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garretta

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Everything posted by garretta

  1. garretta
    And to top it off, it's only available eight or nine hours a day. I hope no one was charged if they called during an off hour. After a second viewing, I think the announcer was doing a half-assed Hogan imitation.
  2. garretta
    Thanks, Pete. I wonder why Vince buried that segment. Pressure from the Steinbrenner family, maybe?
  3. garretta
    I forgot to mention that, Dooley. Then again, if they only planned on him being a warm body, what did it matter who he was or what he'd dome previously? He wasn't there to be Ricky Steamboat, champion wrestler. He was there to be the literal personification of a dragon, presumably one who didn't have much experience wrestling humans. As a dragon (note the small D), his accomplishments were thus limited and irrelevant. Yes, I absolutely believe that we were supposed to see Steamer as an actual dragon, not a human being. The only animal-type wrestler to get away with appearing human for very long was Jake Roberts, and if I remember right, someone- I'm thinking it was Dick Ebersol- actually wanted him to slither and hiss like a snake during his interviews, at least on SNME. He was promptly told by Jake where he could go and how long he could take getting there.
  4. garretta
    The promos: Hogan- About the same as his Main Event interview. Whatever you thought of that, you'll think of this. Sarge- On top of the war references and puns (which are terrible), he also has to use the phrase "Immortal Slime" every single time he references Hogan. That leads to him at one point threatening to turn Hogan into the "Unknown Immortal Slime". God help us, that's a new level of awful. Add the useless prattling of Adnan and this was almost unbearable. Give me Heenan, Teddy, even Fuji instead. "You suffa, boy-san" laps that Iraqi gibberish by a mile. Savage- The usual divine nonsense. Only one problem: Hogan had just referenced "the big dude upstairs", so Savage's reference to "the great Macho King in the sky" lost just a bit of its punch. Sherri again says nothing, and wears no makeup either. Warrior- He flipped the switch and sounded like a wrestler. The stuff about sewing a piece of Savage's scepter into his head was crazy, but it was wrestler crazy, not space alien crazy. For whatever reason, Savage brings out the best in him in a way that not even Rude could. Of course, Bob Costas ended up bailing out because of the Slaughter angle. I'm trying to think of who replaced him. For some reason, Marv Albert sticks in my head, although he was most likely busy with the Knicks and Rangers. I know someone else was there besides Steinbrenner and Maguire. Anyone care to jog my memory?
  5. garretta
    I don't have any of the figures (I was an LJN child of the eighties), but this was a nice little tie-in commercial. Not too obnoxious, and with a clever cameo by Hawk and Animal. Stuff like this is why the WWF became synonymous with wrestling long before they were the only real game in town.
  6. garretta
    This might have been all right for Steamer if Vince had had plans for the gimmick. Wearing a headdress and breathing fire aren't exactly the worst things in the world for a wrestler. It was the fact that the whole thing led to absolutely nothing that made it so awful. Steamboat/Hennig wasn't in the cards because of Curt's injury, but why not renew Steamboat/Jake later in the fall until Savage is ready? That would have also possibly given him a series against Taker, who was Jake's main ally, and they could have really played it up big when Taker went over (as he certainly would have, given how he was being built up). It could have made at least some money, but just like Tony Atlas and Saba Simba, the gimmick ultimately went nowhere (although Steamboat used the fire-breathing entrance at least occasionally in WCW). I don't know if Vince was still mad about Steamboat leaving in the middle of his IC run, but Ricky himself admitted that Vince never trusted him to do anything major again, which would explain why he was just gimmick filler during this run instead of anything substantial. What a shame.
