Why we rate matches
The mantra we try to live by here at Pro Wrestling Only is that there are only two types of professional wrestling -- good wrestling and bad wrestling. We profess this because as a medium, pro wrestling has proven that it can connect to people in a way that transcends time, place, and culture. We also believe passionately that no matter when or where new fans reach their point of entry, the most open-minded ones can discover and enjoy great wrestling in all corners of the world and moments in history, provided that the footage exists. We find it fun at PWO to make comparisons between matches in different time periods that involve a diverse array of wrestlers. Rating matches provides a quantitative way to do that, which makes it possible to do direct, match-to-match comparisons. On a larger scale, it also facilitates list-based projects and countdowns.
Why we think about wrestling critically
There are some who argue that watching wrestling should be lighthearted or mindless entertainment and that we shouldn't overthink it, to which we respond that this is fun or we wouldn't do it. We consider pro wrestling a form of performance art and consider rating it a way to show our appreciation for just how powerful pro wrestling can be at its best. Consider this critical thinking respect for the form, not an attempt to tear anything down. We believe pro wrestlers can achieve greatness in any environment, with any wrestlers, in any style, in any era, and with or without any limitations. We believe this, in fact, because we've seen it happen.
Why we don't use the classic five-star rating system
At PWO, we find challenges with the more conventional and established five-star rating system. It has certainly been useful in determining what matches are worth watching, and in the past, we've championed it ourselves, but it's not an infallible way to view wrestling (nor is our approach, to be clear, but it does work well for us). There are specific ideals that usually accompany the star rating system about what makes a match good or bad. We find those ideals to be narrower in scope than the way that we enjoy watching and talking about wrestling, even if they are admittedly useful as a short-hand reference point. We have also learned that not all four-star matches are created equal and that greatness resides on a spectrum.
What matters to us when rating matches
We believe that matches should be rated on their own terms. A 9.0 squash is possible, even if we have yet to see it. It may not be as good as a more competitive 8.0 match the way that we would traditionally think about it, but we also believe this distinction to be an unnecessary fan construct in the first place. Matches are something more than the sum of their parts -- crowd reaction can elevate or devalue wrestling, as can historical significance, buildup, match follow-up, later increase or decrease in importance of a move or hold, or an angle or interview that precedes or follows the match.
What we care about most is how successful a wrestling match is in either creating or maximizing its surroundings. Show us a match where fans are cold early on and end up fully engrossed by the end of it and you're likely showing us a match that we'll go to bat for. Show us a match that started with a super hot crowd that stayed that way and we'll give credit where it's due, but we're less likely to be impressed because the specific actions taken in the ring are not what generated that reaction. Show us a match that had a strong storyline with over performers going in and then went on a thrill ride, taking the crowd up and down as they saw fit and getting their desired reaction most of the way, and you're likely showing us an all-time classic.
We believe that there is no such thing as a bad crowd, just as we believe that everything is possible -- the five-minute opener at a TV taping that was just decided upon by the bookers that afternoon has every bit the potential to be a 10.0 as the main event of a card at Budokan Hall that has 18 months of build and will be given 30 minutes of ring time. That doesn't mean that the latter isn't more likely to be great than the former, but we have seen wrestlers overcome obstacles to produce something great so many times that we see preemptive dismissal as disrespectful to the pro wrestling craft. That's not to say that matches that have uninterested crowds don't have other merits and can't be great in their own way, but it does make clear that they failed to achieve their most basic goal, and they likely aren't something we'll view at the all-time classic level. Likewise, two wrestlers in a pie-eating contest or game of cards that the fans go crazy for isn't enough to make it great by itself -- the bell-to-bell actions and technique do matter and are significant, but we care more about the dish than the recipe.
We also realize that what a hot crowd is differs according to time and place. It's not about volume or frequency as much as it is about generating a favorable reaction through specific actions in the ring. Crowds in RINGS are a bit more attentive to detail than crowds in 1980s WWF, so they might not make as much noise, but that also doesn't mean that they aren't interested. We believe that context matters, just as we believe that understanding the norms in a given wrestling company or era is highly important.
What we think matters most in pro wrestling
In the end, we see professional wrestling as something where presentation matters as much as or more than content. This means that the whole of a presentation can often render the content of the match less important or even irrelevant. For example, the main event of Bash at the Beach '96 is iconic in that it concluded with a classic angle that jumpstarted an era and cemented WCW as the number-one wrestling company in the United States, at least for a couple of years. From a business perspective, it accomplished everything one could hope for in spades. When watching it decades later in an attempt to discern the match's quality, that alone won't make it a great match, although those positives do work in the match's favor. We believe that current watchability is important, and ultimately, any rating that we provide for a match is our way of saying, "This quantifies just how much we think this match is worth your time."
How we think great output reflects on a wrestler
We all have favorite wrestlers, but we don't put as much stock in quantifying our thoughts on them. The reason is that most wrestling careers have peaks and valleys. 2010's great wrestler can be 2011's disappointment, and forming an overall takeaway from that is something a bit more nuanced than it is something that can be explained in numeric form. While we appreciate projects that rank wrestlers and see immense value in it, it's not our priority because there are too many ups and downs in the average wrestling career to distill it all down to a "bottom line" much of time. And possibly to our detriment at times, PWO loves the bottom line (and not just 'cause Stone Cold said so).
We also think we are far less qualified to rank chefs than we are meals. When eating a meal at a nice restaurant, we might not know who developed the recipe, who thought it needed more seasoning and called an audible, or who boiled the potatoes. It's not that we see those issues as unimportant as much as we see them as mostly beyond our knowledge -- we just don't know enough to say. Even when wrestlers are on the record with their account of how a match is put together, wrestling's carny history means that we (lovingly) treat it with skepticism. All we can do as fans is observe patterns over time.
We do believe we're fully capable of explaining what worked for us or didn't work for us about a match, and why. We see ourselves as insufficient when we delve into The Politics of Who.
Who we think owns it all -- work and perception of work
The wrestlers own their actions in the ring, but we do not believe they have any ownership of the interpretation of their work. The best intentions sometimes result in the best matches, but they sometimes don't. A match is more than a collection of ideas -- it is something executed. If that wasn't true, the staff of Pro Wrestling Only could probably have great matches against each other now, and you aren't likely to see us pop up on any year-end lists.
How we view the lifespan of a match rating
There are two leading views on this. One is the strict originalist point of view championed by Dave Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which is that all that matters is how good a match is in its place and time because it can't be known at the time how well it will hold up, and that wrestlers have no ability of working for a future audience.. While we agree that wrestlers can't see the future, we disagree with the notion that durability is meaningless. We would suggest one reason that we can clearly make that distinction is that we are able to separate the number of high-end matches from the perception of the wrestler. Another is that if we review a match that took place forty years ago, we aren't expecting the wrestlers to perform like today's wrestlers, and we likely have a good understanding of what wrestling was like at the time. To disagree that only the views of the moment matter is not to argue that they don't matter at all.
How a match holds up long term matters to fans who come along in future generations and want to see what all the fuss was about. Sometimes, because norms have shifted, what was a great match in its time (or even five years after its time) is no longer anything special, or vice versa. We see this as a normal and healthy process, just as we believe that new knowledge or attitudes can change past opinions. No opinion on a wrestling match should be seen as permanent. Wrestling fandom is always a work in progress, and when you see a match rating, it just means that's where we were on our journey at the time the match was reviewed. We see this as a great thing because old wrestling can always become new wrestling, whether that's because we're seeing something old for the first time or because we're approaching it from a new point of view.
How authoritative we think our opinions are
We don't. Seriously, we don't. We put this out there because our desire is to provide what we see as a great roadmap for the curious pro wrestling fan. In the same way numerous publishers print their own maps (and in the same way that new construction changes old routes, to add to the previous point), others may see it differently.
Our goal is not so much that you'll read and agree with everything that we write, although if you do, that's really amazing and we'd love you to let us know so you can be our new sidekick. It's more that you can compare your own thoughts on something you've seen to those that we've put forward and see how much of a gap exists between your take and our take. We think that if you get to a point where you can do this and generally predict how much you'll like or dislike a match, we've provided a valuable service.
How we rate current year wrestling compared to classic wrestling
We believe that hindsight provides a much clearer view than real time and typically wait one year to assign a match rating to ensure that we aren't just caught up in the moment. If we do feel that the match warrants a rating, we'll usually just give it a star rating so that our readers have a general idea of where we fell. Some argue that losing that moment goes against the entire purpose of watching wrestling, but we disagree in such a roundabout way that we actually agree and end up back on your side -- one could argue that matches aren't meant to be rated or watched outside of real time at all, which means that we're respecting the intent of the moment by not rating it at that time. If it sounds like we're teenagers trying to twist our way out of trouble with our parents, maybe we are. We'll get back to you on that. In a year, when we give the match a rating.
The rating scale we use
As we've mentioned above, we use a 1-10 scale -- or more accurately, a 0-10 scale, to rate matches. A 0.0 would be the worst match and a 10.0 would be the best match. Don't worry about our deep affection for both Dave Meltzer and Spinal Tap affecting the site too much -- if we saw a 10.0 match that we truly believed set a new standard in pro wrestling, it would still top off at 10.0. It might mean that next time we watch some other perfect tens that we see them as something more at the 9.9 level. Again, this is a journey. We'll never make it to the destination. We see that very fact as something worth celebrating.
Match currency conversions
9.8 - 10
* * * * * match
This is a match that can be reasonably compared to any match in wrestling history in terms of quality. As good as any match in wrestling history, or at least in that level of discussion.
9.3 - 9.7
* * * * 3/4 match
This isn't something quite as good as the very best matches in history, but it's at a minimum one of the best matches of the decade. Maybe the work itself is every bit as good as in some better matches, but the match doesn't quite have the same universal appeal.
8.8 - 9.2
* * * * 1/2 match
This is one of the best matches of the year or of its era. It's not quite one of the best matches of all time, but it's near the top in its own era. This is the type of match that represents its style, performers, company, or weight class exceptionally well. The best match of its kind, or among the best of its kind, even if it might not click with those who aren't fans of the style.
8.3 - 8.7
* * * * 1/4 match
This is a fantastic match. In some years, it could be a low-end match-of-the-year candidate. This is often a match that has something hold it back like a weak finish, questionable booking, bland atmosphere, or one moment that works against what the match was aiming to achieve otherwise, although that isn't etched in stone.
7.8 - 8.2
* * * * match
This is an excellent match worth seeing. It's not a match-of-the-year candidate, but it's an exceptional match by either global standards or the standards of the company, performers, style, or weight class. This match usually hits every note that that can be reasonably expected.
7.3 - 7.7
* * * 3/4 match
This is a borderline great match that usually isn't quite at that level because of either something like a weak finish or a few off moments that bring the match down. If we'd say "This would be a great match if not for ", this range is about right.
6.8 - 7.2
* * * 1/2 match
This is a very good match well worth seeing. We tend to rate a lot of matches in this range that tug at our heartstrings. What usually keeps them from going higher is that either they weren't given enough time, there were extenuating circumstances beyond their control or that we admired what they were going for so much and they came close to pulling it off, but they didn't quite get there. The prototypical match in this range would be the really hot, well-worked 10-minute TV match that is forgotten about quickly.
