jdw

Double ugh.

Does anyone else find it bizarre that throw away news items like "Kenta Kobashi's final match announced" are password protected over at WO.com? John

Ugh.

Not everyone. There were two groups that like him: * Paid Whore Shills Mostly RYDER & Co. over at WCW.com, but there were others sucking on the WCW Teet that supported Russo and Russo's Bullshit. * Russo Fanboys I swear to god... there were some of those guys around. They were even Russo Fanboys after WCW failed and died, and Russo continued to suck in his post-WCW Life. Those guys would have an explanation for why the ratings were Really Great under Russo, how he turned things around, and how he was held back / cut off by [Kevin Sullivan / Standards & Practice / Various Members of WCW Management / Etc / Etc / Etc]. If you think the threads here between me and Jerry were banging your head against the wall, they were NOTHING compared to WCW Fanboys vs Thinking Hardcore Wrestling Fans. Dumb as fucking rocks... and would take forever to drive away. John

Thank you !!!! Nash is killing me !!! Wait until you get to make fun of Russo later in the year! John

Hot moves are just another form of action. John

Shawn wasn't "hot moves", anymore than Flair was. They brought something that appealed to Dave that was different from Liger or Kobashi busting out the cool moves. John

Exactly... no joke beyond Harley dropped into different events in history... John

June 1990. We all thought with the Warriors in, and Demo switched to heels in the Demo vs Harts vs Rockers feud, that the Warriors would get the title at Summer Slam. Instead... Harts got it. Demo got switched over to a Demo vs Warrior + LOD feud that kind of went nowhere... Harts stuck around with the Rockers, with the Rockers winning / not winning the titles. 1990 was kind of a messy year for WWF booking. John

Here's what we had earlier in the thread on the Misawa Akiyama vs Hayabusa Shinzaki match: Dan should have them per the CM posts. John

Barbarian's push peaked when POP chased Demo for the Tag Titles. That went bust, and after that their push was kind of running in circles in the tag division, before getting a running in circles push as a singles. It wasn't exactly like he/they were getting a push like Bossman was. In turn, Bret got a push against Demo... and beat them for the tag titles. Bret (and the Foundation) were so over as faces in the three-way (Demo vs Rockers vs Harts) that they had to turn Demo... which I don't think was the original plan. The promotion was always pushing Bret (and the Foundation) and giving him stuff to do. Maybe it was clearer from having watched back to 1986, and being 25 in 1991 rather than 9. Not a knock, but looking at it from different POV's. John

Beats me. I knew it was a work, and Bret was getting a singles push. It was clear that he wasn't going to job that feud with Barbarian. I suspect that a good share of the crowd didn't think Bret was going to lose, or there would have been a Backlund over Patera style pop when he simply "survived" against the Barbarian. :/

I didn't say that Bret-Barbarian in went around the horn in 1990. I just said that Bret beat him in singles in late 1990, which kind of shows where they were on the totem pole: Bret was higher. I pointed to the earlier around the horn ones to try to get across that the notion that, prior to coming out of Mania in 1991, Bret was a Tag Team Guy Only is a problematic notion. I certainly didn't think it at the time. A tag team specialist? Sure. Long standing partnership with Anvil. Sure. But he also struck me as the WWF equiv of Arn Anderson: loads of tag work from 1986 - 4/90, famous team(s), but you also ran into him working singles on house shows and TV which weren't all related to his tag feuds. John

Good piece. John

Bret was higher than Barbarian. They got thrown together for a few matches the prior November, and Bret won them all. There's an MSG match where Barbarian barely got to go 4 minutes with Bret before getting pinned. He got wins over Tito (Mania and a series in the Fall), Snuka (long unending series through August then occasional matches after that), Garvin (short series after Snuka), Dustin (Dec before he left), wins here and there against the likes of Hercules and Brunzell, then a series with Saba Simba in January. Couple of Sam Houston, and Koko was his primary leading into Mania. Others on that level. He lost around the horn to Bossman, kind of blown off at the Rumble. Some losses in there to Duggan mixed in. Some others like Tugboat. Of course the Bret ones in November. The thing is... Bret had been working singles for quite some time. There was the Bad News Allen feud from April-July 1988. Bret-Perfect was paired from after Mania V through 9/89, with the blow off looking like the 10/02/89 match that aired on Prime Time. Bad News pops up again in Sep-Oct 1989, even into January 1990. Almost all of the end of 1989 through Mania VI was as a singles. Some of it tied into tag feuds (Bravo, Valentine and HTM) where he was split from Anvil to work singles, but there also was a lot of random stuff tossed out there it looks like they preferred to have Bret work as a singles. If one was a fan of work in the era, he felt like a massive step down from the Bret-Perfect series the year before. Granted, revisionist work theory is that Barbarian could go, and admittedly Pefect does extremely little for me when re-watching his WWF work from 1988-91. But as a work fan of the era... Bret-Barbarian wouldn't get me to buy a ticket, while Perfect-Bret is something that would interest me. Barbarian is "kinda acceptable" in a spinning their wheels kind of way, just filling time until Bret hooked up with Perfect for the IC Title. But it was a modest push, and modest feud, rather than getting him hot leading into something with Perfect. On the other hand, he'd been in the WWF for ages. Fans had seen him win the Tag Titles. Fans had seen him in singles, against bigger guys than Perfect (Savage). So he might not have needed a ton. After he had the belt, neither of them were viable as IC Challengers. That was just filling time until the figured out the Mountie was the right feud. It's strange it took them a month or so to figure that out. John

