A personified snake.
“Ants”.
A Princess.
“Nightmare Warriors” and “The Snake Pit”.
These are just some of the characters and groups that you will find on the roster of the wrestling organization, CHIKARA Pro. CHIKARA is on a midwest tour, and made a stop in Jeffersonville, Indiana – about 5 minutes north of Louisville and the closest they’ve ever been to Kentucky – which I got to attend on Saturday, for the first time.
CHIKARA is not your “traditional” wrestling organization. If you are looking for fast-paced action, you’ll find it there. If you are looking for in-ring talking segments, you won’t find many of them. If you are looking for “hardcore wrestling”, you will not see it in CHIKARA. Instead, it features 2 concepts that were a breath of fresh air for this wrestling fan:
- CHIKARA is family-friendly and re-enforced that throughout the show. They cut down on any obscene, offensive, or even suggestive cheers or shouts. The wrestlers didn’t even shout too much that could be deemed “offensive” at the audience or at each other.
- CHIKARA is based on the “Lucha Libre” style of wrestling, prevalent in Mexico. The action is fast-paced, usually tag-team and 6-man-tag (“Trios”) based. When a wrestler’s feet hit the floor, a team mate can enter the ring, as if he/she were tagged in; this can lead to some insanely quick exchanges.There are also a lot of wrestlers in masks (just check out the “Roster” section of the link provided above).
This was a highly fun and entertaining show. The arena was a little too small for my tastes (about 100-125 fans) but they were loud. The wrestlers had a lot interactions with the fans, both “good” and “bad”, both usually comical. For example, a “rudo” (‘bad guy’) named Prakash Sabar came to the ring with ‘weapons’ hidden in his costume. The weapons: Cucumbers, hidden in each boot. He also had a 3rd hidden in his tights but gave that to a little boy sitting right in front of me. When he demanded the cucumber back, to use as a weapon (I don’t know – a Cucumber to the jaw might hurt…), the boy refused, causing enough of a delay for Sabar to nearly get pinned; he ultimately won the match. The cucumber was taken by his opponent- an overly polite frog whose name is escaping me – and smashed it on the ground.
The show itself was fairly short, considering that were 7 announces and an encore 8th: the bell rung at about 7:15, there was a 20 minute intermission, and it ended a little after 9:45… early enough that the younger audience members could be home by 10:15. I’ve been to a handful of WWE events and one IWA-MS event that have had 5-8 matches on the card and ran well over 3 1/2 hours, not always having the same amount of entertainment value as this show did.
The Main Event featured an odd 8-person tag team match; ‘odd’, in the sense that not only did each team have a mix of good guys (“técnicos”) and bad guys (“rudos”), but there the woman on each team wrestled the guys much more than they wrestled each other (which almost never happens in some of the ‘bigger’, ‘traditional’ promotions, like WWE or TNA). This included a near 7-minute segment where “Princess Kimberly” took – and dished out – offensive move after offensive move from/on her opponents, while Heidi Lovelace, CHIKARA’s “Young Lions Cup” Winner, took a Tilt-A-Whirl Backbreaker that somehow ended up being a Facebreaker. Intense and fun match!
So, if you are into fast-paced, action-packed wrestling that have some of the more unusual ‘characters’ in it, then I’d suggest checking out CHIKARA. It’s not something that all fans will like but it is something that could appeal to you!
The Nexus 