Loss

Tajiri comes across as such a superstar in this. Guido does such a great job putting him over at the ultimate end of nearly every sequence. (Even Big Sal gets in on the fun.) He's wrestling with so much confidence, and all I can think about watching this is all the foreign talent WCW had that theoretically could match or exceed Tajiri in talent and charisma that could never get over like this. Part of that does come down to booking and presentation, yes, but part of it also is Tajiri knowing the audience, knowing how to carry himself and wrestling with so much confidence. Really fun match. *** (I'll also note that this aired on the 1/28 TNN show but appeared to have been slightly clipped, so we went with the fancam version, which comes across better.)

I thought this was pretty great. I don't think this is really a predictor of the more hardcore fan-driven style of the 2000s indy scene at all. It seems to exist as its own thing. Maybe calling it a conclusion to 90s indy wrestling is appropriate. Check out the kids chanting Modest's name, Daniels' cheating and the counting along with Modest's ten punches in the corner. There's nothing exclusive or underground about how this match is worked or the audience to whom it is trying to appeal. It probably more closely resembled the traditional U.S. pro style, in fact, than most of the matches the WWF and WCW were presenting at this point in time. There were a few times that they got a little more creative than I wish they would have with some of the counters, but I really dug this overall and think the iffy moments were overshadowed by what they did right. ****

PG-13 mic time got interrupted by David Flair and Crowbar, which makes them the biggest heels in WCW in my eyes. I think I liked this more than soup if only to see PG-13 work more of a fast-paced sprint than we usually saw out of them in their USWA studio matches. It's good to see that side of them just to know they have it in them. They are way too good to just be doing jobs on WCW Saturday Night, least of all to a tag team that includes David Flair, but I'm at least glad to be watching them in some form.

The first match between a second generation wrestler and a third generation wrestler of the project. I suspect it'll be a while before that happens again, if it does at all. Scott is probably the worst Armstrong. That doesn't mean he's bad -- just means of the Armstrongs, he's the worst. Okay match, but nothing special at all. I guess a notable Chavo B-show match around this time would probably require a more spectacular opponent and more motivation from him, which came later in the year when his heel cruiserweight push became a bit more focused.

I'm not sure why Palumbo never clicked. Good athlete, good look and good enough charisma. Fun match. Cornell looks good too. He'd be repackaged as Reno later in the year and get a pretty strong midcard push through the end of WCW. Palumbo caught Cornell with a super nasty kick to the face just before the flying shoulderblock finish that someone should GIF. Worth checking out. Fun way to pass a few minutes.

Thought this match kind of meandered, which made this match seem longer than it really was. Bull Buchanan had been in wrestling for a few years at this point and still wrestles like he's a rookie. I'm not sure why they ever saw him as a top prospect, as he's never really impressed me at all. Cornette's commentary is also a little overbearing because he won't stop screaming. I didn't get much out of this at all. I would have expected something a bit more wild from a No DQ match, but more than that, what we got was pretty bland.

Steve Bradley is like a version of Rob Van Dam that is a good worker. Ali works hard, but Bradley is clearly the more seasoned guy of the two, and Bradley carries him through a strong TV match. Good booking here with Brandon Baxter offsetting Jim Cornette to set up Bradley's departure from PPW TV. I've really enjoyed watching him there in 1999-2000. He was such a prospect and I wish he would have made it to the big time. Really nice power-speed contrast here, and a longer TV match than usual. ***1/4

We haven't been tracking promos, but if anyone has cut a better promo in 2000 than Tracy Smothers cut before this match, I'll eat my hat. This was a hell of a match. It was short, but awesome. Tracy Smothers sort of looked like the best guy in wrestling here, working in street clothes and doing a masterful heel performance, wrestling with intensity and making Dinsmore look great while also looking like a killer himself. Great pre-match and post-match booking, great wrestling and one of the all-time great short matches in my mind. ***1/2

I really liked Omori in the Kobashi match earlier in the month, but he was pretty uninspiring here. Maybe that's just his ideal opponent. The match was really good when Takayama was in -- strong opposite Misawa and great opposite Honda -- and dropped when Omori came in. It wasn't because Omori didn't work hard, but he lacked Takayama's presence and ability to make things matter. If the goal here was to make me want a Takayama vs Honda match, they succeeded wonderfully. If they were just filling time, it was good too. I laughed at how the crowd didn't even bother to react to cover attempts on Misawa. I'll probably forget this quickly but I enjoyed it while it lasted. Tamon Honda has quite possibly the best German suplex in wrestling history. ***

Short but solid stuff, mostly a hype piece for Atlantis-Villano III. That in itself is pretty fun and so much is still to come before we get to 3-17, so I'm pumped.

