jdw

That's a little post-Bock as AWA champ. I was thinking more in terms of the 1986 match that people loved. John

Haven't watched any of them but the 5/93 TC in ages. But it struck me at the time that the 5/93 was far above everything else they did, pretty much the "perfect" match the two could work. The 8/92 sticks in the mind because of the finish and the title change, but the body of the match blurs with all the rest. The 10/93 match sticks in the mind for blowing, which tends to highlight how forgettable that the 3/92 TC is since I don't even remember that one blowing as much as David says it does. They weren't really a good match up. John

Taue got what would have been Jumbo's challenge: 2/93. Jumbo would have gotten the belt back. I've written about it a number of times, including here... probably even in the 1993 thread on the match. John

Yep. Some of that changes of plans / shit happening. Whatever the plans were for the belt at the start of 1990 went out the window when Tenryu left. Gordy's OD caused more issues. We finally got to stability when Jumbo won it in 1/91. We would have gotten another round of stability in 1993 when Jumbo took it off Misawa, and since Jumbo went out it was Misawa who kept it for the long run. It might be seen as a shift in how Baba thought about the belts, but it was more of a return to how the belts were treated prior to the mid-80s / late 80s. John

1990 was a bad business year. WCW was bombing left and right. It's not like 1989 was great business, but at least Flair-Funk did some good house show business. 1990 was a disaster. In the WWF, business was so bad that they cut from their three crews down to two, and went about eliminating slots for workers. The famous Harts vs Rockets title change / not title change? It was done because they were going to let Anvil go as part of the cuts. Instead they kept him and wiped the title change from the books before it aired. Warrior bombed. Hogan took a couple of months off, and also worked a lighter schedule than he had earlier in expansion. As Dylan said, Hogan-Perfect didn't do great business, and my recollection is that the Hogan-Earthquake feud (with Bravo and Tugboat attached) was disappointing around the horn at house shows. The bloom was off the WWF in 1990-96. Business is vastly better now than back in that period. John

Yeah, that was his peak year, and you could argue that between his offensive efficiency and his strong defense, he was a top-5 player in the league. But in addition to Bird and Magic on the rise, you had Moses Malone at the height of his powers, Kareem and Dr. J stil playing at an elite level, and a bunch of great scorers like Gervin, Dantley, Alex English and Bernard King. Then Isiah jumped up, and by 1984-85, you had Jordan. So if Moncrief had a window as a cream-of-the-crop star, it closed quickly. Moncrief was a terrific player from 1981/82 - 1985/86. Consistent, efficient, excellent all around game, off the charts defensive player relative to others since it was an era when no one played defense. Not saying that if you look at the film you'll see him playing Pippen / Jordan / Payton level defense... but relative to what other guards did in the era, he and Cooper were on an entirely different level. In the sense that if Coop and Moncrief came along in the 90s and an era that paid more attention to defense, they would have been a cut above Scottie, MJ and The Glove. If you're putting together a list of the best players over that five year period, the only ones clearly above him would be Moses, Bird and Magic. I suspect there are some basketball-style sabermetrics that might actually put Moncrief ahead of Magic because he was so efficient, but I don't think anyone who watched them would really buy that. After that... Jabbar was still very good but in decline for that period. I love the guy, but Moncrief was probably overall a better player. Zeke came into the league at the start of that period. Different beast of a player, but those Bucks were also a better team in that period. I think I'd go with Moncrief. Doc was declining in that period as well. MJ had his rookie year then was hurt. Gervin wasn't even close: he was just a scorer. If someone wanted to say he was the 4th best player in the NBA over that five year stretch, I wouldn't argue. He was an awfully good player. His teams we good as well, just running into the 76ers and Celtics. An underrated and sadly forgotten. Five years isn't that short of a time, either, to be at that level. What hurts him when people look at his record is that he doesn't have a post-prime of playing 80 games a year scoring say 17-18 points for another four years, before dropping to 13-15 for another 3 years. The injury devastated his career. John

The Korakuen Hall fans in that period picked out some undercard guys to love. See the Momota Mania of the prior year. It's possible that they were high on Kikuchi at that point, and it caused Baba & Co. to add the Kikuchi element to the Jumbo-Misawa feud when the teams were gradually adjusted. Fuchi had teamed a little bit with Jumbo / Jumbo's group in the May/Jun series. He spent far less time in the comedy matches starting with the July series, and was very clearly defined into Jumbo's group. In turn, Kikuchi started regularly team with Misawa's group. So yeah... I'd be interested to see that 6/30 match as well. I'll have to check the Japanese Wrestling Journal. Korakuen Hall show, it's likely he went to it and there may be some notes. John