6.3 - 6.7
* * * 1/4 match
This is the B-plus player of wrestling matches. A step above the average good match for sure, but only a step above. Maybe a solid match that has an outstanding finish or a really great singular moment in it would qualify.
5.8 - 6.2
* * * match
This is a good, solid match that we're glad we saw. Everything was done very well. Nothing world changing, but so what -- it was good while it lasted. We believe that every wrestling card should have at least one of these to justify its very existence.
If we rate something below 5.8, we are usually saying that the match is not worth your time. In some cases, we still think the match is interesting and worth your time, but more as a snapshot in time of the wrestlers involved, the era, or the company. That's why we write reviews to go with the ratings.
This is the first Wrestling In Sevens, a new feature at Pro Wrestling Only where I'll talk to some of the most fascinating fans that I know. The first is with Victor Rodgers, who posts at Victator on the PWO forums and is the author of Chairshot: A Savage Sports Story, available on Amazon.
When did you become a wrestling fan?
It's difficult to remember a time pro wrestling was not in my life. I can't remember much before I was six. A lot of it feels like a camcorder on low battery. Things come in and out.
What are your earliest memories of pro wrestling?
My earliest wrestling memory is drawing a picture of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. My first live show was a Continental Wrestling Federation card in Hartselle, Alabama, in 1988. The main event was Lord Humongous vs Detroit Demolition. In hindsight, this was an Eddie Gilbert-booked card, as I can also remember a Nightmare vs Nightmare match. [Editor's note: Continental results from 1988 are scarce, so we could not locate a date or results for this card.] In my kid logic, I thought Danny Davis was connected to Sting.
I am way off course. My first real memory is seeing Hogan lose the WWF title to Andre on The Main Event. I really wanted to see WrestleMania IV, but that did not happen. I doubt we even had pay-per-view capability. Pay-per-view was the scourge of my young life.
But I did get to see Clash of the Champions. Ric Flair versus Sting is what really made me fall in love with wrestling -- this epic match between two larger than life gladiators.
What did you like most about pro wrestling?
Hulk Hogan represented to me all that was good in the world. As bad as my young life was, I slept easy knowing Hulk Hogan would vanquish the monsters. When a good guy (or "clean" wrestler as I called them) would punch the dirty manager, all was right with the world. Wrestling was a world where a big fat kid fit in. Where the things that made me an outcast, was an asset. I was a full true believer as a kid. Even when I started seeing the cracks, I still played along. It was important for me to defend wrestling. Or what I later learned was protecting the business.
You've mentioned seeing a Continental show live, but you've also mentioned your affinity for Hulk Hogan and Sting. Did you see any WWF or NWA shows during this time?
My first WWF show was a TV taping in January 1989. I was watching the WWF Superstars of Wrestling where Bad News Brown accused Elizabeth of doing "favors" for Jack Tunney. As a naive eight year old, I wasn't sure what favors he meant. Maybe she was doing his laundry, I just know it made the "Macho Man" mad. Suddenly [WWF ring announcer] Howard Finkel piped in announcing they were taping Superstars of Wrestling in Huntsville at the Von Braun Civic Center. They announced two matches: Hulk Hogan vs Big Bossman and Randy Savage vs Bad News Brown.
I remember the NWA running a house show in my hometown and really wanting to go, but not being allowed to go because I broke something and tried to lie to cover it up. I was about the same age as you at the time. Did you face any parental resistance?
I told my mother how bad I wanted to go and she said she would try to get tickets. But as kid life goes, I forgot and months passed by. Christmas 1988 comes along and we were visited by Santa. Despite being very poor, Mama always found a way. That morning, I am very happy with my Tiger Force GI Joe toys when Mama says she hears it and we should see what it is. We all go to the back and on the dresser I see two ringside tickets to the WWF TV taping. I have probably never been happier. I was so excited about the show. We get there and Mama buys me a program. She felt bad she could not buy me a shirt, but I understood.
Was there anything that surprised you about seeing wrestling live?
Now one thing I did not is these tapings are long. So we left after three hours and I did not get to see Hogan vs Bossman and they did not even do Savage vs Bad News. But I did get to see Hulk Hogan. It was the Savage vs Akeem match and Bossman attacked Savage. Hulk runs out to save Macho Man and this was the first religious experience I ever had. There was an incredible energy running thru everyone watching. My mother was screaming "Its The Hulk!!! Its The Hulk!!!" Right after this my uncle tapped me on the shoulder. He and my aunt bought me a Hulk Rules shirt. It meant the world to me.
How did wrestling fit into your own routine as a kid?
Saturday morning cartoons was what I lived for as a kid. I would get up at six and binge on various cartoons from Captain N to Muppet Babies to Real Ghostbusters to Saved By The Bell. WWF Superstars was the main event of the day. The longest five hours of the week was the time between Superstars and WCW at 5:05 [Central Time].
You're speaking my language! I would get so angry when Atlanta Braves games pre-empted wrestling, and killing time meant that I saw far to many episodes of Andy Griffith. Now being in the Southeastern United States, we always hear about how this area was more of a WCW stronghold. How much WCW did you watch?
As I said earlier, Sting vs Ric Flair made me fall in love with wrestling. But it was hard to watch it as regularly as the WWF because I would need to wrangle the TV from adults, even though my parents did like wrestling. But not as much as I did. The most terrifying memory of my wrestling childhood was the Road Warriors turning heel. I treated wrestling as a holy war. Under no circumstances did I cheer a bad guy. At most I could hope a bad guy would turn good.
I remember the Road Warriors turn well. What was terrifying about it from your perspective?
Who could stop them? I was watching TV when they stabbed Dusty in the eye with a spike. I can't express how upset this made me. When I later learned Dusty got fired for booking it, while I disagree, I get it.
Are there any other turns during this time that stand out, either to the light or the darkness?
The main comfort I got was Demolition became good guys. It was like the wrestling gods evened things out.
Was there any other wrestling you'd watch at this time?
I would get to watch Prime Time Wrestling as a treat. My mother would let me stay up until 10:00 [when it ended in the Central time zone], since I would wake up for school with no issues.
Let's jump ahead seven years to your teens. When you were 14 years old, were you still a fan?
I still loved wrestling, but some of the magic was gone. The real world problems that made it an escape started leaking in. When I was a little kid in third grade all the kids loved wrestling. Even in fifth grade there were other kids who enjoyed it. But in sixth grade things changed. A lot of them became social climbing little shits and suddenly I was also picked on for liking wrestling. Of course a lot of these shitheads would be wearing Austin 3:16 shirts, just as I was growing disenchanted with wrestling.
In 1992, wrestling became really important to me. My grandmother died in March 1992. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. She ended up being buried on my birthday. I remember a lady walked up to me as I was sobbing. She asked what was wrong and I told her. She gave me five dollars and I knew one thing I wanted. The Galoob Barry Windham wrestling figure. It was at a discount store called "Bill's". The figure was five dollars and I had been eyeing it for weeks.
Did you have any other wrestling figures?
I loved wrestling figures as long as I can remember. The first one I ever got was an LJN Terry Funk for my birthday in 1988. Actually I had the Hulk Hogan one, but I the memory is vague. I can remember a really happy feeling, that only a toy aisle could provide. I collected any I could find. I got a Marty Jannetty Remco figure, but those had the He-Man builds so I had no idea. I thought Buddy Roberts was Sid for years. The Hasbro figures were my favorites and Mama kept me in them. Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior were my favorites.
Any thoughts on the Ultimate Challenge at Wrestlemania VI?
I hated when Warrior challenged Hogan. I thought he would be too weak to fight off the bad guys who wanted the belt. But I still supported him because he was a good guy.
We talked about action figures? Did you read wrestling magazines?
So figures were the biggest part of my fandom and the magazines. I discovered Pro Wrestling Illustrated and they were far different from the WWF magazines. Which even as a kid I knew were propaganda. So every month I would hunt down the magazines. Pro Wrestling Illustrated was my favorite, if I was lucky I could get The Wrestler and Inside Wrestling. They showed me wrestling beyond the WWF and WCW. It was as much an escape as the comics I read. But the real world was leaking in. Fracturing my escape, backing me into a corner and shoving a hot poker into my side.
Wrestling was changing a lot during your teen years. What do you remember about those changes?
I discovered ECW in February 1996 after reading about it in the magazines. There was an anger and atmosphere that really resonated with 15-year-old Victor. But I was still loyal to the WWF and to a lesser extent WCW. My WCW had really died in 1994 when Hulk Hogan arrived. My favorites were slowly disappearing or being downgraded. Dustin Rhodes, Cactus Jack, and Ric Flair were neutered and Sting was Hogan's sidekick. The last to go was Vader. So I ended up cheering the bad guys. Big Van Vader had been a figure of terror for me in 1993, to the degree I did not even want the good guys to go after him. When he defeated Sting, I struggled to rationalize how he cheated. But I was growing to admire him. I think the way Bossman cheated him out of the title [at SuperBrawl IV] and the magazines praise pushed me toward being a fan. So Vader was my favorite and I was psyched to see him kill Hogan. Then Hulk Hogan no sold the Power Bomb [at Clash of the Champions XXX] and I mentally checked out of WCW in 1995. With the WWF I had favorites, but no one spoke to me like Vader.
What were your thoughts on Vader leaving WCW?
I was excited when Vader joined the WWF [in 1996]. The [Royal] Rumble debut was awesome, watching him crush the Headhunters alone then fighting Yokozuna. The next night he attacked Gorilla Monsoon. I did find it off he had to sneak attack Gorilla.
Vader's WWF run wasn't really everything it should have been, was it?
The run was all frustration. Him stooging for people like he was any other heel. Losing to Shawn Michaels, Ultimate Warrior and Ahmed Johnson all over the country. But Summerslam 1996 was going to be our night. Now I did not read newsletters or anything. My only inside news was this free phone service the [Pro Wrestling] Torch had through my local paper. But I had been a fan long enough I could make educated guesses on how things would go. It made sense for Vader to win the belt and build to someone getting the belt from him.
So the match starts with Michaels dominating which really did not work. HBK was not Sting when it came to offense. So the count out win happens and I am happy enough. Would like the title, but a W is a W. Then [Jim] Cornette started yelling for a restart. So this one is a DQ and Vader got a visual pin fall. Then Cornette starts again and I am wishing he would shut up. Vader kicks out of the Superkick and takes a questionable moonsault. When I heard the story behind that night, I get it. It does make me wonder why they screwed Bret over when he was way more reasonable. But as a 15 year old kid with no friends and a bad life. This was all I had and I was pissed. I spent my allowance for August and September on this.
It was all downhill from there for Vader in the WWF, in my opinion.
Well as a Vader fan, this was the peak. Beating Undertaker and Bret Hart on TV, I had hope he would be champion. You have to understand, if Vader was doing well, I was doing well. In hindsight, a lot of his work was good. But I watch wrestling for more than matches. By the time of the "fat piece of shit" promo, I was pretty numb to it and invested in little, but I was getting to watch ECW again. But in '99, he kept losing and losing and losing. Then he disappeared in 2000 and my interest in ECW slowly waned.
