GOTNW

Shine was pretty long and they kept teasing the heel cut-off which was amusing. Then the heels did take over and just as you're wondering what's gonna happen the video cuts off! Oh well.

Pretty standard squash, Bass slams the smaller's guy head in the corner, punches him and slams him for the win. Nothing really stood out good or bad.

I don't know how much stomping in a match you can tolerate, apparently I can a lot and therefore kinda enjoyed this, particularly the stomps the german team did when they were on the apron. Average-ish.

Meh. Match was used as a vehicle for Austin's manager to build an angle. Austin controlled the match with headlock which he didn't really work, just grab and let go after a while. His overhead punches didn't look very good and his legdrops obviously missed.

This was ok but the post-match beatdown and angle was much more interesting than the match itself. Something about a Buddy throwing good looking punches and their dads fighting.

I was gonna do a Gordy list for Fujiwara but that requires way too much energy and I don't have the will to write about anything concerning pro wrestling at that length currently. The one thing I do want to research more is Fujiwara's role in late 70s/early 80s. Since he starts making tape as a star he's presented as pretty important. I would say he's just below Masa Saito, who was a good worker but really most of his case is probably fame, being a big Inoki opponent helps too. But since Fujiwara doesn't make it in star power (sure it's cool he allegedly attended Bill Clinton's inaguration and did a bunch of roles as a(n) (voice) actor but that's not getting him in. As a worker he is brilliant. He was voted around the same spot Riki Choshu was on the GWE poll which is amazing. His influence is enormous. He was Karl Gotch's best student. Just think about how many people he had a hand in training. It's not like THEY constantly remind you how important Fujiwara was to them. He has a case on influence alone. Fujiwara won awards in Tokyo Sports in 1987 and 1989 that would be equivalent to most oustanding. It's not a 1-1 comparison (though if someone is interested in the politics of Tokyo Sports awards I can explain stuff) but that's what they were in his case. Hase only won one of these and he's in. Fujiwara was cheered over Choshu and Hashimoto when facing them. He was very much a hardcore favourite like someone like Ishii is, except he was way better as a worker, a million times more influential, higher on the card and wrestled in a time wrestling was actually popular in Japan. The idea Fujiwara isn't great was manufactured by ten people who traded puro tapes in 1980s-and even with Dave not digging Fujiwara he still made his way on honourable mention lists and such in WON voting in real time.

I hate storytelling as used and represented in the majority wrestling criticism. It's a BS phrase thrown around that doesn't mean anything. It reminds me of the time I dissected why everything in the Triple H-Brock Lesnar cage match was a bunch of nonsense (specifically the "narrative" of the match if you will-what the established characters were, what the match was going for, why it wasn't efficient and wasn't enjoying to watch) only to get replied with "well, you don't get it, the match told a great story". Think more how Jim Ross or some other old dude would use it than Matt D. Of course everyone is going to talk about stories of matches, because that's just how we perceive things-but not unlike other modern artforms it often doesn't really give us answers that could be as good and precise if we stick just to that very primitive way of looking at it. What I want to come understand from watching every wrestler is what they represent-how they come to certain conclusions, how they try to achieve something, how that lines up with what I like in wrestling and so forth. I LOVE colorful characters in wrestling, and I love watching battles of said characters, but just leaving at "great storytelling" instead of looking at individual skills that are primarily those that make anything work in wrestling doesn't do much for me. And since people just LOVE analogies with music over here-too much of it is centered at lyrics that don't mean anything and wouldn't interest anyone if it were not for the noise/composition holding everything together. Wrestling matches don't need a story-just like films, songs and so on. That doesn't mean we still can't come to understand and appreciate abstract art in those art forms, and maybe even form our own narratives that will have........questionable basis in reality. Wrestling is an exaggerated artistic exhibition of a fight, not a novel. Sometimes "hate/violence/struggle/desperation" or "battle of skill" is enough for a match to work and even reach the heights of the art form, and that we greate big narratives around those in cases like those is just an indicator of how we communicate. It might also be why I found it quite hard to express my love for some shoot style and lucha matches heavily based on matwork. I'm not sure I have a good answer for the specific question in the thread title. I'd guess about as much as in poetry, where we're taught we can't know what the writer was going for but still mostly reach similar conclusions and learn "stories" about the work in education despite not being able to know for sure and have the same "you can interpret it how you want".

Tamura should absolutely be in since being "one of the best workers of a generation" is enough according to Meltzer. The real problem is that the WON HOF is a mess and the japanese side is probably the most chaotic one.

Of course I'm not. Cena's work and interviews suggest he's seen his share of Race, Flair, Misawa and Kobashi. He isn't ignorant. Also let's not pretend All Japan would be held in the same regard it is without all the headdrop suplexes and big moves.

