FIP In Full Force 2017
Timothy Barr and Kaci Lennox are once again our host and hostess. Unfortunately.
Both guys worked the head for a while until Stone won with a choke using the ropes because there are no rope breaks- or pretty much any rules- in FIP. Seeing Fox playing the babyface in this perfectly clean professional wrestling match despite being one of Uncle John's Friends was very weird, but the match worked.
A dull boring brawl, which is astounding when you consider how short they went and how much they tried to do. A Dana Brooke vs. Eva Marie match would have more charisma.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Painful. Drennan says that when Odinson comes back, he, Parrow, and Odinson will be unstoppable. Then he makes an open challenge. Then some dude in jeans, a t-shirt, and taped fists comes out and a woman in the crowd asks the same question that was on my mind by shouting "WHO THE F*CK ARE YOU?!"
This guy is apparently "'The Outlaw' Mitch Mitchell." Really. I don't care how much of a mark you are for Eddie Edwards: names like that sound really dumb. In Eddie's case it's his shoot name, but even if it is your shoot name, THIS IS PRO WRESTLING! YOU CAN CHANGE IT!
Mr. Repetition angrily shouts what his name and moniker are and says that he doesn't back down from anyone. This guy comes off like the absolutely worst stereotype of an indy geek you can imagine. He says that Drennan was "too big of a b*tch to fight me in ACW"… and immediately gets grabbed from behind by Parrow and tossed out of the ring. Then some other lose came out and met the same fate. And another. And another. And another. Then Mitch Mitchell grabs a mic, loudly calls the other wrestlers assholes, threatens to rip their heads off, and demands a five-way match. What is Gabe doing here? This is exactly the sort of terrible, cliche, sh*tty ECW wanna-be wrestling that Gabe started ROH to move indy wrestling away from. ECW has been dead for sixteen years now. Why is this walking cliche on my computer screen?
Anyway, we wind up with a…
FIVE WAY FREE-STYLE:
When you hear the name "Vertigo" you're probably thinking of some small, high-flyer in a Lucha mask, but this guy was a large, old, hairy dude. And what kind of a name is "Irish Jack." Apparently these guys are a combination of ACW guys and A.R. Fox trainees. They were mostly acceptable. The only guy the crowd gave a crap about was Mason Tyler, who is one of A.R. Fox's trainees, which has left me wondering what, exactly, ACW bring to the table that it is being included under the WWN banner.
The match was pretty short. It was mostly a bunch of not particularly exciting spots (but they weren't sloppy or anything, either), then Mitch Mitchell locked Mason Tyler in a cloverleaf. Drennan broke it up, then hit Mason in the leg with a chair a few times, then made him tap out to the figure four.
So after that display of bad 2003 indie wrestling, Timothy Barr starts to tell us how great that action was, complete with many unnecessary F bombs. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but I thought I saw Kaci Lennox role her eyes when he did this. I really hope she did, because if her job isn't to let me know that Timothy Barr is supposed to come across as verbal love-child of Don West and John Zandig, then I can't imagine why Gabe is even paying her to be on these shows. If you want to book someone just to be eye candy, there are many other women on the Florida indy scene who will do the job better (and, from what little I've seen of her, will also be able to bump better than Kaci can if situation ever comes up). Seriously, Gabe. Why are you wasting money by having two ring announcers.
This was a pretty good brawl and that Pedigree on the bar still looked sick even though it was pretty clear she didn't make too much contact, but I just cannot get into Aria Blake. She comes across like someone who has seen charismatic wrestlers on TV so she knows the sort of things they do to get the crowd behind them, but she doesn't actually have any charisma of her own. She also looked like a total dork on the finish. She went to get Priscilla's metal… thing… that she wears during her entrance but her attempt to use it was immediately countered into an arm submission of some sort and she quickly tapped out. When the ref tried to help her up after the match she pushed him, so at least she has learned how to look angry in the five months since I've last seen her
TIMOTHY BARR & KACI LENNOX SEGMENT - Yes, these two now get their own segment. It began with Barr putting over the toughness of the two women, then doing a 180 and saying "it's such a shame it took until 2017 for women to learn how to wrestle." Kaci Lennox took the mic from him (thank G-d), asked "are you serious?" and then gave him the horrifically weak-looking slap of someone who is afraid to make too much contact with the other person.
