FLIK

Ah, I always remembered Hughes doing an angle whear someone headbutted his glasses into his eye but i'd completely forgot who did it & what it led to.

Random thought, it's really weird to think Michael Hayes has been employed by the WWE for 17 years.....and not been fired.

World Wide 1/11/1992 Arn Anderson, Steve Austin & Bobby Eaton vs Ricky Steamboat, Dustin Rhodes & Ron Simmons Follows the usual Dangerous Alliance vs Random group of Sting's Buddies formula but as far as those go I thought this was a really great example of it and they got a little more time then usual going 14-15 mins. Thought this was better then the Rude/Austin/Eaton vs Sting/Steamboat/Bagwell and Arn/Larry/Rude vs Steamboat/Dustin/Simmons matches from Jan 92 that did make the set

Getting back into 92 WCW, amused to discover they were recycling the jobber matches. By pure coincidence I watched an ep of Main Event from early Feb today then went back and watched an episode of World Wide from a month earlier and they had the exact same Brian Pillman vs Chuck Coats and Big Josh/Van Hammer vs Jack Savage/Jim Boss matches. *EDIT* Holy shit, same episode of World Wide features a Mr Hughes match whear he's NOT wearing his glasses.....didn't know such a thing existed...this just looks wrong....

It's a pretty similar thing that comes up with the male talent too. Maybe not 2nd careers but WWE preventing their talent from doing side projects is something i've heard Chavo, MVP & John Morrison complain about when talking about why they left. If i'm remembering correctly that's a big reason why Flair left too.

I legit thought he was a future WWF champ waiting to happen at one point as well

I had a longer response written but meh, to sum up my point. Han was absolutely great when he was on and could do his style which he was one of the best ever at but he just didn't do it often enough for me to consider him an all time great the way others do. He's talked about as this magical wrestling angel who floats in the sky and shits 5 star matches from the heavens but...yeah...for every Tamura match there's a lot of not so hot Volk Han matches out thear too and when you only wrestled like 60-70 matches in your entire career to begin with, that's something to consider. Maria was fired, forget why, she's said she would have stayed otherwise tho. Maryse just got sick of it & quit. Tiffany was aparently nuts and got fired, killed Drew McIntyres push since they're married. McCool left because Taker wanted her at home to take care of him, she'd have probably stuck around if they weren't married otherwise.

Lord Tensai Guy's strengths are playing dominant monster and is really good at having competitive matches that are worked as either slugfest brawls against tough guy wrestlers or faster paced cat & mouse type matches vs smaller flashy dudes WWE signs him, makes him work as a 1980's cartooon stereotype in really slow paced squashes then wonders why he doesn't get over.

Well, okay, any other non shoot style setting I should say. Like I said, the matches of his I tended to like the most were against the guys that came from those feds. Really dug his exhibition with Fujiwara in 01, kinda pissed that didn't air in full. Didn't get that myself. I saw a # of so so matches against lesser guys whear maybe the only interesting thing that happened was Han getting in an ocasional cool move and a lot of average matches whear if the guy was good enough to go with the flo Han could put on his flashy show. But yeah, didn't see much that gave me the impression that his opponent was the one looking better then normal because of Han. I've got a # of other RINGS stuff that i'll get to eventually so maybe i'll change my mind. A lot of Tamura matches since that's what Ditch was hosting so I just went through and grabed all the RINGS stuff he had. Then, on my own on Youtube after watching them vs Han I went and tracked down some Willie Williams who I allready knew of and what I was getting before hand, some Grom Zaza and some Andrei Kopylov the latter two i'd never seen/heard of before. Kopy had one of the more interesting series with Han I thought actually. 7/92 which I thought was thier best match that they equally looked good in 3/93 which I thought Kopy stunk in and was one of the worst Han matches I saw 10/94 liked a lot, thought Han was the one who stunk it up and Kopy turned in a much better performance then him Thinking about it I should probably track down some Nikolai Zouev too since I thought he had an awesome match with Han in 93 & a pretty good one again in 95. Yeah, usually around the 8 or 9 min mark he'd start sucking wind. Off the top of my head I thought the 8/96 Kohsaka match was a good example of one whear he really gassed out (didn't really care for their series of matches). Notcible in one of the Maeda matches too whear near the end Han just stops fighting for some reason and puts his hands on his knees to rest so Maeda just spin kicks him in the face for giving him the opening Course, actual mat/amature/shoot/whatever style wrestling is one of the more physically taxing things you can do since it requires constant energry as opposed to striking or doing suplexes & other moves so I don't mean it as a major knock against the guy. Looking at it in the context of RINGS itself whear most stuff was kept shorter it's not so bad I guess but when comparing it to other places it's still not impressive either. Yeah, since he wrestled the same guys over and over again (would be surprised if he faced more then 20-25 opponents total in his career) I watched all the matches in a certain feud in a row before moving on to something else so a lot of jumping around timeline wise. Even though his best matches I saw were in 96, I thought he looked most consistently good in mid 92 through mid 93 and late 94 through mid 95.

