Indulge me for a moment of gushing: I love, love, LOVE Zack Sabre, Jr. In an era where so much of professional wrestling is dominated by MMA-influenced strikers, high fliers, and the homogenous “sports entertainment” that WWE shoehorns multiple styles into, the ultra-technical wizardry of Sheppey's favorite son is a joy to behold. Look, my favorite wrestler of all time is Bret “Hitman” Hart—it stands to reason that I'd be crazy go nuts for a guy who can stretch dudes to a degree that would have made that crazy old wizard Stu Hart lick his lips and rub his hands together. Add in his leftist Labour politics and I'm completely twitterpated. He often walks to the ring to the chords of “Mother” by the band Idles, getting the crowd to chant “The best way to scare a Tory is to read or get rich.” Heck, his real last name is Eatwell and he's a vegan. Eatwell! Its like he was destined to be the world's most annoyingly flawless man. And his pompous, arrogant heel character lets you know how perfect he is at all times.
Over the past year, while I've finally dived head first into the deep end of the New Japan Pro Wrestling pool, I've gotten to enjoy watching ZSJ stretch the hell out of guys like SANADA, Tomohiro Ishii, and one of my other favorite NJPW boys, Tetsuya Naito. But it was during a YouTube search of his opponent here where I stumbled across this gem from a Knights of Columbus in Brooklyn.
I've been hearing the name WALTER for several years now, and to my eternal shame, I didn't get a chance to take in any of his work until his NXT UK debut (I joke about WWE, but let's be real, there hasn't been this much quality wrestling in WWE on the whole since, well, ever, so it's hard to break out and invest the proper amount of time in the indies when you also have a day job and two bands). But his NXT UK work hasn't shown too much yet, so this past weekend I took some time to look up highlights of his recent independent work. Which brought me to this match from EVOLVE 99.
ZSJ and WALTER have crossed paths several times in their careers, which is right and logical for two European indie journeyman superstars. As teammates, they've held the tag titles in Germany's wXw, and as enemies, they've become familiar with each other all over the world. But this match in Brooklyn from just over a year ago is early on in a series of singles matches these two engaged in all across the independent scene, starting with a white-hot encounter in October 2017 across the country at PWG's All-Star Weekend. That match was given the elusive 5-star rating from Dave Meltzer and featured an arrogant ZSJ taking the role of pigheaded David vs. WALTER's sick-of-your-shit Goliath. Sabre, convinced he can match WALTER blow-for-blow (or at least, convinced that he has to prove he can), absorbs an absurd number of the Austrian's already-legendary chops, gets suplexed from pillar to post, and certainly holds his own, hitting solid kicks and many of his signature holds before trying to tie WALTER up in his signature European Clutch neck-bridge pin, only to fall right back into a Gojira Clutch sleeperhold and immediately tap out. What's fun about this rematch nearly three months later is how the two men, across the country in another promotion, build off their earlier contest, callback to it, and build on it as chapter two of an ongoing series, which, now with WALTER in WWE, is on indefinite hold.