  7. garretta
    I don't really get the point of talking about Warrior when Savage is supposedly going to end his career at Mania; like Pete said, it sort of telegraphs the result. On the other hand, Taker's not really in a position to be thinking about Hogan just yet, and there's really no one else that he could have been programmed against who would have been as big a deal as Vince wanted. A Jake feud would have been a natural, but I think Jake's heel turn was already in the works. Maybe Piper would have worked if he'd been able to go, but he was too important to the DiBiase/Virgil situation. Kind of a low-key debut for Percy here. He couldn't have worked long-term as Taker's manager and been that soft-spoken, since Taker barely spoke at all, but it was effective for a first impression. It hit me while I was watching that Brother Love has only two more weeks, so they needed to do this now in order to get him out of the picture. This might also be the reason for the Warrior trash talk, as we all know who ends the Brother's career. I think the Paul Bearer joke would have been just as lame if they'd given his first name first. Even Vince and Piper have to acknowledge how stupid the whole thing sounded. It's one of the few times that Taker and everything associated with him isn't treated with (no pun intended) dead seriousness
  8. garretta
    Savage isn't much more understandable than Warrior here, but for whatever reason, he's more easily relatable even at his most bizarre. I'd rather hear him talk about WWF champion yesterday, today, and tomorrow than hear how Warrior tasted his own power as it flowed from his head. Warrior's not quite as bad as he was at this time last year, but he's not nearly as human as he was a few months ago, either. Sherri was there, but she didn't say anything at all I noticed that they're kind of keeping her and Randy apart, even as they're still together. This whole Warrior feud has been more his deal than theirs, if that makes any sense. She started it on The Brother Love Show and kept it going at the Rumble, but she's not the driving force behind it like other managers tend to be for some of their wrestlers' feuds. It's almost like they're subtly trying to set up Sherri's eventual turn. I notice that Gene just generically mentioned Los Angeles without naming the actual venue where the card would take place. I'm assuming that the Coliseum was out by now, but when was the Sports Arena made official on TV? I don't remember it being mentioned at all until the show was actually on the air.
  9. garretta
    Take away Adnan (who was useless anyway), add a little bit of extra old-man craziness, and you have classic heel Slaughter here, who was absolutely phenomenal both on the mic and in the ring. I'm glad Vince finally remembered most of what made Sarge the great heel he was in the early and mid-eighties, even if it was a little too late to completely redeem the whole Iraqi sympathizer routine, which would hang over him more or less for the rest of his career, even after he "came back" to America. I don't think Piper was in the studio for this day of dubbing; you'll notice that even though Vince references him, he has nothing to say at all, which never happened during one of Sarge's promos.
  10. garretta
    The puns were flying thick and fast with both Mean Gene and Martel here. I'm not too surprised that the blindfold match wasn't mentioned, though; big pieces of news were saved exclusively for Superstars by now. If they teased it on Challenge, it would almost certainly be announced on Superstars the following week. The cheesiest part of Martel's getup was the huge "Yes, I Am A Model" button. This is a serious question: What was it about Martel that was supposed to lead us to believe that he wasn't? I know Vince was unsubtle about his gimmicks almost as a rule, but this was not only hitting us over the head with a sledgehammer, but following it up with a two-by-four.
  11. garretta
    These were a couple of really good promos here. I liked Sarge going from Iraqi sympathizer to desperate heel champ who knows he's in for it at Mania. My favorite line is, "It(the title)'s mine, and I don't have to share with anybody!" Every heel champion in history has thought that way, but Sarge is the first champion to verbalize it. As for Hogan, other than the stuff about the million gallons of oil and the Scud missiles shooting down the Hulkamaniacs, this was as good a promo as you could get out of this whole regrettable mess. Vince has brought the Gulf War into this, and it can't be taken out just like that, so let Hogan play superpatriot to the hilt. I especially liked the line where he reminded everyone that, deplorable as Slaughter's words and actions are, they're protected by our Constitution. So many times when we see foreign menace angles in wrestling, babyfaces tend to ignore that. Remember when Jim Duggan tried to tell Nikolai Volkoff that he couldn't sing the Russian national anthem because this was the land of the free and the home of the brave? Wrestling hasn't gone far on the evolutionary scale when it comes to freedom of political thought, but it's at least started the journey. You could have made a legitimate case for all four of the named wrestlers getting championship matches at Mania, even Duggan since he'd just beaten Sarge by DQ earlier in the evening. But only Hogan's character was strongly identified enough with patriotism and the American way to sell a pay-per-view main event against Slaughter the foreign menace. I would have liked to have seen the Savage/Slaughter situation cleared up someway, since they keep mentioning the bargain Sarge made with Sherri about giving Randy a title shot, but given how hated Sarge was and why, Randy would have been an instant babyface, even if it was for one night, and Vince (rightly) felt that that would have taken some of the steam from the retirement match with Warrior at Mania. Maybe they could have met right after Mania at a taping, with Liz in Randy's corner for the first time in over two years, and called it his last contracted match before retirement like they did his real-life bout with Rick Martel, but that was as close as they could have possibly gotten.
