STRUGGLE’s resident innocent little snuggy bear, President Evil, was back at it over the weekend, leading a full-scale assault on Doc Wyatt after his successful title defense at Warrior Pro/Dragon Fire Japan‘s joint New Year’s Gold event. This is pretty much standard procedure for the pirck at this point, but what was odd was that Becky was there doing henchperson work, which is something she rarely (never) does, and Agent Bulldog was nowhere to be seen, when she’s usually the Prez’s evil little sidekick, throwing more gas on the speculation that First Lady Evil is getting ready to kick her out of the Administration. Also odd was that Evil seemed to be completely healthy and moving with ease, when the most recent reports were that he was still laying around in a neck brace and flip-flops, eating meatball sammiches and listening to Kenny Loggins. Eh, I guess he was just screwing with us. Again. Anyway, the theoretically-reunited Jackson Hole Outlaws saved the day, (such as it was – Doc vs. Evil is still one of those “no matter who wins, we lose” situations) and fans of both STRUGGLE and Warrior Pro should probably be monitoring the situation closely.
After an impressive win over Soccer Ninja, local free agent/Mortal Kombat obsessive weirdo Flawless Victoria suddenly became a hot commodity, at least on a very small scale, so we said fuck it, let’s make her a lowball offer, just to see what happens. For some reason – more than likely financial illiteracy – she accepted, so now she’s part of the full-time STRUGGLE roster. Welcome to the struggle, Victoria!
In injury update news, no injury news is good news, but it’s better than usual. Zippity Duda and Big Baby Lucifer are actually ahead of schedule in recovering from the robot attack at the last show, (I can’t belieive I just typed that) but they’ll probably look different whenever they return. Lucifer has some facial fractures that are going to require some sort of Bill Laimbeer protective mask situation for a while, and Zip damn near lost an eye, and while he can still see out of it, there are some serious light-sensitivity issues. So he’s currently rocking an eye patch, meaning he’s dangerously close to looking cool for the first time in his life. Meanwhile, there have been no official updates on President Evil, but I guess we got our update on his condition at New Year’s Gold. Also, Donita Zapata won’t be returning to the ring in a wrestling capacity any time soon, but she may get to lose the neck brace soon, depending on how the next checkup goes. Also, Referoth somehow managed to lie and cajole his way through a winning psychological evaluation, meaning he’s got his referee license back.
The biggest news as of late is STRUGGLE’s impending return to the Frank Lucas Arena for our first major show of 2023, NO ESCAPE. For the younger whippersnappers out there, back before the bankruptcy, pre-crisis STRUGGLE used to run the building – which has roughly ten times the crowd capacity that our beloved Vito does – at least once a month. Basically, we noticed that in spite of everything, including the conspicuous absence of several of our main event players, such as President Evil, Big Bird Machine, and Immortan Jimmy, we’ve been selling the sucker out on a pretty regular basis lately, folks all hanging from the rafters and whatnot, so we just thought to hell with it, let’s shoot for the moon. If we pull this off, who knows, maybe we’ll achieve financial solvency sometime within the next seventeen years.
As for the card, the main event will be the big blowoff match between Women’s Champion Jezebel Grim and challenger/former champ Becky With the Evil Hair. Thing is, last time these two got together, things got out of hand almost immediately and it broke down into a glorified 4 vs. 4 match between The Evil Administration and Jezebel-Gun, (with an assist from Junior Grim of B.A.R.S.) and more recently, Jezebel got clubbed in the knee by Agent Bulldog and while she has refused any sort of official medical assessment, she’s been kneebrace-bound ever since. So we figured the answer was easy: just throw them in a cage and get a clean result this time, plus use the no-rules “unsanctioned” nature of things to get around problems with Jezebel’s medical clearance. However, when we checked the back room storage for our cage, the damn thing was a shambles. Two of the four sides are going to need he chain link replaced and one was completely missing. So we went back to the drawing board and considered a barbed wire match for a minute, but Becky would most likely never agree to such a thing, it would give Jezebel an unfair advantage as someone who used to forgo the women’s division completely in favor of the garbage nonsense, and it wouldn’t keep any interfering team members out anyway. Then, as if by magic, we got a call from Ol’ Hoss, who had the rookies clearing out some the accumulated barn-hoard on his property, telling them it was some sort of Karate Kid training whose utility would become apparent in the near future, when it was really just an old man scamming some free labor. Anyway, you could imagine our surprise when we heard the old man tell us, “Hot damn, y’all won’t believe it! The goddamn Purgatory Cage was in my barn this whole time, and the sumbitch looks intact! I got them two skateboard lesbians hosin’ the bird shit off it right now!”
