Dramatis Personae

It’s important to acquaint the reader with me and make known the matters of my heart, especially in relation to this wonderful thing called pro-wrestling. I won’t say my style is unique or any of the other cliché things used to describe prose. A safer characterization would be that it’s a beautiful bastard of prose brought about by very different flavors of my existence. To start, I’m a successful Toastmaster public speaker with a national championship and a slew of regional titles. So there’s a certain annoying confidence in how I present my ideas, and I have a nasty habit of writing conversationally. I’m also a debater with a fairly decent body of work that has the accompanying gold to support my occasionally bullish and argumentative nature. So I’ve been trained to push and argue and push and be relentless with my ideas. I have a college degree in Creative Writing, but I’m also a law school graduate, so while I’m trained to write, the tough environment of law really trained me to be defensive. That very harsh and competitive environment also trained me to keep a lot of my softer instincts out of my professional voice, so I guess when I write you’ll feel two voices: the very clinical version of me and then the goofier side of me that tries to balance things out with more humane and light-hearted musings.

I’m not throwing these out to brag or impress upon you that I’m some higher being. No, far from it. What I’m doing is letting you readers know that this background and these accolades shape the way I express myself, for better or worse, and sometimes I come off as forceful, but I’m trying to change that and be more emotional and sentimental in my prose. It’s important to lay those things out because while I’m quite adept at communicating ideas due to being a public speaking champ, I also have this compulsive need to be correct or to sound correct, and that’s also a result of my training as a debater. So don’t be turned off if, whenever I discuss an idea or concept, it comes off as the definitive-est thing ever or very declarative. I’m open to being corrected, I just don’t sound that way. But I really am.

Perhaps, for all my fortunate and humble success, my most defining era now is how I’ve failed the Philippine Bar exam a bunch of times, in spite of the accolades I earned over the years. I’ve been taking this damn thing for a while now but I haven’t gotten it done, and a lot of my peers are moving up through the ranks while I’m still stuck at the doorstep.

Goes to show that life puts everyone in a heel control segment, at one point or another.

I was devastated ’cause of it. I’d never known a failure of this magnitude before. I mean, I didn’t win every single battle in life. I’ve had setbacks for sure, but I’d always lived in a bubble of comfort and reassurance. I wasn’t an academic scholar, so failing a class wasn’t going to cost me anything other than pride and some irrelevant narcissistic need to prove to people that I was occasionally the best. I was chill. Privileged guy with a healthy social life, a lot of different friends, and enough hobbies and little subcultures to keep changing character classes depending on where I was. But I couldn’t stop myself from getting depressed. I was such an emotional wreck. The pressure had gotten to me. My dad is a former Supreme Court justice, so failing for me was some David Flair type of bullshit. It was a small scandal. Nothing got me out of the dumps. Not comic books, not novels, not television, not friends, not partying, not films, not Warhammer 40K, not music, not even my girl.

But then my friends got me back into wrestling, and it turned out to be the thing that saved me from deleting myself.

There’s something about pro-wrestling that resonates equally with the meek and the mighty. We all know it’s fake, but we all treat it as real because, in doing so, we allow ourselves to hope that the world of good versus evil it espouses can become true and that everyone is due for some sort of babyface comeback. In my case, the rise and fall and redemption of wrestlers both in kayfabe and in real life appealed greatly to me. Seeing a babyface chase that elusive belt or seeing him in real life grind it out trying to get over or to hone his craft hit me something strong in the feels.

As with all my hobbies, my tendency to deep dive reared its snout. My natural starting point was WWE, as with most Filipino wrestling fans. Cody’s Finish the Story got me out of depression, and then strong booking in 2024 got me giddy about pro-wrestling again. After that, my cousin hooked me on AEW. The AEW universe, unlike WWE, makes callbacks to the lore of different companies, so naturally Bullet Club and the Elite were next for me. When I consumed even that, I wanted more. A friend of mine who is a smark (wrestling nerd) told me to check out our countryman, a distinguished wrestling critic named Joseph Montecillo.

That’s what ultimately led to The Middle Rope. This Montecillo fellow.

