dawho5

His tags in NOAH vs. Kobashi are the highlights of his time there.

My feeling is that he stopped caring unless he was across from somebody he felt was worthwhile. Even then he wasn't the same Kawada. Most of his post 2000 matches I have seen are really disappointing. There are bright spots where he flips the switch back on, but for the most part he's like a shadow of his former self.

*points at Grahm Crackers' post* That. I did like their one tag in the 2000s project but seriously. How many opportunities did both get to do something worthwhile and not take advantage of? I would take NOAH Kobashi on his most overbearingly bad day over both.

Here's a question I had while reading through this. What is the difference between "they need to use the talented women wrestlers more" and "they need to use their talented midcarders more" arguments at all? Yeah, they give guys who can work maybe 10 minutes or a bit more to put on good matches on TV. But do they do anything worthwhile about them to make the fans care in any way about them? Or do those guys have to get themselves over with whatever crap they are give? I will agree that there is a huge increase in scale as far as how little respect the women are given in the WWE. But the reality is that both situations aren't going to change as long as certain people are in charge of how the TV works. So arguing about whether it would draw as vehemently as has been going on the last few pages seems a bit much. If it is ever tried it will be done incrementally. The women management has faith in will get a chance at enough ten minutes matches to see if it gets a better reaction. If it does then maybe they get a semi-main on a show after a long while. If that works then maybe you start to see fifteen minutes on a PPV. Same kind of deal for pushing talented midcard guys. I would argue that Bayley is heavily marketed towards young girls as an inspiration. It's pretty heavily put over by the announce team on NXT that way as well as by Bayley herself. I also feel like she plays the underdog role really well and Badlittlekitten is selling her well short of how good she is. But I will leave it at a respectful disagreement on that point. It is rather odd that they talk about how Bayley can inspire young girls to want to be wrestlers given the WWE's historical treatment of women.

I was actually wondering about that today. It would essentially be the same thing as what was done at the time. It would also be pretty interesting to see how different promoters looked at it. is it a boon or a bane? Is it great because you get the prestige of your guy being the champ? Is it bad because your #1 draw is off around the territories while you are running shows? With the prospect of national expansion that creates just another wrinkle. Also with regards to that aspect. How do the people playing promoters handle the idea of national expansion? The same way the promoters did at the time or with an eye to correcting their mistakes regarding talent and television? Also, I've been wondering how it is decided if/when a new act to a territory gets over. Obviously in the mind of the booker what they are doing will work. How is it actually decided?

I have two lists. Taue Kawada Misawa Kobashi That's where my heart lies. I love Taue so very much for the work he did as the guy nobody appreciated. If I have a spirit wrestler it is Akira Taue. I love how he puts matches together, I love the way he carries himself and how he does everything with an understated quality. The other three are the flashier, easier to love for the big stuff guys. Taue has far more limitations and knows it, but manages to be just a step behind all the way through. I would argue that once the new millennium hits he is the best of the four because he simply continues to work around his own limitations rather than having them imposed on him by time and finding the need to adapt. If we're going by purely by how much I love the character and the approach it is Taue by miles. A big part of this is that I tend to be very quiet and understated, don't care so much about how something looks as opposed to what it accomplishes and constantly battle with my own awkwardness and limitations. So yeah, my spirit wrestler. And here's the one that my brain imposes itself on. Kawada Misawa Kobashi Taue Kawada as a character is just up the street from Taue. I had a cranky, tough, never-back-down great uncle when I was younger that didn't give any part of a shit what anyone thought of what he said or did. But he also had such pride in everything he did that it came out looking pristine. And my understanding is that he was a straight ahead boxer who could take a punch with the best in his younger days. For a long time I wondered why I love Kawada so much and I finally figured it out. Oh, and Kawada was one Hell of an incredible pro wrestler. Misawa was and always will be the quintessential ace of a promotion. When he was on nobody could touch him and that came through in every big match. Kobashi in 1990-1994 was one of my favorite wrestlers of all time. I know he gets out of hand a lot after that, but damn when he was coming up through the ranks he was the best fired-up underdog babyface of all time. As much as I HATE some of his later performances I can't take that away from him. Taue is simply a great wrestler who can play babyface pretty well and heel to a T. In most companies during most time periods that makes you a #1 or 2 guy with a career downside of being the gatekeeper for the next generation. In 90s All Japan that means you end up being the guy to do a quick job to Akiyama to help put the young guy over and get him ready for Misawa while always being undervalued by the majority of fans. And since I mentioned Akiyama, he's probably got Taue beat on this one too as much as I hate to admit it.

