Pretty sublime performance from the Destroyer. As far as heelin' it up goes you'll struggle to find many better examples of it from the era, or maybe any era. It was sort of masterful how he had people agitated just from his body language and complaining about every little thing. He didn't need to make physical contact with Baba or outright cheat for you to know that this was not a particularly pleasant man. Then when they did make contact he acted like the shithouse we all expected. He couldn't get anything to stick and Baba had his number early so that only made him more frustrated, which he demonstrated by bitching about mask-pulling that clearly never happened. When he manages to actually tie Baba in a hold for a second he gets right to cutting corners, bending Baba's fingers at disgusting angles, biting them behind the ref's back, choking Baba with the free hand when ref' checks him on the biting then kneeling with his shin across the throat during yet another conversation with the referee. Everything was a discourse, everything needed an argument and everything made him outwardly belligerent. It actually would've been MORE conducive to doing underhanded shit if he'd just shut up, but he could never help himself. It's simple enough stuff but he's so natural with all of it that you really want Baba to crack his jaw and really that's the whole point at the end of the day. And Destroyer is great at even delaying that payoff because he'll never be above just ducking out the ring to avoid one of Baba's big boots. The build and escalation was excellent, basically. Escalation in this sense was how they moved through holds and kept milking and teasing key things, getting closer and closer to landing them each time. For Baba it was that boot, while for Destroyer it was the figure-4, which he explicitly brought up before the match even started as his route to victory. He went for it several times and got jammed on each attempt, Baba rolling through on the early attempts and chopping him in the throat on the late ones, before it finally stuck at the very end, just as the time limit expired. They ran through a solid chunk of holds and rarely went back to any of them, always finding something new after their previous gambit ultimately proved unsuccessful. They almost worked the holds in blocks, got what they could out of them before moving onto something else, but it never felt like it was done in a haphazard way. Even Beyer's cheating had escalation as he finally got fed up enough to use a foreign object, first by jabbing it in Baba's eyes and hiding it in the trunks. Then when he'd reached the end of his rope he loaded up the mask and split Baba open with those headbutts. I loved Baba just trying to rip the thing off him towards the end because at a certain point what else are you supposed to do? Both guys really sold the toll of everything, the exhaustion of working 30, 40, 50 minutes and beyond at a stalemate, and by the end Destroyer was almost walking around with his eyes closed while Baba's face was covered in crusted up blood. The longer it went the more of a scene Destroyer's entourage on the floor caused as well. I don't know who any of them were, two in cowboy hats and waistcoats, another in a suit smoking a cigar and the suit jacket was on and off every other minute. The latter was up and down like a yoyo and after Baba picked up the first fall Destroyer had to tell his boy to calm it before he wound up getting disqualified. In the last 10 minutes they get properly involved and one of the cowboy fellas holds Baba's leg over the bottom rope so Destroyer can jump on it. That was another really cool moment of escalation because Baba had managed to avoid it all match. Honestly, I think the French Catch stuff has halfway ruined a lot of other matwork and grappling from this era (or really every era) and I can't help but compare things like this to that. The actual trading of holds and complexity of movements here will never really match that, but the beauty of this doesn't entirely lie in the holds themselves as opposed to the slow build and escalation and rampant cheating and the desire it INSTILLS in us to see someone get their ears boxed in. Or maybe that's all wrestling in a nutshell. I guess this was good.
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