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| Amasis ain't got time for your "too long" complaints Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein |
Less is more, some might say. Honestly, I think that's a good credo to live by in any form of entertainment, but I'm also a raging hypocrite in some respects. I like prog rock, for crying out loud. I didn't think Watchmen, the movie, was long enough. I wanted another season of LOST, even though it told a satisfying story over the six it was on the air, to me at least. When something is good, I don't mind it going longer. It's when the material is weak in the first place, unsustainable for such lengths, that it becomes excess. I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but man, Return of the King could have been a half-hour shorter. The point is, every case is different.
Of all the matches that didn't end in the paramilitary destruction of the stage and set and shuttling of wrestlers out of the ring, there was one that I had a feeling would draw ire for being "too long." The rumblings that I heard and read afterwards seemed to confirm that resentment of the Sarcophagus Match between Ophidian and Amasis did indeed exist. I didn't have a timer on me, so I couldn't remotely begin to tell you whether it was the longest match on the card by time or not. If I had to guess which match did consume the most time, it would have been that one. However, there wasn't a time during said match that I thought the performers were continuing the match just for continuance's sake.
There are some battles that need to be epic in scale. I would say that a disintegration of a wildly popular tag team that featured one member of said team desecrating the memory of the career of the other for 18 months would need that kind of grandiosity to it. There is more than one way to make a wrestling match have that air to it. One, of course, is by having it go really long, but it's certainly not the only way. Ramping up the violence could be an option, but in a family-friendly promotion like Chikara, there's a limit on how much you can push that envelope without compromising that PG atmosphere. Eddie Kingston walloped Icarus with a chair across the back three times, and I thought that was in the stratosphere of what could pass for ultraviolence in that company. You could also argue that the Egyptian Destroyer onto the sarcophagus lid was both appropriate in scale for the match and something that was a bit risque for Chikara's ethos.
But 18 months is a long time to have to seethe at home. It's a long time to have to keep up a psychological war against what Ophidian thought was a memory as well. A feud that goes on that long has to have saga to conclude it. I might be able to understand complaints about the match's length if it wasn't all that great, but from where I sat, it was one of the three best matches on an absolutely stacked card. This is coming from someone who has been running hot and cold on Ophidian in the last year and a half as a singles wrestler, especially with matches he's been involved in that I thought did border into excess (the match with Hieracon at the season 11 premiere being one of them). There were gobs and gobs of psychology littered in the match, and it was all well-executed.
The best example, outside of Ophidian doing something that has been rare if not completely foreign in modern American pro wrestling in putting his defenses up, was when that aforementioned Egyptian Destroyer was busted out. Obviously, that was a move that could and maybe should have finished the match in any circumstances. But the fact that Amasis rolled down the steps and off the stage, thus making any attempt to put him into the sarcophagus, immediately after was a brilliant bit of positioning. These were two wrestlers that knew they needed to fill a lot of time in order to give the ending of their feud the proper magnitude, and instead of going all Davey Richards-kicking-out-of-an-avalanche-Air Raid Crash, they paced their match intelligently, peppering in the big spots at the right times to hit key beats. When you can do that, it really doesn't matter how long you go. It all works.
I, just like everyone else who was there live, had every reason to get antsy with this match. The Trocadero was a sweatbox yesterday. Excessive heat can make anyone a bit more on edge than normal. However, there was never a point where I got annoyed with this match. I was rapt in my seat, and I feel like the entire crowd was with it along with me. A match isn't "too long" when it breaks a threshold of time in actual minutes and seconds. Wrestling is not science, it's art. A match like the Sarcophagus Match yesterday could go three hours in the right hands and not feel like it was a chore to get through. Thankfully, Ophidian, Amasis, and even Kobold all had the "right hands" yesterday.
Of all the matches that didn't end in the paramilitary destruction of the stage and set and shuttling of wrestlers out of the ring, there was one that I had a feeling would draw ire for being "too long." The rumblings that I heard and read afterwards seemed to confirm that resentment of the Sarcophagus Match between Ophidian and Amasis did indeed exist. I didn't have a timer on me, so I couldn't remotely begin to tell you whether it was the longest match on the card by time or not. If I had to guess which match did consume the most time, it would have been that one. However, there wasn't a time during said match that I thought the performers were continuing the match just for continuance's sake.
There are some battles that need to be epic in scale. I would say that a disintegration of a wildly popular tag team that featured one member of said team desecrating the memory of the career of the other for 18 months would need that kind of grandiosity to it. There is more than one way to make a wrestling match have that air to it. One, of course, is by having it go really long, but it's certainly not the only way. Ramping up the violence could be an option, but in a family-friendly promotion like Chikara, there's a limit on how much you can push that envelope without compromising that PG atmosphere. Eddie Kingston walloped Icarus with a chair across the back three times, and I thought that was in the stratosphere of what could pass for ultraviolence in that company. You could also argue that the Egyptian Destroyer onto the sarcophagus lid was both appropriate in scale for the match and something that was a bit risque for Chikara's ethos.
But 18 months is a long time to have to seethe at home. It's a long time to have to keep up a psychological war against what Ophidian thought was a memory as well. A feud that goes on that long has to have saga to conclude it. I might be able to understand complaints about the match's length if it wasn't all that great, but from where I sat, it was one of the three best matches on an absolutely stacked card. This is coming from someone who has been running hot and cold on Ophidian in the last year and a half as a singles wrestler, especially with matches he's been involved in that I thought did border into excess (the match with Hieracon at the season 11 premiere being one of them). There were gobs and gobs of psychology littered in the match, and it was all well-executed.
The best example, outside of Ophidian doing something that has been rare if not completely foreign in modern American pro wrestling in putting his defenses up, was when that aforementioned Egyptian Destroyer was busted out. Obviously, that was a move that could and maybe should have finished the match in any circumstances. But the fact that Amasis rolled down the steps and off the stage, thus making any attempt to put him into the sarcophagus, immediately after was a brilliant bit of positioning. These were two wrestlers that knew they needed to fill a lot of time in order to give the ending of their feud the proper magnitude, and instead of going all Davey Richards-kicking-out-of-an-avalanche-Air Raid Crash, they paced their match intelligently, peppering in the big spots at the right times to hit key beats. When you can do that, it really doesn't matter how long you go. It all works.
I, just like everyone else who was there live, had every reason to get antsy with this match. The Trocadero was a sweatbox yesterday. Excessive heat can make anyone a bit more on edge than normal. However, there was never a point where I got annoyed with this match. I was rapt in my seat, and I feel like the entire crowd was with it along with me. A match isn't "too long" when it breaks a threshold of time in actual minutes and seconds. Wrestling is not science, it's art. A match like the Sarcophagus Match yesterday could go three hours in the right hands and not feel like it was a chore to get through. Thankfully, Ophidian, Amasis, and even Kobold all had the "right hands" yesterday.