It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States, and Violent People Radio has taken the week off. My co-hosts Sam, Dan, and Chris will be using the week to celebrate the holiday in their various ways: enjoying good food, reconnecting with loved ones, watching the NFL, gracefully avoiding weird political arguments with family members they see once every three years, and overall just taking stock of and appreciating the blessings that life has bestowed upon them. I don’t have any of those. All I have is Combat Zone Wrestling.

The deadline for voting in the VP2010s poll (to decide, once and for all, the best pro wrestlers of the decade 2010-2019) is December 1st. Those of you who have yet to cast a ballot might be panicking. “There’s so little time left!” I can imagine you yelping, or perhaps squawking. “I don’t know which Cage of Death matches from the 2010s are the ones I should be watching!” It’s okay. Chill out. I’ve got this.

Join me on a journey deep into the wilds of New Jersey, where we will watch every CZW Cage of Death match from 2010 through 2019. “Hah!” you sneer. “Just watching wrestling is for cretins and plebes! The only way to truly process wrestling is to publish a personal rating for it online immediately after viewing!” Well, yes, but also, I said to fucking chill out. The rating thing is already covered, don’t you worry.

Rather than star ratings, or adjectives, or anything that might be useful to the legions of wrestling fans who somehow lack any capacity for imagination, we will be using an innovative new match-rating procedure. The question that must be answered for each one of these Cage of Death matches: Would it have been better with Violent People Hall of Fame Inaugural Class Member John Cena? Bear in mind that we aren’t talking about “what if Cena suddenly went death match crazy and was rolling around in glass.” No, we’re talking about whether or not a match would be better off for including standard-issue Five Moves of Doom jorts-and-all John Cena, working the match like it was a Hartford house show. A match that excels on its own merits has no need for Cena to enter the Combat Zone and pump up the crowd. A match that suffers needs a Five Knuckle Shuffle to liven it up.

Let’s begin.

Cage of Death XII (December 11, 2010)
Suicide Kings (Danny Havoc, Devon Moore, Dysfunction & Scotty Vortekz) defeat Cult Fiction (Brain Damage, MASADA & tHURTeen) & Drake Younger (w/Billy Gram) (26:15)

The Cage looks like a big squooshed hexagon this year, and is going by Royal Rumble rules, i.e. anyone who hits the ground is eliminated. There are no referees in the Cage, but Billy Gram does enter with tHURTeen, making it sort of a five-on-four situation. tHURTeen (and Gram) and Devon Moore are the first ones in. Moore hits Gram with a barbed wire bat which gets caught in Gram’s hair, and Moore rips it clear out. Moore does a Falcon Arrow on tHURTeen from the top of the cage to the mat before another contestant can even enter, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about what kind of match we’re working with. Brain Damage and Danny Havoc are next in, followed by MASADA and Dysfunction. The ring is so full of people and barbed wire boards and tables that it’s like the middle section of a Royal Rumble, where no one has any direction except to play for time, and no one has any physical room to do anything noteworthy anyway, aside from jumping off the top of the cage, which people do repeatedly. (No referees in the ring also means that there’s no one there to clean up after the wrestlers, so broken tables and boards just sit there, taking up space.)

Dysfunction and Brain Damage trying to do a worked fistfight is the most exciting part of the match so far. Brain Damage gets bundled through a barbed wire board and hits the floor, with a gruesome camera angle that shows the barbed wire pulling the skin over his triceps like raw dough. Drake Younger gets the biggest reaction of the match when he enters the Cage and runs wild. Scotty Vortekz is last out, with the weed whacker, and in running away from the weed whacker, Drake Younger eliminates himself. Most hilariously unsafe spot of the match: Vortekz is standing at the top of the cage, and MASADA chucks a steel chair up and brains him. The chair itself nearly lands in the front row. MASADA chucks Vortekz out, and tHURTeen knocks Danny Havoc off of a scaffold, where he half-successfully hits two barbed-wire tables, and much more successfully splats against the floor. Dysfunction then sets tHURTeen up for more or less the same bump, but with less accidental near-death. Down to Dysfunction and Devon Moore vs. MASADA (and Billy Gram, I guess). Dysfunction is hanging off of the Cage for dear life, so MASADA jams skewers into the back of Dysfunction’s hand, one of the few actually-clever spots here. MASADA and Moore brawl on top of the chain-link scaffold, including a pretty cool spot where they break a glass pane so that broken glass ‘rains’ through the chain link, until Gram accidentally bops MASADA on the head with a bat and Moore throws MASADA off to win.

