John E. Dynamite

What if Giant Baba lived five years longer? He hypothetically passes in 2004, after Inoki alienates the NJPW locker room with his shooty bullshit and Mutoh & Co jump. ship Do they join up and bolster the ranks of a stacked AJPW roster? Do they form their own company (a super-powered ZERO-ONE?) because Baba keeps in place AJPW's isolationist policies? Does Misawa get fed up and bounce anyways? I want answers.

Yeah, anybody saying NJPW is "snakebitten" forgets that they built their house on a sign that says "CAUTION: SNAKES". I don't want to equate this to NOAH because 1) that's morbid 2) NOAH didn't have heavyweight prospects like Khan/Shooter/Tsuji/Fredericks, but this isn't bad luck so much as it's the inherent flaws of NJPW's peak years coming home to roost. Kota took so long to put himself in a contractual place to get a big push, and now that he's there we expect more of the same instead of a forty year-old with a million miles on him. What did we say about his matches with Naito? What did we say about every great Hiromu, Ospreay and Shibata match? And where are we now? Those five or six Glory Years G1 didn't do anybody's bodies any favors and only exacerbated the issue of Gedo's run-it-back booking. The fact that Shibata is the consolation prize in all this is nonsense - I will not believe he's back until I see it, and it still might be a disastrously stupid idea to attempt it.

Dork time, I'm gonna correct the horse here. The Backslide from Heaven was Genki Horiguchi's highly-feared, completely normal backslide when he was a babyface. When he turned heel it became the Backslide from Hell because it was preceded by a low blow. I'm about 50% confidant that I saw Jack use a bridging backslide before his first Dragon Gate tour. But if he says it's the Kamikaze Damashi, that's what it's called. Ok actually the right word is "Damashii". EDIT: OK, so Jack beat Horiguchi with the Bridging Backslide in the 2006 BOLA, when Genki was still a face and had beat Chris Hero with the Backslide from Heaven the night before. So I have no idea what Jack is going on about.

Not to mention Tony and Show sound miserable getting cut off by him and trying to keep up with whatever tangent he's on. Yeah, it ain't working.

It's way, way up there on my list. #4 or #5 on mine, behind Cody/Dustin, Britt/Rosa and Danielson/Suzuki, more or less tied w/ Stadium Stampede, and one or two notches above the primo Bucks matches (vs. BANG~man + vs. Fight Hermanos inna cage). I think it has the dual advantage of being the culmination of an expertly constructed TV build - the match and the feud are inarguably territoral/Southern and I'd love the teams to run it back in a concession stand - and having enough good, cheap modern pops to perfectly juxtapose the grit 'n hate, Sue & OC's involvement both. What's been prematurely swept under the rug is the genius of the Arcade Anarchy match. Watched without the (bad) preceeding feud and it's not that far off the Parking Lot joint. HEED THESE WORDS - A dubbed Best of Chuck Taylor VHS would involve those two tags, his PWG Championship matches vs. ZSJ and Ricochet x2, Cabelleras contra Mascaras w/ Icarus vs. Fire Ant & Soldier Ant (OC + Gulak), the TPI Final w/ Quack & Claudio, streetfight vs El Generico, and your pick of the Best Friends' best PWG tags and his best comedy matches (vs. Archibald Peck & the BOLA Liger butthole tag). Think about where you'd place Chuck on your AEW Roster Workrate Rankings and then tell me how many of your better guys' resumes would fill out a single blue-jacket Maxell. I would put the cream of Chuck's crop above, let's say, the best five hours of Malakai Black.

