Jim Cornette has praised the mask versus mask match between Chad Gable and Ludwig Kaiser at AAA, calling it great and refusing to tear it apart.
On his podcast with co-host Brian Last, Cornette said, “I’m not going to take the piss out of this thing. It was great,” he said, before breaking down why.
Cornette credited the atmosphere and a hot crowd, arguing the Mexican audience has been protected in a way that keeps fans invested in the match itself rather than spectacle. “They still have wrestling fans that like to get into the wrestling match,” he said. He said the performers were turned loose to be athletes and to “simulate a fight, an athletic contest, a mixture of the two.”
He contrasted that with what he called the dominant American style. “All we get in the United States these days is either the WWE big match, big show, big star style, where you’ll get a 10 minute stretch where they’ll do 30 or 45 seconds of action, culminating in one of the stunts, and then they’ll sell for a minute and a half.” He said the AAA match avoided the opposite problem too. “They also didn’t do what you get in AEW or the indie-minded wrestling of the world, where they just do every move like they’re in a video game and don’t sell any of it.”
The result, Cornette said, felt like wrestling. “I said that was more like wrestling than what we see today.” He praised the pace as a fight rather than a stunt show. “It was more of a struggle still than a stunt show. They did their stunts, but it didn’t overwhelm the thing.”
Cornette was struck that two performers who are not luchadors could carry a lucha main event. “Neither Gable nor Kaiser is Hispanic. Neither one an actual luchador, but they worked enough of the style with the athleticism and the dives and the moonsault. It translated, it worked.” He argued the match proved a universal point, that a personal issue a crowd understands travels across styles and cultures.
On commentary, Cornette praised Corey Graves, suggesting Graves could call AAA on his own. He was less impressed with JBL. “He was trying to take up for the heel too much,”
Cornette framed the whole thing as a rebuke to the modern American scene, taking swipes at both WWE’s TKO ownership and AEW’s Tony Khan, and arguing fans can no longer get “logical, sensible wrestling with guys that can work” in the United States. He summed the match up simply. “This again was just lovely.”
Cornette also walked through the post-match, in which Gable cut a promo, turned babyface and was unmasked alongside his son. He explained the lucha tradition behind it, noting that an unmasked wrestler is expected to announce his real name, hometown and age to the crowd, a ritual Cornette traced back to the early days of masked wrestling. He said Gable identified himself as being from Minneapolis and acknowledged the Mexican fans and culture in defeat.
Co-host Brian Last, who said he raved about the show beforehand, called it the best match he had seen all year and credited the performers along with AAA’s booking team of The Undertaker and Jeremy Borash.
Source: Jim Cornette’s podcast with Brian Last. h/t WrestlingNews.co.
