Loss

I agree that this turned out to be a big nothing burger. The talent level of those involved is too uneven to amount to anything, and there's nothing really to tie it all together. JWP's version of the Toryumon fustercluck from the day before. The 7-way sleeper is DUMB no matter who does it, and even more so with this many people, because it's clearly done to look cool instead of to have any affect on the match at all.

I thought this was an excellent match in terms of establishing a clear and unique role for each person. They really protected Devil Masami -- who in this particular match is probably a better Aja Kong than I can ever recall Aja Kong being -- by waiting a long time for her to take any offense, which gave it meaning when she finally did. Azumi Hyuga and Ran Yu Yu are names we'll be seeing a lot more as the decade progresses. I suppose you could call them the hot new stars of the time and important figures in 2000s Joshi. I thought Hyuga was excellent in that not only did she provide the typical reliable athleticism, but she also sold consistently throughout the match, really favoring her neck every chance she got after DevilRan worked it over so much for so long. I also like Commando Bolshoi as a masked wrestler full of life and energy -- the consummate teammate who actually stood on top of Devil at one point (who was laid out on the apron) to prevent her from saving Ran Yu Yu when it looked like Hyuga may have the match in hand. I agree with Chad that Devil being built up so much and not being involved in the finish, and even being on the losing side, felt a little anti-climatic, but the work itself was strong. ***1/2

This was a solid match. I enjoyed it, especially as a contrast to Ki-Blade, because they didn't dabble in excess at all, and just worked a solid, basic match focused on Colt getting heat from the crowd and not doing anything too complicated. Nothing that will change your life, but worth watching. I could easily see this opening a WCW pay-per-view or happening on one of their weekend syndicated shows.

I'm willing to give Ian Rotten more of a try based on people whose opinions often jive with mine really liking him -- and considering that this isn't in his home promotion -- but this did nothing for me. There's acceptable wrestling violence, then there's this, which I felt like crossed a line a few times. Maybe I need to desensitize myself to things like guys cutting each other open with pairs of scissors while the camera zooms in if I'm going to watch 2000s Ian Rotten matches, I don't know. As it is, it felt like a way to cover for guys who can't work a match instead of guys using props to create a style all their own. Axl Rotten shows up at the end to cut a shoot promo and everyone involved swears like crazy because they don't know how to get heat otherwise. Oh joy! My least favorite thing so far.

Wow. So I jumped through quite a few hoops to find this show, but I'm glad I did. It was a great early look at both guys, with Blade looking every bit as good as Low Ki, who ultimately became the bigger indy star of the two. It's funny to me that CZW even existed before ECW folded, because what exactly were they rebelling against when ECW had that market cornered already? That aside, this is equal parts great match and trainwreck. It's hard not to admire the effort here, although they do way too much. But the overkill is part of the charm of the viewing experience, and I will give Blade huge credit for recovering nicely and not missing a beat when he missed his dive onto Low Ki on the outside. This has every nutty bump, crazy moonsault-style dive and headdrop you could possibly ask for in a single match. It's nuttier than Tanaka-Kuroda from three days earlier, and I think it's ultimately better worked because they didn't even pay lip service to the idea they were trying to have an actual wrestling match -- they just shot for the moon. Every once in a while, that works. This could pass for a WWE main event now. ***1/4

I really liked this one. I was prepared not to like it when babyface Rob Conway wrestled in his sunglasses and wouldn't stop flexing for the camera, but it got better after he took them off. Dinsmore in particular looked really seasoned, doing little things like shaking his own hand after punching Conway and doing a better job jaw-jacking and otherwise interacting with the studio crowd. He feels like he should be either Dash or Dawson in that tag team. They did not let up on the pace one bit and it's hard to ask for better action than what we got here. I also really liked the finish of Dinsmore hitting Conway with the chain and Conway doing a surprise kickout before getting the chain himself and trying the same thing, accidentally hitting the ref and then a heel ref coming in and doing a fast count off of Dinsmore's German suplex to give him the win. I'd probably really enjoy seeing these two in a longer arena match around this time, although I think Dinsmore is pretty clearly miles ahead of Conway by this point, as he should be since he's more experienced. ***

These guys are all a bit green, but this still had its moments. I think White Trash just about died on that German suplex near the end of this. Good Lord. There was a little too much going on to know what to follow, but the announcers did as good a job as could be expected of calling it and it was an interesting look at some guys I had absolutely no idea existed. Not sure if any of them were repackaged as people we know well or not. Rukkus is a big muscle guy who does moves from the top rope, which tells me had WCW stayed in business, he would have ended up there eventually. Fun time capsule if nothing else.

NWA Wildside! Ron Killings ... awkwardly rapping while fans sit on their hands for 17 years and counting it would appear. He's actually serviceable in the ring, with some sharp offense and good bumping and feeding for Estrada, so I won't be too harsh. I can see why the WWF took a chance on him in 2000, because he is a charismatic guy with some cool moves. Not much to the match, but it's fine.

