Gregor

The credits at the end of the video list 1991 as the copyright date. It looks like Volador started using that gimmick in August or September 1990, and Pirata's hair in the video is too long for it to be from the month and a half of 1990 after his hair match loss to Faraon. This one's more of a judgment call, but going by this match from August 1990 I think his hair is too short to be from the period from August '90 through November '90. My guess is that it wasn't a delayed airing or replay and that it actually did take place in '91. Short answer: no, I don't know the date for that match.

I'm not sure if any of these guys has a shot at cracking someone's list, but whatever. Javier Llanes http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/blog/8/entry-333-random-cmll-part-two/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/blog/8/entry-413-dandy-vs-llanes-trios/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15525-el-dandy-vs-javier-llanes-cmll-022294/ Norman Smiley http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/18020-konnan-rey-misterio-sr-vs-chris-adams-norman-smiley-nwa-starrcade-121690/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/18674-blue-panther-javier-cruz-pierroth-jr-vs-el-dandy-apolo-dantes-black-magic-cmll-081691/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/20612-dean-malenko-vs-norman-smiley/ Robert Gibson http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/12472-robert-gibson-vs-jimmy-del-ray-smw-tv-091893/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/12610-rock-roll-express-vs-heavenly-bodies-wwf-survivor-series-112493/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/14989-heavenly-bodies-robert-gibson-vs-the-thugz-brad-armstrong-smw-tv-112595/ Shane Douglas http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/14050-jushin-liger-kensuke-sasaki-vs-ricky-steamboat-shane-douglas-wcw-philadelphia-122992/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/12140-ricky-steamboat-shane-douglas-vs-hollywood-blonds-wcw-worldwide-032793/ http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/11260-shane-douglas-vs-2-cold-scorpio-ecw-a-matter-of-respect-051196/

DDP? Those are both really good ones. I'll go with guys speeding in from off-camera, either during a match or for a backstage beatdown.

Third installment of this thread. The standard questions: Current favorite wrestler to watch: Last fun match you saw: Wrestler you want to see more of: Last live show attended (if applicable/different from last time you answered): Match you're most looking forward to watching: Last fun interview/promo you saw: Last interesting thing you read about wrestling: Last worthwhile podcast you listened to: Most fun you've had watching wrestling lately: And, in a sad attempt to spruce things up, two new ones: Favorite recent post on this board: Favorite thing about the wrestling landscape in the past three months (if you live in the past, then go with your past three months of time-traveling): I'll get this off to an exciting start by saying I haven't had wrestling on the mind much lately and don't have any answers right now.

I've probably watched this match more times than any other, and, yeah, I'd absolutely have it as the WWF's match of the year and one of the best in company history. "Twists and surprises" is a great way to describe how they work this. The match has great spot after great spot, and it never feels like they're changing course or trying to cram stuff in; it all feels totally logical and in the flow of things. Michaels trying to break Mankind's fingers is as nasty as he ever got, nastier than anything he ever did as a heel, and they smoothly go straight from that into putting sympathy on him and making it look like his title is in danger. I think you could argue that this was a career night for both guys.

Sorry, I got this wrong. The match took place on December 6.

This is really, really good, definitely better than their Starrcade '96 match. It's also the rare case of a ladder match sprint, as they get only ten minutes, but by the end I couldn't believe that it had been that short because of all the stuff they'd managed to pack in. They add a bunch of new ladder match spots to go along with some of the ones that had become staples by this point, and none of it feels contrived. There is some slow climbing, but there aren't any spots where they're lying around just selling how epic the match is. Jarrett again shows good intensity. As good as the match is (and it's absolutely worth watching if you can stomach Benoit), the effort is even more impressive, as pulling this off in only ten minutes is quite a feat.

I'd never seen this before, I guess because by the time I started to come around on Jarrett I wasn't interested in watching Benoit matches. They have very good chemistry together, both here and in their Nitro match from November. Jarrett shows a lot of intensity here and shows off some moves that I don't think were part of his usual arsenal. That said, he's not very likeable as a face. Ric Flair can strut because he's won the world title someteen times. Even to people familiar with him from the WWF, Jarrett's not really good enough to act that cocky and get away with it. The finish is amazing in that at least four people look like idiots (Konnan, Morrus, Jarrett, and Anderson, and you could argue for Benoit and Mark Curtis). Booking referee distractions in no-DQ matches generally annoys me, too, but I don't know if it actually was no-DQ or if Tony said that earlier just to cover for Curtis seeing Woman rake Jarrett's eyes. I should also mention that, between Jarrett's goofy suspenders (always a bad look, but white and gray with gold boots is a uniquely bad color combo) and Benoit's crotchstain tights, two of my least favorite wrestling outfits are on full display in this one.