Actually, I was invested in two wrestlers, Vader and Sabu.
What drew you to Sabu?
Sabu was amazing. It went beyond the flying. He was like this savage animal, truly larger than life. Any match he was in felt like an event. Of course the magazines had hyped him for years. I got to see him in WCW first and he lived up to the hype. Even if he felt out of place in WCW. I can't explain why. He seemed like he was from another world. In ECW, he was like an elder God. But by '98, my ECW came and went as my cable package dropped America One. They also stopped carrying pay-per-view as wrestling became hot. You can afford to be stupid if you are a cable monopoly.
Let's shift gears to the wrestling boom. Did you have a "team" you rooted for during the Monday night ratings war?
WCW I watched for the great undercard, but I was sick of the nWo even in 1997. I figured out they were not going anywhere, as guys would get ganged up on and none of the WCW guys would help. So I was really invested in the WWF up until Montreal. Vince [McMahon] made that stupid speech and I felt betrayed. As a fan I always played along. Now he was fracturing the last layer of the fantasy.
As positively as it's remembered, rightfully so in many cases, there were some awful moments during those years for sure.
The WWF did things thru out 1998 and '99 that I could not explain. In particular times when they would say things on the show were real. Or Kane chokeslamming Undertaker into his mom's corpse.
Ugh.
I would watch every Monday and enjoyed the undercard and the main event matches. By mid-'99 I grew to suspect Vince was never going away. But I had my comics and games.
Were you still as dedicated a fan of pro wrestling during this time?
I would order ECW tapes, but that was it. I do not want to go too deep into 2000 WCW. Vince Russo made me hate wrestling. Just an utter piece of garbage who did not understand the escape wrestling was suppose to represent. So WCW rightfully died and the WWF bought the scraps. Which was a pretty exciting time as a fan.
What are your memories of this time period? For me, there was so much uncertainty.
There is a weird energy in the wake of a death. I don't know, maybe its change.
So the night of the ECW Invasion on Raw[, July 9, 2001], I was so excited. Then at the end of the night, Stephanie McMahon was added as the ECW owner. Now on a logical level I can tell you why this was stupid. But as a fan it felt like I was spit on. I did not watch for two months and when I returned, I had no enthusiasm.
What were you into when you returned?
I did really get into Rob Van Dam as I had been a fan since he was in WCW in 1993 [as Robbie V]. But as the year closed, I figured out RVD had his spot and that was it. In hindsight, he should have kept the Hardcore belt as a special attraction.
Did you ever leave again?
I might have went away completely for a few years after the first Kiss My Ass segment. Outside of finding NWA Wildside on a weak signal station, I felt like I was done as a fan. But I ended up getting access to the Internet and a new aspect of fandom was opened up, seeing the inner workings of wrestling and finding people to discuss old wrestling with. I also started tape trading. So I got to see old wrestling I never got to see. My Vader fandom gave me my first taste of Japanese wrestling. I got to see All Japan [Pro Wrestling] and New Japan [Pro Wrestling], which was Vader unfiltered and it was awesome. Vader could be Vader and even got to win titles. So I would buy tapes and more or less enjoyed it, but in ways it felt hollow. The magic was gone and it was no escape. My real life was getting worse, I lost my father and my mother's mind was deteriorating. Wrestling was not an escape, it was a distraction. There is a significant difference. But I met some of my best friends thanks to forums. Which did make life easier.
Did you explore lots of old footage?
I got WWE 24/7 and started watching Prime Time Wrestling again and I remembered those old feelings. So I started watching wrestling like it was real. Like I did as a kid, thinking of how I would act in these situations. Wrestling became way more fun and older TV became available. What was old was new to me.
What else do you remember about wrestling fandom in your 20s?
I had stopped collecting figures in 2003 in a misguided attempt at being an adult. I sat in a room with bare walls on a computer. The only thing I allowed myself was editing videos and I became pretty good. I would go down the wrestling toy aisle and loved all the options, but I could not buy them.
Let's talk about being a wrestling fan in your 30s.
Mama is dead and I went thru an awful experience. But one bright spot was my nephews, who were very young enjoyed wrestling and watched it like I did. Getting angry at cheating and euphoric when heroes win. They found my wrestling figures and just loved them. I ended up giving them to the kids. The only ones I would not part with were my WCW Galoob figures. I still have that Barry Windham figure near by. It comforted me.
During the [Super Outbreak] Tornado of 2011, I dug out my figures to find the kids. But like a recovering alcoholic, I was hooked. I started buying the WWE Mattel figures and looking for the old Jakks figures. Its probably the biggest connection I have to the mainstream. I watch TV and mess around with the figures, thinking of angles and matches. At times I feel like a creep doing it. But my therapist said its not different than fantasy football.
In 2010 I wrote a wrestling novel. I wrote it from the perspective of wrestling being real. I used a combination of my old magazines and [Dave] Meltzer's [Wrestling Observer] Newsletters as sources.
Have you ever wanted to be a wrestler or work in pro wrestling?
My biggest regret in life and this is hard to admit, but it is I was never in the wrestling business. I think if I had gave it my all, I would have made it. I am a big guy and was really agile as a 19 year old. I was also pretty good at talking. But you know things don't happen like you dream. The wrestling world I grew up in was gone by 2001. Fat guys were going extinct. I felt responsible for my parents, who had issues. Or in the harsh light of day, I did not have the guts to try. I'm 37 now and have a lot of health issues. I go to live shows but it is fun and heart breaking at the same time. Seeing people younger than I am, doing better than my dream than me hurts.
What do you enjoy about being a wrestling fan now?
The best thing about being a wrestling fan in 2018 is the choices. Almost everything is available and requires very little effort to watch. Even compared to ten years ago, things are so much easier. What before required a computer, Internet connection, account on a torrent tracker, a torrent client, and a DVD player. Now I need an Internet connection and a PS3 or Roku and I have a huge selection of wrestling at my finger tips. You can find scans of newsletters or magazines easily. Or if you want a physical media, you can find most things you want fairly easy if you are willing to pay. Downside with current wrestling is that the stories suck with a few exceptions and you don't see enough character work.
If you think your own wrestling fan journey is interesting and would like to share it, we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us and explain your background.
What a difference a week makes!
I'd like to thank each of you for being so supportive and active during PWO's first week. In the first seven days the site was up and running, we posted a staggering twenty-two match reviews, two features articles, a podcast, and more! I thought I'd use today's update to talk about lessons learned and where we go from here.
My real-life background is in content management and it's something I've done a decent amount of, but what I'm aiming to do here is much, much bigger in scope and I'm working entirely within a system I'm creating myself, so it's a new world. At a certain point in the week, I realized that I was spending about 90% of my time on website tweaks, which wasn't leaving me with very much time to do what I should be doing with most of my time, which is to develop and deliver great wrestling content. After looking into it a little more, I realized the insanity of my goal to manually build an all-things-wrestling database while juggling 35 articles per week, each 500-750 words or so, and record a daily podcast, which was my initial ambition. It was a lot of work and I was never blind about that, but when I realized just how much I could automate and restructured a lot of old articles to accommodate that, and that working 18-hour days just to work on site design wasn't quite what I had in mind when I launched this, just shifting those gears alone took three days of my time. A lot of the big features I wanted to add to the site won't be here immediately, but most of them will be here relatively soon, and they'll be better than they would have been.
The big takeaways are that unexpected discoveries, challenges, and ideas will happen again and also that I can't work myself to the bone constantly when something can be automated. I've come up with a new core content schedule that is still ambitious, but also realistic and gives me some flexibility:
20 match reviews from this week in history, to be posted throughout the week
Three weekly podcasts
Regular Editor's Notes check-ins
This also gives me the time and flexibility I need to work on some of the exciting developments on their way to fruition, such as:
PWO30, our new monthly digital magazine. Each month, PWO30 will provide a fresh look at everything in wrestling 30 years ago this month. The first issue will be available on Monday, July 23, and will be FREE for download!
Wrestler, year, promotion, title, and media (e.g., podcasts, books and magazines, shoot interviews, etc) profile pages. Find the ultimate one-stop shop for wrestlers (and the other stuff) inclusive of all nationalities, genders, styles, and eras, and of people at all levels of pro wrestling stardom. These pages will also include PWO-specific stores for each wrestling entity with thoughtfully-curated listings to buy wrestling items from PWO's affiliates (Amazon, Redbubble, Spreadshirt, Highspots, eBay, WWEShop, and others).
PWO on Patreon. My goal is for PWO to have a tier system available on Patreon by August 1 with some really cool and unique offerings included. I'll keep you all posted of that progress here. While 8/1 is my goal, I will not launch on Patreon until I am confident that each tier is offering something of real value.
Feature articles. Look for the first installment of Wrestling In Sevens, a regular feature that spotlights individual wrestling fans and their lifelong journeys with pro wrestling, early this week. I'm really excited about this offering and think you'll love it!
A more interactive platform that's more fully integrated with the PWO forums. The forums are still here, but I'm exploring ways to more fully integrate that sense of community with the site itself. This is a long-term work in progress.
Thanks again to those of you who have been here all week. You have truly made this a worthwhile endeavor and I'm endlessly grateful.
Onward we go!
Charles
Editor, ProWrestlingOnly.com
Kenta Kobashi and Tsuyoshi Kikuchi are an all-time great babyface tag team, but because of Kobashi's subsequent singles superstardom, they aren't really talked about much at that level. This match -- and frankly, all of their 1992 matches that have made tape -- show much of an oversight that is.
July 5, 1992
All Japan Pro Wrestling
Summer Action Series
Tokyo, Japan
All-Asia Tag Team Titles
9.4
The most rewarding part of navigating Kenta Kobashi's extensive body of work is the number of "Ohhh yeah, THAT match!" moments that we open ourselves up to when going back to look at his best matches. Kobashi's career was appropriately documented and appreciated, so it's not that he has a career full of hidden gems (even though those exist too) as much as it is that he has produced so many great matches at so many different phases of his career that it's difficult to remember all of them. It would be another decade before he finally had the definitive run as a world champion that his talent and popularity demanded, but in 2003, 1992 was more than ancient history -- Kobashi wasn't even in the same company anymore; nor was Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, whose career had followed a radically different trajectory than his own.
Here, Kobashi and Kikuchi defended the All-Asia Tag Team Titles. The duo was unique because in virtually every other partnership at this time, Kobashi was the subordinate junior wrestler, a status that would follow him until he was paired with Jun Akiyama in 1996. The All-Asia tag titles had their own interesting history in the company because they were usually assigned to smaller and faster-paced tag teams, while the top singles stars paired up and controlled the World Tag Team Title picture. This team might have been the only place where Kobashi exerted any authority at all in relation to his more seasoned teammates. A list of Kikuchi's strengths -- likability, fire, great offense and selling, expert charisma -- would read very similar to those of Kobashi, which made them a natural fit for each other.