Kaci then gives the big speech where she tells Timothy Barr that she is tired of his "egotistical pompous attitude" and his "disrespect towards women." She really lacks stage presence, and her delivery was certainly sub-par. She did manage to come off as angry, but also managed to be very flat. Like she was reciting lines that she had spent a lot of time committing to memory, but very little time working on the actual emotion in her delivery. If you had an acting robot and you set it to angry mode and gave it these lines, it would have come out the same way. There was a lack of human elements to it. Little pauses or getting louder as she got angrier. That sort of thing is what was missing.
She orders him to leave so he does, but he flips her off on the way. I know I just said that I wanted Gabe to get rid of one of these two and this segment seems to be building to that pretty clearly, but I really do not want to see these two feud. In fact, I really don't want to see either of them at all.
After Friedman ruined Anthony Henry's big moment at Style Battle last night, they started off hot and heavy here. The story of this match alternated between two guys beating the crap out of each other, and Friedman working over Henry's (non-punching/forearming) arm, and they told both stories very well. The women continue to be a key part of this feud, although I assume that whatever they otherwise would have been able to do was severely limited by Mila's injured knee, which almost legitimately almost kept her from making a key save in time. The women's spot led to a finish so great that I won't spoil it for you.
DONTAY BROWN PROMO - Excellent, if a little odd, creatively. To talk about why this is weird I will have to spoil the result of the above match, but I won't give away the actual finishing spot, so you should still definitely check out the match. Henry won. Dontay then cut a promo in which he decided he was just done dealing with Anthony Henry and Amber Young and rescinded the bounty he had put on Henry. Instead he announced that he would invest it in making sure his stable dominated a new FIP women's division. It's kind of weird seeing a heel just give up on a vendetta (assuming he's telling the truth, and it's certainly possible that he's just lying about that part), but Dontay explained it very well: He likes money, so he has decided that rather than give some away via putting a bounty on Anthony Henry, he will invest his money into a plan to make himself even more money in the long term.
He then introduces the newest member of his stable: Aria Blake. She seems to a have little bit more charisma as a heel than as a babyface, but when I want to see a woman with very little charisma have short matches, I've got Dana Brooke on free TV for that so why would I need Aria. Maybe we'll all get lucky and some of Dontay's charisma will rub off on her. Also, more promotions need to start using Dontay Brown ASAP.
As you'd expect from these two, they start brawling immediately. They wind up in a stalemate, each blocking the other's chairshots with a chair of his own. Teddy Stigma asks for a mi and suggests that instead of fighting each other they team up and call out the tag champs. Tremont accepts this proposition.
I get what Gabe was going for in this segment with the idea that they would earn each other's respect before teaming together, but the idea that he tag champs were in the building and willing to defend their belts but hadn't been booked in any match at all was pretty hokey. If you're willing to let two guys that have never teamed before show up and get a tag title shot, then why not just book that the match as two hardcore guys teaming up to go for the titles in what is sure to be a violent, weapon-filled brawl?
Out come The Hooligans to accept the challenge and we get…
FIP TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH:
They brawled for a bit and then all just decided to walk outside because I guess they all agreed that it would be nicer to fight out there. The cameras did not follow them out, so that wasn't very fun to watch. We did get to see fans getting up to follow them out, and in that pack of fans is Gabe Sapolsky with what seemed to be a rather confused look on his face. He walked to the doorway, seemed to shout something, then walked back inside. He didn't seem angry, though.
We finally get a camera outside and they're just doing the same stuff they were inside, but they made everyone get up and walk instead of watching from the comfort of their seats, and made it impossible for us viewing this at a later date to see anything for a bit. Then they went back inside. That was lame. Didn't MsChif and Cheerleader Melissa do, like, a bodyslam on the sidewalk or something? (I'm not encouraging anyone to ever do that again, but if you guys are supposed to be the hardcore guys then maybe you could do something that actually looks cool and hardcore rather than just punching and choking?
