Sup Nerds?

An exploration of all things great about CHIKARA through the eyes of one of their most underrated talents, "Mr. Touchdown" Mark Angelosetti.

I am a CHIKARA guy.

There is just so much charm about the entire operation. They aren’t afraid to try things, and when they do try things, they lean all the way into them. Is it an insanely dorky promotion of mostly little white guys doing mock lucha? Absolutely. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s just another ring to the circus of professional wrestling.

I’ve wanted to cover a CHIKARA guy on here for a while, but there’s just so many great options. They’ve got some generational talents, like The Colony or Quackenbush or Eddie Kingston, but all of them feel too acknowledged for me to add a lot of analysis too. They have some incredibly fun guys like 3.0 or Chuck Taylor or even someone like Dasher Hatfield, who will get a lot of coverage in this article. However, there is one man who always stood out to me in CHIKARA when I first started following the promotion.

That’s right. It’s Mr. Touchdown. Mark Angelosetti. He’s a fascinating wrestler for a variety of reasons. On the surface, you might improperly think that he’s a goofball undercarder from CHIKARA history, where there have been multitudes of goofball undercarders before him. But on closer inspection, he’s really the perfect thesis for the whole promotion; tonally bright and silly, to be sure, but never losing technical prowess or legitimate pro wrestling logic in pursuit of that vision.

If you couldn’t already tell from the Tebow pose and the cheerleader and the actual football, Mr. Touchdown is an 80s football jock parody gimmick, complete with all that entails. He runs through a hand-drawn piece of paper sign before his matches. He comes to the ring in full pads with a helmet on. His offense is littered with football references, from shoulder tackles to up-downs that he turns into body splashes to a general dumb athlete demeanor that permeates through his matches. It’s an absolute master stroke for a gimmick, mainly because they lean fully into it (like CHIKARA always does!) It’s the kind of thing that makes me hate that WCW went under; there’s a world where a guy like Mr. Touchdown could’ve made millions as a Barry Horowitz-style Saturday Night worker who always had a good time and put over the upcoming talent. However, what we do have is a collection of great matches where he displays a staggering amount of capability to play any role you need him to. He can brawl in the house style, he can grapple with the best of the best, he can work shtick-heavy character-driven matches, but most importantly, he can always find a way to be entertaining.

I watched 26 Mark Angelosetti matches and 17 of them were great enough to get a review. Welcome to Touchdown City!

The Throwbacks (Mark Angelosetti and Dasher Hatfield) vs 3.0 (Shane Matthews and Scott Parker) (CHIKARA Caught In The Spider’s Den, 2/26/2012)- GREAT

This is the first key look at Angelosetti and the Mr. Touchdown character and he is greeted with two of the most perfect foils any new act could ask for in 3.0. They are absolute shtick machines the likes of which are rarely seen in the modern era and embody the house style of CHIKARA better than almost anyone else, which make them a perfect sort of gatekeeper to welcome in new talent. Mr. Touchdown is a theater dork’s idea of what a football player is like, particularly one theater dork that runs the company whose last name rhymes with Thrackenmush. He’s an aggressive oaf who calls everyone a geek and is too dumb to see a brick wall in front of him. He’s arrogant in a high school letterman sort of way. He doesn’t understand why he has to take his football helmet and pads off before the match starts and keeps threatening to tackle everyone. In typical CHIKARA fashion, they lean fully into this gimmick with the offense he brings to the table. It’s a lot of shoulder tackles and spears, plus a really cool thing where he starts running routes and doing spin moves to avoid your usual irish whip counters. Dasher comes in and he’s a whole different beast entirely, starting off as this proper sportsman old-school grappler type and devolving into a little maniac. He and Matthews, the future Daddy Magic, trade insults back and forth from world-famous The Sandlot (1993) culminating in a massive hockey brawl and pull-apart. For the last five or so minutes of this, it’s a really good Southern-style tag where Parker gets stuck with Angelosetti doing essentially Goldberg-style spots before landing a perfect spear tackle of his own, giving Matthews the hot tag, and picking up the win over the greenhorn bully. It’s a perfect little thesis not only for Mr. Touchdown as an idea, but also the whole spirit of CHIKARA at this point in time; sort of post-peak but still pumping out really interesting stuff with a talent roster full of future TV stars. This was probably specifically targeted at me to some extent, but it worked in spades. TOUCHDOWN! (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Colt Cabana (CHIKARA Aniversario: A Horse of a Different Color, 5/19/2012)- FUN