  12. garretta
    Oh, come on. Look, we all know how horrible the Slaughter stuff is, but should that disqualify Vince and the WWF from making any patriotic gestures ever again? Okay, so Hogan autographing a missile doesn't make up for Saddam supposedly giving Slaughter a pair of the Iron Sheik's old boots. But it's the best he can do under the circumstances that Vince has put him in. I'm sure most of the troops were thrilled to have Hogan in their midst regardless of why he was there. Even if they thought the Slaughter angle was awful (and why wouldn't they?), taking their anger out on Hogan wouldn't force Vince to change the way he booked one bit. He probably thought that the idea of people threatening Sarge's life over the whole thing was a sign that the angle was working as intended. Kudos to Hogan for at least trying to make a cup of chicken salad out of a metric ton of chicken shit, and showing some hometown pride to boot, as the base he visited was in Tampa.
  13. garretta
    I didn't feel the emotion here nearly as much as some of you did. I know we as wrestling fans love chaos, but this was too chaotic, expecially considering what was at stake. The brawls outside were too confusing to follow for the most part, and I'm sorry, but blatant weapons use (meaning it's seen by the referee) should always equal an automatic disqualification in matches where regular rules are believed by the fans to be enforced, regardless of country or preferred wrestling style. It should be the closest thing to an unbreakable universal rule that this business has, period. Otherwise, Vince was an idiot for not booking Hogan to hit people with chairs and get ten-second pinfalls in every match, to name just one example. In an environment such as this, Kyoko's so-called botches don't mean a thing, since all four of these women were just brawling around and beating the stew out of each other with whatever was handy anyway. Where did they get nunchuks and boards that big to begin with? The real drama was in the postmatch. It was something else to see the expressions on Bull and Kyoko's faces as they watched Aja and Bison being shaved. Now that they'd gotten what they wanted, they weren't sure it was such a good thing. The crowd seemed awed by the whole thing as well. For their part, Aja and Bison conveyed their humiliation and anger perfectly. Aja was stoic from the start, while you could almost reach out and touch Bison's utter misery, even after she stopped crying. The funny thing is, Aja looks even scarier and tougher bald than she did with hair! Seeing the scissors spots sprinkled throughout the match (which, perhaps hypocritically given what I just finished saying above, I had no real problem with in this context) gives me the idea for a twist on this stip: The winner of the match is the first person to cut/shave his or her opponent bald. This would have been a natural kind of feud blowoff for Brutus Beefcake in the late eighties had Vince found someone willing to have their hair cut in a match besides Ron Bass.
  14. garretta
    Thanks for trying to keep me straight, Zenjo!
  15. garretta
    This one took a while to get going, but once it did it was a classic. There was a ton of blood, and it played into the story of the match, as by the third fall both men struggled to execute even simple moves crisply due to the blood loss. In the end, a simple desperation move like a small package should be enough to put away a guy who's bleeding like de Oro was here. I liked the special posts they had around the ring; I don't recall ever seeing them before, but they looked like what iron posts surrounding a wrestling ring should; in other words, get your head rammed into one of them and you'll bleed badly, as both of these guys found out the hard way. I liked the mini-movies between falls, even though I had no idea what they were about. As for del Santo being carried to the ring, we've seen it here before with "kings" on their thrones, but never with a guy who's not doing a king gimmick, and certainly not with just regular fans carrying him. I would have loved to have seen it with Lawler in Memphis, as AJ said, and another guy it could have worked with (provided that Vince had found fans big and strong enough) was Hogan. I liked the Dandy/Satanico matches from '90 a little better, especially the 12/14 match, but this one fits in snugly behind those two in my overall lucha rankings so far.
  16. garretta
    I don't know where all this talk about low-key and lackluster is coming from, because I thought this was superb. Did they throw chairs and bust each other open? No, but as Pete said, these matches tended to adhere more strictly to the rules than most. I liked Jumbo targeting Stan's lariat arm, which most guys either fail to do or do ineffectively. Eventually, Stan connects, however, and it's all Jumbo can do to stay alive. Jumbo beating Stan with a slightly more impactful version of the lariat was a sweet bit of irony, and it pisses Stan off so badly that he kills Jumbo with a second lariat after the match, and plasters Taue (I think) with a chair when he tries to protect his partner. At the end, Taue is helped back to the locker room, and Jumbo looks like he should be, so it's a normal night's work for the Badman from Borger. I agree that the Misawa feud is definitely fresher at this point and arguably has a more compelling story, but every once in a while it's nice to see a change of pace for Jumbo. The fans certainly got behind it, especially when he was presented with the belts at the end. Now that Jumbo rules the roost again, his feud with Misawa and company is bound to take on a new dimension. Can Misawa pull off another victory over Jumbo, this time with everything at stake? We'll find out in the months ahead!