The most famous match the duo had (and the one that I considered the best match of the 1990s when I did a nutso ranking at Place To Be Nation a few years ago) was against Doug Furnas and Dan Kroffat about six weeks before this one. Like Kobashi and Kikuchi, the Can-Ams were great offensive wrestlers, so pitting the teams against each other made for a stellar matchup, just as it earned one of the best crowd reactions for any match -- especially a midcard one -- in AJPW history. Like the May match, this match was joined in progress when it aired on Nippon TV, but unlike that match, this never came out in full. My initial thoughts when I watched this were that it was better than the May 22 tag, although at that time I had only seen the twelve minutes or so of it that aired back in 1992. I've since reversed that opinion, but only because the tag was finally aired in full on television. If we also had this in full, I think a full comparison would be both interesting and unpredictable, because Masa Fuchi adds so many interesting touches to his performance that it's not out of the realm of possibility that they topped themselves here. This was also the type of match that has more staying power because it's more classically worked -- the May tag was an incredible spectacle of offense while this was more substantive outing focused on limb selling and mat details, joined in progress right as Kobashi was starting to masterfully sell a knee injury. I'm also not sure I'd trust Furnas and Kroffat, whom I love, to pull off the finish the way Kikuchi and Fuchi did here, with Kikuchi reversing Fuchi's rolling reverse cradle, almost like an unlucky game of Wrestling Uno.
All Japan Pro Wrestling T-Shirt - Redbubble
This also spotlights something that AJPW did exceptionally well in the early 90s that they became less expert at doing with time. Kikuchi was embroiled in a six-year chase of Fuchi (a six-year chase to win a junior heavyweight championship!) and pins in tag matches were an effective way to keep hope alive for their next meeting. This shows that the same booking philosophy and respect for the story was applied to the undercards as it was the main events, an idea that seems unimaginable in most companies with weight classes.
Most of all, this match acts as a crusader for the midcard cause, a case study in the value of promoters not treating those who aren't current headliners as afterthoughts. Kobashi and Kikuchi owned the crowd as much as anyone owned their crowd in wrestling at the time, even while taking on a subordinate role when they did participate in All Japan's hierarchy-centered main event tags and six-mans, showing that with a little forethought, wrestling really can have it both ways.
Ric Flair and Ricky Morton -- two of the most symbolic figures in wrestling -- voluntarily toss reputations aside to prove their mettle.
Jim Crockett Promotions
NWA Great American Bash
July 5, 1986
Charlotte, North Carolina
NWA World Heavyweight Title
Cage Match
9.5
I don't know if I'd go as far as to say he's taken a beating among hardcore wrestling fans over the last decade, but it's fair to say that a lot of wrestling fans no longer see Ric Flair as infallible. Based on years of debates and discussion at Pro Wrestling Only, I've probably written more and thought more about my own views on Flair than just about anyone alive. I've been pretty convinced that he is the greatest wrestler I've ever seen for a long time, but believe me, I have tripped over the holes in his work as much as anyone. Like anything else, some of the general points used to critique him probably have merit and some are probably off the mark.
For years, Flair was regarded as the Greatest Wrestler Ever. (He was surprisingly voted as such a couple of years ago by PWO members.) It only becomes harder for anyone to maintain that type of reputation over time no matter who they are or what they've done. We saw it in wrestling before Flair, when Lou Thesz presumably transformed from professional wrestler to black-and-white museum painting, even while still alive. For Flair, that process has been slowed by continued relevance -- both in and out of wrestling -- as his best wrestling days became a smaller part of the rearview mirror. However, if you are someone whose prime was three decades ago and most fans started watching when you were already -- at a minimum -- in your 40s, it's a battle that is destined to end in loss.
For at least a generation, Ric Flair was the wrestler nearly everyone in the business talked about both in out of WWE canon as the guy against whom they had their greatest matches. He was the consummate champion; in fact, I think it's arguable that the simple gesture of allies and announcers calling him "champ" regardless of his title status went a long way in preserving his legacy. He became memorialized as the greatest world champion ever -- the model heel, the greatest at portraying greatness in others, and the guy who had unrivaled stamina. Like being champion of two companies at the same, it's difficult to be considered the greatest both in myth and in actual personal discoveries, which hits on the difference between being the greatest and being the best. Still, being the guy who had the greatest body of in-ring work, the best interviews, and the most charisma meant Flair owned every superlative in wrestling folklore. Watch his classics with Ricky Steamboat and Terry Funk, we'd both say and hear, to see wrestling at its finest.
Much of what can be said about Flair can also be said about Ricky Morton, although on a smaller scale. Morton has had tenured standing as the greatest tag team wrestler of all time. Poke around long enough and it's unlikely that you won't see Morton called the greatest tag team wrestler of all time, the greatest babyface of all time, the most sympathetic wrestler of all time, and plenty of other labels. When wrestlers are isolated in tag team matches to build to a hot tag, they're "playing Ricky Morton".
Ric Flair fans found Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, Jumbo Tsuruta, Kenta Kobashi, Jushin Liger, Toshiaki Kawada, El Hijo del Santo, Negro Casas, and Mitsuharu Misawa (and in more recent years, Kazuchika Okada and Hiroshi Tanahashi) and Flair wasn't as peerless anymore. It became easier to point to criticisms of how he wrestled. He was overly reliant on a formula. He didn't have the range of offense of Kobashi. He didn't work his signature spots into the match as logically as Bret. He didn't age as gracefully or adapt to new opponents as well as Jumbo. Likewise, Morton fans found Tommy Rogers and Tsuyoshi Kikuchi. They sold extremely well too, and they had cooler looking moves to boot. In my mind, those were valid reasons Flair shouldn't be regarded as the best wrestler -- meaning on the merits, the best at the mechanics, actions, and reactions of being a pro wrestler -- than they are that he shouldn't be the greatest wrestler -- meaning, the people who add excellence in skill and style to importance in wrestling and go on to carry the torch -- but those distinctions have only faded with time. This blurred distinction was never more the case than when there was even an argument with brief momentum that the whole idea of Ricky Morton being attacked to build to a hot tag was a facade, based on skewed footage samplings that circulated in the pre-YouTube days where Robert Gibson happened to be playing Ricky Morton for a night. If Flair became a name on a list of other great wrestlers -- ironically, the same way he portrayed his predecessors like Harley Race, Gene Kiniski, and Jack Brisco in interviews -- Morton became something worse: he became someone who didn't actually have the run we thought he did. We just imagined that he did.
One of the biggest problems with high praise is that at a certain point, there's nowhere to go but down. Flair's untouchable matches with Steamboat from their '89 series could suddenly not only be touched, but also be poked and prodded. In some circles, people would watch those matches and be underwhelmed, think based on praise that's out there that the match has to be the best American wrestling has to offer because of how it's been talked about, and start seeking out matches from Japan and Mexico that they hope will prove a little more exciting. Most of the time, they would fulfill the prophecy they set for themselves, and hey, in the days when wrestling bootlegs cost $20 a pop, can you blame them?
The second problem with overwhelming praise comes when people praise the wrong matches. The Flair-Steamboat matches are awesome in my mind and fully deserving of their status, but for someone trying to find wrestling they really enjoy who's still discovering new styles, it's not the most daring recommendation one could make. There's a time for watching epic matches, and I love epic matches myself. I think this is true for most wrestling fans. However, I think we would all get bored if all matches attempted to be epics. It again goes back to that distinction between best matches, the matches that most effectively combine performance elements to create something enjoyable to watch, and the greatest matches, those that do a serviceably great job of this but do it with great storyline development, over performers, and strong card positioning. Imagine the best matches as cars that start at 10mph or 20mph and go to 70mph, while the greatest matches start at 60mph and go to 90mph. Flair and Steamboat probably didn't have the best matches of time, even if they're in the conversation, but it's a more convincing argument that as respected NWA champs working at a really high level, they had the greatest matches of all time.
There's really no reason for anyone to see Flair-Steamboat from Wrestle War '89 if they haven't seen the video set to Europe's "The Final Countdown" that preceded it. There's really no reason for anyone to see a Ric Flair-Terry Funk match if they haven't seen Flair swing a branding iron and put Funk in the hospital, or Funk suffocate Flair with a plastic bag and bring out a jobber dressed like him in a cheap robe with a yellow stripe down his back. If you don't feel it and see it, these matches will be a bit hollow, which should go without saying, but based on the length of time I'm taking just to set up this review, doesn't.
This match and the Barry Windham match from Worldwide that was on the first Flair DVD set back in 2000 are probably the two matches I'm most proud of WWE for putting out there. It shows that there is more than Flair-Steamboat and Flair-Funk and that it is worth digging a little deeper to find them. I'd go as far to say that Flair looks as good as or better than I've ever seen him here. This is a world title match that is about revenge, as opposed to being a stoic encounter between two respected legends. Ric Flair rubbed Ricky Morton's face into a concrete floor until blood was smearing all over the floor, and he broke his nose. Morton was wearing a face guard here. He came in full of piss and vinegar, attempting to give Flair a dose of his own medicine. He tried to break Flair's nose and smear his face on the mat as a form of retribution. He leveled him with some tremendous punches. He had Flair begging off. Yes, Ricky Morton came into the match so angry and possessed that he managed to scare Ric Flair. Flair begs off a lot, because he always tries to bring his opponent to his level. Sadly, sometimes instead of his opponent coming up a notch, he falls down a notch. That didn't happen with Morton. When he begged off, it felt more organic because it was believable. He wasn't working with a Sting or Lex Luger that he had to get over before they could even really take the rivalry anywhere. Morton was already a red hot challenger.
When Flair takes control of the match, we see him at his most brash and violent. He's talking trash constantly, rubbing Morton's face into the cage in front of the Apter mag photographers, screaming "So you wanna be the world champ?" at him. Flair rips off Morton's face gear and throws it out of the cage so Morton can't even put it back on. He then starts punching him Ricky squarely in the nose as hard as he can. The crowd winces, because they feel Morton's pain. He convincingly beats the shit out of poor Ricky for a long time without giving him any openings at all.
Morton finally has enough and tears into Flair yet again. Flair is now scared yet again, and is now getting exactly what he deserves. He's now bleeding just like Morton and he's now on the defensive. With a flying bodypress from the top rope, Morton comes about a half a second away from winning the world title, and the fans appeared to be convinced. The best thing about this nearfall -- and nearfalls of this generation, really -- is that they didn't have to cheapen a finishing move to get the reaction. Nearfalls based on the split-second timing of the kickout are far more compelling than nearfalls based on what move a wrestler has kicked out of. Morton tries covering Flair again, but this time, Morton ends up falling on the ref during Flair's kickout. Sensing that it's now or never and that there's no referee present to tell him he can't, Flair crotches Mortons on the top rope and pins him with his feet on the ropes to escape by the skin of his teeth with the world title. (I'm convinced that he gave him such a strong out with that finish because of the respect he had for him as an opponent.)
Ric Flair was rarely about somber gatherings, clean wrestling matches, and handshakes. His usual routine was to enrage fans who were dying to see someone take him down a notch because he wasn't modest and loved to play on class resentment in his promos, pointing to himself as the guy you'd run into from your past only to find that he had more life success, more money, and a bigger house. Flair had dual-layer heat -- beating him was fine, but lots of guys did that so Flair could get them over as worthy challengers. Put him on TV to gloat in a Hugo Boss sports coat the next day and it was like he won. The real heat was in taking the title from him, which the best moments of this match made clear were the source of real intrigue. That they pulled that off with an undersized tag team wrestler, even a great one, explains why they had the reputations they had in the first place. What makes this particular outing so noteworthy is not that they continued to expand on their reputations as the greatest, even if they did; but rather, that they made a case for being the best.
