McGuire’s Monday: AEW and NJPW announce The Forbidden Door event, but is still possible to have a dream match?

By Colin McGuire, ProWrestling.net Staffer (@McGMondays)

After I put the console together, I started playing it, fully expecting to beat the first couple levels and then be forced to start over. But then something that I wasn’t expecting happened: There was no game over. Because there were no spots to insert change into the game, the version I have continuously gives you infinite lives.

Or, in other words, as long as you have the time to spare, you can beat the game.

The fun of it almost immediately dissipated. I didn’t want the end of this game that I spent hours trying to beat as a kid just handed to me. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to earn it.

I was thinking about that brand of disappointment the other day when …

TOO EASY

… I started to think about the AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door pay-per-view set for a couple months from now.

In so many ways, it feels like Tony Khan has unlocked the cheat code in professional wrestling, and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing anymore. He has taken every single aspect of the wrestling world that isn’t WWE and he’s brought them all together to create this amalgam of talent and, as a result, the possibilities are endless.

I’m not insisting that’s a bad thing. If you want to go the whole One Love route, that’s fine. It’s better to work together than it is to work against one another. If the wrestling community is one, big happy family, everyone wins, right?

Maybe. But I also think there’s value to competition and I certainly think there is value to boundaries. What made WCW vs. WWE so much fun in the late ’90s? You never knew who was going to jump where and you oftentimes fantasized about what could be. Imagine the Undertaker vs. Sting. Or Stone Cold vs. a healthy Hulk Hogan. Those ideas were fun to think about, mostly because it seemed impossible that they would ever happen.

These days?

THE IRON ISN’T HOT

These days, it seems like the second someone floats a fun match idea out into the Twitter-verse, we have a running clock counting down to when someone (most likely Tony Khan) is going to book it. And the thing about that is, maybe sometimes these dream matches are better left for our imaginations.

Look back to when AEW really started to get going and then fast-forward a little to when we got a first glimpse of New Japan talent in an AEW ring. If memory serves, we had our first taste of it when KENTA worked a short program with Jon Moxley between AEW Dynamite and NJPW Strong. It featured a tag match on AEW television that saw KENTA and Kenny Omega take on Moxley and Lance Archer.

At the time, the novelty was fantastic. It wasn’t just seeing a New Japan star in AEW; it also seeing Moxley show up on an empty-arena NJPW Strong — a show that very much needed the star power at the time. It whet the palate for a relationship that a lot of fans of both companies wanted to see happen. The fantasy booking went up a few notches and excitement from all sides was palpable.

Everyone was waiting for the next step, but the next step never came. We didn’t jump right into seeing loads of AEW talent in NJPW and we didn’t jump right into seeing loads of NJPW talent in AEW. The “Forbidden Door” talk went to new heights (so much so that if I never hear the phrase “forbidden door” again in my life, it will be a day too soon), but we never got immediate forward movement.

Instead …

MUDDYING THE WATERS

… We got drips and drabs.

Minoru Suzuki showed up, but he’s since decided to take any and every booking he could possibly take anywhere in the country (and that’s OK; he deserves every right to go collect his flowers, the legend he is). Satoshi Kojima came through. There was a Jeff Cobb sighting at one point. But until recently — with Chaos and Best Friends becoming some type of super group and Jay White shaking things up every so often — that was really all we got.

To be fair, this all formulated during a global pandemic that compromised travel for everyone involved. It was hard enough to get into the United States anyway; getting into Japan during that time seemed to be downright impossible. There were reports of certain wrestlers that were meant to show up, but didn’t or couldn’t, and perhaps if they could have, the arc to this story would be different.

But we have to go with what we got, and what we got was Impact wrestlers showing up on AEW and AEW wrestlers showing up on Impact and occasional New Japan stars showing up in AEW and AEW wrestlers showing up on New Japan Strong and one star from one company jawing at another star from another company on Twitter, sparking rumors of matches that would never happen, and then … and then … and then …

Well, and then it just muddied. We didn’t hop into Kazuchika Okada vs. Kenny Omega part four. We didn’t get Tetsuya Naito vs. Chris Jericho part three. We didn’t even have Kota Ibushi vs. Sammy Guevara or Cody Rhodes or … anybody, really. Nobody struck when the iron was at its hottest. It appeared as though everyone tried to the best of their ability, but between travel, the pandemic and the reportedly shaky relationship between AEW and New Japan at the time, it never felt like the dreams were becoming realities.