  17. garretta
    This was a match of two halves: Kyoko destroying Mita's back in the first half, and Mita paying most of it back exacrly in the second half, with many of the same submission holds. No, this didn't make a ton of sense from an injury-selling standpoint, but I think they were focusing on the payback aspect more than worrying about selling earlier damage. Eventually, of course, both women have to forget about doing damage and start trying to win, and Mita's cradle suplex at the very last second is a much more effective last-second near fall than Scott Steiner's was on Flair. Come to think of it, Mita sold plenty while Kyoko was outside; usually in these matches, the combatants go right after each other on the floor, but Mita couldn't because of her injured back. I liked how neither woman could move well at all after the match, and that Kyoko needed to psych herself up on the mic just to get off the apron. There will definitely be more matches ahead for these two, and I hope we get to see them. I didn't read the comments beforehand, so I had no idea that this was for the AJW title. It's interesting that the promoters would allow a match for a vacant title to go to a draw without some way of determining a winner. Were they waiting to award the title at some sort of big event? Also, even though the promotion is called AJW, I'm getting the impression that the AJW title takes a distinct second place to the WWWA title, both in singles and in the tag ranks. Is this correct?
  18. garretta
    I had trouble getting into this one until the end, mainly because nothing Hokuto did appeared to hurt Bull. She just laid around looking annoyed until it was time to do the next spot. I understand the psychology of monsters, but with most monsters it's more about the struggle to apply holds and moves than it is getting them to work once they're applied. This match worked better when Hokuto was throwing desperation bombs, like the dropkicks in each corner. The dives to the outside by both women were insane, as each of them seemed to wipe out half of ringside. As for the tombstone spot, it seems kind of like a waste for it to be set up the way it was, since it's well known that the refs in all the major Japanese promotions, both male and female, refuse to count potential falls set up by illegal tactics. The thought of anyone executing (or taking) a second-rope tombstone is terrifying, especially if Hokuto already took it once and was almost crippled. To do such a potentially career-ending spot knowing that it wouldn't even result in a count by the referee was senseless, callback spot or not. They should have found something else to do, even if it was considerably less dramatic. I never thought that Bull was really in danger of losing, even with all of Hokuto's nearfalls, and that took a lot away from the match. Basically, unless Aja's her opponent, it's just a matter of how much Bull chooses to give the person she's in there with, and invariably the answer is "not much". Her matches are good spectacles, but not good contests. I prefer joshi matches where the competitors are almost equals, and I'm still waiting for that with Bull.
  19. garretta
    There's not much to add here. You knew Flair wasn't losing the title, since breaking up the Steiners would have been a horrible move that would have left WCW without a top face tag team, but they could have gone out there and at least given an effort to make it look like Scotty could be a champion. Flair's excessive stalling, the lack of nearfalls, the fact that Rick was there to throw Flair back in the ring when he bailed out instead of Scotty being aggressive enough to go out there and get him, as Dusty kept telling him to do on commentary, all of these and more added up to something that looked like a Worldwide non-title main event instead of the main event of the next closest thing to a pay-per-view. We got a "saved by the bell" finish almost as an afterthought, but no one watching was convinced by it. Flair never looked like he was in danger of losing at any point. Even JR and Dusty noted the overall lack of fire that Scotty showed, and most of it was his fault. He could have made sure that he looked good even if Flair didn't for whatever reason, but he chose not to. I've heard it said that Scotty really didn't want a run with a singles title yet; he preferred to stay with Rick as a team. Well, this match was a good way to get his wish. I enjoyed the cameos by Matsuda and Gigante; they really helped to give the match a big-time feel that it ended up not deserving. Dusty was insightful on commentary while still being recognizably himself, and JR did his best to call a match that he no doubt would have termed "bowling shoe ugly" just a few years later. In fact, this was a rare occasion, at least during a so-called "big" match, where the commentary completely outclassed the action in the ring. I liked the gauntlet match in September of '90 much better than this; in fact, Rick's constant physical interference has me wanting to see what he can do against Flair at some point. When the best thing people can say about your performance is that it helped elevate your cornerman, that goes to show how bad Scotty was on this night. Better luck in a few years, pal.
