The (Timothy) Thatcher EVOLVE (Wrestling) Watch(through of matches) returns and I hope you’re all as glad as I am. This will be Thatcher’s third match of the Style Battle and he steps in against the big New Zealander, James Raideen. Pretty cool name, so that’s a start. His tattoo is a bit crap but I’m guessing it’s still being filled in? It just looks like a pencil drawing. But that doesn’t have much to do with the match.
I believe the idea of the Style Battle was to pit different styles against each other, but the differences weren’t really drastic: everyone fought a pretty close, physical style. The biggest stylistic difference in the whole tournament was Raideen and any of the other three (Thatcher, Drew Gulak, and Biff Busick). Raideen’s style is pure strength with a very puro flair. He’s got lots of chops and lariats, he does big throws, and it seems that he finishes with a powerbomb. A big meaty muscle man who can stand and trade with the best of them, as the commentary emphasized with the mention of his battles with Masato Tanaka in Zero-One.
Strength, though, is not enough to be exciting. You need to have power in pro wrestling, and power implies an explosiveness, an active quality that isn’t there in just “strength”. That’s really what was missing in Raideen’s performance. At this time he was only 23 and I’m not sure how long he’d been in wrestling but he seems like someone who’s very new and who was pushed in Zero-One due to his size. Not altogether a bad thing and it’s not as if he stank, but it could be that he still needed to be carried. Masato Tanaka would certainly be up to that task. Timothy Thatcher in 2014? I don’t think he was.
To focus on the idea of power, though, and explosiveness. I’ve often found that there’s an undefinable quality in the best wrestlers, or maybe more accurately, a difficult-to-describe quality. The best word that I’ve found is “confidence”, but it’s a specific sort of confidence. I’m not talking about swagger. It’s the point where the image of the act — that is to say, a worked punch as the image of the act vs an actual punch which is the true act — becomes a true act itself.
In sport wrestling, people don’t do this hesitation before engaging, at least not at the top levels. There’s an intention and a commitment to that to the exclusion of everything else.
In professional wrestling — worked wrestling — two things work against that sort of confidence in action. The first is that you’re not supposed to hurt your opponent, and in fact, it is your responsibility to make sure that they don’t get hurt. The second is that pro wrestling is worked and it is, especially in this day and age, very conscious of that fact. For those reasons people tend to overthink and to worry, and therefore not to build that commitment/confidence that is more than realistic, it’s real.
The best wrestlers are the ones who can somehow get to that level of confidence in their work. It comes in a lot of different ways. For some, the most dangerous ones, it comes from not giving a single fuck and throwing without care. For others, it’s lots of drilling and getting the placement of moves to be immaculate. For others it’s knowing the limits of your opponents. For lots, it’s a mix of the latter two. How they get there is ultimately not important, though. What matters is that until you get to that threshold, there’s a stopper on how good your matches can really be.
Don’t discount your subconscious reading of a match. Sometimes matches just feel off for some reason, and this para-hesitation from a wrestler is the biggest reason for that feeling in my experience.
This match, Thatcher vs Raideen, was laid out like a good match, but Raideen did not feel real, so it plodded. The moments where the commentary said he was being methodical seemed more like the wheels were spinning furiously in his head but getting no traction. The ending was supposed to be a clutch reversal of Raideen’s big powerbomb, but it honestly felt like the match ended just as it was getting going, and not like Thatcher was yet in danger. Raideen showed potential but not more than that. Tim Thatcher seemed to work hard, but he didn’t do much to elevate the match above an average affair.
Technique D
Intensity C
Drama D
Excitement D
Dull Match