La Parka and La Parka Classic fight over the rights to the name in a real yawner.
July 4, 2010
AAA Lucha Libre Worldwide
Sin Limite
Merida, Mexico
4.0
This was a bit hard to follow much of the time, mostly because they were dressed so similarly. I've seen Super Parka wear the yellow skeleton gimmick and Undertaker-Underfaker at least had purple and gray gloves to distinguish the two of them. It's even harder to follow when Konnan shows up and the RUN-INS commence. I don't even know if Konnan was booking, but I've decided to blame him anyway since I groaned when he showed up, knowing this was about to become the Over The Edge '98 main event of lucha libre. Don't waste your time.
Based on personalities alone, you might think Suzuki and Murakami could have a delightfully entertaining match. That theory was put to the test here when that was about all we got -- personalities alone.
Minoru Suzuki vs Kazunari Murakami
July 4, 2004
New Japan Pro Wrestling
Summer Struggle
Tokyo, Japan
5.9
The words are barely there because the inspiration is barely there. This match intrigued me on paper because Minoru Suzuki is a bonafide legend and Kazunari Murakami is the greatest Little Snot of his generation. I could watch Shinya Hashimoto kick him away at the Tokyo Dome all day and still want to see it again. Neither seemed particularly inspired here, which could have been a case of time constraints or it could have been a lack of genuine motivation. I would have even been happy with the two of the standing around making funny faces at each other since they're both so great at it, but they managed the virtually impossible here in creative a bland, grave disappointment.
Even if you weren't watching World Class in 1984, it's hard for this type of intense brawling to not make you nostalgic for the brawls of wrestling's past.
July 4, 1984
World Class Championship Wrestling
Independence Day Star Wars
Fort Worth, Texas
Badstreet Match
9.2
It's pretty clear what we're getting when a match is billed as a street fight or any type of brawl in modern wrestling. Ultimately, the match will build to a huge spot with someone going through a table, landing on thumbtacks, or being set on fire, the crowd will chant, "Holy shit!", and we'll all go about our evening. It wasn't always this way, but when so much of the "personal issues" used to hype matches are so clearly just a way to fill time and are so transparently phony to even the least cynical among us, maybe it's hard for it to not be this way. It's hard to fault the wrestlers for this regression too much. When they aren't booked in meaningful, relatable situations, they have to go farther to manufacture the excitement they create by trade, working against the booking tide just as much as they work without it.
If we look at Duggan-DiBiase, the Doom-Horsemen match at Starrcade '90, or the Cactus-Sullivan vs Nasty Boys match at Slamboree '94, to name only a few, the best brawls of previous generations had a few things in common. The wrestlers dressed for a fight instead of dressing for a match to get it over as a departure from the norm. They also kept the match relatively short. The highspots were derived from taking actions that would normally result in a disqualification -- and the match continuing! -- or for the babyfaces finding ways to do unto the heels what is normally done unto them on a level playing field. So the best moments ended up as low blows, babyfaces using weapons, heels being isolated for babyface double-teaming, and all of that. Call it Wrestling Ice Cream for the fans that usually try to eat healthy, topped with plasma syrup to boot.
The best thing about this match is the short duration. It's not the least bit convincing for a brawl with such ramped-up intensity to last thirty minutes. The longest matches in the classic view of what professional wrestling is are typically the most sportsmanlike wrestling encounters pitting evenly matched wrestlers with great stamina against each other. This is why brawling and cheating are called "shortcuts". Such things seem like Basic Wrestling Psychology 101, but they get lost when wrestlers, and those who produce them, stop thinking about wrestling with the "What if it was all a shoot?" mentality. To paraphrase Bret Hart, isn't it so much more fun to pretend that something as ridiculous as pro wrestling is deathly serious?
It's so much easier for wrestlers to have a great brawl when they are complimented by the aesthetics and setting. When most matches are somewhat scientific, a brawl is a big deal. When the wrestlers can avoid cheesy in-house productions in favor of popular music that everyone knows, as the Von Erichs did with their "La Grange" entrance here, the mood is more inviting and has more widespread appeal. When the wrestlers wear street clothes when they aren't wrestling, wrestling gear to traditional matches, and bandanas, jeans, and boots to a fight, it all means more and is more distinct. When weapons aren't conveniently placed around the ring, it's easier to buy the action. And when the brawl is over quickly, it's easy enough to suspend disbelief and question if we might have seen something legitimate.
The idea that most fans ever thought wrestling was real was something I never took seriously, but I do think most fans, both then and now, want to at least find the possibility that this rivalry is real to be plausible because it creates a more fun viewing experience. Wrestling fans want to follow along, and they will, but those in wrestling have to lead them somewhere. The Freebirds and Von Erichs took fans on a five-year journey that certainly had good and bad qualities, hot periods and cold periods, but it was also a rivalry that defined pro wrestling in Texas for a generation of fans. This match, its setting, its action level, and its respect for its own mythology, is one of the reasons why.
Johnny Saint and Ken Joyce delivered an all-time classic without even getting too competitive or heated. All they needed was an overabundance of joy.
June 24, 1981
Joint Promotions
ITV 07-04-81
Shrewsbury, England
9.0
Wrestling is fun.
It's true. I love watching wrestling, talking about wrestling, writing about wrestling, and thinking about wrestling. It's a wonderful combination of absurdism, emotion, excess, and demonstrated skill. There's nothing quite like it. I love wrestling so much that I started ProWrestlingOnly.com. I've loved it enough to follow it closely for more than thirty years. I've loved it enough to have spent a borderline shameful amount of time and money on the hobby. That said, I could never love wrestling as much as Johnny Saint or Ken Joyce. I simply don't have the capacity, even if in that failure, I've salvaged an endlessly rewarding journey as a wrestling fan.
By merely embracing the purest parts of the craft, Saint and Joyce defiantly had an all-time classic bout, forgoing the things that are typically necessary to make that happen. This was a friendly trading of holds and little more, yet it somehow never felt remotely like an exhibition. They clearly had the desire to win, but they were both babyfaces and they weren't going to stray from that. There was no subtle heel work from either guy. There was also no anger. I think the average person gets more upset when some idiot on television buys a vowel.
Johnny Saint and Ken Joyce took a pretty straightforward approach, attempting to best each other in one incredible mat exchange after another. Both had moments of triumph, and all of them were celebrated. Joyce in particular cheered both his own successes and Saint's successes equally, just happy to be in the ring with someone who could challenge him to be at his best.
The best thing about being a wrestling fan is that just when I think I have it all figured out, wrestlers show me some new path to greatness that I haven't seen, proving that I'll never completely solve the riddle and neither will anyone else. As a perfectionist, it's something that has driven me nuts at times because I've had an innate desire to watch it all and see it all. With time, however, in the same way that scientists love being proven wrong, I've grown to love having any prejudgments that I have about professional wrestling tossed in the garbage. It's a medium where with enough skill and courage of convictions, virtually any approach can work. I now know that it's possible to have a classic match without the wrestlers involved showing any anger and I'm better for it.
Forget everything you think you know about the effort level on WWE house shows, as these two tore the house down in Tokyo.
July 3, 2015
World Wrestling Entertainment
Tokyo, Japan
8.3
As much as we hear from wrestlers about how fun it is to work house shows, this seems to be pretty much what you would expect from a television or pay-per-view match around this time. In fact, it greatly mirrors the two matches they had on pay-per-view, with John Cena busting out the Code Red and lots of finisher kickouts. They also protected Kevin Owens, who Cena still hadn't beaten with the cameras on where it "counts", by doing a low blow DQ finish.
I have no qualms with any of this, and my thoughts pretty much fall with where they would for the more high-profile matches from this feud. If you like those, you'll like this, even if it doesn't really bring much of anything new to the table. The more interesting part is that a kid on smartphone captured the match and might have in the process exposed that everything we're told about how WWE thinks about house shows is wrong.
"WWE likes to send fans home happy on house shows with a babyface win."
"What happens when the cameras aren't on doesn't really 'count'."
"Wrestlers do more schtick instead of taking big bumps or working too hard because they need to prolong their careers."
We've heard it all a million times. Have we been living in a vast web of deceit? In wrestling? I do think this was a great match, but it's the kind of great match that only works once because of all the kickouts. This feud gave it to us twice, and I suppose we got it three times if this match truly does "count". (It apparently does or Cena would have won, right?)
Now, to go ponder everything I've been told about everything since childhood, being that I'm suddenly skeptical of everything we're told about what WWE does and why they do it.
Old ARSION and new ARSION collided when Lioness Asuka and Mariko Yoshida used the ring - and ringside area - as a battlefield of ideas.
July 3, 2001
Hyper Visual Fighting ARSION
Tokyo, Japan
7.2
When ARSION debuted in 1998, it was a huge breath of fresh air on both the Joshi landscape and the overall pro wrestling landscape. In the late 90s, wrestling all over the world was starting to drown in its own excess with ever-lengthening finishing stretches, bigger bumps, and unnecessarily long matches. This was every bit as true, possibly even more true, for women's wrestling in Japan. Suddenly, ARSION showed up to suggest return to basics -- similar to how the late 70s punk rock movement made restraint something radical.
If ARSION was 1970s punk, they turned Korakuen Hall into CBGB's and the cards were like Ramones set lists. The wrestlers weren't getting paid by the hour and they were in and out quickly, which felt like a return to early JWP in many ways, a Joshi promotion that was a misfit congregation for women who dared to be older than 25 years old (and thus, were required to retire under All Japan Women rules) and Yoshiaki Fujiwara trainees. One of the most dramatic reinventions came from Mariko Yoshida.
Yoshida was always a very good worker, and she was a midcard mainstay in AJW during the glory years of the 1990s interpromotional era. She worked the house style in AJW, but in ARSION, she would create it herself, transforming into one of the greatest mat wizards in wrestling history. Others followed suit and we saw an interesting and sometimes new side of wrestlers working the mat. If you can imagine an all women's promotion of nothing but Steven Regal WCW TV title defenses from TBS up and down the card, you can probably get pretty close to what ARSION was.
Like any big attempt at change, there was resistance. It came in large part from Etsuko Mita and Mima Shimoda, who teamed as Las Cacharros Orientales, usually called the LCO for short. The LCO had a reputation as an all-time great tag team, and rightfully so, but they also popularized around-the-arena brawling and long bloated matches to a fault wherever they went, which was pretty much everywhere. Phil Schneider of Death Valley Driver once called them "the Public Enemy of Joshi" in a scathing review.
Lioness Asuka had success in wrestling as both a minimalist and maximalist, but on the issue of the day, she sided with the LCO. She was brought in as company booker and reformed everything in her image. As arguable the number two star of 1980s AJW, Asuka had some capital as one of the biggest draws on the scene, and suddenly ARSION, while still producing good matches, was more conventional.
That struggle played out in how the match was worked, with Yoshida repeatedly taking Lioness to the mat, only to be countered by brawling on the outside. Art further imitated life when Asuka won the match, just as she won the battle. Call it a pyrrhic victory, as ARSION sadly only lasted a couple more years, which made the whole scene Pretty Vacant.
