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Childs

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Everything posted by Childs

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. Childs
    This tournament illustrates perfectly how great Funk could be without having a single great match. Those punches on the outside made me cringe, with Lawler doing a great job of selling them with little facial expressions and verbal cues. A lot of guys suck at talking at talking during matches, but Funk's pig monologue absolutely added to his unhinged act. I also loved Lawler instinctively fighting back at the end, even with Gilbert counting the falls. This and the Brickhouse Brown match were master-class Terry Funk. I can't imagine giving any other wrestler a script with the same settings and the same motions and getting this level of performance.
  16. Childs
    This actually made me want to see a full match between them, with a real finish. Taker was pretty good as a heavy-handed, green big man. And Lawler's comeback, though abbreviated, was great as always. It's a total cliche to say it, but no one in wrestling history punched like the King.
  17. Childs
    Man, Kobashi was kind of a badass here. That lariat to knock Jumbo off the apron was something else. I actually think Jumbo was really good in general against guys who had no chance to beat him. He had a way of being generous while putting the match away decisively enough to uphold the hierarchy. It's one of his stronger points.
  18. Childs
    I fell asleep during this portion of the disc and had a very strange mini-dream in which someone with the Black Scorpion's voice stalked me in a parking garage. As with the program, the dream offered very little payoff. Seriously, what an emascualting storyline to throw on your new champion.
  19. Childs
    I have loved this match from the first time I saw it, and that didn't change this time -- which is saying something, because my patience for long draws ain't what it used to be. You guys have pretty much nailed the particulars of what made it good. This was both Taue's first world-class performance and the first significant chapter in his great, underrated rivalry with Kawada. And there was very little unfocused or heatless work for a match this long. Top 10 for the year.
  20. Childs
    This is more evidence that Bobby Eaton was the best worker in WCW in 1990. You can't do much better than lining him up with Flair and Arn against the same limited opponent on the same weekend. Those guys both had good matches against Steiner. But Eaton was more impressive, both with his own offense and with putting Steiner over.
  21. Childs
    I watched this with the Kobashi/Tiger Mask and Kobashi/Kawada singles matches firmly in mind. And what struck me was how, only a few months later, all three were so much closer to the guys we remember from the '90s as a whole. That's not to say they were all there. But there was an evolutionary leap over the course of this year, for Misawa and Kawada especially. Overall, a very exciting second-tier match that would've stood out more during the promotion's fallow period early in the year.
  22. Childs
    I was more excited with this as a listing than with the reality of it. Good match but very much roll-out-of-bed stuff for these two.
  23. Childs
    Windham was probably my favorite wrestler for a time when I was a kid, so I'll always be biased. He was in the main event of the first WWF show I went to (six-man teaming with Rotunda and Andre against Studd, Bundy and Heenan) and the 45-minute TV match against Flair was seminal in making me a Crockett loyalist. Then his match against Flair at the Crockett Cup was probably the greatest live match I saw in my youth. That aside, I believe he holds up as a tremendous talent. He was great as an inspired babyface challenging Flair, and then his heel turn was tremendously well executed. I loved him with the black glove and the dark chin stubble. He added an air of physical menace to the Horsemen that just wasn't there with Ole, and you could stick him in a tag team with just about anybody. He was agile enough to work with small guys, big enough to work with big guys, threw good punches, had the badass rollover superplex. I would generally agree that he comes off best as a TV wrestler, though the Battle of the Belts and Crockett matches with Flair were pretty great and he was damn good on most of the PPVs in 1992 and the first half of 1993. Will's Windham comp was the first one I bought from him; I was just so excited that someone had painstakingly recreated the career of a wrestler I liked so much as a kid. So in a sense, Barry also deserves credit for inspiring me to send so much money to Will over the years that I've surely furnished a room of his house.
  24. Childs
    Wow, this thread got delightfully unhinged. I've never much enjoyed arguing about music, because honestly, I'm terrible at articulating the reasons why I like particular artists. But I do enjoy reading others' explanations for why they love given bands or albums. For example, I really like Lucero -- own a couple of albums and have dug them as a live act. But I'd be interested to read Dylan's argument for why they're the best band of the last 15 years, because I'd probably learn something and be turned on to a few recordings.
  25. Childs
    Done is too strong a word, but he was certainly diminished. He cranked it up pretty well for some of the WAR matches.
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