(5) Devon def. Joseph Park
Rating: D+
Please don’t take the above rating to mean I didn’t enjoy this match; sometimes it’s not about the technical aspect, but the story being told. There were a few typical Impact Zone “marks” in the crowd that just had to cheer for Devon, but the majority of fans sided with Park as he attempted to combat a true veteran of the industry.
To be fair, Chris Parks the man/wrestler/actor is definitely a veteran in his own right. I’ve said this before, but it shouldn’t go unnoticed how exceptionally talented this guy is. It takes skill to pretend to have no idea what you’re doing. The Joseph Park character has been shockingly entertaining since its inception. The weekly OVW video packages were often hilarious, and served to get his story across on TV while taking up a minimal amount of the broadcast. Overall, I love the angle and I wouldn’t mind seeing Park become a semi-permanent extension of his character.
That being said, part of the low rating must be attributed to the fact that we’ve seen almost this exact same match several times before. Park gets beaten up and outmatched by a “real wrestler”. He hits a few moves to pop the crowd, but ultimately it’s not enough. In the end, he gets busted open, sees his own blood, and transforms into the Monster, Abyss. Black Hole Slam connects, but the momentum isn’t enough to finish the match; ultimately Park snaps back to reality and loses as a result. We have seen this way too many times for me to find it captivating. What made it harder to go along with was the strange lack of blood that triggered his change. Maybe it was my set, but if there was any blood on that man’s face, it was invisible to me.
At the end of the day, Aces & Eights gets another win, which is never a bad thing for them at this point. They need any amount of momentum they can get their hands on. As I said earlier, adding Ken Anderson to the team would be a huge step in the right direction. But this win only gets them so far; technically, Devon beat up a fat guy with 3 weeks of OVW training. As a fat guy without 3 weeks of OVW training, I can pretty definitely say that we’re not hard to beat up.
