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If you're looking for match recs, Violet Viann vs June Byers would be a good place to start to see televised women's wrestling wasn't always a wasteland of good matches in the US.

Would also love to see Baba/Dory from Dory's same 1969 Japan tour as the Inoki match. Highlights from it seem to have aired on a Baba special in the early 80's.

I've long thought the idea that all or most styles are created equal as bullshitty and that OP summarizes the main reasons why. While it's certainly possible to adjust your expectations to match an alien style's internal logic, your own tastes aren't things that can just be changed on a fly. When you conpare stuff like lucha and shoot, even if you can find things to appreciate in both of them, they're just so different that it stands to reason that you'd find one of them generally produces more enjoyable matches if you analyzed them that way. It follows from this that rankings of different matches and wrestlers are really just rankings of different styles. Although it's possible for someone to disrupt things a bit by being especially good at an inferior style, the best stuff from the best style will always be on top.

This is the most sensible answer. I've seen plenty of great matches that don't fall inside that range, but that range still seems to be the most conductive for great matches. Generally speaking, guys have to be really fucking good at filling time to get a great match that goes over or under that time frame.

To each his own. I simply disagree. The fact that we have to go back to 87/88 speaks volumes. From the first women's matches available on tape to the early 90's (with the exception of the 6 months in 87/88 with GG/JBA) women's wrestling in the US was nothing more than one piece swimsuits and hair mares. Then you have the year and a half of Blayze/Morgan/Nakano/Faye although in that whole time there were very few TV matches and even less variety. Women's wrestling is pretty much dead, aside from random Debbie Combs/Malia Hosaka Nitro matches until the summer of 1998, but Sable v. Tori isn't setting any fires. In fact, until the Trish/Lita era in early 2000's, it was all crap. 2000 to 2005 you have a slow, but steady progression in the quality of women's matches in WWE and with Shimmer starting, things are starting to look bright and at this point I'd have a hard time defending last nights women's match against the best stuff from this era. EDIT: As I typed this I actually recalled the Madusa v. Hokuto match from Bash '97, Madusa's "retirement" match. I'd site that as the best match before 2005 in the US. Still would take the 6 pack over it. That early 40's and 50's period is actually remembered as the golden age for women's wrestling in the US and it was Mildred Burke touring Japan that set the table for the joshi boom. Even going by the limited footage up on YouTube you can see the women from back then were clearly quite good. That it declined in the mainstream 70's onwards aside from some brief hot periods is a fair point, but footage availability is an issue there as most of the good workers seem to have predominately wrestled for untaped indy promotions.

I'm sure plenty of people would be have no problem accepting millions to get beat up for 2 minutes if given the opportunity. It's fair to give him credit for trying, but there are innumerable no-name fighters at small gyms who will never come close to the UFC that could have destroyed Punk. That's where the mockery comes from.

Eddie/Taker is a good one. It actually main evented a house show in my home town in 2005 but I wasn't watching wrestling at the time so I missed it.

Having rewatched Sarge/Sheik a few weeks ago I thought the finish added a lot to the match. A very cinematic feel with the camera zooming in on the boot as both guys crawled on the ground, desperately inching their hands towards it. Something like that really helped cement the match as a classic in my mind and I think if you look back at what gets touted as all-time great matches you'll find a similar situation of a great match body with an iconic finish to get them over the top. Matches widely pimped as ***** in spite of a weak finish are a definite exception and I can't think of any off hand. On the subject of Rich/Sawyer, I'll add that a finish doesn't need fireworks at the end to qualify as iconic. Hokuto/Kandori had a similar exhaustion finish with Hokuto pretty much just falling on top of Kandori and getting the pin because neither had anything left. It still qualifies as iconic, though, because of how they earned that finish with the work prior. Much of the complaints about the Rich/Sawyer center around how they didn't earn the finish with them selling themselves as having gone through a similar war of attrition as Hokuto/Kandori despite the match only going 12 minutes and not featuring anything out of the ordinary from brawls of the era.

The match would have been a lot better if they had gotten a few more minutes and did more with the arm work in the beginning. I say that not because I'm the type to get annoyed when a guy stops selling a body part when it's not being worked, but because as it is the match lacks a hook to really get it to the next level, content to settle into being a nice fisticuffs brawl with blood but not much more than that. Match needed to feel a bit more brutal for me to feel comfortable putting it on the level of Magnum/Tully given its short length and the somewhat anti-climactic ending also knocks it down a bit. I enjoyed it but it's debatable if it's even the best match in the collection as there's Thesz/Gunkel as a great NWA title match that's a masterclass in working holds and Ali/Wolfe as a really entertaining boxer vs wrestler match followed by some vintage Ali promos.