Would Cage of Death XII have been better with John Cena? Almost certainly. The rules and format of the match work against everyone involved, but 2010 John Cena has a better grasp of not just how to work a crowd than anyone in the Cage that year, but also how to structure things. Cena’s presence might have mitigated some of the “guys just doing stuff like in a Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home game” factor, where you had people getting bats broken over their heads and then immediately scrambling up a wall to prepare for their fifth dive of the night. Sometimes that works, but it didn’t here.

Cage of Death XIII (December 3, 2011)
CZW World Heavyweight Title Four-Way Cage of Death Match:
Devon Moore (c) defeats MASADA and Robert Anthony and Scotty Vortekz (20:35)

This year’s Cage has slanted chain-link walls, and an open top half where four giant ladders meet to make a pyramid. It looks like CZW was cribbing notes from Daft Punk live shows. The CZW title is hanging from the rafters, and first to grab it gets it. While Larry Legend does the ring introductions, referee Brett Lauderdale is standing there with a look on his face like he’s not sure whether he’s shitting his pants or not. Everyone starts sticking one another into the barbed wire immediately. Eventually, Scotty Vortekz does a headscissors on Robert Anthony that sends him through a pane of glass. The build of this year’s Cage is like someone trying to make the Aggro Crag from Guts out of whatever they could steal from a construction yard, and honestly, it’s less charming than the early Cages of Death where they just stuck some guys in a big homemade cage with all kinds of breakable implements. MASADA and Anthony take out Moore and Vortekz with some powerbombs through glass. This Cage has a slower pace than last year’s, since it’s not eight guys doing ten-foot dives every two minutes, but that doesn’t seem to be working in its favor. The 2010 Cage was borderline seizure-inducing in how quickly everyone rushed through things, but at least it didn’t give me an opportunity to get bored.

We get to the climbing portion of the match, and both Devon Moore and MASADA take their turns being thrown off of platforms and scaffolds into the chain-link walls below, which get horrifically bent out of shape with each impact. The crowd chants “Jump!” at Scotty Vortekz, so he leaps onto MASADA, but it’s not as cool as you’d hope. The second a table comes into play, the crowd chants “We want fire!” with more gusto than they’ve shown for anything in the match thus far. Robert Anthony and Scotty Vortekz do a chop battle for some insane reason, and then Anthony does a running powerbomb through the wall of the Cage and to the floor. Crowd: “He just died! He just died!” MASADA and Devon Moore both climb the ladder pyramid and it looks for all the world like it’s going to collapse and kill them both, and not on purpose. Moore smacks the belt down from the top, and then MASADA smacks Moore to the floor, so Moore crawls over to grab the belt and win the match. The crowd boos.

Would Cage of Death XIII have been better with John Cena? Yes. You would think a meth-and-pills four-way match inside a weird rickety ladder-and-fences contraption wouldn’t be so boring, but this was. Cena wouldn’t have given the crowd what they wanted deep down (suicidal bumps and flaming tables), but he would have at least been able to keep them primed and their attention focused in the right direction. The finish coming off as halfway botched was its own separate mess.

Cage of Death 14 (December 8, 2012)
Matt Tremont defeats DJ Hyde (22:35)

The 2012 cage is traditionally shaped, but segmented so that you have a pane of glass, a frame of barbed wire, a regular cage panel, glass layered over barbed wire, chain-link fence, and so on. It’s weird going back and seeing Tremont so young and (relatively) skinny. The size difference between him and Hyde makes it look like the world’s toughest teenage KoRn fan getting into the ring with his stepdad. The crowd is one hundred percent behind Tremont, and loudly so. They get into breaking glass early, with a spear through one of the wall sections that looks cooler than any of the bumps in the previous two years, plus Hyde raking broken glass over Tremont’s forehead for good measure. Brutal stuff.