If you wanna explore a new territory one of these days I suggest binging 2000/2001 NOAH. One of the best booked promotional runs in history. The Akiyama-Kobashi feud lasts until 2004 and continues being great but the transition they made from All Japan is just unreal, particularly in establishing so many new guys and getting them over (hindsight is what it is, but it worked at the time). They go from having no undercard to having a loaded one and take full advantage of that. The Sternness-Burning tags are just so damn cool-pretty much every match has something distinctive and memorable about it.

Fun beatdown after some solid chain wrestling, Oliver really laid in his shots. What more to say of a minute long match?

Really liked this. Charles was great here, just super smooth takedown and submissions, he was almost WOS-esque. I liked Gilbert's tenacious takedowns and how he wouldn't let go of the leg. The face in peril segment was a little monotonous at times, I liked how they kept cutting Gilbert off with nice punches but the submission they used to work over him got pretty repetitive, though it did make the eventual tease of a comeback more satisfying. Non-finish was perfect as a set up as they managed to get even more heat on the heels (one of them pulling the rope so Charles would fall out of the ring during the attempted comeback the perfect spot for it too) and shoegorn Gilbert sr. into the story. ***-***1/4

Fun showcase match for Lawler and Dundee with the dominating with basic spots. Liked the one sequence where Dundee took to the mat as well as the gags him and Lawler pulled like Lawler outsmarting the heel on the fake heel handshake and Dundee telling the ref to look up before nailing, urgh, one of the heels . **3/4

Lol so true. Why couldn't he watch AJPW and Crockett tapes with his girlfriend?"If only Cena watched workrate wrestling B instead of workrate wrestling A things would be so much better".

random 1978. show obligatory back up: source: http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=0&z=823&C=20&godina=1978&broj=000028&F=&H=&vrsta=&grupa=&lang=&stranica=001 Talk about vague. World class wrestlers in a small croatian town? Eeeeeeeeh. The search only showed this, but I checked next week's issue just to make sure and: I had no luck in finding how big the school venue is, says it was almost full. Article says ticket prices were high and "fans" very disappointed, looked more like a circus than a sport. source: http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=0&z=823&C=20&godina=1978&broj=000029&F=&H=&vrsta=&grupa=&lang=&stranica=001

1974. drama sources: http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=3&godina=1974&broj=000020&stranica=013&u=ke%E8er http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=3&godina=1974&broj=000044&stranica=013&u=ke%E8er I just figured out there are pics of the scanned newspapers as well! What does it all of that say? Well basically someone hyped the show a lot, people showed up to see a new form of entertainment out of curiosity (400 paid for the first show), the show sucked and the crowd booed ("whistled" is the term used) the hell out of them the entire time. The articles are written very professionally with no malice towards wrestling itself. The first article also mentions many of the viewers had seen wrestling on TV or in cinema and had an idea of what they would see but the show just sucked so bad.

A nothing match. Headlocks for a minute before the time limit expired. Seems like a weird way to end the show but oh well.

Hard to write a novel and fresh comment on a match where you get the opening two minutes of pretty much......any match ever with lock-ups and hammerlocks and then Koko hits two nice Dropkicks for the win. The *wrestling* looked fine and I like how wrestlers often kinda tease kicking out after they get pinned. I'd give this match, like............52%. Still an average match but something that will give you a good impression of workers in it if you watch it.

Basic match with simple, well executed offence combined with an interesting angle and efficient match structure. After opening the match with pretty standard matwork spots they move into the FIP segment where Sawyer refuses to help Gilbert, Gilbert eventually snaps, tries to fight back and even strikes his own partner but ultimately falls short. ***

Fun little match, Bounty Hunters had simple but good looking offence, their punches definitely met Memphis standards but I also really liked their elbow drops that looked like they were just smashing the back of their opponent's head. I liked the chaotic brawling at the end, though the corner post shot looked way more dangerous than the Piledriver on the floor they based the angle around. **3/4

I'm not sure what a lot of Valiant's moves were even supposed to be. His partner looked a lot better in terms of actual work, had some nice knee strikes and a good right hand. I did get a kick out of Valiant's goofy antics. **1/2

A random tidbit from a 1909 newspaper. It's in italian. Why are there newspapers on Italian in Croatia? This should be a good starting point if you're interested in that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istria Interesting that it mentions Frank Gotch as famous for the time, that'll give me more material for searching. Trieste is a disputed territory and Raičević is most certainly not an italian surname but whether he was of croatian or slovenian ethnicity/origin doesn't really matter. He even has his own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Raicevich Is he a well known name among wrestling historians? source for the article: http://library.foi.hr/novine/broj1.aspx?v=1&t=1&C=56&godina=1909&broj=000315&stranica=001&u=catch