The full pro shot show is up on XWT Classics last I checked. However, there are audio difficulties in the AJPW 6-man and the version in the Google Drive appears to be a straight rip from that version. I remember a version without the audio difficulties being uploaded to YouTube a few years ago, though, and I would be interested if anyone saved it or had further info on the story behind that.

It's possible that pic of him could have been in perfect lighting while he had a pump, but I'd be inclined to think that he's started a steroids cycle or at least TRT and that's why he's been making such a fuss lately over wrestlers using steroids.

I haven't seen it since it aired on 24/7 but I remember thinking the Tito/Valentine 20 minute draw from the 12/17/1988 LA show was one of the best matches from the promotion's late 80's period. There's also the Rockers/Demolition MSG match.

I would agree on this feeling more like a Rogers heel showcase than an attempt at a great match. I love all the mileage these guys get with a simple headlock throughout from the all the escapes when it's being worked straight early on to Thesz's selling of the accumulated damage from Roger's punches in the 2nd half. Also a nice dynamic here with Thesz playing more of a crafty guy not afraid to try Rogers's own tactics against him instead of just being a clean fighting face playing to the crowd. Of course the finish is nuts and Rogers also takes a hard bump to the outside off a Thesz forearm prior to that, but the hard knee he takes off one of Thesz's dropkick is getting slept on. ***3/4

As others have noted, wrestling's discussed/critiqued in ways far surpassing mere match synopsis all the time. That said, match reviews are getting short shrift in this conversation. DVDVR/Segunda Caida were/are match reviews as high art. The context of a match and date are really just a springboard for talking about wrestling however the writer is capable of tackling it. Even the bell-to-bell isn't a confined beginning or end point when you see the best of our peers at work. Sure, there are reviews in some places that are too focused on simply writing down the play-by-play of moves. But I likewise think there are folks here and elsewhere who prattle on with vague, needlessly obtuse theories that simply read as self-aggrandizing. When I read eight paragraph essays of why someone liked or didn't like a match via an attempt to coin capital-T Theories, I'm reminded of H.G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which clarifies how bullshit is neither true or untrue, but an attempt to cloud thoughts in such word salad that they're technically irrefutable, or cause your audience to just shrug and surrender. I would be interested in some examples of what you see as word salad reviews. I seriously can't remember ever thinking of a match review as being like that.

The ref spots in this reminded me of that quote from a WWE writer on how they used to book women's wrestling. No heels, no faces, just crazy bitches. Really enjoyed the aggression worked into all the holds here. I'll echo the thought that Vivian sold well as an underdog, but I'll add that June did look pretty badass with her choice of offense, especially the arm work early and the drop kicks on a tied up Vivian later on. Also love the finish with Vivian finding just enough to win with a late match rally right when she looked out of it. ***1/2

AFAIK the surgery for a torn rotator cuff still amounts to a doctor drilling some holes in your shoulder and putting in some rods to keep the arm in place. Fans really seem to underestimate the serious nature of many in-ring injuries barring concussions. The whole safety argument against steroids ultimately leads to arguing for banning all pro sports as they all have high risks for life-altering injuries. In this steroids and growth hormone actually have the potential to be be beneficial by helping heal and prevent injuries. I actually brought up the painkillers and 70's bodybuilders thing to Meltzer on Twitter and his response was basically that it's not an either/or thing between steroids and pain killer abuse and that 80's bodybuilders who took a bunch of stuff in addition to steroids do have a pretty high death rate. While I won't deny that the combination of steroids and pain killers is far more deadly than either in isolation, I'd still argue that pain killer abuse and the rough ring style that leads people to it is a far more serious problem than steroids in a wrestling context. If the goal is wrestler safety a wellness program that barely catches anyone who isn't falling out of favor with the company is utterly ineffective. The only long-term solution would be to push an easier ring style that puts more emphasis on tags and conditions the fans to accept mat work as more than just filler. Basically something that leads to less guys feeling they have to abuse drugs just to keep up.

I don't get the love for Cena/Styles at all. It kind of had a cool finish if a bit hammy, but I'll echo what people are saying that the stuff before that was just another finisher kick out match in the vein of Cena/Rock II. Lesnar/Orton looked like it had the potential to be great if it continued after the blade job but what was there just felt like an inferior copy of the Cena match 2 years ago. Charlotte/Sasha was easily the best match I saw on the PPV with lots of sick looking spots from both and some nice emotion at the end with Charlotte wanting to settle for nothing less than to remain the undisputed ace of the division.

