FLIK

.....ain't no tea party.

Out of curiosity, anyone have any info on Jumping Jim Hussey? Google search doesn't really tell me much except that he's Roller Ball Rocco's dad and that he was Kendo Nagasaki's opponent in his first match. * EDIT * And this awesome pic http://www.britishwrestlersreunion.com/app...hotoid=12266488

Along these lines, whear do ppl stand on ranking older wrestlers who there just isn't much footage available of? Personally it's not something I do (else i'd have Zoltan Boscik in my top 20 or something ) but I have known several fans that would.

Important lesson learned at training today. Leapfrog spot wih tall guy who can't duck down super far (me) + short guy who can't jump very high = recipe for disaster

On the original Greatest Wrestler Ever poll I had him #30, on a re-do he'd be a bit lower but still top 50 pretty easily.

I'd pretty easily have Michaels over everyone mentioned above except maybe Atlantis

Finished off the 1997 GAEA TV Season, interesting year. If 1995 was just about getting the company up & running & 1996 was about establishing their identity then 1997 was about the company feeling safe in said identity then wanting to branch out, experiment, throw a lot of shit against the wall & see what sticks. Some things failed and fell by the wayside, other things caught on and changed the company for the better. Business wise they grew a lot and were able to run their first major show in a big building (blanking on the name of the arena) on 9/20 which was really succesful. Roster wise there weren't too many changes this year. No new trainees debued and Bomber Hikaru, Kyoko Ichiki & Chihiro Nakano all left the company early on in the year. Nakano was a big loss as she showed a lot of potential and had a handfull of damn good matches in the 2 or so years her career lasted. Toshiyo Yamada officially jumped from AJW to GAEA around July but she'd been almost an honorary roster member for a while leading up to then. Aja also shows up for the first time late in the year and she'd start playing a bigger role in things in 98. This was the first year they did the GAEA GIOIA, their year end talent/variety show which became a yearly tradition for remainder of the companies existence & was always something I looked forward to seeing highlights of on tv. The 1st High Spurt 600 tournament was held in December which also became a yearly tradition. They went through a weird phase whear they did a bunch of Pancrase like shoot style matches (GAEA KAI). I actually enjoyed them quite a lot and thought it produced some good stuff but they abandoned the idea after 97 only doing 1 or 2 more in 98. Probably the biggest story was Ozaki coming & going through out the year. The early months were great with the OZ Academy angle being super hot. They even turned rookies Hiromi Kato & Sakura Hirota heel and had them in the roll of pledges trying to earn their way into the group. Then things splintered off from Chigusa being OZ's main enemy to Hokuto feuding with her and Chigusa debuing her weird alt ego character ZERO & attacing them both at the anniversary show which I thought was interesting but after that Ozaki disapeared from GAEA for a few months (for various reasons) and the booking kinda fell apart since everything was being built around her as top heel. With no Ozaki the heel Kato/Hirota thing flamed out and didn't end up going anywhere with them both quietly turning back face in the fall and all the heat kind of died down on Nagashima & Sato for a while too and they kinda got suck in this weird tweener phase for a bit. Ended up with this long stretch of shows mid year whear pretty much nothing of interest happened. Some good wrestling here & thear but no emotion to most of it and GAEA's a promotion that was always at it's best when there was a feud or angle surrounding things. Things pick up again big time during the last couple months of the year when OZ makes a surprise return and starts shit with Kaoru & Yamada leading to some brilliant stuff. We also get the Sakura Hirota redemption road series to try & prove herself as a serious competitor and sees her teaming up with Chigusa a lot vs various teams and producing some really fun matches. Them vs LCO was a nice precurser to the