Jingus

I've seen him have lots of fun matches in his old age that were perfectly decent, and only suffered by comparison to THE KOBASHI, SUPERWORKER back in his prime. But the last real masterpiece I saw him have was with Samoa Joe in 2005. That match was fucking awesome, to the point where I think it's been severely underrated by many people just because of how much the ROHbots loved it.

It's two complaints that overlap: 1.They've been doing too many screwy finishes on PPVs lately. SEVEN shows in a row without a single clean finish in the main event. Things like makes the audience lose faith that the company will ever give them an ending they'd actually want to see. Like a 1998-era Nitro, when everyone was beyond sick and tired of nWo run-in fuck-finishes in the main events (and the ratings proved this with math), but they kept happening on every show anyway. 2.Seth Rollins hasn't been protected at all. He's the world champion, theoretically the top guy in the company, yet he apparently couldn't beat a Mulkey without an Authority run-in. Unlike heel champions of the past, he's not allowed to beat any undercarders. And really, don't ya think three non-title pinfall losses on television within a few months are more than enough to make the guy look like a loser? This devalues the world title; if a chump like this guy can be champion, then ANYONE could be champion and the belt means nothing. Part of this is due to the ridiculously illogical way that the Authority exercises super-dominance of all the top storylines. (Especially how HHH and Steph can never decide if they're really heels or not; but that would be yet another different overlapping complaint.) But they've got their entire booking ass-backwards when all the wrestlers are portrayed as quaking in their boots at the wrath of Stephanie, yet they clearly view their own world heavyweight champion as a joke.

In the big matches? Sure, most of the time. But in EVERY match? Graham, Savage, Flair, and Yokozuna all had a ton of jobber squashes. Undertaker beat people clean all the time, as did Triple H. (And how often were those guys getting pinned in non-title matches like Seth has been?) Rollins seems incapable of beating anyone ever (hence the namedrop of Gillberg, which I guess you missed). And even when all those other guys cheated to win, most of them did their own cheating. Rollins usually has someone else to interfere, and nothing makes a wrestler look weaker than constantly needing someone else's help in order to defeat any opponent ever.

It'd be nice if WWE had some equivalent to the All Japan/NOAH Curtain-Jerking Six-Elderly-Man Tag match. Take banged-up fellows like Bryan and Christian, put them against some washed-up-but-still-over guys like the New Age Outlaws, and then have them work six minutes of comedy spots and heavily-teased "the crowd always pops for this one trademark move" stuff before sending everyone home with a happy ending. You could do that every week forever, just changing up the participants based on who's currently available/healthy. But sadly, the company's dumbass "you've got to give 101% every night!" workaholic philosophy means that they'd be totally blind to the merit of letting a few people half-ass it (while still entertaining the casual fans).

Different countries do tend to have different psychological trends among their population. In America, there's this really strong Mock The Loser tendency. We're subconsciously taught that if you don't win, then you're seriously an inferior human being and not worthy of respect. That's not as true in Japan, where a loser's effort is something that the crowd typically respects. They tend to care way more about "maybe you didn't win, but you tried as hard as you could and that's what really matters" than most American crowds do. Ergo, we see American heels depicted much more often as despicable worthless people with no humanity or redeeming qualities. But since wrestling is wrestling and it often treats subtlety as its mortal enemy, this too often gets translated into "the heels must be inferior athletes who can't win a fair fight without cheating, and shitty people whom nobody would ever want to cheer". Which of course is ridiculously one-dimensional and intellectually lazy. Mick Foley had a great rant about the shallowness of that in his first book, when he got to Memphis and was forced to play a cringing stooging cheating chickenshit, despite that not fitting his character or his style even the tiniest little bit.

Anyone else noticed that every single WWE PPV has been ending cheaply for months now? Wrestlemania, Extreme Rules, Payback, Elimination Chamber, Money in the Bank, Battleground, and now Summerslam have ALL had fuck-finishes. Seth Rollins has been booked as a "world champion" who couldn't beat Gillberg without someone running in to help him, and Brock Lesnar hasn't had a clean ppv win since the Royal Rumble. I'll take even-steven pinfall booking every day of the week over some neverending bullshit like this.

I love that she ended the interview by referencing TANK ABBOTT VS BIG AL of all damn things.

