WRESTLING ON THE INTERNET NOT FROM THE NOW

[Curt McGirt]

Piper being forced to mat wrestle is a treasure. Haven't seen that in years.

[Matt D]

2006-7 Goldust in Puerto Rico is something I knew nothing about. PR footage is tough to find online but he wrestled Apolo for the Universal title at the first of the 2007 Aniversario shows too. 

Also, I was looking at what he was doing in 2007 and there are a bunch of "United Wrestling Federation" spots. The Corino bullrope match definitely made tape and is available on Highspots but I'm not quite so hard up on wrestling to hunt it down. He wrestled Corino a bunch more in that little run, plus Scott Steiner, Aries (Starr) and Hemme with Jerry Lynn, Test, and a random three way with Damien Wayne and Bobby Houston. I assume none of this stuff actually survives. Ah well. EDIT: actually Highspots has a lot of these cards at $15 a pop, even the Wayne/Houston three way. I suppose that's good to know. 

You know, I wonder if I can convince Phil to get this for War Games Weds:

UnCivil War - Double Ring - Double Cage
Team Sgt. Slaughter
Dustin Rhodes, Scott Steiner, Rick Steiner, Kirby Mack & TJ Mack
vs.
Team JBL
CW Anderson, Steve Corino, Hernandez, Homicide, & Elix Skipper

[odessasteps]

King Curtis when he was only a Prince.

[Guest Edwin]

Not a great match by any chance, but a pretty masterful performance from Danielson. On the ground he looks competent as he shows he knows at least grappling basics and goes for an adequate heel hook instead of sitting in a lame poorly executed kneebar like a lot of others do when they are on the ground. Loved him getting frustrated with End's palm strike flurries and blasting him with leg kicks.

End's palm strikes and leg kick selling are pretty average which make the finish look a bit weak. He also looks like a fish out of water on the ground. This doesn't seem like a style that suited him back then and his strikes are a lot better now than they were back then.

It's short and well worth a watch for Danielson's performance.

[Guest Edwin]

This match rules.

Masterful performance from Hashimoto. Him chopping the bigger Goodridge down with leg kicks, his selling of Goodridge's somewhat held back punches, his selling/facial expressions during Goodridge's rolling kneebar and him finally getting frustrated with Goodridge's clean breaks and blasting him with a headbutt and then landing the grounded headbutts, etc. was pretty awesome. I thought Goodridge did pretty good for having such limited experience in pro-wrestling. Him getting the full mount was pretty neat and got a pretty neat pop from the crowd.

Watch it if you haven't.

[RIPPA]

Hey @Curt McGirt - do you remember which issue you found Pete's Taue/Dreamer review in?

And as aside - Dean also talked about it in DVDVR #5 since it was part of when Dean called Dreamer the American Masato Tanaka

[J.T.]

On ‎1‎/‎5‎/‎2019 at 2:42 AM, Edwin said:

It's short and well worth a watch for Danielson's performance.

Since we're posting Bryan Danielson matches.

Here is the slightly overbooked first match between Super Dragon and Bryan Danielson that is remembered so fondly due to the million billion start ring commentary between Excalibur and Larry Rivera.

[J.T.]

May as well post the vignette that led up to the Super Dragon / American Dragon match where Super Dragon beats the shit out of a homeless vagrant while training to defend the EPIV TV title against Danielson.

It is fucking hilarious.

[Curt McGirt]

22 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Hey @Curt McGirt - do you remember which issue you found Pete's Taue/Dreamer review in?

And as aside - Dean also talked about it in DVDVR #5 since it was part of when Dean called Dreamer the American Masato Tanaka

Upper 90s I think? A Google search came up with it; I had read it recently and it was fresh in the mind.

[RIPPA]

Hey @DEAN

[thee Reverend Axl Future]

Bison Kimura is no joke. JYokota is genius as well. This is the real strong style mother lode.

- RAF

 

[Kang]

 

[OSJ]

On 1/7/2019 at 7:28 AM, J.T. said:

May as well post the vignette that led up to the Super Dragon / American Dragon match where Super Dragon beats the shit out of a homeless vagrant while training to defend the EPIV TV title against Danielson.

It is fucking hilarious.

Damn, but I love Super Dragon, the best heel that most people have never heard of.

[RIPPA]

12 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Damn, but I love Super Dragon, the best heel that most people have never heard of.

yeah.... no one has heard of Super Dragon on this board 

[DEAN]

The fuckin SUPER DESTROYER~!

 

[Web Conn]

 

[Curt McGirt]

The CLAW HOLD and Jerry Brisco going into spasms are the best!

[thee Reverend Axl Future]

6 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

The CLAW HOLD and Jerry Brisco going into spasms are the best!

