AEW’s Continental Classic gave us some great action and unforgettable images, but it also gave me a question: what are we really looking for when we want a clean finish? When we tuned into the C2, many of us were hoping for quote-unquote “clean matches” throughout: two wrestlers, one winner, no bullshit. That’s not exactly what we got. I think the most outrageous night was December 4th, a Dynamite, where we got two C2 matches and two dirty finishes. Certainly, it got criticism from Joe Lanza in his review of that episode. I was critical of the booking myself. What were we going to be getting, I asked myself, if we’re this early into the tournament and already getting screwjobs?
But why should it matter that there’s cheating in pro wrestling of all things? You might be thinking that now; if not, just go with it. After all, pro wrestling is all about heat, and cheating gets heat. Why not take advantage of that whenever you can?
People love ranking things. “Love” is probably not even the right word; people might need to rank things. It’s a major part of understanding the world: separating what you see into good and bad, better and best, most and least, etc. Marketers are well aware of the drawing power of lists, as an article from Neuromarketing illustrates; they cite psychologist Daniel Kahneman about our brains relying on shortcuts in order to work efficiently.
Though that article is about lists, it’s not just about those. I’m not saying “everybody loved the ROH Pick 6” (I did but, again). What I’m saying is that people want to know if A is better or worse than B, or if A is on a better track, or whatever. They want to be able to compare, not just for the fun of it, but also so they can understand better.
How does the saying go? You wouldn’t know what it is to be happy if you could never be sad? Maybe it’s not a saying, but you know what I’m talking about.
This comes back to finishes because when you have a cheating finish in wrestling, like when Kyle Fletcher held the ropes to pin Shelton Benjamin on that December 4 Dynamite, you can’t make any conclusions about whether Fletcher is better than Benjamin or not. Now, obviously, you can have your own opinion about which one is better regardless of what happens, but it’s easy to underestimate how much people in general take from the outcome of a match.
Think about it: if you have someone that you’d like to get over, why is it a better idea to have them win a lot than to have them lose? It’s fake anyway, right? Well, when someone keeps winning, it tells everybody that they are meant to be better than the people they beat. Even though it’s staged, that process and presentation has an effect. It gets people engaged. It allows people to feel confident saying yeah, this guy is actually better than everyone else, and it’s because he beats them.
Clean finishes are effective because they help you establish the pecking order. We’ve got that sorted out. So what is it that we’re talking about when we say we want a clean finish? This is the key question, I think, and it’s so important that I wish I could give you a definite answer but I can’t. It’s not possible. It’s more of a vibe, as the kids say.
What I can do is lay out the terms and discuss them so we can get a better understanding. First things first: why just a clean finish, why not a clean match? This is really a matter of circumstance, in my view. Usually, when we ask for a clean finish, I think what we really want is a clean match. The understanding is, though, that sometimes things happen in the match which might not affect the outcome: a heel grabbing the tights at minute 10 probably doesn’t have much impact on the finishing stretch at minute 20. So when we talk about a clean finish, I think we’re really talking about two things:
- A finishing stretch without anything that would put the outcome in question, like cheating or interference
- A match outcome that is not tainted by anything out of the ordinary (like cheating or interference)
Why do I split these apart? Well, like I said, if a heel tried a cheat pin at minute 10, it doesn’t really affect the outcome; even though you couldn’t really call it a clean match, you could still say it was a clean finish. If a heel instead took out a baseball bat and hit a homerun with their opponent’s head, that probably has a huge impact no matter how much longer the match goes, so calling it a “clean finish” isn’t really accurate. The important thing as far as being clean is not the finishing stretch itself but whether the match outcome was affected by anything other than wrestling skill and physical traits.
It’s difficult to say exactly when a “finishing stretch” starts in any abstract sense. Really, the idea of a point where the match starts to finish is more something that we as viewers put onto matches and less a thing that really exists. Of course, I’m not saying that matches don’t often have moments where they really pick up the pace or the violence. But it’s like the idea of story structure, right? We can use it to understand how stories flow but there are very few stories which come right out and say “This is the rising action”.
The type of “dirt” matters, too. If we’re talking about just pulling the tights or putting the feet on the ropes, that usually only affects a finish if it’s the actual pinning move. That baseball bat shot would affect the finish from any point. Distractions might be the best way to gauge what a finishing stretch is, whether that means actually clever sequences or the modern dopey deer-in-the-theme-song distractions. If you have a wrestling distraction at the beginning of the match, it probably doesn’t affect much. But towards the end, even if it’s not right at the end, the distraction tends to have a greater and greater effect on the match’s outcome.
