JerryvonKramer

I agree that there is marketing around it, I wasn't saying that there isn't any sort of push there, I'm just saying that Bruno was also legit a folk hero. So the marketing is supporting that, not *creating* it. I don't think Vince goes on and on and on about Bruno as hero on commentary though. Whereas I think HBK as GOAT is like 90% WWE marketing creation, 10% slither of truth (i.e. he did have some good matches).

Hmmmm ....

I don't disagree with that Chad, but you can't tell me that WWE fans aren't conditioned. I mean look at Brock beating Taker, you literally have to go back to 1971 and Ivan to find a parallel to that. I do get that the fans are more willing to protest and reject the product -- closer, if you think about it, to late 80s Crockett or WCW crowds (think: Starrcade 87, fans shitting on the Fantastics and Rock n Rolls in the late 80s, "We Want Flair!" etc.), and possibly also old Philly or Baltimore crowds in general (MSG crowds were very well behaved). But I also think that the WWE has been extremely adept at tapping into "smart fan culture" and steering opinion. Let's put it another way: Bruno WAS a folk hero, legit. They didn't really have to sell the fans on that too much. If you watch those shows, Vince isn't putting over Bruno as the big hero all the time because he doesn't really need to, MSG, Philly or anywhere, he was just loved. Whereas the idea of Shawn Michaels as GOAT is just pure marketing, plain and simple. Repeat the lie enough and it becomes a truth -- a well known phenomenon. WWE also do an excellent job of controlling not only history, but also the accepted narrative of history. Look at how the Monday Night Wars are presented. Look at how the careers of certain guys are packaged in a way to foreground their WWE runs. And now think about how your average fan (outside of PWO / DVDR) engages with wrestling history. Shit, just go and listen to the way those guys on the Squared Circle Gazette podcast discuss them ... you won't hear talk of Rick Martel without his Model run being brought up (as just one random example). The agenda, the focus, the entire mindset is conditioned through years of watching WWE product.

Place to Be trying to hold me down by sending me stiffs to work with ... Just kidding, just kidding

I heard his ROH commentary ...

http://placetobenation.com/titans-of-wrestling-36-interview-with-tito-santana/ Parv and Pete interview Tito Santana about his early career in Florida, Georgia, WWF, and AWA, and about his legendary feud over the Intercontinental Title with Greg Valentine from 1985. Head over to Tito's website: titosantana.net/ And contact him on Twitter @RealTitoSantana The PWO-PTBN Podcast Network features great shows you can find right here at Place to Be Nation. By subscribing on iTunes or SoundCloud, you’ll have access to new episodes, bonus content, as well as a complete archive of: Where the Big Boys Play, Titans of Wrestling, Pro-Wrestling Super-Show, Good Will Wrestling, and Wrestling With the Past.

I'd argue that this is entirely untrue and that modern WWE fans are among the "most conditioned" fans ever. Consider: - How every match has to end with a finisher - How every "big match" must end with endless false finishes - How much the WWE fanbase has bought the idea of a "Wrestlemania moment" - How much the WWE fanbase bought into "the Streak" - How much the WWE fanbase has bought into the idea of Shawn Michaels as GOAT - How much the WWE fanbase has bought into the idea of HHH as an all-timer - How much the WWE fanbase has been conditioned to accept the WWE version of wrestling history - How much the average WWE fan develops the mindset of "if it didn't happen in WWE, it might as well have not happened" - How much the WWE fanbase accepts and possibly even expects 20-minute promos delivered solo in the ring - How much the WWE fanbase were actually worked like proper marks during that whole Bryan run before he got injured - How much they've been worked over Cena (I'm convinced they've known what they've been doing there for years now) Don't try to tell me that modern fans aren't conditioned by the product. They are arguably more conditioned than fans have ever been. I think people sometimes forget about that. Shit, listen to some of the podcasts put out on PTBN and which are posted right here on PWO which aren't put out by "PWO guys" and you'll see all of the above and more, and those are fans hardcore enough to have podcasts with actual followings! Let's not delude ourselves that fans aren't conditioned any more.

Sounds pretty awful to me.