I suspect he was raising valid points in that interview too. Well, let's see: Rogers says some of the things they're doing today insult people's intelligence and that there's no need to resort to them. He thinks they should get back to wrestling and that there should be more rules. In his day there were suspensions and fines, and he tells some story about how he was suspended for two years from the state of New York for shoving a guy after a match was over. The interviewer mentions that nowadays guys are bringing chairs into the ring and Rogers says they use everything next to machine guns if they can carry it in there. He says it's ridiculous because there's some super wrestlers like Backlund and Muraco. The interviewer blames it on the promoters and Rogers goes off on a tangent about how wrestling can still draw because it's the second oldest sport in the world next to running. The interviewer senses that Rogers wouldn't mind getting back into the sport and having some control over it and Rogers admits he wouldn't mind getting back into the business in a "supervisory" role. Rogers knows he could do a lot for wrestling and mentions a young guy he managed in Florida who is the greatest athlete he's seen in wrestling in the last 25 years and would set the place on fire. That man being Jimmy Snuka. Rogers calls wrestling the greatest show on earth. It's got action, it's got strength, it's got "everything about it," and if they resorted more to wrestling it would even be greater. The public don't want to see constant kicking and hair pulling. They want to see some holds. In Rogers' day they had holds where a guy would give up or you'd beat a guy with a hold and you hardly see that today. The interviewer says everyone has a costume these days and Rogers says you don't need that. There's such a thing as charisma and being colourful but you can overdo that too. Later on, the interview gets a good line in about how Rogers used to hang out with Nat King Cole and how he couldn't imagine Backlund hobnobbing with Barbara Streisand. ................................................................ You can interpret Rogers' comments anyway you like. Maybe there was more wrestling in Rogers' day but there was also a hell of a lot of the stuff that "insulted people's intelligence." And everything that is wrong about wrestling "today" can be found in Sheik vs. Slaughter, which last I checked is considered pretty much the height of that era. Thought this comment in the ageism thread deserved more discussion than getting lost in a debate about the nuances of rspw. I would have to say that I think Rogers was pretty much spot on with his comments regarding the degeneracy in the working style of the kayfabe era. As I watch more Golden Age stuff I'm seriously starting to take a view similar to that of Bruno Sammartino, in that things were great before the 80's and 90's took the US scene down a descent into over-reliance on gimmicks and cartoonish tropes, from which it's only recovered in the last decade or so thanks to a burgeoning market of puro-influenced independent promotions. The folks who go on about mystic objective standards that are constantly evolving seem to view early wrestling with a view of it being primitive and unskilled compared to newer shit, yet I had pretty much the opposite reaction when I went through the stuff available from the 1920's-40's. The glimpses we have of the pro working style as it was originally developed by the Gold Dust Trio are fantastic. Capable shooters like Shikat and Don George going out and having matches that are basically high-end shoot-style, built around mat work that's beautiful yet still ruggedly uncooperative looking with just the right amount of hard strikes and showiness to make things more interesting. The post-WW2 era saw the rise of more flamboyant workers like Gorgeous George and Buddy Rogers, but the guys back then were still very capable grapplers, who, beneath the pomp and circumstance, were still more or less carrying on the style of the forefathers with just a touch more theatrics. A headlock might be a move that's only used by distraught beginners in modern shoot grappling, but in the hands of Verne Gagne it looked like a potential match ender if the opponent hung around in it for too long. Because so many guys from that era were trained as actual shooters, they knew how to make everything, even something like a headlock, look painful and potentially injurious if applied properly. The guy taking the hold couldn't just hang around in it and would have constantly struggling for ways to ease things or escape. This issue with hanging around in holds is very prominent among the 80's guys who seemed disinterested in learning proper matwork, and even a pimped guy like Bob Backlund has been pretty disappointing to me in that respect. Sitting around for minutes in holds making faces and occasionally doing a cool counter or escape does not great mat work make. As someone who's also not a fan of tricked out and cooperative looking lucha submissions that leave me wondering half the time how it's even supposed to hurt, I'm starting to feel the legacy of the 80's is a world where, outside of the basically dead shoot style, the best place for good mat work is actual shoots like freestyle wrestling and submission grappling. The 