It is kinda like screaming CALM DOWN in someone's face, yah.

For another example: it's kinda like trying to review a single episode of a long-running TV show. I could blab for hours about how the "The Body" was by FAR the best forty-three minutes of television that Buffy the Vampire Slayer ever gave us. (And in case you've never had the pleasure: yes, a show called BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER managed to provide a lot of shockingly intense character-based emotional drama over the years.) A lot of my enthusiastic blabbing over this particular episode would definitely be about various artistic choices: the bizarre camerawork which ignored all the typical rules of composing and framing a shot, the soporifically muffled sound mix which made it sound like you were overhearing a conversation in the next room (in between occasional nerve-shattering screeches of loud noise), the hypnotic pacing wherein most of the shots and scenes were edited to stretch on just a little bit too long to the point where you're actively uncomfortable before it cuts away to something else, the brutally stark and uncompromising dialogue (in a show where the talking is usually very arch and cutesy and overwritten), and especially the slack-jawed dead-eyed performances from actors who doing an almost unwatchably tense portrayal of people who are all about three seconds away from a total nervous breakdown. I don't think I've ever seen any other show or movie ever quite nail that unique, excruciating feeling of drowning in shock after an unexpected trauma has shattered your world. It's like as if Cries and Whispers had centered around characters who strongly resembled archetypes of various people I've known in real life. BUT: it wouldn't be the same if you share this episode with someone who had never watched the show before. So much of the emotional effect depended on our close knowledge of these characters, what they'd been through in the past, and where they were in life now. Buffy's ever-mounting exhaustion at being presented with ever-more-impossible obstacles to overcome (and currently dealing with a terrifying enemy who is seemingly invincible), Dawn's existential crisis about her identity and her place in the world, Joyce's various medical and social problems, Spike being so far removed from Buffy's daily human life (it's easy to forget he doesn't even show up in this episode!), Xander's insecurity about being the clownish weakling in a world of gods and monsters, Anya still trying to recover her sense of humanity after living so long without it, Willow's raw vulnerability to emotional trauma and her unpredictable overreactions to dramatic situations, and Tara's endless feeling of "what the hell am I doing here?" everywhere she ever goes... pardon me for fanboying out for a moment, but all that shit matters. Joss Whedon could've copied as much of Ingmar Bergman's stylistic playbook as he wanted (right down to a final shot which basically says "closure doesn't exist; and by the way, God's probably dead"), but it still wouldn't have given that episode such a shattering effect on the viewer if they simply weren't aware of the larger story surrounding the afternoon's worth of events in this single episode. To drag it back to wrestling: Flair/Steamboat at Chi-Town Rumble '89 is as close to a perfect wrestling match as I've ever seen in my life. Even watching it for the first time and having no clue about any of the backstory, I was blown away by the first-rate athleticism and both men's seemingly effortless ability to tell a large story with tiny little bits of business. Like, early on when Flair drops down and rather than Steamboat doing the traditional "I jump over you, hit the ropes and come back" he simply puts on the breaks and snatches a headlock on his prone opponent. That says "the hero knows the villain very well, knows many of his standard moves, and has counter-attacks which he can apply with lightning speed". This trend continues throughout the match, right down to the finish. All that can be easily enjoyed by a first-time viewer who doesn't know diddly about Crockett-era NWA. BUT, when they do the Anti-Dusty-Finish at the end where the original ref gets bumped and then a substitute ref runs in to count the pinfall: that's where the context pays off. A first-time viewer probably wouldn't know about Dusty Finishes, how prevalent they had been throughout the mid-80s, and how goddamn sick and tired the fanbase were of them. Longtime fans back then probably groaned in familiar contempt at the sight of the first ref being bumped and the second one counting the pin, because they'd seen that shit too many times. But amazingly, just this once, Lucy let Charlie Brown kick the football. BOTH referees raised Steamboat's hands in victory. This sent multiple unspoken messages: it said "Steamboat is now The Man, full stop" with a definitive finish. It also said "and by the way, motherfuck a buncha Dusty Finish" to the hardcore fans who knew that Rhodes had been canned from his job as head booker in WCW. That sort of thing, and various other history-reinforced details (like Steamboat pinning Flair with essentially the exact same move he pinned Randy Savage with at Wrestlemania III) are things that I found totally enhanced the overall experience of rewatching this match from a more educated and far-seeing perspective. EDIT: and as time goes on, I've found I don't like using star ratings. I've certainly never been comfortable trying to narrow them down to the quarter-of-a-star level. A lot of my favorite film reviewers have a common problem, where people will only glance at their numerical rating of a movie and get mad about the score, while not really bothering to read the review and find out exactly what the critic did or didn't appreciate about this particular work of art.

