AUG 2020 WRESTLING DISCUSSION

[Matt D]

I don't want to talk about Flair but I do want to do Hansen again.

So here's the deal with Hansen. He, more than any other wrestler in history, is completely dependent on what his opponent does. He's a tool, a force of nature, and it's up to the opponent to contain it and craft a narrative. It's like wrestling a tornado. This is different than, for instance, Bill Eadie shattering the WWF heel-in-peril structure in the 80s by making his opponent work for it for narratives purposes. Instead, it's just an unthinking, ineffable wave. What makes Hansen's 90s ultimately so good is that he was just broken down enough that opponents could more believably get something in on him in ways that they could barely do in the 80s. So while you have a hundred 80s tag matches which should be interesting where he never gives and just takes and takes and takes and his otherwise excellent opponents get swallowed up because they're trying to wrestle a normal match instead, there are chinks in the armor that offensive dynamos can take advantage of. It's like someone trying to climb a mountain. The exceptions in the 80s tend to be when he's up against someone who's his boss (like Colon in PR). Hansen matches are absolutely exhausting. It's like modern Brock except for instead of doing a bunch of stupid suplexes and finishes that completely ruin the suspension of disbelief and hierarchy of offense on the rest of the card, he's just constantly throwing every part of his body at you. 

Edited August 27, 2020 by Matt D

[Eivion]

The talk of Hotta/Kandori is interesting to me since I just watched their 93 match. Was nice, but kind of dragged at the end with the overkill and the two kind of getting repetitive. Maybe I will watch their title match from later to compare.

[Death From Above]

1 hour ago, Matt D said:

 

My personal feeling is that 90-92 AJPW is better than post 92 AJPW, but that's me. I tend to think the escalation gets to be too much a couple of years before most people do.

If we play that silly Desert Island game and I could pick one wrestling thing I could watch there it would probably be "all the 1990-93 AJPW TV". I think there are some individual matches past that which reach new heights, most of which should be fairly obvious to name to anyone with real knowledge of the decade, but the week to week quality in that period is going to be hard to ever match again.

[Jiji]

I feel like '95 was the high water mark of AJPW but their TV slot was diminished, so they became even more top heavy than they already were, and the head drops were becoming excessive. At that stage, they were building to huge, all time incredible matches and the TV was not nearly as consistently good as the '90-'93 period. First half of '90 has some good shit but doesn't really pick up until Tenryu leaves (he goes out with a bang though in that last Tsuruta match in which Hansen beats the fuck out of him before the start of the match). Also by '95, the foreigner monster heels were past their absolute bests. Hansen had magic left in the tank and Williams wasn't done by any means but '94 seemed like their last great, great year IIRC. So the drama was almost entirely on the Four Pillars. 

[Matt D]

My favorite 90s AJPW guy is definitely Kroffat. Then Taue. Then Fuchi. Then probably Ogawa. 

[Death From Above]

Big matches continued to be good but it's hard to argue that the undercards didn't get significantly worse when at one point you had Furnas and Kroffat stuck in mid-card hell despite pumping out very very good matches every single time they got on TV vs later on, like, Wolf Hawkfield and Johnny Smith when he started getting fat. Jun Izumida honestly never got good, even in NOAH. Tamon Honda basically did literally nothing at all until he had that weird, miracle run in 2003 that came almost completely out of the blue. Omori was pretty mediocre but servicable, I actually think he came very close to taking the next step at one point, but it just never quite all clicked for him. Takayama doesn't really take off until very late in the decade.The early 90's still had a somewhat healthy Kikuchi, Can-Ams, the late British Bruiser/Bulldogs stuff is still good, etc, there's just more juice there. Even guys that had shorter runs like Bigelow or Ray Traylor managed to have at least one or two fun things make tape in the early 90's. By contrast for years Johnny Ace was always around and he wasn't bad but was never really anything special either. Even when they signed Hase they didn't know what the fuck to do with him and he went over basically "nobody" which kind of neutered him. The cards got so top heavy that nothing but the top stuff mattered. Granted it was some of the best top stuff conceivable, but still. Gary Albright has rode one good match with Kawada to like 20 years of "what if"s but he honestly wasn't as good as some people wished he was.