So if I was being asked to come up with some kind of abstract definition of a “finishing stretch”, I’d say that it’s the point at which the match seems to become make or break, when a mild mistake or interruption or cheat can actually turn the match one way or another. Regardless of what happened before, this is when it’s critical for each wrestler’s skill to be measured, and that’s why it is so impactful for cheating to happen at that point.
I can’t go any further here without pointing out a fact: the Continental Classic had 78% clean finishes by my calculations. It was predominantly clean. Now, the dirty finishes were significant (nearly a quarter of the total), but this is comparable to the shenanigans even in New Japan’s last golden period with Toru Yano in the G1 Climax. The criticisms of the C2 booking were heaviest right after December 4, at least on the cheating front, and soon those complaints dissipated. The cheating didn’t really kill the tournament at all, if it even hurt it.
At the same time, there are matches which I called clean – such as Ospreay vs. Fletcher, or any of Darby Allin’s matches – which featured not only brawling on the outside but a lot of involvement from the barricades and the ring steps especially. By the broad definition(s) of “clean” that I laid out, these would be pretty iffy, because the events of those matches did throw the outcome into doubt. They’re normalized, for sure, but it’s not strictly normal. Darby Allin gets away with it because he’s small and because of his gimmick. For other faces, it’s tough to just start using the barricade maliciously and be taken to be a straight-up wrestler.
I’m not trying to pick on AEW to say that their tournament wasn’t as clean and prestigious as they made it out to be; I’ve said that other places. I bring up the idea of these matches being “semi-clean” because of what I said earlier: rankings. Stakes.
When we’re talking about pitting wrestlers against each other to see who is better – to rank them – the purest form of that concept is two wrestlers in the ring using nothing but wrestling moves. That’s the ur-clean match. When you get a match like that, what you assume is that you really have seen who was better, at least on this night, in this match. Every move you make away from that puts that assumption into more doubt. It adds confusion.
Confusion isn’t always bad. It’s vital, in fact. Confusion is heat. When Ole Anderson turned on Dusty Rhodes in the cage, it was all about confusion. Of course, confusion about why Ole had turned, but more than that, the confusion was just “what’s going to happen?” That’s heat. It’s when people are confused or upset in a way that makes them more interested in what’s going on.
So far, what I’ve been giving is my analysis of how things work. That is: what does a clean match accomplish, what is involved in it, why people want it. I’m going to end with more straightforward opinion. See, in what I’ve given you, I don’t believe I’ve pushed too hard into saying how such finishes should be used, or why my opinion is that clean finishes should be favored.
I support more clean finishes for two reasons, but I’m only really going to talk about the second one.
The first reason is that I like to watch wrestling action and I find wrestling is more compelling when it’s straight-up and clean, even though it should also be vicious and violent.
The second reason, which is important for this article, is that I think “heat” is meaningless if you haven’t built things up with clean matches first.
I’ve just said that confusion is heat, but heat isn’t the only thing that confusion can be in wrestling. It can also be something that I’ve given the catchy title of “non-heat confusion”. This is when things have gotten so confusing that even though people don’t know what is going to happen next, they no longer care. I don’t think this is a general thing, even in a promotion. One part of the show might create non-heat confusion while other parts don’t. However, once you’ve gotten to that point, I don’t think you can heat your way out of it again; you’re just making more NHC.
I think that using dirty, confusion-causing finishes best enhances a match (and a story etc. etc.) when we go on with clearly established stakes that are then confused. That way, viewers are invested in something they know and the level of confusion that has been created has a smaller chance of totally losing them.
The babyface is supposed to win in the end. You’re supposed to get that resolution. However, if you don’t really know what was at stake in the first place, how can you be engaged in the resolution? If you constantly hit heat heat heat thinking that you’ll just make things so hot it has no chance to go wrong, who has the chance to even think?
Step off the plane in Atlanta and you’ll be smacked in the face with heat. But people live there. You get used to it. c If you keep things at the highest temperature all the time, who notices the next hot day? You have to build the stakes and then apply heat. From my perspective as a fiction writer, this just makes storytelling sense.
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