More character exploration from Mr. Touchdown with another excellent personality foil. Right from the jump, this is more intentionally a reactive routine on the part of Cabana; Touchdown says he can bench 350 and Cabana says “oh, you’re SOOOO cool!” Cabana has a football background and is willing to lean into the joke a lot more than 3.0 were, even if the in-ring results are not as lucrative. He knocks the football out of Touchdown’s hands and yells FUMBLE before securing the ball outside of the ring. A giant game of keep-away breaks out for a prolonged period of time, which essentially amounts to Cabana matadoring Touchdown around the arena, playing off the dumb jock character he fits into. We also get Bryce Remsburg refereeing here, which makes the antics involving him more enjoyable. The three of them start dropping into drills that end with a roll-up from Cabana getting two. The rest of this is pretty standard Cabana fare; he’s past his athletic prime and unable to execute the moves like he used to, but he knows where to hit the beats and how to lead the youngster to something solid. I wish Cabana would’ve been slightly more giving to Touchdown, but that’s probably personal bias more than anything. Fun way to spend ten minutes or so.

The Throwbacks (Mark Angelosetti and Dasher Hatfield) vs The Young Bucks (CHIKARA Give ‘Em The Axe, 7/29/2012)- GREAT

A nice little character flesh-out for Touchdown in his best match yet. The pre-match promo tells us that a rift is starting to form between Angelosetti and Dasher after Angelosetti has started to take more liberties with the rules. Dasher tells him that he has his eye on him and he cannot break any rules tonight or he will be out of the team and out of CHIKARA. As a result, we’ve got a pretty cool babyface performance from Touchdown in the face of the ultra-hateable Young Bucks near the absolute peak of their powers. Matt and Touchdown in particular are absolutely electric against one another; Matt turns the tables and keeps calling Touchdown a dork and he does not take too kindly to it. Dasher and Nick are the floatier guys of the team but keep things really fresh and lucha-y in the land of Quackenbush. The shtick towards the beginning plays off of each other perfectly; both teams are super dorky but The Throwbacks are so much more honest by comparison. Angelosetti is a surprisingly competent emotional core of this thing too! He pinballs around for the Bucks and takes some crazy spills to the floor, plus he gets admonished by Dasher for trying to cheat and ends up eating the first fall. He gets back on course and fights back to even the score, before eventually succumbing to one of the best tag teams in the world. It’s incredible how much he does not feel out of place here. He’s athletic, capable, and very fun to watch. A perfect plug-and-play guy for a match like this and tonally perfect for CHIKARA. (****)

The Throwbacks (Dasher Hatfield and Mark Angelosetti) vs Team FIST (Chuck Taylor and Icarus) (CHIKARA To Benefit Baseballtown Charities, 8/12/2012)- FUN

This was at the Reading Phillies stadium at a rare outside show for CHIKARA and it’s an absolute blast of a brawl. We get the usual Team FIST opening shtick here, making fun of Icarus’ back tattoo and Chuck Taylor wiggling around all goofy-like. Things devolve into something more serious when Chuck Taylor gets a baseball and decides to pitch to Dasher, pinging a heater right off of his back and leading to a big fight. Angelosetti isolates Icarus and takes him into the men’s bathroom, giving him a swirly and yelling “FIVE STAR!” into the camera before slapping Icarus in the back. Touchdown also comes out eating a hot dog. A perfect sort of wild stadium brawl, for CHIKARA standards. A real crowd-pleaser.

The Throwbacks (Mark Angelosetti, Dasher Hatfield and Matt Classic) vs Team JWP (Command Bolshoi, Kaori Yoneyama and Tsubasa Kuragaki) (CHIKARA King of Trios 2012 Night 1, 9/14/2012)- FUN

Another super fun and sort of goofy tag team match. They don’t do as much with Angelosetti, outside of some fun shtick where he huddles the guys up as the team captain to regroup. They are really working the Dasher/Touchdown tension here; Dasher is this proper sportsman who is taking it easier on the joshis and Touchdown wants blood. Matt Classic is more in the Touchdown camp and is absolutely hilarious here. He is noted on commentary to not be into the whole progressiveness behind men and women wrestling each other and he’s also sporting a knee injury given to him by Ed “Strangler” Lewis. There’s some nice double-team moves and a sweet moment where Tsubasa Kuragaki finally gets Matt Classic down with a shoulder tackle. Simple and sweet wrestling with a bit of story continuation and a nice showcase for fresh talent. Pretty much the ideal version of a King of Trios match.

