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WRESTLER OF THE DAY: AJ STYLES


RIPPA

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Might as well do a TNA week. Start with the man who clearly looks to have gotten out at the perfect time... but was too fuckng cheap to buy a suit.

 

Pre-TNA

http://youtu.be/1KLYd60vARM

 

TNA

 

Post-TNA

http://youtu.be/VUw4ZOEZ9lA

 

The TNA clip is fitting since it starts with 2 1/2 minutes of Russo putting himself over

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Nicest thing I can say about Styles is that he had the same Little Dude That Could thing going on for him same as Low-Ki, Danielson, and Punk and knows how to work that gimmick.

 

Problem is that his persona comes off as really forced and he gives horrible promos because you cannot coach charisma.

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I loved AJ when I watched TNA from 2003 to 2006.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1QCgwpIqKc

 

Favorite TNA match. From AJ being balls ass crazy to hop through the cage and slide underneath that guardrail to AJ being so desperate he starts biting Abyss's hand as the only counter to a chokeslam. I thought everything was perfect in the match, even the commentary team whom are usually fucking idiots. Hell, the match was so perfect, they copied the finish a year later with Christian Cage.

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wasn't there a period of time where he was a cowardly stooge character? Was he in the Main Event Mafia at the time? I've never actively watched TNA but I remember that was one of the few times where I thought 'maybe he has some charisma after all...'

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wasn't there a period of time where he was a cowardly stooge character? Was he in the Main Event Mafia at the time? I've never actively watched TNA but I remember that was one of the few times where I thought 'maybe he has some charisma after all...'

 

No No - he was in Frontline which was the Kurt Angle group feuding with the Main Even Mafia. It included the angle of Styles and Karen Angle getting married.

 

There was also the period where he was paired with Ric Flair doing the "New Nature Boy" stuff

So yes - he was doing stooging heel stuff for a bit

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I have always been a big AJ mark. He was one of my early "gateways" into independent wrestling. I had the opportunity to meet him here for a small independent company that I helped do odd things like ring announce or play timekeeper on the same night as ECW One Night Stand.

 

AJ had a solid match against Elix Skipper that night, and I had fun interacting with Elix's son throughout the show. After the show there was a bit with Raven lecturing AJ about his match wearing nothing but a towel. That's one of those images you don't expect to see when you are helping out at an indie show.

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I saw AJ Styles at the OMEGA reunion show where I met several of the DVDVR guys, and the main thing I remember was him dumping himself on his head.

 

I saw him in Wildside and he was easily the 5th or 6th talented guy there, prone to no-selling and dumping himself on his head.

 

I never ever got the hype.

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wasn't there a period of time where he was a cowardly stooge character? Was he in the Main Event Mafia at the time? I've never actively watched TNA but I remember that was one of the few times where I thought 'maybe he has some charisma after all...'

 

No No - he was in Frontline which was the Kurt Angle group feuding with the Main Even Mafia. It included the angle of Styles and Karen Angle getting married.

 

There was also the period where he was paired with Ric Flair doing the "New Nature Boy" stuff

So yes - he was doing stooging heel stuff for a bit

 

Don't forget Prince AJ in the Christian Coalition.

 

That actually happened, right? The fact that nobody else has brought it up makes me wonder. 

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I saw him in Wildside and he was easily the 5th or 6th talented guy there, prone to no-selling and dumping himself on his head.

 

I remember the tag team of AIR PARIS~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!    ...............................  and aj styles....

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I also forget that Styles was at a Super 8 and lead to all of us yelling at each other

 

 

DONOVAN MORGAN vs. A.J. STYLES 

MH:  This one started out fun, with the matwork and the striking and all of that.  Everything was going along swimmingly and I was looking forward to another really fun Super 8 Final, until Styles finally nailed the Springboard Shooting Star Press and came up selling a leg injury.  My beef here is not with the actual move, as that’s one of his spots.  Nor is it with the fact that Styles nailed Morgan hard with an elbow on the way down, bloodying his mouth and (so I hear) knocking out one of Morgan’s teeth.  Not even is it the fact that Styles crashed and burned, torching his head on the security railing.  No, my beef is that Styles sold the leg injury like it was a big deal, and then sold Morgan’s subsequent attacks and submission attempts on the leg like it was about to fall off…and then forgot about it when it was his turn to go on offense.  I mean he went from screaming bloody murder about his leg to propping up big, polished Donovan Morgan to do his spots when it was his turn.  Blech.  I don’t care what Rippa said; I wasn’t going to just enjoy it.  This is the Super 8 Final, you don’t forget about selling like that.  And then to piss me off even more, they start doing some nearfalls with a whole bunch of moves that should have been the finish, but they all got broken, turning this into Ronnie Zukko vs. Romeo Valentino with better spots.  Styles works out of the Sitout TD91 a few times, but finally eats it for the pin.  I blame Styles for the forgetting to sell; I blame Morgan for the All Japan fifty-million-finishers nearfall section.  Rest of the match was fine, but these two factors dragged it way down for me.
 
PP:  Morgan and Styles have the annual Super 8 pre-final face-off on the ECWATron, where Styles quickly makes Shane Helms sound like William Regal.  The beginning to this was really great as they traded headslaps, then shook hands and hunkered down for some of that there professional wrestling.  This got a ton of time and both guys looked really good.  My beef with the match isn’t WRT the selling issues so much as the fact that they each burned through about a dozen legit finishing moves in the course of the match, including both guys’ established finishers.  I can understand Styles getting to kick out of Morgan’s piledriver because he was the one doing the job in the end and it isn’t like Morgan’s going to be a regular here, but now Morgan has kicked out of the Styles Clash and Styles has to come back to the Parish next month with a lame-duck move.  Post-match Michael Modest comes out and they hold up a NOAH Pro Wrestling banner to a big “NOAH” chant from the crowd.  We all immediately start booking our fantasy ECWA/NOAH talent trades.  “Tamon Honda/Benny Stolzfuss!”  “Jun Akiyama/Japanese Pool Boy!”
 
