Gregor

With 1997 being a banner year for Eddy Guerrero, I figured that I'd toss these out: Eddy Guerrero vs. Dean Malenko (9/18/97, handheld) Nothing like their stuff from 1995. This might be the best showcase of what Guerrero brought to the table at this point. He gets huge heat for his typical heel spots at the start, and when he's in control he has some good, unique legwork that keeps the crowd into it for the most part. There is a short "boring" chant from a couple of guys. Even if I'm overrating this match (I'd call it borderline great), it's worth seeing just to witness the way Guerrero riled up the crowd and got them behind Malenko. Eddy Guerrero vs. Rey Misterio Jr. (11/23/97, World War 3) This is more interesting than good. They try a lot of creative stuff - some of it's good, some of it's botched, and some of it's executed well but isn't really a good spot (I'm thinking of one where they switch places on a superplex attempt). In a way, it makes their match at Halloween Havoc even more impressive, as there they hit everything perfectly and made nothing but good decisions. Here, the crowd is really hot at the start and gets quieter as the match goes on. They don't reuse anything from Halloween Havoc, which is a testament to them even if it might have backfired a little. If nothing else, you can see how hard these guys worked and how much they wanted to put on a good match. I think that's something worth watching - the match that results when two talented guys can't drag a classic out of themselves.

Goldust and Austin had some common opponents around that time - Marc Mero, Savio Vega, Undertaker, HHH (although that last one is stretching a bit into 1997). Both guys got 10+ minutes with each of those four opponents. Austin's series with Mero and Vega are generally fondly remembered (and Goldust's forgotten), and Goldust's series with Undertaker and HHH are remembered as boring (and Austin's matches with those two are mostly forgotten). It's not a perfect comparison, because Goldust never got 17 minutes with Mero or a 21-minute strap match, and those are the two sub-main event Austin matches from 1996 that have the best reputation. I don't want to argue about who was better that year, because I don't remember any of those matches very well. I just thought it was worth pointing out that Austin and Goldust were put into some similar spots in 1996, and Austin is generally remembered as doing more with them. Also, a main event match against Bret or Shawn that year doesn't necessarily guarantee an iconic or great match. Both of those guys had their share of misses around that time, even against quality opponents.

I think it's the Madison Square Garden - August 9, 1996 show that you may be referring too; however it may of been the Tacoma, WA - October 12, 1996 show OR Toronto, Ontario - Exhibition Stadium - August 24, 1996 Ladder match. I'd actually love to see Goldust / Michaels ladder match, sounds a lot of fun. I think he was talking about the ladder match. That one is online and pretty good (albeit clipped); the MSG one is online and kind of bad. There's also a Michaels/UT vs. Goldust/Mankind tag that's pretty good if a bit long.

With all great pro wrestling gimmicks, you know you've succeeded when you inspire imitations within the business:

Okay, yeah, then we didn't see it all that differently. I remembered him weathering quite the storm in that third fall but still looking like a dirtbag, so it was probably just seeing "tecnico" that threw me off.

I agree with a lot of your description of the match, but I don't think Satanico became anything like a tecnico in the third fall. He was the one who was borderline fouling Cochisse (with that hold where he had his elbow in Cochisse's groin) and arguing with the referee after a two-count. Nothing Cochisse did in that fall seemed particularly unbecoming of a tecnico, either, especially given the way Satanico had worked him over in the previous fall and ignored Cochisse's request for a handshake at the start of the match. Kneeing Satanico off the handshake wasn't clean, but the announcer and the crowd had doubted the sincerity of the offer right along with Cochisse.

What happened to make him come back?

Thanks, guys.

Okay, I know pretty much nothing about the situation other than Foley being added so that Austin didn't have to lose to HHH. Why didn't Austin want to lose to him, and what drama did it cause?

The 11/13/00 Nitro was taped in London.

You could have Kane cause his elimination in the Rumble. Or you could have him try to avenge his loss to Jeff Jarrett from the previous month's PPV.

Sorta feels like it could've been lifted from the 1990 yearbook.