Bryce debuted with the second-generation CHIKARA class that included Eddie Kingston and Jigsaw, which is to say he cut his teeth on & specializes in being the befuddled official trying and failing to corral eight man indy clusterfucks. AEW wants the refs to be "bad", because a lot of the highspots in these tag matches are technically kayfabe-illegal. Bryce at least registers shock, confusion and exasperation. Compare this to Knox, who just doesn't act like he gives a shit. I think the gap between them is sizeable

I have not seen two guys saunter into a ring and produce a classic like that with such effortless brutality in a long time, if ever. My God, man My balls feel like concrete. And then every second of the actual televised show overachieves. Junior Dos Santos looked like he was having the time of his life. Bountiful amount of pro wrestling joy. My Crockett Cup runneth over.

Minoru Suzuki about to be the frontrunner for Top Jobber to the Stars 2021.

Yeah and a fuckin' lip fulla dip, and a cornflour sack filled with horseshoes and duplicate copies of Alabama cassettes that you forgot you already had, and a BIBLE with a GUN in it, God DAMNIT.

I'm in the post-cheesesteak phase of things. I know my John's Roast Pork + DiNic's but I need to get around to Nick's Roast Beef. I think I've had Cosmi's before but I could use a refresher. Last time was bahn mi at Ba Le. I tell ya. Good town for sandwiches. I'm pretty sure they're running Punk/Garcia first. Getting tired of the big matches being the opener but if the crowd is gonna be burnt out for the last taped match I get it.

No lie, I wonder if her being completely cheated out of a Dancing With The Stars win makes her a favorite with Jericho. She's got nowhere to go in combat sports and she's money any time a camera is on her. Think she can learn how to work that Switch Kick into a viable TV finisher?

Very, very compromised attempt at looking this up on Cagematch. Nyla = 46 Conti = 39 (Most wins in AEW 2021) Rosa = 36 Swole = 33 Britt = 32 Red Velvet = 32 Ford = 28 I'd say there's no good reason not to run Shida vs. Nyla back when they're both 49 wins deep. Maybe as one of the matches in the TBS Title Tournament? I don't see either winning it so it would be a good feather in their cap.

Philly, man. This show, that crowd, shows why it's the capital of US pro-wrestling as far as I'll ever be concerned. Punk daring to play the cheesesteak/cheesecake angle was a real cute way of seeing if he can still get booed. I like the answer he got. Excalibur's "corner of Swanson & Rittner" call during the main... I could smell the Bengay <3. I like the big hot tag match opener better than the "best match we've got tonight" opener. Adam Cole not diving so that he could taunt & be goozled is what he should be adding to these matches, Jesus, that catchphrase is over. I hate heel ref angles but I don't know how else to justify Knox counting anything, much less quadruple-team finishers. Credit where credit's due - Dan Lambert cut off Judas at the perfect time to force the a capella sing-along. Sometimes he gets real heat, sometimes he gets go-away heat. Sometimes Jericho commands a crowd like no other, sometimes he's a tryhard oldbag. Nice to see both of the upsides hit in the same segment. They need to find a happy medium between edgelord Max Caster and whatever yo-baby-yo-baby-yo stuff they wrote for him tonight. TOO MANY TALENTS. Bobby Fish is certainly better than a lot of guys who have proper contracts. When does AEW start cutting day-one midcard "projects" for fully-formed workhorses like Fish? Do they ever? Is it worth the PR hit? These questions are anything but rhetorical. Deeb/Shida was needed, both in terms of the talent being on TV and as a means to express the depth of the Women's Division. They looked like two Pokemon cartridges fighting out there. I usually understand why control segments end up on PiP but I'm gonna rewatch a rip of this one. I kinda knew Shida was losing when they showed the trophy but I like the story being told there. btw just call the fuckin' Serenity Lock Serenity Now. I need somebody to make an "MJF PUSHES MONGO" sign. Y'know, that's a very different phrase in the TNT wrestling dialect... Every time I see a multi-person ladder match, I think... what if NXT booked that sort of a match and Kacy Catanzaro, American Ninja Warrior standout, just wins the whole thing in a minute? PAC/Andrade, feud forever, if they're alive. I mean JESUS, PAC should be in a wheelchair for a month. I love that Jon Moxley has the kind of gimmick that can dip down into a more upper-midcard feel when the booking calls for it. The Page stuff writes itself, if this was WWE I'd say I was glad that they ran this in front of a smart town - I'm still worried that he's going to cool off, but now is better than never and Kenny is in a feud that doesn't need a belt. There's a time for the obvious. Kenny/Page, pull the trigger.

