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Puroresu General Discussion for 2020


Control

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I'm trying to find a really specific match and I'm at a loss.

I think it's a NOAH match from the 2000s, it might have been in Differ, and I think it was a charity show of some kind?

What I remember really clearly are three of the four participants: Ricky Marvin & Shuhei Taniguchi were on one team, and Kotaro Suzuki was on the other. I want to say the other participant was Taue?

Also, the match had really specific rules. There was a screen showing the names of several different moves, and you weren't allowed to pin until your team did all the moves. There was one bit where Shuhei Taniguchi kept failing to do a flying cross chop, Marvin gets frustrated and tags in, and gets his whip reversed into an iron claw by Kotaro Suzuki.

These are all the things I remember about this match. Cagematch and Profightdb seem to think I'm hallucinating. Any ideas?

Edited by Lamp, broken circa 1988
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On 5/18/2020 at 11:08 PM, D.Z said:

Puroresufan/SSS to be shut down. 

Was it still very active?  I went there once after reading Stuart had been arrested and the message board seemed basically dead.  Were the other sites in the Puroresufan network still being updated.  Fairly sure several of those shut down years ago.

KInda sad to see it go, even though I've only visited it a couple times in the past eight years.  I was active on the site years ago (mid-late 2000's) when Stuart was really into it and getting ahold of backstage notes about contract talks and such.  The last couple years that he updated the main page (he stopped updating in Dec. 2014), his focus/time/commitment had noticeably waned and he was basically just posting results.  At his peak, he was reporting stuff that no one else was getting ahold of for English websites.  He probably had better sources than Meltzer and that had a lot to do with getting me invested in New Japan.

The stalking and child porn charges still seem surprising, though I never really knew anything about him or had an had any contact with him to form an opinion one way or the other.  

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Interesting story about Yajin's life after wrestling. I was married in Uji, and we go there at least once a year. It's a green tea lover's paradise and one of my absolute favorite places in Japan. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that his family has a tea farm there:

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13362525

(The article states that Yajin means 'wild one', but I think it means something closer to 'country boy')

Edited by gordi
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On 5/24/2020 at 6:30 AM, Control said:

I see from twitter that Tokyo is lifting restrictions, though I have no idea how close they are to returning to large gatherings.

They came out with the rules which were a little stricter than what was originally announced.

Still no shows to be held until June 18th. This goes for Korakuen Hall or Shin-Kiba. 2AW Square can still run in front of no one because they are owned by 2AW and they can run as many shows as they want/rent it out to other promotion as long as crowds are not there.

June 19th to July 10th you can run a show anywhere you want but no still no one in attendance. So expect to see those empty Korakuen Hall/Shin-Kiba shows again then.

July 11th you can run shows with people as long as the building is smaller than 5000 seats and the crowd is half the size of the building (150 or so for Shin-Kiba/900-1000 allowed for Korakuen)

August 1st you can run a building 5,000 seat or more as long as it is half filled. 

 

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AJPW renewed their sponsorship deal with Carbell Co., Ltd.

Champion Carnival is moved to Autumn. No gaijin but more natives.

50th anniversary show in 2022, they want to use a large venue and have the show seen by many people and invite former AJPW players and etc. They want older lasped fans to return.

Edited by D.Z
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Shiozaki vs Saito sounds like a fun "last stand" for Saito and allows NOAH a chance to give an older, hard working guy a title shot during a time when his being not much of a draw won't hurt attendance numbers (being as there, uh, is no attendance). Kind of like the reverse of when they made Saito the V1 challenger for Rikioh and hurt Rikioh's momentum so much by giving him a scrub challenger right away. Lots of talk about "The Rikioh Era" in this thread lately. 

 

As for the 50th anniversary show in 2022, sounds awesome to me. Hopefully the company is still standing by then. My dream is that they can dust off Tosh and get him in shape for a proper retirement match (maybe a tag with Akiyama against some young guys like Miyahara or Jake. Or if he's in too rough of shape to bump he could do a 30 min broadway on the mat with Fuchi, who will no doubt still be on point in '22). 

Edited by Belgian_Waffle
TYPOS
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On 5/24/2020 at 8:54 AM, Control said:

So 2AW can go back to their full crowds starting tomorrow!

They were there 2 weeks ago already.

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On 5/24/2020 at 10:31 AM, Tarheel Moneghetti said:

Was it still very active?  I went there once after reading Stuart had been arrested and the message board seemed basically dead.  Were the other sites in the Puroresufan network still being updated.  Fairly sure several of those shut down years ago.

KInda sad to see it go, even though I've only visited it a couple times in the past eight years.  I was active on the site years ago (mid-late 2000's) when Stuart was really into it and getting ahold of backstage notes about contract talks and such.  The last couple years that he updated the main page (he stopped updating in Dec. 2014), his focus/time/commitment had noticeably waned and he was basically just posting results.  At his peak, he was reporting stuff that no one else was getting ahold of for English websites.  He probably had better sources than Meltzer and that had a lot to do with getting me invested in New Japan.

The stalking and child porn charges still seem surprising, though I never really knew anything about him or had an had any contact with him to form an opinion one way or the other.  

I think most of his sources were just fans or translations of Japanese sites.

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32 minutes ago, D.Z said:

AJPW renewed their sponsorship deal with Carbell Co., Ltd.

Champion Carnival is moved to Autumn. No gaijin but more natives.

50th anniversary show in 2022, they want to use a large venue and have the show seen by many people and invite former AJPW players and etc. They want older lasped fans to return.

