Childs
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Everything posted by Childs
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We're no-selling it in tribute to DK and Sayama no-selling those tombstones on the floor.
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WAR I think.
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UFC is even more monpolistic than the NFL, MLB etc. because at least in those leagues, you have groups of rich owners driving up salaries by competing with one another. You would need a Dana in charge of each fight camp or something to create an equivalent labor market in MMA. I suspect it will take some time for fighters to cease being grateful that UFC pulled them out of the gutter in terms of earning potential. But if the sport continues to thrive, some attempt at labor organization seems like a down-the-line possibility. It will be interesting to see if it ever gains more traction than it has in pro wrestling. Given the current set-up, I can't see the sport following a boxing model and splintering in a million directions.
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I think you'd also want Tenryu vs. Fujiwara from 11/24. It's a dream match-up for a lot of people on this board and was pretty damn good as I recall.
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I'm listening to the Observer audio analysis, and I can't believe that Bryan regards this as a long-range plus for the fighters. He should be chained to a wall and forced to study guilded age economics or, hell, the WWF purchase of WCW.
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WRONG and Meltzer is totally right. A) They do hold up. 4/21/83 is still one of the best matches of all times and has the privelege of being a match that can't be duplicated While on a rant, a lot of Sayama's backlash and DK's too for that matter is that people always tear down what is obviously the best out there. People always tear down people who are better at something so they can feel and cheat themselves up higher in the totem pole of life. The scary thing is that people don't even conciously know when or why they're doing this. Than they embrace mediocrity or something not quite as good as the best as a way to justify not getting their self esteem by actually going out and doing something .... I have to go but I continue on this rant if i have time. You are comparing 80s matches to other 80s matches from a 2011 brain. I am one of the few who can actually put myself in the 80s. Also, you are comparing 80s to s80s in what you think is good wrestling from your perspective, not what was actually great wrestling than and what is actually great wrestling now. Yeah Will, your mental time travel skills are for shit.
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It also seems like Dave fails to understand that looking back at old art using standards which have evolved over time is something that we do constantly as thinking humans. Yes, it's helpful to understand how various works were viewed in the context of their times. But in other fields, it's generally accepted that as modern consumers, we're still allowed to judge them. And I'm not saying Dave is dumb. This is just a real analytical blind spot for him.
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[1993-01-10-WCW-Main Event] Cactus Jack vs Paul Orndorff (Street Fight)
Childs replied to Loss's topic in January 1993
Loss, I was curious why you guys chose this one over the Superbrawl match between these two? I haven't watched it yet, so there's no implied criticism there at all. Just curious. -
Going more than 15 or 20 minutes in a singles match was certainly not his thing. But I can't think of a ton of matches where that weakness got in the way (the Jumbo broadway is an obvious exception.) In fact, he was pretty damn good at working to his strengths. Most of his peak singles matches were short and intense. He left the epic stuff for tags, where he was tremendous as the guy who would run in to create game-changing moments. I guess I can see the criticisms of his headscissors- and scorpion-centric control segments. But he rarely held them long enough to lose the crowd, so they don't bother me too much. I don't know if he carried people exactly but he brought an intensity to matches that lifted other great performers. Jumbo and Tenryu, for example, both got more interesting when he showed up. Fujinami, another all-time great, had his best matches with Choshu. Some of Hashimoto's earliest great matches were against him. Fujiwara had one of his best matches against him. I guess what it comes down to is that for all of his technical deficiencies compared to other all-time greats, he had a rare ability to make matches feel big and charged. Throughout the New Japan and All Japan reviewing, I never groaned when I saw his name on match list, because I knew his presence promised some sort of excitement. I can't say that about too many guys.
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Yeah, Choshu was probably my favorite guy on the New Japan set, though not technically the best. He's like the Jerry Lawler of Japan. If you can get past perceptions of a limited moveset, he was awesome at making pro wrestling feel alive and meaningful.
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Are you saying Tenryu didn't match up well with Hansen? I thought they matched up great -- one of my favorite All-Japan singles series of the the '80s.
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JDW and others can probably speak to the issue of Tenryu perception over time, but I've always gotten the sense that his physical awkwardness was a big part of it. It's a less pronounced issue than with Baba or Taue, but he did not come off as a natural athlete. The constant contrast to Jumbo probably didn't help on that front. To his credit, Tenryu turned his lack of grace into an advantage, building a style that emphasized effort and desire to inflict damage from any and all angles. He was like the Rocky Marciano to Jumbo's Ali.
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That was a strength pre-WAR as well. He brought tremendous intensity to tags in which he was the biggest star by far. I'm thinking in particular of a match from '89 in which Tenta and Shunji Takano were the opponents, but there were plenty of others. It was like Tenryu just couldn't stand to be in a bad or boring tag match. Jumbo, by contrast, was often content to stay in the background of matches like that. Not a knock on him; it's just that Tenryu's effort in those kinds of matches is a real positive for his case.
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I will be interested to see if a strong Jumbo vs. Tenryu debate gets going as people work through the '80s set. For me, Jumbo was unquestionably better from the beginning of their respective careers until Tenryu turned on him in 1987. Tenryu equaled or surpassed Jumbo in '88 and '89, when his style and spirit really drove the main event scene, despite his old partner's continued technical superiority. Jumbo regained the lead from 1990 through mid-1992 with his brilliant stuff against the next generation. But then Tenryu took the next 18 years (and counting) with his ability to persist as a top guy in various promotions, against a wide range of opponents. Of course, that's just the career bulk analysis. I'm more interested to see if people come away from the set thinking one guy's peak was clearly better than the other's. I've watched it all, and I'm still not sure.
