Childs
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This was an interesting contrast to the Misawa-Kobashi match from March. It was more spirited and exciting than that but kind of a mess tonally. They started out wrestling a flashy cruiserweight match. Then they went to a testy brawling sequence, which was cool but quickly forgotten. Then Kobashi moved into a long sequence of working over Kawada's leg, which was well-executed but dragged. Finally, they went back to the cruiserweight stuff, with both guys attempting springboard moves to the outside (I say attempting because Kobashi blew his pretty badly) and Kawada selling the leg intermittently. I guess it's not surprising that two talented young wrestlers, given 25 minutes to work a singles match, would deliver a mess with a lot of interesting ideas swirling around in it. It certainly wasn't boring.
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The whole "come back Hulk" angle was fairly cheesy, but this video package was very well-executed. I particularly liked the maudlin, instrumental version of "Real American" playing underneath the footage. Whatever you want to say about the WWF, they were on a different level of sophistication with this kind of stuff.
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I wonder what it is about Flair's particular form of low-lifery that compels him to keep getting married. Yes, his existence would be a mess of self-destruction regardless, but at least he'd owe money to fewer people.
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Hoshinoooo! A beloved "discovery" from the '80s project makes his yearbook debut and does not disappoint. New Japan 10-mans are among my favorite things in wrestling, and this was a great one. The crowd was batshit, the hatred palpable, the action wild and unstinting. This was 2/3 falls instead of elimination but no matter. Everybody in the match got a moment to shine, from Koshinaka as the face in peril to Kurisu as a badass invading wild man. The sequence outside the ring with Kurisu fighting Choshu's whole team was particularly great as was the moment when Hoshino played king of the mountain, continually dropkicking opponents off the apron and into the guard rail. Ultimately, these matches were the perfect vehicle for Choshu, because he could wrestle in explosive bursts, which he did as well as anyone ever. He came off as about the biggest star in the world here, and there was no doubt he could regulate whenever he chose. I had a grin on my face for the duration of this, and I can't see it falling out of my top 10 for the year. I had to stop watching wrestling for the evening, because I knew anything else would be a letdown. -
Oh Leon Spinks. Oh my. This feud continued to be a highlight of the year, with Lawler seeming to begin a turn after the former heavyweight champ screwed him. But the Spinks promo was the highlight -- laugh out loud funny.
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I mean, it's Terry Funk taking bumps into a river. The match itself wasn't much, but it's still one of those great wrestling things that has to be seen.
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This blew away their January match. I know I often rag on Takada, but he turned in a really aggressive performance, to the point that the crowd treated Maeda as a sympathetic underdog. The key difference here was that every time they went to the mat, I believed someone was going for a submission and that the other guy desperately wanted to get the hell out. I loved the sequence where Maeda was rocking Takada with knees only for Takada to catch him in a heel hook. It was almost like Takada channeling Fujiwara. There were some great exchanges near the finish, with both guys eating big shots and staggering around like they were in the late rounds of a heavyweight fight. The finishing submission was nicely executed as well. This was probably their second best match behind the 11/10/88 classic. Great shit.
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Was that something you observed or something one of the guys said somewhere? I hadn't thought of the match from that perspective but now that I do, yeah, it helps explain what made it feel different.
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Another good match between these teams, though not top tier for their rivalry. This one featured a more frenetic pace than usual, without the long, well-defined face-in-peril section you expect from Morton. It was pretty much the only praiseworthy thing from an underwhelming Clash.
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I never thought I could be this bored by a match between these two, but God, it dragged on forever. Stan Hansen stalling on the outside? Vader lying on the mat and working holds? For 22 minutes? And we still got a shitty, inconclusive finish. This made me appreciate what they did in the eye match that much more.
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More blood from this show. I'm not entirely up on 1990 NJ booking, so I don't know what turned these BFFs against one another. But Hamaguchi jumped Choshu in the aisle, and Choshu bled heavily before he ever reached the ring. They went for a really simple structure. Hamaguchi, as the underdog, poured on everything he could to capitalize on his ambush. But he couldn't put Choshu away and eventually, Choshu just obliterated him with lariats, seeming to work past a throwing in of the towel from Hamaguchi's corner. There was a greater factional angle at play, but again, I don't know the specifics. It was certainly a fun match, with the former partners going to war and bleeding a bunch.
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The first two rounds consisted mostly of unremarkable grappling. But Aoyagi ripped at Liger's mask in the second, which seemingly planted the seed for the match to become something else entirely. Liger pulled off his mask completely before the third round and just tore into Aoyagi with a vengeance the rest of the way. It was odd in that the reaction seemed delayed and out of scale with anything Aoyagi had done. But I will say the match got a lot more interesting after raving lunatic Keiichi Yamada emerged. I'm not sure how I'd rate this overall. I was glad it made the yearbook.