...and the loading & unloading of the mask make me all tingly as well.

- RAF

[DEAN]

2 hours ago, thee Reverend Axl Future said:

...and the loading & unloading of the mask make me all tingly as well.

- RAF

I don't know what I miss more- loading the mask or loading the boot.

[thee Reverend Axl Future]

My favorite way to see the boot loaded is the ritualistic tapping of the toe down into the mat: a special-made boot, loaded with an unknown dense slug of material that we can only speculate on, mechanized by arcane heel science. My second favorite way is thee stacked sole, because of a gamey leg. There is a doctor's note of course. The apotheosis is reached when the babyface can get the dreaded boot off, and use it both as a flailing ring weapon and as proof of the skulduggery that been perpetrated for so long. (this scenario is very ripe for a handicapable rights gimmick, the put-upon villain demanding rights whilst dancing on both sides of the PC/anti-PC fence) ((Frankie Caine has complained about this gimmick, extended use of the big boot would cause hip problems, these men are artists)) Now, the mask is strictly manual, and can involve a partner or manager - the tech is not at boot level yet, and it can go horribly awry if said alleged gimmick should slip and obscure vision and/or be discovered by the ref.

- RAF

[OSJ]

On 1/9/2019 at 8:38 AM, RIPPA said:

yeah.... no one has heard of Super Dragon on this board 

I didn't say "this board", I said "most people". If you really think that "most people" read this board, you have a seriously delusional sense of grandeur.  

[OSJ]

9 hours ago, DEAN said:

I don't know what I miss more- loading the mask or loading the boot.

Nothing beats the Grappler loading up the boot!

[Contentious C]

So I felt like writing things about wrestling again.  There is something wrong with me.  And this was all stuff I found on the webs, so it may as well go into this thread as well as anywhere else.  Buckle up; this is going long.

On a bit of a lark, I initially wanted to rewatch Kawada/Sasaki from 10/9/2000, then follow it up with the Kawada/Fuchi vs. Nagata/Iizuka 12/14/2000 tag that got mentioned in one of the other threads.  It turns out I hadn't ever reviewed the former (though it seems to stick in my head as a ***3/4-ish match), while I apparently savaged the bejesus out of the latter.

I haven't watched the tag.  Maybe later, maybe not.  Instead, I drew a straight line through 3 slapfights.

Kawada/Sasaki is a match that still holds a strange place for me; I had just started buying tapes around that time, and there's a certain bias towards hoping that what you're seeing right now is 'the greatest'.  This match isn't that.  What it is, instead, is the inflection point for me - the dividing line between When I Gave a Shit about Wrestling and When I Didn't Give a Shit about Wrestling.  It was, ultimately, far more worth my time to have revisited a significant chunk of both All Japan promotions from the 90s (which I did a lot of) than it was to try to con myself into believing that what was coming down the pipe was going to be fantastic.  There are always some exceptions - having seen Santito/La Parka live, for example, as well as attending the matches Liger had in ROH back in 2005 - but mostly, the whole of professional wrestling is still giving off the stench of a corpse.  Kawada/Sasaki was where that became evident to me.  Any number of events since then - the Benoit insanity, Misawa's death, WWE thinking Saudi Arabia shows are a good idea - only solidify that position. 

But what about the match?  Well, it's still a good match - and perhaps more importantly an effective one.  It has the structure and build and feel of a spectacle, and both guys come out looking good.  It's sloppy at times and takes a little too long to get going, but no one expected them to go out and repeat 6/3/94 move for move.  Even if they had, it wouldn't have played as well as this, because the goal here was to give All Japan enough of a rub to make them look like more than the hollowed-out husk of a dead tree that they were at the time.  This is less of a match and more like Seth Bullock versus Al Swearingen.  "I'm not going to let that cocksucker beat me, if it means I have to kill him or myself or both of us."  There's something to be said for that, in the Dome atmosphere.

So, I thought a lot about the preponderance of chopping, and that led me back to two other matches.  

------

The next match I rewatched was Gen-ichiro Tenryu vs. Shin'ya Hashimoto from 8/1/1998 (the G1 quarterfinals).  I (ugh) dug up my old website from the Internet Archive, and, well, let's just say I called a lot of people morons for liking this, when the real moron was me.  It looks like this finished 13th in the old Bot90s NJ poll, and so I would say it's still overrated, but wow, this was a lot of fun.  New Japan had a lot of these matches - just two guys who brought a lot of hate and a lot of hurt and just wore each other down like a boxing match.  It's more than the 'outsider versus local' motif, or the sheer beatings that make them similar matches.  It's the way they sell pain that is just fun to see.  Pain can make you curl up and cry, but it can also make you rage out and want to smash things, and sometimes it does both within seconds of each other, and these guys make you feel that.  A good example is Tenryu selling his arm like he had a stinger from the accumulation of all those chops - it's subtle, not acting like his arm's coming off, but just acknowledging it and reminding you how much sheer abuse he's taken. These two are an even better Bullock & Swearingen than Kawada & Sasaki (not that that should surprise anyone).  Kawada/Sasaki wasn't quite as good as I remembered, largely due to the early sloppiness before they started laying in bombs, but this match was much better than I remembered. 

