Loss

No one seems to get the point of this thread, which was NOT to criticize them for doing charity work or even to criticize them for doing it for selfish reasons, but to criticize them for not being better at disguising that. I've said that over and over and over. It was a thread about a company of workers not being particularly good workers in this case. When one of the big banks presents something on one of the shows my kids watch on TV, it seems heartfelt because the segments are better produced and it's far more subtle. So yeah, you'd think a wrestling company would be better at this type of image manipulation since it's so embedded in what they do, but it turns out they aren't. And that's surprising.

This seemed to be a night where everything was working for these two. Much like in music, though, this does feel like a pop artist taking cool stuff from the underground, sanitizing it and getting it over with a bigger audience, even if I'm not sure that works perfectly as an analogy to the Fujinami era of the juniors. Still, this was a very good match and far more grounded than you'd expect. Pretty much everything looked crisp and hit the mark, and it's clear they know their audience. That said, a personal pet peeve of mine is endless sequences that never have a payoff. There were so many exchanges that just went on and on without any type of payoff happening or something decisive coming at the end. I won't fault the match too much for that, but it is the biggest thing keeping this from hitting the next level for me. Dynamite's tombstone was the first time a sequence really ended with a thud and that was in the latter stages of the match. ***1/2

Talk about it here.

This is about as random a match as you can get that doesn't take place on a WAR card or inside the Worldwide Arena at Disney MGM. It's the top three stars of New Japan facing imports from Sudan (read: America), England and Mexico. New Japan has been home to what I would argue as the best wrestling in the world in the early 80s, if only because of Tatsumi Fujinami's junior heavyweight mat clinics. This is not that. Instead, they follow the lead of the legendary final match of All Japan's tag league just a few weeks earlier by inviting chaos and escalating the pace. What I really like most about this match is that the presentation is one that favors the strengths of virtually everyone involved. Inoki can stand on the apron and get involved when he needs to sell a top feud or get a pop from the crowd (which wasn't difficult), so his credibility adds something. Abby is up against two willing bumpers in Fujinami and Tiger Mask, and his brawling around the ring fosters the atmosphere as much as or more than anything else. And of course, Fujinami is the utility guy who can work with everyone, but he's hardly carrying that load alone, as Babyface helps him out from the other side. For all the deserved criticisms levied at Tiger Mask and Dynamite Kid, they both shined in this setting. Tiger kicked Dynamite squarely in the face with a roundhouse kick to break up a choke attempt on Fujinami across the ring. Dynamite pays him back by dropping a knee on his nose a few minutes later. They largely avoid the highspots that would be their trademark, probably because I don't think either guy wrestled a sequence that lasted two minutes. If anything, Tiger's primary role here (well, everyone's primary role here) seems to be to get Abby over as a monster, and he (and everyone else) is (are) very good at that. In one of my favorite moments of the match, Tiger is about to hit Abby with a plancha on the floor when Dynamite pushes him off the top rope, which is a great tactic to heel him with the crowd. That's not the only time something gets teased that doesn't happen as expected -- I don't think Tiger squaring off with Abdullah would have gotten the reaction it did had Tiger not saved Fujinami earlier from Abby's attempts to pummel him on the outside. Most wrestling fans can appreciate a troop of top stars holding off foreign menaces, and we've seen it in countless incarnations if we've been watching for any length of time. When done improperly, it seems archaic and when done right, you get fever pitch heat and a nice stage to get over the characters of everyone involved. This was that dynamic done right. A ***1/2 match, and I'd love to go higher but they don't really build to a strong climax. That said, that rating hardly tells the full story.

Talk about it here.

If they really want him to get over as a babyface, they should put him in New Day.

I enjoy this discussion and I absolutely think some really intelligent points are being made. I just want to err on the side of caution, however, and say Pro Wrestling Only. No one has done anything wrong. It's just that I could see it getting heated. Thanks for understanding.

Because when he's on, he's on. And he's on about 90% of the time.

No reason to further engage this guy. I'm banning him.

He's also said that jocks making anti-gay jokes in a locker room setting doesn't make them homophobic. It's a mental block.

Do you have stuff from Jericho's feuds with The Rock, Michaels and Rey on tap? I just ask because I'm curious what you think of those. I'm really enjoying these reviews.

That's one reason it always gets me when Dave criticizes Hogan or whoever for doing a media interview and not plugging the company they work for, the upcoming show, etc. Is someone really going to become a fan because they heard Hogan talking about it in an interview?

