dawho5

I can't wait til the Blue Panther v. Casas singles match. I know that won't be on TV, but once it makes it's way to some kind of comp I'll be finding a seller.

Three more down. Hashimoto/Iizuka vs. Ogawa/Murakami was a fucking barnburner! The booking was spot on, as was the work. Hashimoto got a MASSIVE reaction coming out and didn't disappoint at all. Not gonna say too much on this one for those who haven't seen it, but it is well worth a watch. I rank this one pretty high, probably top 20 by the end. KENTA/Ishimori vs. Hulk/Shingo was a fun juniors tag. KENTA and Ishimori work over Hulk for quite a while after the opening sequence, with Hulk's lip busted open when he finally gets the tag. Shingo seems like a good powerhouse junior and has a sweet lariat. Ishimori seems hit and miss, he can be really slick, but some of his late match offense is really contrived. Hulk didn't do a whole lot besides bump around for the middle of the match, but I have a suspicion that may be his actual job description within that tag team. Hulk and Ishimori hit some awesome dives in this. One of my favorite spots early involves Shingo taking a swing at KENTA (who is rope-running over a downed Hulk) and KENTA giving Shingo the business end of his boot on the return trip. Shingo repaying KENTA later on the outside is pretty nice. The finishing run is mostly good, can't say I liked a few of Ishimori's big moves and his counter sequence with Hulk was way overdone. KENTA takes a bit too much of a beating to kick out of a few things to me, but overall a fun match. Kobashi vs. Taue. Yeah, that's my number one for right now. The bad: Kobashi needs to lose that stupid hood he can't see out of prematch. That's about it for me. Taue's chest has these sick welts by 10-15 minutes in that hurt me watching. Kobashi is pretty damn good at chaining holds together on the mat. Taue having to try multiple times to escape the abdominal stretch was nice, especially when he finally did and revisited old times with Kobashi for a while. Both blew me away with their dives. Taue was awesome here. Kobashi was almost as good. The head drops that were there were well-placed. Not one was wasted, even if I found it more than a little amusing and sad that the half nelson got a decent pop but nobody was counting along or surprised at all on the kickout. I guess that would be the other bad part, even if it isn't really a fault in this particular match. Finish was great, can't believe these two are still working at this level in 2004.

So while I was going over some unrelated stuff in my head, I recalled my biggest gripe with modern puro. There are too many damn strike exchanges. I love the majority of 90s All Japan I have seen. Maybe it's just that I've only been exposed to the better workers who knew how to keep their egos and their in-ring stuff in check so they didn't go way too long exchanging elbows and slaps. Anyway, most post-2000 puro I have seen, regardless of if the workers involved could pull off the strike exchanges well, involves at least one. Hell, KENTA vs. Sugiura from 2013 seemed like a 20+ minute strike exchange with a few wrestling moves thrown in for good measure. I always thought it functioned best as a transition or a tease of one. But this was in matches between workers who were known for their stiff strikes and smart use of them. I suppose once it ends up becoming a staple of the majority of Japanese wrestling styles, you get a lot of workers who just don't understand how to use the strike exchange to move the match forward, not just for the sake of having one.

After my first Tanahashi match I had to come see how others reacted to his work. I'm not too far off of OJ and Nintendo's basic idea. He's not as great as all the hype, but neither is he awful. The hot finishing sequence after uninspired early match work was one of the reasons I ended up going away from NJ juniors matches in the first place. It's not that I won't watch that kind of thing, I just find that after a while it all tends to run together for me. The argument that a lot of current puro is overdone on the no-selling of head drops and the overdone "fighting spirit" is one I totally agree with. I think it is almost a requirement now that there is at least one strike exchange in every match. To me that is overkill. Let the workers who are *good* at the stiff striking do that, and if you get a guy like Tanahashi who is clearly not, don't force him into that.