It doesn't get much better than this. This is yet another match for people to watch who can't get past the 2/3 falls format of lucha libre because this match is structured in a way that overrides that completely and demonstrates that watching each match as three segments is not the right way to approach this stuff. Here, Los Infernales start out strong jumping the technicos during their entrance (when will Tarzan Boy ever learn?) and end up getting DQ'd in the first fall for not listening to the ref before winning the second fall decisively. So they take one to lose one, but the key is that during that entire run, they have an uninterrupted stretch of dominance. Tarzan Boy gets bloodied and all hell breaks loose. We don't start seeing signs of life from Tarzan and friends until inside the last five minutes, when Antifaz mounts a comeback and a plasma-soaked Tarzan Boy finally looks at Satanico with rage in his eyes and decides he must die. Satanico is of course the master of feeding a comeback and this is one of the best examples of it. In the end, his only escape is a low blow, which ends the match in a loss for his team, but at least allows him to fight another day. And so the feud of the year at this point continues. And so the promotion of the year continues its hot streak with its best match yet. ****1/4

This was of course awesome. A fantastic new dimension on a feud that had been running for a full year at this point. I love that still, after all that time, that match doesn't seem stale, and the feud still feels like it has legs. I think that's because they are both booked to be strong players instead of as a Harlem Globetrotters-style sideshow like the WCW guys, and this match represents a progression. The feud has taken a newly violent turn. Some of the other matches they could have elsewhere. This match can only happen in ECW. They have blended what they do with the house style. They did a great job both getting over Tajiri's sadistic side and getting over Crazy's resilience and ability to fight back. Great psychology too -- look past all the table noise and notice how the fans are rooting for Crazy during his comebacks and how the blade helps build sympathy for him. Just a total masterpiece. ****1/4

It's early 2000s ECW wrestling in Louisiana, so of course there's homophobia. I'm not offended by it so much as I am bored with it. At least homophobic crowds in the territories could appreciate could wrestling matches. This awful crowd can't even do that and only pops for table spots, rendering them completely useless. It's such a distraction that I can't even focus on the match and find it too difficult a watch honestly. If you want to see parts of a wrestling match in between a cameraman arguing with a fan and calling him a male rat who sucks dick, this is the match for you.

This Baton Rouge crowd is my least favorite crowd of 2000 so far, sitting on their hands for Storm-Tanaka and treating this match with contempt until the tables started breaking. That's a shame, because they were giving the people a really well-worked match. I appreciated how Sabu and Spike didn't get frazzled and still made them wait for it. They were building to use of the tables and just kept their patience. I loved the chain wrestling at the beginning for a nice change of pace and even the garbage stuff was structured well in a wrestling match sense. Much better than I would have expected. My favorite thing so far this year from either guy. ***1/2

I thought this was pretty substandard. Nothing wrong with the action, but it didn't have much heat, and the second was overly physically involved. Neither guy really controlled the match for very long either.

With double the time, I think this had the potential to be a great match, but trying to rush two eliminations into a 10-minute match is pushing it, considering that they were trying to do full, fleshed out matches to build to each elimination. A for effort that they tried and almost succeeded, but it disappointed me because I saw the potential. Despite a few moments in the match from everyone else that look a bit unpolished, Joey Matthews and Christian York look ready for primetime, especially with similar teams like the Hardys and 3 Count floating around the Big Two.