Tremont and Hyde smash each other into, against, and with various objects in the ring, until Tremont dives off the top and then adds insult to injury by bashing Hyde’s nuts with a snow shovel. In a fit of poor planning, the Cage of Death has a big mass of barbed wire with glass over it on a side that isn’t nominally breakable, so Tremont uses wire cutters to make a hole in the Cage that he can chuck Hyde through. Hyde gets the upper hand, and chokeslams a shirtless Tremont into the barbed wire and glass contraption. We get some grotesque close-ups of the refs having to cut the wire out of Tremont’s skin. Eventually, both guys find themselves on top of the Cage, and plummet through part of the Cage set in a bump that looks like it should have killed them both. They drag themselves back into the ring so that Tremont can drape one arm over Hyde for the three count. The crowd love it. As Hyde is stretchered out, Tremont climbs the cage and screams “Fuck you! You mothafucka!” at him, before leading the crowd in the goodbye song. This is how to be a top babyface.

Would Cage of Death 14 have been better with John Cena? I don’t think the match needed Cena, to be honest. Making it a three-way would have distracted from the real attraction of the match, which was Tremont and Hyde subjecting one another unspeakably brutal punishment. Cage of Death 14 had a hot crowd, a beloved babyface, a hated heel (who’s also owner of the company), some truly insane bumps… adding in John Cena would put us in “hat on a hat” territory.

Cage of Death XV (December 14, 2013)
Four-on-Three Handicap Cage of Death Match:
The Nation Of Intoxication (Danny Havoc, Devon Moore & Lucky 13) defeat Drew Blood, Matt Tremont, Ron Mathis & Rory Mondo (30:15)

We’re back to a War Games style rule set, with a cage that resembles last year’s (no slanted walls) but with the addition of scaffolds, suspended barbed wire boards, and other weird shit you can imagine Danny Havoc drawing diagrams of on a cocktail napkin. Rory Mondo is out first with a literal katana as his weapon of choice. Devon Moore is the first guy on the other side, and as ever, he looks like if the Briscoes had a cousin who didn’t try as hard as them in school. The very first move of the match proper is a brainbuster, and then we get into the usual brutal-but-not-TOO-brutal stuff until Ron Mathis and Lucky 13 can come in, and we get our first glass breaks of the night. Nothing much interesting is happening, but at least Matt Tremont is out now.

Danny Havoc getting into a hockey fight with Rory Mondo is the most exciting thing to happen in a while. Everyone is just kind of doing stuff. Drew Blood walking out as the last entrant manages to deflate my excitement even more. Has anyone ever been excited to see Drew Blood do anything? No one has used any of the contraptions around the ring yet. The countdown happens for the last Nation of Intoxication member, but no one comes out, so everyone just carries on giving one another brain injuries. Lucky 13 cuts a wire that makes a fucking Home Alone style trap of chairs wrapped in barbed wire swing into Drew Blood, which is easily the coolest and funniest thing I’ve ever seen Drew Blood be involved in.

It’s difficult to analyze these matches in a way that isn’t just listing cool stuff that happens. There’s no narrative, there’s no flow, it’s just a bunch of stuff, and the people doing the stuff are by and large not dynamic or exciting enough to make their work stand out. Things just keep wandering along for a while until Drew Blood gets eliminated by a slam off of a scaffold through a mass of chairs and glass. Ron Mathis also got eliminated at some point, but who cares? Tremont picks Moore up and just throws him clear out of the cage, so he’s gone. Danny Havoc gets slammed off of a scaffold through a bunch of tables and glass and stuff. I can’t imagine dying for this match. It would be embarrassing. Speaking of, Tremont walks out of the ring and somehow isn’t eliminated, despite both-feet-on-the-floor being one of the elimination methods. The announcers try to cover for it by saying that he wasn’t THROWN to the floor, but come on. The match drags on and on and on, and at some point Lucky 13 does an Air Raid Crash off of a scaffold to pin Rory Mondo, so we’re down to Tremont and Lucky.

Tremont is about to powerbomb Lucky off the top of the cage when “Last Resort” plays and the final member of the other team comes out: Sick Nick Mondo. The crowd reacts like he’s a surprise injury return at the Royal Rumble or something. Mondo spin-kicks Tremont a few times, and then Lucky pushes Tremont off the top of the Cage to win the match. The crowd chants “Mondo! Mondo!” and it’s honestly just sort of depressing that Sick Nick Mondo’s once-in-a-lifetime return happened in THIS match.