Hit 3 more today. Kawada vs. Vader in 2000 seemed kinda rushed, but I'm used to Kawada going quite a bit longer than 15 minutes. Good match, though. Kawada using the Vader hammers to beat Vader down early was awesome. Vader, of course, gets his revenge before we're done. Kawada's backdrop got way flatter on Vader, but I understand. Vader isn't moving great here, and he seems like he gets tired really fast. Brutal match nonetheless. Vader's powerbomb was lackluster, but the following backdrop made up for it. I liked the finish, good way to cap a match like that. The two Takayama vs. Kobashi matches were an interesting watch. The first one Takayama was either not as sharp as the second or he just wasn't as good, don't know which having only seen those matches he's been in. I did like the strategy he took in both, going after Kobashi's right arm to slow down his striking game and take away the lariat's effectiveness. I was really hoping that Takayama would have some kind of countermove or just deadweight himself or grab the railing or SOMETHING on the floor DDT in the second. Some way of building off of the fact that Kobashi was using the same spot at a pretty similar time in the match would have been really nice there. The crowd was clearly a lot more worried about Takayama beating Kobashi the second time around, which I did like a lot. Takayama's Irish whips seemed kinda lazy to me, like Kobashi had to visibly speed himself up to get any kind of momentum going into the ropes or the guard rail. I also thought that the second time around Kobashi could have taken a page from Takayama's book and worked over the right leg early. Would have made for an interesting duel of who could neutralize the other's big offensive weapons better. Still, I did enjoy the match a lot, even if I am not a huge fan of the way the wrestling style evolved in NOAH.

Cena v. Sandow was surprisingly good. Not the biggest Cena fan, but that match had a lot of good things stuffed into what seemed like less than 8 minutes of televised ring time. As much as I don't care for the current WWE style, I really like how this match was worked. Cena putting Sandow over like he did was pretty cool. The TCW juniors match was the first I've seen of that style. Seems like Japanese juniors mixed with some All Japan style head drops in an American counter-culture atmosphere. The match itself had it's interesting points and was definitely worth seeing. Americos needs to work on his elbows, that weird, looping windup is too damn goofy for me. A few spots actually looked like they came out more dangerous than they were supposed to. Fun match, but can't say I want to see a lot of that style. Had to go with the trios. Current lucha looks quite a bit different than circa 2000 lucha. The Puma/Tiger double teaming was not bad, but I have this feeling it would wear on me (a la CRAZY MAX in Toryumon if you watched multiple matches in too small a time frame). Casas & crew were fun after the second caida. The last fall was sweet with the double dives and the awesome (and completely sensible given who it was) finish.

I would guess so. So many things wrong with it that it gets hard to watch at points.

Superstar Sleaze's review of Kawada/Fuchi vs. Nagata/Iizuka was spot on for my viewing. Seriously need to find a lot more Fuchi at some point. I'll do a review of the 2007 Sasuke vs. Ultimo Dragon match. Dragon high fives the entire front row all the way around the ring on the way in. Really not kidding here. Ultimo is gentlemanly enough to sit on the middle rope and allow Sasuke easy acces into the ring. Sasuke, despite this, ambushes Ultimo to open the match and there's some dive teasing followed by a lot of brawling. Ultimo finally starts getting some offense in and goes to the lucha-y convoluted submissions, mostly focusing on the leg. They try some kind of weird front flip spot that goes pretty badly and Ultimo ends up just covering for 2. Ultimo sends Sasuke to the floor, but Sasuke sees the plancha coming. Dragon lands on his feet and Sasuke goes into sweet dive sequence number one of the match. Sasuke hits his front flip neckbreaker off the top that actually looks pretty badass. Ultimo flips out of a backdrop and hits the three kick combo with Sasuke overselling like a madman (and he is, or so I think.) Ultimo capitalizes with a kick to the face off the apron and a moonsault with his name on it to the outside. Some brawling floor stuff leads to a batshit crazy Sasuke dive. How he still walks after all the complete and total disregard for his own safety that is his wrestling career is beyond me. The dive sequences in this match are major highlights. One annoying part of all this is how the ref continually stops his countouts to the point where they no longer matter. Sasuke's senton bomb (where he rolls forward into the splits) is pretty sweet. His roundhouse kicks have always looked like crap though, and do not fail to do so here. Occasionally one will hit enough to look good, but not often. New brawler-y Sasuke is weird, but his punches look far better than his kicks a lot of the time. Rollup sequence, Ultimo hits a leg slap kick to Sasuke's chest and locks on that weird lucha-style leglock where the attacker is behind the opponent cranking down on their neck with the shoulders while pulling the leg up. Ultimo blatantly releases the hold and rolls himself up for a Sasuke near-fall. Seriously, somebody explain to me why he did that. Was there some other submission or roll-up he was trying there? Ultimo counters the Sasuke second rope moonsault thing with a dropkick to the knee. Nice spinning side kick by Dragon. Dragon eats a German after telegraphing a lariat, then tries to counter another German with a stunner or that backflip DDT thingy, but gets neither as Sasuke just falls sideways. And after all the spotty goodness and badness, we make our way to the really not great finish. I've only watched I think 3 others on this list, but I can't imagine this making the top 150, much less any top 100 list. The dive sequences, aborted ref outside counts aside, were freaking awesome. Some of the back-and-forth stuff in the ring was pretty good, as was Ultimo's first control segment. There were some really huge botched spots in there that detract a lot from the match though. I still love both of these guys for what it's worth. Just a bad showingon a few key spots.