I don't see why not. Luger will likely rank above Hogan for me when is all said and done. But let's even pretend that he wouldn't ... I'm ultimately talking about crowd control and "aura". I can think of guys who were really really over, who time and again didn't know what to do with that overness -- Sting would spring to mind. Sid. Warrior. Make your own list. Hogan knew what to do. Like I said, I think it's far too easy to take the things Hogan does well for granted and assume that they are easy. They aren't easy. Many subsequent attempts to manufacture "big match moments" like those Hogan gives us have fallen flat on their face. Very very few wrestlers have that certain quality Hogan does in making the event seem like the biggest thing ever. It's why I quoted you and Childs talking about Choshu. You can point to marketing and booking, but he does it in AWA against Bockwinkel, he does it in Japan in 1981 and 1991, he does it at Wrestlemania 18 when he wasn't booked in the main event, and he did it in WCW after the heel turn. Of course, there's a certain amount of chicken and egg because you can't completely take context away: he's only in the spots he is because he was a star. But as I mentioned you can point to other guys who have been put in similar spots and floundered. He knew his audience, he knew how to work them, he knew his limitations and how to work around them, he understood ring psychology. Many of these sorts of arguments will be made for a guy like Jerry Lawler. People will argue on this forum -- and with a straight face -- that Lawler pulling down the strap is better than Hogan hulking up. But think about it and the psychology is more or less identical, and I think Hogan's timing was almost as good as Lawler's. I also think that he took a good beating when needed. It would be interesting for one of the people who are really really high on Lawler to put forward a point-by-point argument demonstrating why they think Lawler was a better babyface than Hogan, beyond his ability to throw a working punch. I do understand why you hold some of the things you do against Hogan, Charles, but to extend Kelly's analogy, that would be a bit like blaming Elvis for X Factor.

Loss, you'll notice I didn't mention money or drawing in my post. That's not coming into my criteria at all. Even if the qualities and abilities I'm talking about led to success and stardom. Just think it's important to point out that I'm (and I guess Kelly too) are not saying "Hogan is the biggest draw ever therefore you must include him", that isn't the argument.

Well this is why I'm thinking about Johnny Valentine as being a guy who would have direct influence on Flair. Steamboat as I've said elsewhere seems like a post-Brisco babyface. Flair and Steamer seem like "next generation" guys. "Standing up" isn't a bad term at all for the transition I'm talking about here.

It might be a while before I get to Cena, but since you've just reviewed it, I'll throw in my review of the WM29 match, taken from show thread from last year.

No arguments from me there

Yes, well there's two things on that: 1. It seems to be crediting Race with an awful lot, even though I can't find many guys before him who work like he does. Terry Funk in many ways is close, especially in his bumping style. They both do a spot where they swing 360 on the ropes and sort of bounce their legs on the top rope while upside down -- a wildly over-the-top bump that I've only seen Race and Funk do period. 2. Race could sit in a headlock with the best of them when he wanted to. Ray Stevens is someone I am going to look at, but there really isn't a huge amount out there. A bunch of 70s LA / San Francisco stuff has cropped up in the past few days, almost all clips, but between that and the smattering of 70s AWA we have featuring Stevens, I can at least get a sense of how he worked. Bockwinkel is obviously another link, but my current idea with him is that he changed with the times and was much more mat-work-y in the 70s and before that. And it's not like he stopped working the mat altogether in the 80s. Beyond those two, I'm not sure. Buddy Rogers, Pat O'Connor, Lou Thesz, Verne Gagne and Eduard Carpentier -- from what I've seen, all work the older style. The one guy who seems like he worked in a more action-orientated way is Johnny Valentine. He bumped around quite a bit but seemed to go in more for the big clubbing blows than throws and things. But from what I've seen Valentine is closer to Race than any of those other guys. Beyond the US, Karl Gotch is a name one has to consider, even if Inoki was extremely mat-based himself. Seems to me though that guys like Jumbo, Tenryu and so on learned a lot of their style from US workers from their early trips.

Yes! Absolutely perfect Kelly! He even has the terrible films.

