Ma Stump Puller

I found it on YT actually, there's the TV version that gives you 14 minutes of the original 20 As always I would also say to consult the AJPW 90s Omnibus since that tends to have the occasional deeper slice of matches (or things outright omitted otherwise)

Kinda a uber-GOAT in that she's had I think two very distinct but great careers (her workrate-heavy JWP stint, then her later work as a bloody invader). Somewhat hurt by a pretty all over the place 2000's run where I think she took way too much inspiration from Triple H but I think her later work into the 2020's is definitely really respectable given her limitations, especially the pair of matches she had with Mio Momono (who similarly will absolutely be on the top 100 with the greatest of ease). She's basically worked like a far better Onita the last decade and I'm all the more happy for that.

Ishikawa will 100% be on the top 100 list. He had a bit of a lull nearing the end of his second AJPW stint but the guy has had 15+ years of being a big crowbar fuck who just hits as hard as he can with whoever he's paired up with, taking insane punishment be it from ultra-violent bloodfests in BJW or doing some of the dumbest big-man bumps possible in more classical epics in their Strong division, also proven he can work as a more immobile giant in later years. His recent freelance resurgence as this wandering enforcer has really ruled as well and cemented his status as one of the best giants of his time and probably a bit beyond that to boot.

idk about White being a "minimalist" his best stint was in a company that infamously dragged the fuck out of every semi/main event by at least 10 minutes (something he happily got himself involved with) not to also mention that horrendous engorged tumour that was the WK15 Ibushi match. Jerry Lawler was a minimalist, Jay White's just more of a throwback-type to control heavy heels that don't heavily rely on flash. Jay White for GWE is a tricky one, sometimes he clicks and seems like the biggest bastard in the world (especially when it comes to the micro elements like fatigue-selling, emoting, fluidity etc) but he's someone who's whole style hinges greatly on his opponent complimenting what he brings to the table; he needs a strong babyface OR at least someone who's willing to respect his slower pace to truly get something great out of him. He's very defensive, more of someone who relies on a great hook (a super-athlete like late 2010's Ibushi or a face with a big legacy like Tanahashi) than making one himself. One could argue that's been exposed heavily in AEW where he doesn't have the benefit of perhaps having that structure always in front of him, especially with the varied opponents he gets. For him to be on a GWE2026 list you'd need to be heavily leaning it on NJPW work, for me personally I just don't click with that enough to consider him there.

i'd be fine handling the busywork with GWE threads if there's stuff to be covered

thanks! if you want more based late-Momota matches his 1999 Fan Appreciation Night match is really stellar

GOAT-tier at boiling the piss of smarks, good to great most of the time in matches. I kinda wish we got more of the pure shooty-side of him because the Severn Bloodsport-but-much-better- title match they had in 1998 was pretty solid and he definitely had the background chops to make it work beyond just Different Style shit if he was ever inclined. He definitely got a better idea of how to make his stature work in a post-PRIDE world than most, that's for sure.