I tell you, I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for him. Truly, his work gave me some newfound identity outside of trying to be my father’s son and failing at it miserably. I invite you to read his work and watch his video essays. He has a brilliant mind for wrestling, and a love for it that is infectious. I went through his work and it taught me a distinctive language of appreciating pro-wrestling. With the research skills further honed in law school which is like Navy Seal training school for researchers, I spent a good chunk of 2025 absorbing wrestling knowledge. I started with Montecillo and then I started consuming all the other wrestling voices: Handwerk, BrockHatesWrestling, Segunda Caida, Kim’s Justice Road, Violent People, We Work Stiff, Pro Wrestling Time Tunnel, The Mat Wrestling, POST Wrestling, Jonathan Snowden, Tim Hornbaker, as well as traditional wrestling forums and Reddit. (This list is neither exclusive nor exhaustive, by the way.) These are all wonderful people who devoted their time and place

I decided that after my latest Bar attempt (hopefully I get it this time), I would devote myself to using my unique skills to write about wrestling in my own style and brand of thinking, with the end goal of humbly adding to the ever-growing canon of passionate fans who give a sense of intellectual curiosity to a cultural pastime unfairly associated with entertaining children.

So that brings us to:

Methodology

As to Form

First things first, I write long and deep into the woods. I try to trim my prose, but years of doing argumentative position papers and pleadings have honed me to leave no thought out. I try to mitigate the entry barrier by posting estimates of the reading times of my articles, but it’s more of a warning at this point. Also, if you can watch a twenty-minute video essay then you should do well to feed your mind with a fifteen-minute article.

Also, everything published here is written with the diligence of an aspiring lawyer. If there are errors in my research, feel free to reach out to me and educate me. Wrestling can be difficult to chronicle at times, so human fallibility is still present even with my due diligence. More importantly, I do not use artificial intelligence although that does not mean I judge fellow writers or content creators who do. I know it is a sensitive topic but I stay in my lane and avoid judging others.

Next, I’ve already mentioned the odd tonality I have. The discordant nature of my pieces reflects the sometimes contradictory tastes in my life. I’m a film and TV snob, but HBO’s Entourage is in my top five. I’m an avid NBA and golf fan, but I also have a Warhammer 40K army. I practice an organized religion, yet I believe that Cthulhu lies dead and dreaming. There’s more than this, much more. I have over a thousand comic books. I’m an avid reader of fiction and nonfiction, and Nikola Jokic is the best NBA player of the 2020s. Even the people in my life are a microcosm of my multi-identity, so expect my musings to be very geeky but also very jock-coded, intermingled with academic discussions of fake-fighting concepts.

Probative Value of Evidence

I have a strong habit of doing play-by-plays. The reason for that is my legal training in preparing case digests and executive summaries. I’ve been taught in law school that if you want to assert your point, you need to support it with evidence. When I do play-by-plays, it is me presenting the factual basis for a subjective analysis. I cannot talk about intensity or good bumping without referring to the physical sequences, and I think it makes for neater articles if I just describe the match as opposed to referring to the timestamp or making references that are vague.

Obviously, I’m not trying to document every Irish whip and fucking headlock. I describe what I think the argument requires. Also, narrating what happened makes it easier for less-seasoned readers to follow what I’m talking about. Like sure, the veteran fans know the classic matches by heart but it is very possible to have long-time fans who just watch the wrestling without really paying attention to the wrestling, and I don’t denigrate or gate keep those people because I used to be them. And maybe, in some ways I still am when compared to the great smarks in our fandom.

PG-Friendly Asshole Talk

I promise you there will be no racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or other discriminatory bullshit here. I don’t tolerate that sort of thing, and none of it is part of the heel act. I may market myself as an unhinged fucker caught between jockish and nerdish tendencies, but the abrasiveness is just humorous color and will always be tempered to capture the hot temper of youth but never its misguided leanings. Also, I cuss a lot. Sorry for that.

There is no room for chud-isms here in The Middle Rope.

If you feel that I’m being pushy or antagonistic, just remember that I’m arguing against an idea and never against the reader’s taste or preference. I come off as heelish, but it’s always with good intentions and it comes from a familiar place, which is the love of pro-wrestling. This blog was made to cater to both casual and seasoned fans, so there will be no shaming of fans with limited knowledge.

As to Substance

What do I look for in a wrestling match when I make my review? The truth? Plenty of stuff. You can read the nitty-gritty of it in The Work section. For purposes of transparency to the reader, I can sum it up with the following: offense, pacing, selling, ring positioning, connective tissue, character, narrative, plus style and context.

Offense has many facets, but striking and grappling are the chief ones I look at. I have some principles when it comes to striking. I’m not particular about sound or whether it looks pretty. I am particular about it looking real. A strike looks real when it actually lands on the person being hit. I see more and more grazing strikes or air punches in today’s wrestling, at least when it comes to American mainstream wrestling. Some wrestlers lean heavily on camera angles to hide missing contact, or they throw very soft kicks. I don’t mind presentation helping the illusion, but when the camera is doing most of the work, it abuses the amount of leeway the theatre of the mind gives us to supply what is missing. So, strikes need to land with enough impact that my mind registers them as real. A thudding or smacking sound would help, I admit, but I really need to see contact so that my mind doesn’t need to be a contact apologist.

