Mando

I tossed some musings up on my blog earlier today actually on a DG (well, technically DGUSA) match I'd recommend: Recently watched DGUSA Uprising from 2010 couldn't get the BxB Hulk vs. Masato Yoshino main event out of my head. When you get past that this is a collaboration and not a competition (in terms of mode of story not the narrative therein) I found it strangely haunting. Hulk's ability at demonstrating the determination he has at retaining his championship is crystalline and for his part Yoshino's speed and pluck make him an excellent challenger. Masato hit what easily now ranks in my top three missile dropkicks of all-time. Such height, so compact. By the time BxB did the "H Thunder" scoop side piledriver (his homage to Hayabusa) off the top rope and Yoshino kicked out I was officially enthralled and raptured like I was during the hotel scene in Before Midnight. The crowd at the Mississauga International Centre that night were in for a special treat.

I'm a little late to the party (after the dismal UFC on Sat. night took me a couple days to get to the WWE PPV). I posted a full review I linked below. In general, thought it was a fairly solid, entertaining show, in the "B" range, thought most stuff was in the least good, was slightly disappointed in Punk/Jericho and for a big Cena fan I thought the main was absolute rubbish. http://neverhandover.blogspot.com/2013/06/...payback-13.html

King Kong Bundy.

You should check out Duggan's book as he has some stories about the Russo era and all the ways they tried to force him to quit. He also took a couple potshots at your boy Ernest Miller.

Hybrid Dolphins (Paul London/Bryan Danielson) vs. Nasty Boys - Concession Stand Brawl

I'm throwing PG-13 vs. Briscoes into the mix.

Great topic. Off the top of my head I'd like to see Midnight Express (Eaton/Lane) vs. Golden Lovers (Omega/Ibushi) and Doom vs. Dark City Fight Club. Owen & Bret Hart versus Hollywood Blondes getting 20+ on an episode of WCW Saturday Night would have been choice too.

I was live in Cincinnati for this show. A friend of mine (who now wrestles as Pompano Joe for Karl Anderson's home fed in the States) and I snuck up as close as we could to the rail since everyone was standing for that match's duration anyway and it's cliche but it was electric just seeing those guys all up there under the lights in the same ring together. That Mysterio vs. Kidman was is really, really great and fared well (think it was #9 on our Top 200 Nitro Matches video countdown we did on my blog).

Maxx Payne vs. Ron Simmons - Street Fight - WCW Worldwide 5/21/94 When we did the did '94 Worldwide project on my blog this was one of my favorite matches. It's at Disney MGM but instead of inside a studio lot it's out on one of the main streets of the theme park and they do a wild fight including a shot with a 2x4 that legit look like it broke an arm.

Watching a really, really great WWF house show from the Maple Leaf Gardens in '89. I wrote up a small piece in praise of a wonderful match/angle between Hillbilly Jim and Honky Tonk Man sandwiched between a battle of dualities in Hart vs. Perfect, a potboiler turned avant-garde provocateur in Hogan vs. Savage, and a risque and elliptical thriller between DiBiase and Jake Roberts. Read it here. Never had WWE 24/7 but a friend gave me a few bags full of discs he'd got off of their programming and all of these house shows are a gold mine.

As was I, I always enjoy a nice bump, but there wasn't enough in-between spots to round it out to make a good, complete match. I enjoyed the absurdity of the Walmart bag of feces. Only in CZW I guess. But for their arguably biggest show of the year I wanted more from Sami. Hell, I saw him earlier last year in the opener at an HWA show and he took a sick apron bump for Gerome Phillips for 25 people. I've got a lot of '07-'09 CZW that I have never watched that I'm excited to one day get around to inc. Necro's run.

I just finished watching last month's CZW Cage of Death 14. My full write-up (with some astonishing images) is here. Overall I really enjoyed it, it's the sort of head-scratching, hardcore mayhem that almost has to be seen to be believed. I've always said some documentarian should do a film on regional hardcore wrestlers because the amount of sacrifice and crazy stunts some of these guys do is insane and it'd be interesting to get a look into the mindset of someone who does it for I imagine not a great deal of money. Philosophizing out of the way, the show itself is loaded, some stellar high flying (Rich Swann, A.R. Fox, etc.), lots of nutty garbage bumps (Sami Callihan, Drake Younger, MASADA, etc.), a riot, a really great opener, use of feces that'll make you forget Cena's goofball skit on the year-end Raw, and the Cage of Death itself which was a bloody spectacle.

Good thing I'm not writing for you then, but that's fine, nobody can (nor should try to) make everyone happy. If you've written anything online I'd be interested in seeing it.