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My general experience watching All-Japan for the yearbooks has been that the matches are as good as or even better than I recalled based on past viewings. That was not the case here. My thoughts lined up closely to what Ditch said. They did a great job establishing their stylistic differences at the beginning, and the finish was a great moment. But the body of the match meandered quite a bit and certainly lacked the intensity we saw from both guys in the 5/26 six-man. It's still a great match and seminal moment in the history of the promotion. But just based on the wrestling, I don't think it's a top-50 All-Japan match from the decade.
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Did you guys edit this down to the finish? I can't remember if there's a full version out there, but it was hard to tell how good it was from the clip here. Gordy did seem to show more intensity in dropping the belt than he had in winning it.
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The essential thing Stan Hansen understood was that a brawl should be a claustrophobic affair. It isn't about wandering through the crowd or staging elaborate ways to put a guy through a table. It's about getting right up on the dude you hate and firing elbows, knees, forearms, whatever through any opening he gives you. To his credit, Doc, who didn't necessarily wrestle that way most of the time, bought right into it here. So they had a great brawl! Actually, Doc kicked Stan's ass a lot of the way, which brought Hansen's excellent selling into play. Stan also took a pretty wild bump to the outside off his missed lariat. Then we got a great flash lariat finish, with Stan slipping out of Doc's finisher and Doc taking a nifty bump to put over the impact. I loved this when I first saw it on a Schneider comp and loved it still this time around.
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I know it's semi-blasphemous to criticize Terry Gordy, but he rarely strikes me as a great singles wrestler. I wouldn't say he did anything wrong here. His lariats and power moves looked perfectly credible as he went toe-to-toe against Jumbo. He just didn't do anything to put a real stamp on what was supposed to be a huge win for him. I think that came across in the reaction from the Chiba crowd, which seemed thrown off when he put Jumbo away. Some of the blame goes to Jumbo as well. He didn't show any great desperation to hold onto his belt. A Triple Crown change should at least be match of the night, but I thought Doc-Hansen was easily better than this.
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They executed a pleasing build from flashy exhibition in the first fall to something far grittier and meaner by the third fall. I appreciated their discipline in having the tecnicos dominate while the action was loose and stylish and the rudos dominate when things turned ugly. The cool stuff looked really cool. The nasty stuff -- like the rudos crotching Santo on the post and Casas repeatedly kicking Super Astro in the belly -- looked nasty. So yeah, this was pretty darn satisfying overall, my favorite match to date from Hamada's UWF.
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And as in the baseball debates, cold logic helps you realize flaws in your gauzy memories. I'm the right age to be sentimental about Sting, but I find that I'm not. He was never the face of classic WCW for me; that was Flair. And he wasn't the face of later, boom-period WCW; that was Hogan. He was certainly one of the most important figures in WCW for a decade, but I wouldn't be in a rush to stick a guy who was never an ace and never a historically great worker into the HOF.
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This was absolutely tremendous. If you're not a huge fan of matwork, you probably won't agree with Loss' GOAT talk. But I am, so I see where he's coming from. It's incredibly difficult to do this kind of match well, to maintain the attention to detail in each fight for a hold, to keep finding interesting variations on counters and submissions 20 minutes into a mat-based war. These guys did it at a level that you're not going to see more than a few times a decade. The first fall alone could have been a MOTYC with all of the intricate submission stuff and Dandy's little hints of unleashing something more violent. This was a title match, not a stip match, so the violence never really exploded. But Dandy's selling and the rush of late highspots created plenty of drama in the closing minutes. This was a classic, plain and simple, and is a new desert island match for me.
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Agree completely. I remembered FLIK's description and hoped to see a total war. But this was more just a stiff, well-executed match without a ton of hatred or crowd heat. It was good, just not something I'll remember.
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I agree with Loss' praise for Choshu-Muto but did not see this as an inferior match. Where the Muto match was about power vs. mobility, this was more a straight-up heavyweight slugfest, which suited me fine. I particularly liked their nasty exchange of headbutts. The flash ending was well-executed, with Hash selling that he was pretty fucked up and trying a last, desperate counter before Choshu could hit another lariat. It wasn't their best match, but this is a pairing I can happily watch over and over.
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It's pretty widely heralded as the first great match of the Jumbo-Misawa feud. There are just sooo many great six-mans from said feud.
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Question for you, John. Was it well known to fans at the time that Tenryu was jumping to start a new promotion? Would it have been covered in the Japanese papers and such?
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What about Inoki?
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I've always thought that: 1) This match was incredibly boring. 2) The unmasking of Misawa came off as the most arbitrary moment imaginable. 3) Fuyuki got fat again in a hurry. Rewatching it in the context of the yearbook did nothing to change these views.