After that they got back in the ring and put each other through… pieces of wood. They weren't even tables. They were just slabs of wood. It looked really cool, but then one of the Hooligans ruined the illusion by smashing a rather round hole in one of them with his head, so they're probably designed to easily break away or are just soft. And he did this for no reason. He just picked up this supposedly hard slab of wood, held it over his head, then smashed it down on his own head several times just to show us all how tough and cool and hardcore he is. Bottle caps were used. Thumbtacks were used. The Hooligans, who go barefoot because their entire gimmick is essentially "what if Hillbilly Jim decided to be a Necro Butcher rip-off?" walked around on them. Dumbasses.
Then they did the spot that really earned them this DUD. They stopped trying to kill each other, each grabbed a chair, arranged them in a circle in the ring, all sat down with each guy facing opposite his partner, then one guy punched the guy sitting next to him and continuing around in a circle, while they were all smiling because you see they're not really hurting each other because they're fighting over a prestigious championship: it's about them trying to show us all how tough they are. That's what this whole "match" is really about. This is about professional wrestling. This is four masochists using professional wrestling as an excuse to indulge in their fetish while being publicly lauded for it.
More hardcore sh*t happened. The Hooligans won. After the match, as Tremont went to leave, Stigma hit him in the back with a 2x4 covered in barbed wire. That was very courteous of him to give Matt one last chance to show everyone how tough he is. Morons.
SEGMENT WITH THE FEUDING RING ANNOUNCERS - Kaci Lennox tried to tell us how "crazy" that match just was, so she's just as dumb as the Timothy Barr. Speaking of him, as you might have guessed by the header of this segment, he came back here. He snatches the mic from her, shouting "WHERE THE F*CK DO YOU GET OFF?! I let you share the ring with me! We have a championship match coming up!"
Oh, look! There's Gabe walking up in the background. How great would it be if he just got into the ring, fired them, then picked a random fan out of the crowd to be the ring announcer for the rest of the show?
Barr said that Kaci was not "of the caliber to introduce a champion." He might have a point there. She's not a very good ring announcer, but he's not much better. Dammit, Gabe, stop examining the floor and just fires these two assholes already! Barr said "I don't need your f*king work," threw the microphone down, and then left, so I guess he quit? Well… It's a start.
FIP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH:
Kaci, giving the intros to the first match of real importance that she has been the ring announcer for, said that "the following match is one half of your main event for the evening." Yup. She forgot the word "double." People sometimes skip words when they're typing because their brains are going faster than their fingers can. This is the first time I've ever seen someone skip a word while speaking.
They told a really great story here, starting out with mat wrestling but winding up using a bunch of chairs. Yehi worked the arm while Janela worked the head. The truly interesting part was that it was Yehi who first used the chairs, which is a stark contrast to the last full FIP show I watched, January's Everything Burns 2017, where Yehi defended the title against hardcore wrestler Teddy Stigma and the story of the match was built around Stigma dumping thumbtacks into the ring and Yehi doing his best to avoid them. The announcers pointed out that using the chair was evidence of EVOLVE-style technical wrestler Fred Yehi "adapting" to the more lawless FIP environment. What I thought was particularly great was that most of the stuff Yehi did with the chair was targeting Janela's arm, which shows that Yehi isn't "adapting" by just joining in with the pack doing general hardcore stuff but rather by using weapons in ways that play to his own strengths, even (trying) to use the chair to assist in his Koji Clutch on the finish (the chair slipped away, but Janela tapped out anyway rather than them escaping and going back to the spot a bit later).
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Martin Stone came out and challenged Yehi to a title match. Yehi accepted. Then Stone sucker-punched him.