I didn't think the announcers ever got quite to the place they should have while talking up Sasha's performance. She was essentially channeling the spirit of Ric Flair in the heat. Against Flair's daughter. As for the end I think they had another idea in mind besides finishing the story of the match. Look everyone, the girls can do fun spotfests just as well as the guys can! I just wish they had done that in a different setting because Sasha's heel work was again excellent. Instead of a blistering Charlotte comeback we get the forced "NXT women's division has arrived!" finish. What needed to happen if Charlotte was going to win is Sasha escaping a few predicaments during Char's comeback and using the outside escape/corner tactics again to get the upper hand before losing. Edit: I got this now. Charlotte puts on the Figure 4 after a big comeback to defend the family honor against Sasha. Sasha makes the ropes and manages a cheap shot as they untangle. A few big nearfalls later she throws the same tantrum and gives Charlotte time to recover. Charlotte reverses the next thing Sasha tries and gets a big nearfall before finishing her off. Sasha still out-Flairs Charlotte in the end despite losing, which keeps her heat.

In keeping with the current trends I thought it might be good to take a look at two other guys who will almost certainly finish high in the voting. This one interests me quite a bit because there are both direct and indirect comparisons to be made. They both worked as the ace of All Japan for an extended period of time. They worked against one another during the transitional period and that can come into play for comparison as well. I feel like an interesting comparison here would also be how Misawa worked with Kobashi during the years Kobashi overtook Kawada as the #2. It would be a very direct comparison to Jumbo vs. Misawa in my mind. On the flip side, one worked a very athletic, cutting edge style punctuated with stiff elbows. As well of having a long list of finisher level moves that dwarfs a listing of every move used by the majority of his contemporaries and wresters who came before him. While the other was a very simple, traditional wrestler with good athleticism for his size, but his calling cards were doing the little things exceptionally well, adapting to the moment, working pitch perfect across from whoever he was up against and using a limited amount of simple tools (in comparison to Misawa) to great effect. Another great contrast is their style as the ace. Jumbo was emotional, went with the flow and worked to his opponent to an incredible degree. Misawa was stoic, dictated the way the promotion was going and had a formula he plugged his opponents into with small variations. I'm not saying Misawa was always really formulaic, but when he was working somebody much lower on the card he didn't seem to make all that much seem different. I personally lean towards Jumbo for several reasons. I feel like he had a deeper grasp of the dynamics of a main event vs. midcarder match and that's a pretty big thing when you are the ace of a traditional Japanese wrestling company. I also think he adapted far better than Misawa did as time went on in his career. It doesn't hurt that I also felt like Kawada was the better wrestler than Misawa and should have been in Kobashi's spot.

I agree that Charlotte's run as champ has been the best female wrestling presented under the WWE banner that I've ever seen. And it's not just Charlotte. Bayley and Sasha are really really good at their roles with Becky Lynch coming in at least strong on the in-ring side of things. She needs some work on what exactly her character is, but she's definitely delivered during matches. I don't necessarily agree that female wrestling is going to bring in more female viewers. I do think that if done right it can do just as well with male viewers as the men's matches, but we can probably all agree that won't be happening on the main shows any time soon. That being said, I'm a huge fan of the women's division on NXT and how well the major players work in their face/heel roles. Sasha is an incredible heel, Charlotte is the strong face and Bayley is great as the female Sami Zayn. She doesn't quite have the level of charisma or in-ring panache Zayn does, but she's the lovable underdog with the right kind of charisma to keep the fans on her side through all the losses. Once Becky Lynch decides to be something besides Lita version 2.0 and finds a character of her own she will also be the complete package. Carmella and Alexa Bliss need quite a bit of work before they catch up. Edit: I kind of wish they had left Paige and Emma in NXT right now. They would have a really strong women's division with some very interesting rivalries instead of turning Emma into a glorified jobber.

