FLIK

3/8/1986 Dump Matsumoto & Bull Nakano vs Velvet McIntyre & Dawn Marie 3/8/1986 Crush Girls vs Judy Martin & Donna Christanello 3/11/1986 Dump Matsumoto & Bull Nakano vs Susan Starr & Candice Pardue 3/11/1986 Crush Girls vs Leilani Kai & Black Venus 3/16/1986 Dump Matsumoto & Bull Nakano vs Velvet McIntyre & Linda Gonzalez 3/16/1986 Crush Girls vs Leilani Kai & Penny Mitchell Crush got over pretty well off their ring work, Dump & Bull dumbed themselves down A LOT to generic cheap heel lvl. all of these except the 3/11 Crush match are on youtube. Best match of the bunch is the 3/16 Dump/Bull tag, followed by the 3/16 Crush match. 3/8 Crush match isn't too bad either though it kinda draged a bit in the middle since they go 15 mins or so. Rest is just average/forgetable. The commentary from Monsoon/Ventura & Monsoon/Hayes borders the line between hilarious, annoying & offensive.

Leilani Kai, who had worked with them in Japan before, suggested them as opponents for her and Judy Martin. Yeah, a lot of the US girls that WWF would use like Kai, Martin, Velvet McIntyre, etc... worked a ton of Japan in the late 70's & 80's. WWF had also brought in the Crush Girls, Dump & Bull the year before.

Yeah i'm huge on Kuzumi who is a young Azyumi Hyuga before the name change. Haven't seen this match to comment but i'd chalk it up to bad night if you didn't like her here. At this stage she's only 2+ years in, she'd been in some good matches and showed a lot of potential but wasn't thear yet. 98 is the break out year for her and she benefits a lot from JWP's roster thining out as she pretty much becomes the ace of the company from 99-2000 on and really blossoms into one of the best joshi wrestlers ever over time.

Not specifically Yagi but just JWP going down in general. 97, maybe a bit into 98 is really the last year for a long time that you could consider JWP relevant in terms of being a higher lvl company on the joshi pecking order. Yagi & Candy retire only to pop back up in ARSION. A # of other youngers they had retire like Nouchi & Saburo in 97 too and Fukuoka retires in early 99 so a good portion of the crew they were building for the future is gone. Plus you've got Cutie Retiring in 98, Ozaki quiting, Kansai getting injured & never really being the same afterwards & of course Plum's passing away, among other things.

Yup, always thought that was a clever finish myself. March. Barbed wire match isn't on the lvl of this one but it's really good in it's own right.

She's 10+ years in at this point Yeah they've had a few good ones, though they never peaked beyond that lvl. A million amazingly great tags opposite each other though OZ Academy angle was the best example up to this point but GAEA was always heavily about Vet/Rookie vs Vet/Rookie feuds in the early days. GAEA vs JWP, GAEA vs LLPW, GAEA vs JWP, etc... Devil & _ vs Chigusa & _ usually ruled around this time. Yes & no. There's tons of GAEA that's great viewed out of context but the overall package with the booking leading up to the big matches is their big strength yeah. I'd disagree but that depends entirely on how much you enjoy over the top joshi brawling heel act as Ozaki's maybe the best at it or atleast best since Dump.

.....i'm going to predict Ito vs Toyota, the April LLPW 8 man or something from GAEA ends up as your highest ranking joshi match. 50/50 chance you don't even like the 9/21 cage match at all

Don't know how many they've had but i've seen 2, 6/11/11 & 7/15/12 and I liked the 2012 match a lot more.

97 - mid 99 or so is the peak of the promotion in terms of having the "totall package", great in ring + great booking. The string of semi weekly tv in 97 built around the Hayabusa vs Gannosuke & Tanaka vs Kanemura feuds is one of the most enjoyable runs of shows i've ever gone thorugh.

My latest match from this past Saturday, Hollywood Jason Vega vs Big Benjamin Johnson....sadly I lose, via Canadia Destroyer

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://board....alleydriver.com Most recent archive date they have is from May A lot doesn't work but a large enough amount does you can also pull up some old stuff via google cache He's been a part of a few good ones but I can't really say many of them were that way because of him, he was good enough to go along for the ride & not drag better folk down though most of the time.

Heh, no clue whear you got St from but it's just Oliver John. If you never saw it you should check out their 2012 match from SWF, similar style but I liked it slightly more. Thatcher's been my pick for the best guy in Nor Cal for a while so always good to see him getting props.

What Thatcher stuff have you been digging?

85 is the shorter match that Chigusa loses 86 is longer whear Dump loses There's been like 3 diffrent versions of AJW Classics But every incarnation has aired it that i'm aware of so yes.

I recall liking him vs Kikuchi. At best that was a case specific situation with Joe. Never heard it applied to AJPW before though, the story I always recall was it just being New Japan that allegedly had the issue. Either way, there were numerous times it happened before & plenty since.