------

And the final slapfight I watched was, you know, The Slapfight.  I hadn't ever reviewed Kobashi/Sasaki from 7/18/2005, because it came off like a steaming turd back then, and hey, guess what, if you take the chops out, it's still a steaming turd.  The thread around here about "What would you show to a non-fan" is funny, because there probably isn't much of anything you could do to convince someone to watch this stuff.  But if you knew someone who watched U.S. stuff, and you wanted to get them to watch Japan stuff, well...this match wouldn't be the *first* thing you'd show them, but the chop sequence would definitely be *a* thing you show them.  It's too crazy to skip.  But, it's the one fleck of kale present in a colon full of McDonald's Quarter Pounders.

I've come to the conclusion that Kenta Kobashi is the most aggravating performer in the history of wrestling.  All the great matches, all the time spent on top, all the physical tools - I'm not sure any of them matter at all, because he's probably more responsible than anyone, even Misawa, for how totally overblown his own companies' styles became, for why they fell apart.  It's certainly a business that is guilty of what you'd call "spot creep", I guess, but he's one of the guys who became a force multiplier for that effect, and this match has got to be close to the nadir of what that looks like.  It's part of why I was always baffled about people saying NOAH was still having great matches.  Technically? Sure, I suppose in terms of degree of difficulty or something, they might have been.  But they, much like any number of AJPW mains that preceded them, were wildly self-destructive in a type of work that is already a perpetual meat grinder which arbitarily coughs out puffs of fame in exchange.  That's how much these rise above the baseline; I felt that way then, when I pilloried Misawa/Kobashi matches others gobbled up, and I feel that way now.  I never needed to hear about one of those guys dying in the ring to see it for what it was.

And the chops just make that stand out even more.  They slap each other for four straight minutes and get more out of the crowd there than they do for every tired suplex Kobashi ever invented.  Maybe that should have told them, "Oh, look, we don't have to take insane risks to engage the crowd", but of course it didn't.  This was clearly trying to out-do the Kawada/Sasaki match from years before, which was clearly molded in the style of the big heavyweight collisions of New Japan Dome shows past, but...ugh.  Just no.  I connected more to the lumpy 50 year old shaking his arm out every so often, thanks, guys.

------

A long time ago, I was going to write up the AJW Big Egg Dome show, since that was Akira Hokuto's first attempt at retirement, and it was a capstone for the insane amount of punishment she put herself through during a stretch where no one in the world was better at her job than she was.  It was amazing and impressive and tragic and, even though no one would have wanted her to blow out her knee, her injury was like something you'd write in a book or put into a film.  And I was going to get into a lot of these very details, but it's not like anyone's listening - and by that I don't mean, no one is reading these posts (though, really...haha...). 

What I mean is, wrestling probably shouldn't exist at all, because the people doing it shouldn't have to destroy themselves over some fixed bullshit to fill up two hours of TV or get some PPV buys or fill a stadium.  And who the fuck are we, that we keep expecting that?  Demanding it?  Feeding it?  All the shit supreme & OSJ were saying about drug use in the Movies folder: that's all true about this "entertainment", too.  Except the fame's the drug.  Matches like Tenryu/Hash & Kawada/Sasaki con you into thinking otherwise, that maybe there's something to it, that maybe it could be art instead of something closer to porn.  Kobashi/Sasaki is one cold cup of water in the face, though.  

[Curt McGirt]

Tenryu/Hash is still in my top five Japanese matches of all time. 

With Wrestling at the Chase getting mentioned in the main monthly thread I thought I'd dig up that documentary because 1. I've never seen it, and 2. the only OG St. Louis I've seen is a tag with Murdoch vs... somebody. Yet I have read Larry Matysik book multiple times. Weird...

 

[J.T.]

On ‎1‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 7:39 PM, OSJ said:

Nothing beats the Grappler loading up the boot!

Hate to disagree, but I always was a mark for The Assassins and The Russian Assassins loading their masks for cheap tag-team victories via assisted headbutt.

My favorite loading the boot spots will always be from the Iron Sheik and Bad News Allen.