Wrestling fans can spend a heavy amount of time seeking hidden gems, which is great because it leads us to matches like this. However, sometimes, what we would benefit from seeing most has been right in front of us all along.
July 3, 1992
Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre
Mexico City, Mexico
CMLL World Middleweight Championship Tournament Final
10
In pro wrestling, basics can go a long way. Sometimes we think about wrestling through the lens that we have to temper our expectations on smaller shows because wrestlers can't go "all out" every night and have sustainable careers. This is true, but it's also narrow thinking, as if the only way to have a great match in the first place is to go all out. In some ways, what's most remarkable about El Dandy vs Negro Casas is how much of it is unremarkable. Most of the holds are pretty basic, to the point that any wrestler with semi-competent training could execute them. That could be why they're overlooked so much of the time. We tell ourselves that greatness should never come easy, but maybe the real secret to greatness is the inner wherewithal to embrace the obvious.
El Dandy and Negro Casas proved on this night that what happens in a match is far less important than how it happens. Casas forcing Dandy to do the splits from a sitting position looked legitimately painful, had low difficulty in execution, was sold believably, and looked great. The gorgeous spinning toehold and bridge combo that Dandy used to take the second fall is a more common move, but it's hardly a staple move in any style. This match is filled with the type of grappling that would ideally be a staple of all pro wrestling. It's logical. It's easy. However, for some reason, it's hard.
It's possible, even probable, that this match would not have looked at home on a UWF, PWFG, or RINGS card during the era of worked shoots, more because it's a different style than because it's something less sophisticated. Beyond that, I struggle to come up with any environment where this match would be woefully out of place. It's just easy to imagine this match, hold-for-hold, showing up on an episode of All Japan Classics as it is to picture it as an NWA World Title defense from any decade. It would easily engage a crowd at virtually any U.S. indie show during the last twenty years.
Plenty of great pro wrestling requires you to accept or ignore some things about the style, the promotion, or the culture of which it's a product. The beauty of this is that no such viewer shift is required. This is wrestled in a great tradition with both men at their zenith, and it's elevated by its universal appeal. There aren't many matches you'll see that are more true to what classic lucha libre is, but it's also not as hard to grasp for those who are born and bred on American or Japanese wrestling as some argue that lucha can be. The crowd pops when you expect them to pop. The pacing is similar to what you've seen in classic world title matches. The referee's pin counts are slow indeed, but not so slow that they require a parameters shift.
For many years, the only known copy of this match was grainy as hell and existed from one source. While Dave Meltzer gave the match four stars in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter when his lucha coverage was still in its infancy, this was never really talked up much prior to the last decade or so. In itself, it serves as a reminder that there are boatloads of great CMLL matches, both that aired on television and that never did, that we know are collecting dust at Televisa headquarters when they could be influencing a generation of fans and performers in much the same way that the World of Sport revival of the 2000s that highlighted ITV matches from 1970s and 1980s Joint Promotions and All Star Wrestling had a lasting impact on independent wrestling. In the meantime, I long for the day when most of us care more about such masterpieces as this inspiring more great wrestling than about who has locker room heat or what this week's television ratings were. However, as Casas and Dandy proved nearly three decades ago, just because something is obvious does not mean that it's apparent.
Rick Martel played the role of the champion just as well as anyone, which is impossible to deny in this AWA title defense in the Great White North.
July 3, 1984
International Wrestling
Halifax, Nova Scotia
AWA World Heavyweight Championship
7.0
While the NWA World Title was the pinnacle achievement in wrestling for decades, I definitely have time for an argument that the AWA title was the next best thing. Sure, the WWF title was defended outside of the home territory occasionally, but the AWA champ was probably more omnipresent, whether that meant Nick Bockwinkel and Jerry Lawler were squaring off in Memphis, the title was changing hands on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, or, in this case, Rick Martel was defending the gold against Leo Burke in Montreal's International Wrestling.
Rick Martel's career had quite the odd trajectory. There aren't many wrestlers who were young babyfaces that became world champs before becoming middle-of-the-card tag wrestlers, only to turn heel and gain fame with a male model gimmick -- remember, a male who models can never simply be called a model -- before ending their careers in a series for the WCW TV title, but Martel certainly fits the bill, and this match is an awesome showcase for the best phase of his career. At forty-five minutes and change (of a sixty-minute draw, mind you), I won't say that this match never tested my patience, but the journey was paid off, and Martel only became a better heel the longer the match went. Leo Burke was there, had an interesting career trajectory of his own, and delivered a perfectly fine performance, but this was really a platform for Martel's talents.
As much as we talk about the devaluing of world championships by WWE having two of them, the real issue isn't that wrestling having too many world champions as much as it is a wrestling company having too many world champions. The NWA and AWA champs didn't cross paths all that much, with some notable exceptions, but they existed in a wrestling landscape that gave them both plenty of space to play the role. Here, Martel looks every bit the peer to his contemporary in the role Ric Flair, and all I can wonder is how great Martel's career might have been had he reached the top ten years earlier instead of on the cusp of some transformational changes to wrestling itself.
Portland Wrestling has some really high-quality matches, especially featuring these two. But even the best of us have off nights.
July 3, 1982
Pacific Northwest Wrestling
Portland, Oregon
No Disqualification
5.0
Buddy Rose. More than Nick Bockwinkel, Jerry Lawler, or even Ric Flair, it's hard to think of a single wrestler who made a career out of doing so much with so little on the opposite side of the ring. All three of these wrestlers are considered shining examples of wrestlers who can get a good match out of the proverbial broomstick, and rightfully so. Still, Flair had Ricky Steamboat, Barry Windham, and Jumbo Tsuruta. Lawler had Bill Dundee and Austin Idol. Bockwinkel had Rick Martel and Billy Robinson. Who did Buddy Rose have?
The Pro Wrestling Only forums was home to a renewed love for Buddy Rose a few years back, a love that only seemed to strengthen the more that everyone involved watched more matches. I remember an offline conversation where I asked one of the most prominent members of that discussion, "Who's his [Jerry Lawler career rival Bill] Dundee?"
"He doesn't have one," this person replied.
Looking at match lists, that seems to be true. It's not that Rose never had quality opposition. He faced Rick Martel, Roddy Piper, Matt Borne, and Dynamite Kid. The problem he ran into, however, was one of timing. We usually refer to great wrestlers as mechanics. Buddy Rose was more of a gardener.
Curt Hennig became an excellent wrestler, and quickly so at that. When this match happened, Hennig was probably only six months away from being a really great performer. He was so great at a young age that Ric Flair once opined that as great of a worker as Hennig was, he was never as good as he was when he was young. Hennig also idolized Rose and grew to see him as his own compass. When dismissing booking or match ideas, Hennig argued many times that "Buddy Rose would never do that" when providing his reasoning.
When this match happened, Hennig still didn't quite understand what it was that Buddy Rose would never do. The match is focused on knee injuries that both men have suffered in pre-match angles and it's an explicit storyline point that both men are expected to target each other's knees. At one point, babyface Hennig goes after Rose with a chair in a moment of retribution and just completely obliterates him, but he uses so many chairshots that they quickly lose meaning? There's no logic underpining the weapon shots. Instead of hitting a guy with a chair ten times in a row, why not get him with one shot and make it count? It makes the rest of the match a bit preposterous, especially in an environment where wrestling holds are put over as devastating and are legal and weapons shots are considered beyond the pale and are illegal.
In most cases, a no-disqualification match between two well-regarded wrestlers with both coming in with knee injuries, one where the crowd is so excited that they're specifically chanting for Curt to break Buddy's leg, would be great before it even begins. This match never came close to being something at that level, but for those of us who enjoy following patterns over time, we got something even better. The great matches would come with time. For the better part of a half hour, we saw Curt Hennig sit under the learning tree.
This is unique in that Daniel Bryan carries the offense in most of his matches, but here, he has someone who's on his level in that category, so he puts on more of a selling performance. WWE often talks about Daniel Bryan as this big underdog, which is not what got him over. In fact, he was presented as more of a pitbull. This was an okay match. Nothing really wrong with it, but these are two of the best wrestlers in the company and they obviously have more in them when they aren't doing a short TV main event with a non-finish.
This had tremendous heat, and was pretty much WWE fast-paced wrestling putting its best foot forward. It's a bit weird watching Dolph Ziggler in main events now, four years after most people were clamoring for it but are now sort of over him. Has he changed or have we? Anyway, I guess it's possible he could reverse his momentum. Stranger things have happened. I'm all about Roman Reigns-Drew McIntyre being set up with the post-match angle with Reigns adding a third current program to his workload. One of the best (and longest) TV main events in a while. ***3/4
A good match that tried to tell an interesting in-match story, but a little too much comedy at times for a title match from my view. This is almost a competitive squash for a big part of this, but then it kicks into high gear in the last few minutes when AR Fox stops trying to out-Riddle Matt Riddle and starts wrestling more as himself. The ringside seconds added a lot to the nearfalls by getting so excited after all of the big moves, which I am convinced played a big part in getting the crowd to bite so hard on those. This didn't really come across like a main event-level match to me, but it also seemed like an early chapter in a long series between these two, so maybe that's okay for now. ***
The individual parts of a great match between Konosuke Takeshita and "Speedball" Mike Bailey were all there. However, they never really joined together.
July 2, 2017
Dramatic Dream Team
Hello From Shinjuku Village
Tokyo, Japan
KO-D Openweight Championship
5.0
For whatever else one might say about this match, it was not a victim of bad ideas. In fact, most of the ideas were very good or great. It also wasn’t a victim of bad execution. Mike Bailey and to an even greater extent Konosuke Takeshita have quite the arsenal of crisp, impressive moves. What the match lacked was a lack of stakes in the work, some of which was admittedly a byproduct of a growth story for “Speedball” Mike Bailey.
Bailey had undeniable personality, but he also undermined the match in ways that I don’t think he specifically wanted to happen. The smarmy applause at the beginning of the match was awesome, especially in using the Seth MacFarlane technique of continuing the joke long past the point that we would expect them to stop, thus creating its own meta-humor. On one level, it was funny, but on the more important level, he established himself as an insincere heel. The problem was that he didn’t wrestle the rest of the match that way at all, going so over the top with his facial expressions that heat-seeking heel gestures were instead played for comedy, which might be okay if this wasn’t a championship match.
As a result, Bailey came across as a guy playing pro wrestler instead of being pro wrestler. It’s a shame, because he seems to be a supremely talented guy with a lot to offer, and I think if his facial expressions weren’t so goofy, he might have been a more credible challenger. At the same time, in Bailey’s overall DDT arc, that seemed to be exactly the point, and many of the problems that plagued his work aren’t unique to him in current day wrestling -- does anyone actually struggle to get in a vertical suplex position anymore or does everyone just voluntarily put their body in position for it? Still, it’s a character not yet realized and match cliches that have spread everywhere that bring down the match despite anything else.
