Jump to content
Pro Wrestling Only

Childs

Moderators
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    5001

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Childs

  1. Childs
    Best match between these guys to date. As you'd expect, they kept it simple, but even the most basic stuff felt violent and fiercely contested. Choshu delivered another great comeback. It came off as a testament to Hash that Riki had to use the slightly dirty closed fists to seize the advantage. And the lariats into nearfall into huge final lariat on a running Hash made for a great finishing sequence. If Liger-Benoit featured a style I don't love well executed, this was a style I do love well executed. Big picture, the two-week stretch that started with the 10/19/90 AJ six-man was about as strong a burst of wrestling as we've gotten on any yearbook -- something excellent from just about every style.
  2. Childs
    Don't have a lot to add. I don't think this is quite my NJ MOTY, but they delivered balls-to-the-wall action with everyone looking great. The crowd's response really testified to how hard they worked. Sasaki was probably the biggest surprise. I think of him as more hit than miss for most of the '90s, but here he delivered big-time as a high-energy power wrestler. This vs. the 9/30/90 tag is an interesting comparison, because that one had more developed role playing but this one generated more heat and offered a more satisfying finish. I probably rate the AJ match a hair better, but that might be biased by my greater long-term interest in those four wrestlers.
  3. Childs
    I liked this better than the August match because they didn't go through the motions with a bunch of opening matwork. The soul of this particular rivalry was "Look at what we can do!" not "Watch us fight!" And in that spirit they really hit their shit. I also liked Liger's feisty little flurries of palm strikes, which he used to stave off Benoit a few times. Not my favorite type of wrestling at the moment, but very well done.
  4. Childs
    Another terrific match from this feud, with an interesting finish that made great use of the no-DQ stip. I didn't like it quite as much as the other two matches, because it didn't feel quite as wild. But man, that was hell of a bump Lynn took to set up the finishing stretch. And kudos to them for having the courage of their convictions in seeing it through.
  5. Childs
    Tough match to rate. There were moments, and not just in the third fall, where they looked out of position and uncertain what to do next. But both teams also pushed themselves to do things they wouldn't normally attempt. I loved some of the cat-and-mouse stuff with the Rockers and Neidhart, and the Hart Foundation went for some double teams that I don't recall as standard for them. I also liked the way each of the first two falls felt like mini-matches with their own ebbs and flows. Overall, I can't reconcile the bad stuff enough to call this a great match. But it was very interesting, unlike any other WWF match I can remember.
  6. Childs
    It was a little weird that Doom suddenly took on the role of powerhouse bayfaces. But the crowd responded OK to it, in part because the work from both teams was solid. Simmons was really good here, with Arn and Flair helping to make his offense look big and impactful. Actually, Arn and Flair worked a heck of a match in general, selling that they were overwhelmed by Doom's power early but gradually taking control with cheapshots and cutoffs. I never think of Flair as a tag wrestler, but matches like this suggest he would have done it as well as Arn or Tully if that was his role. Havoc '90 was quite a night for tag team wrestling, with three excellent matches that were all a little different.
  7. Childs
    Wow, two excellent Steiners matches from the same month! Again, the key was that they fit their shit into a fairly traditional babyface tag performance, with Scott playing a surprisingly effective face-in-peril. It helped that the Nasties were big dudes who didn't mind stiffing the hell out of the Steiners. Overall, a great blend of structure and recklessness.
  8. Childs
    Yeah, Rich really didn't do much of anything. This was basically Morton vs. MX and Cornette, with everyone playing their classic roles. The range of offense Eaton unleashed was pretty amazing, though he did appear to come up pretty short on a Savage-style axehandle to the floor. The rocket launcher to the ramp looked pretty sick. Morton was Morton. What can you say? He and Eaton were the best ever at their respective tag-team roles. It's a rivalry that deserves to be remembered with Flair-Steamboat, Misawa-Kawada, etc.