[Jiji]

Izumida kinda ruled for a bit in NOAH when he was a comedy geek and somebody forced him to brush his teeth mid match or some shit. That slayed me. I remember rocking an avatar with his face covered in toothpaste for a while I think. Yeah, he wasn't really good or anything but he was fun and dorky lovable. RIP.

Omori was pretty good as a young boy then he got pushed right before the split happened. After that, NO FEAR was really fucking swell. When Takayama branched off, he was lost in the shuffle. Good, sometimes even very good, but not great.

Fuchi was the key in so many of those multiman Tsuruta/Misawa tags. Sneaky, evil bastard who would be sooooo mean and stretch Kikuchi or even the younger guys before they grew out of their young boy status like Kobashi. Then he'd sell his ass off for Kobashi when Kenta became man-sized and was pushed as such. One of the smarter wrestlers who can still get great crowd reactions doing next to nothing. He spent time in Memphis and it shows. A master of selling without taking moves. His body language said so much. I loved it when he'd do a surprise comeback as shitty, cranky old vet against Chono or in the tag w/ Kawada v. Nagata/Iizuka and he'd do the guts pose and get all fired up.

The best part of the mid-to-late '90s stretch was the rise of Akiyama. He was insanely good pretty much right away in '92 but by '95 and especially '96 he was all-time great. I know a lot of people think the December '96 tag is better than the '95 June tag. I think they're wrong but it's not a crazy statement. 

[Infinit]

1 hour ago, Jiji said:

The only thing that breaks up the Flair formula was when he was a babyface and damn it he was an AMAZING fiery babyface. He'd change up stuff slightly so he wasn't showing ass and instead being a bad ass. Loved it. I guess his babyface run is the McRib or something.

edit: we don't have Morton's or Ruth's here in Canada, so I  wasn't aware of them. I guess that would be like The Keg here?

There are both Morton's and Ruth's Chris in Canada....you just have to come to the cultured part

[Matt D]

There are a LOT of 89-92 matches I've not seen, actually. I think that's what I'm going to do while I run on the treadmill for the next year or so. Just start with January 89 and watch almost everything.

[Jiji]

Be ready for the Fantastics to disappoint. There was a match vs. FOOTLOOSE (Kawada & Fuyuki) that was just... bad despite the talent involved. I was never too impressed with the Fantastics in All Japan despite thinking they'd be a great fit there because they were kind of ahead of their time in terms of moves but also still smart workers too. I think they refused to let the Japanese guys no sell their shit, rightfully so, so it just turned into a mess of a match.

[Death From Above]

20 minutes ago, Jiji said:

Be ready for the Fantastics to disappoint. There was a match vs. FOOTLOOSE (Kawada & Fuyuki) that was just... bad despite the talent involved. I was never too impressed with the Fantastics in All Japan despite thinking they'd be a great fit there because they were kind of ahead of their time in terms of moves but also still smart workers too. I think they refused to let the Japanese guys no sell their shit, rightfully so, so it just turned into a mess of a match.

Yeah I adore the Fantastics in Mid South but it just didn't quite click the way one would hope in Japan. 

[Robert S]

20 minutes ago, L_W_P said:

WWE is the Nickelback of wrestling.

All the 'cool' people say they hate them but when How You Remind Me/WrestleMania/Photograph/Royal Rumble is on everyone tunes in.

This is why they keep making money and keep producing the same stuff over and over.

Photograph is that kind of song that when it was on radio when my radio alarm went off, I was wide awake within a couple of seconds and very pissed (it's literally the only Nickelback song I know and if all of their music is like that, then they are even worse than they are made out to be). There was a Phil Collins song ("I can't stop loving you") around the same time that evoked the same kind of feelings in me. Thinking back, it's a wonder that I never destroyed that radio alarm back then.

Edited August 27, 2020 by Robert s

[SirSmUgly]

I kind of want to seek out this mediocre Fantastics stuff because they were pretty great in Mid-South and exceptional in their JCP run, and I sort of need to see the conditions in which they'd be disappointing. 

[odessasteps]

2 hours ago, Matt D said:

I don't want to talk about Flair but I do want to do Hansen again.