  20. garretta
    I don't know who came up with this match, but Vince should have had him fired. Didn't he know that WWF tag matches are only supposed to have a handful of recognizable spots, with the rest of the time filled by restholds and managerial interference? Didn't he know that no WWF superstar is supposed to work this hard to entertain a crowd in the curtain jerker, even on pay-per-view? Didn't he know that most of the spots in this match are too complex for WWF superstars to execute, that they belong in Atlanta or Japan where wrasslers actually have to wrassle for a living? In all seriousness, this might just be the best match in terms of in-ring action that I've ever seen from the WWF. The sheer number of fresh spots these guys did alone would qualify them for that distinction, but more important than that, we got a five-star performance from an unexpected source. Everyone who's seen the Rockers knows that they had a match like this in them somewhere, but what about the OX? Neither version ever looked this good before or since, and that also goes for Tanaka and Diamond's days as Badd Company in the AWA. It's like these guys got together beforehand and mutually agreed to show the waiting world everything they could do, and they certainly did that. I can't even point to one spot that thrilled me more than any of the others, because almost everything each team did was not only well done, but unexpected, especially from the OX, who up to this time had been the stereotypical three-nerveholds-and-a-pinch-of-salt Japanese heel team regardless of whether Tanaka was teaming with Diamond or Akio Sato. The OX does use a nervehold briefly to slow things down, and we get an interference spot from Fuji, but these are well-placed and advance the story of the match rather than becoming the story Gino and Piper were probably blown away by what they were seeing just like the audience was, and they managed to keep up as well as could be expected on commentary. Piper comes through as well as he usually does on the big matches, delving into strategy and the effects of each move as it's being done, while Gino actually gets to call moves instead of just shilling or bantering and does it solidly. I don't like that he's shouting at the top of his lungs so much; he only used to do that for the really big moments back in his heyday, but I guess Vince wanted him to join the goofball brigade that the WWF announcing crew's starting to become now that Jesse's been gone for a while. I even started liking Monsoon/Heenan less around this time because instead of setting up the Brain and reacting afterward, Gino started to shout him down and ignore him, which effectively killed that team's edge and made Heenan into just another annoying heel color man that's stopping the play-by-play man from calling the match. At any rate, this is my Match of the Year so far as January starts to wind down. and I don't think any other WWF tags will top it for a good long time. As deep as the tag division was at one time in the eighties, matches like this simply didn't happen then, which is a shame because it's teams like the Bulldogs and the Harts that got a reputation for putting on matches like this when they never really did. I just hope that fans who say things like that see this match, because then they'll realize what a WWF tag team classic really is.
  21. garretta
    This one was shockingly competitive, considering how hurt, legitimately or otherwise, Hokuto was. A lot of times, matches like these where one wrestler is so obviously hurt turn into squashes because the hurt wrestler can do nothing but cover up the injured body part. In this case, Hokuto took what she still had- her legs- and wrestled the best match possible, getting several nearfalls on Toyota even after her injured arm had been rendered almost totally useless. Of course, it still doesn't amount to victory, as Toyota eventually finds the armbar effective and just keeps reapplying it until Hokuto can take no more. I liked the teases of Hokuto's partner throwing in the towel Arnie Skaaland-style. Hokuto stays just competitive enough that she doesn't have to, but it reminds the fans that even in a cutthroat business like wrestling, there's still a small bit of room for humanity. Seeing Toyota's face after the match reinforces this as well; she may have done what she needed to do to win, but she wasn't happy about having to do it. I don't know what to make of the timeout right after the match started. On one hand, it could have been a part of the intended story; on the other, maybe Toyota wasn't supposed to go quite so far in ripping off Hokuto's bandages, and a legitimate medical timeout was needed to rewrap her injured arm enough so that she could continue. Either way, it set up what was to come very nicely.
  22. garretta
    I think that the ring was in a lot worse shape than it looked, which is saying a mouthful, and neither one of these guys wanted to be in it more than they had to be. That explains why most of the match took place on the floor. That's also why there weren't a lot of hard bumps when the match made it to the ring. I don't know about the screwy finish. I highly doubt that it had anything to do with how horrific the match was (not very, compared to what it could have been). I think the ref simply didn't want to be in that ring any more than the wrestlers did and took the first opportunity to count shoulders down that he could just to end the match before the whole thing either collapsed or was torn to pieces. That might also explain why the wrestlers took so long to get hooked up; they might have been trying to figure out what they could do out on the floor where it was safer. I'm not rating this match at all, even unofficially. It was a mistake to have it in such unsafe conditions. Let these guys hook it up in a proper ring and then we'll see what they can do.