Would Cage of Death XV have been better with John Cena? Yes. It would have been better with just about any changes to it, because this was a bottom-of-the-barrel Cage of Death. It’s thirty minutes long, it feels like it’s thirty years long, and the only really good part of it is thirty seconds long. Imagine the Cena staredown with Nick Mondo, milking the crowd for all the noise they’re worth. Imagining that is more fun than watching any of the stuff that actually happened.

Cage of Death XVI (December 13, 2014)
CZW World Heavyweight Title Four-Way Cage of Death Match:
BLK Jeez defeats Sozio (c) and Biff Busick and Drew Gulak (38:25)

The Cage for this year is just a cage built around the ring. No crazy Home Alone traps, no weird impractical parapets of glass and plywood. There’s a glass pane leaned up on one corner, and weapons in duffel bags hanging above the corners, so you know it’s not just going to be four guys in a regular cage match, thank God. Speaking of the guys in this match, I’m going to be honest, I don’t remember who Sozio is. Apparently it’s just Niles Young doing some kind of FBI thing or something. Famous sweatpants diddler Drew Gulak is in his regular wrestling trunks, no elbow or knee pads or extra tape on his limbs, so either he’s not going to be taking a lot of bumps on glass, or he’s going out of his way to bleed as much as possible when he does. They give the crowd what they want early, with Busick and Gulak squaring off. It feels like a complete sea change since the last year, where you had guys like Devon Moore and other walking advertisements for indy wrestling substance abuse. It also feels like a show of confidence on the part of CZW: this Cage doesn’t need a lot of wacky contraptions, because they trust the people in the ring to get the people invested. The previous year’s Cage was deathly dull because it was just a lot of Things Happening, which is a different concept than People Doing Things, and it’s the latter that gets people invested in the matches that they’re watching. It does feel a bit bitterly ironic to write about “how to get people invested in matches” when a match has Niles Young as one-fourth of it, but what can you do.

Gulak runs wild on everyone with a barbed-wire bat, until BLK Jeez gets his hands on a salad bowl and a spatula and starts hitting people with them. The crowd chants “Toss his salad!” Gulak repeatedly staple-guns BLK Jeez on the forehead while Jeez yells “FUCK YOU!” at him after each one. No one is really doing anything BADLY in this match, but it’s already feeling like it could have been shorter than forty minutes. Right as I type that, Biff Busick is eliminated in an underwhelming table spot. Thank God he won’t be taking the spotlight away from more Niles Young action. On the other hand, we have Drew Gulak doing color-guard twirls with a light tube, and then a Sozio-Gulak light-tube sword duel. Sozio tombstones Gulak onto a light tube (in theory), and now it’s down to Sozio vs. BLK Jeez, the legendary match-up everyone’s talking about ten years later. Sozio does a Con-chair-to curb stomp from the top of the cage for a two count, which now reads like a dire omen for the future of “guy gets powerbombed from a ladder through ten thousand light tubes, and then kicks out at one” spots. Jeez handcuffs Sozio to the cage and grabs a weed whacker while the referee pleads for him to stop, but Sozio is defiant to the end, taking multiple weed whacker shots to the chest until he passes out from the pain or the blood loss or something. You can just imagine Jack Perry watching this and taking frantic notes on how to be a cool, memorable wrestling character, like Sozio.

Would Cage of Death XVI have been better with John Cena? I guess. The opening bits would have been especially crowded with five men in the Cage, but Cena wouldn’t have gotten in the way of an amazing match suddenly breaking out. The end zone of the match was set up and paid off well, but at the same time, asking me to buy into Niles Young as the guy who can take eight weed whacker shots to the tits without quitting is a pretty huge ask. I’m not sure what John Cena could do to alleviate that problem. We’ll get in touch with him about that.