I've seen a lot of complaining (not just here) about the Arrow guy being the face-in-peril in his match. What else should he have done? Received the hot tag and then cleaned house, beating up both Cody and Wade at the same time? He's a skinny actor whose athletic training is mostly in parkour-type stuff, I'd say that taking a shitkicking is his ideal role in a wrestling match.

Knowing the plays as well as you do would certainly have an effect on how you would rate a live stage performance, wouldn't it? You can't un-know all that academic knowledge about the works and their histories, of course it would influence your reaction to how someone stages those works. You view them differently, react to them differently, based on the prior knowledge you've got.

Look at it this way: you've got an English doctorate, so I'm sure you're at least passingly familiar with the works of Shakespeare. Now, let's pretend for a moment you weren't familiar with them, or with the current events of his time, or with the historical events he was writing about, or with four-hundred-year-old vocabulary words. How much of one of his plays would make any sense? Yes, of course the execution of the script by the particular performance you're watching makes a big difference. Good actors and good direction can imbue and imply storyline which would otherwise be denied to someone who doesn't understand the context of the script. (Heck, they can even supply extra storyline which is nonexistent in the script: hello, Asta Nielsen!) But there's only so much they can do, without practically reducing themselves to blatantly pantomiming the meaning of everything they're doing with overacted gestures and maybe a Powerpoint presentation. Hamlet's legendary monologue about suicide is going to present a LOT of problems to someone who has no idea what "contumely", "bodkin", "fardles", "hew", "pith", or "orisons" mean. Being aware of those words' definitions (and also all the metaphors, references, and analogies Shakespeare constantly drops) is part of the extra education that goes into understanding the context of that play. It's not something that any average Joe-on-the-street would be aware about from their everyday life. Or, to put it another way: isn't that work's entire subplot with the Players MUCH more interesting if you know how most of it was one long insider rant on Shakespeare's part about the state of the theatrical industry in modern England? None of that shit makes much sense in a context of 1200-era Denmark, but it takes on an entire new depth if you're remotely familiar with the context of 1600-era London. Polonius's weird digression about having played Julius Caesar doesn't fit his stodgy old character at all, he seems to regard stage acting as weird or boring. But the line's point becomes clear if you know that the original actor playing Polonius was the same guy who played Caesar when the same company did that play. That's an extra punchline which any viewer would completely miss if they weren't aware of the dreaded c-word that surrounded these subjects. Now, the actor delivering the line might just be naturally talented enough to do that "recite a phonebook and it's fascinating" deal, but it helps to know the motivation behind the words. And in the exact same way, it's naturally thrilling when Kawada is kicking Misawa right in the damn face, but the action takes on a whole new depth if you're knowledgeable about the length and breadth of their feud (and the foundational storyline which took place even before then) which makes this particular kick have more meaning, based on when they did it and how Misawa sold it and what happened before and afterwards and just a thousand other things. (Or, in their shittier encounters, helps illuminate how this particular kick has no deeper meaning at all and just makes you wish they'd done it better.)

Yeah, but the flower would be fucking dead if it didn't have a root. Bad analogy. Of course you CAN review a match in a vacuum. I'm just of the general opinion that knowing the surrounding events (what the storyline was, where this match was on what card, various other variables that could alter the events during a match or an audience's reaction to it) tends to lead to a better overall understanding of what they were trying to do and what they managed to accomplish.

I'd say that a match's buildup doesn't guarantee its quality. Hogan/Sting at Starrcade 97 had a truly epic storyline leading into it (which scored a huge buyrate for the show) but that didn't stop the match from sucking once they got there. A shitty match to finish a storyline isn't much different than a shitty finish to a match, it can retroactively ruin everything that came before it.