  23. garretta
    This match had no point in and of itself, but it either established or continued several storylines that would be prominent over the next few weeks, namely Flair/Scotty at the Clash and the WarGames match at WrestleWar. I'm wondering if Pillman getting a major showcase was Dusty's way of making it up to him for taking the Clash main event away, as he was the only member of the face team to get a major sequence with every member of the Horsemen. I'm not sure if CNN Center was nixed as the site of the Clash due to the war in the Persian Gulf or not, but I'm curious as to why anyone would think it was a bad place to hold a card. Does anyone know how many the atrium would seat for wrestling, what the ring setup would be, and so forth? I agree that Rick/Sid would have been a great singles match for the Clash, especially since Rick was able to get the belly-to-belly on Sid with almost no problem. Sting continues to get the shaft; other than a brief early sequence with Flair and the triple figure-four spot, we barely saw him in this whole match. If I'd been in his shoes, I might have considered jumping to Vince right about now, since even as a former World champion he got no respect at all from the powers that were in WCW at this time.
  24. garretta
    The ending ruined this for me. It wasn't that Gilbert retained, or even that we had a Dusty finish. It's that both the referee and Jeff had to look stupid in order for the above to happen. I'm going to tell you this one time, Jeff: If you win a match by clocking your opponent with a chain (as most wrestlers do from time to time), DO NOT stuff said chain down your tights. Throw it out into the crowd, drop it to the floor, swallow it, but DO NOT stuff it down your tights. It makes it look like you brought the thing into the ring. You already cost yourself the Unified title against Lawler by doing the exact same thing, so we can safely say that this is a pattern of stupidity with you. Lawler (at least then) and Gilbert are bad guys. They want to see you lose and humiliate you, and you're letting them do it. Don't let them do it to you anymore. Do you understand? As for the referee, it's hard to fault him specifically, since this was obviously the booked finish. But why make your ref so gullible as to believe Eddie Gilbert, who's never told the truth in his career and isn't about to start with his title and gateway to Lawler's crown on the line? If you want to run a finish like this, do it the way it was intended and have another referee or official come out and tell the ref what happened. Then you at least have an unbiased observer reporting what the ref didn't know. Yes, the reversal of the decision will piss off some fans, and you can't run finishes like this too often, but occasional use will add intrigue to rematches as long as it's done correctly. (It would also help if whining from the announcers was kept to an acceptable minimum. It's fine to note that Jeff used the chain after Eddie got it out of his towel, but to insinuate that the title change should have stood, as Pedicino did here, strains the bounds of credibility.) The actual match was very well done, with lots of focused limbwork by both guys. The commercial break came at exactly the wrong time, as we didn't see how Jeff hurt his knee in the first place, but the story was still easy enough to follow. The use of the boot lace for leverage by Gilbert was ingenious; as Soup said above, it was definitely a spot worth stealing. Craig botched the false finish at the end, but he corrected himself immediately, so all is forgiven. Craig had a slight case of WWF-itis here; almost every time he mentioned Jeff's name, the nickname "Simply Irresistible" had to come before it. I wonder why Dad pushed him as a heartthrob in Dallas, but not in Memphis, where it stood a greater chance of actually being true, especially when you consider that his competition was grizzled vets like Lawler, Dundee, and the Fabs.
  25. garretta
    This one wasn't too bad. Fujinami knows he's an underdog going in, so he tries to even things up the only way he knows how: by attacking Vader's bad eye. I have to give Vader credit for guts in allowing guys to bust him open anywhere near that injury; one slip the wrong way and not only is his career over, but he's blind for life to boot. Not too many guys would take that chance with a legit injury, especially one as horrible as that. Speaking of guts, if Fujinami's back was still giving him trouble, hiptossing a four hundred pound man took a lot of them too. In fact, he deserves just as much credit for allowing Vader to work his back as Vader gets for allowing Fujinami to bust his eye open. Most guys in the States would never allow opponents to come near real injuries, and if they did, either the injured party would never work with them again or the promotion would fire them. They're a different breed over in Japan, that's for sure. After a win like this, you'd think that WCW would have wanted Vader to wrestle Flair on that big Japanese card coming up in March, especially since WCW fans were at least somewhat familiar with Vader by now. In an earlier post, John made it sound like Fujinami's time in WCW was almost something he booked himself, with the permission of Choshu (the head booker). Do I have this right? It's not making much sense.
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