Last Saturday night, as I got into a car with Tom Sibley, Matt McCarthy and Vince Averill to head to Night 2 of Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles, Sibley turned to me and said, “Are you ready to have the greatest night of your life?" And I didn’t know how to answer. I’d never been to a PWG show before. I mean, I’d heard about it. Plenty of times. A lot of people know I’m a wrestling fan. And they also know I live in Los Angeles. So when fellow wrestling nerds inevitably asked, "Have you been to PWG?” and I told them I hadn’t yet, it was like a gigantic automatic loss of street cred. I’d been to three SummerSlams in a row. I go to Monday Night Raw whenever it’s in town. I go to Lucha Va Voom almsot every time and I’ve even gone to a couple Championship Wrestling from Hollywood tapings. But saying I’d never been to PWG show was like a self-professed comedy fan in L.A. saying they love the Jay Leno monologue on The Tonight Show, but they’d never checked out Meltdown on a Wednesday.

After a short drive and an early dinner, we parked at the American Legion in Reseda and proceeded to wait in line with the other diehards for about two hours. Because that’s what you do. I’d been warned before by Vince that the smaller the wrestling venue is, the fatter the fans would be. But in this case, everyone seemed pretty cool and normal. Well, not everyone. There were some hardcore fatso dweebs, but for the most part, people were young and seemed to have their shit together. The women were surprisingly un-hideous. And there wasn’t a vibe of the “It’s still real to me, dammit” guy that I was kinda expecting. TV’s Ron Funches was there. Jonny Loquasto came later. Justin Donaldson from UCB was there. And I overheard a kid in line talking to Funches about his brother - who happens to be a famous Indian comedian from South Carolina. I mean, these were fucking hipsters! At an indy wrestling show in Reseda. And most of them had been the previous night too. People couldn’t stop talking about someone named Brian Cage having a really bad landing from a botched powerbomb. They loved talking about the match with “Psycho Shooter” Drake Younger and Joey Ryan, where everyone thought Younger was going to dump thumbtacks into the ring, but instead he used hard candies and Legos while the crowd chanted “You sick fuck." And they talked about how "Mr. Wrestling” Kevin Steen and “The Kentucky Gentleman” Chuck Taylor took a fan’s San Francisco Giants cap from the front row and proceeded to throw it on the mat and perform their moves onto the cap. And I’d never heard of most of those people. My initial thought was, “Who would go to Reseda two nights in a row to watch indy wrestling in an American Legion hall?" The answer to that question is EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN TO ONE OF THESE SHOWS, THAT’S WHO. It was the most amazing goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

To try to put things into perspective, I’ll use the most recent WWE SummerSlam as an example. Two of the matches on the card seemed to blow everyone away. They were CM Punk vs. Brock Lesnar and Daniel Bryan vs. John Cena for the WWE Championship. They were incredible. The rest of the matches were just okay. Some were even pretty awful. But Punk-Lesnar and Cena-Bryan were amazing. Afterwards, as I was talking about those two matches in a bar, Jesse Popp still asked if I’d ever been to a PWG show. He and Vince agreed that while those two matches were great, one of the PWG shows Popp had been to had a spot so insane that he literally fell out of his chair marking out. And when Dave Meltzer (the Bill James of professional wrestling and the critic/guru from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter all wrestling nerds worship) reviewed the Punk-Lesnar and Bryan-Cena matches, he gave them both 4.5 stars. In case you’re not aware, a 5 Star Meltzer match is so rare and prestigious, it has its own Wikipedia page. The last WWE match with a 5 Star rating (and only four other WWF/WWE matches have gotten 5 Star ratings, anyway) was John Cena vs. CM Punk from Money in the Bank in 2011. When I got that on pay-per-view at my old apartment back in 2011, I almost hyperventilated. Even non wrestling fans were jumping out of their seats and going ape shit in my living room. The most recent 5 Star match (Tomohiro Ishii vs. Katsuyori Shibata from last month’s New Japan G1 Climax) was suggested to me by a few friends. And when I watched it, I jumped out of my chair screaming "OH MY GOD” a few minutes in. So that’s how good a match can be. Sure, the version of pro wrestling most people are used to is mostly character-based and the actual matches are usually secondary to the storylines. But it’s not always the case. Some of these guys can do amazing things. The American wrestler with the most 5 Star matches is Ric Flair, who has six. And three of them are his classics with Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat from 1989. But at the top of the list of the most 5 Star matches is a guy from Japan named Mitsuharu Misawa. He may have looked like a chubbier Benico Del Toro, but the man was in twenty four goddamn matches with 5 Star ratings between 1985 and 2003. That’s insane. And after some Googling following the show, I decided Misawa is a major reason PWG is so good.