So here's the deal with Hansen. He, more than any other wrestler in history, is completely dependent on what his opponent does. He's a tool, a force of nature, and it's up to the opponent to contain it and craft a narrative. It's like wrestling a tornado. This is different than, for instance, Bill Eadie shattering the WWF heel-in-peril structure in the 80s by making his opponent work for it for narratives purposes. Instead, it's just an unthinking, ineffable wave. What makes Hansen's 90s ultimately so good is that he was just broken down enough that opponents could more believably get something in on him in ways that they could barely do in the 80s. So while you have a hundred 80s tag matches which should be interesting where he never gives and just takes and takes and takes and his otherwise excellent opponents get swallowed up because they're trying to wrestle a normal match instead, there are chinks in the armor that offensive dynamos can take advantage of. It's like someone trying to climb a mountain. The exceptions in the 80s tend to be when he's up against someone who's his boss (like Colon in PR). Hansen matches are absolutely exhausting. It's like modern Brock except for instead of doing a bunch of stupid suplexes and finishes that completely ruin the suspension of disbelief and hierarchy of offense on the rest of the card, he's just constantly throwing every part of his body at you. 

Hansen is a human wrestling bear. 

(No, not that kind of bear)

[SirSmUgly]

I guess modern Brock Lesnar is a good comp for Hansen as @Matt D argued. I was going to say, and I know this was sacrilege, that he reminded me of Brody in that he does a lot of stuff and doesn't really sell, but there's not much going on there that is discernibly anything except "watch me no-sell and do this random shit."*

Which can work if you're wrestling Andre the Giant and you're the smaller guy because then you look like a badass whose plan is to throw everything at this unstoppable monster that you're fighting, but otherwise, it's not a very flexible way to work!

*Note that I haven't seen Brody in PR so maybe he doesn't work like that there, but otherwise, all the Brody I've seen feels like senseless striking and no-selling non-stop.

Edited August 27, 2020 by Smelly McUgly

[ohtani's jacket]

There's not a wrestler dead or alive who hasn't been repetitive in some form or another. I don't think there's ever been a wrestler who approached each match like it was an open canvas ready to paint a masterpiece. It's just not realistic. Not with the amount of matches a wrestler workers. You have bad nights, off nights, unimportant nights. The amount of effort and energy it requires to work a great match is impossible to produce night in, night out, and that's not taking into account how many great matches may have occurred simply by chance. It makes sense to fall back on a formula, a routine, some form of shtick. Fans like us like to point to half a dozen big matches where wrestlers are working at their best and tout their artistry, or find minute differences in an assortment of performances and expound on their versatility, but it's all a bit overblown.

Having said that, I don't think All Japan's booking reflects the artistry of what the wrestlers were trying to do stylistically. And I'm not saying that as a super fan. In fact, the whole super fan thing turns me off a bit. But if you watch one of the matches outside of that bubble, and you're in the right mood for it, the sheer focus on the match, and really every moment or beat of that match, shows a staggering amount of concentration and focus. I am convinced that if they hadn't had a clear focus on what they wanted to do stylistically, they would have wrestled much looser matches. 

Escalation is a problem in all styles of wrestling. I can't think of a style that didn't suffer from it over time. There are limits to what can be achieved creatively. The wrestlers would have had to have re-imagined and reinvented the style and created something new. Who's to say they didn't use up all of their creativity creating the style in the first place? In the case of All Japan, I think you can clearly see that NOAH, while it had its differences, wasn't exactly some trailblazing new style. The root cause of the problems in Japan, IMO, is that they didn't get a new wave of wrestlers. For whatever reason, perhaps the diminishing TV presence, they didn't get as many rookie tryouts and new talent in the 90s as they did in the 80s. Without fresh talent, you become stale. New Japan managed to eventually develop some generational talent, but it took them a while. The Japanese wrestling business has always had severe peaks and troughs, even during the Showa era, but it's basically the same as the US market -- an act gets hot and business heats up. That didn't happen in the 90s. Instead, the promoters cashed in on inter-promotional feuds, had a few fat paydays, and nothing they could book after that which could capture the fans' imaginations. 

As for Hansen, I think there is good Hansen and bad Hansen. A problem I find with wrestling fans is that a lot of people only see the good. If they like a wrestler, everything about them has to be good. The only time you get a balanced take on a guy is when people have contrary views, but often those people think the wrestler is bad. So, it just becomes an argument, good vs. bad, when in fact a warts and all take would be more insightful. I don't think Hansen is complicated, though. He was bat shit blind when he took off his glasses, went full throttle swinging at folks and sometimes connected. If you could take the fight to him, the match was generally good. He was pretty good at selling and generous when the paycheck was good. There are things you wouldn't want to see Hansen do like matwork or bumping and stooging because that would be boring, un-Hansen like, and not cool. Generally speaking, you do not expect Hansen to be a super worker in the vein of Nick Bockwinkel. Hansen belongs in the big man category not the super worker category.  

