SLL

At long last Monterrey Robocop. SLL's All-Request Friday Night on a Tuesday

Good times! Bad times! Maritimes! SLL's All-Request Friday Night is back!

OK, this took a bit longer than I had hoped, to say the least, but SLL's All-Request Friday Night will return for real next Friday. I had to undergo a bit of a wrestling writer vision quest to get my head right on this, and it's undergone a bit of a format change as a result. Most obviously, instead of reviewing five matches every week, it'll be a non-fixed number of matches. But yeah, there's still gonna be plenty of fun times with me talking about the pro graps YOU want me to talk about, so start sending in those requests today! Segunda Caida: Every Day We Write The Book

Suddenly, I want to see Nick Offerman as a wrestling manager.

He oughtta quit snubbing lucha libre, too. And why is he too good for baseball?

I know, but I like to at least aim for making the name accurate. It's a small goal that I try not to get too hung up on, and my readers don't get too hung up on it either for that very reason. As for Estrada, he once got really coked up...excuse me, this is Estrada we're talking about...he once remained really coked up and threw a hooker off of a hotel balcony.

PUERTO RICANS! OUT FOR BLOOD! THE LITTLE PEOPLE! MAKE ALL THIS POSSIBLE! THE NOBLE KRABBY PATTY! FALLING WITH STYLE! WHOSE KUNG FU IS STRONGER?! KAIENTAI DOJO! DELIVERS THE GOODS FOR ONCE! ALEXANDER OTSUKA! STIRS UP WARM AND FUZZY MEMORIES! ALL-REQUEST FRIDAY NIGHT EARLY SATURDAY MORNING RIDES AGAIN!

Back by popular demand (several years ago that has probably since evaporated), my weekly All-Request Friday Nights return to Segunda Caida starting this Friday, January the 9th. That's where you - the reader - request matches for me to watch and review, and I review five of them every week, sometimes to my delight, sometimes to my regret, but hopefully always to your entertainment and enlightenment. So get your picks in now, and let's see where this Friday will take us. Segunda Caida, the stuff internet wrestling dreams are made of

My ballot is...ummm...around here...somewhere...gimme a few more moments.....

It's probably always been there. I think what happened is that, as time passed and wrestling and it's history became better documented, that standard became really hard to justify, because the standards of wrestling offense are always escalating. If you were a fan in, say, the 80's, and MOVEZ was a prerequisite to you...are any of the matches you liked then still any good to you now? Or is wrestling today from barely trained yarders who do shooting star presses through flaming tables so much better than the Flair matches you gave five stars to back in the day so impossibly good in your eyes that your head literally explodes when you watch them? The second you expand your scope of wrestling beyond the immediate, it stops making sense as a prerequisite, and it becomes obvious that there's something else more important. I tend to liken it to a teenager who watches a lot of Hollywood blockbusters and a few of your more "sound and thunder" artistic films like "Fight Club" and "Donnie Darko" (you may adjust accordingly for when you grew up), but is still squeamish about watching anything that came out before they were born, or a subtitled foreign film, or any domestic film that isn't all up in your area the way the kids seem to like it. I have a whole TL;DR essay in me about how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling are incredibly poorly developed compared to the standards of aesthetic criticism of any of the major art forms...I don't think I'm gonna write it today, but I will point to MOVEZ still being a prequisite for good wrestling to to a large number of folks who consider themselves "smart fans" as evidence that it's true. Write it. One day, when the stars are right.

It's probably always been there. I think what happened is that, as time passed and wrestling and it's history became better documented, that standard became really hard to justify, because the standards of wrestling offense are always escalating. If you were a fan in, say, the 80's, and MOVEZ was a prerequisite to you...are any of the matches you liked then still any good to you now? Or is wrestling today from barely trained yarders who do shooting star presses through flaming tables so much better than the Flair matches you gave five stars to back in the day so impossibly good in your eyes that your head literally explodes when you watch them? The second you expand your scope of wrestling beyond the immediate, it stops making sense as a prerequisite, and it becomes obvious that there's something else more important. I tend to liken it to a teenager who watches a lot of Hollywood blockbusters and a few of your more "sound and thunder" artistic films like "Fight Club" and "Donnie Darko" (you may adjust accordingly for when you grew up), but is still squeamish about watching anything that came out before they were born, or a subtitled foreign film, or any domestic film that isn't all up in your area the way the kids seem to like it. I have a whole TL;DR essay in me about how the standards of aesthetic criticism of wrestling are incredibly poorly developed compared to the standards of aesthetic criticism of any of the major art forms...I don't think I'm gonna write it today, but I will point to MOVEZ still being a prequisite for good wrestling to to a large number of folks who consider themselves "smart fans" as evidence that it's true.

