Venue: White Eagle Hall in Jersey City
Submitted by: Cory RabieaSo, there’s this quote that I was told in my foundational art theory course in New Media during my freshman year at university: “The medium is the message”, the idea that the nature of the medium itself embeds the message or even supersedes the message that is being presented.
What is the character of Orange Cassidy? He’s a cool guy who doesn’t take anything seriously. The effort is not for him. This show is just as much an extension of his character as anything else was. The whole show carried a level of low energy that Cassidy himself exemplifies in his matches.
I can safely say that outside of Gresham and Otani – none of these matches were good in a traditional sense. The drinking match between Martina and Nate Webb consisted of sloppy offense and then tripping over each other, the one minute match between the best friends went into five second overtime after they did the feeling out process for 60 seconds, the dodgeball match ended up being turned into a normal wrestling match (which elicited a whole helping of boos from the audience who proceeded to chant “WRESTLING SUCKS” and “DODGEBALL IS REAL”). The scramble match almost felt like a weird imitation of the scramble match last night. They let Teddy Hart talk for what felt like at least 17 minutes as he went on a bunch of different tangents before reading a 5-page children’s book called “If I Were A Kitty” by Jelly Cat – commentating in between every page.
Everything here was masked with a thin veil of humor to make up for the fact that nova pro had to drop their show and GCW picked up the slack in order to kill time. A cheap cash grab, if you will.
But maybe this is the point? After all, minimal effort is the Orange Cassidy ethos. He didn’t even have a match; only coming out at the end to spray orange juice in the face of an angry MJF (who got mad he wasn’t picked to play dodgeball) before he let Nick Gage and Ultramantis Black actually do wrestling moves.
As an audience spectacle, I had a good time – on tape though, who knows. This was easily the worst show I have been to, but I can’t help but think that was the intention? It’s the equivalent to something like a Tim and Eric show; the joke is the lack of effort.
When Martina and Nate Webb passed out from alcohol as the finish to the match, the ring announcer said: “Everybody wins AND Everybody loses!”. It felt apt.