Luckily, Takeshita was in the match as well and he carried himself like a superstar, and had he not, this would have gone from a low-stakes match to a no-stakes match. I absolutely got the sense that Takeshita cared deeply about staying champion. Bailey seemed to be there more to humor himself than win, and to his credit, the post-match interviews make clear that this was an intentional character failing and that this is part of a longer booking journey. Still, this is the type of journey where there isn’t much reason to wake the sleeping wrestling fan until it’s over. As it stands, Takeshita beat a talented guy who challenged him with the brute force of bad comedy and came out champion. Yay him, I guess?
At a spot show in Montreal, Samoa Joe, already one of the best wrestlers in the world, met up with Kevin Steen, who had the somehow likable jerk persona down to a science from day one.
July 2, 2004
Marc LeGrizzly Presents
Midsummer Madness
Montreal, Quebec
7.6
In 2004, Samoa Joe was the greatest-working world champion in the United States. It was quite the accomplishment in the year where WWE decided to coronate Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit. Whether Joe was a better worker than either of them is a matter of debate, but his understanding of what the champion should do and convey showed the understanding of a veteran, even with his career starting only four years earlier.
Joe was not taking on the world champion role in the literal sense in this match. He was outside of Ring of Honor, his home promotion, and working a spot show in Canada. Still, fans were hip to Joe as the indie scene was growing while he was the top guy in the most high-profile indie in North America, so it made sense for Joe to take on the role, even if it was only implicitly so, when he faced local star Kevin Steen.
The Kevin Steen of 2004 was not terribly different from the Kevin Owens of today -- his brashness and quick wit already front and center, as was his tendency to be wrestling’s most easy-to-like asshole. But if Steen was an asshole, he was Montreal’s asshole, which made him the sentimental favorite of the crowd even if they were more likely to cheer the action than any particular guy. Steen was still true to himself anytime he got cheered, flipping the bird to the parts of the crowd who wanted him to come to their side of the ring to deliver offense on the floor. Steen even dared to get into a striking contest with Joe, arguably the best striker on the continent by this time; he might have paid a price for that arrogance, but he earned it back in fan reputation, valuable currency for an indie wrestler. In fact, the more Joe beats the Hell out of Steen, the better Steen looks for withstanding the beating. Joe brutalized Steen with strikes, but the highlight was the release German suplex on the entrance ramp, which was as brutal a flat-back bump as it gets.
I’m not a fan of Franky the Mobster and Chase Ironside running in, which results in the ref throwing out the match and setting up an immediate impromptu tag where they faced Steen and Joe together. It wasn’t that the booking was bad, as I can see the merits of Steen earning Joe’s respect by always fighting back before they end up as unlikely partners, but that's a lot of long-term booking for what wasn't even a full-time wrestling promotion. The match overachieved in a way that it deserved a more decisive finish. Kevin Owens has since become a WWE headliner, but the contrast between the compassionate and caring family man and the sarcastic instigator shows that he never stopped being a walking character contradiction. Maybe the same is true for all of us, but claiming the gray area in a way that doesn’t undermine opponents or treat everything around it like a joke is impressive and rare in pro wrestling.
With Mitsuharu Misawa and Toshiaki Kawada at odds during the peak of their rivalry, All Japan did something rare -- they produced a memorable six-man tag.
July 2, 1993
All Japan Pro Wrestling
Summer Action Series
Tokyo, Japan
7.7
In classic All Japan Pro Wrestling, six-man tags were likely the most interesting matches the company produced. There were so many of them that it took something remarkable for the match to stand out as great (even when it was), but in such a hierarchy-based company, it was a great peek at the pecking order, a flashlight into the back of All Japan’s booking office that resolved most questions about card positioning. Because the layout was usually geared to ensure that everyone involved had something notable to contribute, six-mans were also an effective showcase of All Japan’s top shelf at a given point in time, letting everyone demonstrate what they could do before, generally speaking, getting out of dodge. This resulted in offense-heavy, action packed matches that doubled as a great introduction to the style for novices.
This time around, the setting alone solved at least part of the difficulty standing out. Just six weeks earlier, Toshiaki Kawada, the long-time second lieutenant to Mitsuharu Misawa in these types of matches, announced in understated fashion that he was leaving Misawa’s side; nine months earlier, Misawa bested Kawada in his first Triple Crown defense and their team was clearly drowning in debt from massively-borrowed time. In becoming Misawa’s top rival, Kawada quickly moved from tag-along to top rival and peer.
Jun Akiyama and Yoshinari Ogawa were there to represent the undercard; in Akiyama’s case, a wrestler who would only close out his rookie year two months after this but had gotten off to an incredible start with one of the best rookie years in history. Kenta Kobashi and Akira Taue took a mostly background role by design. They impressed when they were in the ring, but it was clear they were sandwiched between the top two priorities of the match -- get over the younger Akiyama-Ogawa pairing and get over the Misawa-Kawada rivalry, which would headline the next tour when Kawada would challenge for the Triple Crown one more time.
Much like Kobashi and Taue before them, as the least experienced person on his side, Akiyama would now work the lion’s share of the match. As awesome as Akiyama was, Ogawa was serviceable but not really spectacular, someone who was still about five years away from finding himself. The spectacular belonged to Misawa and Kawada, to the point their intensity swallowed the match whole.
If the goal was to get Misawa-Kawada over as a deeply personal rivalry, which was not really a huge stretch, the match wildly succeeded. Some have debated whether the right person was the ace of All Japan during these years; Kawada and Kobashi had huge positives, but it’s clear watching this match that neither could have assumed the mantle quite like Misawa, who alternated between stoic and fiery with seemingly near the same ease that most of us put on our shoes. The end result does less to advance the plot than continue it, which is the biggest part of what makes All Japan six-mans the most disposable great matches of all time. This one wasn’t disposable, but it doesn’t quite earn all of the shelf space it takes either, landing in a spot where you know a match is great and can’t deny its virtues, but find it hard to care. The match’s greatest drawback is the lack of emotional hook or importance, meaning that it’s easier to admire than love.
Wrestling fandom requires a sense of eternal optimism, although sometimes when we think back fondly on great feuds, we forget that even the best rivalries had an expiration date.
July 2, 1987
Jim Crockett Promotions
NWA World Wide Wrestling 07-04-87
Landover, Maryland
NWA World Tag Team Championship
5.6
If any headline act suffered the most from the decline of the territories, it just might have been the Rock N Roll Express. Just like heartthrobs marketed to teenagers in all forms of entertainment, they can be wildly successful, but Tiger Beat usually closes its window before the hormones can escape. Before coming to Jim Crockett Promotions in 1985, Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson worked in Mid-South Wrestling. They “popped the territory”, as the old-timers would put it, but they were also careful not to overstay their welcome.
By the summer of 1987, Crockett fans were growing tired of the Rock N Roll Express, a trend that had only been confined to the heel-friendly Philadelphia market earlier in their Crockett run. The duo peaked both as team acts and a solo acts during the previous year’s Great American Bash tour, with Morton as a hot challenger to NWA World Champion Ric Flair and most of their matches on the tour happening against the Four Horsemen. There was anything but shame in working with the Midnight Express, but it was the second version of the feud in JCP alone and they had already traded the World Tag Team Titles the previous year.
It seemed like they had no idea where to go next. The Rock N Rolls were still very well-received in lots of places, even in this match, but it was clear the act had gotten colder in the previous twelve months. Less than three months earlier, the two were mercilessly booed in Baltimore when ring announcer Gary Cappetta told the Baltimore crowd that they would not participate in the annual Crockett Cup tournament because of Morton’s eye injury. The idea was floated in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter of a heel turn and feud with The Fantastics, while booker Dusty Rhodes pitched a program with The Sheepherders where Morton would have his head shaved, an offer perhaps made specifically so the Express would leave town.
In spite of this, the Capital Centre crowd were receptive to the Rock N Rolls and they might have had a good match that kept the people; however, a television match that spanned 30 minutes with commercial breaks was enough to remind any viewer how played out the team was becoming, which meant this sputtered to a conclusion instead of building to a hot finish. Stan Lane had also replaced Dennis Condrey in the Midnight Express since the previous summer, a change that in theory might have freshened up the rivalry, but didn’t get there in practice. The work is good at times and floundering at times; the teams seemed at least a little off their game because of the growing apathy from the crowd, but haven’t stopped providing the reliably great sequences. Who doesn’t love Ricky Morton literally climbing Bobby Eaton during a simple knucklelock, for example? But more than anything, perhaps the biggest problem they faced was the absence of Jim Cornette. There were a few times in the MX’s run other than this where we saw Cornette not at ringside, and each time, the match had trouble garnering heat. This match made a strong case for Cornette as a difference maker, and as a key component for why this classic series worked so well.
When the Rock N Roll Express returned to the company in 1990, many still weren’t thrilled to see them return, but they won fans over again with their in-ring work even if their days as company main eventers were over. In 1987, they hadn’t been absent, so the hearts of fans hadn’t had time to grow fonder, which showed in how it made even the good moments seem lesser than they deserved.
Tulsa fans were a far less unruly bunch than many ticket buyers in other Mid South markets. Their reward was to receive the ideal snapshot of tag team wrestling.
July 2, 1984
Mid-South Wrestling
Tulsa, Oklahoma
7.8
Jim Cornette has spoken in the past about how when Mid-South Wrestling came to town, Tulsa, Oklahoma, attracted a more -- shall we say -- housebroken crowd than in some other major markets in the territory. Understanding this, Ernie Ladd, Bobby Eaton, and Dennis Condrey were licensed to cheat at will, secure in the knowledge that they could be total meanies to Ricky Morton without some drunk deciding to murder the manager. This doesn’t mean that Tulsa drew a docile people; they were hot for the action and in fact, the crowd reaction came easy, being that the Rock N Roll Express were the most over act in the territory. Still, Ladd and the Midnight Express didn’t take the crowd for granted.
Out of the goodness of their dark hearts, they decided to let the Rock N Rolls and Jim Duggan have the lion’s share of the match. There are many moments where you think face-in-peril -- the concept of one babyface being isolated by the heels and struggling to make the tag -- has arrived but it’s not time just yet. They tease Robert Gibson first but quickly abandoned that idea when Gibson tagged Duggan. Then they hinted briefly that it would be Duggan but despite taking a few shots, he tagged out to Morton quickly. It was only when Morton missed a dropkick that the heels took over, leaving Morton to play the role that defined his career as much as it did tag team wrestling in the era.
The contrast of the gigantic Ernie Ladd attacking the pint-sized Ricky Morton made for an awfully effective visual. Ladd was clearly winding down by this stage of his career, but he still has simple moves in his arsenal like the double legdrop and basic thrust-like strikes that got the job done. He also understood how to rile up the crowd, playing Milton Bradley’s Hide the Foreign Object to maximum effect. It’s the double-team moves combined with complete lack of moral turpitude that made the Midnights and Cornette such a credible triple threat; the duo combined legal and illegal tactics seamlessly.