If I find myself wondering how they made that punch or kick or headbutt look convincing without actually hurting each other, then that’s good striking. As for sound? Sound for me is like whipped cream. It adds to the experience but it’s not the endgame of striking. In fact, sometimes you can hear a strong slapping sound but it doesn’t do justice to a very demure strike. So for me, it is visual contact over sound, any day of the week.

I’m not particular about textbook form or orthodox technique. I’ve been in a real fight and my punches look nothing like Bret Hart’s. Plus, I have a personal rule for striking form in wrestling. It’s called the Shawn Marion Rule, named after an NBA player with one of the ugliest-looking jump shots ever. I believe that the NBA was more fun to watch when they still had players with unorthodox forms, as opposed to all the kids today with the textbook jumpers. In that spirit, I prefer having the occasional Shawn Marion with the ugly punches, elbows, and kicks as opposed to every wrestler looking like they came from the same fake fighting academy.

Grappling or holds need to convey struggle and tactical realism. Like, why the fuck are they locking up? Why is the wrestler putting the other one in a hold? Are they sizing each other up or exploiting some weakness? Or is the hold a delaying tactic to keep a superior striker from striking? Most importantly, the other wrestler should look like he doesn’t want to fucking give you the hold. There has to be a struggle and opposition from both sides: one is trying to get it done and the other one keeps resisting. I love it when wrestlers only manage to lock in a hold or break free from one after much trial and error. Trial and error is good because human nature and logic dictate that grappling is an ebb and flow of struggling against another person’s will to impose yourself physically. And I also don’t need my shit to look clean and smooth all the time. It’s fun for an early-match gimmick to get the crowd going or embarrass the opponent, but the best holds for me are the ugly-looking ones that remind me of a plumber trying to wrench a pipe. I want that sleeves-rolled-up, get-down-and-dirty-with-your-foe type of physicality.

Pacing is how the flow of the match is managed. Is it too fast or too slow and plodding? I want to know if the match distributed its interactions meaningfully, or if they put all the eggs in one portion of the match and used filler shit or dead space to occupy the others. Pacing, then, is the architecture of time. How well did they use that time to hold the match together?

If you give me a ten-minute match, I want to see what you did in those ten minutes and how the match manages the clock so all those things weren’t rushed or dragged along. For example, if Wrestler A only did three lariats, two suplexes, and a piledriver in a ten-minute match, I want to see what they did in between those moves. How close together or far apart were those sequences? Did they do most of them in the first five minutes or in the last five? Or did they spread them out to fill the whole ten minutes and then use meaningful submissions, grappling, and punches to make the spaces between believable?

Selling is an entire discussion on its own, but to keep it brief, selling can’t just be “it hurts” acting. I want that shit to alter how the combatants go about the match. Is A on the defensive because he’s hurt? Conversely, is B going to be more aggressive because there’s blood in the water? Selling for me also includes bumping. How well did the wrestlers take a bump, and did it communicate the force, danger, or character of the move? Accumulated damage, fear, trepidation, and frustration are all things I really put a premium on when it comes to selling. After all, these are emotions and states of mind that people would feel in actual combat. If Wrestler A keeps getting socked in the face by Wrestler B, then A should become angry, more cautious of the next punch, or otherwise change because of it. If A takes a piledriver and immediately gets back up as though nothing happened, it kills the realism of the fight. I know there are exceptions, such as when certain wrestlers are booked to be somewhat impervious to damage, like your usual monster-of-the-week or squash stars, but those are exceptions, not the general rule.

I also look for moments when the wrestler has to fight differently because of all the blows they have taken, or because the opponent has gotten into their head or made them lose their cool. People change because of stuff that happens to them. I want selling to show me that change and make clear that it is deeper than physical pain. I want to see the fighter adjust to the action they experience, because selling is essentially experience registering in the mind and the body. And in an industry trying to entertain an audience through fake fighting, conveying relatable experiences and emotions is a must.

Ring positioning is another thing I wanna go into in detail in another article, but in summary, it’s how the wrestlers use the center of the ring, its four corners, and the areas surrounding it to tell the kind of story they want to tell. You can spend most of the match living and dying near the ropes, or those fucking turnbuckles can become a third party because the wrestlers keep going back to them. What’s important is that the movement is meaningful. I value ring positioning because I believe there is a way to utilize the entire environment to improve the quality of the match itself. Whether the wrestlers keep their action contained to a certain area or go around and try to maximize the whole space to inform their wrestling can make the difference between a boring match and a terrific one.