stuff we'd get in a few laters with the Eccentric vs D-Fix feud. Top 20 matches of the year (For the purposes of this thread i'd say only 1-11 are MUST have yearbook matches even though I think all of them are really good/great) 1 - 7/19/1997 (WCW Women's Cruiserweight Title) Toshie Uematsu © vs Yoshiko Tamura 2 - 4/12/1997 Akira Hokuto vs Kaoru 3 - 11/30/1997 Mayumi Ozaki & Sugar Sato vs Kaoru & Toshiyo Yamada 4 - 2/23/1997 (Street Fight) Mayumi Ozaki vs Chigusa Nagayo 5 - 1/19/1997 Mayumi Ozaki, Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima vs Chigusa Nagayo, Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura 6 - 7/21/1997 (GAEA KAI Rules) Toshiyo Yamada vs Kaoru 7 - 12/27/1997 Akira Hokuto & Kaoru & Chikayo Nagashima vs Chigusa Nagayo & Sonoko Kato & Toshiyo Yamada 8 - 1/12/1997 (3AW Tag Titles) Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura vs Chihiro Nakano & Makie Numao 9 - 9/20/1997 Kaoru & Sakura Hirota vs Toshiyo Yamada & Sonoko Kato 10 - 7/19/1997 (3AW Tag Titles) Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura vs Saya Endo & Tomoko Miyaguchi 11 - 10/19/1997 (3AW Tag Titles) Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura © vs Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima 12 - 3/15/1997 Akira Hokuto & Sonoko Kato vs Kaoru & Meiko Satomura 13 - 5/25/1997 Toshiyo Yamada, Sonoko Kato & Meiko Satomura vs Akira Hokuto, Toshie Uematsu & Maiko Matsumoto 14 - 9/20/1997 (3AW Title) Chigusa Nagayo © vs Aja Kong 15 - 10/13/1997 Meiko Satomura vs Sonoko Kato 16 - 11/18/1997 Mima Shimoda & Etsuko Mita vs Chigusa Nagayo & Sakura Hirota 17 - 9/20/1997 (3AW Title) ZERO © vs Super Heel Devil Masami 18 - 5/25/1997 Chigusa Nagayo vs Kaoru 19 - 7/2/1997 Sugar Sato, Chikayo Nagashima, Maiko Matsumoto & Hiromi Kato vs Sonoko Kato, Meiko Satomura, Toshie Uematsu & Sakura Hirota 20 - 8/30/1997 (1 Night Tag Tournament FINAL) Sugar Sato & Toshie Uematsu vs Chikayo Nagashima & Sonoko Kato Honorable mention to 8/15/1997 Chigusa Nagayo & Toshiyo Yamada vs Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima 7/21/1997 Fake Reyna Jabuki & La Infernal Kaoru vs Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima Wrestler of the year was easily KAORU. I've always had gread admiration for those types of utility players that you can just slot into any role that's needed and they'll excell at and she really steped up this year in a wide variety of roles, brawling, working the mat, high flying, etc.. put ppl over quite a lot, both the vets & youngsters but was always able to remain creidble. Was really a key player in major feuds vs Hokuto, Yamada & OZ Academy and had a cool little mini feud with Chigusa that I enjoyed a lot too. Re my top 3 matches 7/19/1997 (WCW Women's Cruiserweight Title) Toshie Uematsu © vs Yoshiko Tamura Just an awesomely great match built around selling & drama with Toshie channeling Akira Hokuto as Tamura goes after her knee. 4/12/1997 Akira Hokuto vs Kaoru Exact opposite kind of match, all about high impact moves and action built around blowing off a really hot feud. 11/30/1997 Mayumi Ozaki & Sugar Sato vs Kaoru & Toshiyo Yamada Entirely diffrent then the previous two matches. This isn't 5 stars, this isn't the best match i've ever seen or the best match of the year but to me this match is perfection. Story of the match is after Ozaki returned, Yamada is so pissed at her and is so desperate to beat her ass that she can't think about anything else to the point of not caring about winning which pisses Kaoru off. With the way they execute things with OZ playing evil genius, twisting things around to the point that Kaoru & Yamada end up fighting with each other by the end allowing OZ to win is just brilliant stuff. A big pull apart brawl ensues post match, Chigusa has to run out post match to play peace keeper, Kaoru & Yamada won't even look at each other in the back and Ozaki just laughs on & smiles, like wow "those chicks are nuts". Great action, great story, cool/interesting characters....I don't really think i'm doing a great job or atleast as great a job as i'd like of verbalising things but yeah, this match really encompasses everything I love & want out of wrestling and is the kind of thing that makes GAEA my favorite promotion of all time.