It's a colloquialism, just like shoot style. I don't think it's meant to be taken literally.

They never had a televised singles match in WCW. They may not have had a match at all, in fact.

The problem with Beat The Clock and the current WWE working style is that this would normally be a good time where it makes sense to cut a way faster pace than normal and do tons of nearfalls. But when you have guys mostly wrestling too fast anyway, they can't really get over the stipulation as well as they might be able to if there was a higher gear possible.

I'm fine with the Dudleys being in. I just hope they don't have the typical Even Stephen feud because that cools both teams off.

You should hear the things they say about Cena at goc's preferred tear-your-hair-out message boards (no offense meant, goc, I just thought this was funny), which I sadly do believe captures the zeitgeist.

The trouble with Cena is that he has to be their top babyface to maintain the status quo, but they can't really grow their audience a huge amount as long as he's their top babyface either. They've taken the safe route, perhaps wisely.

A few weeks back, he was vocal about Rollins popping up too easily for the finish in his TV match with Neville. He still gave the match **** because "that's the style". He's willing to overlook stuff like that if it was effective in popping the crowd.

It's wrong to say Dave favors a lot of action and moves, considering how often he dives into the details of psychology on WOR in a way that anyone should be able to appreciate. He likes hot crowds and people who he thinks are working a contemporary style. But he complains about guys not selling enough all the time and points out good things about matches involving Timothy Thatcher and Chris Hero that have nothing to do with the workrate. But he's said many times in the last few years that a match that works in the building it's in is great, period. The Dave of now wouldn't agree with the Dave of 10 or more years ago.

The thing that really stands out to me about how Eddy worked in his 2004-2005 babyface run is that it required some really quick thinking on his feet. Yes, I suppose he could have a general idea of what fun cheating spots he wanted to pull off, but to actually have the timing and psychology to pull them off in a way that works is something else entirely. On top of that, he also had to understand wrestling's norms pretty deeply to pull off something so creative. He added these wrinkles to his ringwork as his body was breaking down and it added a few years to his career. It often felt like Eddy was doing an oil painting in the land of guys using crayons. I'm not convinced there is a wrestler currently in WWE who is smart enough (read: quick thinking enough) or skilled enough to do what Eddy was doing at that stage of his career. It wasn't merely cheating, it was also the type of cheating he could do and ensure that he was still cheered -- the philosophy behind the babyfaces-pretend-to-tag-behind-the-ref's-back was expanded to define an entire character and working style. Yes, it was an audience predisposed to love him and that always helps, but it would have been a comedy gimmick or even Wrestlecrap in the wrong hands.

They are nearly doing the anti-push now and it's not working.

Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again. No single idea in wrestling history has produced more watchable, good, great and classic matches. I can see being tired of it, but I think for the most part that comes down to poor execution of it.

That formula has evolved over the years, though. The heat really was the finishing stretch in the old days, because the match would usually end within a minute of the hot tag. At some point, that changed and the hot tag became the beginning of the finishing stretch. I'm sure there were others before this, but Midnight Express-Southern Boys at the 1990 Great American Bash was one of the first high-profile matches worked that way.

The magic of Bret-Austin is that it's really the last match of its kind -- a great babyface and a great heel having a great no-frills wrestling match on pay-per-view. The WWF in-ring style continued reliance on gimmicks and shortcuts more and more in the coming three years, and moved farther away from slow-building matches and matwork. The Wrestlemania match is the birth of an era, but this is the death of one. It's a feud that forever changed wrestling. It's Austin's coming out party and the first truly great singles match of his career. MSG can be a tough crowd and this took some time to build, but they eventually had them hot for really basic technical wrestling and non-signature submissions like Austin's Texas Cloverleaf, which was something I appreciated. I also like the finish of Austin beating himself with his own bullheadedness. Eddy-Rey has always been a match I admired more than one I loved, so I'm with you there. Every time I watch it, it loses a little something for me, and I've never been able to get as into it as others. I like how in Eddy-Brock they felt like they had to have the Goldberg run-in since they were building a match with Lesnar at Wrestlemania, but it was a begrudging run-in and they didn't want that to be the biggest takeaway from the match. I'd like to throw out a match that doesn't really get talked up much, but is a great display of Eddy as a cheating babyface: Eddy/Rey vs Bashams from No Way Out 2005. Check it out if you can.