What do you take with you into a cage fight? You only get one backpack. Do you bring thumb tacks? A bomb? A snack? Another wrestler scrunched up real small? A Nintendo Entertainment System?
How about…all of the above?
That’s what one team did last night at Forbidden Door, All Elite Wrestling’s latest PPV event, during a 12-man steel cage match between two teams of six guys each, both of which consisted of several different smaller teams smashed together in various alliances of convenience. To understand what happened, all you really need to know is that Kyle Fletcher, Kazuchika Okada, and Kevin Knight are on one team, and Kyle O’Reilly (sorry, yeah, it’s two Kyles), Mark Briscoe, and Orange Cassidy are on the other team.
Orange Cassidy (my personal favorite wrestler) is known for, among other things, lugging a Jansport backpack around with him, in which he tends to store any championship belts he’s recently won. Occasionally, he puts other things in it. For this match, he appears to have convinced his entire team to bring Jansport backpacks loaded up with useful items for the fight. Orange, for example, let his friend Willow pack his bag, and she provided a Ziploc full of orange slices as a snack for the team. Mark Briscoe brought thumb tacks: useful. And Kyle O’Reilly had a Nintendo Entertainment System complete with controllers and a “game.”
This whole sequence is great. O’Reilly appears delighted to have found the classic console. He passes one controller (like a good buddy) to Briscoe, and proceeds to wallop Okada with a second controller while Briscoe goes for Knight in the back corner. Over on commentary, Tony Schiavone remarks that it might be worth a lot of money (probably not, and certainly not in the state it’s about to be in), while the villainous Don Callis (also on commentary) coolly calls O’Reilly a nerd.
Briscoe and O’Reilly then regroup in the middle, which gives Fletcher the opportunity to get in a few kicks, but it doesn’t last long. The two teammates stretch a controller cable between them and use it to clothesline Fletcher directly onto the NES on the floor (giving Callis an opportunity to call the NES a “piece of garbage”…shut up Don Callis!!). O’Reilly produces a cartridge for the NES—it’s unclear what game it really is (Pro Wrestling?) but it seems to just be labeled “AEW”—and loads it in. Unfortunately, he blows on it first, which suggests to me that someone needs to pull all these men aside for a conversation about caring for retro tech. Then, after pondering it respectfully for a moment, he smacks Fletcher upside the head with it. Fantastic!
The presence of an NES in the ring isn’t really a normal thing, but it also doesn’t shock me. Many wrestlers are massive nerds, and I have almost no doubt that the NES was the delighted idea of one of those gentlemen involved in that altercation. O’Reilly and Briscoe seem genuinely gleeful about the violent nostalgia trip, though I do think they could have done more damage to Fletcher if they had brought a GameCube instead. Heck, I got into AEW originally because I kept seeing pictures of incredible video game-themed signs held up at events, a robust tradition that continues at AEW to this day including at yesterday’s PPV:
Man, I love wrestling.