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4 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

My point is that "He couldn't have been great when he was young because he wasn't great when he was old" is a pretty weak argument. There may be some wrestlers who consistently perform at a high level well into their 40s and 50s, but there are also plenty, including some of the greatest of all time, who fall off a cliff when age and injuries catch up to them. Not to mention all the guys who die or retire before they reach that point. On that note, Patterson is a curious counterexample given that he had been retired for several years when he was 46, which is how old Stevens was at the time of that Robinson match. There's not a lot of Stevens footage out there, and almost none of it is from his prime. You're extrapolating from an extremely small sample size.

Here's some prime Stevens footage where he looks like a proto-Flair. I wouldn't call him an all-time great based on this alone, but he does seem like someone whose overall body of work would hold up pretty well if we had access to it.

I've made the argument at length that old Flair teaches us a lot about the relative limitations and narrowness of young Flair that might not be as apparent otherwise, so I'm consistent at least.

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  • 2 weeks later...

That fucking Bossman match. It's been so long since I saw Ray Traylor throw his uppercut... One of the things you guys didn't mention is that Kobashi pulls (well, "pulls") his stomp/kick to Dr. Death to break up one of the pins at the last second and he gets up PISSED for the rest of the match, flipping Kobashi off twice. Either that's some great work or they had words in the locker room after. 

And as for Eddy/Rey, I have NO words.

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That tag match is spectacular. I loved it so much I watched it again right after watching it the first time. 

Rey/Eddie was sooooo good. I saw the match a month earlier at the Cow Palace, this is the only time I've seen anything from that run since seeing it live. 

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Is that Bossman match the one where he hits Misawa with his nightstick?

Eddie in 2005 is an interesting case. When he was on, he was in a class by himself, but he didn't seem to be able to consistently reach those heights. And it wasn't just a matter of him picking his spots, as some of his most high-profile matches from that year (vs. Rey at Wrestlemania, vs. Benoit at One Night Stand) were letdowns. We know now that his body was rapidly failing him, so it could be that there were some days where he was just wasn't physically capable of bringing it. That handheld is from right after Wrestlemania, so Eddie was still a total babyface (albeit of the lie, cheat, steal variety) at that point. They began teasing dissension between the two in the middle of April, and the actual turn came in May.

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I disagree re: Eddie during that final run. I think using that ECW match to somehow say he wasn't up to performing is really disingenuous or misleading. The fans were getting obnoxiously into the role of asshole ECW fans, as WWE foolishly had Eric Bischoff come out into the crowd with a bunch of RAW wrestlers right before this match, so everyone in attendance is being kewl and chanting shitty Lita chants at Edge while the RAW wrestlers taunted back. Eddie looked awesome in the match, he did everything he could to try to get their attention back, but fans were too excited to be a part of an angle. Eddie looked pissed the entire match, which is pretty understandable considering a minimum of 2/3 of the fans were focused on the balcony the entire match. Go back and watch the match. Due to the circumstances it's not a great match, but Eddie looked awesome. 

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I rewatched the ONS match. Eddie did seem somewhat gotten to by the ECW mutants chanting at Bischoff and company. There were also reports that he was upset about having to put Benoit over clean. Or maybe he just wasn't physically capable of going all-out that night. Either way, there's no way it can be classified as a great Eddie performance. I didn't see a wrestler doing everything he could to win the attention of a distracted crowd. If anything, the opposite was true. He seemed to be going out of his way to slow the match to a crawl. Benoit was by far the more explosive of the two. And there were moments where Eddie was indisputably off, like with his sell of a Benoit clothesline late in the match. In the end, when he was in the crossface, he seemed to be tapping out of boredom rather than pain. He literally apologized to Benoit in the ring after the match (you can see him mouthing "I owe you one"), so he evidently felt the same way about his performance.

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I appreciate you going back and watching the match again, even if we disagree. While it did seem like there were moments where Eddie looked in genuine pain (it was crazy how much size he was carrying around at this point), I still thought he really turned in a great performance in a not great match. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

If we had reviewed nothing more than this 1991 handheld match of Richard Slinger vs. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, it would have been completely worth it. I've seen a lot of Kikuchi, and occasionally you see this total dickhead side of him come out. You're so used to Kikuchi being the one eating a beating, that it's shocking how sadistic he can be. And then you realize Slinger is also a total monster who came up entirely within the Japan dojo system, and these two just beat the shit out of each other for 10 minutes. The whole match feels like they're taking liberties with each other, and while it never goes off the rails into an actual shoot, it feels like it could at any second. This is unprofessional professionalism, and I've already watched it three times. 

https://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2019/02/new-footage-friday-thesz-valentines-jr.html

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  • 1 month later...

Check out this new to us FULL WAR handheld show we reviewed from 1993, WAR vs. NJ in Korakuen! The best thing about WAR handhelds is we get to see how mean and nasty these guys were all being when the cameras weren't on. This show is filled with tough guys. 

https://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2019/03/new-footage-friday-we-declare-war-62593.html 

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We've been doing this for a year now and we've got some great stuff on deck over the next many weeks. 

Barring what the network gives us and other finds, we've got at the very least a Hashimoto vs Ohara massacre, a couple of great NJPW undercard tags in Satoshi Kojima/Tatsuhito Takaiwa vs Shinjiro Otani/Yuji Nagata young lions match and what i'm pretty sure is a new Malenko/Guerrero (Black Tiger) vs Ohtani/Samurai match, More 77 Piper in Japan, some WWF 1992 handheld footage, more of the lucha that Roy Lucier's been posting and oh yeah, a State Patrol vs Cam-Am Express match (Phil and Eric haven't seen it yet, but I have and there's no way we're not doing that). Of course if the network keeps giving us full AWA matches, Texas matches, and Omni shows, some of this might take a bit, but we'll get to all of it eventually.

I'll try to be better at highlighting things here. 

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