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WRESTLER OF THE DAY: ABYSS


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Hoo Boy - so yeah Abyss... He might be the perfect wrestler for TNA

 

I especially like how that Joseph Park deal was fine and then went on like 6 months too long.

 

I had thought I had done Abyss as WOTD but it just seems he has turned up in a lot of the other threads

 

 

 

And if this wasn't posting in the Ridiculous TNA Matches thread it should have been.

 

 

You can't score the Pin/Submission until you make your opponent bleed first

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I can't say that I ever particularly cared for the Abyss gimmick.  It started off as Mankind meets Jason from Friday the 13th, but without the charm and Park is downright sloppy in the ring.

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I can't say that I ever particularly cared for the Abyss gimmick.  It started off as Mankind meets Jason from Friday the 13th, but without the charm and Park is downright sloppy in the ring.

 

Which is part of why Joseph Park, non-wrestler, worked so well.

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Ugh, that horrible Barbed Wire Deathmatch between Abyss and Judas Mesias still makes my eyes hurt.. 

 

Any fed not named FMW shoud stick to rings with normal ropes on them.

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Vs Sabu in barbed wire massacre

This was a blast at the time, watching it with friends and a few beers. Still a fun little match.

 

The thing I always think of first about Abyss is how when they changed the Impact set, they made the ramp shorter and steeper so Abyss run ins became amazing just because he always looked like he wasn't going to be able to stop, or even just fall over. His arms would be windmilling the whole time.

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I don't mind Abyss, he's a good marquee character and loved it when he was paired with Sinister Minister. As mentioned, his brief run as WMD for Prince Nana's stable in ROH was great, I remember liking his matches with Rhyno in TNA too

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Story tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime....

 

I've seen Prince Chris Abyss Justice wrestle live in person like, maybe literally a hundred times, in at least two different states and three different gimmicks.  And ya know what?  He's pretty good.  He always tries hard, is willing to do anything you ask him to do, and although he might've been "sloppy" he wasn't dangerous.  He's not the type to force hardcore onto people who don't want it, he pretty much just shows up and lets the bookers and agents tell him what to do.  He's been stuck with some absolutely impossible booking at times ("Chris Park shot his father in the back 3 times!" has gotta be TNA's equivalent to Katie Vick) and gamely went along with it and tried to make the best of whatever chickenshit Russo or whomever handed to him into something that might not be chicken salad, but it's at least a chicken mcnugget.  

 

Anecdote: the year, 2000.  I was still a paying fan, one who had started to get vocal on Bill Behrens's old Mid-Southern-Ish message board that covered Wildside but also Nashville indies because Bill provided some kind of television outlet, America-1 or something like that; it was a weird time, and maybe someone who hasn't taken unprotected chairshots could remind me of the details.  JL Sigman was there too, maybe she can run in with some more stories.  Anyway, I followed the local promotions wherever they went, and one of the more random shows was held in a car dealership parking lot.  Under the open air.  It eventually got rained out, and the wrestlers scurried for cover while Bert Prentice started taking the ring down in a hurry.  But I do remember Abyss there, back in his baby-fat Prince Justice days, when he was doing sort of a mini-Big Show gimmick in an unflattering blue-green singlet.  One thing I noticed in this particular match was that he switched "hard cam" sides.  You see, the way the ring was set up in the parking lot, the majority of the fans were standing off to one side.  So when Justice went to work the crowd, he naturally aimed his cheap heat thataway.  BUT, somebody was videotaping the matches (possibly for the promotion, like one of their wives or girlfriends or something, I dunno) and she was standing with a tripod on the opposite side of the ring from the majority of the crowd.  Abyss noticed this camera was there, and for the rest of the match he did all of his threats and complaints towards the camera (and away from the loose crowd of 50-100 people who were actually watching the match).  Even that early in his career, he was at least trying to "work towards the hard cam", which is a really tricky business to get right.  I've botched it myself on numerous occasions, so I could appreciate the effort, comical as it was.  

