The Young Bucks vs. Lucha Bros
All Elite Wrestling All Out 2021
Hoffman Estates, Illinois - Now Arena
September 5, 2021
Source: Daily DDT
It took me an incredibly long time to warm up to the Young Bucks. I’m not a WWE cultist—or in the Cult of Cornette—but the Bucks reeked of the worst of Indie wrestling to me.
We all have celebrities that we have no valid reasons for disliking. But in pro wrestling, as fans, we’re encouraged to soak in someone’s aura and go, oh, fuck them. And they were that tag team for me, solely on appearance. I hated their Hardy Boys 1997 outfits, the watered-down superkicks, the derp faces on all their advertisements. So for those reasons, I actively avoided watching their matches. I dismissed the accruing of four star matches from the internet wrestling community. So out of sheer curiosity, I checked out the match against the Golden Lovers at New Japan’s Strong Style Evolved on March 25th, 2018 to see what the hyperbole was all about.
Upon watching, I got why people loved them. But I also got new furor for why I went, oh, fuck them in the first place. I could not stand how seemingly, the story they desperately wanted to tell, is Nick Jackson needs to be injected with a gallon of propofol to the jugular, then decapitated, then have his head impaled on rusty, diphtheria-soaked nails, and only then could he be put in the camel clutch to drop one.
Worse, I felt myself aging as a fan. That the business was passing me by. That wrestling today was more about doing video-game like maneuvers of endless finishers and was less about simulating a real fight. That their seemingly lack of realism in storytelling was becoming the new normal, taking the art of professional wrestling to something entirely up Meltzer’s ass.
But, good god, that match against Kenny Omega and “Hangman” Adam Page at All Elite Wrestling Revolution 2020. The Elite’s outing was so undeniably powerful and symbolic and weaved a tapestry of emotion where you as the viewer couldn’t predict how the friendships would dissolve and whom would betray whom. Even I couldn’t shit on the Bucks after that! And with their heel turn earlier this year—when Rey Fenix’s mask was torn off to the get the cheapest of cheap carny heat—I begun to see how meta their performances were to work me, the smartest of smart marks.
Wrestlers on podcasts have forever dismissively decreed that the easiest marks to work are smart marks. We want our wrestling our way and we will hate wrestlers that we feel are using go-away heat. The Bucks became the most hated act in wrestling by continuing to wrestle with mega-finishers as transitional moves. And then they always went over. During their AEW Tag Title reign-of-doom, there was no reason for why a Buck had to pin Jungle Boy. And why did a Buck need to survive with Kenny Omega against Adam Page when Hangman lost his chance to challenge Omega at AEW All Out 2021. The finishes intentionally got predictable to lead to this cage match where the hardcore wrestling fan was clamoring to see them lose clean.
Like every classic five star wrestling match, this story was simple and understandable to all who saw it—inside a steel cage, the Young Bucks had nowhere to hide, no one to interfere on their behalf, and revenge would come full circle.
The Lucha Bros had been feuding with the Young Bucks for years in different Indie and international promotions. The Bros had a win over the Bucks in another fantastic gimmick match, a ladder match, in the debut edition of AEW All Out in 2019. The Lucha Bros would have the Bucks beat if it was a fair fight and they neutralized the bullshit interferences from Brandon Cutler and the Good Brothers (you could say the cage would keep out Alex Abrahantes, the voice for Penta as something of a Latin Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart” as well, but he didn’t factor in much beyond cosplaying as “Runaway”-era Kanye).
AEW’s cage is ridiculously high. In kayfabe, every steel cage is said to be 20 feet even when they’re clearly 12, but this was legit 20ft if not higher. As the cage descended to the ring and the competitors took it in, you sensed that it would be too high even for them to do an abundance of high-flying, finishing moves off the top. Also, the cage had no functioning door in the match itself, eliminating cheap-heat spots of having an outside heel slamming the door shut on the head of one of the Lucha Bros. The Young Bucks and the Lucha Bros set out to have the greatest cage match in wrestling history and they undoubtedly pulled it off. It’s laudable to think of what the Bucks and Bros had going against them in this match. With it being Texas Tornado rules, they eliminated any cut-off spots and traditional heat-building. The height of the cage striped away the performers’ willingness to trade literal high spots off the top of the cage, naturally toning down some of the Young Bucks worst tendencies, to force them to create innovative subtitles to create a masterpiece.
