Tabe

Volk Han. His debut was not only the best on the card, he was far and away the best worker on the card. He legit was world class from day one.

It's....OK. He makes some outlandish claims but has an interesting story. Definitely not top-tier but...OK. I would happily part with my copy of it.

All Japan has released the full 7/29/93 house show in HD.

EDIT: I am a moron.

Small correction: 6/22/84 Midnights vs R&R is a double DQ not win by DQ for the R&R. Source: just watched the match

Very well done. As a huge fan of Han, I completely agree with everything you wrote.

I'm 160 pages into "Nitro" by Guy Evans and, so far, it's the best wrestling book I've ever read.

Here is my review of Tim Hornbaker's "Death of the Territories". It was written for Amazon but they think Tim bribed me so I can't post it there: Tim Hornbaker is a writer with feet planted firmly in two subject areas - professional wrestling and baseball history. His biographies of Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson have received universal acclaim and are absolutely best-in-class for their respective subjects and in the realm of baseball biography. Hornbaker's pro wrestling offerings have been much more of a mixed bag. His initial entry, "National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling" was a dense, scholarly tome packed with a tremendous amount of detail. Unfortunately, it was held back by a lack of editing, mixing of real & stage names, and being out of order chronologically. Hornbaker's history of the World Wrestling Federation, "Capitol Revolution: The Rise of the McMahon Wrestling Empire" featured better editing but its back cover falsely claimed the book covered the WWF up through the late 80s (it actually stopped in early 1984) and it suffered a bit of sameness with regard to material in comparison to his NWA book. "Death of the Territories" is Hornbaker's latest foray into the world of pro wrestling and it largely corrects the flaws of his prior books. Stage and real names used in a way that makes sense? Check. Chronological order? Check. Better editing? Check. "Territories" tells the history of how the pro wrestling industry divided the United States into various areas ("territories") in which promoters would have essentially exclusive control of the wrestling business. Competition between territories was largely non-existent. This format allowed dozens of groups to flourish. Then came Vince McMahon and cable television in the 1980s. Suddenly, fans in one part of the country could see wrestling from another part of the country. The boundary lines became blurred and the rumblings of competition began. McMahon had the foresight to know what this meant for the future of wrestling and immediately began making moves to expand his World Wrestling Federation after purchasing it from his father in 1982. One after another, McMahon moved in on various territories and swallowed them up. This eventually led to wrestling being reduced, essentially, two companies with McMahon's WWF being the far larger of the two. "Territories" recounts this expansion in tremendous detail. There are plenty of dates, attendance and gate dollar figures to satisfy even the most demanding of readers. Hornbaker has always been known for his deep research and that is on full display here. I am well-versed in the subject of wrestling's territories and the expansion of the WWF and I still learned quite a bit from this book. I would think EVERY wrestling fan would find "Territories" educational. If "Territories" has a flaw, it's the inevitability of the story it's telling. We all know how it plays out and where it's going. In addition, there's a certain sameness to much of the detail. McMahon's expansion mostly boils down to something like this: Lure away a couple of star wrestlers, land a TV station in a territory, begin running live events, buy out or force to close the competition, rinse and repeat. That's not Hornbaker's fault - after all, that's how it really played out - but some might find this just a touch repetitive. Also missing are new/fresh interviews with the subjects of the book. Sure, some major players, like Verne Gagne, are no longer alive. But many others - McMahon, Jim Crockett, Bill Watts, Jim Cornette, Greg Gagne, etc - are but they are not interviewed here. We do get quotes but they are all from news stories or prior articles from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter or various newspapers. Hornbaker's style is to do research, not interviews, but I think it hurt this book just a bit. Some additional "color" and stories would have helped balance out the litany of statistics. So what's the bottom line? "Death of the Territories" is very, very good. It tells a well-known story with a depth of detail not previously seen and tells it well. With "Death of the Territories", Tim Hornbaker has hit his stride as a pro wrestling writer. Any fan who was around in the 1980s or has explored that time period at all will enjoy this book and find much information that they didn't previously no. Definitely recommended. Five stars.

Yeah, if you ask people to name famous shoots, you won't get past 3 or 4 nominations before the Maeda/Choshu kick comes up.

A few off the top of my head. Unfortunately, I don't have video links for them: - Akira Maeda vs Kiyoshi Tamura, UWF, 10/25/89 - Tamura comes out firing and Maeda retaliates with legit knees and just kicks the crap out of Tamura. Have heard Kiyoshi ended up with a fractured eye socket and he missed a few months of action. - Koki Kitahara vs 150% Machine, UWFI, 6/26/96 - Just a one-sided squash shoot that is just brutal. - Kiyoshi Tamura vs Gary Albright, UWFI, 6/18/95 - This is more famous than the first two. Albright is booked to lose and doesn't like it. He'd jobbed to Masahito Kakihara a month earlier and being asked to lose two months in a row to guys smaller than his left leg set him off. And he was unhappy with his money. Anyway, he basically just stops cooperating, laying around and deadweighting Tamura. Then he apply holds and refuse to release them while the referee (whose name escapes me) was pleading with him "Break Gary! Break!" over and over. Albright eventually did the job for Tamura but made it clear that he was losing on purpose. Tamura was so upset by the whole thing he cried in the ring. They rematched two months later, Tamura again winning, in a completely normal match in what was Albright's last UWFI appearance.

