FLIK

Shouldn't be ignored that he got over in Japan too. And re Japan or other foreign markets. It's not like things such as promos & charisma don't matter in those cultures either or that it's impossible to tell if someone has it even when not speaking the language. Inoki.... Onita or any number of guys & girls I could name. I mean fuck, Onita's had some of the worst matches in the world the past couple years but he still manages to get me excited to see him wrestle again just by being the coolest fucker walking the planet. At this point i'd pay just to watch him scream into the mic, pound the mat and throw water around.

I think the real important question to ask is Terry Funk......or Terry Punk??? Terry goes into a lot of detail in his book but the short version is that during that era, once you got the NWA title, the board was 99% of the time happy to leave it on a guy until he just got sick of holding it and voluntered to pass it on and apparently Terry just didn't want that long of a run because he was getting worn down by the schedule.

Yup, there's a really fascinating hour or so long video interview he does online whear he tells all kinds of Yakuza stories.

Nope

To me it's just the most amusing example of what a gigantic mega super main stream star he was for time. Once he blew up he got a shit ton of merch deals, tv apperances, movies, his own album, etc....

Ah yeah, totally forgot about the rise of Sapp. For his non wrestling stuff, THIS is all you really need http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXPfVtb6lrg Ignoring the fact that it was bad for business or rather just that NJPW was stupid in terms of pushing him so hard with out locking him into a contract to ensure he'd stick around long enough for it to pay off, I totally loved his initial New Japan run. The 10/13/03 Elimination match with the Inoki Army of Bob Sapp, Takayama, Minoru Suzuki, Nakamura & Fujita vs Tenzan, Nagata, Nakanishi, Tanahashi & Seiji Sakaguchi is one of my favorite NJPW matches ever.

Thing to remember is this all happened soon into his very first major push as a legit top guy in the company so he was doomed from the start. He was crazy over at the start of it and very much looking like the guy who was gonna carry the company into the future when he won the 01 G1 then 4 months later the Cro Cop thing happened. Getting booked in 2 60 min draws vs Chono & Nakanishi during his title reign didn't help either as he easily should have gone over both at the time & a lot of his other defenses weren't against the strongest of challengers. Guys like Murakami, Nishimura & Barnett. Once his title run was done he wouldn't even challenge for the IWGP for another 4 years

Yeah that. Although the correct answer is, because it's a show, it looks cool and 99% of wrestling doesn't make sense if scrutiniezd under the "you wouldn't do that in a real fight" microscope

Heh, was I? I think that just a combination of laziness & forgetfulness But yeah, i'll get to it in the next day or 2

Without a shadow of a doubt, had Liger chosen to bulk up and modify his in-ring style, he would probably have been IWGP Heavyweight Champion. Even as a Junior, Liger's had some thrilling "catchweight" bouts against the likes of Keiji Mutoh and Shinya Hashimoto. He has such strong crossover appeal. The jr division was pretty weak at the time so they tried the "let's make Liger a Heavyweight" experiment complete with modified look in parts of 2000/2001 & it bombed horribly. The light weight guys having their own division which is actually treated with respect & credibility is one of the things i've always enjoyed about Japanese wrestling but no one outside of that country can really pull it off anymore. TNA was doing well with the X-Division for a time but it fell to shit thear much like WCW before them.

Heh, I posted it like 3 weeks ago in the Tajiri thread at DVDVR, surprised you missed it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MovHA-5tdfI

Heh, I actually like Rossy these days despite his shaky past, atleast he's done a good job with Stardom, the #2 (arguably #1) current joshi promotion.

yeah this Stuff i've added to my list since I first posted it 11/19/2005 (No DQ Match) Homicide vs Colt Cabana 12/03/2005 Homicide vs Steve Corino 12/03/2005 (Steel Cage Warfare) Jimmy Rave, Alex Shelly, Abyss & Prince Nana vs Roderick Strong, Austin Aries, Matt Sydal & Jack Evans 09/23/2007 (2 out of 3 Falls) TAJIRI vs Osamu Nishimura 01/14/2013 (IWGP Title) Hiroshi Tanahashi © vs Kazuchika Okada Tajiri/Nishimura is such a wonderful hidden gem. Happens in the MUGA promotion so it's all about old school style mat work, selling & psychology. It's on youtube and i'd really recomend everyone giving it a watch.

Finished watching the show. Guess i'm the only one here but I really have nothing negative to say about the show. Nothing on the show except the main which I loved is a MOTYC to me but I enjoyed the card top to bottom. Wouldn't call anything truely bad but from best to worst i'd rank things (IWGP Title) Hiroshi Tanahashi © vs Kazuchika Okada (IWGP Jr Title - 3 Way) Prince Devitt © vs Low Ki vs Kota Ibushi Manabu Nakanishi, MVP, Strongman & Akebono vs Bob Sapp, Toru Yano, Takashi Iizuka & Yujiro Takahashi (IWGP IC Title) Shinsuke Nakamura © vs Kazushi Sakuraba Yuji Nagata vs Minoru Suzuki (IWGP Tag Titles) Lance Archer & Davey Boy Smith Jr © vs Karl Anderson & Hirooki Goto Togi Makabe vs Katsuyori Shibata Jushin Liger, Tiger Mask & Hiromu Takahashi vs Ryusuke Taguchi, Kushida & Bushi Tenzan & Kojima vs Shinjiro Ohtani & Keiji Mutoh (NEVER Title) Masato Tanaka © vs Shelton Benjamin Wataru Inoue, Captain New Japan & Tama Tonga vs Jado, Yoshi Hashi & Tomohiro Ishii Nakanishi, the ring announcer & pals vs Iizuka & pals is easily my favorite feud in wrestling over the last several months.