This feels like the kind of wrestling that Onita was always one of the best at; causing disruptions whenever he'd go, shaking things up and not being afraid to piss a ton of people off in the process. They do a good job making him seem like a legit complete outsider against the polished martial artist in Aoyagi, eating a quick and easy knockdown at the very start to set up his desperation to keep in the match by any means necessary via going right into dirty clinches, threatening to stomp the shit out of his opponent while he's trying to clean break, just all of the effective heel shit that a man like Onita would've learned from already a decade+ of refined wrestling wisdom. He knows how to push the buttons just enough to work Aoyagi's buddies at ringside (the crowd to boot) to get them more and more pissed off at this washed up retired jackass trying to get his fame back to the point where they're just ready to run in and cause chaos, something which at MULTIPLE occasions almost becomes reality and at some points overspills into actually happening. I can't say that the actual bulk of the action is especially amazing from a purely technical standpoint; the takedowns look real hokey, there's really no stand-up work asides from a lot of messy limb throwing/flailing (with maybe a couple of unpolished clinches) the few submissions that are applied as well don't look the greatest execution wise (though Onita applies a pretty good facelock in the first half). This is forgivable because the match isn't going for polish, it's going for the pure spectacle factor in its entirety. You aren't watching this for the epic knockdowns or the creative submissions, you're watching it because Onita's being a shithead and Aoyagi is the hometown hero ready to beat his ass for a good 20 minutes, a match built off the abstract premise of home-grown violence rather than the parts of the whole. Some people go to football games just to throw hands. This appears much the same. Crazy real brawl happens in the middle half when Onita smacks Aoyagi with a chair on the outside which ends up having the guy legit punched in the face by one of Aoyagi's buddies. There's a huge scuffle and it takes multiple agonisingly long minutes to break it up then to restore the match, creating legit confusion in the heated crowd as to what's going on. I absolutely loved the fact that as soon as the match actually restarted Onita scumbag as he is goes right into another dirty clinch to throw clearly illegal headbutts before choking the shit out of the Karate lad on his side of the ring lol. This gives them the chance to get Aoyagi blading for some classic Southern colour to really get the intensity up, helped by Onita's almost feral antics at this point as he just lays into his opponent with as many headbutts as he can muster. He eventually decides to go full crazy by assaulting the ref directly with punches (which while not uncommon here, was something Onita was prepared to do in more sneaky ways like indirectly pushing him over earlier on) out of pure frustration due to not being able to get that definitive big victory despite taking a painful beating, ultimately losing his patience with not just Aoyagi but the hostile crowd to boot by throwing out the entire thing. Post-match he very quickly scarpers out while his buddies throw hands, Aoyagi gets the symbolic victory post-match by being the only guy involved to be capable of staying inside the ring without getting chased down with fists; it's definitely built to be inconclusive given the feud to come, however, so one expects that this is for sure not a conclusive end. Is this absolutely clunky in execution? Sure, this is pretty dang messy on many occasions. The magic here is as I've said Onita is a perfect outsider heel: a Funk-lite contender that really communicates his mounting frustrations with the unstoppable brick wall that is Masashi Aoyagi though his escalating intensity and his selling, both forming a brilliant combo that serves to make the crowbar karateka seem like the coolest fucker to ever live with every explosive rush of strikes thrown: draining away at Onita's body but also his sanity to boot, he comes into this a polished competitor willing to sprawl and wrestle in a clash of styles and literally runs out looking like a desperate man looking for a equally desperate way out. In a way, perhaps, it marks the end of the polished & clean AJPW Onita and the true beginning of his grimy roots as an supreme disrupter, giving him a out to his now conclusively failed past and a clear direction towards his future with no way for him to ever go back to being a generic Jr babyface with this lingering in the background. Onita running from the tradition of the ring and into the violent sprawling Korakuen crowd is the gesture needed to finally commit the exorcism required to make that part of him melt away completely, assisted by the beatings provided by a all-too eager opponent and audience. An absolute masterclass in how exploiting a hostile atmosphere and taking complete advantage of it can make or break a match; lesser men would've capitulated to the pressure, maybe even tried to do some shitty Curtain Call "sign of respect" post-match gesture to avoid the real risks involved like personal scrutiny (and to a lesser extent, getting punched in the face). Onita was thankfully never that man, and we're all the more better off for it.

I think asides from the occasional good promo this heel run has been a complete dud so far, which is a shame because Cena's RR and Chamber performances respectfully were quite enjoyable for what he was bringing to them. I think they just waited far too long to pull the trigger; Cena hasn't looked good in-ring since 2021 and hasn't looked great since maybe 2018, his body simply is too out of it to deliver on the promise of a proper heel stint (and no, not in the "muh workrate" kind of way)