Cage of Death XVII (December 12, 2015)
CZW World Heavyweight Title Four-Way Cage of Death Match:
Matt Tremont (c) defeats AR Fox and Devon Moore and MASADA (32:10)

We’re back to a weird-shaped cage in 2015: two regular cage walls, one tilted one hung by chains (with a table underneath it, so you can already guess what’s going to happen), and a scaffold on one side with tables next to it (ditto). When the cage is set up like this, the actual match just becomes an exercise in waiting for the “big” bumps to happen as promised. Every time MASADA comes to the ring wearing his ratty rasta hat I wish he had a “TOO COOL FOR THIS PLANET” pin to go with it. The crowd is either much louder and hotter than last year, or just better mic’ed, and it’s anyone’s guess which. That tilted wall with a table underneath it that I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph? Within two minutes of the match starting, MASADA powerbombs AR Fox through it, so that’s one load blown already. And of course right after being killed with that powerbomb, AR Fox is up and walking around, so that MASADA can walk-and-brawl bop him with a trash can lid. This already feels like it’s going to be a long half-hour — and there Matt Tremont goes, falling off the scaffold through the barbed-wire table.

I guess it makes sense, on some level. The crowd sees the obvious huge bumps that are being telegraphed by the Cage set-up, so you get them out of the way early, and then try to genuinely surprise and amaze them with the remaining twenty-five minutes of the match. On the other hand, it works against a fundamental principle that pro wrestling matches are built upon. I heard Conan O’Brien say this once, relating some wisdom he received on how to work a crowd doing comedy: “Tell the audience what you’re going to do; do it; and then tell them that it has been done.” Traditional “ring psychology,” if you want to apply such an insane thing to a CZW Cage of Death, would dictate something like calling attention to the tilted-wall bump and the scaffold bump and then teasing it out for as long as you can, training the crowd to want it more and more, until they (hopefully) explode when you finally DO the thing. Instead, these four guys rushed right into the big crowd pops, and then went right back to the usual cookie-sheet shots and grinding one another’s foreheads against barbed wire, not even giving the huge bumps time to register as having been “huge.” Anyway, I stole this entire paragraph from one of Matt D‘s Segunda Caida reviews. It’s okay. No one is reading this far into the article anyway, so it’s a victimless crime.

What the crowd really wants in this Cage, more than any of the sick contraption bumps, is Matt Tremont. He spends half the match catching his breath on the outside, bleeding like he’s dressed up as Mass Transit for Halloween. When he comes back in to brawl with MASADA, the crowd electrifies… until MASADA takes control of the brawl, which dials them right back down to a simmering murmur. Tremont is the guy that they’ve connected with, the guy they want to see running wild, the wrestler who combines the body shape of a fat toddler with the unteachable charisma of a top WWF star. When he holds up a bundle of light tubes, the crowd comes alive. When he dives off of the scaffold to hit a big belly-flop double lariat on MASADA and Moore and barely even connects, it doesn’t matter. He’s still The Guy, and the fact that he made the attempt at all is what people want to cheer. When he takes unprotected chairshots to the skull, people cheer not necessarily the act unto itself, but the idea that their guy, the Bulldozer Matt Tremont, will come back from it and win the match. Which he does, and they love it.

Would Cage of Death XVII have been better with John Cena? Just like the last time Tremont was the star of the Cage of Death, Cena isn’t needed here. The crowd already had a top guy to cheer, and Tremont delivered on what they wanted to see. Cena could have brought a little more structure to things, but people didn’t want structure. They wanted Matt Tremont to side-slam AR Fox off of a scaffold, through a table and a bunch of glass.

Cage of Death 18 (December 10, 2016)
Team Notorious Inc. (Dale Patricks, Devon Moore, Drew Blood & Josh Crane) defeat Team CZW (Conor Claxton, Jeff Cannonball, Joey Janela & Matt Tremont) (39:45)

Oh, good, it’s another War Games format match. And even better, we start with Drew Blood! Look, I’m going to call it right from minute zero, this match probably needs some John Cena in it. No tilted walls on the Cage this year, but the scaffold is actually set a ways apart from it, with a wooden plank bridging the scaffold and the top of the cage. The cage itself is also full of junk: glass panes, chairs, ladders, weapons strung up on the cage walls. I feel like I’ve made multiple comparisons to video games already, but strewing a curated selection of weaponry around the ring feels especially video-game-y. Yes, I understand that the barbed-wire bats need to get into the cage SOMEHOW, but there’s still something very… “press the L1 trigger to pick up the water-cooler jug” about it. At the same time, maybe more pro wrestling SHOULD take its cues from WCW Backstage Assault. What’s the worst that could happen? Everyone in AEW is slipping discs in their necks anyway, so just leave a sledgehammer and a bucket of Legos in the ring for them.

Joey Janela was a star on the rise at this point, still capitalizing off Zandig Falcon-Arrowing him off of a roof into the bed of a pickup truck filled with junk. When he enters by diving off of the top of the cage into the five other guys already in the ring, it feels like the first time the match has come alive. He stands there and mugs for the crowd and gets more of a reaction than Jeff Cannonball mauling someone with a barbed-wire bat two feet away. Devon Moore does the same jump-off-the-cage entrance a few minutes later, and his jump looks less like a triumphant announcement of his own star power and more like a pilled-up suicide attempt. Indy drama scholars can hopefully appreciate why I chose to highlight Devon Moore stealing something from Joey Janela. Anyway, despite Janela being the new up-and-coming star, Matt Tremont — the last man to enter the Cage — is still The Guy, as far as the Flyers Skate Zone is concerned.

So that’s why CZW caves to the temptation to turn him evil. After a long, long match where way too much happens and half the participants in the match nearly break their ankles by landing weird on suplexes from the top of the Cage, Tremont turns on Janela and hands Notorious Inc. the match. It’s the sort of scenario that appeals to every wrestling booker on the planet: take the most beloved guy and try to turn him into the most hated guy, so that another guy who’s getting love from the crowd has a worthy foe to try and conquer. It’s like no one learned the lesson of WrestleMania VI, because these sudden-swerve turns are never as exciting as the basic promise of “what if one unstoppable fan-favorite collided with another unstoppable fan-favorite?” Getting the crowd to chant “asshole” at Matt Tremont is something that they’ll go along with for a while, but inevitably, the people always return to cheering their guy.

Would Cage of Death 18 have been better with John Cena? Yeah. Why not? The match was already a chaotic mess. Adding Cena wouldn’t be a “hat on a hat” scenario because the hat is already wearing six others.

Cage of Death 19 (December 9, 2017)
CZW World Heavyweight Title Three-Way Cage of Death Match:
Rickey Shane Page (c) defeats Joe Gacy and Shane Strickland (24:00)

It’s amazing to consider the lofty heights that all three of these guys went on to reach from here. Pre-HGH Strickland looks like he might as well be sixteen years old. Even though he’s inarguably a genius of professional wrestling, my enthusiasm for a half-hour-long Rickey Shane Page match is near-zero. An electric saw gets brought out and used for some slice-and-dice spots, and then the escalation from there, the thing that’s supposed to be worse than attempted murder with an electric saw, is to dump a bunch of Legos on the mat. For the first time, I start to wonder if I made a good choice by watching ten Cages of Death within a twenty-four-hour period. Let’s just get this one over with. The one upside of the match is that they brought back the Home Alone swinging chair trap.

Would Cage of Death 19 have been better with John Cena? Absolutely. Look at two-thirds of the names in this match. Are you fucking kidding me?

Cage of Death 20 (December 9, 2018)
CZW World Heavyweight Title Cage of Death Match:
Mance Warner defeats Rickey Shane Page (17:13)

Okay. I’ve had a little bit to cool off and calm down after that last one. I won’t let one Rickey Shane Page match break me. John Cena would be stronger than that, and that’s why he’s in the Violent People Hall of Fame. This year’s Cage has a wooden platform bridge thing spanning the top of it, instead of a scaffold to the side. It doesn’t look good. It looks like someone left a bunch of lumber balanced on one of the Cage’s corners and forgot to clean it up before showtime. We’ve also got the random bits of plunder filling the ring again, and it still doesn’t do anything but remind me of a video game. RSP is looking especially like the long-lost fourth McElroy brother tonight. Within three minutes of the match starting, Mancer has gotten slammed onto a bed of nails. A few minutes later, the camera catches what looks like Mancer stashing his gig back inside his knee pad.