80's style of working over a body part to set-up a submission seems to often be treated as the norm and the puro style of instant tap-outs to properly applied submissions but otherwise fighting through the pain viewed as a corruption due to MMA influence, but I'd argue otherwise. In a shoot, the only two modes of selling seen are either none at all or seriously injured without much middle ground between the two extremes because, generally speaking, by the time the pain has even registered to the extent that you're wincing some serious damage has already been done. This is the style of selling seen in the Shikat/Londos 1930 title match. Londos doesn't have to work over a body part; he just catches Shikat in a leg lock late in the match and things don't last much longer when it becomes clear Shikat's knee is hurt. The deal with having someone spend half the match working over a body part and then the person getting worked over spending the other half of the match selling that body part (in theory, anyway, but someone no-selling body work on offense is one of the most common complaints I see) strikes me as something that become prominent as part of the kayfabe era with trying to make things more accessible for people who didn't know what a real fight looked like or what those holds could actually do. A world where a single hold could potentially decide the outcome of a match is far more exciting to me than one where someone has to spend 10 minutes working over a single body part and the best you can hope for is it makes them harder to do a move down the stretch. I saw GOTNW say in another thread that he thinks Buddy Rogers imitators ruined American wrestling, but I think it would be more accurate to say Gorgeous George imitators ruined it as he was the guy who made a name for himself with the over-the-top selling and blatant fouling that became the norm for heels from around the 70's onward. There are several factors for why I think George succeeded where most of the guys followed him failed, one of them being that the over-the-top aspects of his ring work were warranted by his flamboyant gimmick instead of being something every heel back then did. More importantly, though, a big part what makes him interesting to watch even today is that the guy was actually very capable on the mat when he needed to be and, thus, didn't need to build his entirely matches around bumping, stooging, and heeling like his imitators did. I'd almost call the 80's heels aping George's heel spots but not the other stuff that made it work the 80's version of 00's workers aping AJPW near falls but not the other things that made them work. Buddy Rogers's line about 80's wrestlers insulting the audience's intelligence is exactly how I feel when I watch the cartoony face-heel spots that become en vogue during that time period. George may not have been the only 50's worker cheating, but someone far more representative of heels from that period and who I'd argue as a far better example for most to follow would be Hans Schmidt. Though working an obvious race baiting gimmick, his working style was simply that of a vicious badass doing what he needed to do to win the match. Unfortunately, the archetype of the vicious heel seemed mostly phased out in the 80's in favor of the bitch heel. The main guys carrying that on were guys like Vader and Hansen who had extensively worked Japan, and even they had to tone things down a little for stateside matches. Similarly, the 80's also saw the crafty champ in Thesz phased out in favor of the bitch heel champ in Race and Flair. Thesz might have heeled it up on occasion and tried to put over the skills of his opponent, but it was nowhere near to the extent that I'd call him a prototypical Flair as I've seen him characterized. He was a guy who, even in selling, never looked like the match was totally out of his control or that he was outmatched like I've often seen from Flair, and didn't rely on fouling nearly as much. The NWA champs of the 50's didn't forget to show themselves as being just as capable as their opponents and, partly due to that, stuff like Thesz/Gagne and Carpentier/Gagne reaches far greater heights of emotion and drama than any of that banana peel shit I've seen from the 80's. This is another case where Rogers's line about insulting the audience's intelligence is applicable as I've seen Race show himself as being really good in a role of a crafty champ in AJPW yet he felt the need to dumb things down into working as a bitch champ for US audiences. I don't mean to completely shit on 80's stuff as I won't deny there were some great matches back then, including the Slaughter/Sheik bootcamp match mentioned in the quoted text, but my general feeling with US matches from that era is that they succeeded in spite of their environment rather than because of it. As someone who tends more towards watching Japanese wrestling because it's based more on real sports, I also find it unfortunate that US wrestling started similarly before going down a different path. A lot of the differences between modern Japanese and modern US stuff has often been chalked up to overall cultural differences, but as I watch more old stuff I'm starting to feel many of those differences are simply rooted in the Japanese promotions having more respect for wrestling history.

