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Give me the best 8-10 of those and I'll cover them for my site. I'll give them as fair of a shot as I can. Trauma I vs Canis Lupus is MOTY easily Outside of that, the next best I've seen (and I haven't seen all these) are; Kamaitachi vs Dragon Lee Rush vs LA Park Delta vs Galactar Negro Casas vs Rey Hechicero and the two Cavenario vs Volador Jr. matches Report back, would love to hear it. I've watched Kamaitachi/DL and Cavernario/Dorada so far and...you're probably not going to like what I have to report back, lol. The ultra short falls in 2/3 matches is something that always drives me nuts, but short fall is normally like 5-8 minutes, not 90 seconds.

Give me the best 8-10 of those and I'll cover them for my site. I'll give them as fair of a shot as I can.

NXT Osaka wasn't good, but DIY vs Tozawa/Tajiri sure was. The Nia/Asuka match was such a mess. A real shame because their match at the Takeover show was by far my match of the night on that show. It was just way too damn long. I doubt Nia has been in anything that long outside of the SS tag match. Best part of the show was ugly ass Takayama sitting in the front row looking as bored as could be except for when Asuka was out there.

I want to point out that I've rarely fucked with Marufuji for his entire career, and I generally think he embodies the same excesses that guys like The Young Bucks carry the torch for today. And I know Okada can fall into those same traps, so heading into this, I was worried they'd bring the worst out in each other. Instead, this was Marufuji's breakout performance as he enters the cunty vet stage of his career, and he finally decided he's start laying his strikes in. His shitty superkicks and combos always miss by miles, but here, he was drilling Okada with everything, and his chops were Kobashi-esque in their brutality. I do have to ask, what happened to his arm? It's pretty heavily atrophied, but it didn't slow him down one bit from laying in some of the nastiest chops I've seen in 2016. The whole match felt like he was angling for a full time spot in NJ after NOAH is finally put out of its misery, and I'd fully support it if he's going to wrestle like this from now on. He was so impressive that the fans were pretty hot for the idea of him winning the title, and it really seemed like he might at times. Okada hitting him with the emerald flowsion was so great, reminded me a lot of Chono/Misawa when they started doing Inoki/Baba spots. Not even Okada's best title match in 2016, but the most surprising for me, as I would never have believed Marufuji could be in something this good, and be this good, in 2016.

That angle actually went on for about 4 months. It kind of died off, Norton went to Japan for a month or two, then came back and resumed like nothing had happened.

Just wait until Jim Rome replaces Goldie. That asshole, plus Dana, plus NSAC, plus USADA, plus the heel fighters, plus Mario Yamasaki will be unbearable. MMA needs Takada's Trumpet.

Probably my favorite lariat of all time (outside of that one Hansen laid on Tenryu) I think a real argument can be made that Kensuke Sasaki is the singular MVP for the first 10 years or so of 1/4 dome shows. Considering that there were 1-3 good match per show until like 2008, and Kensuke was in almost all of them between 1992-2001.

That one?

Vicious and Delicious was a perfect mid card team. Buff was a perfect mid card heel before the neck injury.

I think you could blame the idea that Seth/HHH HAS to happen. There was really no other reason for KO to win the title the way he did other than to build for a match that wouldn't happen for another 7 months. HHH not returning to TV to explain anything didn't help KO's reign feel like an afterthought from the beginning. No one seemed to be clamoring for the idea of the match before Seth got injured, and no one seems to be clamoring for it now, but here we are, and KO has had the title since August because.....Seth/HHH? I assume Balor/Rollins would have feuded for a few months, then the HHH/Seth feud would have picked up closer to the Rumble.

KO has been booked pretty terribly as champ, but he's also completely shit the bed in the ring since being champ. It's hard to be excited for him because now you know you're going to get a shitty match with a bad finish. Meanwhile, AJ Styles has been the best wrestler in the world for 3 years in a row and the other show is built around that guy.

I think he gets the character part of wrestling, but I'm not sure he understands how to apply it to matches. His instincts tend to take him to comedy spots or making sure the fans can chant this is awesome. He's a natural on the mic, but also tends to go for comedy, which makes him kind of hard to take too seriously. It's not like he's a huge super athlete like Rock was, or the legitimate killer Kurt Angle could be when he flipped that switch. I don't think he's a main event type of guy, at least not in WWE, but he's very well suited to having a great mid carder career for many years. I recall seeing some clip from his show/shoot thing he was doing I think for Highspots before WWE signed him where he was talking about a match in ROH where he had someone in a sharpshooter, and he was getting booted repeatedly in the head but just spat at his opponent. When he got to the back, people were saying he killed that boot for future matches (which was I guess a signature for whoever, but I don't recall more than that), and he was like "Who gives a shit, the crowd lost their shit". That seems to be the mentality that most of his generation of indie guys that are currently in WWE seem to have. As long as the crowd pops in the moment, that's all that matters to them. Compare KO and Seth's mentality in matches to AJ Styles'.

I was always a fan of Norton as a kid, mostly because if he was on TV, he was going to be murdering dudes and bouncing. He was huge and scary and had an awesome move set for Revenge. Over the years of actually covering wrestling, I've come to develop a great appreciation for him. Not only was he an incredible bruiser with wonderful powermoves, but he tried so hard with his bumping and selling, going way beyond the level of a normal guy his size, and often his own talent levels. He was so earnest in his attempts that he could be a genuinely sympathetic FIP while being a barrel chested monster who could snap people in half. His work, particularly from around 1992-1997, both in WCW and NJPW, is a real treat to watch. He just tried so hard that it's impossible not to like him. He and his wife are also very nice people to fans on social media. I have a large collection of Norton gifs, and I'd like to open up discussion on what people think of him in comparison to other big men of his era, or just good memories of Scott Norton. I'm not going to say he's an all time great or anything, but man, he's a guy I'm going to consistently enjoy pretty much against anyone, because I know exactly what I'm going to get from him and I'm going to love seeing dudes get splattered. The running gag of him coming out and beating the shit out of The Cat for months is one of my favorite WCW side angles of all time.