At some point in the 1990s, we started thinking of the hot tag as the beginning of the end of a match -- a sign that both teams would start the finishing stretch, do at least one nearfall, and then go home. In the 1980s, the very sight of the perilous babyface was the beginning of the finishing stretch, and it’s important to watch tag matches from the era with that in mind. Think of it like the film where the villain has the hero on the ropes until the villain’s last weakness is exploited. Just like Dorothy pouring water on the Wicked Witch of the West, the hot tag signified such a moment; complementing that, “shine” -- the part of the matches where the babyfaces get the better of almost every exchange -- is often thought of as a match introduction, but can also spill into the body of the match. It was only in the last five minutes that the Morton beatdown even began. They made those minutes count, but make no mistake, that’s because they were teasing a finish at any moment. Exceptions can and will be found -- the famed “double heat” with two face-in-peril stretches and two hot tags, particularly common in the AWA, and the hot tag that’s followed by multiple nearfalls and teases before the real finish. Those matches are usually the exceptional ones, something this, while very good, is not, even while it does act as an excellent representation of the positives of tag team wrestling in 1984.
Well, the time has finally arrived! Thanks so much to all of you have joined us in this adventure. If you believe in the mission of PWO and want to support the site, there are many ways you can do it without spending any extra money at all that I'll talk about in this entry. I'll also talk about the content that we have up so far, along with some other content that you should expect in the coming days. There are already a lot of exciting things happening at PWO, so let's get started.
TODAY’S CONTENT
First of all, if you haven’t seen them yet, there are five match reviews posted from this day in wrestling history. Five new match reviews will be posted from this day in history seven days a week. The match reviews posted today are:
Harley Race vs Terry Funk (Houston Wrestling 07/01/77)
Toshiaki Kawada vs Kenta Kobashi (AJPW 07/01/89)
Toshiaki Kawada vs Masa Fuchi (AJPW 07/01/00)
Steve Corino vs Doug Williams (1PW 07/01/06)
Kenny Omega vs Michael Elgin (NJPW 07/01/17)
Hopefully, there’s a little something for everyone there, as it’s always the goal to provide just that. I’ll share a list of tomorrow’s matches later in this post.
JUST ANOTHER MODERN MONDAY
If you’d like to see my take on current wrestling, Monday is going to be your favorite day of the week for a change. Starting tomorrow, we’ll do our first #PWOModernMonday, where I’ll walk through matches that have gotten buzz over the past week. I have about 10 matches lined up for tomorrow, so look for tons of new content immediately.
PODCASTS
I’ve also posted the first episode of Pro Wrestling Lonely, a new podcast that I’ll do almost every day flying solo. It will be an opportunity to talk about whatever is catching my attention in the world of pro wrestling. #PWL is already available on Soundcloud, and it should be available on iTunes earlier in the week. The first episode is a full walk-through of the Shawn Michaels: Showstopper Unreleased 3-disc set WWE is releasing in October. You can preorder your copy on Amazon here.
FEATURES
We have re-posts of some old feature articles I’ve written. The first, The Story of Jerry Lawler and the Snowman, was originally posted at PlaceToBeNation.com a few years ago, and it walks through one of my favorite, most nuanced feuds in wrestling history.
The second, Wrestling on Fast Forward, is an extended look at how tape trading and hardcore fandom have had a bottom-up influence in pro wrestling. More feature articles will be coming on the site, including some submitted by guest writers. One that I think will be especially interesting is called #Wrestling7Up. I’ve asked some of the most fascinating wrestling fans I know to write about what wrestling fandom was like to them at the ages of 7, 14, and 21, continuing as far along as their birth year will allow. The first piece will be posted in the coming days. Stay tuned.
“USE ME, USE ME, CUZ YOU AIN’T THAT AVERAGE GROUPIE”
For those of you reading who host your own podcasts, if there’s a topic where you think I might add value, I’d probably love to be on your show! Please contact me to tell me what I need to do and it’s pretty unfathomable that I’ll say no. Likewise, if there’s opportunity for me to contribute a piece to your site, please let me know.
THE BOARD
The PWO board will likely always be the lifeblood of the site. It’s what gotten us this far and that shared sense of community is something that’s still important to me that I want to continue to foster. Some recent interesting content that I would like to point out includes:
Some match reviews from December 2000 in our exhaustive Match Discussion Archive
G. Badger’s Badger Blog is back from hiatus (If you want to start a wrestling blog with a built-in wrestling audience, consider PWO as your blogging home. I'll even promote your content here, free of charge!)
Various thoughts on the NJPWxCEO and ROH shows over the weekend
Thoughts on Matt Cappotelli, who recently passed away
TOMORROW’S MATCHES
Tomorrow, I’ll have reviews up for these matches:
Midnight Express & Ernie Ladd vs Rock N Roll Express & Hacksaw Duggan (Mid South 07-02-84)
Midnight Express vs Rock N Roll Express (NWA World Wide Wrestling 07-02-87)
Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi & Jun Akiyama vs Toshiaki Kawada, Akira Taue & Yoshinari Ogawa (AJPW 07-02-93)
Samoa Joe vs Kevin Steen (Marc LeGrizzly’s Midsummer Madness 07-02-04)
Mike Bailey vs Konosuke Takeshita (DDT 07-02-17)
WRAPPING UP
Thanks again for your support and readership! Feel free to join us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram for more updates.
Take care,
Charles
ProWrestlingOnly.com
It's possible that Kenny Omega and Michael Elgin made magic on this night. However, it also seems that the spell has since been broken.
July 1, 2017
New Japan Pro Wrestling
G-1 Special in the USA
Los Angeles, California
IWGP U.S. Championship Tournament
5.9
Kenny Omega, Michael Elgin, and the other stars of New Japan Pro Wrestling should be commended for creating American interest in a foreign wrestling company at a level that would have been virtually impossible at any other time in wrestling history. In the current era, Bullet Club members can show up on WWE television and get the, “Hey, we recognize you and see you as stars!” crowd reaction that used to be elusive to anyone who rose to stardom outside of the national television establishment. Omega’s cornermen, the Young Bucks, are legitimate difference makers in Ring of Honor and on the independent scene. They have a popular YouTube show and their merchandise even sells well at Hot Topic! They relied on their own intuition and creativity to forge a new path, which I deeply respect. I just wish I was as impressed with this match as I am with their ability to succeed.
That’s not to say that this was a bad match or that I didn’t like it. Power versus speed is a timeless wrestling match contrast and they executed it well, as seen in moves like Elgin’s delayed vertical suplex that showed off his strength and Omega’s surprise Rocker dropper on the floor that highlighted his craftiness.
This resembles two separate matches superglued together when they started working toward a finish; everything before those few minutes was just an exchange of moves because of the lack of significant follow-through. Moves like the aforementioned Rocker Dropper on the floor seemed to have predicted an offensive run for Omega, but all was forgotten two minutes later. When Omega started throwing all of the V triggers, the drama picked up considerably, but drama without equal suspense to precede it is merely hysterics; in the best competitive matches, you might not know when the comeback is happening or how it will happen, but you know that it will come. Elgin’s crowd-thrilling German suplex on the apron worked like a charm in the moment, but doesn’t stand out as special when apron moves are so common. For all the attempts to wrestle big, the match still feels small, like it’s a B-show match that needed to keep going because one of the wrestlers in the next match hasn’t arrived at the building yet.
To deny the effectiveness or positive reception of the match would be foolish. Omega-Elgin worked in this building on this night and in this moment, but for those who place a premium on replay value, there sadly isn’t much to see here.
After Mitsuharu Misawa abandoned ship with most of the roster to form Pro Wrestling NOAH, Toshiaki Kawada and Masa Fuchi began rebuilding a company left in shambles.
July 1, 2000
All Japan Pro Wrestling
Summer Action Series
Tokyo, Japan
8.1
On June 9, 2000, Mitsuharu Misawa had his last match in an All Japan Pro Wrestling ring. Sure, he returned for a one-off match four years later, but that was for an AJPW so different that it might as well not even count. After years of problems with the widowed Motoko Baba, Misawa had plans to form his own company, Pro Wrestling NOAH, which would launch in August. Much like Mrs. Baba’s deceased husband, Misawa inspired massive loyalty in other wrestlers, so when Misawa left, the entire native roster left with him. The entire native roster left, that is, with two notable exceptions: Toshiaki Kawada and Masanobu Fuchi.
Despite longtime personal animosity, Misawa expected Kawada, arguably his greatest rival, to come with him and ended up angered by Kawada’s decision to stay. In Misawa’s mind, he was the modern-day Biblical Noah and he was building an arc for everyone to escape AJPW, hence his new promotion’s name and navigation-based symbolism. Kawada made the calculation that AJPW would be his for the taking with Misawa and other top stars out of the way, which proved itself true in the short-term. Rumors were flying of everyone from Genichiro Tenryu to Atsushi Onita returning to the company, but they would need to be cast aside on this night, when Kawada and Fuchi needed to prove a basic credo -- that the company could still deliver great main events.
Fuchi was never anything less than a stellar pro wrestler, but he was also past his peak. It had been four years since he passed the junior heavyweight torch to the now NOAH-bound Tsuyoshi Kikuchi and it had been even longer since he was phased out of his reliable antagonist role in six-man tags at the top of the card. Fuchi never completely disappeared, but he rarely appeared alongside the top stars anymore. The mass exodus of talent and the pressure on his shoulders inspired a brief, but exceptional comeback that started with this match.
All Japan’s calling card was always the match quality of its main events, especially in the preceding decade. Misawa and Kawada, along with Kenta Kobashi, Akira Taue, Jun Akiyama, Steve Williams, Stan Hansen, and a select few others, set high standards -- some would say impossibly high standards -- for action-packed main events with excellent psychology. Kawada and Fuchi had a challenging path ahead of them, but they also had newfound freedom. Kawada’s longtime suggestion of interpromotional matches, which ostracized him politically when he suggested it to Mr. Baba years earlier, was suddenly a very real possibility.
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Despite high standards, the in-ring style had escalated in an unhealthy way in recent years, with ever-lengthening nearfall stretches and more dangerous moves happening in each marquee match. The company had also grown stale, as great as the top talent was, because of the lack of new stars. Kawada and Fuchi not only needed to demonstrate their ability to have a great match, but they’d need to have a different type of great match.
Their unfavorable position seemed to earn the sympathy of fans. Fuchi received the most heartfelt welcome he had gotten in years, (or possibly ever, considering his usual surly heel personality) making clear that All Japan fans would do their part in helping the match succeed. Rather than attempt to parallel the action quotient of the Misawa-Kobashi series, Kawada and Fuchi worked smaller and smarter with heavier focus on details, the type of match where Fuchi has always looked his best. Fuchi was totally in his element with tactics like the cold staredown off of a clean break or stepping directly on Kawada’s face. The lasting visual of the match is, of course, Fuchi’s raw and bloody chest, the result of Kawada’s brutal chops. Kawada finishing off Fuchi with one powerbomb when it had taken multiple powerbombs to bring home the win in some of his past big matches, felt right. They proved that they could dabble in greatness without dabbling in excess.
To ask if All Japan ended up okay in the long run is to ask a loaded question. The glory days of the Baba era were long gone, but the company itself remained a staple under new ownership with different stars. They never reached the same heights of match quality or popularity after the formation of NOAH, and it’s probable that they never will. However, that’s only a loaded question with the benefit of hindsight. On July 1, 2000, after the show was over and fans had left the building, the answer of the moment was clearly that yes, All Japan would be just fine, even if they had become the Little Promotion That Could overnight.
