Art is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
It challenges our sensibilities. Forces us to think and feel beyond our comfort zones. From the gruesome imagery of Francis Bacon’s paintings to the dread of The Caretaker’s distortion of Al Bowlly’s “Heartaches” in his six-album series Everywhere at the End of Time, it reminds us what it is to be human.
Oh yes, art can be fun. Beautiful, intriguing, contemplative, and whimsically so. But it would not be complete without the human capability to draw something so innately primal, so indescribably flawed in our genes.
In professional wrestling, hardcore and deathmatch wrestling add to this sentiment. That is a form of theater with a set designed in broken glass, barbed wire, and blood spread upon a canvas.
Yet, when sporadically delivering this spectacle of terrors in a traditional wrestling promotion, it resonates on a different wavelength. Specifically, when delivered at the right place, time, and circumstances, these matches become an experience.
The main event of 2024’s All Out is AEW’s shining example of that. Many a fun match was had on this September night beforehand, but the tone drastically changed near the end.
Following the heartbreaking betrayal of Bryan Danielson at the hands of his beloved Blackpool Combat Club, The American Dragon was carried out. The tone was shifting, but there was one more match to follow.
And what a story to beget it.
It’s a tale scribed in hate and signed in viscera. Of something that would take a miracle to put back together.
The previous autumn, “Hangman” Adam Page was back with his newly reunited friends, The Elite. He’d been meandering for some time after losing his AEW Men’s World Heavyweight Championship to CM Punk. Oh, but the crowd adored him so.
Encroaching upon him was a quickly rising star, Swerve Strickland, who sought to reach superstardom even faster. He had no more patience, so he was going to take it. Men in the past had tried to ignore his shine, so it was by his light he’d blind everyone.
Thus, Page and Strickland were set to collide. Undoubtedly, it would be a fight for the ages. In the end, Strickland would go through any means necessary to use him as though he were a rung on a ladder.
At first, it wasn’t personal, a simple match at WrestleDream, which Strickland won. Nevertheless, he wasn’t finished with the cowboy. On the road to Full Gear, he committed an act that forever damaged Page’s sense of privacy and safety when Strickland invaded his home and draped a shirt over the crib of Page’s sleeping babe. The wolf sank its teeth into the lamb.
Mortified and violated, Page brought hell with him. The pair’s Full Gear match became a bloody contest within the Texas Death Match rules.
Strickland later won the title from Joe, while Page returned later in the Owen Hart Foundation Tournament. The tournament winner, Bryan Danielson, would defeat Strickland at All In to become the AEW Men’s World Champion, thanks to the intervention of Page.
To settle this, a Steel Cage Match was determined for the pair at All Out.
Unsatisfied, Page stepped over the line himself in the weeks leading up to All Out when he haunted Strickland’s newly acquired childhood home. He sat and he burned it to a crisp, ashes in the night sky. The smell of flame and gasoline permeated the air, the heat of which evaporated childhood memories like jellyfish in the sun.
A childhood home is a sanctuary, a haven for adulthood to revisit. It’s the house that built you. Those walls either held your happiest times or your deepest nightmares.
With the understanding that there’s no coming back from this, there’s no way that this will end in civility through sport, Tony Khan made their Steel Cage Match unsanctioned: a Lights Out Match.
On that fateful night, Justin Roberts addresses the fans, stating this match will not be sanctioned by AEW. They cheer, a hopeful clamor in the hopes that the carnage removes the heartbreak of the night’s earlier betrayal.
“Hangman” Adam Page marches out, with the scowl of a thousand rageful stars bursting in the night sky. The light is misty and warm as he comes, a pilgrim among the burning horizon of an undulating plain. Tonight, cowboy shit means ruination.
His heart scorches as Strickland struts out, decked in white with flames signifying what Page took from him. It is etched upon the pants he wears.
Not a second is wasted; the moment the cage starts lowering, Strickland and Page brawl. Each man, malice etched upon their face as though carved into stone tablets, holds the other’s head there. They could end it early, so long as the cage chokes the life out. Prince Nana, ever the trusted partner, tosses various weaponry for the mogul’s employ.
Flesh upon steel, they grate the other’s face into the mesh. This flay lasts little, when Strickland rebounds a forearm with a Flatliner, capped with a House Call.
Page pulls out a staple gun from a weapon’s case that Prince Nana left in the ring. He staples Strickland’s chest again and again to be met with a manic grin; his enemy ate them as though they were candy.
