They are two of Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s finest, they are two of independent wrestlings finest, they are two of professional wrestlings finest, they are Adam Cole and Sami Callihan, this Saturday in Reseda, California they will collide in a sixty-minute Ironman match at an event fittingly named “Is Your Body Ready?” for the PWG World Heavyweight Championship in a match that means more then meets the eye.
Adam Cole and Sami Callihan are no strangers to one another. In Combat Zone Wrestling the two are for all extensive purposes the bitterest of enemies, dating back to when Cole was CZW Jr. Heavyweight Champion the two have never gotten along. Callihan fell in defeat during their first meeting, but would win the title on his second attempt from Cole. Their third meeting was built as a rubber match but despite Callihan coming out victorious, when Cole returned late last year their was unfinished business to attend to.
At Cage of Death 14 they met in a No Holds Barred, Falls Count Anywhere match which featured a weird structure made of chairs, a Powerbomb onto a bag of feces and eventually a roll-up from Cole to bring them back to two a piece in their rivalry. At the 14th Anniversary Show with female partners the duo rivals met in an inter-gender tag team match where neither got the pin over the other and was more frowned upon by viewers due to Callihan’s use of homophonic slurs to gain heat – yeah, don’t do that in WWE, Sami.
They’ve met many times outside Pro Wrestling Guerrilla too, most notably Evolve #3: Rise Or Fall where Callihan got the win, but in the 2011 ECWA Super 8 Tournament Adam defeated Sami on his way to the final where he would lose to fellow Ring of Honor star Tommaso Ciampa. And on day 2 of Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s BOLA 2012, Cole defeated Callihan on his way to winning the tournament and eventually the PWG World Heavyweight Championship.
So what makes this Saturday’s clash so meaningful?
In recent months rumors have made the rounds that WWE were breathing down both mens backs respectively, both attended a tryout earlier in the year which was the actual reasoning behind Cole missing a set of ROH television tapings, and it seems one has taken the bait while the other has decided to stick around, as Sami Callihan’s dates for Evolve and Big Japan Pro Wrestling were canceled and Adam Cole re-signed with Ring of Honor two weeks ago.
This is Callihan’s final major independent wrestling date before he links up with WWE’s development territory in the south, and what better way to go than by facing one of your biggest rivals in-front of a rabid Pro Wrestling Guerrilla crowd for the PWG World Heavyweight Championship? PWG benefits from this because much like how people took an extra interest in DDT4 for El Generico’s final match – hope he’s doing well in Mexico, them orphans needed him – they’ll do the same for the Callihan Death Machine.
So how do you go about making this match any better? Oh, I know, make it a sixty-minute Ironman match!
For only the second time in its history Pro Wrestling Guerilla will host a match of this kind, it previously featured in the 2004 feud between Super Dragon and Joey Ryan, considered by many PWG fans as one of the best matches in that year and in the promotions history – when you consider some of the matches PWG has played host to we’re talking about a great match, Joey Ryan taking a clothesline in the final ten minutes, getting momentarily knocked out and still continuing is a testament to how much the match meant to them.
You’ve got two of the best and brightest prospects in all of professional wrestling in Adam Cole and Sami Callihan in the main event for the PWG World Heavyweight Championship, who have a well-documented history and rivalry, it’s Callihan’s final major independent date and they don’t have fifteen or twenty minutes to let the creativity shine but an hour, a whole sixty-minutes.
Quite simply, Is Your Body Ready?
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