Weekend Wrap-Up: Where's My Bloody Ring?

Danielson's Whirlwind Indie Tour Is Drawing to a Close

- The big events of the weekend took place in Chicago and Milwaukee as Dragon Gate USA invaded the Midwest again, featuring Bryan Danielson's two penultimate matches in the indies before his morphing into Daniel Bryan becomes 100% complete. The Chicago event saw him close the card in the non-PPV main event against YAMATO, which I'm hearing was a phenomenal match. Also being reported is that Ricochet more than held his own and in fact may have had his coming-out party, teaming with CIMA against the team of Naruki Doi and Masato Yoshino.

The card in Milwaukee was a bit snake-bitten. The doors opened at 2PM, but the ring didn't even get to the arena until 2:15. Yikes. Apparently, there was a "personal issue" with the ring guy the night before. I couldn't find a report to the proceedings from the Milwaukee show, but the highlight of the card here was Danielson taking on Jon Moxley.

- Tyler Black made his final indie appearance Friday night, defending and losing his AAW Tag Team Championships with Jimmy Jacobs to the House of Truth. Now, he can continue his morphing into Caleb Downer unfettered in the swamps of Florida before moving on to NXT Season 4, to be shown on WWE.com if he's lucky.

- TNA did something pretty old-school last week. They had Jay Lethal drop the X-Division Championship to Amazing Red at a house show in New York City, Red's hometown. I got a little bit livid at this at first, thinking that Lethal's reign as X-Division Champ had just started, but Red dropped the title back to Lethal in his hometown of Rahway on Friday night. You can criticize TNA a lot, but having title switches on house shows, especially to reward guys in their hometowns, is pretty cool. Contrast that to what the WWE does for guys in their hometowns, mainly embarrassing them, jobbing them out and in the case of Jim Ross, making them kiss Vince McMahon's ass (literally), it's a stark contrast. That is one of the things I hate about WWE. They make people look like idiots in their hometowns or on their birthdays. Makes me wish that there was a company out there to compete with them so they couldn't pull this bushleague bullshit. And no, TNA isn't that company because they aren't competition.

- Matt Hardy apparently either has come down with dissociative personality disorder or he's trying to work somebody by pretending he has it. Who would he be trying to work? I have no idea. If Hardy were a dog, he'd have been put down by now. Since he's not, I take back what I said about laying off him for being fat and out of shape, since he's clearly being all attention-whorey and stupid in trying to get his release from WWE. At this point, if I were TNA, I don't think I'd want to go near him with a 10-foot pole, but then again, this was the company that willingly hired Sean Waltman, so who knows anymore.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography

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