Watch some news reel footage from the 30's or 40's and you'll hear commentary pretty openly mocking wrestling and not even trying to treat it as a legitimate sport. My grandpa only needed to see one match back in the day to realize the whole thing was fake. The kayfabe situation is far more nuanced than it simple being "alive" then "dead," and the 70's-80's period where it was treated as a big deal is a relatively brief period in the overall history of US wrestling. I'd also argue the emphasis placed on protecting the business during that period is more indicative of the lowest-common-denominator crowd being pandered to than anything to do with the working style as stuff from that period is generally far more distanced from a real fight than stuff before or since.

There's a clip somewhere of Kobashi doing a chop to a civilian and the guy falls over after only one from the sheer force that Kobashi throws them at. There's plenty of uses for chops and chop exchanges besides ending a match such as a display of machismo, a sign of disrespect or respect, or just to set up for another move. Giving in depth analysis of the things workers use such moves for in specific instances is also a good argument in favor of serious wrestling criticism.

Didn't think this was very good. It was like a less boring version of an MSG jobber match. They did stuff, some it pretty cool stuff, but they didn't really make any of it feel meaningful or build any sustained heat. Odd decision as well to have all 3 falls happen in quick succession at the end, but I wish they showed more flashes of how they were working at that DQ finish during the actual match.

Interesting seeing the amount of give in the ring during the close up of Moto's footwear before the match. I liked the power vs technique dynamic on display here. Story saw Moto using a combination of technical prowess and underhanded tactics to repeatedly get Ivan in compromising positions, but he just couldn't get past Ivan's size and strength to finish it. Towards the end, the frustration builds until we get the shit finish. As an aside, I agree that Ivan threw some good strikes and it was refreshing to see a guy who just let the punches speak for themselves instead of having to stomp with every blow. ***

You could try emailing CFA about it. They have the copyright on the match, so there's nothing stopping them from contesting WWE's claim, though I didn't get a response when them when I did that myself. For now, if you want to see this, there's a torrent on XWT Classics with all the Chicago stuff downloaded from YouTube that includes this.

This is a scaffold death match for Miyamoto's death match title, called "one night carnival again" in reference to the first match of this type with Sasaki in 2007. Takeda is definitely the underdog not just because he's a new guy fighting for the title for the first time, but also because the match was originally designed in reference to Miyamoto's day's working construction, so this is definitely his sort of match. I've seen it called ***** by some people and, while I'm not sure if I'd go that far, it is a damn good match at worst just a notch below the March tag and I'd love to rewatch it in better quality than the Youtube video. This is a really good example of a slow building title match, and one of the few I know of that successfully combines the format with deathmatch elements without devolving into a spot fest. Match starts out with some mat work as they trade, and, while you could dismiss it as them ironically going through the motions before the props are introduced, I prefer to think of it as a feeling out process that also builds tension. Light tubes are introduced after these first few minutes and we get both guys get busted open pretty nicely for the occasion. They do a good job of progressively turning up the intensity until they both decide about 10 minutes to make their first of four trips up to the scaffold, and that's where the match really gets going. Although both guys play their roles well and do some pretty sick things to each other even when not on the scaffold, what makes this so great to me is how masterfully these incorporate the scaffold into the match between all the great teases, the selling, and the absolutely amazing scaffold moves themselves. Although you could argue they went just slightly overboard with Takeda kicking out of two Fire Thunder Drivers, it felt like Kobashi in 10/31/98 with him having nothing left and it set up for an epic ending with Miyamoto bowing to the crowd before hitting his signature moonsault off the scaffold for the win. ****1/2

For the longest time, this and the March tag just blended together with the main difference in my mind being that this one was more focused on strikes and went longer. Watching them both almost back-to-back, though, really makes me notice how fundamentally different the dynamic is. Whereas the March tag had Kodaka and Takeda selling for most of the match and wrestling as if they had something to prove, here they've already proven themselves with the win in the prior match and a good showing for the rest of the tournament. That's reflected in the much more even style of this match. Kodaka/Takeda even get the first big control segment of the match when they work over Miyamoto and it takes Takeda running into a bundle a light tubes and getting a pretty nasty cut on his shoulder to turn the tide. I remarked that March tag was a really good standard tag with deathmatch props providing a backdrop, and that's even more so the case here with most of the first 30 minutes just being hard strikes with the occasional light tube because blood and glass makes everything just a little bit more awesome. Of course, these teams wouldn't dare to disappoint deathmatch fans in the finals of a deathmatch tournament, so they do bring out the props when the match goes into overtime and we see some pretty sick spots. My favorite was Miyamoto taking a german suplex at a sick angle on a barbed board that got placed on Sasaki. I remember this getting criticized at the time for overkill, but I was actually pretty impressed with how well they managed to believably work in all their near falls and the effort put in protecting Miyamoto's Fire Thunder Driver. It's never kicked out of, only broken up, and ends up taking Kodaka out of the match for several minutes after he eats it towards the end. Doesn't quite reach the overall heights of the March tag, mainly because it drags at points due to Kodaka and Takeda not being quite ready to work a match of this length while on offense for significant periods, but that was how the match needed to be worked both to establish them as a team and to show they had more to them than pure deathmatch guys like Ito and Kobayashi. ****