Old-school All Japan is a great example of context helping things. The first time I ever saw Misawa/Kobashi vs Kawada/Taue, I could already tell it was a great match, even if I didn't know the backstory and even if I found the finish to 6/9/95 to be oddly flat for such a dynamic match. But after I'd gone back and seen the various stuff which built up to it (12/3/93 is of course the main part, but having a commercial tape of the entire 1995 Champion's Carnival helped a lot, and seeing all those Misawa/Jumbo feud matches added its own dollop of psychological legacy), then it goes from merely "great" to damn near being a religious experience. Or, for a completely different example of context's importance: Ultimate Warrior versus Honkytonk Man. To someone who's totally ignorant on the backstory, it's an utterly meaningless squash that doesn't even last a minute. To the fans at the time, it was the culmination of the year-long storyline of HTM being the biggest piece of shit to ever hold the Intercontinental belt, and FINALLY getting his just reward.

There isn't much work to be had. The days of the 1970s and 80s, when the Japanese promoters had contacts with American territories and could send their young lions over here to make their bones, are long dead and gone. Aside from SHIMMER, I offhand can't think of any companies that consistently bring in any joshi workers (some like Chikara might do it on occasion, but not often and usually only for big shows). And even if someone worked every single SHIMMER taping, that's not exactly an exhausting schedule, considering that company basically runs like three or four shows per year. Which is really telling about the sad financial state of the industry, when that's apparently the only way Dave Prazak can keep his company in business.

There's a bunch of her matches on Youtube, take your pick of whoever you wanna see her fight. Here's a quick teaser clip: I had to fight the urge to post her match against Sakura Hirota; but, the pink-wearing laugh machine is the very definition of Acquired Taste, sadly enough. And the clip I really wanted but couldn't find was of Kana literally picking up Aja Kong and wearing her like a jacket. Apparently, Kana is one of those Cesaro types who have freakish strength that's all out of proportion to their body size/shape.

I've heard that before, and never understood it. Sloppy brawler, sloppier mat worker. Offense that switches between laughably light to borderline-dangerously stiff, with seemingly no middle ground. Selling that's often mediocre at best, especially anytime he's doing convoluted hardcore spots where soaking up legit pain is treated as being more important than conveying the effect of that pain to the fans. And GOD HELP YOU if you're a captive audience at one of his shows and he grabs a microphone, he's just as bad with endless dull talky segments as Triple H ever was. Behind the scenes, he's arguably an active detriment to the industry. You've got his various shady promotional tactics, constant pushing of deathmatches (which is the primary cause behind the too-strict athletic commission which stifles the indy scene in Kentucky to this day), burning out crowds with hot-shot booking techniques and shows that drag on for four or five hours, his fondness for airing personal grievances in public, so forth and so on. I know all that stuff isn't strictly relevant to a Best Performer poll, but it certainly doesn't make me want to upvote him.

Seriously? I can tell you from personal experience that Ian's a fun guy to just hang out and smoke with, but 90% of the time he's a downright terrible wrestler. Even as a deathmatch worker he's nothing special, guys like Jun Kasai run rings around him. Heck, I'd argue that Mickie Knuckles can do everything Ian does, and do it better.

I'm not saying he didn't earn it. Of course he worked hard, it's not like he was Brutus Beefcaking his way to a top career. I'm saying he stood out as being the only guy who was allowed to ascend through WCW's glass ceiling (without Giant-sized extenuating circumstances). The widespread contempt and resentment he's received from many other wrestlers is pretty natural, when the boss's best friend in the company just-so-happens to be the one guy who gets handed special opportunities that are denied to everyone else. Especially considering his age at the time, and how his excess of personality is infamous for rubbing lots of people the wrong way.

