joeg

Matt sent me this as part of the match trade. Match opens up with Fuerza Guerrera and Solar trading overly cooperative lucha style matwork and I instantly hate it. But I push through. Then midway through the second fall all hell breaks loose and this match suddenly peaks my interest. Doink viciously boots Rey Sr in the face ala Inoki vs Great Antonio and its on. Rudo Doink is a sight to behold as he stomps the life out of Solar. The match spills to the outside with all 6 guys brawling all over the place and Borne bumping like a mad man. There is some of blood in this, not an excessive amount, just the amount you would expect from Tijuana. The third fall descends into complete chaos with bleeding technicos, mask pulling, low blows, fake low blows, etc. This was probably the best Borne performance I've seen outside of his run in the Rat Pack.

@ Childs I never watched worked my through the yearbooks, I'd say I've seen most if not all of the Benoit and Eddie matches on them however. Where did you have Eddie and Benoit GWE? I had Eddie at 22 I think, and Benoit at 56 I believe. I'll give you that Benoit's intesity probably made for a better 3 to 10 minute TV match. Eddie could do so much more though. My main thing is I never bought tickets and drove to another city to go watch Chris Benoit. I did buy a tickets and drive to another city (whether it was Philly, Baltimore, Washington, etc) to go see Danielson or Eddy.

Eddie was head and shoulders above Benoit. Benoit could only have that go-go-go type match. He never allowed any of his spots time to breathe so he never really was able to draw heat or garner sympathy from the audience. I'd put Benoit in the same category as Angle, RVD, Low Ki, Dynamite Kid, etc. His stuff looked good and it looked like it hurt but he didn't really seem to make the moments in between the moves matter. Eddie would be a closer comparison to Danielson in that they were both undersized but both were able to draw heat against larger opponents. Also both were able to draw sympathy as babyface underdogs. Benoit could never have had the match against Lesnar that Eddie had and he could never have had the WM30 performance that Bryan had because Benoit just couldn't gather a reaction from the crowd like that. Now Benoit could put on an action packed badass match and he had plenty of those, but as for big dramatic moments he didn't really have many of those.

Danielson vs Benoit isn't even close... Danielson vs Eddie would be much closer

I feel like I'm one of the few people around these parts that is still a big fan of this series. I don't know when or why it became cool to shit on Tiger Mask or Tiger Mask vs Dynamite Kid. 20 years ago it was the the gold standard, now its very en vogue to criticize these matches. Every singles match in the series is at least fun. Most of the tags and 6 mans in the series are fun also. 8/5/82 is a great culmination of the 3 or 4 previous matches building up to one of my personal favorite nearfalls and a borderline classic. 4/21/83 is a hell of a brawl with a cool broken bottle spot and a really hot crowd. It too is a borderline classic. It seems to me that sometime in the past decade it became cool to say that established classics weren't all that great. It became cool to pick apart the Tiger Mask vs Dynamite Kid series or the Misawa vs Kobashi series. What bothers me the most about the hate hurdled at TM/DK is that the people who tear apart these matches are the often same people who hype sloppy, sleazy indy matches for their grittiness or innovation.

UFC did a much better job or promoting Rousey.

For Matt D Leon Spinks vs Onita Cage Deathmatch

Winner winner chicken dinner, and they don't want NJPW's houses to get any bigger with the addition of Danielson to the card. My immediate reaction was to google if the CTE lawsuit had been dropped so they now needed to stop pretending to have concern for the wrestlers long term health.

Black Terry vs Wotan 8/21/16

Nope not his first match on tape. He had 3 or 4 matches make tape in TWA from 99 and there is a tryout match from 99 that got recorded.

Terry Funk returning to ECW at Return of the Funker. Lawler piledriving Kaufman. And this one And this one

Two weeks before 6/9/95 Kobashi vs Ace

How can I get in on this? It seems like a lot of fun

I'd probably have around 20 of those matches in my top 100... What surprises me is the lack of Kobashi and Danielson. I would have expected a list with that much Omega, Okada, and HBK to also have a fair amount of Kobashi and Danielson...

Who knew how much working booking a couple of shows would be? Anyways Yeah I'll get around to doing this at some point this month.

Yep. Ospreay reminds me of Styles at that age. I really look at Ospreay and see a guy who isn't good right now, but is very naturally gifted, very athletic, and just naturally talented. I think 10 years from now Opsreay could be one of the best in the world.

What is the Hulu version like? Is it condensed down to around an hour- hour and a half without commercials and much of the fluff or is it the full 3 hours? Maybe its me, but I can't make it through the entire 3 hour broadcast without flipping to something else. Honestly for the 3 hours that Raw is on, if I'm in front of the TV all 3 hours (which I'm too ADD to stay in front of the TV for 3 hours without doing something else) I probably spend about a third to half of that time watching RAW and half to two thirds doing or watching something else.