Mark Angelosetti vs Mike Quackenbush (Wrestling is Fun! Hasta Banana, 9/29/2012)- GREAT

Hoo, boy. A look at Main Event Mr. Touchdown! Quack is such a perfect partner for a jock parody gimmick like this, given that he was likely the brain that developed the gimmick and he himself is America’s biggest nerd of all-time. Quack wrestles this like he was trying to get back at all of his bullies from high school with tricked-out llave and comes out like an absolute bat out of hell. Lots of really sweet leg work here that Touchdown sells fantastically, really slowing down his natural athleticism and making him think a lot harder before his normal lizard-brained style of offense. There’s legitimately one of the greatest crumple sells I’ve ever seen here where Touchdown goes for his backflip out of the corner and cannot quite land. Quackenbush is still extremely outgunned in terms of power and athleticism and no matter how much he slows down Touchdown, there’s still a significant amount of hill he has to climb. It’s a classical kind of Touchdown finish here too, with a nice referee distraction into a baton shot to Quack’s midsection leading into the Flea Flicker. Quack has a gripe but gives Young Touchdown the singles match of his life thus far. Sweetness. (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Green Ant (CHIKARA Deep Freeze, 10/6/2012)- GREAT

This was a vast improvement on their first match from Wrestling is Fun and really goes to show how much Angelosetti has improved in his time in CHIKARA so far. This is more Main Event Mr. Touchdown worked in a very similar vein to the Quack match, but with a little bit more of a burden on Touchdown to carry the personality portion. Green Ant is the submission specialist of The Colony and gets to work a much grittier and nastier style than Quack’s flashier llave on Touchdown. Mark is a bit more of a spaz here, playing into the angry jock character and getting outsmarted by Tracy early and often throughout the match. Lots of sweet ankle lock transitions and nasty holds that eventually give way into a bubbling bombfest fronted by Angelosetti, who unloads a shockingly deep bag of offensive tricks including a superplex with an especially crunchy landing. Green Ant responds with a absolutely filthy pop-up Michi Driver that obliterates Mr. Touchdown, but we get more of that signature sauce on the finish, where Bryce gets distracted and the baton comes in. However, this time, the baton gets thwarted but the football helmet comes in and absolutely brains Tracy for a Touchdown win. This was worked a bit more aggressively than the Quack match and falls just short of it, given a little bit too much dead air, but it was nice to see such a marked improvement from the first match.

Mark Angelosetti and The Batiri vs Mike Quackenbush and The Colony (Fire Ant and Green Ant) (Wrestling is Fun! The Allentown Potassium Massacre, 10/27/2012)- GREAT

More super fun and solid wrestling, this time in trios action. The Batiri have never been my favorite and they are pretty much just hired guns for Touchdown and are not super involved. What we get instead is Touchdown getting to play off and match up with three of the best wrestlers in the company and three of my favorites ever, bar none. And he steps up to the plate! The Quack interactions have a specific kind of aura to them but The Colony pulls an immense amount of weight as well as the ultra-babyface fighters in the face of Touchdown. It all devolves into one of those big AAA-style move chains where everybody hits something and then a bunch of dives and it’s all just a complete breeze to get through. Genius booking too, where the baton comes in and gets thwarted before Quack hits the QUACKENDRIVER III for the win on Touchdown to set up his title rematch. Everything was quick, easy, and done with the biggest emphasis on having fun, which is the very thesis of the entire promotion. Very rarely is something this perfect within the bounds of promotional walls like this is. (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Mike Quackenbush (WIF! Bananaversary, 11/17/2012)- GREAT

Sort of a perfect counterweight to the first title match. We start off with an amazing video package that is shot like the peak New Japan stuff, complete with the filter and everything. Quackenbush cuts a promo in the video that ends with a STUNNER on Touchdown, which was absolutely insane in all the best 2001 *you think you’re special* sort of way. Unfortunately for Touchdown, Lightning Mike is using his stroke to make sure that no funny business happens in the title match and brings out Dasher Hatfield as the special enforcer to keep any interference out of the match. Unfortunately for Lightning Mike, Touchdown immediately grabs a hold of his arm and destroys it with all of his might. He buzzes the feet and hits the up-down splashes to the elbow. He rows it against the ring post. He shoulder-tackles the injured shoulder repeatedly and really big dogs Quack around. Quack has always been great at working his way back from behind, getting to lean into the more floaty Liger-style stuff that he likes to do, especially in his older age. Touchdown is no all-time great base or anything, but he’s more than capable of hitting his spots when he’s in there with SUCH a professional like Quack. It’s shocking to see someone as outwardly charismatic as Touchdown in an extremely goofy way be this incredible in a control segment this early in his career. Another notch in the badge. (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Soldier Ant (CHIKARA The Cibernetico Rises, 11/18/2012)- FUN

