50 Worst Wrestling Moments Of The 2020s (So Far)
2. One Final Beat
The two men who walked into this match were never the same afterwards.
Usually, that is a WWE cliché designed to build up anticipation ahead of Hell In A Cell (even though someone like Randy Orton has worked, like, 50 of them). In this case, it’s actually true. Not because it was so brutal - but because it was so excruciatingly awful.
This was a match so singularly pathetic and self-indulgent that Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano, a SmackDown TV ladder match aside, were never over at the main event level again. These guys had wrestled what was thought at the time to be a classic WWE match, at NXT TakeOver: New Orleans. People actually debated, in April 2018, if it was better than Bret Vs. Austin.
One Final Beat - the enforced cinematic closing chapter - was not better than Bret Vs. Austin. It wasn’t better than DX Vs. The Brothers of Destruction because that match had one redeeming quality: it was funny. One Final Beat, with its nauseating camera cuts and dour acting and total lack of a sympathetic character, was not funny. It was not emotional. It was not entertaining.
One Final Beat was closer to drinking cement than it was watching a wrestling match; when it was done, when they’d stopped lying down for nearly an hour, when they’d stopped grunting and moaning and motioning to reconcile and crying and questioning their very soul, there was simply no more room to ingest anything these pretentious men, banished to quiet TV match hell thereafter, would ever do again.
A teary Candice LeRae kicked her husband Johnny in the balls. She hated him for what this obsession had made him. Ciampa realised, in that moment, that it had all gone too far. “We can fix this,” he said softly, before LeRae kicked him in the balls and Johnny revealed he was wearing a cup. That moment was unintentionally funny. That is one redeeming feature. But even Candice knew these self-indulgent geeks were going long, otherwise she wouldn’t have waited three hours to interfere.
One Final Beat was the most tedious, self-important, pompous contest ever performed under the broad classification of professional wrestling.