I think the whole debate over whether the quality of Hansen's American work would take him out of GOAT is a little off. To illusrtrate, I will draw a comparison between another GOAT guy and Hansen. Ric Flair had some very fun Japanese matches. His Kerry von Erich match from AJPW was awesome just to see Flair vs. Kerry in a different setting. In the States, Flair cheated a lot to get to his control segments and generally made it look like Kerry had his number if he didn't go to the eyes, cower away and cheapshot, etc. And that made for awesome heat from the (from what I've seen) pro-Kerry crowds. In Japan, it was more of an even setting with Flair using a lot of technical wrestling to counter and get to his control segments. Just fun stuff to at least see. it was not (as was the case with all of his Japanese work I have seen), however, in any way groundbreaking or very influential. Back home, though, Flair was one of the most influential wrestlers of his generation and rightly so. He made everyone he wrestled look great and knew how to generate crowd heat like few others. Stan Hansen's American work was hit or miss for me. Some of it was very good (the Hennig match was nice, the Funk match where Stan gets mud thrown in his eyes after throwing Funk into the lake is too much fun, need to see some of his Blackwell stuff), but the majority of what I have seen is not on par with his Japanese work. I can understand that, the difference in styles is pretty big as you reach the '90s. His Japanese work is every bit as influential as Flair's American work was, if not always quite at Flair's level. And he put over most, if not all, of the really big names in AJPW while he was there. Personally, Kawada is my GOAT, but both the above mentioned are top 5. Which gives me a thought, take a long, hard look at Kawada and find some major faults as I watch my '90s AJPW. Back to the point, I could never fault anyone for saying either Flair or Hansen was number 1. They are both incredible workers who had a huge impact on the next generation.

I really like the direction this has gone, even if I had no idea it would. I would agree that Koji complaints have been done and are overdone, but that wasn't truly my point. I still love watching him wrestle, at least for a short time before I start seeing too much of the things I dislike. So I adapt and watch 2 or 3 matches then switch it up. Doesn't mean I don't appreciate his skill and efforts as a worker. That's what I'm seeing from a lot of the other things that have come up. People are willing to see the flaws in workers you can tell they love. I saw Jericho mentioned and totally agree. He seemed to me like a guy who was great at his schtick and could go in-ring, but lacked something s far as putting great matches together unless he was up against a Benoit or someone of that caliber.