This was another blast, but maybe not to the level of the other Colony member matches. Gulak as Soldier Ant is in a bit more of a goofy mood tonight and also loses an antennae in the match, which is very funny. Everything is performed well and everything, but it’s more of a paint-by-numbers sort of affair from both of these guys. However, it is incredible to see Angelosetti already able to hold his own with someone like Drew and work a crowd like this with such a limited amount of time under his belt with this gimmick. He’s outstanding and people need to know.

Mark Angelosetti vs Fire Ant (Wrestling is Fun! Feliz Banavidad, 12/29/2012)- GREAT

The Colony trifecta is finally complete, and it’s everything it should have been. Fire Ant, the future Orange Cassidy, is a generational babyface and works exactly the way you would want him to against Angelosetti, who is clinging to the Banana Title territory-style through acts of thievery. Angelosetti is unleashed in this match, working the crowd into a stupor early on by joining them in the seats and sarcastically clapping for Fire Ant before berating a young fan wearing a mask of his hero. Fire Ant approaches the boy and lifts him up Simba-style and we’re off and running. They stick to a faster pace, which is a welcome change of pace that places this closer to the Quack matches than the outings with Drew and Tracy. Angelosetti is a natural athlete in a way that complements Fire Ant really well; he once again doesn’t quite base but instead just uses his power and strength to create movement and offense in places that smaller men couldn’t. Fire Ant nearly touches the ceiling on a crossbody attempt. Finish is more of your usual Touchdown shenanigans, but we’ve got an added wrinkle now. In one of the most high school moves possible, Touchdown and his lovely valet girlfriend are in the middle of a big ol’ fight in the lead-up to his no-DQ match with Archibald Peck and as a result, they’re not quite on the same page. Mark is working REALLY hard to impress her with his strength and holds and she is not even looking at him. It’s the pettiest, most high school soap opera Degrassi bullshit of all time but in this moment and with these people, there’s nothing that makes more sense. If you’re going to make a high school bully football jock character, it’s little details like this that stand out as exceptional bits of realistic character background that really add to a match and a gimmick as a whole. And that’s one thing that CHIKARA has always gotten right. (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Archibald Peck (CHIKARA All the Agents and Superhuman Crew, 2/9/2013)- FUN

The moment they’ve sort of been building to for most of the run is finally here. Back in June, embroiled in a feud with the Throwbacks, Archie lost a Loser Leaves Town match where Touchdown pinned him after Veronica, his then-girlfriend left him for Touchdown. Since then, Veronica and Touchdown have been happy together until recently when Archie showed back up and wanted revenge. That set up this No DQ match, serving as an effective blowoff to Archie’s banishment and Touchdown stealing his lady. Archie is, of course, a marching band character, adding an additional wrinkle to the whole melodrama by featuring the age-old band vs sports rivalry. This is a very fun plunder brawl with a lot of callbacks to the feud at-large. Archie gets out the old Mixed Martial Archie gloves and goes to town on Angelosetti for a little bit. Archie hits a D’Lo Brown-style splash with his pads on. Then, things get perfectly CHIKARA. Earlier in the feud, Touchdown killed Archie’s feral pigeon, Sapphire, with the up-downs splash. As the match is progressing, a trainee wheels out the injured pigeon in a wheelchair. Touchdown puts Sapphire into the falconry bag and tries to finish the job he started, but Archie makes the save with a nice low blow. He pulls out a fake pigeon and straps it to his knee and hits a GTS-type of thing for a big nearfall. Archie returns to the back and gets a big bass drum. Veronica comes in with the baton and there is a struggle over the weapon, which results in Veronica pleading with Archie not to hit Touchdown with it. Touchdown charges in for a shoulder tackle and accidentally hits Veronica, which the commentators give an 8.5 on the Chris Brown scale, which is crazy. Staggering back, Archie plasters Touchdown with the bass drum and puts his marching band hat on for a diving headbutt and redemption. Big blowoff brawl and once again, Touchdown finds a way to make it an attraction.