PS: I enjoyed the heck out of the first part of the match, and the second half completely lost me. They psych of this match was all fucked up, they kept having Styles get cut off in his attempts to do the Top Rope SSP in the earlier rounds, and when he finally hits it, it as used as a transition for Morgan. Then Morgan works over the leg for a long time, until they decide to go for the finish, and then Styles is doing springboards. Then they have a full blow shitty So-Cal ending, with then just exchanging finishers for cheap two count pops. After spending all tourney pimping Morgan’s finisher, Styles kicks out of it, and goes back on offense. Morgan spent a lot of time at the KOI railing about wrestlers who don’t know how to work and just throw out spots with no rhyme or reason, he seemed to be talking about Styles vs. Franz which got a lot of praise. Well he works Styles in the biggest match of Morgan’s US career and doesn’t have a match approaching Styles vs. Franz, and a match which is way more of a meaningless spotfest then that match. Morgan is the veteran, and he is a better worker then this.
 
DR: Eh, this match fucking ruled.  It was perfectly fine junior heavyweight wrestling but with finishers that were beyond the state-of-the-art.  Fuck, if they know that many finishers, I’ll sit in a Parrish Hall and watch them go through it.  It Momoe Nakanishi could half the shit that Donovan Morgan can do, I wouldn’t hate her Maekawa matches as much.  If the CZW guys could get the thud per buck that these two got for each finisher, “CZW Junior Finishing Sequence” wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  Match of the night.  This ruled.  Xavier vs. Styles was technically better, but this was the best All Japan 99 match ever reenacted on US soil.
 
PR: I just didn’t like Marcel and Schneider killing everyone’s buzz. I agreed with everyone’s rationale of why the 2nd part of the match was very weak - I agreed with it at the moment. Still doesn’t mean I don’t want to enjoy myself as I am watching it. I had a bigger problem with Styles doing the pop-up headscissor thingy after taking the KO forearm from Xavier than I did with him not selling the knee. I guess, sadly, I have conditioned myself to expect finishers to get kicked out of left and right nowadays. And, it’s not like either one of them has kicked out of a Burning Hammer like a certain Jersey worker did. Me... still bitter... naaahhhhhh.
 
RD:  This was just sort of there.  For some reason, it felt like AJ was trying to play the heel in his promo, but uh, it wasn't good.  This match was probably the 4th best Super 8 Final behind Ki/Dragon, Daniels/Scoot and Daniels/Bradley.  I'm not sure if Style's selling the leg was all selling, I'm thinking he probably banged it when he crashed and burned on the dive, he probably could improvised into selling it for the match, but he didn't.  Otherwise, it had the kicking out of the finishes, which I would have rather had the rope saves out of or fighting to block or countering rather than hitting, but hey, I'm not running the matches.  Styles did a pretty crazy corkscrew somersault senton in this at one point.  Post match, everyone comes out to congratulate Morgan as he and Mike display the NOAH banner.  I was hoping for the heel promo with Morgan saying he was going to fly to Japan and present the trophy to Mr. Misawa!  Of course, they'd have to tape that for the ECWATron, especially the part where he tries to slip it in as carry on and store it in the overhead compartment.
 
TKG: Recapping the story thus far…. In his first two rounds AJ Styles didn’t show too much of his offense but he was able to win the matches by reversing moves into his finisher. The Styles Clash gets over as a move that he can hit out of nowhere to get the win. In Morgan’s first match he won with the devastating chickenwing piledriver, in his second match his opponent fought to avoid the piledriver and Morgan could steal a win with a roll up. One of the neat things about the way the matches have worked thus far is that you didn’t get that sense of this is the body of the match and this is the finish section that you get in too much wrestling. The finishes of the matches seemed to arise naturally out of the work in the body.
 
TKG: Well this is the match where AJ Styles shows all his high end offense that he hadn’t used in the first two matches. He hits his shooting star press to the floor a dive from the ring barrier to the floor and a sweet looking move where he springboards off the middle rope lands on his feet in position behind Morgan to execute a neckbreaker. He lands the shooting star press to the floor a move which the story was he hadn’t been able to hit for the first two matches, but it comes across as meaningless as he can’t looses the control of the momentum immediately after hitting it. The springboard from middle rope move (which also requires that he lift Morgan for neckbraker after landing on his feet) was done right after a long section of him having his leg worked on. I don’t think the criticism of the leg work was based on him selling or not selling after torching his leg. But the early part of the match was all about Morgan working over the leg. I really enjoyed that early section as each leg lock looked progressively more painfull and I think hit all those seven points of the leg that Solie always talked about. There was a neat point where Morgan had Styles in a hold, when Styles escaped he applied another version of the hold one upping Morgan by adding I think a grapevine of some sort. Morgan then rolled it over into a pin. In a tourney filled with matches involving neat mat chain stuff, this was probably the coolest. It’s a shame it was ignored later on in the match. The end of match with the exchanging big finishers section for two counts and kick outs was well just silly as it killed the story of the tourney. Knoble fighting out of the chickenwing piledriver would have been a better model, as I’d rather see both guys fight out of their opponents finisher until one takes it then to see them just eat finisher after finisher. All this burning through of finishers was an affront to my lucha mask. This was very much a match where you had distinct section of here’s the body and here’s the finish. I loved the first 5 minutes but then it went sour. Nice US indy match, dissapointing super 8 final match.

 

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