June 12th, 2008:
Motor City Machine Guns vs. SpeedMuscle
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Tag Teams Going Steady

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A seven minute undercard tag match and the deep seated emptiness it evokes. Naturally.


 WHO?: Motor City Machine Guns (Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin) v. SpeedMuscle (Masato Yoshino and Naruki Doi)
WHEN?: TNA Impact! #207, 6/12/2008
WHERE?: Universal Studios (The Impact! Zone). Orlando, FL.
SHOULD I WATCH IT TOO?: Got seven minutes to spare?
LINK?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXYujuN71B4 (Uploaded by SAWrestlingEire)


 Okay, so it’s a summer night in the former ECW Arena. It’s a Ring of Honor television taping in Philadelphia and Jay Lethal is in the ring verbally sparring with the current champ, Matt Taven. Taven’s reign has, not entirely of his own fault, been a symbol of decline for ROH in 2019. Ring of Honor’s had a handful of short stretches lauded as gold standards for in-ring work and rabid audiences, but I can’t really speak to those while I browse shots of empty seats on Twitter. I was largely absent for most of that. But I am here now. Well, not literally - I’m about two miles away watching on a laptop in my bedroom. 
Music I don’t recognize begins to play, and the two men in the ring are cut off by the surprise appearance of Alex Shelley. Isn’t he a tag team guy? Shelley had hinted at retirement a year prior and vanished. He stands in the entranceway, looking razor sharp in a three-piece suit, and delivers a very strong promo laying out his claim to a title shot. He cites a figurative punch card, with a hole punched for each of his seventeen years of duty. He intends to cash it in. “If you don’t think that my fingerprints are all over wrestling in every corner of the globe,” he says, “then you’re not thinking hard enough.” That’s true, or so I’m told.
Shelley’s legacy, along with that of Motor City Machine Gun partner Chris Sabin, only seems to gain value as his presence diminishes. Their tag work on national TV is regularly brought up as an early and major influence to the spot-heavy, fast-paced tag team style of today. The Young Bucks - the very faces of the movement - credit them constantly; there’s lore of CM Punk trying to get Ricky Steamboat to watch their matches on a flight; and they even receive a shout out from Excalibur during AEW’s inaugural Pay Per View, Double or Nothing. The only problem is, I missed all of it. 
When I watch this match, I feel something akin to an intense FOMO. Kind of like a fear of having already missed out, like I’ll never really know because I wasn’t there. I was twenty one years old, touring in a punk band, and I don’t really recall having the capacity to care for much else. The match is part of the TNA World X Cup, an international competition within their high flying junior class, the X Division. The 2008 World X Cup is this fantastic time capsule of folks I’d come to care about a great deal close to a decade later. Had I made room in my life beside the domestic light beers and imported heavy guitars, I’m fairly certain this would have been my shit. 
Wrestling eventually came back like any bad ex does. This time you swear it’s going to be different; you’re mostly watching Japanese stuff. You don’t want your friends to know what you’re doing at night, you keep it off social media and you begin to forget all the ways it wronged you. Then, before you know it, you’re plunking down fifteen dollars a month for Dragon Gate’s barely functioning subscription service and just like that you’re in too deep again. I got hooked in hard by Dragon Gate and no one gripped me more than Masato Yoshino. When you watch Yoshino pick up speed running the ropes for the first time, it’s difficult not to tense up in fearful anticipation of the pending collision. In gobbling up as many of his matches as I could find, I’m introduced to the dynamic he shares with his terribly untrustworthy friend Naruki Doi - the muscle - who he now leads the faction MaxiMuM with. 
Watching the two of them tag together is indicative of the system they’re borne of; Dragon Gate’s tag matches have a pace and fluidity I’d never really seen before. It’s the sort of thing that makes detractors shout about contrived synchronicity and a total lack of “ring psychology”, but I’d argue that in a fantasy scenario where combat is largely dependent on finding shit to bounce and leap off of at high speed, odds of success are contingent on team synergy. Also, it kicks ass. I still don’t think creative tag team offense exists anywhere the way it does in Dragon Gate. Still, whenever I want to talk about my new favorite niche tag team, I’m met with an all too familiar refrain: “The old stuff is better.” 
In this match SpeedMuscle are the foreign heels by default, and their stretch of offense grabs the audience immediately. They sprint through their signature tag spots in a way that doesn’t feel so much forced as it does imposing. One of their greatest hits is Doi performing a drop toe hold to tee up the opponent’s face for impact with a running Yoshino’s foot. Here, they both go into motion so quickly they leave a millisecond margin for error, and with an intrinsic awareness of the other’s every move, ace it before soaking up Impact Zone jeers. In Alex Shelley’s episode of Colt Cabana’s Art of Wrestling podcast, he talks about being a fan of Toryumon, the precursor promotion to Dragon Gate. He goes on to specifically mention the Toryumon offshoot, T2P, where Yoshino and Doi first came to prominence. “The first time I saw that I was like, ‘This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen’,” he says. I can relate, and the influence is apparent whenever he and Sabin start heating up.  
Mike Tenay, a very familiar voice, is one of the two men on the call. During the Monday Night Wars I was completely enamored with the WCW cruiserweight division. I would get bummed when their portion of the show ceded to the lumbering WWF castaways, trading fingerpokes of doom and the like - even while I was wearing an nWo shirt. Tenay would steer me through it all. Would the same curiosity have sparked listening to him detail Doi and Yoshino’s history in and out of Dragon Gate the way it did when he’d shepherded me through Jushin Liger’s match with Rey Mysterio at Starrcade ‘96? Would my growing propensity for contrarian bullshit lead me to claim these small undercarders as my own, the way I had Psycosis and Ultimo Dragon, or the obscure bands I’d found on handed off compilation discs?  
Maybe I’d have already been made aware of them from their own stint in Ring of Honor two years prior. In 2006, ROH’s contribution to Wrestlemania weekend, the inaugural Supercard of Honor, exposed an American audience to a relatively standard Dragon Gate six-man tag for the first time and they responded. Meltzer slaps five stars on it, ROH main events the same event the following year with an attempt at a sequel, and we’ve got a new model for the American junior tag match. Doi and Yoshino share a side with CIMA, who led the way for these Ring of Honor/Dragon Gate crossovers. Back then, CIMA would have won me over on his entrance theme “Me Gusta Cola” alone.