Professional wrestling, like comedy or anything else, is subjective. Some people love the WWF’s Attitude Era with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the Rock and DX. Or they like the Hulk Hogan Era. Some hardcore fans loved ECW. But it seems like, for a vast majority of wrestling snobs, the greatest era in the history of professional wrestling happened in the 90’s with a promotion called All Japan Pro Wrestling. It’s their Richard Pryor Live in Concert. And by contrast, Hogan vs. Andre the Giant from WrestleMania III would be Jeff Dunham. All Japan’s top stars at the time were Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Toshiaki Kawada and Akira Taue and collectively they’re known as “The Four Corners of Heaven." Their matches are the stuff of Internet legend. Not all their matches necessarily hold up in 2013, but if you were to just say, "6/3/94” to the nerdiest of nerd fans, they’d know the exact match (Misawa vs. Kawada) and tell you it was a flawless masterpiece and the greatest thing of all time. These four guys took the torch from a previous generation of great AJPW wrestlers and perfected the “King’s Road” style of wrestling. Their matches built slowly to bigger and bigger moves, constantly teasing finishes and signature moves. Their in-ring action played off of previous matches and finishes, telling a story within the context of a match based on the performers’ histories with each other. Oh, and they could get dangerous as fuck. Misawa was the mastermind behind most of it. When I was reading about the Four Corners of Heaven matches, I immediately thought of the insane series of WrestleMania matches the Undertaker had with Shawn Michaels and then Triple H between 2009 and 2012. The main difference is that Dave Meltzer never gave any of those matches anything higher than 4.75 stars.

In the tape trading era of wrestling nerddom, All Japan matches were a Holy Grail wet dream for fans outside of Japan. Nobody had ever seen that style of wrestling before. But Misawa’s style would have the biggest effect on American wrestling after he formed Pro Wrestling NOAH in 2000. That year, Misawa left All Japan Pro Wrestling after a dispute with the new owner (Giant Baba’s widow) over the direction of the company. And of the 26 Japanese wrestlers on the AJPW roster, 24 followed Misawa to his new promotion (one of the two who stayed was Kawada, who legitimately hated Misawa). And then AJPW also lost their TV contracts to NOAH. The Biblical name reflected the new beginning for those 24 men. But at NOAH, Misawa also set up relationships with independent American promotions, like Ring of Honor. And when ROH guys (independent wrestlers who could tour and do things like NOAH and PWG) would return from Japan, they had new skills and inspiration for their matches. Kobashi and Misawa even came to ROH events in 2005 and ‘07, much to the delight of nerd fans. When Misawa died in the ring in 2009, PWG posted that their company “would not exist, or at least not resemble its current form, were it not for” Misawa. ROH fans (and then PWG fans) adopted the streamers from All Japan and Pro Wrestling NOAH and the wrestlers adopted a style that would make them the top indy promotion in America. Indy wrestling was looking less like The Wrestler and more like violent Japanese performance art. Except that the fans were chanting “Ho-ly shit!” and “This is awesome!” for most of the show.

To go along with the PWG quote about Misawa, WWE itself could not exist in its current form without ROH. CM Punk, Daniel Bryan, Antonio Cesaro, Seth Rollins and Evan Bourne are just a few of their guys who were indy stars before getting the call from WWE. They just signed El Generico and Sami Callihan to NXT, their developmental promotion. And all of the above have wrestled at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla over the past ten years. In fact, on their fifth show in 2003 (An Inch Longer Than Average - they usually have crazy names), you could have seen Punk and Bryan, as well as Colt Cabana and TNA’s Samoa Joe. It’s how I’m guessing people will talk about stand-up comedy shows in Chicago from 2006 and 2007. And that’s probably why one of the 'celebrity’ sightings at Saturday’s PWG show was William Regal, who was there to scout talent for WWE. I’m guessing he wasn’t disappointed. PWG’s roster consists of the best independent wrestlers from around the country. Of ROH’s current roster, Adam Cole, ACH, Kevin Steen, Kyle O'Reilly, Michael Elgin, Roderick Strong and Tommaso Ciampa were on the show I attended. And while ROH is getting its iPPV issues sorted out and other promotions like Chikara are in (fake?) hiatus, many nerds in the Internet wrestling message board community are saying that PWG is the best promotion in the United States, independent or not (and arguably second in the world to New Japan Pro, who is having its own renaissance similar to AJPW in the '90s). Got all that? It’s okay if you don’t. I didn’t when I walked in to that American Legion hall on Saturday. But afterwards, I just wanted to know (or have an idea of) why what I’d just seen had blown my goddamn mind.

What I saw was hours of insane matches and non-stop 'top this’ moments and huge bumps with no breathers, except for the intermission (where everybody was raving about what they’d just seen). And if you’re sitting anywhere in the crowd you’re part of the show. Guys come flying, flipping and diving into the crowd from the ring while everyone scrambles to get out of the way. At one point, Kevin Steen (by far the most popular performer with the fans) landed in a chair right in front of me before he was attacked by Johnny Gargano. Most of the matches warranted a “this is awesome” chant from the rabid crowd. After Kyle O'Reilly beat ACH in a roller coaster of a match, the crowd chanted “please come back!” to ACH. Fans scream-sang Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” to taunt the Young Bucks before they and Adam Cole triple super kicked (very talented) female wrestler, Candice LaRae. Michael Elgin (who had his own 5 Star match with Davey Richards last year in Ring of Honor) held multiple wrestlers in a suplex for upwards of a minute. And Brian Cage got to powerbomb Tommaso Ciampa on top of chairs and the concrete floor as revenge for the botched spot the night before. These guys (and girl) were holding nothing back, beating the shit out of each other (and occasionally the fans) for our entertainment. And I’ve never seen anything like it. And that was before Steen hit the ring to end the night with a giant swerve in the storyline to leave the crowd chanting “what the fuck." This was one of the very few things in my life that had been hyped up too much, but actually exceeded my expectations. I don’t know if it was the greatest night of my life, but I’ll be back again. Because one of these nights it just might be.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of some of the highlights.

#pwg #prowrestlingguerrilla #misawa