Street Fight - The Greatest Match Ever
I have been summoned here to argue why Street Fight is the greatest match type that has ever been invented.
See, I am not blind. I know who my audience is. The regulars that inhabit this dungeon known as Columns Forum have years of experience in not only watching varied forms of wrestling but also in writing thought-provokingly on the same.
I, therefore, feel that it is an impossible task to convince you fine folks that The Street Fight is the absolute finest form of match type that has ever been invented. I am not even going to try that and insult your intelligence.
What I can do, however, is make a case for it.
There is literally no singular match-type that can carry the weight of the entire wrestling product on itself. A simplistic, regular match-type in Match for one fall has taken the unenviable task of carrying most of the load of the wrestling product, but it does not make the product special. What makes the product special is the variety that is involved in it. There are so many dimensions in the wrestling product that it puts any SyFy movie made in 3D to shame.
You want to just fill the time without thinking up much about it? You have One Fall match which is nothing but the regular bread and butter match. You want some comedy? Throw in a Tuxedo match. You want to arouse your audience for some weird reason? There’s a Bra and Panty match at your service. You want your audience to cringe? Put Kelly Kelly in a match against well, anyone.
It’s like Sex. Teasing, Caressing, Fore-play, the act itself, After-play etc. are all ingredients of the entire activity known as Sexual Intercourse. But the ultimate climax of it all is the Orgasm. You can’t really have Sex without experiencing Orgasm. And the Street Fight is the Orgasm of Wrestling.
More so, it is a female orgasm – it is rare. Street Fight hasn’t been as used as a Divas Battle Royale. It hasn’t even been slightly tainted like a Hell in a Cell Match or Tables, Ladders and Chairs Match because of annual appearances. It hasn’t been laboured out like Cage match either. It still remains a Special Attraction of sorts.
Any Stat-guy worth his salt would tell you, however, that what we must aim for is not Minimum or Maximum but simply put, Optimum. In order to be claimed as the best match-type of all, it not only has to be something that gets rarely used for a special occasion but at the same time, has a rich history to show off of. This is where it separates itself from the likes of Inferno Match or a Punjabi Prison match which have been used so scarcely that you wouldn’t even know that they exist.
The Street Fight was once used as a stepping stone to bring back to the forefront a former, retired and crippled legend in Shawn Michaels. The match was so satisfying that he gave us another eight years of a career which, if seen singularly, is a Hall of Fame career in itself. And who can forget about that one night when Triple H was ‘made’ by Cactus Jack? There are so many gems in the storied history of Street Fight which makes a strong case for why a Street Fight should be considered as one of the greatest match type, if not the greatest.
There is a reason why a Banana Milkshake won’t sell for all you have in your pocket in a Five Star Restaurant but a Cape Gammon Banana Shake would. Like every single Chef in the world will tell you, you can bring a unique combination of food items together, cook them in a certain special way, decorate the dish in the most attractive way but you haven’t won your customer’s money until and unless you name your dish artistically. The Street Fight is nothing but a No Disqualification, Falls Count Anywhere match but it has been given a different name so as to strike a chord with the masses, so as to give it a special meaning. It may not be the most extra-ordinary name that there is but it is a name which distances itself from the ordinary.
Wrestling is famously known as the male soap opera. It is the sports entertainment. The soap opera part of the wrestling is the feuds. Feuds may begin with a match, or a mere confrontation. They may last for only a week or a day or in some cases, they may begin with the Kindergarten and end with one of the two being buried (Example: AJ Styles Vs Chritopher Daniels). But some feuds last just for the right amount of time and culminate at the pinnacle of that feud. I earlier alluded to the Street Fight being the Orgasm of Wrestling and this is why – it is something that you can use to culminate, to end a feud.
The most recent example of such a feud would be the feud between Chris Jericho and CM Punk. It began with Chris Jericho claiming that CM Punk stole what was his, the feud then developed further and ended up being a very personal feud or in more attractive words, a blood feud. If we were to explain what a blood feud is in a nutshell – it is where we, the audience, are invested emotionally and heavily in.
To end such a blood feud, there needs to be a match that forces the wrestlers involved to go an extra step, to use their anger and desperation to produce something more emotional. The Street Fight allows them to do just that. It elevates the feud in that way and in most cases, raises the stock of both the wrestlers involved.
With that, I rest my case!
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