WWN TITLE MATCH:
An intense battle between two men who each had something to prove. In Davis' case it was that the fact that it took three members of Catchpoint to take him down in WWN Title match at the Mercury Rising 2017 WWNLive Supershow on WrestleMania weekend is because they knew none of them could beat him on their own, and Riddle, the then-member of Catchpoint who ultimately won that match, was out to prove Davis wrong and show that he deserved to be the champion. Both men relied on their personal specialties; technical wrestling for Riddle and power for Davis. The match was quite awesome. Davis does a great job of playing the monster babyface. He can be big and scary and domination and vicious on offense while still not coming off as mean or malicious. I'd like to see him back in EVOLVE sometime soon.
This show was very up and down. The stuff I enjoyed I really enjoyed and the stuff I didn't like I absolutely despised. FIP is weird, as it seems like it's two promotions in one. In the first you've got guys like Fred Yehi, Jon Davis Martin Stone, and Anthony Henry in what feels like a weird hybrid of 80% EVOLVE and 20% ECW, which I love, and then you've got all of the other drek that feels like a low-rent ECW knock-off from the early 2000s. I think that's what I'm going to have to get used to if I continue to watch FIP… although I'm not sure that I will be continuing with it. I'll probably wind up following it from afar and then jumping in for some bigger shows if anything interesting happens on the "Uncle John's Friends" front.
1. Mr. Saint Laurent called a rake to the eyes but then corrected himself, saying maybe it looked more like the forehead. Trevin Adams then told him to just call it the forehead, then said "Oh, it it's FIP. You don't have to cover it up."
This might be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard an announcer say. Not only did he break kayfabe by essentially exposing that guys aren't actually being raked in the eyes every time an announcer calls an eye-rake, but he buried the very promotion that I am watching right now as a second-rate promotion where the announcers don't really even need to try to do their jobs right. If I'm running a promotion, that's a firing offence. At the very least Gabe and Sal need to take him off of commentary.
A.R. FOX vs. MARTIN STONE - 7.25/10
Both guys worked the head for a while until Stone won with a choke using the ropes because there are no rope breaks- or pretty much any rules- in FIP. Seeing Fox playing the babyface in this perfectly clean professional wrestling match despite being one of Uncle John's Friends was very weird, but the match worked.
JIMMY LLOYD vs. PARROW (w/Drennan) - 0.75/10
A dull boring brawl, which is astounding when you consider how short they went and how much they tried to do. A Dana Brooke vs. Eva Marie match would have more charisma.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Painful. Drennan says that when Odinson comes back, he, Parrow, and Odinson will be unstoppable. Then he makes an open challenge. Then some dude in jeans, a t-shirt, and taped fists comes out and a woman in the crowd asks the same question that was on my mind by shouting "WHO THE F*CK ARE YOU?!"
This guy is apparently "'The Outlaw' Mitch Mitchell." Really. I don't care how much of a mark you are for Eddie Edwards: names like that sound really dumb. In Eddie's case it's his shoot name, but even if it is your shoot name, THIS IS PRO WRESTLING! YOU CAN CHANGE IT!
Mr. Repetition angrily shouts what his name and moniker are and says that he doesn't back down from anyone. This guy comes off like the absolutely worst stereotype of an indy geek you can imagine. He says that Drennan was "too big of a b*tch to fight me in ACW"… and immediately gets grabbed from behind by Parrow and tossed out of the ring. Then some other lose came out and met the same fate. And another. And another. And another. Then Mitch Mitchell grabs a mic, loudly calls the other wrestlers assholes, threatens to rip their heads off, and demands a five-way match. What is Gabe doing here? This is exactly the sort of terrible, cliche, sh*tty ECW wanna-be wrestling that Gabe started ROH to move indy wrestling away from. ECW has been dead for sixteen years now. Why is this walking cliche on my computer screen?
Anyway, we wind up with a…
FIVE WAY FREE-STYLE:
"The Outlaw" Mitch Mitchell vs. Mason Tyler vs. Irish Jack vs. Vertigo vs. Drennan (w/Parrow) - 2.5/10
When you hear the name "Vertigo" you're probably thinking of some small, high-flyer in a Lucha mask, but this guy was a large, old, hairy dude. And what kind of a name is "Irish Jack." Apparently these guys are a combination of ACW guys and A.R. Fox trainees. They were mostly acceptable. The only guy the crowd gave a crap about was Mason Tyler, who is one of A.R. Fox's trainees, which has left me wondering what, exactly, ACW bring to the table that it is being included under the WWN banner.
