Bad back pain and a brutal headache have kept me from doing a new content entry today. So I'm going to recycle my ProWrestlingOnly.com Greatest Wrestler Ever post on Ace Rockwell. I'm a big fan of his, and could easily add a lot to this very brief discussion of his positives. Maybe I will at a later date. As a bonus I'm including a link to a Facebook video of a match he had with Tank at the last Empire show in the Empire Arena in Rossville, Georgia. The match is one of my favorites of 2016, as it's two veterans and stars of the Southern indie scene beating each other up in a number one contenders match in front of a sellout crowd. Think Ishii/Honma but with some fun theatrical selling spots from Ace, and more significance on the one count/pop up spots because it's not something either guy does in every match.
Here it is.
And here are my GWE inspired thoughts on Ace Rockwell.
I just wrote a long post on Shaun Tempers, and Ace Rockwell probably deserves the same though I'm not sure I have enough context with him to do it. That said I could not imagine nominating Tempers and not Rockwell.
If Tempers is the evil spawn of the Chattanooga indie world that went fourth into Georgia and douched his way through the broader scene, Ace is the good son. Mechanically he's actually better than Tempers and has a better range. I love Tempers, but I can't imagine him having effective "workrate" matches on a weekly basis. I could easily see Rockwell doing it, though he'd be the first to bitch about it as it's not really his style.
In fact his style is basically to be an old school, traditional, hard nosed, Southern babyface. This means he knows how to take an ass beating, and knows how to return fire. He's very good at setting up, teasing, and delivering on his big spots, none of which are especially huge by contemporary standards, but all of which are effective and generally very crisp. He's probably got the best bulldog in the game for whatever that is worth.
In last years Scenic City Invitational he had a match with Gunner that I loved, but didn't resonate with others. In fact it was probably the most polarizing match of the tourney. To me the match was entirely believable and featured a masterful performance by Ace in particular with his timing, bumping, and facial expressions really carrying the day. It's not the best Rockwell match I've seen, but the fact that he was able to get over as an equal "star" against Gunner in that building on that night was telling to me.
He has plenty of good matches from Anarchy online, but the real standout is the excellent title match v. Tempers. The Empire title match that is on the Empire website is also great, and remarkably ambitious for a match of this era. That said the best match of his I've seen is probably the I Quit match from 1/2/14 v. Matt Fortune, a young talent from the Chattanooga area. They worked an excellent brawl that probably would have rated in my top ten matches of that year from anywhere on Earth if I had seen it sooner. If pressed I'd rate it as the best Empire match I've ever seen, and that's a promotion I like a lot.
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