I think a lot of people conflate great for popping the crowd these days, which is part of why PWG matches that have absolutely zero structure or story often get so much praise. Or why someone like Will Ospreay is so heavily hyped online. Or Cesaro. Actually, Cesaro might be the prime example. Cesaro does nothing of substance in his matches, a complete and utter spot machine on par with the cruiserweights in 1996 who had to throw everything out that they could in their 4 minute match to get people to remember them. So he pops the crowd with his big spots, but they don't care about him when he's not doing spots, they don't care about his terrible promos, but that doesn't stop the majority of internet fans claiming he's so great and so over.

There are so many examples of workers, matches, and angles that you could point to for justifying that "American wrestling sucks" that I couldn't even argue it. If someone watched the Ambrose Asylum match from earlier in the year and then had to see the Old Day segment with the time machine, or anything The Club has done, or any show during the guest host era, or ROH's TV show, or Konnan matches on Nitro, or Jim Duggan matches, or a Bushwhackers vs Natural Disasters match, or those late era AWA jobbers, or or or or....

So lucha should be ignored and is inferior to puro and american wrestling? Maybe. I never said it should be ignored in the first place. The majority have spoken. Lucha isn't covered as much because less people are interested in lucha, and don't care to force themselves to watch lucha until they like it. You can put up the good fight for eternity, but telling people they're wrong and missing out and need to put effort into liking something is not going to entice people that already are not interested or know they don't like lucha to watch. Certainly not the people who control the talking points and coverage, either. Start a popular newsletter and cover lucha all the time. Clicking the link to your blog, the focus is on Colosseum Home Videos and the top 100 matches has just a handful of lucha matches on it. Your own list is pretty dominated by matches from Japan. 300 twitter followers can be thousands of eyeballs with just a couple of retweets. It's never been easier to connect with lots of people and get your shit out there. You're not going to change anything on this tiny, niche site. Start posting more lucha on your blog, at a regular clip, send links out on Twitter, post matches and links on Wreddit. Don't start people out with 50 year olds they've never heard of mat wrestling for 40 minutes. Start out with guys they are familiar with (Rey/Juvi/Psychosis/La Parka/Eddie, La Sombra, NJPW guys in Mexico, popular guys on LU) and ease them into Mexican indies and bloodbaths with people they don't know. Instead of telling people they need to put in work to understand or appreciate, or that they don't understand the context, or that they have some kind of cultural bias, explain to them the context. Explain to them why this is great and how it works. Teach, don't lecture. You have many platforms to get the word out. You're not using them. You need visual content, because people just aren't going to read walls of texts. That means gifs or video links when possible.

Wrong to you, not wrong to the people who control the narratives, nor the people who agree with them.

There's also a big difference between someone having great matches in front of hundreds, later seen by thousands, and someone having great matches in front of thousands, seen by millions. The same reason why some tiny art house movie that got released into 25 theaters world wide isn't held in as high esteem as The Godfather.

WTF? History of America is not made up by me, there is a clear history and narrative. Same with history and narratives of everything. Doesn't matter if I go around and say Nirvana didn't change the boring music industry, that is the history and narrative. I, as an individual, alone can not change that. I'm sure you're familiar with history is written by the victors. As you say in your own post, history and narrative are the same thing. Narratives are controlled by people, and as such, history is controlled by individuals, not necessarily pure fact. You can't change the narratives of the individuals that control history, or lucha coverage in this instance. I can? I can try. I can talk about lucha, review lucha, etc... I don't have the power to change what the narratives are. I can try, but I only have 333 twitter followers and about 500 people listening to my podcast. Not nearly enough people to make that kind of change. To the majority of online wrestling fans, puro is the best form of wrestling and lucha is not worth their time. You're agreeing with me, you know

WTF? History of America is not made up by me, there is a clear history and narrative. Same with history and narratives of everything. Doesn't matter if I go around and say Nirvana didn't change the boring music industry, that is the history and narrative. I, as an individual, alone can not change that. I'm sure you're familiar with history is written by the victors. As you say in your own post, history and narrative are the same thing. Narratives are controlled by people, and as such, history is controlled by individuals, not necessarily pure fact. You can't change the narratives of the individuals that control history, or lucha coverage in this instance.

History and narratives are controlled by the individual, so I don't know if you're ever going to find an acceptable resolution for your issue

People usually don't go out of their way to watch something they aren't interested in or know they don't care for in hopes that watching/listening enough will gain them a new appreciation for it, if that's what you mean. That's not the same thing as refusing to expand your horizons.

It's almost like sitting through hours of TV for something you aren't that interested in to see something good isn't a great way to watch, either

This is where I'm going to defend him: 1997 is one of his best years. He spent almost the whole year working with Hall/Nash/Syxx and various much much younger lower card guys and he had a real fire that he hadn't had in many years.I also think his work in Evolution is better than his prime years, because at his core, Ric's in ring style and abilities were much better suited for tags and 6 man tags where he could hit his spots and tag out instead of repeat his spots for 40 minutes by himself. Flair had the promos of a lead guy, but the ring style of a lackey.

I think he's asking for the context