The match was pretty short. It was mostly a bunch of not particularly exciting spots (but they weren't sloppy or anything, either), then Mitch Mitchell locked Mason Tyler in a cloverleaf. Drennan broke it up, then hit Mason in the leg with a chair a few times, then made him tap out to the figure four.
So after that display of bad 2003 indie wrestling, Timothy Barr starts to tell us how great that action was, complete with many unnecessary F bombs. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but I thought I saw Kaci Lennox role her eyes when he did this. I really hope she did, because if her job isn't to let me know that Timothy Barr is supposed to come across as verbal love-child of Don West and John Zandig, then I can't imagine why Gabe is even paying her to be on these shows. If you want to book someone just to be eye candy, there are many other women on the Florida indy scene who will do the job better (and, from what little I've seen of her, will also be able to bump better than Kaci can if situation ever comes up). Seriously, Gabe. Why are you wasting money by having two ring announcers.
ARIA BLAKE vs. PRISCILLA KELLY - 5/10
This was a pretty good brawl and that Pedigree on the bar still looked sick even though it was pretty clear she didn't make too much contact, but I just cannot get into Aria Blake. She comes across like someone who has seen charismatic wrestlers on TV so she knows the sort of things they do to get the crowd behind them, but she doesn't actually have any charisma of her own. She also looked like a total dork on the finish. She went to get Priscilla's metal… thing… that she wears during her entrance but her attempt to use it was immediately countered into an arm submission of some sort and she quickly tapped out. When the ref tried to help her up after the match she pushed him, so at least she has learned how to look angry in the five months since I've last seen her
TIMOTHY BARR & KACI LENNOX SEGMENT - Yes, these two now get their own segment. It began with Barr putting over the toughness of the two women, then doing a 180 and saying "it's such a shame it took until 2017 for women to learn how to wrestle." Kaci Lennox took the mic from him (thank G-d), asked "are you serious?" and then gave him the horrifically weak-looking slap of someone who is afraid to make too much contact with the other person.
Kaci then gives the big speech where she tells Timothy Barr that she is tired of his "egotistical pompous attitude" and his "disrespect towards women." She really lacks stage presence, and her delivery was certainly sub-par. She did manage to come off as angry, but also managed to be very flat. Like she was reciting lines that she had spent a lot of time committing to memory, but very little time working on the actual emotion in her delivery. If you had an acting robot and you set it to angry mode and gave it these lines, it would have come out the same way. There was a lack of human elements to it. Little pauses or getting louder as she got angrier. That sort of thing is what was missing.
She orders him to leave so he does, but he flips her off on the way. I know I just said that I wanted Gabe to get rid of one of these two and this segment seems to be building to that pretty clearly, but I really do not want to see these two feud. In fact, I really don't want to see either of them at all.
ANTHONY HENRY (w/Amber Young) vs. MAXWELL JACOB FRIEDMAN (w/Dontay Brown & Mila) - 7.25/10
After Friedman ruined Anthony Henry's big moment at Style Battle last night, they started off hot and heavy here. The story of this match alternated between two guys beating the crap out of each other, and Friedman working over Henry's (non-punching/forearming) arm, and they told both stories very well. The women continue to be a key part of this feud, although I assume that whatever they otherwise would have been able to do was severely limited by Mila's injured knee, which almost legitimately almost kept her from making a key save in time. The women's spot led to a finish so great that I won't spoil it for you.
DONTAY BROWN PROMO - Excellent, if a little odd, creatively. To talk about why this is weird I will have to spoil the result of the above match, but I won't give away the actual finishing spot, so you should still definitely check out the match. Henry won. Dontay then cut a promo in which he decided he was just done dealing with Anthony Henry and Amber Young and rescinded the bounty he had put on Henry. Instead he announced that he would invest it in making sure his stable dominated a new FIP women's division. It's kind of weird seeing a heel just give up on a vendetta (assuming he's telling the truth, and it's certainly possible that he's just lying about that part), but Dontay explained it very well: He likes money, so he has decided that rather than give some away via putting a bounty on Anthony Henry, he will invest his money into a plan to make himself even more money in the long term.
