CWF Mid-Atlantic Worldwide Ep. #103: Championships & Chucky T
Watch the entire episode at the bottom of this review
We’re starting the night off strong by opening the show with a title match. Cain Justice is set to defend his Rising Generation League Championship against “The Revolutionary” Darius Lockhart. This was essentially a heel vs heel match, but Justice had the crowd support despite coming off as an even bigger jerk than Lockhart. Watching both guys fight dirty made for a unique dynamic, but difficult to find someone to root for. Regardless, it still made for a good contest between two guys who were hungry for the championship. You get a strong sense of how badly each man wanted the Rising Generation League Championship, as well as a sense of bad blood between the two. They started off trying to out-wrestle each other before divulging into dirty tactics (eye racks, eye pokes, dragging eyes across the ring rope, etc). Then, the longer the match progressed, the more these two were adamant about hurting each other with the stiffest of shots. You get to hear kicks, punches, and forearms loud enough to echo across states. We get a decent back and forth until the final moments where Justice stiffs Lockhart with two earth shattering kicks to the face before wrenching back on Lockhart’s arm—the same arm Justice had been working on for most of the match—for his Twist Ending finisher that no man has escaped from. Lockhart is quick to tap, giving Justice the retaining victory in a solid 12:48 bout.
That whopper of a contest gets followed up by an in-ring Q & A session by an apparently hungover (so he says) Brad Attitude. He just answers crowd questions/heckles about music, Motley Crue, his friend Dolph Ziggler, and drunk Snapchats. These questions were random and the segment didn’t seem to be anything but a means to cool down the crowd. Still, I’d take a cool down segment like this over a pointless bathroom break match. No harm, no foul.
Next, we get a backstage promo from “The Filmmaker” Movie Myk. Myk says it doesn’t matter what kind of extra or supporting character he has to face for next week’s Battle Bowl. He will be the star and whoever is in the ring with him will share the spotlight with a superstar. He also brags about his jacket costing $30,000, which might be more expensive than Chris Jericho’s light-up jacket. How fancy.
Afterwards, we get Television Champion Aric Andrews out to the ring. His opponent is drawn from a name out of a bowl randomly picked out by an audience member, Papa Hales. That is until Hales chucks the bowl in the ring, refusing to pick a name at random after driving 7 hours to the event. Instead, the entire locker room comes out to give Hales an opponent to choose from. Certain to give Andrews a real challenge, Hales chooses 400-pounder and one-half of the Mid-Atlantic Tag Team Champions, Mecha Mercenary, to challenge Andrews for his title. The locker room guys remain by the ring to make this an impromptu Lumberjack Match.
I’m usually not a fan of Lumberjack Matches because they’re so repetitive and this was no exception. The formula revolved around Andrews trying to squirm his way out of the ring every other minute only to get thrown back in quickly or getting hit by an outside and then tossed back in. This reverse David vs Goliath match saw Mecha squishing Andrews for most of it until Andrews got a cheap shot every now and again. Unlike our previous match, we have a definitive babyface in Mecha, who’s likable enough to get some well-deserved cheers. Despite the insane size difference, Andrews works well as a weasley heel. In the final moments of the match, Mecha nearly wins it, but because Andrews had been working on Mecha’s leg, Mecha struggled to hit his Elbow Smash finisher in time before the match reached its 10-minute time limit. It’s a draw, but Andrews retains. These competitors did the best they could with this match and the crowd were into it, but again, I’m not into Lumberjack matches and couldn’t enjoy this. I feel like if it was just a straight-forward contest, I would’ve liked it more.
Out next, we get Chuck Taylor™ (aka Stokley Hathaway) taking on White Mike Jordan for our main event of the evening, with an appropriately 69-minute time limit. Never knew the manager Hathaway—or, excuse me, the new and improved Chuck Taylor—ever wrestled nor do I know the backstory of this match, but I can dig it, baby. It made for one hilarious comedy match. The banter between these two and strange exchanges—including White Mike caressing and licking the top of Chucky T’s head—was wildly funny to watch. These are clearly two insanely charismatic individuals. Their natural charm and chemistry with each other made for one of the better comedy matches I’ve seen in a while. Also, despite being a non-wrestler, Chuck Taylor™ is actually kind of decent in the ring. After White Mike invites members of the locker room and a small child to take Chucky T to Mike’s newly coined Suplex City, the two exchange finisher reversals before Mike finally hits his Can Opener for the win. Then, parodying The Undertaker’s WrestleMania exit, White Mike strips off his boots, shirt, and the rest of his clothes to announce his retirement and earns the respect of Chucky T, who tells Mike he earned the name Black Mike.
All in all, this was quite the entertaining episode of CWF. I highly recommend it if only for the hard hitting first match and the absurd main event. Those two contests are on two completely different spectrums of wrestling, but are still intensely entertaining wrestling matches.