One of my favorite fun matches is Ernest Miller vs. Elix Skipper on a Nitro in 2000, and part of what makes that match so much fun is Steve Ray giving a Dusty Rhodes-like performance on commentary. He's having a blast and going crazy for the fun spots, and it's always more fun when the announcers are enjoying it. He also does a good job with the storyline by explaining how feuds like this are bound to happen when one wrestler has a woman valet. Unlike Dusty, he doesn't have a funny sounding voice, but he makes up for this by having a unique vocabulary.

I think so, but I'm not 100% certain. Part of the reason that the crowd was that hot for Owen was that it looked like there might actually be a payoff to Bret's run and exit, which obviously left a lot of people feeling empty. Would he have been able to sustain that after moving on to other feuds? For Owen to have a good uppercard face run at this point, he has to somehow get revenge on Shawn. That's tough to do with WrestleMania coming up and Shawn needing the belt for a feud with Austin. A title win would have been huge, but they'd have to do a rematch almost immediately, and I don't know if the heat from the win would have stuck with him (how much of Luger's post-Road Wild fall was the post-Road Wild booking, and how much of it was the deflating title loss?). The best thing I can think of is an unsanctioned, no-DQ, non-title main event at the Rumble (the main event of No Way Out was unsanctioned, I think, so it's not like they didn't do that around this time), and you still have the issue of getting Shawn to job. Maybe they could work in an Austin run-in to give the WM feud more of a spark ("The second I won the Rumble, son, you might as well have painted a bullseye on your little chest"). I don't know that pushing Owen to the top against someone else would have worked. Maybe he could have beaten HHH. Regardless, he was definitely hot at the time, and they lost all of it by having him job repeatedly to HHH while looking stupid in the process.

It's impressive that Owen and Shawn were able to switch roles and not lose any in-ring chemistry. This is just as good as their stuff from 1995, 1996, and earlier in 1997 (the tag match more than the mediocre October match), even though it's only about seven minutes long. Owen's usual heel offense gets hot two-counts in the closing stretch, and Michaels brings out some nice moves that he didn't often use. His time in control is three minutes, half of which is Owen fighting out of a sleeper, and according to Bret's book he really was punching Owen in the face, but it gets the job done. Unfortunately, this was a high point for Owen. He didn't feel out of place nearly beating the champion, but this just set up a feud with HHH that made him look really bad.

Oh, yeah! But instead of being really fun it just pissed everyone off.

This is the finals of a double-elimination tournament, which gave this match a cool format. Blue Panther won the winner's bracket and arrived at the finals undefeated; Atlantis had lost in the first round, so he had to win out to get there. Because Blue Panther had no losses, he got a one-fall head start for the finals. He needed to win only won fall to take the match, whereas Atlantis had to win in straight falls. Has any U.S. promotion done that? That's a really fun way to book a tournament. I actually like this more than their famous 1991 match. I can't quite pin down why, but I know that they spend most of the match of the mat, and it's outstanding. It feels like a letdown when they go to standup spots, in part because the matwork is so good and in part because the chemistry/fluidity isn't as good there. CMLL usually had one title match each year that felt more important than the others. I don't know if it really felt like that or if that's just me noting that they had one title match per year that gets called really great in 2013. Anyway, this is 1997's, even though it's not actually for a championship belt.

The best part was that, even when pretending to be Sting, Nash couldn't bring himself to step through the ropes. Tenay deserves credit for sounding puzzled when Sting came in over the top.

As Loss noted, this is more about Shawn trying to survive and Undertaker picking him apart than it is about a fight. Undertaker doesn't feel any urgency because he knows he has it in the bag. Shawn does wrestle with some urgency - it comes through when he tries to climb the inside of the cage to get away, and it's why a lot of his offense is big stuff like dives and weapon shots. Even there, his goal is more to put Undertaker down than to hurt him. He does try to win the match, but all he can get is a two-count off a chairshot, and his finisher doesn't even get him a pinfall attempt. Undertaker doesn't need to really try to win until he's beaten up Shawn to his liking. He heads for the homestretch with the top-rope chokeslam - I don't think it was meant to be a big spot or anything, just a bigger version of the usual setup to his finisher - and a nasty chairshot to pay Shawn back for the chairshots from earlier in the feud. Doing nearfalls would have undermined what they were going for. Shawn isn't supposed to be coming close to beating Undertaker, and Undertaker wants to punish Shawn as much as possible before putting him out of his misery. If the whole thing bored you, I can't argue and say that, no, you actually DID like the match and just didn't realize it. I thought that they worked this pretty smartly, but a match can have a logical story/narrative and still be really boring.