One thing I really identified with was the discussion of neck/spine injuries. It's something I have thought for quite a while. If this current Bryan stuff is head/neck related I'm all for him retiring before things get too bad. As unfortunate as it seems there's no way around how fragile the human body can be and it's best to be safe about serious injuries. Great listen and I have to agree with Tim about the future of wrestling. Nothing is going to change much. I'll catch up on NXT and watch that weekly until too much WWE nonsense ends up moving it's way over there. Beyond that I don't have much hope for anything except highly pimped PPV/TV matches available on the Network. So I guess I agree with Will that it's a good thing there is all kinds of wrestling out there from the past and smaller companies that I can look to when the WWE isn't delivering.

Three words. Holy Demon Army. Kawada and Taue are my best and favorite tag team ever. Also, perhaps the coolest Japanese team of all time. They are both great at being their characters, which only makes the team work better because their characters have a lot in common. They are not traditional American heels, but they definitely have the "win at all costs" mentality. Also, there are few teams out there that are as fun to watch when they start kicking the shit out of somebody.

I feel like now we are getting down to the two big questions asked in this thread. 1. What is NXT supposed to be? and 2. What kind of contracts are these big indy names getting when they sign on to NXT? To the first question I think it is a way for the WWE to steal the thunder of the indies and get those fans who have gotten used to watching people like Zayn, Owens, etc. to watch the WWE. This is in addition to what it was originally supposed to be as a training ground for future WWE guys. If they did add touring I can only imagine it would be a limited schedule that allowed their big names the time to get back to FSU in time for the tapings. As to the second, I can't imagine they are getting main show money despite getting more than the raw guys who need to be trained from scratch. Before there were house shows it had to be less due to less benefit to the company. I also have a hard time believing that there is any kind of clause that says there are X amount of days you will spend in NXT before going to the main roster. To your point earlier, what if there are no openings that fit Owens when his NXT time is up? I would agree that there has to be enough money for the big name indy guys to draw them there because they have to know they aren't going to be the big star. They may get to main event NXT, but once they get to the main shows they are very likely stuck in that midcard cycle. And you know most of these guys are smart enough to realize that. So there has to be some contractual incentive for them to sign. But I still think it's less than somebody like Dolph Ziggler gets.

That's a fair point for sure, but how do you think the wrestlers in NXT are going to look at it? I wonder how long it will be until some of the bigger names start chomping at the bit. They all know the real money is in the WWE even if they get less chances to shine. Most wrestlers, if they come to the WWE, are looking for the payday way more than they are looking to be the next Hogan, Austin or Cena. You can't tell me somebody like Neville or Zayn truly thinks they are going to be a guy on that level. They have to be smart enough to know that they don't fit that mold and the best they can expect is that "B+ Player" spot.

