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Confessions of a wrestling fan


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I am spending way too much of my free time writing a fumbling "Hey, I'm trying to understand lucha. Come try with me" thing over Segunda Caida. 

 

I started back on April 20.

 

It really does make sense most of the time once you get used to structures and tropes.

 

Also, I would totally watch Jumbo matches with you guys but Phil never got moving with the next one. Someone figure out what the most important Remedial Jumbo would be and maybe we'll start it next month on our own? I've ONLY seen the AWA stuff I think.

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The thing that "bothers" me about not liking lucha is that I seem to love watching luchadores wrestle outside of lucha libre.  I loved the WCW cruiserweights, I've enjoyed plenty of lucha guys in the NJPW Jr. division, and I was super excited when WWE signed Sin Cara.  It just never carries over when I watch a lucha match.  It didn't take me much time at all to get into puro, but it could be that I started with guys I already liked (Benoit, Eddy, Liger, Muta) and moved on from there, but the lucha guys I like seem to all be guys who started in Mexico but never really did anything significant until they left. 

 

Thanks for the link Matt, I've actually been reading some of those over the last few months, maybe I'll actually watch some of the matches.

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I actually get hugely frustrated watching them in WCW now. You take them out of the 2/3 falls structure and take out a lot of the ways that they gather heat and prime the crowd for the comeback and then deliver it and you just end up with cool moves and big dives and great masks. It becomes a parody of lucha in a lot of ways, which is what I thought the style was for years and years. Great candy but not much else. It kills me that the Psicosis I've been seeing in early 90s AAA, for instance, was stuck working six or seven minute tv matches on Thunder during the prime of his career. I'm glad he had the paycheck, but man...

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I don't know much about lucha, but my favorite stuff is the brawls, actually. Watching Negro Casas knock a dude's dick stiff is awesome, for example. Since most brawls in U.S. wrestling are now really a bunch of high-spots with tables and ladders and cinderblocks, lucha probably has the best brawls there are, with two guys punching the shit out of each other until they are both bleeding. 

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There's a difference between being a great entertainer and a great worker. I mean, no one would say Hulk Hogan was a great worker, but he's gotta be discussed in the discussion of greatest wrestlers just because of what he accomplished in the business.

 

The real greats to me are people like Ric Flair, who combine the entertainment and being a great worker into a package. There's no "he's great, but ..." in arguments about peak-period Flair. 

 

MIchaels and Angle (man, I loved Angle's character) are great entertainers. Angle just had a problem during his WWF run with remembering this stuff in wrestling called "selling." Being a great worker is consistently doing all the things that make workers great. And Angle couldn't do it. He's still pretty damn good, but he's not in there with Flair just as a worker.

 

Oh, and the thing that bothers me about Lucha is the same thing that bothers me about Japanese wrestling. I have no sense of context. I have no clue why the dudes are fighting, what's personally at stake between the two besides titles. Are they longtime rivals? First meeting? Did they train together and have a falling out? I need to know something about the angle involved instead of just watching a match beween two dudes who I heard were really good from you guys.

 

I still don't understand why someone doesn't buy the rights to classic Lucha and Puro and redub them with English commentary that puts over the angles and the moves and the rivalries. That would be insanely cheap programming for someone like Spike or whoever, and I bet it would draw an audience, even if the matches are old. If you haven't seen it before, it's new to you, right?

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Until Bischoff tweets the results three minutes before the show airs.

 

1-vince-mcmahon-wwe-funny-face.gif

 

Have you gone through the remedial Kawada/Misawa thread, Jstout?

No. I've seen 6-3-94 and I thought it started off slow, but by the end I was convinced it was one of the greatest wrestling matches I've ever seen. I really wish I had a better idea of where that match fit in their history and whether any moves were callbacks to previous matches, etc. I'll have to check that out. I take it it's in the Puro folder.

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No. I've seen 6-3-94 and I thought it started off slow, but by the end I was convinced it was one of the greatest wrestling matches I've ever seen. I really wish I had a better idea of where that match fit in their history and whether any moves were callbacks to previous matches, etc. I'll have to check that out. I take it it's in the Puro folder.