He then introduces the newest member of his stable: Aria Blake. She seems to a have little bit more charisma as a heel than as a babyface, but when I want to see a woman with very little charisma have short matches, I've got Dana Brooke on free TV for that so why would I need Aria. Maybe we'll all get lucky and some of Dontay's charisma will rub off on her. Also, more promotions need to start using Dontay Brown ASAP.
MATT TREMONT vs. TEDDY STIGMA - no rating, meh segment.
As you'd expect from these two, they start brawling immediately. They wind up in a stalemate, each blocking the other's chairshots with a chair of his own. Teddy Stigma asks for a mi and suggests that instead of fighting each other they team up and call out the tag champs. Tremont accepts this proposition.
I get what Gabe was going for in this segment with the idea that they would earn each other's respect before teaming together, but the idea that he tag champs were in the building and willing to defend their belts but hadn't been booked in any match at all was pretty hokey. If you're willing to let two guys that have never teamed before show up and get a tag title shot, then why not just book that the match as two hardcore guys teaming up to go for the titles in what is sure to be a violent, weapon-filled brawl?
Out come The Hooligans to accept the challenge and we get…
FIP TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH:
The Hooligans(c) vs. Matt Tremont & Teddy Stigma - a big, very fat, DUD!
They brawled for a bit and then all just decided to walk outside because I guess they all agreed that it would be nicer to fight out there. The cameras did not follow them out, so that wasn't very fun to watch. We did get to see fans getting up to follow them out, and in that pack of fans is Gabe Sapolsky with what seemed to be a rather confused look on his face. He walked to the doorway, seemed to shout something, then walked back inside. He didn't seem angry, though.
We finally get a camera outside and they're just doing the same stuff they were inside, but they made everyone get up and walk instead of watching from the comfort of their seats, and made it impossible for us viewing this at a later date to see anything for a bit. Then they went back inside. That was lame. Didn't MsChif and Cheerleader Melissa do, like, a bodyslam on the sidewalk or something? (I'm not encouraging anyone to ever do that again, but if you guys are supposed to be the hardcore guys then maybe you could do something that actually looks cool and hardcore rather than just punching and choking?
After that they got back in the ring and put each other through… pieces of wood. They weren't even tables. They were just slabs of wood. It looked really cool, but then one of the Hooligans ruined the illusion by smashing a rather round hole in one of them with his head, so they're probably designed to easily break away or are just soft. And he did this for no reason. He just picked up this supposedly hard slab of wood, held it over his head, then smashed it down on his own head several times just to show us all how tough and cool and hardcore he is. Bottle caps were used. Thumbtacks were used. The Hooligans, who go barefoot because their entire gimmick is essentially "what if Hillbilly Jim decided to be a Necro Butcher rip-off?" walked around on them. Dumbasses.
Then they did the spot that really earned them this DUD. They stopped trying to kill each other, each grabbed a chair, arranged them in a circle in the ring, all sat down with each guy facing opposite his partner, then one guy punched the guy sitting next to him and continuing around in a circle, while they were all smiling because you see they're not really hurting each other because they're fighting over a prestigious championship: it's about them trying to show us all how tough they are. That's what this whole "match" is really about. This is about professional wrestling. This is four masochists using professional wrestling as an excuse to indulge in their fetish while being publicly lauded for it.
More hardcore sh*t happened. The Hooligans won. After the match, as Tremont went to leave, Stigma hit him in the back with a 2x4 covered in barbed wire. That was very courteous of him to give Matt one last chance to show everyone how tough he is. Morons.
SEGMENT WITH THE FEUDING RING ANNOUNCERS - Kaci Lennox tried to tell us how "crazy" that match just was, so she's just as dumb as the Timothy Barr. Speaking of him, as you might have guessed by the header of this segment, he came back here. He snatches the mic from her, shouting "WHERE THE F*CK DO YOU GET OFF?! I let you share the ring with me! We have a championship match coming up!"