Put over Kabuki as Jumbo's new partner. The titles bounced around *all* the time back in that period: 1988: unification + 5 additional changes from 6/10 - 12/16 1989: 5 title changes 1990: 1 change already 1991: 4 title changes It didn't calm down until 1992, where there were only 2. In 1990 there probably would have been another one before the Tag League and then another one with the Tag League winner for a total of 4. Best example: 07/11/89 Hansen & Tenryu over Jumbo & Yatsu 07/22/89 Jumbo & Yatsu over Hansen & Tenryu Hansen & Tenryu were the new super team, and they got 11 days with the belt. John

Two possible reasons: * Sting wasn't 100% He did come back sooner than expected after the initial injury report. * the show had time constraints There use to be major issues if you went past your 3 hour window. I think we all remember the show where Hogan/Warrior and Goldberg/Page had that issue, and that was years later when WCW was doing major PPV business. Back in 1990 it would have been very costly. The show had 11 matches on it. That's a lot of ring entrances and exists in addition to the matches themselves. Vader's match may look like a squash, but he had that long entrance if I recall correctly. It would be interesting if someone had the original live unedited broadcast to see how close they were to 2:45:00 to 2:50:00 when they went off the air. Given they wanted Sting to have a post match speech, I don't know if they had another 15 minutes they could have given to match time. My guess is that it's a little bit of both.

I like Sting better than some people I helped put in the HOF. The case is the problem. Hell, I liked Hase better than a lot of people in the HOF. But I argued *against* his inclusion, and think he got in because a bunch of voters were flat out wrong in their giving him credit for various things. John

Mine have changed too. I didn't like Backlund in 1996. John

Because those were two extremes: they either pissed people off, or they liked them. At the time, I thought Dylan's pimping of Fujinami-DK got traction. That may have played to me since I always thought TM-DK was overrated relative to TM-Kobayashi, even as I was forced to reference TM-DK at times in things I wrote simply because it was an analogy that hardcores got and it would take to long to explain TM-Kobayashi to them. Anyway, I don't think it was a small or short discussion on Fujinami-DK, nor that it was something Dylan brought up only once: it struck me that he went to the well on it a few times, and expressed Fujinami > TM... which of course worked for me as well. John

Kind of what I was saying and kind of not. There are levels of availability. You, tape trader, man in the loop, show-goer, acquaintance of Konnan, were monastery trained. I, on the other hand, can watch a million billion hours of wrestling on YOUTUBE and DAILYMOTION right now. And if I wanted to. I could buy a WHOLE SEASON of something for pennies compared to what it probably would have cost me 20 years ago. With a whole lot less effort. Which is something I covered in my piece. But here's the thing: You can buy the whole seasons of AJPW 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 on disc or download them on the cheap. I happened to watch them... back in 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996. I wasn't the only one. Same goes for people getting season sets of Raw 1997 now, 15 years after the fact, and being 22 years old thinking they're seeing some great discovery. Lots of us watched the shit on our TV at the time. So my point: Half true. Access is easy and cheap now. It allows one to easily get a mass of shit to watch. But lets not underestimate how much people in the past watched. And that if they watched a crapload at the time, how much on the margin the "new discoveries" are to them. I just did a post over in the 1990 Yearbook about a match that I haven't seen. Don't know if Ditch has, but from his writing on a match 10 days later in the same building, it appears that he hasn't either. I watched all the TV from that year, but it's a non-TV match that's been out there for years. There's a strong chance that it's a real cool match. But its addition to an understanding and enjoyment of 90s AJPW? Marginal: * we know Kikuchi got over with AJPW fans in that period * we know his rivalry with Fuchi was cool * we know he played a cool role in the Jumbo & Co. vs Misawa & Co feud * we know he was a pretty fun worker There's probably not a lot the match can tell us that we don't know, other than adding another cool match to the body of work, and getting to see as close to the front end of some things as we probably can get. I'd like to see the match now. But if I don't get around to watching it for three years, it's not going impact what I think and/or know about AJPW in the 90s. John

We had this discussion in another thread. Short version: I'm pretty sure that Dylan specifically has been pushing Fujinami since the Fujinami-DK match came out and he liked it way more than the overrated DK-TM matches. That pushing goes back to the old A1 Wrestling board... which was a hell of a long time again. While I would agree that Fujinami generally wasn't pushed much by hardcores in the 90s, it's largely because he wasn't doing a whole lot of interesting stuff in the 90s (other than bleeding all over Tenryu out of his nose... which was certainly talked about! ). On Choshu, he certainly was talked about in the 90s. I did. I put over Jumbo & Tenryu vs Choshu & Yatsu since the day I got online. I talked about Choshu-Fujinami. I put over Choshu-Hash in the 11/01/91 card even while most people wanted to talk about the other two title matches on the card. Of course I put over their match at the 1996 G1: I was there, and pimped the living fuck out of it. I could go look up when Frank put together his Choshu's Army tapes... my guess is the first half of the 00's. He wrote his Gordy List for Ishingundan in 2003, and two supplemental pieces in 2005. I'm a broken record on this, but if Frank and/or I am to be blamed for have the puroresu-think that's out there ("Can we say Taue sucked in 1994?"), then perhaps a little credit should be dished out for keeping Choshu pimping alive online in the 90s and 00s. Granted, it wasn't as thrilling as what people reading into my Flair comments or Kobashi comments over the years. John