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No, people also took a pretty big dump on his once-revered NJ junior run in the voting for the '80s set. Takada is a guy who looks great if you do a superficial survey of his career. He was in a lot of great matches, no doubt. But if you look at those matches closely, he was more often than not the lesser performer. And if you take a big bite of his career, you start to see how often he gave flat performances or dragged matches down with his incredibly half-assed matwork. I would still consider him for a top 100, because in the right setting with the right opponent, he could make magic. But he was way too hit-and-miss to merit GOAT discussion.
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The range of responses to Dylan's query is, in itself, an argument for the value of periodically revisiting the GOAT question. I know that when I began delving deeper into the worldwide wrestling scene, the threads associated with the Smarkschoice poll were some of the most valuable references I found. The ultimate answer didn't matter to me as much as the little sub-arguments, which gave me all kinds of ideas about what to watch and helped me to understand the community of critics that had evolved online. I hope the 80s projects, other polls, the threads around Will and Loss' yearbooks, etc. will provide the same service for the few souls who stray into hardcore fandom going forward. Whether you're talking about wrestling, baseball or TV shows, I find "who is greater than whom" discussions irresistible. They help me to frame my own thoughts about the stuff I like, and if the right people are involved, I learn. As for the original question, I don't think the GOAT field has expanded considerably since the Smarkschoice poll. I'm sure Lawler, Fujiwara, Tenryu and Hash would do better if we ran a poll right now. Benoit, Liger, Kobashi and Takada would do worse. But I don't know that the pool of guys pulling Top 5 votes would be significantly expanded. I can't speak to the change from 10 or 15 years ago, because I wasn't around.
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[1996-09-07-Pancrase] Bas Rutten vs Masakatsu Funaki
Childs replied to Loss's topic in September 1996
I don't know, I thought it was neat to have a big fight involving the "lost" star of New Japan. It said something about where wrestling was going, even though it wasn't wrestling. With a project like this, I don't see the need to be super strict. -
This was probably my favorite M-Pro match of the year. The 10/10 match might have been showier but not by much, and this one struck me as harder hitting. Hamada, Yakushiji and Togo all turned in great individual performances. The crowd was great. If I do a top 20 for the year, this will make it.
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The beginning of this felt a little heavy on exposition and a little light on wrestling. But once it got down to Dandy vs. Santo, they delivered the kind of gritty violence you want from hair vs. mask. It was amazing to hear how little sympathy the fans had for Dandy, even after Santo's rudo turn. Dandy did a lot of great selling in the match, and I dug his attempts to fight out of Santo's submission. Santo was just vicious throughout. I liked a few of the CMLL trios from early in the year, but this still probably held up as my favorite lucha match of '96.
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[1996-12-13-WAR-Ryogoku Crush Night] Genichiro Tenryu vs Nobuhiko Takada
Childs replied to Loss's topic in December 1996
Thrilling stuff here. They did a great job of establishing their key weapons right off the bat, with Tenryu particularly shining at putting over Takada's kicks. The match lost a little steam when they went to the mat, but even there, Tenryu kept things interesting with his selling and attempts to hook Takada's foot. The stretch run was just breathtaking with Takada landing huge kick after huge kick and Tenryu responding with his chops, punches and lariats. I loved the moment when Tenryu seemed on the verge of being knocked out only to bull Takada over with a desperation sumo charge. I also liked Takada kneeing his way out Tenryu's quasi-full-nelson submission attempt. These guys could have coasted by on star power alone but good lord did they beat the hell out of each other. One of my favorite matches of the year. -
That's interesting. I didn't respond to this match at all. Maybe I'll have to rewatch.
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[1996-09-22-WWF-Mind Games] Shawn Michaels vs Mankind
Childs replied to Loss's topic in September 1996
This was the antithesis of the ironman match with Bret in that something interesting seemed to happen almost every moment. I guess that's a tribute to Foley's creativity among other things. But this was also the best Shawn looked as champion. You really could've come away from this thinking, "That's a tough motherfucker who fights back with great focus when his title is in jeopardy." I never thought much of Shawn as an offensive wrestler, but you would never guess that failing from this match. I will be interested to see if this or the the Bret/Austin match from November ends up as my WWF MOTY. I'd be more OK with the finish if it had led to another big match with Vader. But yeah, at this point, I just shrug and pretend it ended with the superkick off the chair. -
I absolutely agree that they would have been better off using falls to create momentum shifts and plot twists. They spent too much of the time going nowhere in particular. In general, I agree with OJ that 60-minute matches aren't a good idea. It's odd that they've been fetishized over the years. But I did just watch the 10/18/96 draw between Kobashi and Kawada and found it neither tedious nor over-the-top ridiculous with the big moves. Would it have been better as a 40-minute match with a finish? Probably. Was it a top-10 All Japan match for the year? Maybe, maybe not. But Kawada was so good at layered selling and crafting nifty transition spots, and Kobashi brought such a deep well of offense that it never went off the rails.
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[1996-08-10-WCW-Hog Wild] Chris Benoit vs Dean Malenko
Childs replied to Loss's topic in August 1996
This was an incredibly tone-deaf match layout given the crowd. I mean two five-minute overtimes? Really? I don't know that you can blame the workers. They also had the pay-per-view audience to consider and might not have been allowed to call an audible. But it made for an unpleasant spectacle overall. -
Yeah, if you watch early Yamada you realize how tiny he really was. He jacked his physique beyond all reason for his body type, probably even more than Benoit and Eddy did.