I'm going to assume you guys are talking about the 85 one but if you didn't know they had a 2nd hair match a year later in 86 that's just as good...

My 3rd Pro match from last Saturday, Big Benjamin Johnson (me) vs Leon Ikusa, re-match from last month. Weirdly my 2nd match was a few weeks back, working a lucha show at a flea market but that wasn't taped

The 2 things I always remember most fondly about Velocity are the really awesome underrated FBI vs Basham Bros tag series and POKERFACE!!!

Off the top of my head, The 8/18 JGP FINAL Show was a pretty big oversight (AJW Title) Takako Inoue © vs Mariko Yoshida (JGP) Toshiyo Yamada vs Kyoko Inoue (JGP Semi Finals) Aja Kong vs Bison Kimura (JGP Finals) Kyoko Inoue vs Bison Kimura Are all worth going out of your way to check out, the rest of the card is solid too

Thanks guys Heh, glad someone caught that. Re the name - wasnt my idea but it's much better then the original idea i was going to be given so can't complain

....sooooo yeah....again...1 year later and I made my debut last Saturday as Big Benjamin Johnson. Same day Kobashi retired, sadly I failed on my promise to no sell even 1 burning hammer and I lost via getting kicked in the head

......don't feel like going into a big thing at the moment so i'll keep this short. I think a lot of the criticism directed at Lioness is both fair & unfair at the same time and completely ignores a lot of the context in which her work was taking place. She's a very unique product of the environment she came up in. One of the top 5 most famous joshi wrestlers of all time in the 80's and #2 babyface in the company, working in an era that increasingly focused more on fast paced, flashy action. Forced into retirement before she was ready. Allowed back into wrestling 5 years later but now treated as a mid to upper mid carder, mostly putting over a new generation of girls who'd now taken her spot. Leaves with Jaguar & Bison to form her own company whear she's once again a main eventer and working on a roster full of mostly rookies. Now takes on the role of top heel, mixing her usual workrate style with the psychology of what a classic joshi heel should be, the kind she grew up fighting in the likes of Dump & crew. Mean, violent, dominant, cheats, brawls, uses weapons and gets lots of help from her buddies & underlings. After that, constantly involved in a death feud of some sort against a crew of faces usually led by an older vet or after she turned face again to reform Crush, a crew of heels usually led by older vets. All that said to say this, given the character she was portraying in stories they were trying to tell. Slower paced matches, looking really vulnerable and elevating the mid card younger generation weren't things that really fit. Whether you enjoy the story or not is up to the individual. I wish she'd done more of the latter myself but I atleast get why she didn't. And while she never lost to a youngster ever, she atleast didn't hog the spotlight to the point whear they could never have any of it and when the time came she did plenty of jobs to her fellow vets if nothing else. I never had a problem with her selling either at any point in her career and she wasn't unwilling to take her share of punishment from anyone when it came down to it. So yeah, i'm a big fan of Lioness still.

To clarify, I didn't hate it because of the man on woman violence (i'm not overly fond of intergender but i'm not offended by it). I hated it because all 4 involved as well as the commentators failed to show even a basic grasp of day 1 wrestling psychology should be. Things like, large guy brutally beating up tiny woman should = heel (& if not, woman should atleast be over the top annoying/evil to whear you can sorta do the "she was asking for it" bit), or that faces should be likable and shouldn't act like cocky douche bags. Days later i'm still confused by this match as i'm 99% sure they were not trying to work this as heel vs heel and given that, they massively failed at their jobs. Coming off this show I did just that and it exsposed me to a lot of other guys I dug a lot from CWF 9/22/2012 Chiva Kid, Arik Royal & Nick Richards vs Walter Eaton, Roy Wilkins & Ray Kandrack 12/1/2012 Arik Royal, Kamakazi Kid & Chiva Kid vs Walter Eaton, Roy Wilkins & Ray Kandrack These 2 were both really good 12/29/2012 Hurricane Helms, Chiva Kid & Kamakazi Kid vs Mecha Mercenary & The Dawsons 1/19/2013 Ray Kandrack, Walter Eaton, Roy Wilkins, Jesse Ortega & Michael McAllister vs Chiva Kid, Kamakazi Kid, Ty Dillinger, Aric Andrews & Mark James these 2 were great

Yeah this, i've seen guys at training who can bench like 400+ not be able to get dudes up all the way who weigh under 200 for a powerbomb because the guy taking it didn't post right. I've always found taking them really easy. Took me forever to learn how do give one correctly though. That's another one that can be helped greatly by a guy springing & posting corectly. I remember early on trying to lift up short tiny dudes and it feeling like a sack of bricks because they sandbagged and then doing it with a much bigger vetran guy who went up for me and it feeling like lifting a feather.