@Yo-Yo As Ed H. and Jason B. said in their terrific conversation about Wong "minor War-kai" i.e. My Blueberry Nights. @ Flik I understand it's without context. It's actually part of a larger co-review of that show with a friend to kick off our blog's 9th year in operation posting Jan. 1st. We use a ten-point scale to rate matches but I didn't include my score here. There's a 1000 people that review wrestling online but I've never enjoyed the play-by-play style -- I've always been more interested in what people thought about what they saw (i.e. Loss' write-ups which brought me here years ago; glad I'm a member now!). After writing about wrestling (which we can all admit isn't always the most complex art) for so long (we've got probably 5000+ reviews on our blog and never done PBP) I've grappled with new approaches to writing about it and my style is a bit "different". I was a Film Studies minor in college with an interest in theory, Alternative Traditions in Cinema (Stan Brakhage, etc.), Italian Cinema, etc. and read tons of film criticism and essays on downtime at work and my sense of humor leans toward obscure references (like Family Guy on PCP) so I channel that into how I look/write about wrestling. It might not be the most coherent style to each reader but at least it's not the same PBP style regurgitated by 411, Scott Keith, and most of the other online reviewers.

Just started a few random shows including ROH Testing the Limit. Just finished Heatwave 2000 too: The Sandman vs. Rhino - ECW Heatwave 2000 I liken the rabid ECW fan base trying to convince the rest of us Rhino was the messiah as pure agitprop garbage. He's still doing the same thing 13 years later on the independent circuit and it still packs as much depth and dimension as a street corner busker's four-minute set break to eat falafel. Sandman is such an odd bird it's as if he's a roughly sketched Lena Dunham character. The drunken Sous-Chef that emerges from the basement pantry with a lit cigarette and worn paperback copy of Lowry's The Giver. There's a thread of longing running through this match that'd call to mind the films of Wong Kar-wai were it not for the ineffectual acting of Terry Gerin. He's like the high school talent show approximation of pro wrestler complete with monosyllabic speech pattern ("Gore!") so an unintentional satirization. The Spike Dudley segment at first seemed tacked on but strangely somehow necessary in a Grindhouse-like marrying of violent spectacle. The match-ending jumping piledriver on twisted metal guardrail seemed like a piece of neo-conceptual Blažej Baláž performance art. There was something perversely appealing about this like throwing caution to the wind one night and slumming it with your girlfriends downtown at a seedy boner factory with cheap drinks and a Filipino bartender working toward a Bachelor of Music in Theory upstate named "Condition Seth".

Here's an offhand list of some of my faves: Generation ME vs. Motor City Machineguns - Empty Arena Match - TNA ReACTION 11/18 This was pretty insane. The fast-paced, high flying style of these guys is often most criticized for its lack of stiffness. But here, with no crowd, etc. you could really hear the shots landing, air getting knocked out, and so on, and both teams kept ratcheting up the intensity and its easily the most physical match I can remember either team in. At first, seeing how it was shot, the usual ReACTION method of random close-ups, racking the focus, etc. made me unsure, but as it progressed and got more and more violent and hate-filled it totally won me over and really wowed me. Bully Ray vs. AJ Styles - Last Man Standing Match - TNA Slammiversary IX Motor City Machine Guns vs. Generation Me - Full Metal Mayhem Match - TNA Final Resolution '10 Desmond Wolfe vs. Kurt Angle - TNA Turning Point '09 AJ Styles vs. Booker T - TNA Destination X '09 Jay Lethal vs. Sonjay Dutt - Black Tie Brawl and Chain Match - TNA Hard Justice '08 AJ Styles vs. Kurt Angle - Last Man Standing Match - TNA Hard Justice '08 Christian Cage vs. Samoa Joe - TNA Bound for Glory ‘07

Was listening to episode #26 of the Wrestling Culture podcast today on my commute that dealt with WO HoF discussion. A couple things I wanted to share. On the topic of Gran Hamada: I'm lucky that my neighborhood indy fed is HWA (where Jon Moxley, Sami Callihan, Nigel McGuiness, Shark Boy, etc. started out) and as such I've had the opportunity to nerd out and discuss with a lot of the talent. Over a decade ago I was chatting with Chad Collyer who was selling homemade "Best of" tapes of his and when I inquired about his tours with Michinoku Pro he immediately and vehemently put over Hamada as the best worker he'd been in the ring with. He couldn't say enough about him and put him over huge. Secondly, Dylan was saying how he felt wrestling magazines were the biggest under represented thing in the HoF. I totally agree that Apter deserves a spot and was also a fellow subscribe to PWI, The Wrestler, Inside Wrestling, and Wrestle America (that was Apter too, right?). It got me to thinking, and personally, I'd never vote for the guy, but would Rob Feinstein ever be considered ballot worthy? Not as a promoter etc. but for ushering in the tape trading/collecting boom which in its own way really cultivated and developed a lot of people's avid fandom. Just like I used to wait for my Apter mags I can recall my high school years during the late-'90's and a few of us at school trading RF Video catalogues and circling tape listings and filling out my little order form on the back page during study hall. There's no way to quantify his impact and it wasn't as widespread as Apter's by any stretch and its absurd to imagine him on the ballot when the JYD and Jimmy Hart's of the world aren't but would be curious to hear what others thought of it.

I've started a drinking game wherein a shot is taken every time Dylan does an exasperated sigh.

I was a big backer of Varsity Club 2.0 much to the annoyance of my friends. I'm guessing their feud with the Harris brothers doesn't hold up.