Hopefully early autumn, if the forecast of another COVID spike later this year holds true.

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That 1990 AJPW/NJPW Tokyo Dome show was fantastic. Zbyszko and Saito had a brilliant old school match for the AWA title, Kido/Kengo vs. Jumbo/Yatsu brought the interpromotional hatred which was then ramped up by Choshu/Takano vs. Tenryu/TMII in an incredible match. One of the best lariats I've ever seen leads to the countout finish. Sounds like a gun firing off. Then you have Vader and Hansen with the eye incident in the main event. Wild brawl. Great wrestling matched with a white hot crowd. Adore this.

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That Masa/Larry Z match may be the best of them all. It's certainly the most psychology-based of the bunch. Larry's early frustrations leading to him taking a bunch of shortcuts to finally gain the upper hand, Saito's white meat babyface comeback is so gotdang pure and amazing (my friends and I do a weekly Google Meet viewing party Thursday nights, we were all marking out for it), and then the finishing stretch which is really well done and goes back and forth in a dramatic way. It's built around the small package too. Great, great match with a quintessential white meat babyface going crazy and a really smart chicken shit heel avoiding entering pantomime villain territory but being devious in a realistic way. 

I probably enjoyed the Tenryu/Choshu tag the most because of the passion and violence mixed with crowd reaction. Tiger Mask and Nakano were putting some extra stank on their moves too, with Nakano jumping into TM's running attacks adding such a cool visual. I remember really digging The Cobra back when I was doing my '80s Japan TV binge all those years ago and this was an impressive showing for him. Dude was huge and mobile. Vader/Hansen is hard to rate in that it is exactly what it should be: a wild kaiju battle with maybe like 2 or 3 wrestling holds and just a bunch of stiff strikes, including the EYE injury, and the rules prove to be ineffectual in containing the two monsters ending in the traditional double countout. I think it's on the border of really good and great, even if Stan's my A no. 1 and Vader is a top 10er all time too. I'm excited to watch the summer rematch that I don't believe I've seen yet. Weird that they had Hansen on a random Fukuoka card in June. 

The Tenryu/Choshu tag really highlights the difference between Showa and Heisei wrestling that Suzuki often talks about. There was pure hatred between those two legends. They didn't do fancy, complex moves but what they did they did with emphasis and it allowed for the big moves to breathe. I think there's a mixture of Showa and Heisei where you can maintain the intensity, hatred, violence, and no nonsense wrestling as a sport psychology with some of the more spectacular moves and more complex storytelling of the modern age. I don't think anybody's quite nailed it perfectly yet though. NJPW can sometimes be close, especially Shibata before the Showa style ended his career and almost his life. WALTER sometimes gets close too. But it's something I hope we see emerge soon. Take the best of both worlds and drop the waste. It's easy to point out the flaws in modern wrestling but Showa violence wasn't perfect either. 

Edited by Oyaji
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Saito/Zybyzko has the end cut off so I'm passing on that. 

Kimura/Kido vs. Jumbo/Yatsu was great. The heat was already smoldering by the time they all got in the ring. New Japan liked to use a lot of double teams to an unfair advantage while All Japan was more comfortable going it alone. Kido actually stood out here with some technical work, like sliding into Fujiwara armbar a couple times and into a heel hook from an attempted Scorpion on another. He also had the baller mustache that made him look like a guy in a Hawaiian shirt enjoying a drink on the beach. There was a lot of heat on Jumbo and Yatsu but the end was what you'd expect, unfortunately no lariat though. 

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Choshu/Nakano vs. Misawa/Tenryu was really good too but had a way different vibe. First of all you've got Misawa under the Tiger Mask, and he doesn't even throw elbows FFS. At some points it seems like he doesn't even want to be there. At the same time the Choshu/Tenryu feud is still burning hot after all these years and these guys want to kill each other. You'd think Takano would be a third wheel but he's really a solid tag wrestler over all and glues this thing together between beatings. The problem is between Tenryu and Choshu erupting on each other there isn't any real snark between the other two. There's parts where if Misawa would just take his time out to be unprofessional and kick somebody in the eye it would make this so much of a better match. His high-flying is also low grade and he also doesn't even do a Zybysko kick (maybe because the man himself already had a match) which is against the gimmick. This could have been a lot better, but still. 

Vader/Hansen is another one you can watch for yourself, I am not gonna see Vader's eye pop out of his head again haha

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To each their own but I thought the Tenryu/Choshu match blew the Jumbo tag out of the water. Watching a lot of '90 matches and Jumbo's been a bit disappointing through January/early Feb tbh. He's one of the best and my faves but this wasn't his best stretch. I'm looking forward to the blowoff to the Tenryu feud and the Misawa feud taking off. He was pretty damned great in that tag though, to be fair.

Going back to the idea of combining the best of Heisei and Showa... How could I forget Tomohiro Ishii? He's the guy that does it the best and I wish more people worked like him. He's got the anger, tough guy persona, straight ahead attack/fight feel, and violence of the Showa era like his mentor Choshyu, but he's also got really great storytelling, can go 30+ without it feeling a chore or relying on repetition, and his selling is my favourite in the world because it is perfect for Tomohiro Ishii. He will put up a stoic or defiant face while in view of his enemy and only after they go down first will he then sell and sell so well. Dude does really convincing shit like the nerve damage/Kurt Angle hands, but Meltzer then says he's totally fine and it's selling. I hope that's true. So, yeah, Tomohiro Ishii: the perfect blend of Heisei and Showa wrestling.

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