Wrestling Grab Bag: November 2025 Thanksgiving Edition

Because I have no real immediate family to celebrate this year’s Thanksgiving with and nothing to really do at the current moment, I am choosing to start a new (hopefully) monthly project in which I am tentatively calling “Wrestling Grab Bag,” where I write about some random wrestling matches with no real correlation to the next, most of which were recommended to me at one point or another by different people. Happy Thanksgiving!

If you’d like to read MORE writing by me, but not on this blog then I recently contributed to the Death Panel over at the Violent People blog, which you can go read here.

John Wayne Murdoch vs. Reed Bentley vs. Nick Depp vs. LuDark Shaitan - Home Run Derby Light Tube Fence Match - IWA:MS King of the Deathmatches (05/20/2017)

**suggested by ptotime of violent people

This match is another notch in the list of reasons as to why I love The Rejects. John Wayne Murdoch and Reed Bentley just have loads of chemistry together no matter the role they’re playing. This is a gruesome chaotic fourway match, with almost a central theme of Nick Depp (who i’ve literally never heard of before this) getting violently abused as much as possible till roughly about halfway through the match when he gets eliminated. Lots of gruesome spots in this one. Reed caves in Depp’s head with the stand of a CRT TV, the same TV which Depp also takes a Spiked Tombstone from both Rejects through a few minutes after it’s brought out. That spot in particular is just the highest point of the match, man. Also gotta give props to LuDark in this because she puts up a good fight, outsmarting her male opponents in the beginning stretch in an almost comical sense and making it all the way to the end as one of the final two. The giant blowpop that LuDark uses also got a big pop out of me, admittedly. The finish is disgusting looking, with JWM suplexing LuDark through the chair and a pool noodle with toothpicks that almost nearly falls off.

Vampiro & Pierroth Jr vs. Negro Casas & Shocker - CMLL on Televisa (06/04/2004)

**suggested by jom

Jom gave me two matches I could watch and I ended up choosing this one because I don’t watch as much older Lucha as I realistically should. Shocker immediately wins the vibes contest for coming out to “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, alongside TWO valets AND Kemonito. Vamp and Pierroth immediately jump the tecnicos before the match can begin and just start smacking them around, getting a lot of heat. Negro Casas has some amazing selling during this. Shocker and Casas have a comeback which leads them to get the first fall after Shocker’s Lion Tamer on Vampiro AND a big splash from Kemonito. The rudos quickly take over after that, getting DQ’d when Vampiro turns Negro Casas’ silla into a turnbuckle nutshot and gives what looks like a Styles Clash to Shocker. The biggest most dastardly move of the whole thing being Vampiro’s piledriver to Kemonito after the match!! Really fun, more people should watch old CMLL matches for the soul, myself included.

Kazunari Murakami & Mitsuya Nagai vs. Carl Malenko & Yuki Ishikawa - BattlArts (10/01/2000)

**suggested by Cameron aka unmasked_taro

I fully admit that I’ve always been interested in BattlArts as an entity but for some reason have never decided to dive more into it than I should outside of the occasional Ikeda or Ishikawa bout. This is a really, really solid tag match. Definitely feels like a vehicle to showcase how much of a bastard man killer Murakami is, he’s the real star of the whole thing. Ishikawa in particular sold really really well for his offense, probably because Murakami was legitimately beating the shit outta him. Carl Malenko is also an interesting case in the match because he does some decent looking holds and also sells pretty well for both Murakami and Nagai. Murakami knocking out Malenko for the finish and the post match scuffle between him and Ishikawa which led to multiple wrestlers coming between them looked great. Don’t know much about the “lore” and Cagematch doesn’t necessarily help me but I do hope this led to some kind of big match between the two because that’s what it felt like.

Daniel Makabe vs. Brett Ison - TWE Nightmare on Dayton Blvd (10/23/2021)

One of my favorite sub ten minute matches to ever exist, should honestly be talked about in the same reverence that KENTA vs. Ricky Marvin (which I’ve reviewed) has because I think this is just as good, if not better. Makabe’s one of those wrestlers that I never feel like I see the same match twice out of, it’s a personal goal in life to watch and write about every match of his that has ever made tape now. The match is centered entirely around the clear difference in styles both men exhibit, Brett Ison’s brute strength and Daniel Makabe’s technical genius and its class. Brett clearly does not have ANY of Makabe’s submissions and counters out of all of them, even just telling him to get up when Dan clearly is trying to bait him into something. Brett’s facewash getting countered into some kind of leglock is genuinely something that I don’t think I've ever seen done before and I'm quite honestly shocked I haven’t seen anybody else pick that up? Go out of your way to watch this if you have some time to kill, it’s definitely worth it.

