Loss

The wrestling here was pretty good, as Chris Candido has pretty good chemistry with broken down Shane Douglas. Sabu comes in and the booking gets confusing and overly complicated, and I don't know what to say about a guy like that coming in and doing the honors the same night he debuts. The promo after is about as self deluded as possible, but I guess that's what great heels are made of. Douglas is off to Russoland to save the world.

Somehow this worked, even though Shawn looked off his game (understandably so considering he was retired, but he was clearly not at a good point in his life), Venom didn't look all that good and Shooter Schultz messed up his run-in pretty badly. I guess it was the pacing and the psychology of the match that carried this, and maybe Shawn was going on instinct. Hard to say. But there's nothing specific I can really point to and say, "That. That's what made this work." Maybe the pacing and selling? I'm not sure. The match was laid out well, so maybe that? It wasn't a huge success, but it worked.

I can't really watch without sound, sadly. Heads up, we're missing Power Pro footage for a few months, but will return to it around October.

This was good, but was missing something. Maybe it was Lance Russell's commentary to put it over, I'm not sure. I like how they structured the 7-minute match, but if Regal's going to be in a pseudo-studio (su-su-sudio) environment, I'd prefer he have a title or something that enables him to do 10-minute matches on the regular. Loved Regal's ab stretch pinning combo at the finish, an old Flair favorite that he'd dust off every now and then, and that post-match forearm looked brutal.

This was quite the showcase for Kobashi for sure -- the end of an April trilogy that has showcased his versatility as well as any three matches in his career, even if he peaked way higher many, many times. Misawa-Ogawa still my MOTN, oddly enough, which seems odd considering their relative scope, but that match had surgical precision, where this match sort of drifted in and out since Omori had trouble holding his own at times. Kobashi really did look great though, even if I've seen just about enough of Kobashi having his leg worked over in matches. (And I know we have barely scratched the surface there.) If the goal was to make him look like the best wrestler in the world coming out of this tournament, then the goal was accomplished. ****

This was so great! The simplicity of it was just beautiful. About 3/4ths of the match (I'm fact-ing) was built around Ogawa's headlock and Misawa trying to maneuver his way out of it with basic stuff, only for Misawa to come back and trigger the slugfest to end all slugfests before they take it home. I respect how they made no effort to go epic here and instead just had the best possible match that was appropriate based on the standing of both guys at this point in time. Misawa should have won, but Ogawa should have looked good, and both things happened. **** Edit to add how I've always loved how obvious it is that Misawa enjoys working with Ogawa and always makes sure he calls the monkey flip every time they work opposite each other. Maybe he likes how Ogawa takes it. Not sure.

Looks like less than six minutes of this 19 minute match was taken out of the beginning. Tiger Mask looked good once again. The CIMA-Mochizuki exchanges were the best part of this. These guys at this point probably do the best hot finishing stretches in wrestling. ***1/2

This was amazing. Perro is getting by on rep for the most part at this point, but he knows how to use his aura and credibility to get the crowd rocking, and his understanding of what the ebb and flow of a wrestling match should be is spot on. I loved the extraneous stuff here with the ringside doctor and both guys just bludgeoning each other in the second and third falls, especially because it created an eye-for-an-eye motif that played out in the finish. Salvaje woke the sleeping giant by pissing Perro off, and the old man proved he still had some fight in him. This rocked. Seems like Bestia Salvaje is always put in a position to be the mechanic in CMLL more than a star player, but he handles that role very well. ****1/4

This is just tremendous. It's held together by everyone knowing their part. For Villano III, that means the character work that plays during the pre-match, match, and post-match. For Fuerza and Pierroth, that means acting as foils and ultimately turning on him in a fairly hardcore angle at the end. I really liked the pacing of the match itself as well, with Atlantis and Villano starting off with matwork that won't make anyone forget Santo-Panther, but was perfectly satisfying and fit the story of the match nicely. I am always a fan of using a loss to get a wrestler over as a bigger star, as has been done with Austin, Rock, and countless others, and Villano III seems like even more of a superstar than he already did coming out of this, losing his mask and turning. ****

This was awesome. I'm tempted to call it my favorite ECW match ever, but I need more time to think on that. I was totally engrossed in the match and the series of post-match angles, so as an entire presentation, it was tremendous. What I really liked about the three-way portion of this was the rhythm that kept everyone involved and doing something most of the way. The appearance of The Network at ringside bordered on the type of heat that's bad and turns people off, walking quite the fine line, and I'm not a fan of seeing that type of finish after a great match, but I also know Paul Heyman's match on slow booking and building heat. The triple juicing gave this all an extra sense of importance, and I liked their attempt to truly try something new. I like that Sandman has yet to come out of any confrontation with Rhino standing, and also that RVD's return blew the roof off the place. This doesn't feel like a dying company. ****1/4

Most of this feels like an extended post-match beatdown with saves and such posing as a match, which is fine because the goal of all of this was to build to a moment more than it was to have a good match. It's interesting that we got a true WWF vs WCW match ... in ECW.