I could see this being ****+ unclipped, but even the 9 minutes we get are pretty great. Kobashi tends to work with Vader like he's a typical big man while Akiyama better understands what makes him unique and takes advantage of his ability to play pinball and cut a harder pace. I liked how they did more to get Johnny Smith over here. Fans weren't really buying a lot of what he did as credible, but they were giving him offensive flurries that would at least get fans in the micro, and I thought his kickout from Akiyama's first exploder at the end was well done in that regard. Everyone looked really good here, and I'd love to see this in full sometime. ***3/4

Yes, I still think Kanyon's best path to stardom was just to STAY MORTIS. I will keep saying that. The match itself was really good TV stuff, I thought -- action packed, and it helps that these two knew each other well and trained together a lot. Very good heavyweight wrestling at a time when WCW really needed very good heavyweight wrestling. Kanyon could sometimes get a little overly creative and come across awkward, but he was a solid working heel here.

This was short but full of life and excitement. Zumbido continues to impress and I hope a real showcase match for him is on the horizon. Pantera was awesome too. I thought this was a fantastic combination of highspots and character work. Short, hot TV match that was everything it needed to be, although I think a longer match would yield better results. ***

This was a pretty one-sided slaughter. Whether it was or not, it struck me as a largely improvised match after Olimpico suffered what appeared to be a legit injury off an awful bump hitting the mat when Panther took him to the mat. This ended up as an isolate and destroy match from there, with Lizmark getting his turn next and Casas meeting the same fate, while briefly teasing a miracle comeback, only to flame out. I enjoyed this match but wow, I hope Olimpico was okay after that, because that splat was pretty nasty. ***

That makes a little more sense. Still not particularly compelling but Nash was taking on the role of shitstirrer at commissioner if I recall correctly.

I do think we should define what objectivity means in the confines of this thread, one, because we probably all have different takes on it, and two, because I would like for Jimmy Redman's feathers to be unruffled if that's possible. I don't think (hope) that anyone thinks it means there are factually good and factually bad matches. I think it's more about keeping ourselves in check and attempting to say things about matches that come from both the head and the heart. I think swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction and turning wrestling watching into an entirely intellectual exercise is probably worse than just going on gut feeling, but I'm sure each person's take on that is different.

Okay match brawling into the crowd, which at some point became a cover for conveying violence in a wrestling match. I hate stuff like this because who made Kimberly the referee and why would they do that? She is his wife and theoretically, referees are there to officiate athletic contests. There has to be a better way to drive this conflict than that. I know refs are often special enforcers in matches, but usually it's to ensure there's no funny business or something. This was to deliberately seek drama. Silly. Avoid this. You'd think DDP would know better than to go there considering how wrestlers booking problems in their marriage goes, and you'd definitely think new booker Kevin Sullivan would know better (unless this was his attempt to kill it off). It's also hard to tell who is really the babyface and who is really the heel in this since both come across sort of scummy. Bagwell had been a babyface and DDP had been a heel before this feud started, but Bagwell has been messing with a married woman, so this is all sorts of mixed up. But hey, it played on a real issue that happened between Bagwell and DDP around this time, and I guess that's all that matters.

Psicosis is a total machine in this match. Just an outstanding performance from the guy, making Kidman look like a million bucks by building sympathy on him and taking his moves so well to make them look amazing. He does a great job building heat by interacting with the crowd and I watch this and think he and Juventud Guerrera really should have been the top heel tag team and could have been a massive heat magnet. Kidman does look good and does everything he should do here, but I was just sort of wowed by how seamless Psicosis was. He made it all look so easy. This match was basically booked to start Nitro as a way to say, "Hey, Vince Russo's gone, we have wrestling again!", but then they didn't have wrestling again after that really, so it didn't work. ***

I don't know, this match hasn't lost much for me. I thought this was a borderline great match. It kind of evolved from All Japan's version of a Tenryu-Hashimoto strike battle to a stalemate. If it's hurt by anything, it's that neither guy was dominant at any point in a way that was truly decisive. I suppose that being a good or bad thing is a matter of interpretation. I loved the drama over the cross armbreaker at the end and the double lariat spot during Kobashi's Hulk Up was a pretty cool twist too. As is customary, Kawada lost in his return match, but pushed Kobashi pretty hard. ***3/4