My criticism of Hansen would be about the way he could really throw off his opponents in bad ways. I read a shoot interview where he said that he liked to just go at his opponents and see how they reacted, then go from there. While as a wrestling fan I find this approach very entertaining, there are only a certain amount of wrestlers who are going to be able to deal with that well. The vast majority of pro wrestlers need more predetermined structure and just to have things laid out beforehand. I can imagine a lot of guys got a little intimidated by the way Hansen did things and the matches would suffer for it. Also, the point of safety has been brought up earlier in the thread. The way he really drove his elbow drops and some of his knee drops in and how close they were to the throat is pretty scary considering the guy was half-blind. Also, that powerbomb on Kawada in the big 93 match, he completely lost him about 2/3 the way up it looked like. If he loses control while Kawada is at a worse angle, that could have gone really badly.

I thought the best Hansen vs. Tsuruta singles match was when Hansen and Tsuruta were brawling for 99.9% of it. Tsuruta came out all fired up and started using Hansen tactics against Hansen. Oddly enough, the only wrestling move in the match besides pin attempts was Hansen trying a piledriver that got reversed. Tsuruta even started grabbing chairs and chucking them at Hansen, which I thought was pretty cool. Then I watched the matches Hansen had with Misawa, Kobashi and Kawada, which blew that one to pieces. Thing is, after watching 1983 All Japan, I can't in any way discount the effect Hansen vs. Tsuruta had. 1983 AJ would have fit in as an American territory with some very small modifications to the style. Then along comes Hansen and 6, 7 years later Tsuruta is working at least 5x stiffer and more intense. I don't know (read something about this guy on here) if Hansen was the only thing that brought Yoshiaki Yatsu around or what happened, but the tags with Hansen/Tenryu facing Jumbo/Yatsu actually got quite a bit more intense. First few tags I saw Yatsu against Stan, he was trying to suplex and use submissions all the way through. Then in the later part of '89, Yatsu starts going after Hansen like a madman with his overhand chops and headbutts (even while he's wearing a head brace). Combine that with the HATE between Jumbo and Tenryu at the time and those are my favorite matches involving Hansen and Tsuruta. I do think that Hansen had a ton to do with 90s AJ wrestling style. His influence is really easy to see in the stiffness of Kawada, Misawa and Kobashi. Jumbo didn't have that stiffness until after he had a lot of time in against Stan. I'm not saying that Jumbo, Tenryu and Baba didn't have any influence over the 4 Pillars, but Hansen made a really big mark on the future wrestling style there.

So I got back into wrestling recently and discovered I have different tastes after 7-8 years of not watching any. One of the big things I noticed was something about a wrestler I really used to enjoy and now find myself unable to watch more than 2 or 3 matches without having to find somebody else to watch. That isn't to say I don't enjoy some of the work, just parts of it I find bothersome, especially when grouped into multiple matches strung together. Koji Kanemoto is somebody I really wish I could call a great wrestler. He has good kicks (I really like his spinning side kick to the ribs, looks brutal), a great dickish sort of charisma, an incredible moonsault and his bridges on German and tiger suplexes are absolutely incredible. However, several things he does tend to annoy me pretty quickly these days. First and foremost, despite how nice it does look, is his belly-to-belly. Almost invariably, when it comes time for a late match turnaround to get to the finishing run, Koji's opponent will start rope-running like a madman. Which leads, not *always* right away, but it always does lead to the suplex. Which is usually not too far from big-nearfall moonsault time, after of course the front slam and the single fist. On that same note, a lot of his '90s matches I have seen (haven't seen much of his work after 2000 but it seems similar) follow a very similar flow. I suppose you could say that about a lot of the NJ juniors stuff at the time. Either way, it seems to me that good wrestlers are the guys who are physically capable of outstanding performances in the ring, but never really got the mental part of wrestling fully. They can put their spots in the right order and do all the things they need to, yes, but they don't adapt mid-match to their opponent. After watching more than a little Stan Hansen, he seems really good at building a match based on what has happened so far and where it is going, not trying to fit it into some pre-conceived structure he had in his head. This to me is what makes great wrestlers great. On a slightly sad note, I have been looking at Ultimo Dragon in a very similar way to how I (before I could truly articulate it) looked at Koji Kanemoto in terms of enjoying his matches. Will have to delve a little deeper into that when I reach a good stopping point on my AJPW. My question to all of you is: Who fits this kind of experience for you? Why?