It's not any kind of idea that somehow indy guys are any more qualified than home grown talent that I'm trying to put out there. I'm just looking at the tendency of the WWE booking and mindset when it comes to wrestlers in general. To be completely fair I think that the way NXT matches are structured is a big benefit to a lot of people who come in because it limits how much they are going to throw out there during finishing runs. There is something to be said for the less-is-more approach. One example I can think of to back up why I think the homegrown guys will always get an advantage is the Ascension. They were certainly over in NXT, but are you really going to tell me that they had developed to the point where they were better than Zayn, Neville, Breeze, Gabriel, most of the women or even a rejuvenated Tyson Kidd. At best they are the exact same thing you see on the midcard of Raw or Smackdown with the exception of Viktor's size. Generic power-based brawlers who are super intense. And they aren't even overly good at that. Part of the reason I think the WWE was so high on them was because they were the exact same act they have been trying to push for years with a pretty low success ratio. The flip side of that argument is that they fit into the WWE roster far better because of their almost cookie cutter nature than any of the other talent at NXT. How does somebody like Itami or Breeze fit into the current WWE climate? What is the likelihood that they become jokes the instant they hit SD and end up shuffled off to Main Event and endless jobs on SD? Which really brings into sharper focus the real question. What is the WWE trying to accomplish with NXT? It's possible that it has changed enough that they aren't quite sure themselves anymore. Which brings us to the question of contracts. Eventually these main event guys on NXT are going to get unhappy and want a piece of the pie. When that happens does Vince start paying them more like main show guys? Does he find a different way of structuring the contracts even if they don't tour? Because with the rate they call guys up to the main roster it's hard to see a lot of people they have now sticking around at the developmental contract rate until their call. Maybe they give main event guys/gals on NXT midcarder salaries. Give the young kids working in the PC something to look forward to. I tend to think they have some kind of plan for when the rumblings get too loud. They have to know that the NXT roster as it is now is not exactly what they had in mind when they started it up. The changes they've made to the show suggest that. So if NXT is to be it's own brand in addition to the training ground for the future, there has to be some plan going forward. I can't imagine they are going to pay them main event money and I would guess the contracts would be shorter with less guarantees. They are always going to treat it like the WWE "made" whoever it is they call up and it's a lot easier to do that when one of the things that comes from a jump to the main roster is a nice pay bump with more stability.

In 1990-93 All Japan the most common transition is a guy "telegraphing the back body drop." The truly great part of this is that once in a great while somebody hits a back body drop and it still manages to mean nothing despite being almost impossible to get it to connect.

Modern WWE has quite a few. The variant on the reversal, charge that Parv mentioned where the guy charging eats the post. The other variant on this where the charging heel (the above works for both heels and faces it seems, this one is more the heel or a much bigger face) gets the top rope pulled down and tumbles over to the floor. Anyone who is a high flier does an odd-looking jump off the top that could only lead to them getting hit. When somebody is on the apron and the opponent gets "too aggressive" and ends up getting draped over the top rope. Or the variant where the intended victim is on the floor and pulls their legs out from under them. 95% of the time a vertical suplex is attempted that is meant to be filmed. An interesting thing since the last two NXT main events I watched feature a vertical suplex into a resthold when the match returns from commercial. Those seemed like more mistimed commercial breaks on either the TV people or the wrestlers part. For a long time a short-arm clothesline was bound to miss.

It seems like they call up a few guys each year, but with the rate they are signing up big indy names that's what, 4-5 years down the road for some of them? And we know that Vince has no vested interest in things he didn't create. So if one of the PC guys picks it up in the meantime to the point where it is feasible to put them over a name guy, what do you think is going to happen? Will they choose Joe, KENTA, Owens, etc. or whatever one of the guys "they made" like a Baron Corbin to give a big push and then move up? It just makes more sense with the way that the WWE operates. You think that Cena and Batista didn't have a bit of an advantage being products of the WWE system in terms of push and how many chances they were given to get big? There will be big indy names that do make the big show in between, but given the choice the WWE run by Vince will be pushing "their" guys over indy guys any day of the week.

I loved the performances from Sasha, Charlotte and Bayley in this. Sasha ducking Charlotte early and using the Lynch distraction to clothesline her on the apron was great heel work. As were the little taunts thrown Charlotte's way. Charlotte played the badass face perfectly. Bayley starting off as the fiery avenger and morphing into the FIP was great as well. Becky was fine but overshadowed by the other three by a long way. If this match had about five to ten more minutes and was the blowoff to a tag feud it would have been a MOTYC, but it was a buildup match for Sasha vs Charlotte. So the Bayley FIP turns into a quick Sasha rollup to get the one-up on Charlotte instead of a big Bayley comeback that sets up a Charlotte hot tag (the crowd would have gone for this hook, line and sinker with a few more cutoffs.) Regardless, really good stuff and worth seeing if you like tag wrestling and great heel work.