Jarrett quit the promotion immediately after his match at the July IYH.

CMLL rode Dandy hard after AAA split off. In a span of six months, he had four major feuds, and from a work standpoint all four delivered to some extent, even if Dandy ended up flopping as a draw and the booking wasn't particularly good. Physically, he wasn't where he'd been in 1990, and I don't think his '92 was as good as his '90, so in that sense it's fair to say that he'd begun to decline. At no point does he feel like a drag on the rudos he's paired with, though. This is just my opinion, but in each of those feuds there isn't someone I'd rather see Bestia or Fiera or whoever wrestle. In terms of a match-by-match comparison, the singles matches in 1990 are better than those in 1992, but in trios matches the two years are a lot closer. Tecnicos vs. tecnicos just isn't a style that allows for the highs of tecnicos vs. rudos, for one thing, and the Dandy/Satanico/Emilio Charles vs. Angel Azteca/Atlantis/Javier Cruz matches have disappointingly little matwork, which is the biggest thing to look forward to from that kind of match. Those 1990 matches required a lot of skill from Dandy, but the Dandy-Casas feud was physically demanding as well. You could argue that in 1992 he was paired with the three best rudos in CMLL plus one of Mexico's all-time top workers, but in 1990 he was up against a better Satanico, and Angel Azteca was quite skilled himself. 1992 has a lot of successes from Dandy. There's a stark difference between that and 1993, when he has more misses, like that long match with Ultimo Dragon and Jericho.

I think that this match may have taken place on February 1, 1991 and that the November airing may have been a re-broadcast. It appears to be from the same show as the Pierroth vs. Mascara Sagrada match that's on YouTube, and it's less likely that the date associated with that match is incorrect (as there would have to be an unrecorded Pierroth title reign for him to be champion in late 1991).

Most of the trios matches so far have been tecnico vs. tecnico, or at least worked in that style. It's a very showy type of wrestling. The emphasis is mostly on the skill of the workers and just what they're capable of doing. There's little rudo dominance or subsequent tecnico comeback to shape the match. There's usually some build, but for the most part the match is the sum of the individual exchanges. After the 1990 yearbook, you won't see many of them, in large part because they weren't very common post-1990. I imagine you'll like stuff such as the Dandy vs. Satanico trios match in November and the Cien Caras/Mascara Año 2000/Sangre Chicana match in early 1992 more than you liked this series of matches. If not, and if in fact you always find lucha a chore to watch, there's no shame in that. Goodness knows that there's a bunch of wrestling that I have no interest in watching.

Thank you! Whenever I heard him say this I just figured that my terrible knowledge of Spanish was causing me to misunderstand him.

Who could have guessed that, in a career featuring wins as important as the hair of Javier Cruz and the inaugural CMLL World Light Heavyweight Championship, Jerry Estrada's greatest triumph as a wrestler would come in February 2015, over ten years since he stopped regularly lacing up the boots?

If that's actually how it happened, then Ross at the very least deserves credit for locking up two unsigned guys whom Russo was somehow permitted to push.

Sting 1996 WCW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhGWrHGI6jo#t=3m34s There isn't anything cool or badass about sticking up for the little kids who watch WCW, but Sting sounds so genuine with everything that he says. He really did see himself as a hero of the children. Sting comes off as a guy who believes in what he says and is truly hurt by the fact that Hogan never actually did. It's hard to deliver a promo like this without sounding cheesy, and he still nails it. Good for him for not letting Okerlund cut him off, either.

Wow, this was absurdly one-sided. There are times when that can work, but I don't think that a lucha title match is one of them (and especially not if the winner is the guy getting no offense). Casas took Dragon off his feet maybe five times in the whole match. On top of that, the sequence that won him the third fall was an exact repeat of one that got him a two-count in the second fall. The only really good part of this was Casas breaking the tapatia. I think that this took place on August 28.