Erick Stevens vs. Myung Jae Lee - C4 Underground Championship - C4 A Fistful of Dynamite (09/19/2025)

This is one of Erick Stevens’ first matches back since going on hiatus again in 2022, and he’s going against a guy who I’m kinda hoping starts to break out in the States someday soon in Myung Jae Lee. It’s a really solid veteran vs young guy bout, with Stevens getting to play a decent old man bully and drop him on his head a few times. Myung Jae Lee also shows a lot of heart in this as well and I love the visual of him being busted open at the mouth(?) during some really good looking comebacks. The commentators definitely fanboy over Erick, and, by extension old school ROH but it doesn’t really get annoying at any point. Love the finish of Erick’s Sarasota Screwdriver getting countered into a Small Package rollup, too. The younger wrestler getting to outsmart an old grizzled vet and whatnot. Dunno how long this Erick Stevens run is going for, but i’m a fan of how much he’s been able to mesh well with the current indy generation from what I have seen. Hope I get to see him live one day before it’s over.

An Introduction To The (Ian) Rotten Archives, I Suppose.

It’s about time that I dust this off once again. I have to apologize really, my 2025 has been all over the place and while I meant to do more with this I earnestly kinda forgot about the blog for a while. That’s on me, that’s my fault. I plan on doing more with this blog whenever I can, especially as I actually do the thing I've been meaning to do for ages and put more focus on wrestling for my now-main YouTube channel. I wanna try and actually get at least one or two videos out on my YouTube before the year ends (because to be honest with my mental health, this year's probably a wash in terms of content), and then hopefully in 2026 I'll be able to really lock in I guess.

Anyways, it’s time for me to introduce a new project.

I’ll be completely honest in saying that I don’t really know a terribly massive amount about IWA Mid-South, a lot of my experience comes from the latter half of the promotion’s existence (2020-2022) which includes the moment where Jake Crist burned their World and Light Heavyweight Championships due to multiple instances of not getting paid by Ian Rotten, that also led to IWA hopefully ceasing operations for good, and in general learning about a lot of the various other incidents that have happened over the years that i’m not really go over here, (Really, with how infamous Ian is, it would probably take a simple Google search to find at least most of them) PLUS some various matches sprinkled in such as Eddie Kingston vs. Chris Hero from 2007 which is quite honestly one of my favorite matches of all time. So, because I have severe problems and I love turning anything at all possible into content, I've decided to start a project I'm currently calling The Rotten Archives. The name is a work in progress, obviously, but is inspired partially by snowboiiii’s 2005 watchproject where he watched every single wrestling show that occurred in the year 2005, and also by @MarilynOfDeath who is watching every CZW show ever. I also want to give a quick shoutout to Tom Green for his video on the 2004 Ted Petty Invitational (which you should check out, he’s really cool) as that was part of the inspiration for why I went with IWA. I will choose a completely random year of IWA:MS to watch and review every single show that has made tape that I can even FIND, talking about what I do and don’t enjoy from it in hopes of… well, to be honest, I don’t really have much of a goal with this. I guess you could say to fully understand the “lore” and “mythos” around IWA Mid South, but honestly I thought it would be funny to do this one night and it’s stuck around in my brain like a mildly catchy song. I’m still really trying to figure out how I'm gonna format this, there’s a high possibility that once I finish a year I might make a big YouTube video compiling everything within the year and talking about it but it really depends on how I'm personally feeling. There’s also a high chance that I could expand this into other indy companies if I get bored of just doing IWA:MS, hence why the title isn’t an “official” one. Hell, everything’s kinda just a complete crapshoot work in progress and I won’t fully know what I'm doing till I really get into the whole meat and bones of it, soooo…. I mean, I dunno, I hope you guys can understand?

To decide WHAT year I’ll exactly be watching I put a bunch of years that were available on the “Sugiura Holdman” VK channel (IWTV does not have a complete archive, I also do not have IWTV currently) on a wheel and spun to find out that i’ll first be watching 2005. A year featuring both a mildly interesting TPI lineup (some of the members pictured above) AND an interesting KOTDM lineup, AND Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, AND a War Games match from the vague look I had on Cagematch! It’s honestly probably not the WORST choice I could’ve gotten? I will begin this project very soon, in the next couple of days and posting updates alongside hopefully gifs/clips of my watchthrough progress on Twitter and Bluesky (@emmosWRLD/@emmosfunnywrld respectively).

There's a total of four shows in January 05, most of them being over two hours so i'm gonna have a crapload on my plate. I hope you guys will be as entertained as I will be with this. Hopefully I'll have the fuller details of what ENTIRELY I wanna achieve with this soon.