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Childs

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Everything posted by Childs

  1. Childs
    Yeah, I saw after posting that you really liked the match, which made me want to rewatch it. So perhaps I will also have some second-take notes. But I agree very much with your general breakdown of the NWO. Hogan was fine in the ring, but Nash and Hall brought little presence to this or most of their matches from the period. There was just such a disconnect between the aura they created as characters and the actual physical performance.
  2. Childs
    They got off to an excellent start with HBK looking relatively crisp on his hit-and-run offense and Vader looking appropriately devastating when he took command. Great strength spot when HBK tried to flip Vader out of the ring with a headscissors, but Vader just snatched him and hurled him about 10 feet face-first. It's hard to fathom why they booked two false finishes. These guys didn't need that kind of help to fill 20 entertaining minutes. Because of the booking, this one will always feel like a missed opportunity. I think I found the earlier boiler room brawl more satisfying.
  3. Childs
    For all the sharp booking that went into the early months of the NWO launch, they rarely paid it off in the ring, did they? I mean, with all the craziness of the previous few months, this should have been great. But instead, they raced through the match to get to the Sting stuff, which was more set-up for a payoff that, notoriously, never came. Was it just that the NWO guys lacked commitment to the in-ring moments? Was that a mistake Bischoff made in composing the group? Or was it irrelevant given how entertaining the weekly TV stuff was?
  4. Childs
    Kind of a bummer that there's no tape of the arena matches from this feud. The TV segments were great fun.
  5. Childs
    This felt like an absolute war between two huge stars, with Tenryu joining Fujiwara on the list of guys who could beat some passion out of Takada. I loved Tenryu's ground-and-pound elbows and the straight rights he fired in response to Takada's kicks. But Takada gave as good as he got with some vicious leg kicks and that cringe-inducing series of knees in the corner. The ending sequence was great, with Tenryu showing his will by attacking with the lariat arm that Takada had just worked over. I wish Takada hadn't looked quite so nonchalant when putting on the final submission, but that's a quibble. This was my kind of wrestling.
  6. Childs
    This fight was held back a bit by the rule against punching on the ground. Funaki seemed best positioned to attack when he took Bas down, but he couldn't really do anything in Bas' guard. Bas was on another level in the standing game, and with Funaki neutralized on the ground, this became stalk and destroy. Funaki showed a lot of guts in standing and fighting, and it was fun to watch Bas' striking. But I don't think I'd call it a great fight, as others have. I'm glad it was on the set.
  7. Childs
    I'm not sure I had ever seen this match, but it's a worthy addition to their great matches from earlier in the decade. Hansen turned in a great selling performance after posting his lariat arm. I appreciated how much he stuck with it and made it a key part of the finishing stretch. It felt character-appropriate, because he came off more as an aging gunslinger than the bionic cowboy of years past. It amazes me that some think of Hansen as a guy who made up for precision with stiffness. Watch the timing of his cutoff spots -- impeccable, even this late in his career. I also loved Kobashi's body punches as a response to Hansen's early-match potatoes. All in all, another testament to the greatness of All-Japan main events.
  8. Childs
    This was the best RINGS match on the set so far. Tremendous creativity and intensity to the submission attempts with a real sense that either guy could win.
  9. Childs
    Danielson is an easy top 100 for me at this point, even with Japan and Mexico in the mix. Cena would have a good shot at my US/Canada top 100.
  10. Childs
    I thought Fujinami got in plenty of stuff given the context of his shattered nose. I loved him calling back to his cruiswerweight days with the early topes and throwing desperate potato shots once Tenryu had him in trouble. Tenryu is probably the all-time-great dick. Can't beat his contemptuous little facials as he booted Fujinami in his busted nose. I liked the fact that he kept looking at the ref to stop it, because it made Fujinami's last rally all the more dramatic. Fujinami gushing blood on Tenryu's chest as he held him in the dragon sleeper was another tremendous visual. This, Muta-Shinzaki and Hash-Takada made for a perfect run of dome-show matches.
  11. Childs
    This felt like a Wrestlemania match to me, with the two of them building to a handful of big, theatrical moments rather than cramming it full of stuff. I liked the goofy subplot of Muta stealing Shinzaki's stick, goring him with it and then painting it with Shinzaki's blood. Kudos to Shinzaki for that crazy fucking bump over the rail and for selling the shit out of Muta's beatdown before finally staging his rally. Nifty finish too, with Shinzaki ducking the first misting only to eat the second after lifting Muta for a power bomb. I wouldn't call the match a classic, but it absolutely worked on its own terms.
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  13. Childs
    I would dearly love to see some of the '70s Hoshino that Meltzer referenced in his obit. Sadly, there's not a Hoshino-level "find" on the All Japan set. There are guys who are better than I thought, like later-period Yatsu and young Tenta, but nobody shocked me. Takashi Ishikawa might fit this topic, but he's more of a WAR find than an All-Japan find.