I'm with JAC on this. According to Vince, the wrestling done outside the WWE is "different" as specified by the "sports entertainment" moniker rather than pro wrestling. There does seem to be a high level of contempt from Vince towards anything that comes from the indies. It's almost worse than somebody being big in WCW or one of the other territories, which always seemed to piss Vince off more than a little. Then you add in how everything is heavily scripted and controlled, why would they send people to the places around the country or the globe where they called matches on the fly and, as mentioned, may pick up "bad habits." It's not that I disagree with the idea that indy wrestling has always nurtured certain bad habits in wrestlers, but I'm not going to pretend the WWE style is somehow beyond reproach. So I don't see them seasoning people like Enzo, Cass, Mojo, etc. around the world or the indies first. It would also be difficult for them to convince indy promotions to take their guys given the WWE's overall attitude towards the indies as well as the recent talent raids. As for what they are trying to do, I think there were two major shifts between July 2014 and Fatal Four Way in both production and presentation. A bunch of people got new music (sometimes more than once). Entrances became more grand. The angles and interviews became a lot more similar to the main shows than what they had been. Regal was named GM and they started having references and angles involving him. They gave the show a lot more polish and started to make it a lot more like watching a shorter Raw or Smackdown. What this means in the long run I don't know, but it seems like they stopped looking at NXT as some sort of feeder show to develop guys for their undercard alone. The undercard is filled with guys like that, but once you get to the main event there's a lot of really good ex-indy talent hanging around. And they even brought the racist booking with the Ascension trying to chase Itami out, all the while telling him to "go home." The tag titles seem like they are still used in the developmental sense, which is odd given Vince's aversion to tag wrestling. Why build a bunch of tag teams out of your young guys when tag wrestling is mostly dead in the WWE proper? There are a lot of contradictions between the stated purpose of NXT and what has happened. That makes it really hard to say what it truly is at this point, but my feeling is that it's some sort of hybrid where the WWE attracts all this indy talent to hold the top of the card over and maybe kill off some of the bigger indy buzz. All the while they are developing their own guys who will eventually be using whatever indy talent is there when they are ready (or somebody in the WWE believes they are) to springboard into the main event and quickly into the WWE proper. But they are going to be telling these indy guys all along the way that their turn on the main roster is coming.

I was wondering when I read OJ's point this morning whether or not that's a rabbit hole worth going down. When you get down to it every worker who innovates is taking bits and pieces from the people they watched as a kid and making them into something "new". So if you were going to say Marty Jones and Mark Rocco invented the Calgary style, who invented their style? And who were their heroes watching when they grew up?

It would be pretty much the exact opposite of the Dylan comparing guys to HHH thread. Still fun, but complete other end of the spectrum.

You guys do a great job with this topic every time out. I had no idea that Davey was supposed to get Show's spot in the NWO. That could have been a major career boost for Show if it had turned out that way. Also, I had to pop in my Horsemen disc two and watch that promo on Nitro. Great, great stuff from Arn and Flair. Stuff like that makes you wonder how great the NWO angle could have been if the inmates hadn't been running the asylum and Bischoff had any kind of respect for/idea of what Flair meant to the WCW fans. he got so caught up in "his idea" that he tossed aside anything already existing that might work within it, something that is frighteningly similar to how Vince operates when faced with things that he didn't make himself.