I am not well-versed enough to really go into a lot of the detail people have in this thread (and likely elsewhere) about this match. However, one thing that really struck me about this match that hasn't been mentioned yet is the Kobashi quest for the moonsault in this match. It's clear that early on Kobashi is not going to stop trying to get that moonsault. Every time he does, that bum wheel is just making him too slow and he ends up eating more damage, but Kobashi being Kobashi, he's not EVER giving that up. Admitting defeat is just not in his nature. So eventually Misawa comes in, seeing the struggle Kobashi is going through, and when Taue/Kawada still resist allowing Kobashi to get his moonsault, Misawa goes to the extreme step (and possibly one of the most selfless things I've ever seen in a wrestling ring) of using his frog splash to set up the moonsault. Not many main event wrestlers will put one of their big spots as support to allow a similar spot by their teammate. I admit, it's not like he used a tiger driver to do it, but it's still a big thing. Then Kobashi FINALLY hits that moonsault and the crowd is all over it. Honestly, I knew that he wasn't getting the win with it but after all that work I had this little glimmer of hope that it might pay off big.

My name is Mike, I live in North Dakota and I am 36 years old. I got into wrestling watching WCW in late 1996 until somewhere near the end of '98. My favorites at the time were Benoit, Eddie, Dean Malenko and the cruiserweight division. This, naturally, led me to the NJ Juniors. Watching that got me hooked on wrestling, but then I stumbled upon my first Misawa vs. Kawada match. Honestly, I don't think I've ever looked back as a wrestling fan. '90s AJPW (anything I have seen involving the 4 Pillars, Akiyama or Stan Hansen anyway) is my favorite wrestling style and has been since I saw that match. After about the 2005-6 time frame I stopped watching wrestling altogether until late 2013. During that downtime, I also threw away an entire box of wrestling tapes. Can't say I don't curse myself for that one daily at this point. I got back into wrestling after playing enough TEW 2013 to kill my brain off by early Sunday one weekend, just started looking up matches on youtube and immediately rekindled my love of '90s AJPW. Then I started to explore some of the old territories wrestling in the States. That to me is something I really have to get into. The way they used such a small amount of wrestling moves to create such emotionally involving matches that could go 20, 30, or in some cases 60 minutes is absolutely incredible. Then I went back to my beloved NJ Juniors and saw (I think) in a new light all the things that drove me away from watching a lot of that stuff back in 2005-6. I could get away with watching a few matches, but by the 3rd or 4th, depending on who it was, I really struggled to not see the pattern that every match seemed to follow, the obvious setups for transitions and (worst of all because I know I hated this back then) the way every match degenerated into going to the top turnbuckle at the very least every third move if not more in most of those matches. In a quick return to obvious transition setups, I am a Koji Kanemoto fan, but I have a hard time not hating how 90% of the time he needs a late match turnaround, the other guy will start rope-running and smacking him around, then comes the miraculous belly-to-belly (that is incredibly nice). It's such a disappointment for me to see that too often now. Also, early Marufuji got a lot of heat from fans for the flash kick turnarounds, but I gotta say that Koji wasn't too far from that kind of abusiveness with the belly-to-belly and was experienced enough to know better. And so (after a bit of rambling) now I am working on beefing up my 90s AJPW stuff from the 4 Pillars and Stan Hansen. Starting a bit on some of the more American stuff from the 80s, but Rudoreels is not exactly a prime source for that. Their 90s AJPW stuff is excellent though, and I am hoping to one day get started on some lucha libre as well. Any suggestions on where to pick up some good Lawler, Terry Funk, Horsemen in NWA, Dusty, Steamboat, Freebirds, etc., just anything from around that time would be welcome. Once I build up my All Japan gonna look into investing into some chronological compilations involving the big feuds, matches and promos from that era.