Childs

He's in Japan for BOSJ, I think.

Is anyone else getting Big Bang Theory instead of Dynamite?

That Regal segment made my heart sing. Beautiful.

That was weird all the way around. Didn't do anything for Dante or Hangman. Not a world champ segment.

This is such a stupid tempest in teapot. For those of us who understood the gesture, it was neat. For everyone else, he'll come out to "Cult of Personality" again on Wednesday. There, settled.

Couldn't agree more. People seemed weirdly lukewarm on that match, maybe because the crowd popped so much louder for the car crash stuff on the rest of the card? But it was MOTN for me, even above Punk-MJF, which was 95-percent perfect.

Did you think that last segment felt like the setup for a hot title match on top of a loaded card? I just didn't get that from it at all. You're right about the general perception of Cole, and I can't deny that he's gotten over in multiple places. But he is at the top of the "I don't get it" list. With Omega, I get why he irritates people, but he's hit some incredible peaks over the last 5-6 years. Same thing for the Young Bucks, especially as heels. But with Cole, I just don't see it. Unimpressive athlete, unremarkable mechanic, given to the worst excesses of modern wrestling. I'm at a loss for why anyone finds him captivating while acknowledging that is a niche opinion.

That was a pretty meh go-home show aside from Punk-MJF. The main event sure didn't do anything to raise expectations for Cole-Hangman.

I take this as a clear move toward going onto a streaming platform, and in that sense, it's cool. ROH as a current entity doesn't mean much. I wasn't thrilled with the tone of that Danielson-Moxley confrontation. They went more generic and made no reference to the partnership proposal.

The title match isn't even the second hottest on the show. But it would be fine not to have it close given that there's a special grudge match involving the company's biggest star. The PPV I went to in Baltimore in 2019 had Omega-Mox on top over the Cody-Jericho title match, and it didn't feel awkward.

If we're getting Bryan vs. Mox and Punk-MJF dog collar, I don't even care that Adam Cole will be ruining the title match.

It's odd because it means you're treating the nineties as Fujinami's most meaningful period (he turned 36 on 12/28/89) when he had been a great, featured worker since 1977. It feels like a rhetorical trick that works in Bret's favor while miscasting the nature of Fujinami's career arc. I think your broad take - Fujinami early vs. Bret late - is reasonable, but pre-36 Fujinami is a huge chunk of excellent work. He could have left his boots in the ring on his 36th birthday and he'd still be a top-20 wrestler of all time.

Looking forward to reading this because Buzz has always struck me as amazing in theory but lacking substance in practice.

It seems odd to me to zero in on post-36 output as a measure of peak performance, because that would ignore Fujinami's massive advantage in pre-36 output. Now, you can argue that Bret caught up with his work from '93-'97'. That's where a lot of his case would flow from, and I agree that he outperformed Fujinami in the nineties. But they didn't peak in the same age range or in the same time period. Anyhow, I will have Bret in the top half of my ballot, but Fujinami beats him soundly on both input and output.

Fujinami's prime was long, which gives him a boost over your more traditional peak candidates. He really hit two peaks - junior ace beginning in 1977 and heavyweight in the '80s. He also had a legitimately great match in 2006, which is another unusual data point. I find that I care less now about volume of "great" matches or length of career (not that I'll ignore those things when we get to list time) and more about a simple question: How much do I enjoy watching this person wrestle? There's almost no one I'd rather watch than a young Fujinami.

More Danielson always, please.

This all sounds incredibly awful, but I'm old.

I've never been an Okada fan, but I do wonder about the narrative around his "decline." Is it more a comment on the stagnant booking and waning talent pool that we've seen in pandemic-era New Japan? Is his performance really that different? The things that annoy me about him are the things that always annoyed me about him. The things he does well are the things he always did well. His case isn't much better than it was in 2019, but I don't see how it's worse.

This.

There was plenty of anti-Inoki sentiment, don't get me wrong. I just wanted to get across that our assessments of his matches, even those that didn't make the set, were not one-note. I don't particularly want to comb through all the old disc reviews to find examples of Inoki matches I didn't like, because I basically agree with the more positive views of him from recent years. He was frequently a great ace and big-match worker, and that looms larger than whatever inconsistency I perceived 15 years ago.

For the record, this was my DVDVR nomination post for the '85 Inoki-Fujinami, and I've long said our decision not to include the '88 match was a major mistake. So I think the notion that we were categorically anti-Inoki is wrong, though I don't think it's wrong to say he was a boring week-to-week worker for much of the '80s. I imagine this will be divisive. They went about 35 minutes and stayed on the mat for the first 25 or so. I thought they killed the time fairly well, working a wide enough variety of holds and showing enough intensity to keep it interesting. But some folks will probably find the body of the match dull. Fujinami popped the crowd with a mid-match scorpion and ultimately put Inoki in the figure four for several minutes (Inoki did his part by selling the leg work well.) That led into a 10-minute build to the finish, which featured some great back-and-forth action and had the crowd going apeshit. I particularly liked it when Inoki ducked Fujinami's enziguiri and hit his own to shift the momentum only to have Fujinami come back and connect with the enziguiri after all. The ending, with Fujinami fighting out of Inoki's octopus hold several times, also worked. Both men showed genuine emotion postmatch in a nice cap to an effective master vs. protege story. Nomination.

A lot of this show has been damn good, but man we've spent a lot of time on these shitty plunder fests. The art of the factional brawl is dead in mainstream American wrestling.

Those who turned on Hogan were always right.

Well, Punk had a better match with Fish than Danielson did.

I don't view it in relation to what they did in WWE. I was excited to watch Danielson wrestle whenever he got the opportunity there, even if I was frustrated with the way he was booked. I'm excited to watch him every time he gets in the ring here. I've enjoyed him more than Punk because he's better at wrestling than Punk. Always was. Which is not to say I'm down on Punk. He's working smart matches based on his re-entry story and his realistic need to shake off a little ring rust. Good on him for that. I look forward to seeing where he takes it. But I'm not going to feel bad for preferring the superior intensity and execution of a generational talent.