Main folder.

 

Also, Dan Ginnetty, tape trader extraordinaire responsible for those badass season sets, used to do a cable access lookin' show doing commentary over random Japanese matches. It was awkward and the commentary wasn't very good but it's still out there on youtube I believe. Yep, here it is. Looks as if they rebooted it last year.

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The thing that "bothers" me about not liking lucha is that I seem to love watching luchadores wrestle outside of lucha libre. I loved the WCW cruiserweights, I've enjoyed plenty of lucha guys in the NJPW Jr. division, and I was super excited when WWE signed Sin Cara. It just never carries over when I watch a lucha match. It didn't take me much time at all to get into puro, but it could be that I started with guys I already liked (Benoit, Eddy, Liger, Muta) and moved on from there, but the lucha guys I like seem to all be guys who started in Mexico but never really did anything significant until they left.

Thanks for the link Matt, I've actually been reading some of those over the last few months, maybe I'll actually watch some of the matches.

This is how I feel towards Japanese wrestling for the most part. When guys make excursions to the US, it's always interesting to me. But once they go back to their natural way of doing things, my interest level for the most part isn't as strong,

I don't always get lucha myself but in my case I understand the language so if the commentary is trying to get over something I know what's going on. And as I have watched more lucha I find it that much more enjoyable not just because it's cultural significance but the style of guys like Negro Casas is so engaging.

That isn't to say some of the Japanese aren't but it could just be me wanting to praise something that doesn't get as much praise as I think it should.

For me it's Japanese wrestling gets so hyped while lucha doesn't that gets me to dismiss it almost altogether.

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The big multi-man matches were the most intimidating thing about getting into lucha for me.  I wish I had kept some of the notes I used to make for myself while watching so I could remember who everyone was.

 

I think the big mistake for fans is going in thinking "lucha" is one style like getting into hip hop and thinking it's all one thing.  Or imagine you'd never watched American wrestling and you watch a Daniel Bryan match, a Great Khali match and a Davey Richards match.  You'd probably be frustrated and confused too.

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Simon Dean was legit my favourite wrestler when I was 11, so when I had a school project that (for reasons I can't remember) involved designing and building a chair out of cardboard, I painted it blue with various pictures of Simon Dean glued on to it. I still like Dean now, for more smarky reasons, but damn I must have been such a weirdo back at school...

 

Plus I went ape shit when he got eliminated from the 2005 Royal Rumble by Shawn Michaels and, for the next year or so, hated Michaels more than any other wrestler because of it.

 

Nowadays I'm all about The Heart Throbs.

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I really thought Harley Race was going to beat Hulk Hogan for the WWF title when I went to the Garden in summer of 87. I thought for sure King Harley was going to win the belt and hold onto it until Mania

 

James

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I rage-quit wrestling for almost a year twice in the span of two years when Vader beat the shit out of Sting at GAB '92(It took Yoko taking the WWF Title from Hulk to reel me back in) and in '94 when Austin lost the US Title to Duggan(he was my second favorite after Steamboat). I don't remember what sucked me back in the second time. I think some friends of mine were talking about RAW and Nitro in early '96 and I just slowly got back into it about a month before the NWO formed.

 

I like goofy-ass John Cena just as much as I like serious John Cena.

 

I thought the blindfold match at WM VII was great.

 

I went to a WCW house show here back when Foley was doing the birthday gift gimmick with Sting and Abdullah popped out o the box to be his partner in the main. 10 year-old me thought that was the scariest thing ever and tried to run away with my older cousin grabbing me and calming me down. Also, at this same show, a friend of mine from school got to carry the tag belts(I think the Enforcers had it at this time) back behind the curtain because his dad worked security. I was so damn jealous that I didn't talk to him for a week, hahaha.

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I thought the blindfold match at WM VII was great.

 

 

 

That match IS great, don't listen to the smarks. Must've been the easiest Wrestlemania pay-off for wrestlers ever too

 

 

I thought that Martel should've been trying to cheat his ass off during the match. Like, try to peak under the hood and stuff.

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