Locking the cowboy’s arm behind him, Strickland unloads staple after staple upon his back. Clutching pictures from his own childhood, Strickland shoots them into Page’s face. Childhood memories, punctured deeply by the man who removed his tether to the past.
By now, the excitement in the crowd simmers to concerned bubbles. They chant “Whose house? Swerve’s house,” but with less gusto than before.
Momentary escape by Page, prevented by a chair tossed callously into his skull courtesy of the man whose house he’d set aflame.
Wrapping a barbed wire across his wrist, he sinks its needles into Strickland with a soaring lariat; the breeze brushing past his ears unable to cool the wrathful tempest blowing inside him. Prince Nana consoled his dear friend from the other side of the cage.
The wounds continue to pour and drip and scar their flesh as the murmur in the crowd continues to scatter to uncertainty, even as Page asks if he’s truly “their champion.” He says this with hurt to the people who once cheered for him, who claimed him as their champion. A hero left abandoned.
Decorating the cage with the barbed wire within the chain-link wall, he aims Strickland for it but eats a clothesline instead. Page briefly earns the clamor of the crowd after a big boot, a false catharsis that lasts minuscule seconds.
Whalloping and whalloping a steel chair on Swerve’s back, Page is met with a pleading Referee Paul Turner. Strickland does another House Call, the sole of his foot smacking loudly to Page’s cranium, and executes a Buckshot Lariat from Turner’s back.
In Strickland, there’s evil in his eyes, like tears replacing all emotions swirling in the madness of his soul. He punishes Page’s back with steel to his back with the very chair Page used.
A lone cinderblock drops to the center of the ring—Strickland savors dropping Page on it, and drops him. The cowboy, he writhes in agony as he clutches his vertebrae, the abrasion visible in its sore redness.
Swerve sets up a table, but Page beats him to it on the top rope, throttling his head into the steel cage. They battle precariously, with Strickland plummeting Page through the table with a patented Swerve Stomp.
“Hangman” meets Swerve’s House Call with a Deadeye, then casts his eye to a bag in another corner. He taunts Swerve and the crowd with a “Whose house?” as he clutches a charred splinter from the burnt house. They wrestle it from each other; blood courses like a violent river in Swerve as he drives it, a stake to the vampire that sucked his past from him.
His mind swims and swirls, and suddenly the cage exists as the same walls he once opened Christmas gifts in. Hugged long-lost family members in. Measured his height in. Got yelled at by his father in. Tears stream, coalescing and kissing the beads of sweat and blood.
Hungry for more vengeance, “Hangman” drops Swerve’s spine on the cinderblock, where the lumbar and sacrum connect. No, though, he won’t stay down. He can’t stay down.
Strickland unties himself from ropes and inhales some punches from Page before slamming the cowboy into the mesh and phoning in with a House Call and a subsequent House Call. It’s not enough to keep Page down for three seconds.
Swerve climbs to the very tip-top of the cage, or at least attempts to, when Page clutches his legs and powerbombs him back to the mat. The crowd chants “Cowboy shit!”, as he deposed his enemy with another Deadeye.
The more it continues, the less impact their moves have—their flesh is weak and their souls are drained, persisting only in hate.
Page implores Strickland to beg for mercy before striking him repeatedly with a chair. Instead, Swerve rises to meet Page, smiling nastily with two fingers raised. He’s done and he knows it, but he’s still in the lead.
Furiously scowling, “Hangman” yanks out Swerve’s grill and pierces a syringe deep into his bottom lip. The crowd is loud again, but with visible discontent. They never thought it would come this far. It should never get this far.
When a man becomes a father and truly knows it in his soul, he’s to love his family, accept them, and protect them. This was Page’s recompense for his failure to do so. He never anticipated this, but he must right a wrong for that which can’t be placed back.
With one last true and cruel swing, he slams the chair into Swerve’s head. Mortified, Paul Turner calls for the bell. Knockout.
Page is the winner, and the cost is heavy.
He leaves, and for a flash, his eyes soften and his lip quivers, yet he does not remove his scowl. At the entrance ramp, he screams to the heavens. It’s a release of multitudes. Catharsis, remorse, insanity, loss, and confusion. Once a blonde, blue-eyed hero, now a child of God.
What do you yell for? You won, but you’re no winner. You’ve shot the doves dead, their feathers scatter in crimson and snowy.
For these men to ever be on good terms would require signs and wonders, a miracle.
This story is not to be repeated. A song to never reprise. A stanza that must be forgotten and unrepeated.
Art is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