Mark Angelosetti vs Eddie Kingston (CHIKARA The Ghost of You Clings… 5/4/2013)- GREAT

Another big marquee CHIKARA name that Touchdown just crushes. Eddie is fully formed and in fantastic form here. About two minutes into this, Eddie jumps off the second rope for an ax handle and tweaks his knee, leading to extending leg selling, the strongest of all of Eddie’s suits. Touchdown doesn’t quite give a full limb-based control segment like in the second Quack match, but it’s enough of an open wound to give him something to reach for when things get tough. As a result, it’s a super sweet match that lets Touchdown hang around with the biggest star and most protected act in the company for a long time. It’s also a classical Eddie sort of bombfest, with tons of lariats, heavy striking, and suplexes. Eddie takes an absolutely BRUTAL head drop right into the ropes on a backdrop driver. Full of fighting spirit, Eddie finally gets the position and nails the Backfist and a uranage to pick up the win. Once again, it’s Touchdown in something that would seem out of his depth on paper and really stepping up to the plate in a big way. The homegrown soldier is fighting a war for his own pride against a fellow warrior and it’s just the sort of stuff you never would expect to work this well. (****)

Mark Angelosetti vs Drew Gulak (Wrestling is Cool Best Served Cold, 12/8/2013)- GREAT

Touchdown goes grapplefuck. This was everything you want from a Drew Gulak match; relentlessly tight grappling, breathless transitions, a grounded but intense kind of dirt-under-the-fingernails fight. Gulak hits all of his beats, of course. He’s quick to flex his old-school 70s grappler muscles with a locked-on headscissor or a big body slam. However, once again, the surprise here is how well Touchdown takes to the whole thing. He’s not some world-beater of a llave master or anything, but he’s surprisingly capable in the CHIKARA lucha-style grappling that Gulak has always played well with. He straps on a surfboard at one point and is more than game to work an armbar or a top wristlock. The real magic here is in those little moments where the real Touchdown rears his head. In any match against someone as particularly stylized as Gulak, there is always a sort of Different Style Fight energy. Football vs 70s Grappling is a very compelling matchup and Touchdown tries his best to still hit his spots. However, those moments end up costing him big time, as Gulak plays a high-floor low-risk game and capitalizes each time. Also, there’s some surprisingly great rib selling from Gulak here? Just an astounding match on all fronts, wrestling in an aggressively white room with one row of fans on each side. Excellent. (****)

Mark Angelosetti, Shane Matthews, Archibald Peck and Ice Cream Jr. vs Ashley Remington, Dasher Hatfield, El Hijo del Ice Cream and Scott Parker (CHIKARA Moonraker, 10/26/2014)- EPIC

Woo-hoo! If you ever wanted to try CHIKARA and never have before, I can’t think of a better thesis statement for the promotion than this. This match was gimmicked to pit all the tag team partners against each other and shenanigans obviously ensue. Angelosetti is sort of in the background here, but we do get a little bit of tension between him and Dasher and him and Archie following the conclusion of their feud. 3.0 are on fire early here, refusing to fight each other in increasingly creative ways. Ashley Remington and Archie fight over the finger guns, resulting in Bryce Remsburg getting shot and dying, before doing the Undertaker sit up, Old School, and tombstone piledriver. The Ice Creams are bright and colorful goofballs. There are some cool dives. There are some moves. But everything is just done in the pursuit of fun. It’s impossible for me to not think this is absolutely incredible. Legitimate Hoot of the Decade contender. (****1/2)

The Throwbacks (Mark Angelosetti and Dasher Hatfield) vs The Devastation Corporation (Blaster McMassive and Max Smashmaster) (CHIKARA Tomorrow Never Dies, 12/7/2014)- GREAT