K, i've watched 37 Volk Han matches over the course of the last 6 days and I don't get the hype at all. Well, I do but I disagree. At his best, working with someone equally or atleast almost as talented, doing the type of match he was best at full of flashy back & forth submission work he was an amazingly talented guy capable of great, exciting matches. I don't think he'd have worked out anywhear else under any other circumstances but for the time frame he was around, the promotion he was in and the fans he was in front of he was a perfect fit. At his worst however, when he couldn't/wouldn't do his "Russian Spider Man" act and had to do matches based around more traditonal mat work or strikes or wasn't working with top lvl talent it equaled a lot of average at best matches and ocasionally some really boring ones. Tho I will admit that I found the matches whear he gets gut punched to death by giant foreign mountain men pretty hilarious & entertaining in an unintentional way. He also tended to gas really easily too making me glad they kept him under 15 mins 97% of the time. I wasn't able to get a hold of a few of his more pimped matches, couldn't find anything vs Naruse, thought he had OK chemistry with Maeda but only saw 3 of their 9 matches, etc... but of the footage I watched, there's only really about 5 matches i've seen that i'd call great and maybe another 10 or 11 i'd lable really good. And for a guy who's talked up the way he is and who only has a tiny amount of matches to begin with I was hoping he'd have a higher % of worthwhile stuff to be considered an all time great or HoF worthy guy.

She's Claudio's girl friend (according to Tracey Smothers) but Sara's had a lot of ppl on the roster pushing for her for a while. From what a few of the former writers who've done podcast have said, Vince flip flops a lot on whether he wants the women's division to be focused on girls who can do good matches or girls who're just T&A so maybe he just woke up on the right side of the bed for Sara

Even though it'd prob lead to a ton of bitching online, i'd totally book Roode to win it right back on Impact this week

I'm always amused ppl took this so literally. It was only ever really just a marketing gimmick for them but ppl bought so much into the "pure sports wrestling" BS that they tended to ignore that the company always had feuds and angles and whacky characters and all the other "sports entertainment" gaga too.

Thinking about this, that's probably ROH's biggest mistake at the moment, trying to be bigger then they're really capable of being. For the sake of argument, if the average show draws 400 fans and the ticket price is $20, that's only $8000, add in merch & concession and maybe round up to 10k or whatever. That's pretty shitty money for a semi national promotion but it's awesome money for an indy. If they weren't trying to fly guys all over the country and stuck to a local base and weren't trying to sign guys to exclusive contracts and instead just offered their wrestlers reasonably good pay days (more then they'd get working your typical no name indy running in a high school gym) they'd be doing OK.

Hey, he also had a really enjoyable match with HBK on RAW too

On that point he allready went on record saying just as much. To keep the company going he was having to use the profits from his other business

Sigh, learn from the lessons of TNA (10 years+ of they'll die any minute) & WCW before them ppl. No matter how shitty the product may get, no matter how disgruntled the wrestlers may be, no matter how few fans attend the shows, money mark feds don't die until the money mark wants them to/tv station pulls the plug. For every Kenny King there's a guy happy to take his spot and so long as Sinclare is happy with the ratings the being delivered by programing they're paying to produce then ROH will continue on in some form.

