Gordi the former AEW fan

OK. This was not at all what I was expecting. It's a hair vs hair match and the video is 25 minutes long, so I actually prepared a snack and a drink and settled in... but the match itself is surprisingly compact. First fall (or, as the lucha hipsters say, "el fall-o numero uno"): Porky just absolutely rolls over Dos Mil. He gives him nothing, and will not allow the man a moment to catch his breath. He beats him around the ring, then finishes him with a high vertical suplex followed by a fisherman's suplex. It's a total squash, and it is awesome. Segunda otono: Porky just keeps laying in the punishment and it seriously looks like he's going to take Mascara 2K's hair in two straight falls and under five minutes. However, there is an all-time slip on a banana peel spot where Brazo de Plata misses a top rope senton and Dos Mil pounces immediately, hitting a regular senton of his own and stealing the fall. Caida numero tres: The crowd is chanting for Porky now, and they are chanting "Porky" and not "Brazo de Plata" The camera briefly shows a young couple in the front row, and the guy is explaining something to the lady... and her facial expression and body language are 100 per cent "OK, Captain Obvious" She almost rolls her eyes at the camera. It's weird that this is the comedy highlight of a Super Porky match. The moment that Porky regains momentum, 2K bails out of the ring and he and his manager (?) blatantly load up the bad guy (a/k/a el hombre malo)'s forearm brace. I mean, they do not try to hide what they are doing at all. Dr. Morales awesomely losing his shit while that is going on is the second-biggest laugh of the match, for me. Then the rudo (enough with the jokes, already) just slides back in the ring My expectations w/r/t Brazo de Plata include comedy spots and crazy high flying. There is none of the former and only the banana peel spot to cover the latter. He does some really sweet mat work, though. My expectation with luchas de apuestas is that they are generally a bit on the epic side. This match was entirely compact, a nice little short story, nothing epic about it. You could have had another 20 minutes here, easily... but I kind of like the trimmed-down, no fat version of the story they tell. Porky is clearly the better man... but MA2000 nonetheless proves that he could win a fall against him legitimately... then he blatantly choses to cheat anyway. I'm pretty sure this is the first I have ever seen of Máscara Año Dos Mil, and I hate the guy now. Can't wait to see him get his ass kicked. Very efficient story telling, this.

Hot damn, that was great. Hats off to you guys for making this available. It must have been a pain in the ass, seeing as how it is in four parts with audio issues... I am so glad that y'all went to the trouble. Young, mobile, rampaging, angry heel Andre is a rare and precious treasure. He is an absolute force of nature here, bellowing at the crowd, tossing guys around, threatening the ref... it's very appropriate that you made the analogy about how the way Joker treated Fujiwara in that 6-man was similar to how Andre often worked in Japan, with guys just bouncing off of him and selling everything like death and swarming him the moment he showed any sign of vulnerability... but this is young and mobile Andre so it has that whole extra layer of when the babyface team swarms Andre it doesn't even feel a tiny bit like cheating. The sense you get is, "Well, yeah, what else are you gonna do against this guy?" Even when Stan f'n Hansen comes out to distract Andre and it leads directly to the good guys taking the first fall... that doesn't seem unfair. The background to The Young Heel Andre Show is astonishing, too. He's teamed up with Chavo Guerrero and Tito Santana, so here is your extremely rare chance to see Tito kinda sorta working heel (although really he and Chavo are mainly there to bump and sell so that the babies can have a bit of shine in between bouncing off of Andre). The good guys include a pre-mullet Riki Choshu teaming with Tatsumi Fujinami (which has to be the New Japan equivalent of seeing young Misawa and Kawada tagging together). Their partner is Olympic Judo double gold medalist Willem Ruska, legitimately one of the worlds great combat athletes. And here's the thing: As much of a larger-than-life super villain as Andre is in this match, as unstoppable and dominating as he seems, he is somehow so giving at the same time. Ruska gives Andre a hip toss, and Andre sells it by being so discombobulated that he goes for a tag in the wrong corner. At the very beginning of the match Choshu and Fujinami execute a double-team double-leg on Andre and it is awesome when they take him down. At one point he hurls himself into the ropes to do his tied-up spot and the ropes just shake and shake and shake. All of the ropes, all around the ring. The ending is superb, as Damn, I loved this.

