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WRESTLER OF THE DAY: DAVEY RICHARDS


RIPPA

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I spent far too long searching on Youtube for the Davey Richards vs. Super workers matches since those are the Richards matches I can watch. Basically - as long as someone can reign him in he is fine (but Good Lord is he tiny). Though to be fair - I just posted the Vordell Walker match because it was against Vordell Walker

I really liked the match he had with 2 Cold Scorpio that I posted in the the Scorpio WOTD thread

 

But yeah...

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Sometime in the late 80s, I'd think? Coming off of Dynamite Kid and Tiger Mask and what have you. I know as a kid I hated Hogan because he only did two or three moves and I loved the Rockers. Then you got first the rise of Junior Heavyweight Wrestling between New Japan. Either you needed head drops and big bumps and stiff shots or hardcore shots or you needed lots of Moves and spots. "Action." This all culminated in the late 90s with the SAT/Brian XL/Quiet Storm match and led into early ROH and the Kurt Angle/Chris Benoit WWE Main Event style. 

 

And with the rise of older footage being easily available in the 00s, people in our community getting older in general, and the tragic loss of Guerrero/Benoit/Misawa/a dozen other guys in part due to that crazy all action style, a lot of us that had felt that way started to learn to appreciate different aspects of wrestling, etc. etc.

 

There's a pretty direct narrative if you pull it apart and put it back together. I might not be completely right on all of it, but I think it's really the story of our community in a lot of ways, when it comes to watching wrestling.

 

EDIT: It's a narrative I always come back to and no one else ever latches on to too much, but between reading old Observers/Herb's Tidbits, and remembering living through this place in 99-00-01, and even see people like Tim or Resident Evil (I'm sorry for associating you with RE, Tim) who are sort of like perfect relics from that era, it's all just very interesting to me. 

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Did the emphasis on MOVEZ~! come with the inability to properly promote angles via weekly television shows? It's hard to build blood feuds with Facebook posts.

 

Davey wrestled for a local indy and he was SO much better than anyone else, because he brought this DAMMIT, THIS IS IMPORTANT intensity no one else had. He knew how to play to the crowd. The match itself was a stunt show, but still fun.

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ROH was really this monster that put wrestling first over angles and the idea of wrestling was a lot of moves and kick outs and headdrops, but that was just a dot on the map. You have to go back to where it came from, and why there was a market for that. 

 

This is a big tapestry and someone like Bix or John Williams or Phil would be able to pull the big picture together better than most.

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I was hoping this thread was going to be about Davey Boy Smith, and someone would put the "he's a test tube baby" promo in here.

 

I find Davey Richards much more enjoyable in a tag team match than in singles matches. I'm sure there's pretty good Davey singles matches out there, but I haven't seen them.

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I actually like when he wrestles heel.  I liked him in Puerto Rico and I like that match against Kevin Steen in Canada.  Every else is... suspect.

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I do like tracking down the Richards matches in the UK because it usually is against someone I hadn't seen before and for the most part he isn't infuriating.

 

Granted I never ever want him to fucking talk again

 

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At what point did MOVEZ become a prerequisite for a "good" match anyway?

It's probably always been there. I think what happened is that, as time passed and wrestling and it's history became better documented, that standard became really hard to justify, because the standards of wrestling offense are always escalating. If you were a fan in, say, the 80's, and MOVEZ was a prerequisite to you...are any of the matches you liked then still any good to you now? Or is wrestling today from barely trained yarders who do shooting star presses through flaming tables so much better than the Flair matches you gave five stars to back in the day so impossibly good in your eyes that your head literally explodes when you watch them? The second you expand your scope of wrestling beyond the immediate, it stops making sense as a prerequisite, and it becomes obvious that there's something else more important. I tend to liken it to a teenager who watches a lot of Hollywood blockbusters and a few of your more "sound and thunder" artistic films like "Fight Club" and "Donnie Darko" (you may adjust accordingly for when you grew up), but is still squeamish about watching anything that came out before they were born, or a subtitled foreign film, or any domestic film that isn't all up in your area the way the kids seem to like it. I have a whole TL;DR essay in me about how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling are incredibly poorly developed compared to the standards of aesthetic criticism of any of the major art forms...I don't think I'm gonna write it today, but I will point to MOVEZ still being a prequisite for good wrestling to to a large number of folks who consider themselves "smart fans" as evidence that it's true.

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I have a whole TL;DR essay in me about how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling are incredibly poorly developed compared to the standards of aesthetic criticism of any of the major art forms...

 

You should have an essay on how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling is comparable to the standards of aesthetic criticism of porn.

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At what point did MOVEZ become a prerequisite for a "good" match anyway?

It's probably always been there. I think what happened is that, as time passed and wrestling and it's history became better documented, that standard became really hard to justify, because the standards of wrestling offense are always escalating. If you were a fan in, say, the 80's, and MOVEZ was a prerequisite to you...are any of the matches you liked then still any good to you now? Or is wrestling today from barely trained yarders who do shooting star presses through flaming tables so much better than the Flair matches you gave five stars to back in the day so impossibly good in your eyes that your head literally explodes when you watch them? The second you expand your scope of wrestling beyond the immediate, it stops making sense as a prerequisite, and it becomes obvious that there's something else more important. I tend to liken it to a teenager who watches a lot of Hollywood blockbusters and a few of your more "sound and thunder" artistic films like "Fight Club" and "Donnie Darko" (you may adjust accordingly for when you grew up), but is still squeamish about watching anything that came out before they were born, or a subtitled foreign film, or any domestic film that isn't all up in your area the way the kids seem to like it. I have a whole TL;DR essay in me about how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling are incredibly poorly developed compared to the standards of aesthetic criticism of any of the major art forms...I don't think I'm gonna write it today, but I will point to MOVEZ still being a prequisite for good wrestling to to a large number of folks who consider themselves "smart fans" as evidence that it's true.

 

 

Write it. 

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Do a significant number of smart fans really consider MOVEZ to be a prerequisite for a good match, though? There seem to be plenty who believe that MOVEZ can significantly improve a match, but that's not nearly the same as saying that only matches with MOVEZ are good.

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