Eh, in the context of the time I don't think it was that bad. Ppl getting big farewells just wasn't done very often back in those days in mainstream US wrestling. Like you can't miss what you don't have. There was the Savage/Liz moment at Mania 7 and that's about it that I can think of and even then, Savage was sticking around, turning face and knew he was going to come back eventually anyways which doesn't apply here.

1/18/82 is good enough to make you wish that Vince's vault would release the rematch from MSG one day (it has never aired or shown up in the trading circles). Yeah that was a good one. I think their 3/20/82 match is the best of the Backlund/Adonis that i've seen. The lumberjack match from a week later is pretty great too tho. There's a Steamboat/Piper/JYD vs Savage/Race/Adonis Elimination match from Feb 1987 that I remember really liking a lot but can't recall off the top of my head how much of that was due to Adonis.

If it was sold as that I think I probably would have liked it more. Initially this was a match that had a rep as being some ****+ mega awesome match and well.....I just never got it, even in the context of the time.

Not sure I really get this talking point you've brought up. Aja/Toyota & Kansai/Kyoko were both pretty long matches, 17 or 18 mins and they went at it pretty hard in both. Kansai/Aja was on the short side but they beat the heck out of each other in that one too. Never got the sense they were doing much diffrent then they would on a non tournament night.

Yup. There were a fair # of 4 to 6 hours super shows leading up to this but yeah this was the mega one. Live it was a huge success for the company but it was also the peak of the interpromotional era. After something like this you couldn't really top it and after 2 years of going to the well pretty hard on the interpromotional front it got kinda burned out as far as being something special in 95 or so. Criticly for the longest it's been held in high regard as 1 of 3 must have shows (the other 2 being Dreamslam I & II) for someone getting into joshi. Bit of a double edged sword tho since some ppl would get them, enjoy them then not get any other or just very little other joshi. For a guy like me after so many years it got a little tiring for a while in a "hey guys, there's OTHER great stuff out thear too" sorta way. But that's a bigger problem and a subject for another time.

I always thought AJW did a great job of pulling off that style of booking. They had as many as 8 or 9 titles at one point including 3 tag belts for a while but it never felt like too much because there was a pretty strict heirarchy of belt X is for ppl at this lvl and you could have fun tracking diffrent wrestlers over their careers as they climbed the ladder and progressed to getting to challenge for higher & higher ranked championships.

It sounds like Vince has gotten a lot more aggressive over the years. When you listen to JR's commentary in his last few years in WWE, he sounds a lot more tentative and cautious than during the peak of the Austin-McMahon run, and it's because Vince is all over him. Watch something like Austin-Foley from Over the Edge 98 and compare it to Ross calling a match from 2008, it sounds like a different person. You can't really compare modern WWE announcers to announcers from other era or promotions, because you never hear stories elsewhere like you hear with today's Vince. It's an odd quirk he's developed. Meltzer always makes the point that Vince screaming in the anouncers ears is a pretty recent thing that didn't happen much in the past because Vince was either out thear announcing himself or he was an on screen performer and thus didn't have the time to focus on producing the anouncing. He usually likes to point out that Cole's noticably more toned down on the nights when Vince isn't available to do it and someone else like HHH fills in.

I hereby propose that anyone who misspells someone elses misspelling should be banned for life from complaining about such things

??? ????? Jerry was in one of the previous ones the other day

No major storyline reason if that's what you're asking, Toyota & Yamada were still on friendly terms after that. After 3 years it was just time for a shake up and not much more you could do with the team. AJW did that a lot, whear they'd break up a reg team after a while but leave the door open to go back to it down the line if they ever needed to. That's why you get Toyota/Shimoda (Tokyo Sweethearts) & Yamada/Mita (Dream Orca) teaming again regularly 96/97. Also for 95 Yamada didn't really do too much of note and Sakie was getting the "future ace" push so putting her with Toyota on top in tag title matches helped that.

Never really got the appeal of this and was really disapointed when I saw it after all the hype it used to get. On a 23 match card this isn't in my upper half. Comedy was never what I wanted out of this crew so I was glad when they droped/toned down that aspect a few years later. Even for a comedy match i've seen much better from these guys & from others.

You win, FLIK loses. That was the entire point of my post. I call shenanigans on the grounds that the joke doesn't work because the nose job & boob job were years apart

Bryan Alvarez flipping out a year or so back & going on a rant about how awful he thought this match was, how everyone's performances stunk or were just barely average, how any good moments were purely because of the gimmick being fool proof and how anyone who thought otherwise must not watch much wrestling was one of the more hilarious moments he's ever produced I went back and watched it after that & thought it was great myself, Funk's one of the guys who stood out most to me in a positive way.

Yeah, that's a pretty common transition spot in joshi tag matches. I guess I can see how it'd throw some ppl off if they were only used the US style of accidently hitting your partner = imediate grounds to turn on them.

Tracked down the Poffo shoot and only an hr in to it I agree it's really awesome. In the shoot he flat out says homophobia is what he was playing it for. Talks about Terry Funk asking him to "fag it up" a bit more as he originally toned things down when he first got to Texas. Tells a funny story about having heat with Ole Anderson, Ole calling him gay so in retaliation he went around the territory and banged all of Ole's rats. Anyone know anything about Ricky Star? He says that's who he riped the gimmick off from. A few youtube matches poped up on a quick search but I don't have time at the moment to check them out.

That was the reason they had Rhonda Singh smash her nose in when she debued as Bertha Faye. Maybe I would if I went back now and specifically paid attention but I never noticed much of a diffrence either.

Pretty much my exact thoughts when reading the thread title. The innocent days of arguing champion A is better then champion B are long over

Specificly he got pissed they ignored the finish. Almost exactly 1 year earlier was the match whear Vader power bombed him on the floor and he got stretchered out. This time they repeated it but Cactus made it to his feet before 10 which he thought should have been played up as a huge moment and instead was ignored with Heenan just making a lame 1 liner.