Alex Shelley lifted his surname from Pete Shelley, the primary singer and songwriter of seminal UK power pop band and punk rock forefathers, The Buzzcocks. I adore the Buzzcocks; “Autonomy” is one of the first songs I ever played on a guitar (and as an aside, to this day I think it would make an incredible entrance theme). If you looked up a video of this match, you might first notice its runtime. The match is listed as seven minutes, but feels even shorter. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 2009, Shelley addressed the length of matches in the TNA X Division:


The way I look at is a real fight can end in a minute or it can end in 25 minutes. I mean how many boxing matches have you seen that have gone 90 seconds? How many have you seen that have gone 10 rounds? From a creative standpoint, you just try to make the most with what you're given. So if I'm given a piece of paper and I'm given three colors and I'm told to draw this landscape that has a multitude of colors, then I'm just going to do the best I can with what I have.
And didn’t his namesake have a reputation for brevity? “In the 60’s when I started listening to music, everything was good tunes done in about three minutes,” Pete Shelley told blog Brightest Young Things, “which fit perfect with my short attention span.” Neither is drawing from the precise areas we associate them with; if anything they’re both working from necessity, whose familial ties to invention we are all aware of. They’re both laying important groundwork. 
After a Shelley flatliner to the corner followed by a fun Chris Sabin hot tag, SpeedMuscle takes control back and Yoshino starts to roll. He catches Sabin in a gorgeous reverse tarantula in the corner (which I can name correctly thanks, again, to Tenay) and shortly after it appears he’s going to land one of his signature Torbellinos, but Shelley gets in the way. From there the Machine Guns perform each attack until the match’s end in tandem, including a timely counter to a Doi intrusion, before finishing off Yoshino with dual superkicks. It’s remarkable really; most of what I’ll try to convey to you in 2,000 words, they get across here in six and a half minutes. 
Things will later culminate at TNA’s Victory Road pay-per-view in two matches to decide the World X Cup. The first is a twelve man elimination tag, where Yoshino will lose his two partners early and still endure until the match’s climax: an extended showdown with Shelley. The two take center stage in a match that undoubtedly steals the show - 4.25 from Meltzer, a red hot crowd, and an enduring reputation as a banger, all acting as the curtain jerker. For me, the 2008 World X Cup is like checking Instagram to find your friends have all been at brunch without you - for years even! Except in this scenario, your friends are TJP, Christopher Daniels, Alex Koslov, Milano Collection AT, Averno, Volador Jr., Frankie Kazarian and at the head of table, Ultimo Guerrero raising the roof vigorously, not spilling a single drop of his bottomless mimosa. 
During his hiatus from wrestling Shelley would appear on the podcast Journey of a Frontman where’d he shout out the numerous bands of guitar hero John Reis. One of those bands, Hot Snakes, opens their 2002 record Suicide Invoice with a song called “I Hate the Kids”:

Grab a spade
 Get in the dirt
 The older you get
 The less you're worth
Shelley would eventually get that title shot in a losing effort against Matt Taven this year at Ring of Honor’s Summer Supercard, in a match I actually did get to watch live. What it seems to most be remembered for, is a front row oaf who literally drinks himself unconscious. Shelley’s a year removed from a wrestling ring, and Chris Sabin is nowhere to be found. The crowd starts chanting, “wake him up!” The match itself begins to fade into the background and this man’s televised nap has taken the show hostage. But Shelley is a seasoned vet, and he’s got a plan to salvage this bout: he ganks a shoe right off of the sleeping dude’s feet and uses it to attack Taven. 
I want to see you hit the market full force. 
Welcome back, Alex. 
Masato Yoshino on the other hand, never went anywhere. He still sits at or near the top of the card in Japan, and he still performs like he belongs there. He and Doi still dust off the old act from time to time to squash a couple heels, and they haven’t drifted too far from the guys eliciting gasps on tape a decade prior; a little slower, carrying the considerable weight of elder statesmanship. That seems pretty alright, but think for a minute. Offscreen, Yoshino is an integral part of the Dragon Gate front office today, apparently heavily involved in booking. He’s an authority figure now. You know what that means, don’t you? 

Dude’s a fuckin’ cop. 

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Alex Shelley appears on episode #379 of The Art of Wrestling. You can Google it, but I can't find an official link, so instead I'll link Colt's Patreon where he's hosting the entire run of the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/coltcabana



"Autonomy" by the Buzzcocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK9YtcSA1Rs

"I Hate the Kids" by Hot Snakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ktf-Y3pg60

As a bonus, here's SpeedMuscle v. Ultimo Guerrero/Rey Bucanero from the same World X Cup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXMGxkcHz-0

If you’ve somehow found this, please feel free to comment and let me know what you think of the match, the blog and any suggestions/requests for matches in future entries. 

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