Kikuchi has been in the main event of the special 6/30/90 Korakuen Hall card that Kawada-Kobashi was the semifinal of: Jumbo & Kabuki & Fuchi vs Misawa & Taue & Kikuchi I haven't seen it, but it's out there on the lists for the Kawada-Kobashi match: http://www.purocentralshop.com/index.php?a...mp;productId=91 Also saw it listed on Dynamic A's comp of the Jumbo & Co. vs Misawa & Co feud. Korakuen Hall, a lot of the same people go to the shows, they were the hardest of the hardcores. My guess is that they had their spots in that match which got Kikuchi over to the hardcores for when they came back 10 days later. Might want to check it out and see if it's worth adding to your archive, Ditch. While not really a major missing link, it's an opening to Kikuchi's part of it. John

There are a lot on youtube, and probably popping up all the time as the WWE wipes them off. Anyway, he's one of the match in one piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezCOTh6a2Jc Haven't watched it in ages, but recall it was pretty decent. Lex in 1990 through roughly the 5/91 match with the Steiners was pretty damn solid. He might actually have been pretty decent as the heel champ after the 91 Bash, but people were so annoyed by the Flair stuff that they didn't give him a fair shake. But maybe the matches with Simmons and Steiner aren't so bad in hindsight. We usually only think of Lex as being solid in 1989, but he might have had close to a three year run where he was decent against a wide variety of opponents. John

The last time I saw this was at one of our King of Chickens... Could swear that I wrote something about it, but can't find it. Anyway, at the time I thought along the lines of "There a lot of great / cool / nifty stuff in here, but it's lacking somethings." I can't remember if I thought it was a little too My Turn, Your Turn down the stretch relative to other, better MX matches. Or if the finishing run got a little clustery. Or if the "Southern Tag Tweak" that Childs talks about felt a little "WWF Tag Style" for my liking. But I'd seen a few MX-R'n'R and MX-Fans matches not long before the rewatch of this... and it just didn't feel like a ****3/4 Tag Match of the Decade classics. Which was really odd: I loved the match at the time, enjoy pretty much any MX match that I've rewatched over the past decade, and really was looking forward to rewatching this for the first time in years. Instead, it didn't reach my high expectations. A contrast: I did rate the MX-Fans match from Clash 1 "live" as highly as I did this "live" in 1988 and 1990 respectively. But *every* time I've rewatched that MX-Fans match in the past dozen years, I continue to be blown away how "on" all six were, how despite being given a relatively small amount of time to work with and the need to fit in the Big Spots they still fit within it a "match" really well. Every time I watch it, I little give the remote a workout to go backwards and re-watch / point out a detail in it that's just off the "action" to see / show how the six are working tightly together. I didn't have that the last time I watched the MX-SB. John

I'm glad this made it. The two would play their own nifty roles in the Jumbo & Co. vs Misawa & Co. feud that it's nice to see the perspective of their rivalry starting up at the same time Jumbo-Misawa was. So much of Fuchi's unending run with the Jr. Title felt like Kikuchi's chase of the belt that is was sad that his 5th challenge ended up with him getting clobbered rather than winning. John

Here's the thing: The majority of WON readers thought the majority of WWF product in the 80s was boring. The AWA wasn't alone, at least in terms of hardcore fans. In turn, I suspect that a majority of 80s JCP "non-hardcore" fans thought that the WWF was boring as well, since they were JCP fans and you tend to like what you like and hate the enemy. Lots of people thought the AWA was boring in 1986-87. The reality is that *few* fans didn't, given their attendance tanking and the WWF frankly eating up their entire territory for good by that point. :/ So... it's really nothing to get bent about. That we can find 30-50 AWA matches from 1986-87 and say, "Hey... these are good / watchable / damn fine matches" is cool. Same for the WWF. John

