That Was Then, Is This Too? 01.26.10: Kings Reign Supreme – The Heroic Return Everyone Expects?

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments:

At the Ring of Honor Final Battle 2009 show, one of the rare highlights was the reunions of one of the most dominant independent wrestling tag teams of the past decade: The Kings of Wrestling. After having spent almost three years apart, Claudio Castagnoli and Chris Hero jumped the Briscoe Brothers after the latter team’s title win over the American Wolves, hitting Jay Briscoe with their KRS ONE finisher before bailing. They would brawl again following the main event, setting the tone for the first tag team feud of 2010. Both men had spent 2009 as heels, but up until Final Battle, there were absolutely no signs that this team was reuniting.

Claudio Castagnoli spent the first half of 2009 in a midcard feud with Brent Albright. The feud started on January 30th when Brent Albright lost a match because he didn’t notice Castagnoli was in the ropes for his Crowbar submission finisher, causing the referee to disqualify him when he didn’t break at five. Afterwards, Castagnoli cost Albright an ROH world championship shot.

From there on the men spent most of their time feuding on the HDNet show, with Castagnoli picking up the win in a grudge match and Albright winning a flag match. On July 29th the two men had an atrocious European Rules match before finally settling their feud in a steel cage match, where Albright emerged victorious. During the feud Castagnoli also joined Prince Nana’s Embassy stable, which led to several multi-man matches that also involved Albright. For the rest of the year Castagnoli continued to work for the Embassy, although he wasn’t involved in any major feuds.

Chris Hero meanwhile didn’t exactly have a stellar 2009 in Ring of Honor. He started the year off by losing his manager, as Larry Sweeney left the wrestling business for personal reasons. Shane Hagadorn made for a surprisingly competent replacement, but of course he couldn’t hold a candle to Sweeney. It seemed that the once proud Sweet’n’Sour Inc. stable was now down to Hero, Sara Del Rey and the team of Eddie Edwards and Davey Richards, with Hagadorn managing them all. With the American Wolves off to dominate the tag division, Hero was left alone for a pretty lackluster singles run.

Luckily for Hero, Eddie Kingston finally made his fulltime debut for Ring of Honor, and the two man couldn’t run a lemonade stand without a feud breaking out. Soon enough the two were at each other’s throats, and they’d spent literally the rest of 2009 feuding, both on the DVD tapings and the TV show. The entire feud seemed to be based on Chris Hero’s allegedly loaded elbow pad, which had been scoring him knockout victories left and right, and which he claimed was a gift from Mitsuharu Misawa himself when he was training in the Pro Wrestling NOAH dojo.

Eventually Kingston ended up stealing the green elbow pad, but Hero retaliated by introducing a green one. The deeply violent ROH stretch of their feud would finally come at an end in their Fight Without Honor at Final Battle, when, after kicking out of a Ganso Bomb on the railing and the loaded roaring elbow, Kingston successfully put Hero away by stealing the golden elbow pad and hitting Hero with a roaring elbow of his own.

Hero’s night wasn’t over however, as, following the ROH world tag team title match, he reunited with former partner Claudio Castagnoli to lay out the Briscoe Brothers. With this heinous acts, we saw the reunion of one of the most entertaining tag teams in modern independent wrestling history. They seem all set to put an end to the Briscoes’ sixth run as ROH world tag team champions, but can the Kings of Wrestling reunion tour live up to their early exploits?

That Was Then…

The original Kings of Wrestling team formed in CHIKARA, at the 2005 Tag World Grand Prix. The two had been teaming sporadically in CZW and IWA-MS, but didn’t officially become the Kings of Wrestling until Chris Hero turned on his Superfriends partner Mike Quackenbush in the finals of that tournmanet to team up with Claudio Castagnoli and Arik Cannon. Even though Arik Cannon left the group later that year, they found new members in the up to then face team of Team F.I.S.T..

