Happy Halloween! This year, my costume is Dan Rice.

Picking up from where my esteemed colleague left off, the next show that I could find comes to us via the private stash of Tripping Balls, as posted to his YouTube channel. This is all filmed on one camcorder, with no commentary… but it does feature a complete tournament for the IWA Mid-South Heavyweight Championship.

Join me, won’t you… in this Rotten Rewatch?

IWA Mid-South Heavyweight Championship Tournament Quarterfinals

Paul E. Smooth vs. Suicide Kid

The tape starts with the tail end of Paul E.’s entrance (“…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears) and goes right into Suicide Kid’s (“Bawitdaba” by Kid Rock). Both of these men trigger immediate nostalgia for a year when I was fifteen years old. I wasn’t watching IWA-MS at the time, but the aesthetics of these two wrestlers were universal. Paul E. wrestles in shiny track pants, and Suicide Kid does his match in knee-length jean shorts and a sleeveless tee. These two outfits were the default starter pack for indie wrestlers in 2000. You actually stood out from the pack for being in trunks, or even long tights.

The camcorder picks up a lot of crowd noise, and with this being an indie wrestling show from the year 2000, this means you hear a lot of “pretty boy” and “queer” and the occasional “faggot” break through the cacophony. I assure you, the reader, that I tsk-tsked and wagged my finger in disapproval at my laptop screen every time, from my perch in the more enlightened 2025, where these social ills have long since been cured. The match itself is mostly unremarkable; Paul E. does a flip dive into the second row of the crowd, and after a ref bump, Hy-Zaya and Richard X attack Suicide Kid. Hy-Zaya does a Swanton Bomb that almost completely misses Suicide Kid, except for the back of Hy-Zaya’s head smacking into Suicide Kid’s ribs, and I’m not sure which one of them that would hurt more. We’ll call this the first SKIP of the night because there was nothing wrong with it, but there’s also nothing that I can say you need to watch over, you know, 6 weekly hours of AEW TV, or whatever it is the people who read this site spend their time doing.

Oh, and American Kickboxer saves Suicide Kid from Hy-Zaya and Richard X, but we’ll get back to them later. It does set up that the tag match later in the show will be 2/3 falls and Texas Tornado rules, after which the ring announcer declares: “There you have it, folks — a Kerry Von Erich death match!”

Corporal Robinson vs. Cash Flo

Corporal Robinson (“Left, Right, Left” by Drama) comes down smoking a cigarette and yelling about conspiracies and whatever. The bad audio quality makes it sound like at one point he tells the crowd “we’re done being racist, and we’re done being fat,” which would still be memed today if Scott Steiner said it in TNA. Cash Flo (“Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” by the Offspring) picks up the title belt before the match and asks “Is this it?” which is a masterful way to sell your spot in the tournament for that same belt.

They stall and do some fake-out crowd work during the start of the match, and after Cash Flo baits Corporal Robinson into leaving the ring, Cash Flo slides back in and yells “You are RETARDED!” Again, I am clucking my tongue and shaking my head at the screen.

The two of them stall for another six or seven hours, after which Cash Flo dominates with a hip toss, and other moves renowned for being hard to fuck up. Eventually Corporal Robinson reverses a headlock into a back drop, and slaps on the figure four. Coming out of this, Cash Flo sells the wrong leg, and this match is so boring that it’s turning me into one of those dorks who gets snippy about wrestlers selling the wrong body part out of a submission hold. So, you know what, let’s just get on with it and mark this one as a yawning SKIP, with the one highlight being Cash Flo eating complete and total shit by landing face-first on an attempted thousand-mile-an-hour 450.

