gordi

I was expecting to get The Road Warriors vs Blackjack & Cap'n Redneck, too. Is that coming up later on? In another fed? With all the good stuff on both of those cards, Martel vs Lawler sounds like the must-see match, and I'm not even a big Lawler guy. ​There's a LOT of outside interference directly affecting the finishes on those two cards. Is that gonna disappoint your fans, or are they into all of the brawling and beat-downs? Seems like a good way to establish Slater's character, at least.

I was hoping for Bad News and Garvin to stick together and kick some ass, but it suits Allen's character to be more of a lone wolf, I guess... and Dr. D munching on popcorn while watching them turn on each other is a perfect character moment for him.

What a great Main Event. The crowd really got their money's worth with that show.

Totally agree. Russians vs Hansen & Brody, Roadies vs Blackjack & Dirty Dick, and Doc vs Hacksaw means I am there. Slobber knocker after slobber knocker.

I'm gonna go waaaay out on a limb and predict that Hogan vs DiBiase will be a better match than the one we got in the "real world" at WM2 (Hogan vs Bundy). Also, even though the Bulldogs vs Dream Team was a good match, I think that good guy Harts vs bad guy Fabs will be even better. It's a great start for WrestleMania. Also: I love the way you wrote up the intro to SNME, with all those short promo clips. That really brings back some memories.

Definitely not. So much to look forward to with MACW. That card on the 22nd looks like an absolute barn-burner. Every match looks like a good one. Imagine how stiff Harley vs Wahoo is gonna be. And: The New Assassins! Who will be donning those yellow and black masks?

I can't find any evidence that he ever worked in Japan, but if nobody else wants him right now JWA would very much like to bring Mike Shaw over for a while.

That is absolutely true. They come up with countless variations on the "Malfunction at the Junction" spot here, plus the Japanese team gets flat-out "We Lie, we Cheat, We Steal-era Eddie and Chavo" in terms of making Andre think that Buyten is double-crossing him. Also: Teranishi's nickname is "Carpenter" because he's so good at making oter wrestlers look good... and you can really see that in action here. It's just pure "joy of wrestling" for the whole run of this match.

The ten-bell salute is a very nice touch. Andersons vs Funks... yet another dream match coming up right here on Armchair Booking! Bad News and Ronnie Garvin. Yikes! Now THAT is a seriously bad-ass team-up.

That's too bad. I was thinking you could drop Flair and Martel on Dorval Island with maybe 5 referees, a few cameramen, and a big pot of coffee, and let them fight it out falls-count-anywhere/ most total pitfalls wins style over a long weekend.

Whoa, Nelly! A six-man tag with the Rougeaus and Martel taking on the Freebirds, please! And having Fuller and Golden WANT to face Tonga in a street fight immediately gets them more over with me than they have ever been. That's crazy. Finally, I hope that "60-hour ltime limit" is NOT a typo. I wanna see an all-day match. True Iron Man.

So... February 31st, then?

JWA would like to add Kantaro Hoshino to our active roster.

Wow, from Vernon on the 1st all the way across the continent to The Omni on the second! I hope Gordy and Farmer Boy Ipo weren't stuck sitting together in coach. Then all the way back to Regina. Talk about your road trips from hell! That's life in the NWA, I guess. It's hard on the boys but great for the fans. I'd be interested to see that Lord Humongous match from Regina. If anyone could pull a decent 15 minute plus brawl out of that guy, it just might be Matt Bourne.

Yep, that pairing makes good sense as both men have a football background. I wouldn't mind seeing those young guys take on a more experienced power team along the lines of The Road Warriors... and hopefully we'll get a young lions showdown at some point between them and Nord & Foley.

Just a quick heads-up: There is no "e" at the end of "Vachon" Loved how you handled Martel's visit, and the sportsmanship shown by Lawler.

Everything with Flair was just beautiful. Exactly what I imagined/hoped Flair in WWC would be like. It's great how you are building up the The Rock 'n' Roll RPMs as good guys by having them show class and composure after a defeat. I also like how even your short squash matches show something of the character of the wrestler involved.

That Naniwa Style Elimination Match sounds like: 1) A really entertaining match 2) A great way to build up the Korakuen show. That's good booking!