  14. Childs
    The beauty of this was that every guy kept his eye on the big picture of the match (getting Akiyama over as a frontline player) without sacrificing the excitement or execution of the individual sequences. Akiyama obviously got the flashy role and carried it off well. But Misawa was equally great as the ace who could totally reconfigure the picture of the match so his little buddy's star turn would come off. Kawada was great, moving from dismissive prickishness to his realization that Akiyama was a real threat. Taue showed exceptional timing with his big moves, which kept allowing he and Kawada to pursue their 2-on-1 strategy. Just a very well constructed performance that might be my MOTY so far.
  15. Childs
    This match has never received much hype, but it was damn good. I loved Kawada blitzing Kobashi at the bell and the mid-match sequence built around submission attempts. Kawada did a great job selling the right shin as his weak point, and that made the two brutal kicks at the end all the more dramatic. I know there has been some backlash against the idea of All-Japan as the transcendant promotion of this era. But this set allows us to compare promotions in context, and they really did crank out matches every month that would have been strong MOTY contenders for almost every other company. New Japan also had a strong year to this point. I'm not sure anyone else would even be in the conversation.
  16. Childs
    This just never built into the match it could have been. I appreciated the story of Yamamoto winning all the early mat exchanges and accumulating a big lead in the scoring system. Kohsaka seemed primed for a great rally with his back against the wall, but it never really materialized.
  17. Childs
    I appreciated the sense of rivalry and emotion between the teams, but this suffered from a lot of the problems that plague joshi in general. Despite having an obvious asskicker in Kansai, they didn't do much to establish differentiated roles early in the match. They robbed cool moments of meaning by always racing on to the next thing. The finishing stretch went about five brutal suplexes too long. There were a few sequences I really liked, but I doubt this will be one of my 100 favorite matches by the time we get to the end of the year.
  18. Childs
    This was just awesome until all the run-ins midway through the tercera caida. I loved the handheld work here; it made me feel I was a few feet away from (and sometimes in the middle of) a nasty, nasty fight. The reckless topes came across particularly well. Ultraman was also eons better here than in their January match. The last few minutes dragged, in part because the multiple run-ins and elaborately set-up highspots had become cliche in AAA. I wanted to watch these two crazy fuckers finish their fight. Konnan clearing the ring with a bat and a bunch of rudos helping Psicosis find a functional table just distracted from that. Anyway, I was still happy to see 3/4 of a great match.
  19. Childs
    I might put the trainwreck percentage above 60, but this was a hell of a spectacle and I'm glad it was on the set. Psicosis' performance might have been the greatest attempt at suicide by wrestling I've ever seen. He just kept doing insane dives to nowhere. Ultraman mostly sucked dog, but it didn't matter who Psicosis was wrestling. This was more elemental than man vs. man; it was man vs. fear.
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  21. Childs
    Straw drove himself off the cliff but he also had the brief bounceback when he hit 24 homers for the Yanks in 1998. It's kind of amazing that the man was in the thickest fucking wilderness imaginable for seven years but was so talented that he could re-emerge to slug .542 at age 36. For fun off-the-cliff stuff, you have to love Smoky Joe Wood, who went 34-5 at age 22, was done as a pitcher at age 25 but hit .366 with 60 RBI in 66 games as an outfielder at age 31. That's some Roy Hobbs shit.
  22. Childs
    He had a hell of a year here in Baltimore, long after his glory days in Cincy. Let's see -- .327 with 28 HR, .970 OPS at age 36. Not bad at all. With Davis, of course, injuries were always the problem. He was just never meant to play 150 games a year. But he had Hall-of-Fame talent. Dave Parker was an off-the-cliff guy who bounced back. That was a coke thing.
  23. Childs
    I don't know. Garvey wasn't really any good after 1980. I l know he made a couple All-Star teams but that was based on reputation and the fact that he still hit .280. The drop from where he was in 1984 to not deserving a job wasn't that far The fall-off-a-cliff list gets much longer if you open it up to guys like Baerga and Mayberry. Ted Kluszewski averaged 43 homers and hit .300 every year between 1953 and 1956. He never hit more than 15 homers again. In 1953, Al Rosen had one of the great offensive seasons ever by a third baseman. He declined to mere excellence the following season, fell to barely average the following two years and was done after 1956. Charlie Keller looked like a surefire Hall-of-Famer through age 29 and never played more than 83 games in a season again. It all goes to show that the gap between great and obsolete is a lot slimmer than we tend to think.
  24. Childs
    Chipper Jones put up 2.7-3.2 WAR (depending on whose WAR you trust) in a half season this year though. Schmidt went from MVP candidate to below-replacement overnight. Schmidt was still above replacement in 1988. Then he decided to walk away after a rough start in 1989. But regardless of the specific comparison to Chipper, my greater point was that lots of Hall-of-Famers -- whether Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Joe DiMaggio or George Brett -- have gone from elite to out of the sport in a matter of a few seasons. The slope often gets steep at the end, and there was nothing hugely unusual about the way Schmidt finished up.
  25. Childs
    It's not uncommon for great players to fall off a cliff at the end. If you want an example at the same position, it just happened to Chipper Jones, who hit at an MVP level in 2008 and might be done now. What was unusual about Schmidt was his ability to play near his peak level until age 37.
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