 

Also, I don't know if it's drugs or concussions or what, but he's got one of the worst memories I've ever seen this side of Tracey Smothers.  "Hi, Jingus, nice ta meet ya!" (his massive sweaty calloused palm envelopes my baby-white hands) was almost like a reoccurring nightmare; I "met" that dude on at least half a dozen occasions, and I'm not even joking.  One time was on the shaky wooden joke of a staircase that led up to the NWA Wildside locker room; AJ Styles was back in town that night against a mystery opponent, I was walking out the door the very same instant that he arrived, and I couldn't help blurting out "...oh, I wonder who the mystery guy is?" like the begging-for-an-asskicking smartass that I was.  To Chris's credit, he just grinned in a fashion that was either sheepish or bewildered, I'm not sure which.  (Heck of a fine slam-around match, by the way, AJ put Justice through a table for the finish, Abyss always seemed to do his best stuff against those flubber pinball guys who could bounce off him.)  

 

I even got to manage him one time in 2003, when I was Herman Crane, Attorney At Law (no, I didn't use a briefcase, because there was a tag team in the same building that had that gimmick).  It was a benefit show held by USWO/SAW general Nashville legend Hot Rodd Biggs, a prototypical southern fatboy heel about whom there's stories which I can't tell, for fear of statutes of limitations.  Rodd damn near bled to death in a wild main-event brawl against the inevitable hometown Columbia, TN favorite James Storm.  BUT, the semi-main event of this benefit show (as always, it's stacked with a mishmash of whoever feels like showing up) happened to be Abyss versus Smart Bart Sawyer.  Bart was my first mentor in the business, and a pretty good one.  I'd basically been his personal assistant and driver, but I'd never gotten the chance to actually work with him in a match.  This was the day.  I convinced Hot Rodd or whomever was booking that Abyss needed a manager to go out with him, and basically shoehorned myself into the match.  The match was exactly what you'd expect on a benefit show: the smaller, aging regional star played the plucky babyface against the monster celebrity heel.  Went maybe, oh, eight or ten minutes.  Standard shine-heat-comeback-finish match format.  It did its job.  I worked myself into the finish; during the match I'd gotten to attack Bart on the outside of course (I might have been laying my shots in just a tiny bit, in my pathetic attempt to out-alpha-male a Freudian father figure), and at the end the ref was bumped or distracted, I don't even remember which (that tells you a lot about that era and how we did things) I ended up running into the ring just in time to be on the receiving end of the stiffest teeth-rattling "Smilenator" DDT I've ever taken.  Which was a spot I asked for, of course, being the dumb mark I was.  I rolled out, Abyss hit whatever finish he was using at the time (I think it was the one where you pick the guy up in an inverted fireman's carry, and then fall on your ass like you're giving a stunner and the other guy just lets go and takes a bump) and 1-2-3 of course the TNA guy goes over on the house show.  As an epilogue, I laid down on the concrete selling DEAD because a wimp like me had just taken a known guy's finisher, and Bart made a point of stepping right on top of my chest as he accepted a warrior's defeat.  Abyss had walked right back to the locker room, coldly abandoning his borrowed manager.  

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  • 3 months later...

Christian Cage vs Abyss for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4XElppsUg

Abyss vs Kurt Angle at the ECW Arena

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsSyjDj2q9g

Abyss, Sting & Andrew "The Punisher" Martin vs The Christian Coalition (Christian Cage, AJ Styles & Tomko) in a Doomsday Chamber Of Blood Match

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Cic9vOngc 

Match of 1,000 Thumbtacks Abyss and Raven vs Black Reign and Rellik (that's killer spelled backwards)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RofP3uWhGo&list=UUYj-_SJiFSIR7E1WwbYEOkQ&index=8

Barbed Wire Massacre 2 Abyss vs Judas Mesias

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ZnjzMD3VM

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i never super followed TNA but would pay half attention to it maybe every third week. When i saw AJ Styles or Abyss on, i would always pay full attention. this was shortly after TNA started Impact on SpikeTV. dude always seemed to entertain and, even with his lame mask, made for some good visuals. 

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