My feeling is that structure is a starting point. It's something used for less experienced workers to have something to fall back on when they get stuck. It also makes the story easier for the audience to follow. It seems like most movies have a very similar structure to your shine-heat-comeback setup. I get why, it's a good basic story. The good guy shows you why you should like him, the bad guy finds a way to circumvent the good guy's strengths to get the advantage and the good guy rewards our faith by coming back. If you're going to go with "good guy vs. bad guy" as your basis it's a strong narrative despite being as basic as it is. I think a lot of the time face control tends to be filler, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. If it's treated by the wrestlers in the ring as not worth their time, why is it worth mine or anyone else's who might be watching? But there are ways it can be done that make a match better. Let's say that the heel misses an elbow drop and comes up holding his elbow and the face notices. Since the heel has probably proven in the past that he is a dangerous opponent, it only makes sense that the face attacks said arm to weaken the heel despite their finisher having nothing to do with the arm. You're still wearing the opponent down and it gives the idea of an athletic competition. If your opponent in a competition shows some kind of weakness you attack it. Then later in the match the face can keep the heel from cutting him off by going to the injured arm when nothing else works. This would work especially well in matches where the heel was higher up the card than the face. It shows the face may be overmatched, but he is resourceful enough to find a way to stay in the fight. This is one example of how a variation on the structure can work. Very often the deviations from the shine-heat-comeback formula are very heavily dependent on context. What is the history between the two wrestlers? Does the face have an injury they need to protect that might cause them to deviate from their normal offense and use what might be termed as "rest holds" to control the heel? How far apart are the wrestlers involved on the card? Do these wrestlers have a lot of matches against one another that would require different structures to set them apart? One feud that this site has turned me on to has been Valentine vs. Tito. One of the things that makes it great is how the matches are different from one another. Tito comes in with his leg all taped up and ends up beating the shit out of Valentine for the majority of the match with teases of Valentine getting the advantage by going after the leg. But he never quite does. There are several things that make this structure work. First and foremost is Tito's character. He's a guy who will get fired up and destroy an opponent when they piss him off. Secondly, the execution is pitch perfect. Valentine spends any time he gets on offense trying in vain to get ahold of Tito's leg. It's way off classic match structure but it works both as a single match and within the feud. I will say though that in context that match becomes far better than just as a singles match because of all the why involved in that match structure. To sum up, I think that as wrestlers get more experienced they ought to be able to execute more variations on classic American match structure. It's a basic template that can be rearranged effectively by wrestlers who know their craft. But given that the "big leagues" in the U.S. script all of their matches to a fault it's something I feel will become a lost art. Edit: Does anyone else think that classic American match structure has a lot to do with the lack of national TV for so long? It seems almost designed to work for any audience, context or no context, that would fit a regional promotion. People in one part of the territory wouldn't have seen the rest of the feud unless it happened on TV. So the matches would tend to be fairly simply laid out rather than matches in a feud evolving as the feud continued.

TV, internet, however GFW gets their shows seen is secondary to getting their shows seen. But to me that's not the most important part. They have to present something different than WWE, TNA, NXT, anything readily available anywhere so that it stands out enough to get noticed. Otherwise it's just another wrestling show in a sea of wrestling shows. I think that's why LU has had the success it has. It's got a different flavor to it and stands out from the crowd. Obviously this has to be accomplished in a way that can be continued into future seasons, but I think that's the most important thing they can do. Second would be growing your own stars over time. If they can get even two or three current midcard guys over and keep them there as new stars they will have a leg up on the WWE in that regard. I'm not saying don't look for big names right away, but keep an eye on who your crowds (both live and whatever media outlet(s) come along) and make sure you make the new stars you can while you can. If history is any indication the biggest issues even successful promotions have center around the ace going down unexpectedly and floundering until they return. If people are developed from within in relation to the reactions they get from the fans maybe you have a guy ho can keep numbers from nosediving for six months to a year even if they are down while your ace heals.

Is it possible that he got the Jr. belt when he actually was within weight limitations then gained weight? I know a lot of juniors guys who go heavyweight don't get a ton of respect after they switch divisions. And Kawada was a really short heavyweight. I wonder if it isn't a blessing in disguise that early career Kawada never got a junior title run because that might have served more as a long term stigma than a notch on his belt.