You look at boxing, for example. They shuffle around the ring because the boxers are trying to create or eliminate distance. Same with MMA. Some fighters like being in the middle, while others need to use the cage to trap an otherwise faster foe. In wrestling, I need to understand and see the logic as to why Wrestler A kept rolling to ringside. I need to know why they spent most of the match going from one turnbuckle to another. These are actual things that happen in a match, and I wanna know why they did them. Was it just empty movement to eat up the match clock, or was it a way to tell a story? Maybe Wrestler B is bigger, so Wrestler A needs to keep going in and out of the ring to tire B and buy time while they figure out a game plan. These little movements matter to me. A good match makes the geography of the ring and its surrounding parts matter.

Connective tissue is the logic or psychology that chains together all the stuff you’re watching. All that striking, the acting, the moves, the sells, and the bumps all need to connect so that a fifteen-minute match isn’t just a random assortment of moves. The things they do in the ring need to produce consequences. This is probably one of the most important things I look for in a match, the HOW and WHY of the whole thing. The WHAT is just the action and physical details of the match. But the HOW and WHY tell us how each action or inaction fits together and why those things needed to happen in the first place.

WHAT tells us that CM Punk hit Roman with a GTS, but HOW tells us what makes that one act believable: Punk has been trying to wear down Roman by putting him in the Anaconda Vice for the previous two minutes, leaving Roman too exhausted to struggle against being lifted. So when Punk lifts Roman, Roman hardly struggles, and because I’ve been shown the sequences that created that moment, I’m not frowning and wondering to myself why Roman didn’t try to struggle his way out of the GTS. A through D were shown to me, so now I have no reason to logically bitch about E.

WHY tells us why Punk must do all those previous things to exhaust Roman: Roman is bigger and stronger, so Punk cannot simply lift him whenever he wants. If wrestlers do not take care of the WHY, then the whole thing collapses in my mind because the little wrestler and the tall wrestler are acting like they’re both the same height. Match-ups suddenly don’t matter, and how wrestlers solve or adjust to the tactical situation of the match stops mattering as well.

So connective tissue can safely be referred to as the conduit that carries one piece of action into the next and keeps the match flowing in a logical fashion. Conduit is a clanky word, I know, but it’s the most apt one I can think of. Without that connective tissue, I start questioning whether what I’m seeing is even sensible.

Character is one of the things I look for in the ring by interpreting the meaning of all that action. This is the fun part about matches although admittedly it is not as controlling as the other principles I laid out. You can see human archetypes in how a wrestler conveys their emotions through emotional selling or how they use their moves. Traditional logic is that good guys never cheat and never inflict more pain than what is necessary to win. Bad guys will use any move, even dishonorable ones. Of course, wrestling is fucking beautiful because these things can change over time and across cultures. You can get sadistic, vengeful babyfaces or honorable heels. Some wrestling cultures prefer martial prowess over good versus evil stories, so you have two morally neutral wrestlers simply fighting for glory. It can all change, and it’s fucking amazing when you see everything come together.

Narrative is what happens when all of these things start accumulating into an actual story. I don’t need every match to have some elaborate plot or great dramatic revelation. Sometimes the story really is just two wrestlers trying to figure out how to beat each other. What matters to me is whether the match develops into something that resembles an actual match and not just two athletes performing wrestling-shaped material at each other.

Something happens between A and B, the wrestlers recognize it, and what they do afterward should reflect what came before. Wrestler A can discover that his usual offense isn’t working. He can grow desperate or get overconfident, he may start taking shortcuts, or find some other way around the problem in front of him. This is also where callbacks and finishes become important because the ending should feel connected to the match we just watched.

If A did something to B in the first three minutes of a twenty-minute match, I want B to show me human nature for the next seventeen minutes. If A poked B in the eye or spat in B’s face, how does B react to that for the rest of the match? Does it make B more vengeful in his offense? Does B start making mistakes because they’re so focused on trying to repay A with some humiliation?

Basically, when the bell rings at the end, I want to feel like something happened between these people and that the journey from opening bell to finish made sense to me.

Style and context affect how I use all of these values. Different genres of wrestling have different priorities, traditions, and ways of communicating with the audience, so I’m not going to apply everything exactly the same way to every match. There are also smaller niche values that become more important depending on the format. A deathmatch, a lucha match, a shoot-style match, or a traditional American tag may ask for things that barely matter in another style. The values stay useful, but how much weight I give each one changes depending on what kind of wrestling I’m watching.

I think I have said enough, and you’ve read enough. Enjoy The Middle Rope