Hogan's ability to electrify a promotion and make things feel more important should count for something. He did it not once, but THREE times in his career for three different companies. His ability to connect with a crowd is significent. He doesn't have the earthiness of Bruno or even of Austin, but he wasn't that sort of hero. He was larger-than-life, an action figure come to life in the age of He-Man. He also made matches feel BIGGER than imaginable. Mania III, Mania VI, Mania 18. I'm not talking about promos and hype packages, I'm talking about those early match moments. The staredowns. The genuine intensity. People think that's easy -- watching shit like Cena vs. The Rock shows you how much it isn't. Hogan does that stuff better than practically anyone. And it's a rare quality. But those are the obvious things. What else? An underrated aspect of his work -- which has been repeated so often at this point, it's almost a cliche -- is his selling and ability to generate sympathy during a heel's heat segment. He never stopped being good at this, even if he really got lazy with it circa 94-5. The more Bob Backlund I've watched, the more and more I've come to appreciate just what Hogan was able to do well for so long. Yes, the formula became staid and predictable, but look how effectively he drew sympathy from crowds who must have known deep down that he was going to win. He was able to wring a sense of danger from the most contrived of narratives. And he did that through selling. His timing was good too. He knew when to time a hope spot. He knew when to do the comeback. I think people forget that Hogan actually worked with an awful lot of stiffs during his time, but he was able to extract the maximum possible heat from them. Finally, while I'd never say Hogan was that good on offense, in his AWA run and 84-6 sort of time, he does have a real intensity to him. That gets a bit sanitized and watered down as we roll into the late 80s and early 90s. But even in 90 and 91 he has some decent stuff with Earthquake and Slaughter, and I really like that match in Japan with Hansen. ------- So all-in-all, I think Hogan warrants a place on the list for being an extremely effective working babyface. I can't imagine a world where I'd rank someone like Low Ki above Hogan. Low Ki might be better than Hogan at working the mat, doing kicks, coming off the top rope, or whatever -- but the things Hogan could do that he can't (see above) are basically just more important to what I value in wrestling. I don't know where exactly Hogan will go. I hated him as a kid, and he still has a lot of matches where he annoys me a good bit, and his pre-NWO WCW run still makes my stomach turn over. But he was too good at what he did not to rank somewhere. He'll be in the 50-100 half for me. Above Backlund for sure, but below Bruno and probably Austin too. ---------- Finally, I don't really agree with the artistic vs. commercial artist point. If I was to make an analogy, if your Ivan Putskis or Chief Jay Strongbows were like your Phil Collins (ie. commerically successful, but devoid of artistic merit), then Hogan would be more like, say, Queen: yes, their hits are played out, yes, some of their later stuff got a bit cheesy, yes, you "grow out of them" -- but their success was built on some solid foundations and they were ultimately doing something that has some artistic worth which was precisely the reason for their success in the first place. At best Hogan is that, at worst maybe U2 ... actually, U2 is too harsh, maybe like what? Elton John? Abba maybe. On second thoughts, this analogy isn't very helpful but you see the basic point.

Well it depends on how they work it. The story could be something like "here are two big dominant teams, used to overpowering their opponents with high impact offense, but neither of them has have faced a team like THIS before!" Early portion of the match. Hawk hits something big. Ooooooohhh. Scott Steiner hits something big. Oooohhh. Hawk answers. Scott comes back. Hawk is taken aback. Both guys think about tagging out. Commentators put over how this isn't quite what either team is used to. Maybe rinse-repeat that with Rick and Animal to drive the point home. What now? They start ramping up some intensity and even a little bit of desparation. Maybe we can move away from parity and one side gains an advantage for a while. The point is, this has been a spotfest so far and there's a clear narrative and story being told. How *isn't* there?

I've become quite interested in, for lack of a better phrase, the history of the suplex. On the Chicago footage, it seems like once in a while the guys would do a throw. Thesz even did a powerbomb sometimes. But 90%+ of those matches are worked on the mat or with strikes. In the early 70s, in the US, in Japan and in Britain, you still mostly have predominently matwork. In fact, there is not a huge amount of difference (in my view) between the style in the 50s footage and what we see in the early 70s. In the US and Japan, we start seeing more things like hiptosses and bodyslams, and depending on the workers involved, you might get some suplex variations. But for all intents and purposes, the style in all three places isn't a million miles apart. You can look at a McManus match, an Inoki match and a Dory Funk Jr match and recognise plenty of common cross-over points. By the late 70s, though, in the US and Japan (not really watched British stuff from that era yet) you have guys throwing bombs left, right and centre to punctuate the mat-based game. The difference in the style is marked. More bombs, more bumping. By the late 80s, in the US, true matwork almost becomes a lost art, and in Japan (at least All Japan) it's mostly used to eat up a little bit of time before those massive strikes and bombs are busted out -- at the very least the emphasis and focus of the style is not really on matwork. A while back on Titans we watched this Legends Battle Royale from 1987: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp8c-DVvpPU After the match (about 19 minutes in), they ask each of the oldtimers to compare the wrestlers of today with wrestling from their peaks. Most of them are really on their best behaviour (in gratitude to WWF for giving them this one last "big" match), and try to put over the contemporary product, but the common thread through all their answers is that guys come from the top rope a lot more, leave the mat a lot more, and don't work submissions like they used to. And *some* of them, you can tell, have a twinge of "these young guys don't know how to wrestle" about them. In this thread, I'd like anyone with any knowledge about this at all to post whatever they have... I'm interested in how and why this transition in the style came about. Who were the real innovators? How much of it owes to amateur wrestling? Who was the first real "bomb throwing" type worker? What are the reasons for matwork declining in the late 70s and then especially in the 80s and 90s? Maybe this thread will die, maybe something interesting will come out of it. I haven't been able to find anywhere online discussing this particular topic.