So again, if you’re one of the aforementioned young whippersnappers, The Purgatory Cage is a lot like a regular cage, except bigger. Way bigger. Like all the way around the ringside area bigger. You take that, throw a couple people who hate each other in there with a liberal scattering of weaponry, then throw the rules out, and as long as you don’t mind an occasionally obstructed view, horrible, awful, blood-curdling magic tends to happen. It’s where Ace La Grange regained the heavyweight tile that we used to have from President Evil in an absolute bloodbath, as well as the infamous “battle of the devils” between Big Baby Lucifer and “The Yellow Devil” Dag Boomer. And in what could be a good omen for Becky, it’s where First Lady Evil won the women’s title (It was vacant, but I can’t remember if this was when Yumiko had the second big knee surgery or when she had Lil’ Ace) against a much, much, much larger opponent in Minerva, which is similar to the situation she’s heading into against Jezebel. Anyway, here’s to happy accidents, because if we had planning to run this show in the Vito, I don’t think this particular cage would even fit into the building.
As for the rest of the card, don’t worry, because the bigass cage is only going to come out for the women’s title match. Oh man, can you imagine bringing out your big gimmick for an entire show? You’d render it completely meaningless, until the crowd wouldn’t give a shit unless someone somehow got thrown off the top of the goddamn thing every time. But come on, that would be crazy. Anyway, we got a match booked with the tag team champions – and in case you didn’t know, The Grim Reapers are the only team to successfully defend the titles since the relaunch – flying in for a title defense, and this time around, they’ll be challenged by The 46 Defenders. So we’ve got to place all our hopes of bringing the title back to the Tri-State Area in the hands of a team that includes a 50 year old man who has a heart attack thrice daily. I like our chances! Nope.
In other news regarding wrestlers from other promotions showing up in a STRUGGLE ring, our pals under one corporate umbrella in MOSES and Notoriety are sending over a handful of wrestlers for the show, including one pretty major North American debut. From MOSES, we’re getting a cruiserweight showcase between BEAVIS Fukuda, a ridiculous weirdo of the sort we should all be used to by now, and Bone Thug, a masked villain who is a member of the Black MOSES faction and actually showed up in the battle royal at that first big TSLL show. Speaking of Black MOSES, there’s a very good change of group leader Daisuke Kondo showing up at a future show sometime soon, but you didn’t hear that from me. Meanwhile on the Notoriety side, somehow we managed to score an appearance by reigning Queen of Notoriety, Nikuya, who is basically an inhuman monster that doesn’t need to exist. Notoriety management allowed her to appear here on the condition that she wrestle J-Gun member Toshiyo Nakano, which makes sense, because even though this is a non-title match, the non-champ winning would pretty much be guaranteed a title shot, and if the unthinkable should happen, I guess they’d like to keep the title situation based around Notoriety-contracted talent. Also, Nakano was supposed to go back to Japan after the War Party event a hundred years ago, so on some level, this is probably some sort of cruel punishment for not reporting for work in over a year. That girl’s gonna get killed.
Finally, this is the first big show of 2023, so we’re going to try and set the tone by getting as much talent on the show in the big building as possible. So I hope you like multi-person matches, because by god, you’re gonna get a couple! Being our only two singles divisions with active titles, we’re going to have a couple of five-way elimination matches with potential title implications down the line, depending on who wins. In the cruiserweight match, we’ve got Froggy Terry, Cobra Nightraven, Agent Fang, and Uno Muerte in action, and on the women’s side, we’ll be seeing The Phantom Rocker, Twilight Princess Zelda, Ludmilla Grozny, and Deadly Nightshade. You have have noticed that I only listed four competitors each for a couple of five-ways, and that’s because the fifth wrestler will be a secret “Joker” wrestler, who won’t be announced until it’s time for them to walk to the ring. It’s going to be a night of surprises, secrets, and even secret surprises. How secret? So secret that we’re not even going to announce what the other two matches are ahead of time. Secrets! So the card looks like this, as far as you’re allowed to know:
- ???
- ????
- Five-Way Cruiserweight Elimination Match
- Five Way Women’s Elimination Match
- Bone Thug vs. BEAVIS Fukuda
- Nikuya vs. Toshuyo Nakano
- TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP: The Grim Reapers vs. The 46 Defenders
- WOMEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP IN THE PURGATORY CAGE: Jezebel Grim vs. Becky With the Evil Hair
KYAFABE-BREAKING REAL-LIFE NEWS UPDATE:
As always, the scheduling for the show is fluid, because I want to pre-record most or maybe even all of it ahead of time, (especially the match with a bunch of extra cage/weapon textures, begging the the 32-bit Unity crash) but as of right now (February 18) it probably won’t be next week. Also, there’s the added fun of how my internet connection has been super-sketchy lately, so it all depends on whether or not the electrons cooperate. I just replaced my modem, which seems like it may have fixed the problem, but it’s only been about three hours since I did that, so I don’t know for certain that it’s not a “call the cable company” issue. Anyway, ifI can’t do it next week, I may bust out a traditional unplanned house show stream next week. Hell, who know, maybe this weekend. Maybe I’m doing one right now. Maybe I’m right behind you with a knife. Probably not. But who knows? Either way, I’m hoping for next week, but expecting two weeks out for the No Escape stream. Either way, it’ll probably be announced five seconds before bell time, so you’ve got that to look forward to. Anyway, I’m gonna go type up some promos for the next blog-postery now.