Dang. Yikes. Criminey! I was not expecting this thread to take a turn into a somber meditation on man's inhumanity to man. There have been some nasty, harrowing, alarming, nerve-wracking, vicious beat-downs posted here in the last couple of days. Oh, my stars and garters! ? Here's a literal squash match, with none other than a wresting-gear-wearing Masanobu Kurisu on the receiving end of the literal squash!! I also like how squash matches can give you a quick look at a given wrestler during two very, very different parts of their career:

My friend Taizo has a dog. Her name is Milan. She is a very good girl. Her favourite wrestlers are Kuuga, Vader and Tiger Mask.

Thanks Matt, that warms my heart. That whole section where I am sitting (on the left of the entrance ramp from the hard camera's perspective) is full of Kuuga's friends. Everyone sitting around me got their tickets from him. If you look at the pictures from some of the Asian Cooger drinking parties that I've attended, you'll probably recognize many of the same faces. Mostly, we know each other through him, including some of the now-married couples who met each other at one of his parties or events. And most of us spend the match booing him like crazy. When Kuuga makes his entrance, if you are watching closely, you'll almost always see him take a moment to yell and shake his fist at us while we boo loudly and make the thumbs-down gesture. In the context of a pro-wrestling show, it would be wrong to yell "We love you!" at the top heel... but that is basically what we are doing. Although, in this particular case, I was also going apeshit cheering for Fujiwara... which both Kuuga and Mihara noticed and understood. Kuuga spitting at Fujiwara was pretty much the same as us booing Kuuga. It was a context-appropriate show of genuine respect. Mihara couldn't quite hide how hard he was marking out. Look at his grin after he gets slapped. I can only imagine how it must have felt to tag with Yoshiaki M. F. Fujiwara. I was losing my shit just having a good seat to see him live. The special guest wrestlers were a gift that Osaka pro doled out to us fans in unusually generous measure. I've been third row ringside or better for matches featuring Ohtani, Kyoko Inoue, Jaguar, Great Kabuki, Abdullah, Sayama, Fujinami, Sasuke, Danshoko Dino, Sekimoto, Okobayashi, Kana, Dump, Otsuka, Finlay, Dick Togo, Chono, Onita... a ridiculous list of wrestling legends and personal favourites, either at Osaka Pro shows or through connections I made there... Fujiwara was probably the one I marked out hardest for. He had a connection to Osaka Pro through his former student Fuke, and he obviously got a ton of respect from everyone. Check out all of the Joker heels bumping like madmen for Fujiwara's head-butts. They were loving it!

It was so difficult to find toilet paper around here that I had to resort to using newspapers. Let me tell you, the times were rough.

@Matt D I have not seen that Andre match. I also love me some Super Porky, so I may try to hit both of those. Finding something you've never seen is a pretty interesting challenge. I'll start with his one: It's one of those matches that is an all time personal favourite despite not being any kind of ****5/8 classic. It's my drinking buddies Kuuga and Mihara in the ring with an absolute legend. It's my good friend Asian Cooger spitting at Fujiwara and calling him grandaddy. Its the match where Fujiwara gave me a high five on his way out of the ring (though sadly the camera cuts away to my boy Yoon Kang Chul just before that great moment in my life). It's an absolutely typical Osaka Pro special guest 6-man tag match, but I love it more than Okada vs Shibata, Michaels vs Taker, or Punk vs Joe. I'd enjoy hearing the thoughts of someone with no personal connection to the match, and since it's old man Fujiwara you know it won't be a complete waste of your time.

7) Would you like to see all-time-great jobber Lee Scott (wearing tiger stripe tights) slap Terry Funk right in the face then run away? I have some good news for you: 8 - And look at the moonsault Muta hits in this one!! 9) Colin Delaney gets a whole backstory for this one: 10) If there are no jobbers in a match, can it still be a squash? Yes. Yes, it can. Anyway, please enjoy and please feel free to contribute. I'm sure people here will come up with some doozies. Brief comments explaining why you like a particular squash would be very much appreciated.