What this match has going for it is that both Mancer and RSP bleed. A lot. RSP’s face looks like Wolfpac Sting, and Mancer consistently blades himself so well that I wince when I imagine the kind of Dusty Rhodes whale-vagina forehead he’ll have twenty years from now. There’s no carefully constructed story that the match follows. It goes from glass panes to the bed of nails to water jugs on sticks to New Japan elbow exchanges to RSP attempting to do a spin kick in defiance of all common sense. The things that they do aren’t what progress the match. The story of the match, such as it is, is told in how much blood they’re leaking. It’s in RSP laying on the mat with the blood that should be going to his brain instead gushing out onto his outstretched arm. It’s in Mancer palming his own face and then wiping a dark red smear on a pane of glass before he tries to put RSP through it. The moves, the holds (there are no holds), the transitions (there are no transitions), these are just a quick and dirty means of getting to the real story, the one that’s pumping out of both men’s foreheads. When Ricky Shane Page staples Mance Warner’s tongue to a barbed wire board and then stomps it free, it feels like they’ve built it up and earned it by sole dint of how brutally they’re both bleeding. And really, how else would they earn a spot like that? By selling the leg? When Mancer ends the match with a DDT off the scaffold-platform-thing through a big stack of boards and glass and whatever, it feels like one of two ways the match could logically end, the other being hospitalization from blood loss.

Would Cage of Death 20 have been better with John Cena? This one could go either way, but Cena would fit into what these two were doing better than a lot of WWE guys would. He knows the value of blood, and the way that on the right stage, with the right spotlight, people will remember a crimson mask more than they will a sharp reversal or a beautifully timed sequence. Cena is a wrestler who embraces the grisly grand guignol aspect of pro wrestling when he needs to, so I think that he would probably end up a benefit here.

Cage of Death XXI (December 14, 2019)
Jimmy Lloyd defeats Brandon Kirk (w/Kasey Catal) (16:28)

2019 marked the last Cage of Death for five years. There’s no scaffold this year, just one wall that’s tilted a bit (but not as tilted as it’s been in the past). At ringside, boards are balanced on the tops of chairs so precariously that Jimmy Lloyd almost topples one over during his entrance, just by touching it. There are still weapons everywhere and panes of glass in every corner, but somehow, things feel diminished compared to previous years. The decade started with the Cage being this weird alien hexagon, and ended with it being… a cage. On the other hand, that puts the emphasis back on the people WITHIN the cage. There are no big wacky spots telegraphed by the Cage’s very structure, beyond the sheer existence of stacked-up boards at ringside. It’s on them to entertain on their own merits, to make the match matter as a contest between two wrestlers. Of course, as I type that sentence, they’re exchanging superkicks and then there’s a Canadian Destroyer.

Jimmy Lloyd is a wrestler in the same family tree as Matt Tremont. He’s nowhere near as charismatic as the Bulldozer, but his fundamental premise is the same: guy who looks like and is shaped like a goblin from a fantasy RPG, who’s willing to take outrageous punishment in the course of a match. Brandon Kirk is still in the long-bleach-blonde-hair phase that every independent wrestler goes through, but he brings the same skill set to the table as Lloyd. These are two guys who are willing to do dangerous, stupid, borderline suicidal shit in the course of a pro wrestling death match. So why are they superkicking each other? Why are they trading strikes? All the broken glass in the world is no substitute for intensity, and the intensity just isn’t here. The match dies as ringside helpers cart in barbed wire boards so that Kirk can spend forever double-stacking them on chairs. The only spark of life is an improvised moment of levity: Kirk snaps “where is that little fucker?” before he whips half a light tube out of the cage, hitting Lloyd, who’s slumped on the outside. The camera barely catches his grin afterwards, but it’s the sort of thing the match should have been built around. God knows there are worse wrestling plots than an ugly babyface meeting the challenge of a handsome creep.

After years of the crowd chanting that they wanted it, they finally get fire, when Kirk sets alight his board-contraption and then immediately gets slammed through it for his trouble. Then he kicks out at one. A minute later, Jimmy Lloyd gives him a One Winged Angel through a pane of glass to end the match. What is it with death match guys refusing to end their matches on the biggest and most spectacular bump? Do they know something I don’t?

Would Cage of Death XXI have been better with John Cena? Yes. There was too much dead space in the match, too many stretches of nothing happening and then someone scrambling into position to fall off of the cage wall. Cena, we needed you, and you weren’t there.