10 Best Wrestling Matches Of 2023
4. Bryan Danielson Vs. Ricky Starks - AEW All Out
A great match makes you feel something. A great match makes you feel, drawn to its spell, that what you are watching is real.
Bryan Danielson Vs. Ricky Starks was a masterpiece of a stipulation match. Less was more; they primarily worked with just one weapon, and in Danielson's hands, that weapon was more deadly than any exploding bomb or knife board. He beat the hell out of Starks. It bordered on the harrowing.
Starks, in a match that was the making of him, fought back. He leathered Danielson over and over. Danielson faltered. And then he stood back up, face to face with Starks, and hit him so hard, repeatedly, that it was as if he was trying to remove several layers of skin from his face. In that glorious moment of pro wrestling violence, Danielson turned the audience into a monster consumed by bloodlust. In an era of wrestling with rather too much friendship, the Dragon - without one single overdone cliché - brought back the hatred.
You didn't want "tables" watching this. You, a sick bastard, wanted Ricky's beautiful head on a spike.
Spoiler alert for a 38 year-old film, but at the end of George A. Romero's Day Of The Dead, the antagonist, Captain Rhodes, is torn in two and disembowelled by the zombie horde. The look of pure horror etched over his face is ghastly - and Starks mirrored it as he lost consciousness when Danielson choked him out at the finish. This somehow didn't look corny nor out of place in the context of a wrestling match; Danielson wrestled with such lethal frenzy in a video nasty of a match that Starks playing it like a cinematic death scene was only apt.
The match was crafted, and brilliantly, to tell the story that Starks couldn't be defeated, only killed - but it didn't feel crafted. It felt more real than any unreliable memory from your days as a young fan.