“Prophet” Daniel Quinn vs. Rollin’ Hard

Quinn (“Guerilla Radio” by Rage Against the Machine) is our second member of the black sleeveless tee and jean shorts collective, which is a bold choice, considering he has the arm definition of someone who’s in the middle of dying from anorexia nervosa. Rollin’ Hard (“Ghetto Supastar” by Pras, Mya, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard) is in past-the-knee gym shorts, a t-shirt reading “BLACK 24/7,” and an afro wig so huge that from the angle this is being filmed at, it just looks like he has a Koosh ball for a head. No one actually says any bad words, but I think Rollin’ Hard just generally existing makes us three for three in terms of “stuff you can’t say or do in 2025, even at an indie wrestling show.”

Quinn goes for a flip dive into the crowd, completely overshoots Rollin’ Hard, and takes out some chairs. Quinn gets big air on everything he does, whether it needs it or not. Sometimes it looks silly, and sometimes it works, like when Rollin’ Hard turns a full nelson into a pop-up neckbreaker. This is five minutes of sloppy backyard-level work, but as someone who finds that stuff appealing, that puts this one on the low end of WATCH.

Nathan Future vs. Ian Rotten

Nathan Future (“One More Road to Cross” by DMX) has a red durag, and his t-shirt is tucked into baggy khaki shorts, which is enough to visually set him apart, even if it does make him look like a dipshit. Somehow, I always forget that Ian Rotten (“The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson) is as big of a boy as he is. It’s not like I think he’s Spike Dudley or anything like that. Maybe it’s just because Ian invested significant time and money into finding the most unflattering clothes he could possibly wear, like a white muscle tee that gets sucked into the dent of his gut overhang, even though he appears to be wearing a singlet underneath. It’s just this recurring moment of “oh, man, I don’t remember him looking THIS bad.”

The early part of the match is Nathan Future teasing a fight with a woman in the crowd who needs a cane to walk. Ian isn’t interested in bumping or selling, but he makes up for it by laying in his chops. Future sells every punch and headbutt like he’s just been taken out by that Home Alone trap with the swinging paint cans. Ian gets color off of a DDT on a chair, but I can’t imagine why. He barely even wobbles his head off of Future’s punches, and Future’s the one who’s getting repeatedly blasted on the frontal lobe with chairs and stop signs. Ian bleeds so much that it looks like he was trying for Powers of Pain face paint. Meanwhile, the camera angle highlights his bald spot at every opportunity. Nothing much to this one beyond a gory blade job for its own sake, but since this is a tournament where Ian is wrestling three times, I think we can hit this one with a SKIP and hope for better things. That’s always worked out for wrestling fans.

IWA Mid-South Heavyweight Championship Tournament Semifinals

Corporal Robinson vs. Rollin’ Hard

Audio cuts out during Corporal Robinson’s entrance, so we’re denied hearing “Ghetto Supastar” again while Rollin’ Hard walks out. This sucks, because “Ghetto Supastar” is a great song. That aside, this is the kind of match I came here to see. We’re thirty seconds in before Rollin’ Hard does a suicide dive and then throws Robinson into a row of chairs. Even though this wasn’t billed as a Fans Bring the Weapons match (unless that was said during the few minutes of missing audio!), the fans keep trying to give them weapons. Rollin’ Hard tries what looks like it was supposed to be a Diamond Cutter onto a light tube, but in execution it comes across like a Stone Cold Stunner, so good job getting glass up your own asshole, bud.

No section of the crowd is safe from having a grown man hurled into their chairs, as these two walk and brawl. The downside is that the hard (and only) cam can’t always see what they’re doing, so at one point it looks like Robinson got down on the ground to hump the back of Rollin’ Hard’s head. Maybe he did! The whole match is sloppy and goofy and has toddler-level psychology, including a ref bump in a death match, and that’s why it’s an easy WATCH. Post-match, Robinson yells about conspiracies some more and then murders the ref.

