Bix

Good match that happens to be Kid and Jannetty's only successful defense on tape was the reason.

Rick Rubin insisted! He provided the money! What else could Jimmy do?

Eleventy billion stars.

Muraco was a face then.

I'll see if I can start going through listings over the weekend. Off the top of my head... I'd say no to the 8/11/01 elimination tag. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. For starters, Suicide Kid suffers a career ending shoulder injury, Scorpio isn't as motivated as you'd expect and knocks Hero silly with a shoot soccer kick breaking up a pin, the finish is changed during the match for no apparent reason so it becomes a clusterfuck, and...I feel like I'm forgetting stuff. Plus it's 50 minutes of this. The Ian vs Hero vs Cash Flo match that's reviewed in a DVDVR is really good and I'd include it over the elim tag. Hero and Flo went an hour around that time but I've never seen it. The Punk gauntlet match (vs Hero, Ace, and Cabana) the night before the Hero TLC match is something I remember liking a lot. There's a lot of great stuff on random shows shot by IWA on a single camera, including an oddly great Ian vs Corp "Whatever Me and Steve Feel Like Doing Match" (that's what it was called) where they do Muga style matwork for 20 minutes and then do their usual brawling for the finishing stretch. Corp is a guy who I could see looking really good on a yearbook since he was fantastic when given a chance and not stuck with crappy death match opponents. Ditto Mitch Page to a lesser extent.

There's a lot of good stuff on the OCESA Ruleta de la Muerte PPV, especially the torneo cibernetico that opens the show and the key tournament matches.

I'd have to find the dates but these are must haves from the comm tapes AJPW put out after the split: Kawada vs Fuchi (Kawada lights up Fuchi's chest with chops as they desperately try to show the new AJPW can put on a quality main event) Tenryu's return at Korakuen Hall (He comes out in a suit to a huge reaction, I think introduced by Mrs Baba) Kawada & Tenryu vs Hansen & Kea (Hansen's last great match) Fuchi vs Chono (1st AJPW vs NJPW match) Tenryu vs Hansen (From the Triple Crown tournament, Hansen's last stand as a singles wrestler, not a great match since Hansen's back is fucked but fun) Fun/interesting/whatever stuff that might have a place: Early post-split undercard highlights with a hodgepodge of Indy guys Koshinaka stuff where he joins the AJPW side Kroffat/Fujiwara tags from the tag league that show Kroffat was still an amazing finish guy even with no knees.

Sounds like a different IWA? No, something along those lines happened.

I'm glad you brought this up, because I've been intrigued by 70s IWA since I first read about it five or so years ago and this reminded me to ask if anyone knows anything substantial about it. I know it was supposedly an attempt to promote nationally with guys like Mascaras and Ivan Koloff and NWA outlaws, and it was backed by Eddie Einhorn who owned the Chicago White Sox and had good TV connections IIRC (and was later involved in Pro Wrestling USA?). I've never seen much written about it and I'm not sure if much if any footage exists. Anyone know anything beyond my bare bones description? There's a decent amount around because PM Film sold a bunch of the shows later. VCI recently released a commercial DVD of a ton of IWA footage, too.

"Brock Lesnar, are you proud to be back in WWE?" "PROUD!?!?"

I think I saw both Kidman and Rotunda.

No...?

IIRC, I believe that what happened was that there was some issue with getting the proper scaffold match parts they were expecting, but they had already advertised the match and had some scaffolding off to the side of the ring. Since there was no way they could have anything resembling a match without the traditional scaffold match scaffold, Pondo and Bailey essentially did an exhibition of big bumps into the wire instead.

It may have come up in this thread, but why the hell would someone choose a weapon as their signature weapon that is damn near impossible to deliver a decent looking worked blow with? It's phallic and helps him with his insecurities about his balls shrinking?

There was still a lot of great wrestling it you knew where to look but the destruction of New Japan was awful.

Umm, Jingus... Do you remember the last time Mark Henry ran on live TV? WWE is better off avoiding that.

It's in bad taste (at best) for them to profit off the shirt, IMO. They'd be better off donating all of the profit to Thresholds and getting good publicity for it.

This could take a while and require copious examination of matchlists since they often ran weekly during the best period (late '01-fall '03, though there's plenty of great stuff later like Necro vs Joe).

FWIW, I was doing some digging and found a Meltzer post where he said 250,000 of the 600,000 buys for Lesnar's first UFC PPV were from first-time buyers.

New Art of Wrestling Podcast that Colt Cabana put up today is with Roland Alexander. Certainly interesting to hear his side of things, and I give him credit for being honest about some of the more controversial things about him and even mentioning Brian Ong unprompted (in the contexts of making sure he runs APW as a business and has insurance that covered the judgement). Having said that, the part where he talks about how "We teach five kinds of armbars! Who else teaches five kinds of armbars??!?!" is hilarious.

This is from the latest back issue and is awesome:

Legit have no idea how any of that is "HE'S SHOOTING!"

Loss, what did you think of his Smackdown matches with Rey and Benoit?

That makes a lot more sense.