Whoa! Talk about an awesome first show. I'd love to see young Benoit fight Bill Dundee. Steiners are a great choice as Tag Champs. And I can only imagine the Flair vs Lance Von Erich match being brought up in "All Time Best Carry Jobs" threads 30 kayfabe years down the road.

I love the amount of thought you are putting into this. I wonder if your mind works like mine: When I'm on the bus or train or have time to kill and there's nobody to chat with, my thoughts just naturally drift over to Armchair Booking the JWA...

Not my beloved Osaka Pro archive That is heartbreaking news. The early history of Puroresu is absolutely fascinating. I highly recommend the episode of the (David Lee) Roth Show where, astonishingly, the Van Halen front man goes on for over 20 fascinating minutes about that very topic: http://www.vhnd.com/2013/01/22/trs9/ Yeah, for sure. It's not just the early history of wrestling in Japan that's fascinating to think about. It's mind-boggling to ponder how we ended up where we are now, with so many wrestling styles and promotions. I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who once asked "If Pro Wrestling didn't exist, could you invent it?"

It's nuts. I am so overwhelmed by the access to all kinds of wrestling from all different places and time periods from the past that I can't even imagine trying to keep up with all the new stuff coming out. For me, it's all of the archives and old footage that makes watching wrestling in 2018 insanely interesting.

That AWA match is something I would love to have seen in real life. One of the best things about his project is being able to write stuff like that up and also read what everyone else comes up with along those lines (Like Hogan vs Hansen) Absolutely! I am totally looking forward to having some of your guys to come over here. It's inspiring to try to come up with the right match for the right gaijin visitor. Thanks! In those two long posts above I go into a lot of detail about my thinking on that exact subject Thanks! The Jumbo Saga is my first real attempt at long-term Japan-type in-ring storytelling. There is lots more still to come. I love writing for Hickerson. He's a big, tough guy who can really work and who can get away with being a bit goofy, too... kind of like Foley, perhaps. I'm really happy so many people mention the Jumbo stuff. His story is my big project this year. In my opinion, Tiger Jeet Singh was no great shakes as a worker, but there is no denying he got his gimmick over in Japan in a big way. I'm pretty convinced that bloody brawls were a very important part of the history of Puroresu, but it seems like from the late 80s on, that kind of match moved over to indies like FMW and AJPW and NJPW moved away from that. tl/dr on my long posts above: I wanna experiment with the idea of "What if: Mainstream 80s Japanese Wrestling had kept a bit of a hardcore element here and there?"