Paul E. Smooth vs. Ian Rotten

Paul E. immediately cuts Ian back open with broken glass, while Ian kneels on the ground and breathes heavily instead of selling any impact landing upon his body. At one point Paul E. jumps up for a hurricanrana on Ian, and I would have given anything to see Ian try and take that move. Guess what: he doesn’t even wobble for it. Not much going on here, even for a match that’s only three minutes long. For Ian Rotten no-selling aficionados and/or Ian Rotten totally disgusting blade job connoisseurs only. SKIP

2/3 Falls Texas Tornado Tag Team Match

Hy-Zaya & Richard X vs. Suicide Kid & American Kickboxer

Suicide Kid and American Kickboxer don’t waste any time in jumping Hy-Zaya and Richard X (“Whoa” by Black Rob). There’s too much going on here to try and do a move-by-move recap. I’d end up pausing it every four seconds and writing forty thousand words of “Then X did Y.” The crowd erupts in uniform applause for American Kickboxer doing what looks for all the world like a shoot vertical-drop brainbuster. The first fall ends with American Kickboxer and Suicide Kid doing a Total Elimination to Hy-Zaya and Richard X at the same time, which seems like a really risky idea in terms of something having extremely high potential to look like complete shit. Thankfully, it only kind of looks like shit.

The second fall slows down for all of fifteen seconds, before we’ve got one pair of guys doing dives to the outside while the other pair is working two-counts out of a figure-four. Suicide Kid does a flip leg drop onto a chair that’s wrapped around Richard X’s leg. Kickboxer got busted open somewhere along the way. The falls even out at 1-1 after another Swanton Bomb where literally only Hy-Zaya’s head makes contact.

In the third fall, it seems like everyne has either run out of moves they wanted to do, or given themselves concussions, so there’s a good few minutes of aimless wandering around and laying on the mat. The crowd doesn’t seem to mind that much, bless them. Suicide Kid does a triple-jump moonsault and then showboats instead of making a cover, allowing Hy-Zaya to knock him out with a sleeper hold in 0.5 seconds flat and then pull Richard X over Suicide Kid for the winning count. Why Hy-Zaya runs and hides from the ref’s view after doing this, I have no fucking idea, because it’s a tornado tag match. This is at the low end of SKIP; it’d work best in two-minute highlight reel format.

Suicide Kid and American Kickboxer then get on the mic for two genuinely unintelligible promos.

IWA Mid-South Heavyweight Championship Tournament Finals

Ian Rotten vs. Rollin’ Hard

Mr. Rotten has taken off his bloody t-shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. Whether or not this is some sort of ill-advised and racially charged counter to Rollin’ Hard’s afro wig, we can only speculate. The second they start wrestling, Ian’s head opens back up. It looks like that time that Mudvayne went to the MTV VMAs made up like they’d been shot. For a match with so much blood, they’re not exactly doing a lot, even by the standards of a match where half of the contestants are Ian Rotten. Rollin’ Hard goes for three pin attempts in a row and then a sleeper hold. Ian doesn’t even stand up for his comeback, he just rises to his knees and throws a punch or two, before Rollin’ Hard tries to pin him again. On the outside, things pick up, with Ian trying to cripple Rollin’ Hard with a barbed-wire bat shot to the back, and then whipping a trash can at his head as hard as humanly possible. This being the year 2000, Rollin’ isn’t even pretending to put his hands up for road-sign shots to the head. The fans are thrusting weapons at Ian Rotten as fast as he can use them. There’s not so much a comeback or cut-off as Rollin’ just gets up and whacks Ian with a sign, and then they do a silly-looking hockey fight in the crowd. For every two steps back, though, they take one step forward, like when Rollin’ slams Ian’s face into the wall so hard that it probably put a dent in the drywall.

The flow of Ian Rotten matches is always weird. He spends three minutes lying on his side, probably gulping for air, and then in the time it takes me to pick up my cat from the floor, suddenly he’s on his feet and doing a piledriver. The finish comes when Rollin’ Hard ducks a slow-motion clothesline and gets Ian up for a wobbly Samoan Drop. One, two, three, new champ, and a big old SKIP because this was three good ringside-brawl shots in an eleven-minute match.

Not a great show, but you can’t win ’em all. Fortunately, Ian Rotten went on to accomplish many great things from here!