Short but really fun and fully fleshed out, with a strong beginning, middle and end. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the hypocrisy of a match Cornette probably helped layout having a guy go through a table as a mid-match spot with the babyface (Trailer Park Trash) not even going for an immediate pin and the guy who took the bump (Steve Bradley) actually coming back to his feet within a minute or so, but other than that, there is nothing I would point out about this in a negative way. They cut a hard pace, and Bradley looks like a future prospect, which makes it a big shame that he didn't work out. I usually hate the spot where the guy goes for a chairshot and the other guy moves so the chair bounces off the ropes and hits the perpetrator in the face, but it was executed so well here that I really liked it - maybe the best I've ever seen that spot. If it wasn't for that miraculous recovery after the powerbomb through the table, I'd probably go *** on this even with it only clocking in at around five minutes, but that keeps it from hitting that level for me.

This was cool to see as a novelty, but it's a total disjointed mess. Everyone is kind of off in their own universe and the Toryumon guys are still too green to be wrestling next to Santo and Panther (and the awesome Bombero Infernal) without looking outclassed. There is really nothing pulling all of this together as a coherent match. The Toryumon guys don't come across as out of their league when wrestling each other at all, but they are exposed sharing a ring with world class veterans.

This was better than I thought it would be, even if it was a little uncomfortable to watch since we know Bret was concussed at the time and he did take a few hard shots to the head. He didn't look himself, but he did turn in a solid performance on instinct. His execution being so good was enough to carry him along. Terry Funk is reliably Terry Funk, bringing the chaos by throwing chairs into the ring, rolling Bret in some type of buggy at ringside into the ring apron and even attempting a moonsault on Bret who had a garbage can on top of him. In the post-match angle, he even ate a powerbomb through the Thunder set from Kevin Nash. It's of course a shitty way to wrap up a great career for Bret Hart (he does have one more match coming on Monday, which gets forgotten for whatever reason), but WCW hardcore matches were always far more violent and fun to watch than the WWF versions of hardcore matches, less so under Russo, although that still rung true.

This was before the HHH push was so overdone that it was ten times harder to get fans to bite on false finishes, so they have a much easier time getting Rikishi over as a worthwhile challenger. Rikishi was hot at the time anyway, and the work was good, so I don't mean to put it all on that, but I think sometimes people look back at 2000 WWF like the ring work was better. I don't think that's the case. I just think the matches seemed better because even the top guys, while still the favorites to win, seemed beatable, and people really were into their favorites climbing the ladder and believed they'd get there. This is one of many examples we'll get into of that phenomenon. One of HHH's better performances in making a challenger look good, and the time and place were right to get it over. I'm with soup on Stephanie's awful commentary. I think she improved quickly as a TV personality, but it took her some time to become a decent heel. ***

This was really fun TV wrestling. Rock and Angle end up in a mic duel before a short, but fun fast-paced TV match with Rock showing off some impressive varied offense. Rock is insanely over, of course. I liked the booking of Angle winning by DQ to keep his undefeated streak alive while Rock is still booked to walk tall like a real top babyface should in how he closes the segment. Good stuff.

I have been the single defender of a lot of 1998-1999 FMW matches that pretty much everyone else has criticized, but this is one where I can't say anything nice. I like my FMW to either be Onita death matches or All Japan cosplay, not this other junk. A vertical suplex down steps in the audience? Ridiculous. I'm pretty sure Masato Tanaka did three tornado DDTs in what we saw of this match. This was excessive and dumb wrestling in a lot of ways, and I like both of these guys. Lots of popping up from moves instead of selling them and all sorts of other things in wrestling that I absolutely hate. I'm sure I'll see a lot of this in the coming decade, and I'll probably call it out every single time. The only nice thing I can say about it is that it succeeded on its own terms, I guess, but FMW can do better than this and usually does.

This show has to be on my short list for all-time great cards. Tenryu and Sasaki continue the theme of the night by knocking the crap out of each other for just under 15 minutes, and give us something else we haven't quite had tonight -- a strike battle. This is a crowd that has responded to stiffness all night long, and this match had it in spades. I really loved the audacity of Tenryu trying a top rope huracanrana just to set up Sasaki doing his own. The execution of it was great because it wasn't just athletically impressive, but it actually looked like a painful move to take. It was wise to not go too long at the end of such a long show, and it's impressive they kept the crowd so hot this far in. As we start the decade, Tenryu doesn't look to have lost even a step since January 1990. In fact, he may be better. ****1/4

I just renewed the domain for the site. It has now officially existed for ten years!