I'd never heard this before. It's up there with Bret's heel turn promo and his Hart family reunion promo as the best I've heard from 1997.

I'm a big fan of this match. It's by far the best these two guys ever had together, which is pretty odd given that one of them knew that the finish would render everything before it irrelevant. Still, this is the only match they had that actually befits a super-heated rivalry. Shawn wasn't at Bret's level in 1992. In 1996, they tried to force a classic and couldn't really pull it off. By this time, they were both established at the top, and they wrestled like they hated each other. Bret beating Shawn all over the arena at the start felt like something out of 1998 or 1999 WWF. It worked for me, especially with Jim Ross selling going into the crowd as dangerous to Shawn. It's awesome when it feels like one guy really does have home-field advantage. Shawn keeps trying to take the advantage with sucker punches and stuff like that (at one point he flings a referee into Bret), but when he gets the upper hand he rams Bret's head into the steps or goes for a piledriver - it's a good balance of looking like the sneaky heel but still showing that this is a hateful feud. Shawn's time on offense might be a career-best from him. It's not outstanding or anything like that; he's just generally doing something interesting and keeping the crowd involved (for instance, holding up Bret's head right in front of the crowd and grinning like a jerk before punching him). Bret helps by doing a great job of selling his stuff, like the kicks and stomps inside the ring. Bret's aborted comebacks do a great job of building up the real one. He keeps going after the knee, and Shawn keeps going to the eyes in desperation to avoid it. Even the front facelock, a staple of boring Shawn offensive segments, doesn't last too long and gets a huge pop when Bret breaks out. When Bret takes control and destroys Shawn's knee, it really does feel like he's going in for the kill. Shawn sells it well enough, but he messes up after the figure-four and switches the knee that he sells. A face comeback in a heated feud being a bunch of kneework doesn't seem like it would work on paper. It does work, though, I guess because it somehow fits Bret's persona. If this had a finish, I'd probably think it was great. As it is, it's just very satisfying to see these two finally have a match that, at least until the end, worked like it was supposed to. I have no idea why one of Shawn's best efforts came out in a match that he knew was going to be meaningless. Even then, I thought Bret was better here. It feels like the most important thing in the world from start to finish, like all world championship matches should, although I can't tell if that's because the screwjob made it important. I'm pretty sure I like this match more than anyone else, but I guess that's why I'm posting about it.

Undertaker gets to dish out the father of all insane chairshots later in the year.

This was awesome, a million times better than any interview he'd done as a face that year. It was pretty clear after this that Shawn would hugely benefit from a heel turn. Some of the lines aren't even that good, but the way Shawn whipped the crowd into a frenzy was outstanding. Possibly his best mic segment ever. It's remarkable that Michaels, while acting like an obnoxious prick throughout this, somehow is more likeable here than he's been at any point in 1997.

Fuerza Guerrera vs. Misterioso from December 8 is my favorite Fuerza Guerrera match. It's also a title match, and for whatever reason Fuerza's act works more for me in a title match than it does in a hateful fight like the one with Octagon, I guess because comedy fits better into a match where the guys aren't bleeding and ripping at each other. Even though it's a title match, Fuerza still blatantly cheats and he still makes an ass out of himself on multiple occasions. He does his Karate Kid pose before missing a dive, and, later, when he actually connects on an impressive dive, he immediately ruins it with his celebration. All of this is worked into a dramatic third fall, and it doesn't detract from the excitement because Misterioso is such an underdog anyway. Terrific blend of title match and Fuerza match, even with the indecisive finish. Atlantis vs. Emilio Charles Jr. from the March 24 show is also really good. The first fall is outstanding - good matwork that seamlessly turns into rope-running and flying. The match drops off a bit from there, but it's Atlantis and Emilio, so it's still good. The finish stinks, though. I definitely recommend Fuerza vs. Misterioso. Atlantis vs. Emilio is worth watching, too, but they have two other matches on tape just from that one Atlantis title reign.