World's Worst Man

I feel the same way as Loss. I rarely get enthusiastic about particular wrestlers and I'm more focused on the match itself. There are only a few wrestlers that I particularly enjoy and have a high opinion of and that's usually guys who are great sellers and have realistic looking offense (hi Kawada). I think it's because those are obvious things that the individual has control over whereas the psychology and layout of a match isn't something which can easily be pinned on a specific performer. It's just one's mindset when they watch wrestling I guess.

Was he though? Until 1995 or so, I would say yes; but after that, it seemed like Hashimoto eclipsed him - both in drawing power and crowd reaction.

So, Shinya Hashimoto vs. Hiroshi Hase (12/13/94) was more or less awesome, and I love Hase. Dude seems to be in some really unique matches - not unique in general, but unique for the promotion they take place in. This match was like one half UWF, one half AJPW. Tons of hard-fought matwork to start, followed by an epic stretch run of hard-fought struggles for big moves. Hashimoto was awesome too, of course. He did a lot of stuff I've never seen him do before, like going after Hase's mid-section with sentons and the nastiest double stomp of all time. It's quite a shame that Hase didn't get more big matches like this.

The torch website has many more posts than the WO website. Keller posts a lot of articles from other sources and then gives his take on them at the end. Not really quality reporting, but it could explain the greater traffic.

Shinya Hashimoto

Would T/E be the same thing that the WWE testing is supposed to measure? The 10:1 fail rate, and all that? If so, that's hilarious. Also, is the testosterone the stuff that was being prescribed in 10 month doses every 3-4 weeks? Or was that something else?

Maybe they'll take the route of some of their more brain dead fans and say "It's not a steroid!!! He was taking it because he had low testosterone levels!!" Is it normal for someone with low testosterone to take so much that their levels are ten times that which is normal? Nevermind the reason he has low testosterone in the first place.

Everyone save for Ogawa (who was just kind of there) looked really good here. Taue was bringing the dickery early on, with him running interference on a Misawa tope attempt, a Kobashi plancha attempt, and later using Akiyama's jumping knee against him. The FIP portions versus Kobashi were strong, as they made a couple good comeback teases, which got the crowd excited. This lead to the crowd going nuts when the comeback was bridged into a Misawa-Kawada showdown. One of the things I noticed was that during the faster sequences, they do a good job of selling between spots and generally pacing it well. It stood out in contrast to some spotty ROH tag matches I've seen lately (Briscoes vs. Gen Next & Richards/Sydal), where the fast sequences are long and drawn out and end up being overkill. There wasn't a huge lead up to the finish, but they did a bit of a tease with Kobashi's moonsault before he finally hit it. AJPW's main events are often praised, but I'll be damned if they didn't put on the best TV "build" matches too. This was a fairly simple match designed to create interest in the Misawa-Kawada match at the end of the tour, but they still end up with a near MOTYC type match.

I really didn't dig this much overall. The main story point of the match didn't come off that well, because the heels weren't stooging enough, the face comebacks weren't teased well enough and there weren't enough spots I could point to as being super dramatic. There were however, a few minor spots I did like. Kernoodle trying to go through the ropes to the outside only to be met with the cage was pretty clever, since he had been on the receiving end of about 10 minutes of offense. Typical heel move that was foiled by the cage stipulation. Sarge tackling Kernoodle to avoid Steamboat's charge was another nifty spot that really added a nice touch to the match. Sarge's cage-top dive was pretty great, and it was probably the most dramatic part of the match. Sarge was the standout performer, as everything he does really fits his stooge heel character perfectly. From the body language, mannerisms and even bumping, he just screams out as being a big goofball, stooge heel. Steamboat and Youngblood were both solid with their selling during the FIP portions, but I didn't think their comebacks were anything special. They just didn't come off as being very spirited when they were supposed to be charging back into the match. Although part of the problem may have been that I didn't feel like they were ever in serious danger, other than when perhaps Slaughter hit the late-match lariat (right before the finish). I think there were a lot of little things that made this match really good, but the general theme wasn't done well enough to make this an elite match in my eyes.