I particularly liked his NOAH match against KENTA from 8-10-2005. It's the sort of super-stiff performance where you're simultaneously cringing in horror while also laughing your ass off at Tenryu's awesome surliness. Every time KENTA starts to do some of his flashy shit or get on a roll of momentum, Tenryu just punches him right in the fucking mouth. Like, with a Necro Butcher-ish "this is technically a work" sort of punch that probably would've caused a locker room fight if one guy hit another guy like that back in the WWWF. KENTA's mouth is a bloody mess by the end, because no matter what he does Tenryu just keeps punching him in the face and the young kid can't figure out how to put up an effective defense against such a straightforward and downright mean strategy. Agreed that the 1989 matches with Hansen suck. Which is weird, because the early-80s tag stuff that both guys did has aged pretty well. I know that nowadays it's easier to find an abortion clinic in Mississippi than it is to find kind words on this board for Bruiser Brody's work, but those Brody/Hansen vs Jumbo/Tenryu matches still look like pretty cool brawls to me. And Genichiro was also one of the few people who could drag Mil Mascaras to something worth watching. Hell, I even saw him and Jumbo have a shockingly watchable match against the what-the-hell-bro team of Tiger Jeet Singh and Bobby Heenan. Mind you, I totally agree that Tenryu didn't get great until the 90s. But aside from off nights like those Hansen title matches, he was already a perfectly good wrestler even before then.

Didn't one of the opposing attorneys in one of the various lawsuits filed against WCW manage to get Bischoff on the stand, grill him about the Gold Club thing, and get him to admit some kind of wife-swappery? I swear I remember reading that, a long time ago. Yeah, it's nothing I really give a fuck about in the "it's a sin in the eyes of God!" area of bullshit, but it is slightly sleazy; and worse, it's yet another unique connection between the boss and this one employee. The thing about the Bisch/DDP nepotism rumors is partly resentment of how Page was treated by the company. Was anyone else in his situation so thoroughly protected? I mean, look at Bischoff's entire tenure in power from 1994-1999. How many new top stars did he push at the championship level? There were a grand total of three over that entire time period: -Paul Wight is a special case. Just LOOK at the guy, you've GOT to push him hard. He's legitimately the size of Andre, brimming with charisma, and has the agility and athleticism of a regular-sized dude. Even WCW wasn't stupid enough to ignore his potential. (They were plenty stupid enough to squander said potential, but that's another subject.) -Bill Goldberg was another special case. He was a big, strong, fast, intimidating motherfucker with It Factor to spare. He had real-world athletic credentials; and unlike your Mongo McMichaels of the world, he took to wrestling with astonishing speed and seemed to improve by leaps and bounds during his rookie days. His booking as an undefeated monster was practically a science experiment, one WCW placed on the back burner and mostly forgot about until they suddenly found entire arenas chanting Goldberg's name throughout the shows. Once at that point (and while struggling with slipping ratings and a resurgent WWF), once again they had to push this guy. -And then... Diamond Dallas Page? A scruffy-looking, injury-plagued journeyman in his mid-forties? With only average talking ability, average-by-wrestling-standards size, and good-but-nothing-special ring skills? Sure, he had a killer finisher and as much pure desire and willpower to achieve as anyone; but that describes a hundred other guys who've come and gone in WCW and never got so much as a world title shot, let alone a world title reign. What was different between The World's Oldest Rookie and everyone else who never got the same opportunity? I'd wager the answer is probably "they didn't live next door to Eric Bischoff". And I like Page, I mark for the guy. But he sticks out like the sorest of thumbs at the top of the card at a company which was infamous for never seriously pushing anyone who wasn't already a big star.

As a former announcer, I officially second this motion. The kids get wrestling in a way that adults sometimes lose in their overthinking it. I loved how one of them totally pointed out Kalisto's botch, then Graves was smart enough to say something like "that shows how good he is, he can recover from a mistake like that". Damn fine job all around.

Yeah. It worked, the crowd loved it, but I personally kinda hated it. The ludicrously slow climbing would've been understandable if it was Dusty Rhodes on that ladder, but a guy like The Rock doing it was one of those moments where Wrestling just slaps you in the face and says "he didn't do the obvious thing to win because otherwise the match would be over too soon!". I always thought Austin/Taker from that night was an underrated match. Considering you've got two guys whose gimmicks are 90% offense and don't sell too much, and Austin gets a concussion early in the match, and they're both babyfaces... I mean, seriously, they had SO many hurdles to overcome out there, plus both men's nagging injuries at the time. They had the deck so thoroughly stacked against them, but still managed to deliver one hell of an Attitude-era brawl. Did Austin ever have a better match with Taker anywhere else?

I'm told it was a Fake Sasuke, though, in the Backlund match. He was credited as SASUKE all caps, and I vaguely recall someone else saying there was another guy doing the gimmick as a heel.