Oh, look! There's Gabe walking up in the background. How great would it be if he just got into the ring, fired them, then picked a random fan out of the crowd to be the ring announcer for the rest of the show?
Barr said that Kaci was not "of the caliber to introduce a champion." He might have a point there. She's not a very good ring announcer, but he's not much better. Dammit, Gabe, stop examining the floor and just fires these two assholes already! Barr said "I don't need your f*king work," threw the microphone down, and then left, so I guess he quit? Well… It's a start.
FIP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH:
Fred Yehi(c) vs. Joey Janela - 8/10
Kaci, giving the intros to the first match of real importance that she has been the ring announcer for, said that "the following match is one half of your main event for the evening." Yup. She forgot the word "double." People sometimes skip words when they're typing because their brains are going faster than their fingers can. This is the first time I've ever seen someone skip a word while speaking.
They told a really great story here, starting out with mat wrestling but winding up using a bunch of chairs. Yehi worked the arm while Janela worked the head. The truly interesting part was that it was Yehi who first used the chairs, which is a stark contrast to the last full FIP show I watched, January's Everything Burns 2017, where Yehi defended the title against hardcore wrestler Teddy Stigma and the story of the match was built around Stigma dumping thumbtacks into the ring and Yehi doing his best to avoid them. The announcers pointed out that using the chair was evidence of EVOLVE-style technical wrestler Fred Yehi "adapting" to the more lawless FIP environment. What I thought was particularly great was that most of the stuff Yehi did with the chair was targeting Janela's arm, which shows that Yehi isn't "adapting" by just joining in with the pack doing general hardcore stuff but rather by using weapons in ways that play to his own strengths, even (trying) to use the chair to assist in his Koji Clutch on the finish (the chair slipped away, but Janela tapped out anyway rather than them escaping and going back to the spot a bit later).
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Martin Stone came out and challenged Yehi to a title match. Yehi accepted. Then Stone sucker-punched him.
WWN TITLE MATCH:
Matt Riddle(c) vs. Jon Davis- 8.5/10
An intense battle between two men who each had something to prove. In Davis' case it was that the fact that it took three members of Catchpoint to take him down in WWN Title match at the Mercury Rising 2017 WWNLive Supershow on WrestleMania weekend is because they knew none of them could beat him on their own, and Riddle, the then-member of Catchpoint who ultimately won that match, was out to prove Davis wrong and show that he deserved to be the champion. Both men relied on their personal specialties; technical wrestling for Riddle and power for Davis. The match was quite awesome. Davis does a great job of playing the monster babyface. He can be big and scary and domination and vicious on offense while still not coming off as mean or malicious. I'd like to see him back in EVOLVE sometime soon.
This show was very up and down. The stuff I enjoyed I really enjoyed and the stuff I didn't like I absolutely despised. FIP is weird, as it seems like it's two promotions in one. In the first you've got guys like Fred Yehi, Jon Davis Martin Stone, and Anthony Henry in what feels like a weird hybrid of 80% EVOLVE and 20% ECW, which I love, and then you've got all of the other drek that feels like a low-rent ECW knock-off from the early 2000s. I think that's what I'm going to have to get used to if I continue to watch FIP… although I'm not sure that I will be continuing with it. I'll probably wind up following it from afar and then jumping in for some bigger shows if anything interesting happens on the "Uncle John's Friends" front.
STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES
1. Mr. Saint Laurent called a rake to the eyes but then corrected himself, saying maybe it looked more like the forehead. Trevin Adams then told him to just call it the forehead, then said "Oh, it it's FIP. You don't have to cover it up."
This might be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard an announcer say. Not only did he break kayfabe by essentially exposing that guys aren't actually being raked in the eyes every time an announcer calls an eye-rake, but he buried the very promotion that I am watching right now as a second-rate promotion where the announcers don't really even need to try to do their jobs right. If I'm running a promotion, that's a firing offence. At the very least Gabe and Sal need to take him off of commentary.