So, why might the No DQ First Blood Elimination match understandably feel out of place in our kayfabe JWA??? Well, it could be because Giant Baba is the Kayfabe Owner and President of the Revived JWA... and a lot of us mainly know Baba from his sublime booking and promoting of AJPW in the late 80s and early 1990s. Not exactly a ton of bloody gimmick matches in that legendary run. Plus, we generally think of Baba as wrestling slow-paced technical classics with good mat work against guys like Billy Robinson or The Destroyer... or as the smiling, slighty goofy and awkward mid-card comedy wrestler of his later career. BUT: Baba could (and often did) flat-out brawl with the best of them. From his beginning with the actual JWA in the early 60s until He started phasing imself out of the main event scene in the eraly 1980s, Baba regularly wore the crimson mask in matches with guys like Blassie, Abdullah, and The Sheik... In kayfabe-breaking terms, I want to add a few more bloody brawls and gimmick matches to my cards, from time to time, in order to give myself a broader range of story-telling tools (since I'm telling almost all of my stories in the ring, without promos, skits, or commentary); and I want to allow for the widest variety of visiting gaijin workers. In real world terms, I'm 100 per cent confident in saying that violent, bloody brawls were absolutely a part of the Japanese Pro Wrestling Scene in 1986, and as for the Armchair Booking version of JWA specifically, in purely kayfabe terms : 1) Baba was in fact capable of being a flat-out bloody brawler himself. Guys like Ueda were primarily brawlers, and even respected technicians like Fujinami could bleed a gusher from time to time. My roster is loaded with guys who can work this kind of match and work it well. 2) As mentioned above, Onita didn't start up FMW until 1989... but probably what inspired him to go in that direction after recovering from his injury was his participation in the insane 1981 version of the Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl, which was fought between Ricky Morton & Eddie Gilbert and Atsushi Onita and... ... ...MASA FUCHI!!! (Masa Fuchi is a member of the kayfabe JWA roster). In his excellent post in the General Chatter thread, dawho5 said: gordi You have a great grasp of the Japanese scene at the time. I like how you put Tenryu above Jumbo. It shows you are willing to upset the apple cart as it were and rebuild it a different way. I also like how you use that idea in the kind of matches you present. As JWA it makes sense that you can do these things. No major competition. Your detailed show write-ups really capture the way a match goes without killing any enjoyment, which is a hard thing to do. I look at your booking as something like Abby becoming best buddies with Baba and getting in his ear about the kind of matches he ran. ...and that was precisely my thought process when I decided to go with a bloody brawl while Cactus Jack was in town. Except... not so much Abby getting in Baba's ear, but Fuchi dawho5 made another excellent point when he mentioned JWA has no major competition. I think that gives "us" freedom to take risks, and also maybe gives us more power where negotiating with the TV networks is concerned. . I think part of the reason we see a lot less blood in AJPW and NJPW from the late 80s onward might have been the need to appease the TV networks. I know that Tokyo Broadcasting Systems banned Cage Matches from TV in the 70s after some of Rusher Kimura's fights became too violent. Who knows, though... worst case scenario, I just keep the bloodbatchs as arena-only matches and don't show them on TV. dawho also mentions being willing to upset the apple cart as it were and rebuild it a different way. This is absolutely essential to me. If I wanna read about what actually happened in AJPW and NJPW in 1986, i totally can. Armchair booking is way, way more fun for me if I can move away from that (while respecting certain aspects of it, like hierarchical booking and the slow advancement of rookies an so on). Anyway, no offense intended to anyone who disagrees. I love getting feedback, whether positive or negative and everyone absolutely has the right to disagree with what I am doing and to tell me about it. But I feel like I have ample justification in both kayfabe and real world terms for using more blood and more gimmick matches (Cage matches and Texas Death matches and the like... not exploding barbed wire or cactus and scorpion type stuff) and I wanted to let everyone know that I actually put a fair bit of thought into booking that match.

Well... it's true that Onita didn't start up FMW until 1989... but... No offense to you fine gentlemen or to anyone who might have agreed with you, but thinking that hardcore wrestling didn't come to Japan until '89 is a little like believing that Stephanie McMahon invented women's wrestling or that nobody ever slammed Andre the Giant until Hulk Hogan did it at WMIII. The story of Pro Wrestling in Japan begins as the story of Rikidozan. Among the key matches that made Rikidozan into an icon, the matches that made Puroresu a true phenomenon in Japan, were a pair of blood-baths fought way back in 1962, vs Freddie Blassie. One in America, where Rikidozan beat Blassie for the WWA Title in the Olympic Auditorium, and a rematch in Japan (in the actual JWA) a month later. Blassie used to file his teeth into points and draw blood by biting his opponents. He was known and feared in japan as a wrestling vampire. The legend is that three people had heart attacks and died while watching the Rikidozan vs Blassie match on a TV that had been set up in a public space in Tokyo. From Rikidozan vs Blassie in the 60s, through the legendary Funks vs Sheik and Abdullah series in the 1970s, through that unforgettable Dump vs Chigusa Hair match in '85, blood-bath matches have a long and honorable tradition at the top of the cards and among the greatest matches in puroresu history. And it wasn't just an occasional Main Event Spectacle, either. Umanosuke Ueda (who is a member of "my" JWA roster) had a long-running tag team with Tiger Jeet Singh They carried (respectively) a kendo stick and a sword to the ring, and brutalized opponents. From the late 70s throught he mid-80s they rarely lost except by DQ. Though they are pretty much neglected by western Puroresu fans, the team were a a major factor in the roster-raiding wars between New Japan and All Japan, and the first team to win tag team titles in both New Japan Pro-Wrestling (the NWA North American Tag Team Championship) and All Japan Pro Wrestling (the NWA International Tag Team Championship). Ueda's whole deal was weapons and blood. The pic is from an '85 singles match vs. Killer Khan. And this one is from an '85 singles match between Singh and Choshu: So from the top of the card on down, and including several guys on my kayfabe JWA roster, there is a long and undeniable tradition of hardcore/bloodbath type matches in Japan from the 60s right up until our kayfabe timeline of 1986.... So, why might the No DQ First Blood Elimination match understandably feel out of place in our kayfabe JWA???