Since the last thread got nuked. What I wanted to post: 2000s TV & popularity Wrestling was never on croatian TV as far as I can remember (and probably never was). It aired on serbian TV from around 2007-2009. At its peak it aired at prime time (8PM) on a popular channel [1] on a work day. It got moved to a late night time slot after a while and was eventually cancelled. This was one of the causes of a mini-wrestling boom-pretty insignificant on a cultural level but huge in terms of an increasing number of people you could talk to about wrestling. If there's one thing you need to know about balkan mentality it's that people love to complain aboutt things and then somehow hypocritically partake in them regardless of what they said. Reality TV shows like Big Brother, Farm, Love Is In the Countryside, Wife Swap all pretty much get murdered in any kind of commenting, let alone serious critique. They also do great ratings and maintain profitable for the TV stations. I imagine wrestling was similar for the older generation, but they quickly forgot about it like every other reality show. But it did really well in a specific demographic- the more passionate fans were young males/children (amongst whom WWE was most popular) and they're generally the ones who've remained in our discussions to this day, with the majority of them now in teens or early 20s. There were even WWE sticker albums, which are generally only published for football/soccer. It" peaked" with a house show in Belgrade in 2009. The capacity of the Arena is "18 000 to 25 000 spectators" [2]. Only source I could find in terms of how many people were there was a person in the arena who said "not much. 7/8 thousand people". One major bosnian TV station [3] picked up wrestling in 2009. Its best time slot was 9PM on a Monday. They dropped it in 2010/2011 and it caused an insane registration boom on our local message board. Demographically pretty much the same story as in Serbia, but with the show airing a few years later members of our community from Bosnia tend to be a few years younger. This was also the last time pro wrestling was that accessible over here. There are still come channels that carry wrestling but they're foreign (WWE has a great time slot on Eurosport at 9PM Monday and SPORT-1/former DSF carried (maybe still does) Smackdown which aired at 10PM on Saturdays. Eurosport also carried TNA and New Japan for a while, presumably before WWE latched onto them. Anything I can find really. Starting with present day and working my way backwards but will also use this thread to post updates about new shows and what's going on in the scene.

2000s TV & popularity Wrestling was never on croatian TV as far as I can remember (and probably never was). It aired on serbian TV from around 2007-2009. At its peak it aired at prime time (8PM) on a popular channel [1] on a work day. It got moved to a late night time slot after a while and was eventually cancelled. This was one of the causes of a mini-wrestling boom-pretty insignificant on a cultural level but huge in terms of an increasing number of people you could talk to about wrestling. If there's one thing you need to know about balkan mentality it's that people love to complain aboutt things and then somehow hypocritically partake in them regardless of what they said. Reality TV shows like Big Brother, Farm, Love Is In the Countryside, Wife Swap all pretty much get murdered in any kind of commenting, let alone serious critique. They also do great ratings and maintain profitable for the TV stations. I imagine wrestling was similar for the older generation, but they quickly forgot about it like every other reality show. But it did really well in a specific demographic- the more passionate fans were young males/children (amongst whom WWE was most popular) and they're generally the ones who've remained in our discussions to this day, with the majority of them now in teens or early 20s. There were even WWE sticker albums, which are generally only published for football/soccer. It" peaked" with a house show in Belgrade in 2009. The capacity of the Arena is "18 000 to 25 000 spectators" [2]. Only source I could find in terms of how many people were there was a person in the arena who said "not much. 7/8 thousand people". One major bosnian TV station [3] picked up wrestling in 2009. Its best time slot was 9PM on a Monday. They dropped it in 2010/2011 and it caused an insane registration boom on our local message board. Demographically pretty much the same story as in Serbia, but with the show airing a few years later members of our community from Bosnia tend to be a few years younger. This was also the last time pro wrestling was that accessible over here. There are still come channels that carry wrestling but they're foreign (WWE has a great time slot on Eurosport at 9PM Monday and SPORT-1/former DSF carried (maybe still does) Smackdown which aired at 10PM on Saturdays. Eurosport also carried TNA and New Japan for a while, presumably before WWE latched onto them. 1.http://www.foxtv.rs/ 2.http://www.kombankarena.rs/en/pages/details/61/61/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB+%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA+%D0%90%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5 3.http://www.obn.ba/ Anything I can find really. Starting with present day and working my way backwards but will also use this thread to post updates about new shows and what's going on in the scene.

Wrestling fandom is a fascinating thing. Most of the historians are obviously focused on the big areas-the ones that matter when discussing Hall Of Fame candidates and whatnot. Yet I (being from a country where wrestling is an even bigger niche) never cease being fascinated with the placed where you'll stumble upon pro wrestling shows. There's pro wrestling in Chicle, Vietnam and the Czech Republic and it all sounds so interesting and fascinating. I wish we could learn the slightest details of every pro wrestling culture of even the tiniest shows. That's what this topic is going to focus on-I'm sure at least some will get a kick out of it and considering how close Germany, Austria and Italy are who knows what kind of bits and pieces of european wrestling history (which is hardly the most researched place, especially outside of the "major" markets) I could dig into.