Childs
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[1990-10-08-USWA-World Title Tournament] Terry Funk vs Jerry Lawler
Childs replied to Loss's topic in October 1990
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. -
[1990-10-08-USWA-World Title Tournament] Jerry Lawler vs Mark Callous
Childs replied to Loss's topic in October 1990
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. -
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[1990-09-29-NWA-World Championship Wrestling] Ricky Morton vs Bobby Eaton
Childs replied to Loss's topic in September 1990
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. -
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.
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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.
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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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In Baltimore, we got both NWA and WWF syndicated shows when I started watching in 1985. WWF aired on Saturday morning and NWA on Sunday. We also got UWF syndicated for a stretch. We didn't get cable until later, so I was always jealous of the kids who had TBS and USA. Baltimore was a good place to grow up as a wrestling fan overall, because it was competitive ground, meaning we got strong house shows from both the NWA and WWF at the Civic Center downtown and at the Cap Center outside of DC. WWF was the gateway drug, as it was for most kids my age, but by the time I turned 10, I fancied myself a "serious fan," so I preferred the NWA and its longer, more serious matches. I don't think the NWA ever overtook the WWF with the more casual elementary school set. And by the time we got to middle school, most of them had probably moved on to something else.
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You really think Bret Hart was a better tag worker than Ricky Morton?
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I thought the Bulldogs were really over during their initial rise to win the tag titles. Their matches don't hold up very well, but when I'd go to house shows, they seemed like bigger stars than the Killer Bees, the Hart Foundation, etc. I completely agree that tag wrestling was more emphasized, both as a draw and as a craft, in Crockett, AWA and most of the territories. But it's amazing that, crappy as it usually was, '80s WWF tag wrestling was so much more emphasized than WWE tag wrestling is now. At least the teams had real identities and mid-card feuds that were a notable part of the product. Bryan and Kane are probably as over as any WWE tag act in awhile and yet, do we have any expectation that they'll be a team in six months? (Not that I want them to be, given Bryan's greatness as a singles wrestler.) Overall, I'd say Vince's disdain for tag wrestling has been bad for the art.
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[1990-11-05-FMW-1st Anniversary Show] Atsushi Onita vs Mr Pogo
Childs replied to Loss's topic in November 1990
Is that opening line a party suggestion, Loss? Sounds fun. -
Don't think that's fair, NintendoLogic. Jerry was open, for example, to embracing Jumbo as an all-time great when he participated in the DVDVR All-Japan voting. We all have our favorites, guys we see in the best light no matter what. Jerry at least makes a real effort to explain what he loves about a Dibiase or a Flair.
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I don't necessarily agree, Will. I thought the passage on Goldberg read oddly and that the other facts presented didn't line up with the idea of him having a pill problem. At my newspaper, editors are taught to apply extra scrutiny to any information that could be libelous. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if a good editor was stopped short by that passage and double checked it with the writer. That said, mistakes slip through the cracks and sometimes, you just have to apologize and eat the discomfort.
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John, you might be able to answer this better than the rest of us: Is Dave self-aware about the sloppiness of the weekly product? It would just drive me crazy to put my name to copy that raw, even if the volume of information is astonishing.
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As someone who has made stupid mistakes in print and felt that sinking feeling, I can sympathize. But I agree with Loss; in an ideal world, this would spur Dave to address the systematic sloppiness of his product. He often fails to convey what he means because no one has edited his copy.
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Matches that I can't recall seeing elsewhere in the thread - Sakuraba vs. Kanehara from Kingdom 12/2/97 and 12/8/97
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I like that Flair worked his ass off night after night because he took his responsibility seriously. I like that he worked holds competently in an old-school kind of way. I like that he hit hard and conveyed a really vicious side when challenged. I like that his matches don't feel like someone reading off a blueprint but instead like a master performer riffing off some basic structures and character traits. I've just never found Bret as viscerally exciting as Flair. I think of Flair trying to up the intensity of his offense after losing an amazing first fall to Jumbo Tsuruta, of him trying to grind Ricky Morton's face off in a steel cage, of him scrambling desperately to run out the clock against Barry Windham, of him going shot-for-shot with Ronnie Garvin, of him trying to tear a piece out of Terry Funk's ass at the '89 Bash. I like Bret Hart, and I was a huge fan of his circa 1996-1997. But he never sucked me in the way Flair did in the aforementioned moments. And I find it amusing that Bret fans cite believability as a mark in his favor. Do I think Bret spent time dreaming up ways to make his matches more believable? Sure. But he thought about it in such a pro wrestling way that if anything, his "realistic" spots come off as more self-conscious than Flair's carny shit. His face-first run into the turnbuckle looked great, for example. But is that remotely what it would look like if someone tried to sling you around in a fight? Hell no. So it really just comes off as Bret saying, "Hey, I rethought a basic tenet of pro wrestling to make it cooler." Which is fine but takes me back to what I said in the Bret thread: He never stopped feeling like a calculated performer. If you enjoy his highly logical approach, that's great. No skin off my butt. But it's that level of obvious calculation that keeps me from getting into his matches the way I do with my very favorite wrestling.
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It's hard to nominate Japanese shows from the '80s because we don't have a great idea what it was like to watch them top to bottom. You could say the same for a lot of the '90s shows as well. I guess I'm not surprised to see Big Egg mentioned. But to me, the idea of sitting through 10 hours of Joshi seems like a truly vile form of torture. I'll tell you anything if you just make it stop!
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Anybody watched the NJ Dome Show? The praise on the WON is beyond effusive, and I could imagine really liking Sakuraba vs. Nakamura. Not trying to hijack your thread, Dylan. I'd just be interested to see a review of the full show by someone trustworthy.
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Candido's a guy I don't "get." He was good, not suggesting otherwise. But I don't see why he has retained such popularity among the hardcores.
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Hase would drop to the lower reaches of the top 100. Koshinaka would fall out entirely. Hash might jump up a few spots but probably not into the top 15. Hash is one of my very favorite wrestlers -- love everything from his entrance music to his incredible ability to up the intensity of a match when he took a hot tag or started a comeback. Dylan described it well; he just had that rare ability to change the tone of a match without doing anything overly showy. I do associate him with Tenryu in that respect, and not surprisingly, they were great against each other. I'd still rate him below Misawa and Kawada, because their best stuff was the best wrestling there ever was. I'd rate him above Kobashi, because I prefer the short, hot matches at which he excelled to Kobashi's more epic stuff. But if we're talking longer singles matches, Kobashi blew him away. Hash matches started to drag if he went too much past 20 minutes. Him vs. Choshu is interesting, because Choshu is his spiritual godfather. I'd probably take Hash by a nose because he worked a little harder.