Great TV match. These guys gelled really well with each other, which is interesting because I remember hearing about problems the Hardys and the Radicalz had working together around this time. Maybe that involved Saturn. Anyway, usually Matt is FIP and Jeff is the hot tag so he can do his cool moves, but in this case, they flipped it for a change, which was interesting. I also liked that the full-time tag team won the match, even though Benoit was being pushed higher on the card than anyone in the ring. Fast-paced without feeling rushed, and short without feeling too short. ***1/2

That's a lot of recycled late 90s booking in one segment. I'm kind of impressed by its gall. The Kanyon save I actually thought was pretty cool, and the crowd was into him enough that you could be convinced, hey, maybe they should try presenting him seriously and seeing where it goes. The match was a typical DDP match -- solid work, but you see the spots coming from a mile away.

"Meng speared a life sized poster of Goldberg. Meng used the poster to block Knobs spraying him with a fire extinguisher. Meng then threw Knobs off a 30-foot balcony." -- Wrestling Observer Newsletter, 04/24/00 It's funny that Bischoff and Russo have exploded WCW to rebuild it and one of the few remnants they've kept is the horrible Dustin Rhodes-Terry Funk feud. Wasn't the world just clamoring for that? And yeah, doesn't the talent know the way to impress Bischoff and Russo is to hang out with Hogan in the former case or cut promos with sex and drug references and shoot comments in the latter case? This match has too much try-hard and the chaos feels manufactured in a way pro wrestling usually manages to successfully disguise.

This was goofy in the right pro wrestling is goofy way. This required almost as much from the announcers as the wrestlers, so in that sense, it's something that works far better as a TV match than an arena match, and that showed, with Juventud Guerrera, the only star of any significance during the glory years in the match, getting the biggest reaction until Daphnee did her huracanrana. This was a disjointed mess, but it definitely had its moments, and the ring work itself was top notch within the confines of the convoluted story they were trying to get across.

I think that when a match with two guys going this hard, gelling this well, getting this reaction and getting so many details right is not seen as a standout match, and the main reason is because of the multiple times they topped themselves, it's an indicator of how spoiled we truly are on great matches. I almost want to forget about the Misawa-Kobashi series when discussing this and think about this in isolation, because I think looking at it in a greater context does make it seem far less impressive than it truly is. The common expression, and one I've used many times, is the inability to see the forest for the trees, the focus on details at the expense of seeing the big picture. I think not seeing this as a great match is the opposite -- the inability to see the trees for the forest. Misawa-Kobashi matches are really known for their action quotient, but all of the matches have very good fundamentals and this is no different, with the basic headlocks and such that have been mentioned in previous posts. I thought this escalated in a really organic way, and it was cool to see Misawa much stronger for longer stretches of this than he usually is. All I could think about watching this match was how much I love wrestling -- how fortunate are we that something this awesome isn't the peak of the genre and just sort of blends in? ****1/4

What Dave said in full most recently that I read was that WWE presents him as a star, but not as someone worth taking seriously in the ring. That's not quite a "comedy heel", although I'm guessing he used that term somewhere.

Losing a match to Daniel Bryan or another held-down-by-the-man type.

It's worth noting that WCW did this in Kemper Arena, where Owen Hart died.

That's an interesting thing to note and probably why my mental image of him as someone who never seems to get comeuppance doesn't match reality.

When something gets brought up over and over and over as a criticism of matches across all styles, eras and promotions, you start to wonder if the problem is less in the way matches are worked and more in the expectation of how matches should be worked. Somewhere along the way, we adopted this belief and I think it's become too militant. It even causes some of us to overlook a lot of other great (or not-so-great) things about wrestling. I would rather focus on what matches do right than what they do wrong, and while I am someone who really loves high consequence in wrestling matches, I'm at least willing to see where it goes. I don't think wrestlers need to be up and bouncing around after having their legs dismantled for 15 minutes, but I'm also not someone who begrudges someone for not selling an armbar 10 minutes after it was applied at the start of a match. I guess I have a relativist take on this, but I lean toward thinking we overvalue long-term selling limbwork. In the end, there are probably times when it matters and times when it doesn't, and a lot of that is in the eye of the beholder.

Does the hair criticism focus on specific women or all of them collectively? Because that could be pretty loaded depending.

Rule It With Butterfly Wings, Billy.