I can buy that shows being run poorly or just being inconveinyant would be A contributing factor to crowds dipping, i've stoped attending shows myself that I otherwise enjoyed for similar reasons but no way do I think it's a top reason. I just think they ran the well dry. After 2 years of going really heavy with interpromotional mega shows on a monthly/semi monthly basis there was no whear left to go after doing an all day long Tokyo Dome ultra mega super extravaganza. If you look at 95, AJW still ran a lot of major shows in the 4 to 6 hour range but they scaled WAY back on their use of outside talent and mostly focused on their core roster (elevating some ppl who'd been around a while, had a lot of new rookies and Lioness/Bison/Jaguar came out of retirement). Comparing those shows overall tho to what had come the previous 2 years, still a lot of greatness but def not the same quality wise. Had the roster not imploded for financial reasons among other things in late 96 & 97 I think they were on course for bringing things back up from a purely in ring perspective tho.

My memory is fuzzy on this, was it later on in 2003 or not until 2004 when Evolution vs The World started and we got various combinations of Evolution vs Benoit/Foley/Tajiri/HBK/Shelton Benjamin & others in really long 6 & 8 man tags every week? That's actually one of my favorite periods in WWE history but damn was RAW shit until that whole feud kicked off as the post above have reminded me.

04-24-1993 Volk Han vs Mitsuya Nagai - Nagai gets in just enough offense to keep the match from being a 100% squash but it's largely the Volk Han Show 12-24-1994 Volk Han vs Mitsuya Nagai - Nagai puts up a good fight but is never able to get Han in serious trouble 06-29-1996 Volk Han vs Mitsuya Nagai - Nagai's much more agressive & takes it to Han, looking like an equal skill wise. He comes within an inch of winning on sevral occasions and is in controll during the final stretch of the match only to have crafty Han reach up from out of no whear and snatch a quick submission victory to escape. Han was Han in all 3 matches, doing really cool mpressive shit but Nagai brought the little things (story, psychology, passion, something) that seperates a pretty good match (93) from a great one (96), fun times.

2/19/1994 Plum Mariko vs Chigusa Nagayo 5/28/1994 Chigusa Nagayo vs Mayumi Ozaki 1/18/1994 (ECW Title) Terry Funk © vs Shane Douglas Above 3 I talked about in one of the other threads on the yearbook and for me are the biggest oversights that i'd have really liked to see make the set. The rest of these aren't extremely major oversights except for maybe Aja/Hokuto in terms of being something super historicly significant or "omg greatest of all time" but just fall into the catagory of really awesome, potentially top 50 matches that i'd have also liked to see make it too. 3/27/1994 Sakie Hasegawa vs Dynamite Kansai 3/27/1994 (All Pacific Title) Toshiyo Yamada © vs Kyoko Inoue 6/19/1994 (Street Fight) Atsushi Onita, Matsunaga & Fumiharu Asako vs Mr. Pogo, The Gladiator & Hideki Hosaka 7/30/1994 Ultimo Dragon & Great Sasuke vs Jinsei Shinzaki & Gedo 8/24/1994 Takako Inoue & Cuty Suzuki vs Devil Masami & Candy Okutsu 11/20/1994 Jaguar Yokota & Bison Kimura vs Lioness Asuka & Yumi Ogura 11/20/1994 Aja vs Hokuto 12/14/1994 Taka vs Great Sasuke

Guess i'm alone but I loved this match. I suppose if a heavy action, high impact match is what you wanted then I can see how you wouldn't dig it as much but I loved this for the story/psychology of Bret being the better man forcing Savage to get more & more desperate with his tactics.

I think it is for a company that's trying to be national. Outside of the locals why would anyone watch that or read about it and have a reaction other then "who cares" when it comes to radio DJ's and minor league sports figures being involved in the shows. Even on the local lvl, i'd personally be more annoyed then entertained if I went to a show live and saw something like that as well.

Calling Davey Richards the greatest star in company history for being "smart" enough to quit wrestling & be a fireman is a dick head move but other then that he was mostly spot on in his original column.

According to the all mighty match finder http://www.thecubsfan.com/cmll/roster/matchfinder.php you are correct. For the CMLL welterweight title too. Dunno if they exist on tape or not but there were 4 other Pantera/Felino singles matches in the previous few months leading up to this