The start of the match foreshadowed the motifs of the story where nobody could escape when both Bucks leapt up the fence to try and climb out, only to be thwarted by Penta flipping his brother, Rey Fenix, onto them. The very next sequence, again, more with the foreshadowing, was an extended sequence of do-si-do, Irish-whips where both sets of brothers went round and round each other to hit tandem kicks to the head.
The Lucha Bros dominated the start of the match with simultaneous superkicks, throws into the cages, and spears. The Bucks gained momentum back, culminating with Matt Jackson brutally powerbombing Rey into the cage. Rey caught his wind and eventually used the arm of Nick Jackson for balance as he spring-boarded off the cage, out of Nick’s arm, and into Matt’s for a spectacular arm drag that even got Don Callis on the mic applauded.
After a few minutes dominating, and unable to finish the match after kicks to the balls and More Bang For Your Buck, the Bucks resorted to tearing the eye sockets off the masks of the Lucha Bros. Sinking more deviously, Brandon Culter threw in a bag containing a tacky, thumbtacked Travis Scott Air Jordan 1s. In the emotional culmination of the sequence, Penta sacrificed himself to be the recipient of Matt Jacksons’s locked and loaded thumbtack superkick, shielding his younger brother.
Penta, who was in more of a supporting role in a sense to his brother, Rey, who got the more batshit spots, got color by blading offscreen. With his mask already widened, his bloody face became more visible, especially contrasted to his sky blue eye contacts.
“What the hell are we watching?/A classic,” Tony Schiavone and JR called and responded, before a series of exchanges that lead to Penta hitting a tope rope Panama Sunrise on Matt. That allowed all four competitors to get a breather before they built toward the final third of the match. As the Chicago-land crowd did the custom, “Fight Forever” chant, all four brothers got to their feet, and went around the ring, each hitting rounds of chops and superkicks, referencing back to the mirroring sequence earlier in the match, repeating the motif that everything comes full circle. Normally this no-selling and pop-up into another big move is the type of cliched sequence that’s rarely deserved and always derided. But within context, it was a not-so subtle metaphor that what goes around, comes around, in this shootout.
The finish saw the Luchas hit the assisted Fear Factor but it was broken up by a diving Matt Jackson. Rey climbed to the top of the cage, standing atop of it to sell his anxiety, fear, and knowing that this would be the capper to finish off the Bucks once and for all. Enter Nick Jackson—wearing facial hair best described by our Sean Nash as, “when the little kid in the Robin Williams version of Jumanji started to transform into a monkey,”—hit one last superkick to break up the second Fear Factor and scaled up the cell to reach Rey. Rey ran across the scaffolding, PK’d Nick back down to the mat, and hit without embellishment the biggest and greatest high cross body. The Lucha Bros got the pin after a spiked, inverted driver.
The finale of the match, and perhaps one most symbolic, was captured of Penta after they won the tag team titles. Over the sound of an impressed, I’m-still-a-fan-inside Tony Schiavone guffawing, “Oh, what a wonderful, well-earned moment;” Penta, gaping, held his newly won tag team title to his face and cried into it. It was the image of what a steel cage match could be if its basic purpose and tenet wasn’t cheated. It was the capsulation of what a tag team division could be if executed properly.
Later that night at AEW All Out 2021, Bryan Danielson debuted to cap off perhaps one of the most crowd-pleasing PPVs of all time. At his after-show press conference he summed it up wonderfully: “You show excellent professional wrestling to anyone, and they will enjoy it. Because excellent professional wrestling is fucking awesome.”