I think wrestling is as good in the past 2 years as its been in the past 15 years. The down side about modern product is that Raw is really tough to watch. The upside is pretty much everything else. Also wrestling (like most media ) is much more readily available than ever before. The barrier to entry for watching some obscure promotion 15 years ago was that you had to know somebody from a message board or that you met at an ECW/ indy and had to trade for tapes of that obscure show. The barrier for entry to watching some obscure show is simply having an internet connection.

A few things to consider- some that have already been said. Does Shiek make it out of the building in one piece? Probably not. I'd imagine it to be something like Butch's story in Pulp Fiction. Vince's national expansion would still happen. Would it be 6 more months until Hogan was anointed that top guy or would he go get somebody else to fill that spot is really the only question. I would half expect Vince to go sign Bock, Hennig, and the Road Warriors out of spite. Hypothetically, if Hogan were done for, would he go get Savage, Dibiase, and Flair in 84 to fill that gap?

Elgin probably sexually assaulted a women. Dave called her a liar. He never talked to the women, instead he talked to Elgin and used a tumblr blog as his source. Let's get a few things straight. You've already been corrected on the Egin thing (although she has insinuated that Elgin was manipulative towards her). Dave never called her a liar; he stated that, "the text messages released were heavily edit with many things said that were erased." Thirdly, he didn't use tubmlr as a source. All this broke in October/November and he commented on it following that. The tumblr page went live a 3 weeks ago. It was shared on Wreddit and Mo herself replied to a tweet with the link subsequent to that. That's when Dave made the mistake of posting the tumblr link without context or comment. We don't know if he talked to Elgin. He apparently didn't talk to the woman, so you are right there. Read that sentence. Re read that sentence. Then re-read it again. Then re-read it again and again until you understand everything that is wrong with Dave Metlzer's editorial style. If Meltzer's subject and verb aren't even in agreement, and his tense is out of order, how can we agree that his facts are in order? That's what I see as the biggest problem with Metlzer's handling of serious topics. His writing reads like it was written by a 12 year old who just snorted some adderall.

if its in driving distance, I'm there. Hypothetically- a rematch of Jericho vs Omega with Bryan Danielson and/or CM Punk in the main event and Rey Jr on the card should easily do the trick I would expect. Problem is Jericho vs Omega ended rather decisively so its hard to do a rematch. And without Jericho, Danielson, Punk or Rey Jr, there is no way you get to 10,000.

But I said neither. I don't blame Vince and I didn't say everyone carries Nakamura, though I can see how my post could be misconstrued as such. Rather, I was pointing out how good AJ is as a carrier. If we get the same Nak we've been getting all along, it will be another AJ carry-job. If Nak turns up the volume though, of course it'll be tremendous. Like I said, I started out red hot for Nak. I was super into him after that Sami Zayn match. But it didn't take long for the bloom to fall off the rose, for all of the reasons already mentioned by me and several others in this thread. All of you are wrong. Nak is working a completely different type of match than he worked in New Japan. Working a 10 minute upper mid card/mid card TV match on a B Show should look absolutely nothing like working a 30 minute main event title matches we grew used to him wrestling during his 3 years with the IWGP belt and 5 years with the IWGP Intercontintal belt. He's not going to lay it in the way he did in Japan every Tuesday and every 3rd Sunday and he's not going to bump like that either. Now, if we see him in a prominent title match on a bigger show with some sort of build up, I would expect the appropriate level of effort and violence which we became accoustomed to in New Japan.

went to bed for a bit and just woke up and skipped ahead to Omega vs Jericho. Wow. Great stuff, the best Jericho gaga mixed with the best of Kenny Omega's nonsense put together in an Attitude Era/ late ECW type brawl with all sorts of bells and whistles. about to start the main event now

I haven't been this excited for a wrestling show in a long time. Natio's title chase for the past 18 months or so has been the most compelling title chase since Daniel Bryan in 2013. But at the same time they have Omega chasing the title so its not a guarantee that Naito is winning which is part of what keeps it so interesting. The build up to the Jericho vs Omega match has just been awesome. When it was first announced my thought was that it will be like any of the big name Americans we've seen go over for a one off at the Tokyo Dome - a fun special attraction, but an upper midcard match without any heat or build up. Almost like the celebrity or legend appearance at Wrestlemania. Instead the build up has me anticipating something closer to Valentine Piper. On the undercard I'm really looking forward to Sho and Yo vs Young Bucks. I'm not a Young Bucks person really, I can take them or leave them. But I've loved Sho and Yo since they were young lions and this is sort of match that builds to them being the next Apollo 55 or No Limit.