Depends on if "spotfest" is always meant as a pejorative or can be purely descriptive. To me "spotfest" means "a lot of moves, in particular big bombs". "Sprint" means "a short (7=to=12-minute) match worked at a fast pace with some intensity". To me, you can have great spirnts, great spotfests, great technical mat-based affais, great brawls, great gimmick matches ... they are all modes of telling a story and all of them have uses and applications. It's a nonsense to say that one of them is intrinsically better than any other. On the flpside you can have sprints, spotfests, technical mat-based matches, brawls and gimmick matches that are dull, meanandering or fail to tell a compelling story for a variety of reasons. My objection is only to the knee-jerk "it's a spotfest so THEREFORE it has no psychology" line of thinking. As I said, that's basically just lazy. I recall Chad and I had a decent exchange about this when we reviewed that Sting/Luger vs. Steiners match from Superbrawl I. In fairness, Chad did not attack it for poor psychology, but was down on it from an execution standpoint and felt he'd seen a lot of matches achieve what they were going for more effectively, including ones involving The Steiners. I still think it's a great match, personally, that is "made by the context".

Sometimes I love a spotfest that is completely devoid of psychology or context or anything, but examples are pretty rare -- that random Martel vs. Race match from AWA springs to mind. I also think "spotfest" is too easily and lazily thrown around as a criticism by people in general. As a case in point, Sting / Luger vs. Steiners is frequently talked about as a spotfest devoid of psychology. But personally, I think it tells a good story with The Steiners coming up against two studs as big and powerful as they are and then geting increasingly frustrated as they find themselves matched in strength and offense. I'm higher on a lot of the Steiners stuff from 90 and 91 than a lot of people, because I don't think they are as devoid of storytelling as is often made out. The matches against Doom would be even better examples. Seems like people see a bunch of suplexes and think "oh it must be a spotfest and that means it has no psychology" -- and to me that's lazy reviewing. Psychology / storytelling isn't just about working a bodypart or focusing offense on a certain area. There are many ways to tell a story in the ring and a spotfest is one of them. More importantly, sometimes a spotfest would be the best and most appropriate way to tell that story. Let's pretend for a second that The Road Warriors had to face The Steiner Brothers, would you really want to see Hawk and Animal use hammerlocks and arm bars to focus their strategy on Scott Steiner's shoulder? Don't think so: it just isn't the right context for it. They could probably tell a BETTER story trading power moves with the Steiners. This is not so much a defense of spotfests as it is an attack on what I see as lazy and mostly derivative criticism, which is not much better than someone following a Scott Keith rating without thinking about it. Sometimes some of us are accused of "overthinking", I'm accusing some people (note: no one in particular) of not thinking at all.

Question that has come out of some viewing: do the 70s WoS guys ever do suplexes and other such throws? Seems like most "throws" result from flinging a guy by the head or body part from matwork. Is there a moment when they start doing more "moves"? I don't ask this out of any complaint -- it's all incredibly easy to watch and enjoy -- but out of curiosity about style. Guys like Dynamite Kid and Billy Robinson who came out of Britain to work elsewhere have plenty of "bombs", but I don't see guys working like that on 70s WoS. Does McManus ever do suplexes? Does Breaks?

For people who've been reading these reviews the "falling" leglock I've been mentioning is apparently an Indian deathlock.

All this "realism" talk is entirely misplaced, because wrestling creates its own reality and and its own internal logic. Who gives a shit what an armbar would do in real life? In wrestling we understand how an armbar functions and what it is meant to achieve.

Not to give away too much of our upcoming WTBBP review, but Halloween Havoc 91 is a pretty good demonstration of why Eaton > Morton.