I don't know if Azteca had a Lizmark or Atlantis type of career in him. Those guys had spectacular jaw-dropping offense that set them apart from everyone else in the promotion - Lizmark with his powerbombs and plancha suicida, and Atlantis with his moonsaults and Atlantida. Azteca was every bit as solid as those guys were, and he had some cool moves like the rope flip armdrag, but when it came time to end the fall he often ended up just doing some kind of rana. He doesn't seem like the kind of wrestler who'd blow the crowd away. Azteca doesn't strike me as a top 100 wrestler. He had a really nice drawn-out feud with El Dandy in 1990, and other than that you've got to work a bit to pick out his good matches. I agree that he didn't stand out much when he had a limited role in the match. The Blue Panther feud was pretty disappointing, and that was a spotlight feud (although that's probably on AAA for the most part). On the other hand, even late in his career he looked like he still had it. The mask vs. mask match with Arkangel de la Muerte is too short to be particularly good or bad, but Azteca himself looks like he's barely lost anything from earlier in his career. In the end he seems sort of like Mexico's Marty Jannetty to me (with the caveat that, as far as I'm aware, Azteca didn't cause any of his own problems).

That match from Survivor Series '96 ranks right up there on my list of matches whose legendary status I don't get. Even with matches that other people love and I don't like that much, I usually can at least understand why they're so beloved. With Hart-Austin, I genuinely can't see what would make it one of the best matches in WWE history. It's not even an issue with either guy or with the way WWE was worked in that era; I think that their WrestleMania match is absolutely a contender for the top spot. Michaels-Mankind is literally my favorite wrestling match of all time and one that I absolutely consider great, but, if you're talking about the greatest match in the history of a company as old as WWE, that terrible finish probably disqualifies it. It's not just a lame run-in but a poorly executed lame run-in.

Dunno why, but I gave this a rewatch today, and even though I'd already seen all of the spots they still kept my interest the whole time. The point about how they manage to find interesting holds to apply deep into the match is spot-on. Not only are these guys doing stuff beyond much of the roster's capabilities, but they keep it up for twenty minutes, and it's stuff that works both for me in 2015 and for the crowd for whom they're actually performing. I love Azteca breaking out of a full nelson with the Lex Luger pose, and maybe even better is Angel's repeatedly dragging Dandy to the center of the ring, which backfires on him by forcing Dandy to counter into an even nastier hold. There is a small flub on the hold to end the first fall - Azteca doesn't pick up one of Dandy's legs - but they cover for that, and I don't like Azteca kicking out of a suplex and immediately hitting one of his own, but they're doing a good job of selling how gassed they are and that it's a free-for-all so I'm okay with it. Other than those small things, though, this really is a beautiful match. It's probably Dandy's best performance, too. Even if you prefer the Casas match or something else, this is the best demonstration of his skills. Everything he does is clean and fast but still looks like it has painful intentions behind it. Azteca isn't just a passenger, though. Obviously he knows his holds, and I also really like the way he sells Dandy's first-fall bodyslam and legdrop; it does a good job of signalling Dandy's increasing aggression. This also has one of my favorite fan reactions ever. The guy in the pink shirt sitting in the front row, visible from the hard camera, is rooting for Dandy the whole way. On the last replay that they show, he pops out of his chair making the "it's over" sign as soon as Dandy bends down to reach for Azteca's arm. That's a guy who knows what's going on.

Hart vs. Flair, 12/11/92 I was pretty sure I'd seen another match from that show online, so I did a search for the main event and sure enough there it was. Hart really doesn't have any noteworthy offense until the finishing stretch, so I can see where Meltzer was coming from, but on the other hand it still felt like the typical Hart-Flair match stretched out to thirty minutes. It didn't seem like Hart was dogging it there.

What's more important to you: how great wrestlers were at their best, or how great wrestlers were over the course of their careers? This is something that comes up a lot when talking about baseball's Hall of Fame and I was wondering how people here applied it to this project. For me, I generally think about wrestlers in terms of how much they've done rather than best vs. best. Some questions: How long is a peak to you? How many matches or what amount of time is required for someone to establish greatness? Is it possible for someone to make your list without ever having been great at any point in his/her career? Who's your top all peak candidate? Who's your top no peak candidate?

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Would you say that Dandy turned in a mediocre performance or that the layout made him look weak? I'm wondering because I can't really find fault with anything that Dandy did in the match, but still Fiera in this and most of the trios matches looked like the one who was making the feud as good as it was.