What Is a Tag Team?
What is a tag team?
Two wrestlers team up to face two other wrestlers. That's what it meant.
How does the match work?
They fight one-on-one, and midway through, they can swap out their partner with a tag.
Every other rule was more or less identical to a singles match.
In truth, the very concept of a "tag match" exists only in pro wrestling.
No other sport on earth uses a system that swaps players in and out in real time the way pro wrestling does.
And no sport whatsoever allows the opponent to interfere with that exchange, either.
Why?
The answer was simple.
Because it's dangerous.
Sports are battles between savages who have trained their bodies to the absolute limit. Which is precisely why they demand strict, orderly rules.
If the rules didn't bind them, athletes would use any means necessary—any method at all—to win.
That's why I called them savages. Once you've turned pro, winning becomes the supreme commandment.
No matter that Barry Bonds rewrote baseball's history books with performance-enhancing drugs, no matter how viciously he's been vilified for it ever since—the fact that he was a winner never goes away. Even if he did taint the fairness of the game.
And so the rules of professional sports evolved continuously, always chasing the same ideal: fairness with the danger stripped out.
Pro wrestling was the exact opposite. What we did was, above all else, performance and spectacle. Which meant we could show the audience anything.
Human savagery.
The obsession with victory.
Everything professional sports worked so hard to suppress—we could put it on full display.
Because it's fake.
Which, in the end, was the sad part of the story.
Anyway.
I'd wandered a long way off topic.
The point I was trying to make was simply this: tag team matches are difficult.
There's a well-built format—of course there is—but it was precisely because that format existed that introducing variation into it became so hard.
"There's a technique called the hot tag."
I continued my explanation to Shina, who had been listening to me ramble this whole time.
"A hot tag?"
"Hot, as in heated. The tag you make when the crowd is screaming, make the tag, please!"
"What's that supposed to be?"
"Say one half of a babyface tag team gets beaten down by the heels using every dirty trick in the book. He tries to make the tag, but his leg gets dragged away every time. He can't reach it."
"Those dirty cowards!"
Shina got way too into it.
"Right? And that's exactly why the release of finally making the tag feels so much sweeter. The partner who's been saving his strength comes in fresh and just clears house."
"That would feel amazing!"
"Exactly. The hot tag is a story that tag team wrestling has perfected. One of the best tools there is for driving a crowd into a frenzy."
"Um, but Sin? If every tag team uses the hot tag, wouldn't people get sick of it pretty fast?"
"And that, Shina, is the reason I've been explaining all of this."
"I-it is?"
"Taking the things people get sick of and making them not sick of it. That's the real technique every wrestler has to master."
In other words, it came down to this: when you wrestled a tag match, how did you work the opponent over? How did you mount your comeback?
"We're the babyface team, so we have to show them the flashiest, coolest moves possible. The kind of moves that blow all that frustration wide open."
"So tag team wrestling really is hard."
"You wrestle in a tag team too, don't you?"
"Well, yeah, but... honestly, I just do whatever the seniors tell me to do."
"You can't do that, Shina."
I laughed bitterly.
"You should talk it all over with Eddie. You two are partners—talk to each other, and build great matches together."
...Why did I suddenly feel like a producer handing out advice?
I was still thinking that when Russell, who'd been standing behind us, spoke up.
"We'll need to adapt it to our own style, of course."
"Obviously."
I nodded.
Russell was a technician; I was a brawler.
We had to account for differences like that down to the finest detail when we built our moves.
"I figure we start by creating about four big things."
"Four?"
"Technician moves, brawler moves, moves that blend both—and our tag team finisher."
At minimum, that much was needed to handle any situation that could come up.
"Let's start with the finisher. That's priority number one."
Russell and Sin were about to set out on their championship journey.
The plan was to capture the titles at the next pay-per-view, then keep building reactions, experience, and résumé from there.
It was the first step nearly every legendary wrestler had taken on the road to becoming world champion.
With Shina as our training dummy, Russell and I stood in the ring, exchanging moves and ideas.
Our first guiding principle was simple: our moves had to be fusions—each one carrying both of our signatures.
Russell spoke up.
"Let me make one thing clear first. I want to develop my character further."
"In what way?"
"Toward the cowardly, flashy side. Devious tricks and spectacular moves. I think that suits me better anyway."
"If that's what you want. It's not exactly out of character for you, Russell."
The Russell Hart gimmick was a character drawn straight from the real Russell Hart.
In real life too, Russell was a man carrying the weight of his family and his legendary uncle on his back—a man determined to surpass them both.
Having laughed at my joke, Russell opened up, as if confessing something held close to his chest.
"Honestly, of all the big moves out there, my favorite is the Shooting Star Press."
"Oh? You can pull that off?"
"Of course."
"Show me. Shina, grab the mats."
We laid several thick mats across the ring floor and got ready.
The Shooting Star Press, huh.
It was a high-difficulty move that demanded both elevation and technique at the same time.
Russell climbed the top turnbuckle and stood facing the ring below.
From there, flipping forward and landing on your back was a "senton"—a move that used momentum in a relatively simple way.
The Shooting Star was the opposite.
You raised your head, flipped backward through a 270-degree rotation, and collided with your opponent chest-first.
Hard enough to execute—but almost impossibly hard to execute beautifully.
Put simply: ask anyone whether a front flip or a back flip is easier, and everyone picks the front flip.
And the Shooting Star Press was the back flip, performed in midair.
Done wrong, the body would curl up into what everyone derisively called the "frog" pose.
Leaping big, extending the body into a crescent moon, and rotating onto your opponent—that was the perfect form.
So how would he do?
The ugliest possible outcome was twisting in midair and just plummeting.
Russell was a technician—high-flying moves had nothing to do with his repertoire. Could he really pull it off...
THUD!
I needn't have worried.
I let out a dumbfounded laugh. He'd traced a flawless crescent moon all the way down.
And even though that had to hurt, he got up grinning like a little kid.
"How was it?"
"Crescent."
"What?"
"Your new finisher. Crescent. That was a beautiful move."
"I've been practicing it nonstop whenever the master wasn't watching at the Dungeon."
"That's incredible, Russell! Wow, and you land so precisely! You can't even see where you're falling!"
It was Shina's artlessly innocent remark that followed which sparked a blazing idea in my head.
"Russell. I've got a good idea."
"What is it?"
"Hold that thought... Shina, give me a hand."
"Got it."
Shina nodded, and we climbed back into the ring, where I positioned him standing right in front of the mats.
"We're patching the Shooting Star Press's biggest weakness—its low hit rate, since you can't see in front of you."
"How?"
"I knock him down with a kick, then stand on his neck. And right before you land, I pull my foot away."
"Sounds workable."
"Let's try it. Oh—and Shina, you don't have to actually take the Shooting Star."
"Then after I take the stomp, I'll roll off to the side right away."
With that settled, we threw ourselves back into developing the move.
We were going to show the world something magnificent—the likes of which had never existed.
And then, one week later. The show.
The first tag team match since Sin and Russell had truly begun combining their strength kicked off under a mountain of expectation.
Their opponents: the veteran duo known as the Lucha Kings.
Early on, Russell was outmatched by the two men's cohesion—but the moment Sin came in off the hot tag and swept the ring, the tide turned.
Then the two of them set about showing the audience everything they had, riding the crowd's roar to its absolute peak.
A tag team of Sin, the street punk from the back alleys, and Russell Hart, the scion of a legendary dynasty.
Watching the moves those two had invented together, the commentators couldn't hide their amazement at the sheer creativity on display.
"Russell goes for the German!"
Russell wrapped his arms around the waist of Andrade, the bigger half of the Lucha Kings, and flipped him backward.
With a resounding slam, Andrade's shoulders hit the mat.
Russell held the bridge, flowing straight into the pin.
But as the referee moved in to count the cover, Sin came leaping in from out of nowhere.
A jumping elbow drop.
Sin's elbow slyly grazed past, only pretending to strike the neck.
Yet Andrade snapped his body upward at the last instant, selling it beautifully.
Simultaneously, Sin and Russell rose to their feet and attacked their opponents without a moment's pause.
Everyone watching couldn't help but marvel. Until just days ago these two had despised each other—and now that they'd joined forces, they'd only grown stronger.
At this point, people couldn't help thinking, I knew it. I saw it coming, and feeling wise for it. And at the same time, they warmed to the two men for living up to their expectations.
The two wrestlers—raised, or so the crowd felt, by the audience itself—detonated with the explosive chemistry of mentos dropped into cola.
They utterly steamrolled the Lucha Kings, themselves one of the most beloved tag teams on the GCW roster.
No one knew who'd started it, but a chant splicing their two names together had already taken hold.
"Sinsell! Sinsell! Sinsell! Sinsell! Sinsell! Sinsell! Sinsell!"
The reaction reached a fever pitch.
Having driven Andrade out of the ring, the two men now readied their combined finisher for the last man standing—Calista.
"Come on—make some more noise!"
Sin, standing at the center of the ring, spread his arms wide and whipped the atmosphere even higher. The chant rolling off the crowd was so thunderous it briefly left even the commentators speechless.
In the meantime, Russell silently climbed the turnbuckle to take his position. Seeing this, commentator Rick Ross tilted his head.
Of course, it was all an act.
"Wait a minute—Russell is climbing the top turnbuckle!"
"Is he going for an aerial maneuver?"
"But Russell has never used an aerial move in his career! I have to wonder whether he can really pull it off!"
"Don't worry, Rick! That man is Russell Hart! Nothing is impossible for him!"
And with that, the two commentators watched on, praying for the man atop the turnbuckle to succeed.
But Russell, instead of climbing to the very top, hooked his foot on the turnbuckle and simply held his position, striking a pose.
It was not the pose of a man about to leap. Even the cheering crowd blinked, wondering what on earth that was supposed to be.
Sin's knee snapped up into the face of Calista, who had just risen to his feet.
CRACK!
The cheer rolled through the arena, and Calista crumpled backward like a puppet with its strings cut, collapsing where he stood.
It was on that exact beat that Russell fully mounted the top turnbuckle.
The moment Sin delivered the knee, the ring could shake and throw Russell off balance. That danger aside, the sequence was also chosen to funnel the spotlight onto Sin.
The instant the kick landed, Russell pointed at Sin, drawing the roar up toward the rafters.
Sin then stomped the fallen man's neck—or rather, the subtle patch of shoulder right beside it—and flashed a signal.
The camera swung around, and Russell, standing at the highest point in the ring, launched himself skyward with everything he had.
The Shooting Star Press.
No—the Crescent.
A blazing crescent moon, body unfurled to its fullest, plummeted toward the fallen Calista in a searing arc.
At the very last instant, Sin withdrew his leg and rolled clear.
BOOM!
A colossal roar shook the arena, and as Sin backed away, the referee sprinted over and slapped the mat for the count.
One!
Two!
Three!
RRRING RRRING RRRING!
Amid that earth-shaking ovation, the two men's tag team match ended in victory.
Sin leaned lazily against the ring post, playing his role as a performer—while inside, his thoughts were elsewhere entirely.
Damn. That was so damn cool.
It was, without question, a beautiful move.