This was super-fun. Just a great display of Andre's shtick, and how much fun he was in that era. I'd have pushed harder for it if it were actually competitive, but I think it is fine in the Landell/Freddy spot on the set and was worth showing people.

I swear I will start writing things again someday. Honestly I will.

I'd have to revisit some stuff, but on first blush, this felt like the best set opener we've had yet. The ass-kicking rudos were the stars here, and Hamada ruled it, too, fighting back hard and busting out some nifty spots. Yet, despite being the least guy in this, I kinda feel like the story of this match was Sayama. Yeah, he bungled the finish of the first fall a bit, but everything else he did looked really sharp and stood in stark contrast to his laughably bad Tiger Mask run. In fact, there's one sequence in the first fall where he runs off a string of spots that would become Tiger Mask staples - including that big flipping armdrag - and they all looked completely on-point and spectacular. Two years later, those same spots would become running jokes, as he'd consistently try and hilariously fail to do things that he seems to do effortlessly here. Then he'd split for the UWF, and he'd end up being really good again. He'll, I've seen the guy give strong performances as recently as a few years ago. It's weird how wrong we got Sayama in hindsight. It's not just that Tiger Mask wasn't as good as we used to think he was. It's that for years, his early 80's Tiger Mask run was seen as the only part of his career worth looking at, when it was actually his career low-point as a worker.

Finally got mine in. I'll need to go back and write up some of this stuff (and the All Japan stuff, for that matter) that I didn't get around to writing up the first time. Really great stuff here. 1. Buddy Rose & Doug Somers vs. Midnight Rockers (Cage Match) (12/25/86) 2. Buddy Rose & Doug Somers vs. Midnight Rockers (Cage Match) (1/17/87) 3. Nick Bockwinkel vs. Wahoo McDaniel (8/28/83) 4. Col. DeBeers, Buddy Rose & Doug Somers vs. Nick Bockwinkel, Steve Pardee & Brad Rheingans (5/31/86) 5. Nick Bockwinkel vs. Rick Martel (3/13/83) 6. Ken Patera, Jesse Ventura & Bobby Heenan vs. Hulk Hogan & High Flyers (3/13/83) 7. Nick Bockwinkel & Mr. Saito vs. Verne & Greg Gagne (4/21/85) 8. Crusher Blackwell & Ken Patera vs. High Flyers (11/24/83) 9. Jerry Lawler vs. Curt Hennig (7/16/88) 10. Buddy Rose & Doug Somers vs. Midnight Rockers (8/30/86) 11. Rick Martel vs. Harley Race (4/20/86) 12. Tito Santana & Rick Martel vs. High Flyers (8/29/82) 13. Crusher Blackwell, Larry Hennig & Tom Zenk vs. The Fabulous Freebirds (8/22/85) 14. Nick Bockwinkel & Ray Stevens vs. Super Ninja & Larry Zbyszko (2/21/87) 15. Buddy Rose & Doug Somers vs. Midnight Rockers (4/20/86) 16. The Nasty Boys vs. Rock n Roll Express (4/16/88) 17. King Tonga, Masked Superstar, & Sheik Adnan Kaissey vs. Crusher Blackwell & Sgt. Slaughter (Cage Match) (4/21/85) 18. Crusher Blackwell vs. Masked Superstar (3/7/85) 19. Bill Dundee & Jerry Lawler vs. Original Midnight Express (10/30/87) 20. Nick Bockwinkel vs. Curt Hennig (11/21/86) 21. Nick Bockwinkel vs. Rick Martel (7/19/85) 22. Jumbo Tsuruta vs. Jim Brunzell (3/15/84) 23. Buddy Rose, Doug Somers & Sherri Martel vs. Midnight Rockers & Despina Montegues (11/27/86) 24. Nick Bockwinkel vs. Larry Zbyszko (7/11/87) 25. Nick Bockwinkel & Mr. Saito vs. Curt & Larry Hennig (11/8/84)