How Real Woods Beat Joey Mckenna | Final X 2025

Real Woods beat Joey McKenna at Final X, 2 matches to none, making the world team in the process. It’s funny how close he was to not even making the finals of the World Team Trials, let alone winning this, save for this weird last second takedown against Valencia, and now he made it all the way through that tournament, wins, and then wins here. Just goes to show, doesn’t matter how much you beat everyone by, just matters that you beat them all. It’s like the NCAA tournament, some wrestlers win the whole thing with overtime matches all the way throughout, against the number 2 or against the number 20, doesn’t matter. Winning is winning. We’re going to go through both matches and see what we can learn.

Match number one, about a minute and a half in, Mckenna gets put on the shot clock, isn’t able to get anything going in those 30 seconds, so gives up a point, so Real is up 1-0. Real was controlling the center slightly better, and doing more pump fakes, so I’m guessing that’s why. Nothing too crazy to look into here though, kind of a gimme from the ref.

Not long into the second period, McKenna does a rather random lefty high crotch from space. Would really like to see these wrestlers do better setups before committing to shots. I feel like they try to just use timing, speed, and power to get to the legs, which then relies on their opponent to not use that in order for them to get there safely. It’s just not very well calculated, too much guess work involved. Real easily steps out of the shot and drops to a knee, almost like he’s going to try to knee pick, but doesn’t put enough pressure forward to get McKenna to fall backwards. Mckenna’s able to sit a bit and drop to a crotch lock. When you’re on a low single like this the smartest thing to do is to try to get a little distance, get your head back on the inside of the leg, post it above the knee, so you can apply pressure on their leg, maybe pick their foot off the mat, sit them to their butt, tripod, circle double. Once they get past your head it’s much more difficult to get this finish started, not to mention they get the ability to cut the corner and work towards a crotch lock, which is what McKenna eventually does here. He pulls the crotch lock over, gets exposure, and the 2.

2 minutes left, McKenna with another random shot from space, this time a low double to a single, keeps good shoulder position, hugging his neck on Real’s leg, which prevents any kind of whizzer action, comes up with the leg, and casually walks him out of bounds for the push-out. 3-1 McKenna. Interesting that in freestyle they’re more willing to get the easy push out point instead of pulling their opponent to the center like they do in folkstyle where there is no push out point. Complete 180 in mentality there.

20 seconds left in the match, Real snaps the head with one hand, pulls it into his other, which is kind of an interesting way to get a front headlock, where the more common way is to catch with the same hand you’re snapping with. McKenna drops to a leg and holds position, which is an interesting choice, because it does nothing to prevent a good head pinch, which Real Woods does have. He throws hip pressure into the head, falls to the right, and gets 4 points for feet to back. They challenge, win, the points are reduced to 2 for just the back exposure, so it’s 3-3, tied, but Real Woods is still winning due to same amplitude of scoring and he scored last.

8 seconds left, McKenna going for broke, double overhooks, looks for an inside trip on the left but completely whiffs, then tries to just hip toss, but loses track of that left arm and does a cartwheel to give up 4 points, feet to back. I’m not sure if there’s anything to really look into here, this is a last ditch desperation attempt that went really bad. It happens. So Real Woods wins the first match 7-3.

Match number 2. Little over a minute in, Real gets a double off of a low leg. He does a really nice freeze fake, resets, and then drops to the ankle, head inside the knee, in which he could push the knee forward, pull the ankle, and try to sit mckenna to his butt, but going right up to a double seems to be another popular choice these days. Dropping to the ankle was a good idea from Real, McKenna was doing these light fakes, putting a lot of weight on that front foot, which is something you don’t want to do too much because it starts to become easy to telegraph. Try not to do the same motion over and over and over because good wrestlers can and will time a shot on that leg that keeps stepping. Defensively you want their head to miss the leg, try to pull it between your legs to release the pressure and allow you to get to a crotch lock, or maybe deflect it out to the side so you can whizzer.

Real gets his double, lifts, picks him straight off the mat and then puts him to his back for the 4 points, feet to back. Not much Mckenna could have done about that, at least once his feet were off the mat. In folkstyle you can slide your upper body off to the side and look for a crotch lock to extend the position or even funk if they don’t do a good job of keeping their shoulder into your ribs as you fall, but it’s freestyle, you’re not giving up less than 4 points here unfortunately.

McKenna did land on his butt and back, so transitioning to a leg lace would have been ideal, but McKenna does a good job getting his hips off the mat, forcing Real back to a normal shot. Real does transition to being on top, but McKenna wasn’t fighting it too hard. You don’t get more points for the takedown in freestyle after exposing their back like that. 4-0 Real.

About a minute left in the first, Real is caught reaching a bit too much, McKenna snaps the arm down, then goes to snap the head, forces a reaction out of real, and drops onto a lefty single. Real goes for a head pinch, but McKenna stabilizes this time with an extended double, ref gives McKenna 2 for his efforts. 4-2 Real.

2 minutes left in the match, McKenna has Real’s wrist controlled. Real goes for a shot on the right again, again prompted by how much weight McKenna has on that foot, it looks so ripe for the picking, but the wrist control he has gives him enough of a feel to stop the shot. Shooting while someone has your wrist isn’t a crazy idea, but it does give them a lot of reaction time. McKenna follows it up with a re-shot of his own on the foot that Real steps up with. I mean, ideally circling away to get up to your feet is a lot safer, this is just a bad reaction. Real turns to the edge and goes to kick, which I always think is a bad idea. I only support the idea of kicking away if you’re wrestling in folkstyle and are in the bottom position. Otherwise, I’ve seen this give away so many takedowns. There’s not even like, a fight, a good wrestler will keep a grip of your ankle, you will give away 2, and possibly more for stalling or fleeing the mat or whatever. It’s just usually a better idea to turn and fight. Score is 4-4, Woods is still winning because of the 4 point move and the score is tied.

And that remains the score for the rest of the match. I’m a little surprised that there were no shot clocks, Real was running away at the end pretty hard. Unfortunately that’s always a judgement call by the refs, there seems to be no concrete ruling on stalling or shot clocks at this high of a level. Anyways, Real Woods wins both matches, becoming our rep for 65 KG.