4) Sometimes a squash can be the best way to revisit a bit of wrestlecrap, to see an infamously terrible gimmick in action and to get a sense of a crummy wrestler's moveset in case you are making a bunch of obscure CAWs or something. 5) Speaking of moveset, I love this particualr British Bulldogs finisher, which pops up in some of their squash matches: 6) Sometimes squash matches are a fine source of schadenfreude, as when Vince and Jesse spend half the match ragging on a jobber's poor physique and making Steve Reeves jokes!

I don't know what it is but life during The Plague really seems to be doing a number on my attention span. I've been having a great time watching the matches that people are posting up on the Clubbering and Secret Santo and Wrestling Machine threads... but a lot of those matches are getting into 20-minute-plus territory and, sadly, I generally can't maintain focus for that long any more. (Maybe once or twice a day, at best). However, I still wanna watch a lot of wrestling,. The last couple of days, what has really been scratching that itch for me is those delightful bite-sized one-sided matches that used to make up the majority of America's televised pro wrestling content. Watching squash matches online is a pretty damned good pandemic time-killer! There are a lot of squash matches up online, and they can be entertaining in so many different ways. So in the (kind of selfish) hope that other people will join in and post some of their favourite squash matches, and in the (less selfish) belief that there are probably other people on these boards who are experiencing attention deficit issues and who might enjoy getting their fix four or five minutes at a time... allow me to present ten or so of my favourites, and invite you to add some of your own: 1) You have to love this (not really, it's OK if you don't): The WWF version of Koko B Ware was an all-time great Jobber to the Stars, and here he faces an all-time star among jobbers. It's also got that classic WWF squash match structure where the jobber gets in a bunch of offense, slips on a banana peel, then gets destroyed. Also; Check out who the ref is! 2) Sometimes a squash can be extra-fun because of what or who we know the jobber eventually becomes. Also: The very beginning of the Pringle-Taker relationship? 3) Certain squash matches can become pretty well known as part of a pro wrestling hall-of-famer's backstory.

Quite possibly the ne plus ultra of brawling into the crowd. It's more or less all they do in this match:

LCO are my go-to counter-example whenever someone tries out the old "they don't have real heels in Japanese wrestling" argument. They are just plain nasty.

@Beech27 it's an unimportant detail, but Rikio's ramen restaurant is located in Tenri, in Nara prefecture. I have made two attempts to go there but it was closed both times.

I've always enjoyed Rude's bumping... and his grinding. And I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but the three main things that have been keeping me happy during the crisis are being able to spend more time with my daughters, getting back into TRX suspension training, and catching up on all of these great Joshi, Lucha, and territory brawls. (And also Secret Santo). Man, the days would go so much more slowly without this! And here is an absolute masterpiece of a brawl:

He is in The Big Dog-house

I don't want to go and check Cagematch in case it isn't so... but I get some pleasure out of imagining that Tierra, Viento y Fuego got a big win early in his career on September 21st and he always talks about it backstage. EDIT: Well, I had a wee look, and it turns out that, no fooling, he lost his mask on September 22, 1989. So, yeah, the 21st night of September was important to him, as it was the last night he was able to wear his mask. ? 2nd EDIT: And, that particular apuestas match was either the exact one you reviewed, or at least part of the same feud!

It's an interesting idea. I think I'd enjoy comparing opinions with everyone else here.