Samoa Joe vs. Bryan Danielson (8/5/06) I really liked the contrast between the first and second halves of the match. At first, Danielson was taking the worst of it during the striking exchanges, and was just trying to survive. He tried to accomplish this by rolling out of the ring whenever possible or taking the contest to the mat and slowing things down. But in the second half, it was Joe who was just trying to survive, as he was greatly tired and had a bum knee. Danielson was great at his little heel tactics, like the aforementioned stalling, and things like going to the eyes when in trouble or mockingly using Joe's own spots. If the early portions were Danielson's time to shine, the late portions were certainly Joe's time. I think what made the late match so fantastic was because Joe really was tired. His awful body language (in a kayfabe sense), pained facials and noticeable hobble all pointed to a picture of a guy who simply had nothing left. But he still managed to fight. The dazed and sluggish back and forth near the end was simply everything you could hope for in a long, epic, clash of the titans. The flash nearfalls off of move attempts were brilliantly timed and used to good effect. Joe's reaction to the elbow-barrage was so pure and authentic that it was one of the most emotional spots I've seen in a long time. The finish was expected, and while the leadup was good, it was hard to buy anything as the finish. The way the false finishes were worked was certainly convincing, but matches ending in the last five minutes of the sixty limit timelimit almost never happens, if at all. That's certainly no fault of the workers in the match though. There a lot was going on throughout the entire course of the match, not just the very end and very beginning. Focused work, paced excellently, and the downtime served a real purpose. Great performance by both, especially Joe, who looked like he had lost his wind twenty minutes in. This was just an incredible match.

Those people will never get it. It's in their nature to be gullible, uninformed suck-ups. I do like that one person, Stephanie (OMG STEPHANIE MCMAHON!!) who is actually replying and trying to completely dismiss the information as being false. I Haha, classic.

Dundee's figure four attempts and Lawler frantically trying to fight him off was great stuff early on. The stalling was rather excessive near the start, but the match got a lot better starting from that point. Lawler's onslaught before and after the restart was incredible. It was a nonstop barrage of vicious punches, and if anything warranted a stoppage, that would have been it. Dundee's selling was really quite good throughout, but especially here. Unfortunately, the ending was awful. From a logical and dramatic standpoint, I didn't buy idea that Lawler had taken enough damage to be pinned, especially after lying around for a bit. It was a flat ending to what was otherwise a really good match.

This shit just reminds me of baseball, where the players won't admit to a problem, and just go on like everything is on the up and up. They, like the wrestlers, don't want the heat or headaches that speaking out would bring. So it falls to guys like Konnan, who have no interest or hopes of going to WWE, to actually get a realistic account of the problem. At least in baseball, players haven't been dropping dead left and right. But with the unnatural deaths in wrestling, and now this tragedy, it makes it all the more scummy to be covering up the problem.

Abdullah Kobayashi vs. Takashi Sasaki (BJPW 3/31/06) - Earlier someone said this was like a meeting of Honma vs. Yamakawa style deathmatches with more modern overkill BJPW deathmatches, and I couldn't agree more. They worked in some wrestling around the gimmickry, and actually had a solid story going on throughout the match. These two aren't as good as Honma or Yamakawa though, so the wrestling portions weren't as long, or worked as well. The story was basically Sasaki taking a huge beating, and whether or not he could come back from it. It built pretty well, as Sasaki's beating was long and drawn out, and his selling was fantastic. Kobayashi was just kind of there. He handed out a beating, but didn't add much more on top of that. If Sasaki had a better opponent, the wrestling sequences could have been a bigger and better part of the match, along with maybe a bit more dramatics along the way. Anyway, still one of the better deathmatches I've seen.

AJW - Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada vs Dynamite Kansai & Mayumi Ozaki (11/26/92) All Japan - Akira Taue & Toshiaki Kawada vs Kenta Kobashi & Mitsuharu Misawa (6/9/95) BJPW - Ryuji Yamakawa vs Tomoaki Honma (6/20/99) Dragon Gate - SUWA vs. Magnum Tokyo (2/08/04) JWA - Antonio Inoki vs Dory Funk Jr. (9/2/70) Maeda's UWF 1.0 (1984-1985) - Nobuhiko Takada vs. Kazuo Yamazaki (9/11/85) Maeda's UWF 2.0 (1988-1990) - Nobuhiko Takada vs Akira Maeda (11/10/88) Michinoku Pro -CIMA vs Minoru Fujita (10/19/99) New Japan - El Samurai vs. Shinjiro Otani (1/21/96) NWA (JCP 1985-1988) - Ric Flair vs. Barry Windham (1/20/87) NOAH - Kenta Kobashi & Go Shiosaki vs. Kensuke Sasaki & Katsuhiko Nakajima (11/5/05) ROH - CM Punk vs Samoa Joe (12/4/04) TNA - AJ Styles vs. Samoa Joe (12/11/05) UWFI - Super Vader vs. Nobuhiko Takada (8/18/94) WCW (1989-2001) - Vader vs Sting (12/28/92) WWF (1981-2002) - Bob Backlund vs. Adrian Adonis (1/18/82) WWE (2002-present) - Eddy Guerrero vs. Rey Mysterio (6/23/05)

Man. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, especially if that one particular wrestler linked with Astin is who we think it is.

