans barely knew at the time stole the show. The Michinoku Pro tag match, featuring Great Sasuke, Gran Hamada and Masato Yakushiji vs. Men's TEIOH, Dick Togo, and TAKA Michinoku, is still looked upon fondly to this day, and it got Sasuke and TAKA into WWE in a match on what is still considered one of the greatest in-ring pay-per-views ever, In Your House: Canadian Stampede. Kong, Sakazaki, Sakura, Shida, Riho, and Mizunami can conceivably steal the show in the same manner. Kong and Sakura already are two of the greatest of all-time in joshi, and the other four will be hungry to show the greater world what they can do.

That in a nutshell shows the difference between WWE and the promotions trying bite at its worldwide hegemony. WWE is getting money from a genocidal regime that asks it for wrestlers decades out of practice and who may even be dead, while even AEW, which is still corporately-backed and not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, is taking chances on elite foreign talent to put some life in the American scene that could use it. ECW was always the overachieving indie and WWE at the time was far behind World Championship Wrestling in the national race. They took chances and got on national cable and ended up catching and beating WCW respectively. Things like this joshi trios match could end up mollifying AEW as cutting edge, while WWE is currently doing its best WCW imitation by doing seniors tour shit in Saudi Arabia. Even as their financial hegemony grows larger, it's still the best sign that the company might be facing competition sooner rather than later.