I would be comfortable calling this the most momentous match Touchdown has been in up to this point. The Quack stuff was taken very seriously in a way that was funny and fitting for the time, but the crowd is into every single thing here in a way that doesn’t always happen in CHIKARA. Devastation Corporation are the rising top heels; a couple of big boys in Legion of Doom makeup who do a lot of cool 80s squash match offense. Our boys are the champs and they are tasked with defending the company from the new heels. There’s also a new sense of seriousness to both Dasher and Touchdown here that we haven’t seen before. A lot of the sillier stuff is going out the window in wake of the moment in front of them. They take the fight right to the Corporation as the bell rings too, both guys just springing into action. We have a pretty standard CHIKARA shine segment; a couple of mirroring armdrags and dropkicks, but then Dasher gets caught up on the outside and Touchdown is in there all alone. I do not say this lightly, but this is a career selling performance and one of the best in the history of CHIKARA from Touchdown. He has been the power advantage guy in a lot of his matches with the legion of skinny dorks employed by Quack, but he has never been this outgunned. He shows all the fire of Kikuchi, all the tricks and lunging for help and frustration and desperation of Ricky Morton, and it all just bubbles out of him so naturally. He gets cracked with the Midnight Express Veg-O-Matic splash from the top and loses the first fall. The heels stay right with him and as he mounts his comeback, you can feel the Wrestle Factory come alive. He throws elbows wildly, he claws his way out of bearhugs, scampering away to the corner and working as hard as he possibly can to get over to Dasher. There’s a great spot on his way to the tag, a mini-comeback, where one of the Corporation members runs full speed to do a splash and Touchdown just perfectly pops him up into a HUGE spinebuster and the crowd goes crazy. Dasher finally gets the tag and it’s all business from The King of Swing. He doesn’t touch the bases; he goes straight for home plate with a big sliding dropkick. He fires up with some good punches of his own. Corporation regains control and hits the Veg-O-Matic on Dasher but Touchdown storms back into the ring and breaks up the pinfall with a combination of his own to steal the second fall and equalize the match. The third fall gets a little bit too ambitious but they leave it all out there, and the people in the building are really excited to see it. McMassive hits a HUGE tope con hilo to wipe everyone out. Touchdown gets caught back in the Veg-O-Matic but Dasher uses the position to step up off of Touchdown and they combine to hit a top rope 3D onto the other Corporation member setting up for the splash. Bakabella interference prevents that from getting a three count and Angelosetti finally gets his hands on the weasely manager, ripping his wig off. In the meantime, Dasher gets thrown out of the ring and Touchdown gets teed up for a crazy Burning Hammer/Elbow combo thing, which gets a three and the titles are switched. It’s a nice finish that parallels Touchdown’s own hide the weapon shenanigans nicely, but this was such an endearing babyface performance from Angelosetti. Another role that Touchdown fits into impeccably, and even if it got a tad ambitious, a really heated and smartly-contested affair. (***3/4)

Mark Angelosetti vs Drew Gulak (CHIKARA The Ocean Walker, 10/10/2015)- FUN

This was decidedly lesser than the Wrestling is Cool match but this was sort of an abridged version of much of the same story. In a similar move to the Quack rematch, this match sees Touchdown take a more aggressive role in taking things to the mat and him and Gulak really chop it up, with Touchdown getting much of the early advantages. We get some nice neck bridges from Touchdown and Gulak offers his hand as a sign of admiration and respect. Gulak then proceeds to do a rope-walk arm ringer around two sides of the ring and then gets tossed off the top. Touchdown wins with a spinebuster thing. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.

As with my previous exploration of a lost indie great, it is only fitting that I give Angelosetti the same treatment that Our Hero Big C received with a case for his greatness.

Mark Angelosetti is the greatest because he understands the magic of pro wrestling. It’s an art form, structured not on producing the highest amount of “great” matches you possibly can or making the most money, but on invoking a reaction of the people in attendance. Never has an indie wrestler been more suited to be a heel in a promotion than Mr. Touchdown, the high school football bully, in CHIKARA, the haven for the nerdiest pro wrestling fans on planet Earth. And it took a real genius to connect the dots on that one. He’s the greatest because he stays in that gimmick, with all of its faults, inside those ropes. This character is not a particularly smart guy. He’s not supposed to be and that’s not the point. He’s a football player who is wrestling and as a result, he wrestles exactly like a football player who never learned to wrestle but is confident that he could do it. I know, because I was a football player, and I’ve known hundreds of guys exactly like Mr. Touchdown. It’s a magical experience when a gimmick is so perfectly portrayed and EVERYONE on wrestling television today (except for probably one guy who wrestled Angelosetti back in the day, I’ll let you connect the dots on that one) could take a few notes from how Touchdown puts his matches together. Do what suits the gimmick first and then what suits the people in the building second. Everything else is a fruitless endeavor. Pro wrestling is about a connection between audience and performer that is not shared by any other medium. No one elicited more natural hate and earned more natural sympathy from this era of professional wrestling in front of his specific fans than Mr. Touchdown. And he’s someone that everyone should check out.

Once again, thank you for reading another installment of WHITE CASTLE OF FEAR. If you have any suggestions for future wrestlers for me to deep-dive, feel free to leave them in the comments below on Twitter or Substack. Professional wrestling criticism and analysis needs to be weighted in a constant pursuit for more knowledge about the deep cracks and crevices of this great sport and I am always looking for new ways to be challenged. Stay tuned for our next installment where we tackle the legendary figure known only as Kikutaro. Happy hunting.