Toryumon & Dragon Gate has had the female fan base on lock for years & years. Watching NJPW shows and really, lots of other current Japan plenty of female fans show up to their shows too. The primary audiance of modern day joshi is now older males, so while there's less of them, they weren't completely abandoned by that demo like the school girls. On that subject, there have been pockets of time whear they recaptured a little bit of the young girl audiance but it never lasted or caught on big like it did before. Off the top of my head Hikaru in latter day AJW had a pretty noticable female audiance but it was a too little too late type situation since it happened so late into the companies lifespan. Also should note that a whole ton of now grown former 80's school girls came back around during the inital Crush reuinion angle during the early 2000's.

skip To elaborate on this because it's a match that at the time did have a bit of a buzz. Back when Tory was still fresh and ppl hadn't seen much of these guys yet, a lot of folks were going crazy over the high spots Kid was busting out here and I believe this is the match whear they invented the rana into a sunset flip power bomb spot. Reason I say skip is that when you take away the "wow, they're doing cool shit i've never seen before" factor it's just an average match and just for 99 there's much better Tory stuff that should get a higher priority whear you can see them do the same spots anyways. Fuck, completely forgot about the awesome run of Tenryu vs Onita death matches in 99, so yeah, the above are MUST haves as well as these from Onita Pro 3/7/1999 (No Rope Barbed Wire Street Fight) Atsushi Onita & Masato Tanaka vs Yukihiro Kanemura & Shoji Nakamaki 6/27/1999 (No Rope Barbed Wire Street Fight Double Hell Death Match) Atsushi Onita, Shigeo Okamura, Sambo Asako & Mitsunobo Kikuzawa vs Tenryu, Shoji Nakamaki, Ichiro Yaguchi & Hiroshi Ono 8/22/1999 (Exploding Barbed Wire Match) Atsushi Onita, Sanshiro Takagi, Sambo Asako & Mitsunobu Kikuzawa vs Tenryu, Shoji Nakamaki, Hiroshi Ono & Ichiro Yaguhi 9/29/1999 (Falls Count Anywhere Street Fight) Mr. Pogo, Shoji Nakamaki, Dr. Luther, Dr. Hannibal & Ichiro Yaguchi vs Atsushi Onita, Nobutaka Araya, Sambo Asako, Shigeo Okamura & Mitsunobu Kikuzawa

Money. Savage knew being programmed opposite Hogan he was going to get more money. Being Hogan's partner means a good pay day. Politically opposing Hulk would have cost him money. Meltzer mentioned on a recent podcast that if you combined their runs together, Hogan & Savage made more money working with each other then they ever did with anyone else.

skip Would put this in the "only if there's room left over pile"

It's not even the climax, Matsunaga vs Battlarts is which is on my list of greatest pro wrestling ever. A nice moment but it sounds cooler on paper then it actually was.

Heh, really weird comparisons here. Not sure fat lower card comedy guy is really all that comparible to Rey Mysterio other then they both wear mask or that a pre show dark match just meant to entertain the fans that show up early and give the left over guys on the roster who didn't fit anywhear else on the card a payday is comparable to a mid show WWE TV match. Not overly fond of modern day Jado either (though all time he is one of my favorites) but he really didn't do anything groan worthy here I thought. Hashi as Jack Swagger is way too high praise for Hashi. If nothing else I came out of this really wanting to see more Tama Tonga as i'd never actually seen him work before.

I'm the opposite, this would be in my must have pile, thought it was a great match Easily say cut this. It wasn't bad but nowhear near yearbook worthy I'd borderline say cut on these too. They're both good solid/fun matches that I like a lot but there's nothing outstanding about either beyond having the "hey neat Backlund & Greg Valentine in Battlarts" curiosity factor and for Backlund he has much better matches thear worthy of inclusion. Possibly the worst Battlarts match i've ever seen Another that falls under the catagory of decent match with not really much going for it besides "wow, how weird these 2 wrestled each other"

Vader & Stan Hansen vs Kenta Kobashi & Jun Akiyama (AJPW Real World Tag League 11/21/98) I'd drop this, thought it was okay but nothing special at all in the grand scheme of things.

I'm going to assume Tony Nice is Tony/Anthony Nese. If so then he had a little mini run in TNA in late 2011 - early 2012 so not a complete no name at this point. For whatever it's worth, both guys have worked a bunch for CZW & Evolve/DGUSA too. Speaking of 2012 Rhino, have you seen any of the Rhino vs Harry Smith matches in Resistence pro? I saw the 1st and thought it was good but not great, and they've had others which were supposedly better. Their cage match is online but I haven't gotten around to watching yet. It's allready hit the torrent sites.

Think Meltzer said he's ready to come back sometime this month.