My exposure to live wrestling is relatively limited but, without a doubt, the biggest pop I've ever been present for was... New Blood Rising, Vancouver, BC. Bret Hart comes out and the place went absolutely insane. I'm not even a huge Bret fan and I was standing on my chair screaming. It was an amazing moment and just about deafening. Watched it later on video and WCW just destroyed the sound, turned it way down and really killed the moment.

This is easy for me - #2 all the way. That gets me UWFI, RINGS, UWF 1.0, UWF 2.0, Kingdom, JCP, and Mid-South/UWF. Absolute no-brainer.

The referee did not count three. He did a 2.99 / 3.00 count. Really, it's just more terrible work from referree Kyohei Wada. Kawada didn't move a muscle it was clearly meant to be the finish. Wada didn't count the 3 for ... some ... reason and so they instead did one more move with a semi-conscious Kawada and that was your finish. I've always disliked Wada for a variety of reasons - his counts give away finishes, he's overly involved, and so on. This match is just another example of it. The worst is a match with, I wanna say, Misawa vs Dr Death where Wada literally DRAGS Misawa on top of Doc for the pin. Seriously. Good grief. I wouldn't rate 6/6/97 as 5 stars either but it's a great match.

Man, nobody loves shoot-style more than me and even I wouldn't put two U-Style matches in the top 30

My favorite part of Abby/Takada is that Takada clearly has no desire to actually make contact with Abdullah. So he barely touches him during the pin, for instance.

1) Install DVD Shrink 2) Use Re-Author mode on DVD Shrink on the ISO file to cut it down to just the one match you want, authoring to a folder, not an ISO 3) Find the big file in the folder you just created. 4) Change the extension to .mpg 5) Upload to Youtube

You haven't lived until you've watched the crapfest that is Abdullah vs Nobuhiko Takada for Tokyo Pro...

You need to see Kitahara vs 150% Machine on the UWFI 6/26/96 show. Kitahara shoots on him and 150% gets stretchered out.

I'm the guy who asked why I should care Thiel bankrolled the lawsuit. The movie tried to give me reasons but ultimately failed. I still don't care. As long as the lawsuit isn't frivolous, and Hogan's wasn't, I have no problem with it receiving outside funding because of a (possibly) petty vendetta. Key words there being "as long as the lawsuit isn't frivolous". As a whole, I'm not sure the movie works entirely. The first part, with Hogan/Gawker, is very good. The second & third sections, with the "the media is under attack" narrative also is pretty good. Together, however, they make an incongruous whole. Just feels like they are separate movies spliced together. I do think the movie has some valid points about the news media being under attack.

Yep, I did the same.

My answer for the whole thing was Tamura 94-99. He was as good in U-Style in 03-04 too. Well, yeah, obviously if you compare their whole careers, Tamura takes it due to longevity (around 130 > around 75, lol)... but how about just looking at those three amazing years where they fought each other and Kohsaka... In both cases it's obviously an amazing three-year peak period... but which one is more impressive over those three years specifically? Personally, I'm inclined to give '96 - '98 to Volk Han (over anyone else during that time), though I may feel that way in part because I can turn around and say, "...but Tamura had the better career overall." That way everyone gets a trophy I'll still take Tamura looking at 96-98. Volk has the advantage for the first 9months of 1996 before Tamura shows up to RINGS. Tamura has the 3 Sakuraba matches that rock, but feel sort of incomplete overall. Volk meanwhile was having great matches with Kohsaka. When Tamura showed up in RINGS and started working regularly again, I think he passes Volk and stays that way. Part of that is because Tamura works twice as many matches as Volk in 97 & 98. Volk had 7 or 8 matches in 1998 and two of them were against Akira Maeda. But I think Tamura's best non-Volk matches are better than Volk's best non-Tamura matches. And I'd need to look more carefully at it, but I feel like I would probably say I prefer Tamura's matches with common opponents more in that time period. Tamura vs Han 94-96 has a much clearer path for Volk being better than Tamura, but I realize I'm already an outlier in thinking Tamura was already the best guy in the world by that time period. By the time 1998 rolls around and Tamura gets to work multiple times with all the RINGS guys, he becomes so solidified in my eyes as the best guy who had ever done this, that the better comparison is Tamura 96-98 or Michael Jordan 96-98? Tamura's matches with Sakuraba rock? Really? They were too short and mostly consisted of Tamura guzzling Sakuraba at every turn. For 96-98, I'm taking Han. Heck, for any years he was active, I'd probably take Han.

From me.

W*ING is famous for being the place where W*ING Kanemura, back when he was still Yukehiro, got powerbombed into a flaming puddle of gasoline or lighter fluid and got burned really, really bad. W*ING once held a scaffold match - on an actual construction scaffold crane/truck. It had sturdy guard rails and the guys could do actual spots during the match. Another gaijin who made multiple appearances in W*ING? MIL MASCARAS. And Mil actually brawls and does chairshots. If you want a nice intro to W*ING, they released a pair of DVD box sets that cover the entire history of the fed. I've only watched the first one so far but there's some crazy stuff in there, like Pogo setting Matsunaga's head on fire, And Kim Duk - Tiger Chung Lee - speaking ENGLISH.

Pretty sure the plan was an I Quit match with Nikita at SC86. That naturally leads to a world title in 87 sometime, probably Starrcade.

They are criminally underrated. They are probably the second best US team of the 80s (behind the Midnights). I'm biased, as they're my favorite team ever, but they were a great team.