Speaking of dreams, that brings me to this tiny question …

NO MORE DREAM MATCHES

Is the era of the dream match dead?

One of the unintended consequences of everybody outside WWE coming together like this is the mere fact that we can’t fantasize about what could be when it comes to dream matches. That’s because dream matches are just that — dreams. Once they become a reality, they are just another match. They could be very great matches and they could go down as all-time classics. They could also be completely disappointing, drizzling sh!$@ matches that never needed to happen. Either way, they aren’t dreams anymore; they’re just matches.

And, in my mind, that takes the romance out of a lot of this stuff. Will Ospreay vs. Jon Moxley is a matchup that I’m sure at a different point in time would have been a dream come true, headlining match on a big event for either New Japan or AEW. Instead, because we now get these types of matches all the time, it simply just appeared on an overblown episode of NJPW Strong that aired on a pseudo pay-per-view.

Now, naturally, this means that as wrestling fans, we are also in an era during which we have an embarrassment of riches. It is easier to access more wrestling now than ever, and it’s even easier to access more good wrestling now than ever. Thanks to the internet (and the fact that there are approximately 9,302 channels in a television package these days), we can find a very great wrestling match happening somewhere pretty much any day of the week.

But it’s not a party if it happens every night, and I can’t help but wonder if the abundance of cross-promotional action outside of WWE is becoming worn out. Take Cody as an example. The WWE crowds, weeks later, are still hot for him each time he heads to the ring, be it to talk or wrestle. Why is that? Well, in part, it’s because the notion of Cody ever being in a WWE ring again seemed impossible as recently as six months ago.

There’s value in separation. It creates anticipation and it forces fans to become emotionally invested in the unknown. In fact, that’s what made the New Japan/AEW relationship so intriguing when AEW first got off the ground. We all wanted to see that marriage not just for the potential matchups, but also because we knew that the likelihood of seeing it in the immediate future was slim. We always want what we can’t have and the more we’re reminded of not being able to have it, the more we want it.

Which is why …

THE THRILL IS GONE

… At this point, the shine is off the NJPW/AEW relationship. We’ve seen AEW wrestlers go up against NJPW wrestlers in recent memory. We’ve seen Japanese legends wrestle with regularity in the United States in recent months. So much so, in fact, that I can’t think of a matchup that would sell me on thinking the Forbidden Door event will be can’t-miss.

Sure, I’ll probably be proven wrong, and they’ll conjure up something that will make me second guess that apathy. But as we stand now, two months out, it just kind of feels like we’re going to have a bunch of multi-man matches and then the singles matches we get — because this is AEW, remember — won’t have all that much build. It will be like a modern day Survivor Series, but with much better wrestling.

And I’m not intentionally trying to pile on either AEW or New Japan by saying any of this. These words should not fall squarely into the us vs. them or hater-centric dialogue that wrestling fans obsess over these days. Rather, I’m just wondering about the value of holding the cheat code to the non-WWE wrestling world and how or if that is being abused. There will forever be romance attached to the notion of the NWO going up against DX in some capacity. Conversely, Hulk Hogan vs. Ric Flair didn’t happen when it should have at WrestleMania 8 and by the time they finally got around to it, the thrill was at least partially gone.

That’s kind of where the NJPW/AEW stuff is now. Or, well, in my head, at least. It’s a novel idea, and I’m sure the show will sell out (don’t forget the success Ring Of Honor and NJPW had at Madison Square Garden with a similar show), and the way I’m outlining this is harsher than I intend it to be, but … man, sometimes our imaginations are better left for just that — our imaginations. It’s like wondering what it would be like to kiss the prettiest girl in high school, doing it and then shrugging your shoulders because she wasn’t all that good of a kisser.

Or, for that matter, it’s like buying an arcade game you spent all your quarters on as a kid just to see what it’d be like to get to the end of it … only to find out that getting to the end of it is actually possible now, and you’re not so sure you want to get there anymore.

“The Forbidden Door” will probably be very good. But no matter how good it ends up being, it could have been better had moderation in talent swapping been considered long ago. Because once that door becomes less forbidden, the intrigue surrounding the act of walking through it takes a hit, too. And without the intrigue, all that’s left is a door.

And in this case, proceed with caution.