This was the kind of slow-building, 30-minute match that has gone out of style in recent years which I still very much love. Just great. Lots of feeling out to start and a slow pace at first before momentum breaks with Chono and he targets Muto's neck with a series of piledrivers and a reverse full nelson with Muto in a sitting position, to which he repeatedly returns. Chono gets overzealous by trying a piledriver on a ringside table and Muto counters with a dragon screw legwhip off the table, and takes control for a while with some well-timed dropkicks to Chono's knee, more dragon screw legwhips and a figure four. The offense from both guys you could argue as a little repetitive, but I saw it less that way and more as playing into the story they were trying tell, specifically of both men taking chances in the early stages that didn't pan out, and sticking to familiar stuff for the rest of the match as much as possible. It's that same repetitive moveset that keeps this from going up a level -- not that I expect them to be doing stuff more advanced, just maybe a little more varied at times -- but it's also what made it great. ****

This is the perfect blend of pro wrestling excess, shoot style action and pro style action in front of a molten crowd. Murakami is the spark in this -- just an amazing snot who makes the pairing with Iizuka matter and is such a great little punk. The Hashimoto-Ogawa interactions are completely off the page. I like how they teased a quick match just like in October and then restarted. Everyone impressed really, but Murakami was my favorite guy in this in terms of making people not feel disappointed that the finish involved neither Hashimoto nor Ogawa and helping the heat sustain throughout even when those two were not in the ring. Really special feeling and maybe this will go down in some ways as the colloquial end of 1990s New Japan. We'll see. ****1/2

Well this was a massacre, to the point that it seemed to shock the hell out of everyone in the building. Guys are really beating the shit out of each other on this show. Yeah, considering the great matches Liger and Kanemoto have had in the past, and even more so, considering how many of those matches we have in clipped form only, it's doubly frustrating that this was booked the way it was when it wasn't going anywhere productive anyway. This would have been an awesome way to start a match to do something very different with these two, and Liger really did look like a killer. But they had done a lot to establish Kanemoto over the previous four years of feuding with Liger that felt a bit all for naught after this.

Not a ton I'd say about this one. Really fun slugfest. This Tokyo Dome crowd is definitely responding to stiffness more than just about anything else. Wow on those Benoit chops for sure. Funny that this match had more flying than the juniors tag. ***1/4

Am I overrating everything so far? I thought this was absolutely spectacular. LOVED the way they got over the cross armbreaker as the great equalizer and then paid it off at the end. Kashin and Tanaka kept going back to it throughout the match to counter just about everything Otani and Takaiwa threw at them, and it always worked. Kashin and Tanaka, by the way, were a machine as a team and Minoru Tanaka really looked like the future junior heavyweight superstar. He was more over through his ringwork than I've ever seen any junior heavyweight in the dome to this point -- that includes Liger, Kanemoto, Ultimo Dragon, Otani or anyone else you want to name. He was getting both the big stuff like the spectacular offense to wow the crowd right, and the small stuff like pulling back the ropes when Takaiwa was trying to reach them and keeping the match on their side of the ring. I always enjoy juniors matches on these shows because they all face the same challenge in terms of getting a reaction. I've seen many approaches and some have worked but most haven't. This has been the most successful effort I've seen, and I think that's because they wrestled like heavyweights. They turned the stiffness up to eleven, they kept it thematically simple -- in order for Otani-Takaiwa to win, they had to find a way to neutralize that damn cross armbreaker that kept sinking them -- and they didn't do much in the way of high flying. You could argue that doing this style every night wouldn't be best because other than the faster pacing, they aren't distinguished enough from the heavyweights and that would probably be correct, but on this particular night, it was the right choice. I think one reason I really got into this so much is because we've seen years and years of failed attempts from great juniors to win over these tough Tokyo Dome crowds that haven't worked for the most part. This did, and it was earned. ****1/4

Did you watch the complete handheld or the edited commercial version?

I thought this was really good, and there was plenty of stuff here to love, from Togo's crisp and mean-spirited offense to Delphin's selling and the overall structure of the match. I do think it was probably much better in 2000 than it is now, just because a lot of the interference that was a bit more commonplace in all wrestling then felt like overkill when it really wasn't at the time, and the table spot didn't really add much when it wouldn't have seemed that big of an issue in 2000. Those are really my only complaints and they are minor. This was an inspired match, and I also think it's pretty cool how Osaka Pro fans continued the Michinoku Pro tradition of sitting on the building floor instead of in chairs. (MPro couldn't afford chairs for their early shows, so their fans sat on the floor, and it eventually just became tradition.) ***1/2

No.

I had a completely different takeaway from this. I was completely engrossed and I thought this was awesome. In fact, I thought this had a lot of long-term selling, far more than a usual Toyota performance. She sold her leg throughout the match, and each time she executed a move, she seemed to favor it and sort of push herself through the execution, then sell the consequences of doing so afterwards. There were definitely times when she blew it off, but it was a vast improvement over what we normally get from her there. I also thought all of the matwork was compelling -- both Hotta working over Toyota's legs and Toyota rebounding by working over both Hotta's upper body with the camel clutch and her lower body to neutralize her footwork, which only worked to a limited extent. The spot near the end where Hotta came out of the corner with unexpected leg lariat was outstanding. I liked how by the end, both were wounded by knee injuries, so we were looking at a war of attrition. Hotta powered up, as did Toyota, and then they just slugged it out until Toyota pulled off the win. Not a perfect match by any means, but the best one I think I've seen so far, and from my position, Toyota's second ****+ match in the first four days of 2000. ****1/4