It's half true. If we're talking about the 80s, Meltzer and other tape traders / sellers / collectors would have seen (if they so desired): * every weekly WWF TV show * every WWF MSG / Philly / Boston / Los Angeles show that was taped * all of the WWF home releases * all of the WWF PPVs * all of the SNME * the WWF house shows that came to their towns * every weekly JCP show * special stuff that leaked out like Starcade '86 * JCP/WCW ppvs * all of the specials * any JCP stuff that aired in Japan * any JCP show that was in their town and/or they traveled to * Watts tv * special stuff that leaked out of Wattsville * AWA TV * Florida TV * Memphis TV * Georgia TV * Portland TV * etc US promotions that they wanted to watch * weekly NJPW TV * weekly AJPW TV * AJW TV * UWF 1.0 stuff that got commercial release * UWF 2.0 stuff that got released I'm sure there's other stuff that I'm missing... but the point: There was a shitload of stuff available in the 80s. What's available to us not from that period is somewhat on the margins. Not insignificant, but a small % of what is currently available from the 80s. 10%? 5%? Not more than 10%, and it would be hard to say it's above 5%. For some promotions it's more. Watts house show stuff, for example. But for some promotions it's less. We may go bonkers for the 2/87 Macho-Steamer from Toronto as a "hidden gem", but considering the MSG, Philly and Boston shows for 1987 were pretty much all available in 1987, the sum total of matches added by all the 1987 Toronto shows that are now available along with all of the 1987 Houston shows that are now available (neither of which seemed to be in circulation in 1987), that adds what %? There were 32 cards in the usual arenas. It looks like 16 in Toronto, not close to all of them have been made available. There were 9 shows in Houston, again not close to all of them have been made available. But it's a worse % than that: a staggering number of matches from those Toronto and Houston tapings made it onto Primetime. Take just this card: 11 Matches 6 on Primetime 1 on CHV release 4 on neither Or this one from Toronto: 8 Matches 5 on Primetime 3 not on Primetime The next Toronto card had 7 of 9 on Primetime. I sincerely doubt we've added 5% to the total number of matches available in the 80s for the WWF. Granted, some of the stuff that didn't make it is the stuff we wanted to see: Steamer-Savage / Hogan-Ted. But with a lot of those matches, there were versions in other cities. There were lots of Steamer-Savage matches available in 1986/87. Same goes for other things that have popped up. But... I think we can overplay it a bit. What we do have is a good number of people going back and watching stuff in mass, often over the course of a relatively short time period (as opposed to watching all of 1986-89 JCP over the course of, you know... 1986-89 like we did back in the day). They're either looking at it with fresh eyes (having not seen it before), or with generally open minds (as much as that possible, but admittedly we all bring stuff to the table in that respect). As we talked about with other promotions, a lot of what people with "revisionist eyes" happen to like is exactly what people liked back then (Choshu, Fujinami, Tenryu, Jumbo) so it's not exactly a revision, revolution or revelation. In turn, there are some folks that didn't get much run at the time (Fujiwara) that have now... or got run then and are now slagged (Tigeryama). It is far easier to access now. But I think people underestimate the obsessive nature of the biggest collectors back them. Yohe wasn't a trader/seller, but he has a house and garage full of tapes he got from people like Lynch, Frielander and Munari. I don't even want to think of how much puroresu that Zavisa had back in the day when it was all on tape... but it was truly insane amounts. And again, collection on the margin adds... margins. Such as... 2/87 Steamer-Savage in Toronto is one of the best WWF matches of the decade, and adds a missing component to the feud. But: * we knew Steamer-Savage was one of the great feuds of the decade * we had other matches between them that were top flight * we had one other WWF MOTD candidate (setting aside arguments about the Mania match) * we knew Steamer was a great worker * we knew Savage was a great worker I'm thankful that the 2/87 match is out there now. Fab match. But it adds to the margins of the big picture of the WWF in the 80s. Not sure all of that is clear since it's a long response. My point is that the comment is "half true", and we can tend to make more out of what we're doing than really is there. John

Cool. I try to poke him a bit. I'll also see if I can dig up some match lists. John

A Comprehensive Breakdown Of The Katie Vick Saga One also needs to remember: 08/25/02 PPV: Rock puts Brock over for the Unified Title 09/02/02 Raw: Trip cuts Brock's legs off by awarding himself Big Goldie / Brock shipped off to the less important SmackDown 09/22/02 PPV: Trip cuts off RVD's legs by pinning him on PPV 10/20/02 PPV: Trip over Kane to grab the IC Title as well In less than a month, Trip fucks over Brock and RVD before... going into a feud with freaking Kane. And then... wait for it... 11/17/02 PPV: Trip puts over Shawn for Big Goldie 12/15/02 PPV: Shawn puts over Trip for Big Goldie And then work a two match series of PPV main events with his bestest buddy. I'd forgotten all the important reasons to get half the belt off of Brock right after Hogan & Rock "made" him, give that half to Trip along with the top slot on the top TV show in the promotion. Oh... wait... this would go into a different thread: "That Douchebag Triple H' John

I could have done without a Trip vs Kane feud, regardless of whether there was a dead woman in it or not. John

I liked his match banging the dead chick. Oh... wait... that was Triple H and I hated it. John

That said, neither Kane nor Demo ever did anything for me. John