Ospreay is an instant channel change for me. I can't realistically imagine anyone I'd want on the roster less.

Yeah, but 44% percent of that poll was voting for the now-injured Naito to win the block. If you erase that number, factor ZSJ's 9% of the vote, keep in mind that the 18% of people voting for Shingo forgot that the champ can't win... ...hold on, some mysterious chain mail just appeared my head that I gotta go deal with.

Kudome Valentine

Zack looks like a main eventer every night. He's the only guy in the world doing it the way he does it and he's refining it each time out. Please just give him a spot in the Finals. Please give him the Karl Anderson rub.

Velocity was a major part of re-esablishing my love of wrestling. Akio, Sakoda, Tajiri, Paul London, Billy Kidman, Chavo Guerrero, Ultimo Dragon, Jamie Noble, Spike Dudley, and ever other low-card 2004 Smackdown cruiserweight were my jam in high school. I was never a WWE guy, really, but that division was probably my high point in being a committed WWE stan, the semester before I figured out how to torrent RoH shows. Sakoda might be a short-lived undercard guy and a forgotten talent but I'm more sentimental about him than plenty of World Champs. RIP.

I want to see this math applied to so many matches. For the sake of recency & topic I say start with Jericho/Gage.

Oh my God, this fucking match. I came into my diehard wrestling fandom in the post-VHS pre-Youtube days, voracious and obsessive like ya do. When I was 16 and daydreamed of wrestling school as a viable alternative to college (in retrospect, wasn't it?) I was obviously taken by the AJPW classics, the epics. The 30+ minute Triple Crown Tragedies in Seven Steps and all that good shit. So yeah. Lots of thinking about 6/9/95 while failing Calculus quizes. Toshiaki Kawada vs. Akira Taue, 1/15/91 Korakuen Hall is a match for grown-ups. People who only have 15 minutes before they have to go to their fucking job. If All Japan were a North American company that had to rely on feud-based weekly TV, this would be the match to point to as a perfect hypothetical TV main event. If the house style of AJPW were closer to this, Akira Taue would be the most beloved Pillar. It straight-up hurts that no Triple Crown matches looked like this one, certainly the HDA and the gaijin would have loved to get this ugly every now and again. Maybe this was only going to work in a place like Korakuen, but man, matches like this make you never want to leave Korakuen. This match really does hint at an alternative future to King's Road that we never saw come to pass. I love the cutaway shots to Jumbo and Kobashi, I love the blood, I love everything the guardrail is involved in. The non-cooperative headbutts and elbows, the organic nearfalls that emerge from the chaos, the one completely appropriate no-sell, Kawada abandoning his kicks, the announcers getting too hyped and calling the wrong moves, the fucking gross finish... I can't remember seeing such joy in Akira Taue's eyes as when he's obliterating Kawada's knee. This match is a truck full of testicles crashing into an exploding sake factory.

AEW names or AEW jobber names? Cause I will sell you an entire lot of AEW jobber names wholesale. I'll just sit here and bang 'em out. Bump Riley "Houndstooth" Harry Hilton The Convicted Murderer

It was the only really obvious "wrong call" of the night. I feel like the hot opener was a lot more strategically sensible in the Wednesday Night Wars days, and I understand the importance of putting on a big match first sometimes. But it DID burn out the crowd, and it DID create a ratings curve that was less than ideal. I'll hear the argument that the title match should have went on last, but I think opening with FTR vs. Bug Dad & Bone Kid would have worked out better.

That's as damning a statement of Meltzer's credibility as a rater of matches that you'll ever see.

Sample size.