Although they formed in CHIKARA, the Kings of Wrestling would win their first tag team gold in Combat Zone Wrestling, beating the team of Toby Klein and Necro Butcher. They would hold the titles for just a day over five months before dropping them to the BLK-OUT team of Joker and Hero’s arch rival, Eddie Kingston. They would reclaim the titles, which were vacant at the time, in a one night tournament, but would lose them almost a month later to another BLK-OUT team.

The pair of Castagnoli and Hero would become the inaugural CHIKARA Campeonatas de parejas at the following year’s World Tag Grand Prix, beating the team of Milano Collection AT and Skayde. They would hold the titles for most of 2006, eventually losing them to fellow Kings of Wrestling pair Gran Akuma and Icarus. Team F.I.S.T. would hold the titles for nearly a year, finally losing them to Incoherence.

The team of Castagnoli and Hero would make their biggest impact in Ring of Honor, as the team was right in the middle of the CZW Invasion that threatened ROH for most of early 2006. Even though Hero was leading the charge for CZW, Castagnoli, who was a regular in the company at that point, promised he’d be loyal to ROH in stead of joining his friend. The inevitable betrayal came at The 100th Show, where Castagnoli turned on ROH to help the CZW team win a six man tag. They were both part of the Cage of Death match to settle the feud, and even though Team CZW lost the match, Hero and Castagnoli would continue to feud, eventually winning the ROH World Tag Team Championships from the Generation Next team of Austin Aries and Roderick Strong, who had pretty much singlehandedly pulled those belts out of the gutter and back into prestige.

The two men would dominate the tag division, but late in 2006 it was announced that Castagnoli had signed with World Wrestling Entertainment. In the span of about six weeks, they lost the CZW, CHIKARA and Ring of Honor tag team titles. It all fell through on Visa issues however, and when Castagnoli tried to reunite with Hero, he was kicked to the curb by Hero’s new manager Larry Sweeney. From that point on the two wouldn’t team up again outside the occasional tour of Pro Wrestling NOAH, where they mostly worked as a comedy team.

…Is This Too?

With Castagnoli leading his new Brüderschaft Des Kreuzes stable in CHIKARA and both men having left CZW since their Kings of Wrestling days, it seems that the reunited Kings of Wrestling will be doing most of their work in Ring of Honor, where the current tag team division has taken quite a few blows over the past few weeks, especially on the face side, with the team of Kevin Steen and El Generico breaking up and the Young Bucks joining TNA as Generation Me. In comparison, the heel side of the ROH tag division is burgeoning. Besides the reunited Kings of Wrestling, we have the American Wolves, the Embassy team of Joey Ryan and Erick Stevens, Rhett Titus and Kenny King and the House of Truth.

Things would balance out quite a bit with the American Wolves turning face, which at this point isn’t too unlikely. Still, outside of the Briscoe Brothers, it seems that there are very few strong face teams on the current ROH roster, and the company would do well to bring in more outside talent to fill this void, as it seems that the current roster offers very few viable long term options for makeshift teams on the face side of things.

And then there’s the question of management. Between the two men, we now have three potential managers in Prince Nana, Larry Sweeney and Shane Hagadorn. Larry Sweeney’s status with the company at the time of this writing is still unknown, but obviously he’d be my first choice. Prince Nana’s Embassy has died out quite a bit with the loss of Jimmy Rave, but he still has Joey Ryan and Erick Stevens, with Bison Smith as his occasional enforcer. Shane Hagadorn will probably manage the team only if Sweeney doesn’t return, although in that scenario it would be just as likely that the Kings of Wrestling use no manager at all.

In the end, I think the success of the new Kings of Wrestling depends entirely on the amount of strong competition that’s available to them. Unfortunately this seems entirely limited to the Briscoe Brothers right now, although a feud between them and the American Wolves after a face turn would be entertaining too, and would certainly make sense from a storyline perspective, especially if Sweeney returns as a fulltime manager. In the long term however, Ring of Honor definitely needs to be on the lookout for strong babyface tag teams.