The first thing I did when I was 14 and got my first part-time job and my own debit card was to get a Netflix subscription. This was back when subscribing to Netflix meant getting discs in the mail, and as a burgeoning young movie buff, I wanted to have access to any DVD I could get my hands on.
Soon I realized that Netflix could be used to help me with another obsession: pro wrestling.
Soon my queue was filled with WWE DVDs and other compilations where I furthered my wrestling education. One of my issues was that while Netflix had plenty of WWE and TNA DVDs, they didn’t carry DVDs from Ring of Honor and other independent promotions, and having not yet mastered the art of torrenting, I was pretty much left with whatever matches I could find on YouTube and the occasional purchase from Smart Mark Video.
Around this same time period (probably around 2009 or 2010) I remember talking to an indie promoter I ran into and I mentioned that I was a huge fan of flying wrestling and said that Rich Swann was in my humble opinion “the most athletic wrestler in the world.” He shook his head and smirked at me and said, “Man, you haven’t seen PAC then.”
I had heard about PAC, “The Man That Gravity Forgot,” on the internet, but at the time I wasn’t savvy enough to figure out how to watch his work in Dragon Gate or on the UK indies. In a lot of ways PAC was the last wrestler who would remain somewhat a mystery to me–I couldn’t see him even though I was really interested in seeing his work, unless he appeared in one of the promotions I had easier access to.
Eventually, I found a DVD that Netflix had available, PWG Sells Out. This was part of a series of DVDs that Pro Wrestling Guerrilla made, which were more widely distributed than their typical shows, and were compilations of the best matches in the promotion’s history. This was mostly matches from before they moved full-time to the American Legion Hall in Reseda, California, and featured bizarre commentary from Excalibur and others that was recorded after the shows.
The important thing was that nearly the entire third disc was PAC matches.
This, more than anything else I can think of, highlights just how transformative PAC was a wrestler when he first cracked on to the scene. You simply had to see PAC work in the wrestling ring, he didn’t just defy gravity, he defied belief. He did things fans had never seen before, never even imagined seeing, and did it with incredible athletic and artistic precision.
The DVD set contained all kinds of matches from the company’s history up to that point, mostly featuring the original local Los Angeles crew of indie workers. It had matches like Adam Pearce vs. Kazarian, Samoa Joe vs. Bryan Danielson, and (redacted) vs. (redacted). PAC actually didn’t have that many matches in PWG by the time the DVD was released, he made his debut with the promotion in 2007, the same year the DVD was originally published.
Yet PAC had five matches on the DVD set, more than Samoa Joe, Bryan Danielson, Kevin Steen, CM Punk, and anyone else except for El Generico.
PAC was just a kid at the time with just three years of experience, but whoever put the DVD together knew that PAC was someone who could sell DVDs, that he was the person the promotion wanted to push hard as the definitive reason to watch PWG.
What was it about PAC? PAC was not alone as a guy on the indie scene who was doing cool, high-flying moves.
There were a bunch of them in the 2000s and into the 2010s, and guys like Jack Evans (an early PWG staple) and PAC’s countrymen, Jody Fleisch, were doing crazy moves and flips before PAC came onto the scene.
The difference with PAC was that from an even early age, he had a level of intensity, physicality and athletic precision that set him apart from all of his contemporaries.
Jack Evans could do a lot of impressive flips and would take crazy bumps, but everyone that ever booked him understood he was an entertaining preliminary wrestler, not someone you’d toss out for work-rate main events that indie fans were interested in.
PAC was completely different.
He had more in common with Dynamite Kid or Chris Benoit than he did Evans or Fleisch. He was a nasty, aggressive menace that moved in, outside, and above the ring like an elite athlete. He could do anything you could imagine, and he did it perfectly.
PAC wasn’t a preliminary wrestler; it was recognized by how featured he was in that PWG DVD compilation, and it was recognized by every promoter that got a hold of him.
Whether that was various indie promoters, Dragon Gate, or WWE’s NXT, PAC was considered a major singles act, someone you could build a brand around.
The only person who didn’t understand that was Vince McMahon, which is really more of a compliment to PAC than anything else.
When PAC was signed to AEW, he could easily have slid into a role that saw him mostly in multi-man matches, a common placement for wrestlers under Tony Khan.
Instead, he was kept mainly as a singles act, proving to be an effective foil to Kenny Omega and later a valued member of the Blackpool Combat Club and the Death Riders. Could Evans, Fleisch, Matt Sydal, or any of those other high-flyers that hit the indies before PAC pull off being a member of those groups? I don’t think so, but PAC? He was perfect.
PAC paved the way for the next generation of elite workers who wanted to push the boundaries of high-flying while also being taken seriously as top competitors.
Ricochet, Swerve Strickland, and Seth Rollins all followed PAC as guys who wanted to do 450 splashes but also be world champions.
Obviously, Will Ospreay, who in many ways is PAC 2.0, is the most notable descendant from PAC’s tree of excellence.
PAC changed wrestling; he was a must-see attraction for indie wrestling fans, pushed the boundaries of what fans expect from their high flyers, and redefined what athleticism and body control looked like in pro wrestling.
There is only one PAC, and there only ever will be.