- Obviously, this is my bag. Four big tough guys, four MEN in the ring, working hard, fighting for a title. - It's absolutely reasonable to say that this is four of the top 100 pro wrestlers of all time in the ring together. How many people would argue that point? Four of the top 50 American wrestlers of all time? Yep, I'd say that's pretty comfortably true as well. Four of the greatest. And they've got their working boots on. - The work, as work, *clears throat, looks around* ...the work, per se, is unimpeachable. Damn near everything that everyone does in there looks like it hurts, and some stuff (like, to choose just one example: Gordy's lariat) looks as good, as violent, as perfectly executed as anything you are ever going to see in a pro wrestling ring. You could use footage of this match to teach a clinic on big man bumping and selling. This is straight up first class professional wrestling, right here. - And: It's around 25 minutes of that, on free TV, in 1992! It has got to be on the short list of greatest Saturday night TV wrestling matches of all time. I'd have to imagine it ranks pretty highly on the all time list of great American tag team matches. - The structure and pacing are just ideal for a long tag match with four big, tough competitors. The whole thing builds steadily to a very nice crescendo at the end, and they have a good long babyface shine segment that lets Windham and Rhodes shine (if you weel) without making Gordy and Williams look weak or foolish. There is a nasty transition into a long double face in peril sequence where it looks really likely that the champs will retain, and where Gordy and Williams keep cranking up the punishment without repeating themselves. Then, just when all hope is lost, the babyfae comeback, climaxing with a Windham superplex and a Rhodes bulldog, and a win that feels like a huge upset and a real triumph, with the babyface locker room emptying out to celebrate with the new champs. However: Man, the (Center Stage?) crowd are just not into this. The first big hot tag (from Windham to Rhodes) and the finish both get huge pops, but other than that it really sounds like there are maybe 50 or 60 people in the crowd who are reacting to anything that's happening in the ring. Given how hard everyone is working, and how technically excellent the match is I found that pretty disconcerting. I think that the main problem is that the crowd simply does not hate Doc and Bam Bam. They announce them as being from Japan, and they are big, thick, mean-looking, ugly nasty scary dudes... but on the other hand they are pretty clearly gold old southern boys. And, well, they mostly fight fair. And Barry and Dustin are big and tough enough that they don't get any automatic sympathy heat, even against these monsters. And the babyfaces do not seem at all interested in playing to the crowd. There are two long face in peril segments. How hard is it to get the crowd to chant or clap or somehow react to that? I mean, it's not like Rhodes or Windham don't know how to pump up a crowd, right? And it's not like Doc or Gordy can't heel it up in there. Maybe it's down to Williams and Gordy working so much as the MVC in Japan. Presumably, over here, it was more than enough that they are two smelly mcugly foreign guys, and just throwing hard strikes and nasty bombs at the local heroes was enough to work up hatred in those late 80s and early-90s Japanese crowds. Maybe Windham didn't want to play too much of a babyface because they were clearly planting seeds for a heel turn in the post-match interviews? With more crowd work and a better response I'd imagine that this match would be legendary as one of the absolute greatest TV matches of all time. It's still right up there, though. The non-crowd-related portions of the work are really that good. Also, Arn is just great on commentary. He doesn't have the best voice for it, but he drops pearls of insight and wisdom and puts everyone over really well. This might actually be a match that was more fun to watch on TV than it was live and in person!

@Smelly McUgly I wanna give you another heated tag match with a clear heel/face dynamic etc, and I seem to recall you saying that Gino Hernandez is a blind spot (and you didn't enjoy the Sicodelico match-up). So... Here, please try this one:

It seems totally obvious now, but I have to admit I completely missed it.

One of the great things for me when I come to this thread at this particular point in history, after watching some empty arena AEW, is just how awesome it is to have a huge crowd going nuts for a fierce brawl. In damn near ever match in this thread, the crowd adds so much to the action in and around the ring. Ijust love to hear those fans erupting with every blow that Aja or Oz strike. Speaking of which... this is like a slightly more "fighting spirit" and slightly less "borderline manslaughter" take on Black Terry vs Wotan. The chaotic atmosphere never lets up for a moment. There is no gravel and there are no beer bottles - but in a truly great moment, there is some beer. There's also no Wotan... But there is Demus 3:16 (whom my autocorrect really believes was one of the founders of Rome). So, uh, yeah: Black Terry vs Demus, my brothers!

Who are you to doubt El Gigante? He's a jam-up guy!

Was THAT a Groundhog Day reference? If so, good one!

w/r/t Naito on top, I was at New Beginning in Osaka and holy moly were there ever a lot of people wearing Naito and/or Ingobernables gear! KENTA had his pockets of supporters throughout the arena, and Nakanishi got a huge goodbye pop and people were there for Mox v MiSu and Hiromu v Lee... But it was at least 75% Naito supporters and they were all wearing hats and shirts and jackets... That's 8000 people sporting his merch! Dude will definitely make them some yen if he's still on top when all this is over. (Assuming it's not just an Osaka thing).

Imgur is not great, but it's miles better than what photobucket has become. The time I was on the cover of Osaka Pro's program/magazine (in the bottom right corner): The newspaper supplement after Misawa's in-ring death: