Jetlag

Why? He made a lot of very interesting posts. His Top 250 of the 90s matchlist alone has made him a Top Poster for me right now.

This was #245 on our friend shodate's list of the Top 250 90s matches. Good thing because otherwise I probably would've never watched this. This was fantastic and instantly became one of my favourite joshi matches of the year. Lots of cool uncooperative exchanges throughout, and the match told a good story. You had Hokuto being two classes above both opponents (and making that very clear), Uematsu refusing to back down and wrestling a class above hers, and Kaoru and Ichiki trying everything to gain the advantage and topple their opponents. There were some basic spots such as biting, stomping eye rake or hair pulling toss which felt really violent here. There was also plenty of awesome receipt spots, especially whenever Hokuto felt disrespected, she would step up and show who's boss usually by booting someone in the face. There was also plenty of head droppin death moves and crushing diving attacks. Despite that the match didn't feel like overkill and ended at just the perfect spot. Little weak transitions here maybe, but yeah all things considered I enjoyed the hell out of this.

You should go check out his series with Inoki. Once upon a time Tiger Jeet Singh was quite capable in his role. (Hm. That almost feels like a thinly veiled curse. "Go watch a Tiger Jeet Singh match.")

Been a while, folks. But old JWP still rules! Rumi Kazama vs. Plum Mariko (2/12/89) Cool JWP style match. It's a little hard to discern where the line between your average cool JWP match and the great stuff is. The work isn't exactly high end and there's no overarching story, but then the work is GOOD and you get all kinds of neat spots which set these two apart from your average girly spotblower. I really liked the wrestling they did here – nothing high end, but just well executed basic stuff, such as Plum resisting a toe hold, or Kazama turning an Achilles Hold into almost a figure 4 spot by extending the leg to block the pressure. Here Plum gets the better of Kazama with some impressive counters and Kazama almost breaks her jaw with some whack spin kicks in return. I was also impressed by how they did set up the dive in this match. Yeah, I'm a sucker for a good dive set up. Kazama ends up high kicking the steel ringpost and they do a double countout into a restart and Mariko goes after Kazama with her leglocks like the other Mariko. I thought Kazama's selling was good altough it wasn't overly dramatic as she is not that kind of worker and it was just a good trick to get the crowd all hot and behind Kazama for the crazy 2.9 run. One might frown and say this was just another junior match, but I did enjoy it tremendously. Good layout, some cool wrestling and stiff blows, smart thinking, and they never overreached. Miss A vs. Shinobu Kandori (2/12/89) So you look at this matchup and you go „Hm. That can't be that great. They're still babies and not close to their true form.“ But the opening of this match is a house of fire and exactly what an ideal Kansai/Kandori match would look like: Kansai trying to murder the judo woman with thunderous kicks and Kandori going mad grabbing submissions. Kansai hits a huge piledriver and then brains Kandori in the back of the head with a massive kick, leaving her stunned on the floor. One of the more harrowing openings to a match I've seen. What follows is just great – lack of cooperation, disdain, more MURDER and KILLING, but soon things break down and they start fumbling to fill time. It's really hard to do a Super Badass vs. Super Badass going long. At 10 minutes this probably would've been great, but they go 19 and they fill that extra time up with lots of half crabs. I wanna blame Kansai because they lost the crowd when she took control, but Kandori also no-sold a bunch of legwork and she really liked that half crab too. Match picks up near the end again with a big bump that plays of the opening and some fat lariats and Kandori busting out her judo again. Worth checking out for that fiery opening alone, but I couldn't help but be sour at the squandered potential with this matchup.

I don't need a match this week, but if anyone wants my recommendation, here's Masa Takanishi vs. Trexxus. For the South East Asia Title~!

I also really like the Kyushu Pro channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpoDpVFhUGHPWVYqmJ8TBwA/ Unfortunately, they don't upload matches often, but the video production is top notch and they have some cool wrestlers

I thought the whole point of the gimmick was that it was such a foolish disguise that the fans and other wrestlers could easily see through. "I can be PY Chu Hi as much as you can be a king!"

Watched Hokuto/Nagayo. Not sure why that match isn't dropped among the joshi classics. Probably the best Nagayo performance I've seen, folks should check it out.

I've seen very little 1989 joshi. This starts like a house of fire with Hokuto dumping the established star with huge suplexes on her neck and Chigusa actually selling that shit! Hokuto goes on a rampage looking for the sleeper like a madwoman and the heat for this is absolutely deafening. Chigusa gets a sleeper of her own and then starts punishing her smaller opponent with thunderous kicks. I thought Chigusa's leg submissions came across as filler and I was largly indifferent to what they had in mind for the finishing run. I'm not a fan of the random back and forth suplexes. The thing I liked most was probably Chigusas charge into the buckle on a missed lariat, and an almost Benoit/Sabu esque neck breaking flapjack. Folks should check this out as the match had a clear story, good selling and a few clever spots.

Damn, I didn't expect to enjoy this so much. In his prime Lou Thesz would cheapshot Rikidozan and stall, but here, he's going after Inoki like a killer, including dropping him with one of the most vicious backdrops ever seen. His holds look so vicious, and the match was both pretty slick and high resistance, which made the super basic holds here very rewarding. Thesz isn't exactly Negro Navarro, but his reversal into the STF attempt was one of the most graceful moves I've ever seen. Also, his bumping was still damn good - take note how he would whip himself into the mat each time Inoki sweeped him. Then you also get Thesz punching Inoki in the mid section a bunch and both guys using nasty back elbows on the ground. Hence, the match did at no point look like an exhibition. Inoki was along for the ride, but a good enough foil for the old fox. Really enjoyable maestro's match with a cool opening and finish.

Long 2/3 falls match. Unusual beginning as Singh breaks clean and wants to wrestle! It doesn't go well for him though and so he ends up doing the same old cheating tactics like in every other Tiger Jeet Singh match before Inoki catches him with a quick pin combo. The 2nd and 3rd have Singh working over a bloody Inoki with nasty looking finger to the throath chokes and Inoki firing back with his awesome punches. Do yourself a favour and skip the first fall if you wanna get to the bloody meat.

IIRC Tiger Toguchi was threated like a total geek in All Japan, so this could've easily been a 3 minute squash. Rusher Kimura and Animal Hamaguchi get on the mic before the match to taunt Inoki. Inoki seemed off focus and Toguchi immediately starts pounding on him. Toguchi has really good looking basic offense, nasty looking punches with great snap, kneedrops, elbows to the kidney etc. Once again Inoki looked like the baddest dude on the planet when he made his initial comeback throwing punches and slaps and blocking Toguchi's attack. Toguchi makes a few more comebacks by throwing cheapshots including pounding Inoki on the ground with punches and hitting him in the throat and getting in a piledriver, but Inoki catches him with a flash kick and then locks in an Octopus Stretch which nearly crushed poor Toguchi's body. This was pretty much a glorified squash as Toguchi is nowhere near Inoki's league but Inoki gave Toguchi a ton of offense making him look credible and there were a few badass moments.

„Wow wee wow-wow!“ - Chikara commentator „I think Quack wants to wrestle you!“ - Jigsaw, to Danielson Man, Chikara can be awkward to watch. This was a fun indy match. Some fine indy WoS work to start, I especially liked Danielson busting out Regal's nasty knee on chest neck crank. People have talked about the legwork, but I thought Danielson's responses to Jigsaw's dweeby strikes were the highlights of the match. They lost me a bit during the „everybody runs in and breaks up pinfalls/submissions“ section. What's the point of doing FIP when everyone can just run in at any time? Jigsaw's selling was so-so, really exaggerated, but he was also doing plenty of jumping around. Quack's „sumo“ palm strikes were cringe inducing, so were the commentators who talked about how much Jigsaw loves to wrestle Danielson while Danielson was ripping up his leg.

This was in a vaccuum a good match, but YOU, the living breathing human being watching this match will never get over the fucking stupidity of having Lawlor, the taller, bigger MMA badass working all even steven with Gresham's cute WoS shit. (Actually, Lawler is shorter than I am and the same weight, but he looked like Takayama next to Gresham here. Maybe I should get into wrestling.) To be fair, Gresham's faux WoS stuff looked slick and he could probably have a good match with a fellow mini. About 10 minutes into the match Lawlor finally awakens and starts busting out MMA holds. I really liked how Gresham fought out of an armbar, and Lawlor had some really nice chokes and good punches. Still the psychology continues to be a mess with both guys really killing the submissions, a random wristlock comedy spot (?) in the middle of the finishing run and the whole thing just not ending. I should probably cut them some slack because they tried really hard to have a solid mat based match without any flippies and some of the stuff they did was quite good. Still, I'd rather have the match be a grotesque, violent mess.

Oh, Tiger, you and your goofy rapier. Tiger ambushes Inoki and pummels him in the face with the butt of his rapier like a goof. Inoki bleeds immediately and Singh goes to town on him throwing chairs in his face and drinking his blood like a vampire. Jeet Singh may be not as intense a brawler as the Sangre Chicanas and Perro Aguayos of this world, but he does the same things they would do: punching and kicking a bloody Inoki in the head, dumping row of chairs on him, etc. Inoki makes comeback by nailing Singh with a random bottle and then throwing punches. You don't think of Inoki as Jerry Lawler but he throws awesome punches and there are some cool exhausted exchanges from their knees here. Both guys were also grimacing to the max, with Inoki's blood painted face being a distorted mask of wrath. They spill to the outside and the double countout ensues but they keep going at it. This was not on the level of your classic bloodbaths due to being a little long and slow but it may be my favourite Inoki/Singh match so far because it gets straight to the point and the action is what you want all the way.

No love for BattlARTS in 2008? Or 2010 Futen?

If it weren't for a few minor nitpicks, this match would head straight into GOAT territory. Hell, even with the nitpicks, this might be the GOAT as far as a certain vision of wrestling is concerned. The 1985 match was a tribute to the old style with an underdog story, here, they set out to wrestle straight into olymp with modernized high end grappling contest built around the traditional holds. At no point did they go through the motions; at no point (atleast in the first 30 minutes) did they make it obvious that they were going to go the full 60 minutes. Every sequence was worked in such a way that it could plausibly lead to a finish, which is exactly why they had the crowd by the balls the whole time. The holds they used were grinding and tight as it gets, and the suplexes were used in awesome ways. Too many great sequences to list them all, but Fujinami getting fired up when slapped only to get punched in the face and be nearly KO'd and put away may be the best I've ever seen. To be fair, some of Fujinami's transitions were poor, and Inoki may have looked better than him. Inoki looked like a world class grappler (check out that smooth armbreaker/suplex transition) and his selling was pretty cool – he seemed invincible, but was limping, going for desperation moves and clearly spent by the last few minutes. That was fascinating to watch for sure. They lose direction a little and run out of ideas by the last third, but they stuck to what works for them. It could have been better, but that's not a huge knock on what already was cemented as one of the greatest wrestling contests ever anyways. The #2 guy vs. #1 guy story was there too, but for me not as important as the grappling here.

This was a pure 70s grappling epic with an absolutely molten last 10 minutes or so. The grappling here wasn't intricate or anything, but they worked an ultra tight contest and did a good job bringing the intensity up and down. Most importantly, the match never felt slow or dry, so I'll take this over your Dory Funk Jr snoozefest. Inoki is very dominant early on, running through his holds including a great briding indian deathlock, but then Fujinami slaps him like a bitch and finally starts bringing the fight. I especially liked the sequence where Inoki teases the Butterfly Suplex and goes for a fireman carry. He didn't even hit that butterfly suplex later! Inoki's defensiveness ends up backfiring on him and Fujinami puts him in a Figure 4. The Figure 4 segment eats up a good chunk of thise 35 minuteish match so better have a good book ready. I didn't have a problem with it though because the payoff was strong and Inoki's selling was right on the money. Seeing Fujinami pushing the mythical Inoki to the limit was spectacular and the crowd was surface of the sun level hot for the possible dethroning. The finish was inevitable but atleast we get a massive pop for Fujinami powering out of the Octopus Hold. This went over half an hour with barely a bump in it but it was still totally spectacular pro wrestling.

Man, I love this matchup. Young Punk Choshu was the best. You can say what you want about Inoki, but he was great at portraying himself as an untouchable badass. You look at some of the stuff Inoki does here and it's no wonder people thought he was a genius. He also always has these crazy facial expressions. I think the first 15 minutes or so of this didn't even have a bump but still ended up mesmerizing pro wrestling. This was worked like a technical battle of megastars so that was really cool. Both guys struggled hard and every movement could possibly lead to a finish which is exactly what you want from a match with really high stakes. Choshu was aggressive and really putting Inoki through the wringer, not just when he throw punches and stomps, but also in his grappling, butting heads when looking up and uncorking a super tight front headlock roll. Inoki came across as calm and cool headed so exactly the perfect counterpart to Choshu's rage. His selling was really strong too, at the beginning of the match he was dominating on the ground, but after Choshu really put the torque on him with the Scorpion Deathlock he was limping and stalling. Seeing the cool headed Inoki getting into desperation mode when Choshu tried the move again was great too. A limping Inoki punching Choshu in the face from the knees was epic and so was Choshu trying to bulldoze the legend with lariats and suplexes. I think if they had continued in that vein the match would've cruised into my all time top 10-20, but instead they slowed down again and went back to the holds. It was still really strong work and they delivered a great, clean finish. For a clash of the titans type match in front of a super hot 80s crowd that was mostly built around matwork this pretty much delivered all you can ask for.

I like this list a lot. I will have fun going through it and tracking down all the matches. However, there seem to be many matches which don't seem to be available on video, so that's a little sad. Kudos to you for having seen all this stuff. One thing about this list is that it's fresh for sure. I had no idea I wanted to see a 30 minute Norio Honaga vs. Perro Aguayo match until. No idea who Hiroaki Hatanaka was either. Is NOW worth checking out?

I gotta bring this thread back up again cause I've subscribed to the NJPW network and naturally, I've been watching a lot of Inoki matches for the past few weeks. So people have said that Inoki is boring and they can't understand why he was such a big star. To me, this is utterly mystifying. More often than not, he knew exactly how to get his audience by the balls and build heat. He also understood how to keep his matches unpredictable, especially post his match series against martial artists. Most importantly, Inoki was badass. Once in a while, he would look like the baddest dude on the planet by snapping someone's arm or knocking someone out with stomps and punches. He really knew how to punch someone in the face when it counted. In the 80s, there were times when he would look like a master grappler with crazy transitions. Some matches: - the 8/8/88 match against Fujinami is, for my money, the greatest 1 hour draw in history and honestly Inoki looks better than Fujinami there. The 85 match is great too but the 8888 match has amazing style - the whole series vs. Choshu. I am mystified the 84 singles match didn't make it on the DVDVR set because it's crazy good, low end MOTDC. - underrated matches in the 1970s against Strong Kobayashi and Kintaro Oki, two workers who as far as I can see did not have matches on that level against anyone else - figured out how to get watchable, genuinely exciting matches out of guys such as Rusher Kimura or Tiger Jeet Singh - the 1978 match against Roland Bock in Stuttgart, which is an uncooperative, hideous mess and somehow, great Inoki sucking is a bit of a myth, I think. Not saying he was a superworker, all the time, but he could certainly turn it up and look world class especially in that 80s stuff where he would work as untouchable wrestling god getting taken down a notch by his tenacious opponents. He may be the ultimate spectacle worker in a way, given that he got more out of his proto MMA voodoo bullshit than anyone else did out of their own shock acts. I do regret leaving him off my GWE Top 100.

This starts out hot with Inoki going to town on Singh by punching him in the face repeatedly. Of course they settle down do some matwork, but Singh looks shockingly competent here: actually wrestling Inoki, and using cheating tactics to keep the advantage. When Inoki grabs a basic wristlock, he really tortures Singh, who does a mindblowingly good job selling as he was walking around with a limp arm for minutes afterwards and wincing when Inoki reached for it again. He actually reminded me a bit of a Mick McManus/Jim Breaks type with his mix of fun highly exaggerated selling and cheating tactics. Inoki selling a Singh choke by drooling all nastily was a good way to establish Singh as dangerous again. The finishing run was extremely basic but fun. I especially liked them struggling over a suplex. Singh attacks Inoki with an umbrella and threatens to bring his spike into play, so Inoki starts throwing punches again. No finish because they had more matches to come. Shockingly fine match.