It appears that MKJ was reporting it as blood clot related. John

http://www.f4wonline.com/more/more-top-sto...te-on-ric-flair

That after Shawn & Ladder vs Razor. I like that match a good deal. I'm also more critical in my thinking about Flair than most, and certainly far more than Dave ever has been. But... um... John

On the rest: That appears to be the only source. It took up the entire show. I think the match date is 11/23/97. 6:30 appears on this: DVD #23 (of the NTV Satalite / Samurai set) AJ on NTV January 98 (t. 11-12/97) 97 RWTL 12/5 Kawada/Taue vs. Ace/Kobashi (t. 11/27) 5:36 of 30:00 Misawa/Akiyama vs. Shinzaki/Hayabusa (t. 11/27) 6:30 of 12:34 Misawa/Akiyama vs. Kawada/Taue (t. 12/5) 3052 complete I don't recall if the full version ever came out on commercial. Probably pretty similar to what aired on AJ 30. Might have Will analyze it to see if there's any extra that can be spliced from one onto another... but that's a pain in the ass. That appears to be it. Only other option that I could think of is if any of the matches appeared on either of the Kobashi or Misawa marathons. I don't have the match lists for either of those. John

The first set of questions, all the disk are referenced from Dan's 1997 sets: http://www.crazymax.org/index.php?showtopic=53387 * Toshiaki Kawada, Akira Taue & Takao Omori vs. Kenta Kobashi, Johnny Ace & The Patriot (AJPW 05/18/97) DVD #6 (of the AJ 30 set) All Japan 30 on Nippon Tv 5/25/97 (taped 5/18 Tokyo) Ogawa/Shiga vs. Sabu/Rob Van Dam Kenta Kobashi/Johnny Ace/Patriot vs Toshiaki Kawada/Akira Taue/Takao Omori DVD #8 (of the NTV Satalite / Samurai set) AJ on NTV Satalite 6/20/97 (t. 5/18) 1. Kikuchi vs. Asako 2. Sabu/Rob Van Dam vs. Ogawa/Shiga 3. Allbright/Duncum Jr. vs. Kimala II/Honda 4. Williams/Lacrosse vs. Misawa 6/27/97 (t. 5/18) 1. Richard Slinger vs. Kanemaru 2. Baba/Kimura/Momota/Daisuke Ikeda vs. Fuchi/Eigen/Masao Inoue 3. Kobashi/Ace/Patriot vs. Kawada/Taue/Omori The second one would likely be the more complete, if not full, version. I have it, but haven't watched it. * Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Jun Akiyama (AJPW 05/27/97) DVD #7 (of the AJ 30 set) All Japan on Nippon Tv 6/22/97 (taped 6/6 Tokyo) Hayabusa/Jun Akiyama vs Takao Omori/Kentaro Shiga (taped 5/27 Sapporo) Mitsuharu Misawa vs Jun Akiyama Appears to only be available in the AJ 30 version. That's too bad since it shares that program with another match. Might check with Ditch to see if he's ever run across a full version, perhaps on commercial tape. * Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (AJPW 11/28/97) DVD #22 (of the NTV Satalite / Samurai set) AJ on Samurai TV 1/31/98 (t. 11/28) 1. Kikuchi vs. Masao Inoue 2. Smith/Hawkfield vs. Honda/Omori 3. Kawada/Taue vs. Misawa/Akiyama John

Bret sort of split with Anvil after Mania. Handful of matches, but Bret largely did singles. His first series around the horn was largely one with Barbarian while Perfect went around with Davey up to his injury. They had a few singles matches here and there... one gets the sense that they knew that's where they wanted to go: Bret-Hennig ar SummerSlam. They avoided starting the series before SummerSlam as well other than those handful of matches, so you also get the sense that the plan was for their primary series to be after Slam going around the horn. Warlord stepped into the challenger spot... poor Bret. He didn't get his first real feud until October with the Mountie. Bizzare in hindsight that it took them so long to come up with something. John

Getting TV and seeing squashes isn't really the same thing as going to matches and seeing guys actually work. When Dave talks about the wrestling he watched as a kid, and the stuff he thought was great, it draw on San Fran stuff, and to a bit lesser degree Florida stuff as I seem to recall he had family there that he would summer with on occasion. Don't recall if he ever actually went to the matches there. Frisco... he went to the Cow Palace as a kid.

Cool juniors style match. Rudge's early "filling space" stuff (headlock, work the leg/knee, work the gut/back) had nothing to do with working towards a finish, but fills the body of the match with cool holds. Regal blows it off for his two big comebacks, whipping out all the cool flashy stuff without a sign of any of the prior damage and instead does stuff that might be the finish. The actual finish doesn't have anything to do with the earlier knee/legwork, as Regal is perfectly fine running around the ring until getting pitched over and then "injuring" the leg. Which is kind of a cool babyface injury spot. Rudge takes advantage of it, we get a finish that wham-bam but at least is a cool submission. Fun stuff. John

Dave's a NoCal native. He grew up watching Shire's promotion, not the LA promotion. Also, his time of getting into pro wrestling would predate Piper coming to LA. John