When I came back to wrestling in 2004, after being out of it since mid-2000, the one thing I noticed about Japanese wrestling was the "2.9 syndrome", and how heatless some of those matches ended up being. I'm not saying I dislike that style, because when done right, it's probably my favourite, but what I mean is how many matches where it seemed like the wrestlers thought they could get heat simply by trading big moves back and forth for near falls without doing much else. Part of the reason why those AJPW matches worked so well was the gradual build and transition into the near-falls. They'd slowly start working bigger offense in, tease the biggest stuff now and then, and at the perfect moment, BAM, a guy would get nailed by a big move and be in a lot of trouble, which got the crowd on edge and lead into the stretch run. But with some of the more recent stuff (I'm looking at you Zero-One), the wrestlers would just lazily work through the opening portions of the match, and then all of the sudden start throwing big moves out left and right. It just felt like they were killing time to get to the part that the people supposedly wanted to see. Except more often than not, the crowd just didn't care because the wrestlers were taking it from 1st gear all the way up to 6th gear without anything in between. Which caused their 6th gear to have too large of a ratio, and the match just ended up being overkill, with guys kicking out of move after move after move, made even worse by the inevitable no-selling after all the punishment. They just seemed to not know how to fill in the middle portions of matches, so you'd have half a match of slow and dull, and half fast and dull. I'm not talking in absolutes here, as there have been some terrific heavy near-fall matches in recent years. It just seems like the "big offense, near-falls~!" style has become stock, which means it's done by everyone, and not everyone has the ability to pull it off. And given how hard it is on the wrestlers' bodies, if they're not drawing with that style, it's rather unproductive and harmful.

Puroresu is just English slang for Japanese pro-wrestling at this point. It's the same as anime, which is Japanese slang for animation in general, but English speaking people use it as slang for specifically Japanese animation. I don't think people are trying to be fake Japanese or whatever by using the terms. It's just a simple way to specifically denote Japanese wrestling. Big match Japanese wrestling has basically been terrible for a while, due to the goofiness and overkill, and that seems to have been the most popular aspect of it, which is why I think people are so down on it. But going back to 2005 (which is the last year I followed a bunch of different promotions), there were quite a lot of good "small" matches from TV, matches that weren't big spectacles or even necessarily between big names. The sort of matches that one wouldn't see unless they were closely following the promotion. They weren't generally MOTYC type matches, but they were solid, enjoyable matches that would have been a god-send on RAW or Smackdown. I really don't know what the current scene looks likes though, or whether the situation is the same. I should probably get watching goodhelmet's best of 2006 and catch up.

I'd imagine it's different for those who were emotionally invested into Chris Benoit and his wrestling matches, but I really wasn't, nor would I say I've even been a fan of his since the late 90's, so watching him wrestle is no problem for me. The situation is obviously something I'll think about every time I see him, but it's not something that will have an adverse effect on how I view his work.

I don't like the idea of banning moves. It would make more sense to me if they just told the wrestlers to be smart about their usage of the dangerous/flashy moves. That is to say, to only use them for special occasions such as big, high-profile matches or what have you. People like what they like, there's no "right" or "wrong" way to enjoy pro-wrestling, and some people do enjoy "big moves" at face value. But they also need to be reasonable with their expectations, because wrestlers are only human. Seeing high-impact, athletic moves all the time eventually kills the importance of those high-impact moves, and more importantly it greatly increases the wear and tear on the wrestlers. Banning dangerous moves and going back to purely fundamental wrestling would likely turn many fans off, but serious moderation is something that could keep everyone satisfied.

There's the media going on and on about roid rage, but then you have the people who don't think steroids should be an issue at all, despite the fact that they can cause psychological problems outside of roid rage. It's highly unlikely that this was a case of roid rage, but there's still a chance that steroids could have played a part in Benoit's psychological decline.

Not surprising, considering there wasn't really a reason for Benoit to be taking steroids, so the fact that they were prescribed didn't really mean a whole lot.

Is this weird to anyone else? Or is it normal for a grieving person to do this sort of thing, even long after the death?

Kevin Sullivan speaks http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286848,00.html

What the hell were they thinking then? Just being hopeful? Or hopelessly in denial?