  9. Childs
    Finally back to watching wrestling after a few weeks of Super Bowl madness and what a way to dive in! These were probably the two best wrestlers in the world in 1990, and when they finally hooked up, they didn't disappoint. This is how brawling should look -- punches to the back of the neck, biting an opponent's fingers during a wristlock, copious blood, no space to breathe. I liked that the first two falls were decided by Satanico's cheating. It really locked him in as the rudo after a year of them both playing tweeners to some degree. And as Loss mentioned, these guys were so damn good that they interspersed some beautiful wrestling with the brawling. This was awesome without feeling definitive, which is what you want with a caballera contra caballera on the way. I had never quite gotten the GOAT praise for Satanico -- thought he was a very good older wrestler with a few brilliant performances from the '80s and a largely undocumented peak. After watching his 1990, though, I can see why he inspires such devotion. That just makes it all the more maddening that we have so little of his '80s stuff.
  10. Childs
    Nogami was a fun part of the 1989 stuff on the NJ DVDVR set. He was very much willing to die for your entertainment.
  11. Childs
    Most of the show made sense on paper, but none of it really excited me as a viewer. I agree with those who've said the Rumble match was well-worked, but I kept waiting for a wow moment in the last 10 entries and it just never came. Given the last five, I assumed Cena would win, and they did nothing to unsettle my expectations for even a moment. I'm fine with Cena-Rock II at 'Mania, but I'm not so excited about it that I wanted it to become a fait accompli with two months to go. I was into the body of the main event, even though Rock looked pretty shitty at points. But the execution of the finishing stretch didn't pop. For one, I wish they hadn't built the booking around Vince's anti-Shield proclamation. Just let Rock find a way to fight off the Shield. And then, after months of promos about Punk's pride in his reign, he went out like a lamb to a shitty spinebuster and that fucking elbow. At least let the man show some desperation to hold onto a belt that has validated his career. None of what they did was wildly illogical. But it sure as shit didn't feel special.
  12. Childs
    I felt bad for them, having to follow Fujiwara-Takada. But this was really good as well. Basically, Maeda had to weather the storm against Funaki's hand speed and activity level until he could find some ways to grind the young man down. And it worked, because Funaki's athleticism really was impressive. The last 1/3 of the match dragged a little compared to the opening. I would've liked to see them go to their feet a few more times to keep Funaki feeling dangerous. But it was still one of the promotion's best matches of the year.
  13. Childs
    This was a staggeringly great match. I'll talk about Fujiwara in a sec, but Takada was sensational here -- a focused, stalking badass with a variety of great strikes. And the one time Takada dropped down for his leglock of doom, Fujiwara goosed him through it by selling and then essentially inviting Takada to kick him in the face. Which leads me to Fujiwara's masterful performance. I think this is about as good as a wrestler can be. He did a great job establishing his strategy of luring Takada into corners and countering. His strikes, not just with the head but with the hands and feet, were as good as I've seen them. His selling, from the taunting grins to the way he let his body droop when Takada landed a particularly big blow, was remarkable. I just can't imagine a wrestler doing anything more, on macro or micro scale, to put over a match. Pete, I have no idea what boring middle you were watching, because I didn't see it here. Top 5 for the year.
  14. Childs
    Just to be clear OJ, I wasn't saying Kareem should be considered the greatest because of his longevity. I was saying it would be weird to discount his long run of post-peak excellence when assessing his greatness.
  15. Childs
    I don't think anyone here would argue that Jumbo shouldn't be in the debate because we didn't get to see him work through his decline phase. You just don't get to count in his favor great old-age performances.
  16. Childs
    I would take Flair over Funk and probably over Lawler. I just don't see why Funk's adaptability as an older wrestler should be excluded from the argument. I don't think a guy has to be wrestling at a GOAT level in a given year for it to add to his GOAT case.
  17. Childs
    I thought Ivan was still better than Nikita, despite the 17-year age gap. That missed knee drop off the top was kind of a nutty bump for a middle-aged dude.
  18. Childs
    I don't think the point is that Terry Funk's 1994 should be a leading note in his case for GOAT. I think it's that he had a hell of a year when he was 50 and 30 years into his career. That's not typical and therefore adds mass to his GOAT argument.