[cwoy2j]

I'm a Stan Hansen Stan (SHS, feel free to use that and thank me or damn me later), but I've never seen a Stan Hansen match that I haven't enjoyed on some level. At best, it's an amazing match of someone trying to take down a redneck Godzilla. At worst, it's just Stan Hansen clotheslining the shit out of someone so that he can win enough money to drink shit beer and his big fat wife and 9 kids can eat Spaghetti-Os.

[SirSmUgly]

There are also lots of tropes related to pro wrestling as there are in any other artistic medium, and those tropes get used all the time. 

Repetition does not mean that great art can't be made. Originality is somewhat overrated. 

(Sorry to reduce your post to just that response, OJ, but that's what caught my eye the most.)

[cwoy2j]

49 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I kind of want to seek out this mediocre Fantastics stuff because they were pretty great in Mid-South and exceptional in their JCP run, and I sort of need to see the conditions in which they'd be disappointing. 

I've never seen a bad Fantastics match. Granted I haven't done a lot of deep dives into their stuff but they were a team that was so good at the formula, that even a "bad" match of theirs always came across as decent enough to me because of how good they were.

[Jiji]

4 minutes ago, cwoy2j said:

I'm a Stan Hansen Stan (SHS, feel free to use that and thank me or damn me later), but I've never seen a Stan Hansen match that I haven't enjoyed on some level. At best, it's an amazing match of someone trying to take down a redneck Godzilla. At worst, it's just Stan Hansen clotheslining the shit out of someone so that he can win enough money to drink shit beer and his big fat wife and 9 kids can eat Spaghetti-Os.

Yeah, even the disappointing Jumbo matches aren't bad, they just don't live up to the hype I had for two of my all time favourites.

[cwoy2j]

1 minute ago, Jiji said:

Yeah, even the disappointing Jumbo matches aren't bad, they just don't live up to the hype I had for two of my all time favourites.

It's funny because Hansen isn't my favorite wrestler of all-time. However, I feel like whenever I watch him there's at least one thing that makes me think I didn't totally waste my time watching that match. He could wrestle some guy like Tom McGee and I'd go, "well at least Hansen gave him a really cool powerbomb and lariated him hard enough to make him shit his pants."

[SirSmUgly]

7 minutes ago, cwoy2j said:

I've never seen a bad Fantastics match. Granted I haven't done a lot of deep dives into their stuff but they were a team that was so good at the formula, that even a "bad" match of theirs always came across as decent enough to me because of how good they were.

I watched the match @Jiji left, and it's not bad, just disjointed, which is how I feel about AJ tag structure. This is coming from someone with limited exposure to it, so take that as a statement borne from foggy ignorance. 

I think it comes down to my very strong bias for JCP tag match structure, though. It might just be that I'm subconsciously foisting expectations on these 1980s and early-1990s AJ tag matches that said matches aren't trying to fulfill.

Edited August 27, 2020 by Smelly McUgly

[cwoy2j]

1 minute ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I watched the match @Jiji left, and it's not bad, just disjointed, which is how I feel about AJ tag structure. This is coming from someone with limited exposure to it, so take that as a statement borne from foggy ignorance. 

I think it comes down to my very strong bias for JCP tag match structure, though. It might just be that I'm subconsciously foisting expectations on these 1980s and early-1990s AJ tag matches that said matches aren't trying to fulfill.

Fair enough. I grew up on the JCP structure as well and it's kind of tough to judge how good other matches are when that's your basis. 

[SirSmUgly]

Yup. If there was a Form of the Good for pro wrestling, IMO it'd be a Midnight Express tag match from 1987. 

[cwoy2j]

This question might stretch past the month but what's the hardest match to actually put a star rating on? I think something like Brock/Cena from Summerslam is extremely hard to rate. In terms of "holy shit did I just see that!", it's a 5 star. In terms of "ok, how did it fit into formula of a good match? and sitting through it while it's actually going on without knowing the endgame", it's like a 3 star match b/c it's just Brock throwing Cena around for 15 minutes.

Edited August 27, 2020 by cwoy2j