  19. Childs
    Count me in the camp that thinks it's bizarre to discount everything a guy does post-peak. It seems to me that finding a way to crank out productive years past your physical prime is absolutely characteristic of the best of the best. It's certainly treated that way in sports. If you're comparing the greatest basketball players, do you just toss out everything Kareem did after 1981? Of course not. The fact that a faded Kareem was able to remain a significant offensive force on elite teams for another five or six years is a testament to how great he really was. Now, if you believe Flair's peak was so much better than Funk's that it wipes out any advantage Funk might have in mid-40s adaptability, that's a fine argument. It's also fine to argue that Flair's best post-peak performances were better than Funk's. But if you concede that Funk had a better post-peak career and refuse to count that as a point to his advantage, I don't get it. And I don't think it's a performance art is different than sports thing. When we talk about Bob Dylan's legacy, it matters that he was able to come back with "Blood on the Tracks" in 1975 and that he was able to put his old man croak to great use on "Love and Theft." I'm not a hardcore film geek, but isn't Scorsese's ability to do vital work in the last 20 years part of the reason he blows away a contemporary like Brian De Palma? I'm totally on the board with the idea that peak matters most, but I'm suspicious of anyone who categorically refuses to look at the whole picture.
  20. Childs
    There was a holy shit sequence in the middle of this where Kawada ducked a huge Jumbo lariat, caught Jumbo coming back with a full-speed spinning kick to the mouth, then tagged Misawa, who flew in to drill Jumbo with an elbow. There was a combo of pace, precision and violence to it that you just don't see very often. Jumbo was awesome throughout. Loved his vicious forearms to Misawa's body, and he looked every bit the ace at the end, pausing to flatten Misawa with a forearm before he power bombed Kobashi. We got more Taue-Kawada hate as well, though it wasn't the ultimate focal point. This match is probably best known for the work on Kobashi's busted nose. It didn't last as long as I remembered, but it did pump up the drama. Overall, they delivered one spectacular moment after another to a nuclear crowd. As much as I loved the two earlier AJPW six-mans, this one deserves its rep as the best of the year.
  21. Childs
    Best Steiners match I've seen in a long time. The MX provided the structure, and the Steiners fit their neato spots into it without screwing anything up. Eaton was fantastic as the guy taking a huge bump off a Steiner power move and then flattening the same Steiner with a clothesline in the next breath. Really impressive pace and crispness to the finishing sequence.
  22. Childs
    This was your classic stick-and-move guy vs. biggest puncher in the division. Takano, who appeared to have borrowed his shorts from Kensuke Sasaki, looked really good in the opening minutes, when he was nailing all of his big moves. I liked the fact that Tenryu's first burst of offense did not signal the end of the match. Takano was too game for that. But Tenryu was going to catch him eventually. The Tenryu tope was awesome and for once, his powerbomb looked like a real killer. Great crowd too. They helped make it feel like a big-time main event. This wasn't a MOTYC, but it was right in the next tier.
  23. Childs
    Orton and Jarrett both looked sensational here. Orton had a lot left in the tank for a guy who was done with his big-time runs. Jarrett hit a gorgeous dropkick mid-match. It did end a bit abruptly once Tenryu caught up to Jarrett.
  24. Childs
    I could see him near the bottom of a U.S. top 25, though I haven't mapped it out. He hit a higher peak than a fair number of guys I'd rank ahead of him, just didn't sustain it.
  25. Childs
    And the superb booking of this tournament continued with the perfect follow-up to Funk's beatdown of Lawler. Idol was rock-solid in executing the double cross and the beatdown, with his history against Lawler echoing loudly. But yeah, Lawler's furious body language during his comeback was a sight to see, the kind of inspired stuff that's only available to the greatest performers. The ending, with him briefly overcoming Idol, Gilbert and Funk, was both a great moment to end the tournament and a perfect set-up for the weeks and months to come. I loved everything about this.
×
×
  • Create New...