More Deep stuff here Introduction This is a collected version of my notes regarding Mariko Yoshida's volume of work from her departure from ARSION/AtoZ (2004 to be exact) all the way to her retirement in 2017. This was something that I originally set out to doing about 2 years ago as I was fairly curious as to what existed beyond her strongly acclaimed 90s stint especially since there really was next to no real documentation on the matter, so you kinda had to go off vibes for the most part. This sets out to cover almost everything from that time period barring a very small couple of things that I either did not watch (the Yoshida/Fujiwara vs Ishikawa/Amano tag, for instance, which was so aberrant that I outright refused to give it the dignity of a full review at all) or are just too lacking in content that I decided otherwise (some 3 minute exhibitions she has in IBUKI during her mini retirement) Bolded are matches that I think are must-watch though if you're a completionist like me I doubt it'll matter that much lol. I also do dates in the Euro-style so it's day/month/year. 2004/2005 2006/2007 2008 Wilderness Years Conclusion All in all, I'd say every bolded match included here is absolutely worth watching one way or another. Does that mean everything not bolded isn't? I'd say no. There's definitely still plenty to be found with those and if you like them more than me, that's also cool as well. I think the main thing I got from watching all of these was that Yoshida was in the very rare position of being a tremendously gifted wrestler who was equally as generous to boot. As Jetlag said in the original thread this was thrown in at the time, she tends to play second fiddle to other wrestlers; this is on purpose mainly to show them off in a strange inversion of the usual hierarchy-based structure that is quite typical of promotions to follow from even to this day wherein the bigger stars get, well, the bigger spotlight. The issue is that she's STILL head and shoulders above pretty much all of said wrestlers, so it never really clicks in the way that you'd expect, even with the matches that are actually quite solid there's a sense of incoherence that follows from them that I don't think I ever shook off despite watching so many of them at once. If she had more of a ego, could've had led to her having bigger and better matches? I'd say so, and that's a pretty shocking conclusion considering how much of wrestling is dominated by unneeded egos. I think the other issue is that Yoshida was never really challenged in the same way she was in the ARSION work; you didn't have a Hiromi Yagi or a Megumi Fujii-tier talent to really get her grappling skills tested to the maximum meaning a lot of the matches feel like her more or less in second gear and thus not in her full element all things considered. Still solid, but it's a waste having someone who was clearly very talented on the mat not be able to experiment as much as those late 90's years. It's kinda like if Fujiwara didn't go on to create PWFG in the 90s and just stayed in the mid-card of NJPW having competent and occasionally good showings while never being able to truly get his best trait tested as much as it did there. Regardless she's still a pretty stellar GWE addition that can't really be argued against given her wealth of solid matches, tremendous match-carrying and incredible consistency across the board. I hope this has proven that the case and then some.

This match was sick as hell for what was essentially the closest thing to a "sprint" you could get from this era given the length. Jack Moore was a respected vet of the time who was much well past his best years at this point; this being to my knowledge his only actual documented match on tape. He looked good here as the outclassed but experienced vet, using his wits to deal with Don's imposing big-man heel work but ultimately coming up short in most of the exchanges. There's some good spots here where Don gets to showcase his creative cheating antics, throwing closed-fist punches in dirty clinches or yanking at the trunks to escape key-locks, even throwing in a bit of more 80s-style showboating by having Don Leo gloat to the crowd between holds or feigning innocence when the ref catches him out. There's some slightly rough bumps on Moore's end but this otherwise was a really effective heel beatdown, culminating in Don getting huge heat for using the middle rope as a springboard to drop his knee right on Moore's groin which got a lot of disgusted faces from the front row crowd. Don also does solid on the other end of the coin when it comes to working the heel comeuppance spots, getting huge heat for fly-sticking to the ropes whenever his opponent would actually start to land offence (including a pretty cool abdominal stretch transition into a toe-hold attempt by Moore that was shockingly agile from such a old geezer) and managing to survive long enough to get back into things. Finish was surprisingly nasty with Moore taking a couple of big back bumps into the turnbuckles before Don finished him off with a knee drop and a especially brutal looking rowboat-lite (announcer calls it a "Bow & Arrow" interestingly enough) submission where he essentially yanked the back and neck until he got the verbal victory. Super fun 8-minute affair that gets over Don Leo's villainous attitude over a respected vet, felt very much ahead of its time in regards to the more heat-based structure and less of a focus on grindy mat-work. Definitely a fascinating watch for the time period.

I think in many cases that the "bad" parts of a wrestler's career can still be drawn into a positive reflection of their overall work as a whole. People don't comment on Joe's WWE run with the most extravagant of praise but I'd firmly disagree on it being classified as worthless since it showcases how well he did with TV-format matches and how strong his floor was that he was having these sort of decent to good showings with a wide variety of opponents, some good and some awful. For me personally ranking is more down to consistency than peak, even though peak is obviously still extremely important. I will take someone who over 15 years was good to solid regardless of position or role over someone who was a top 10 talent for 2/3 years as a main eventer but was flimsy otherwise.

Don Leo Jonathan Kinda shocking that he wasn't a official nomination earlier. Don Leo has been held in great regard for decades as one of the best giants of his time, his terrific atheticism, and capability to play a strong babyface but a especially strong gift for being a heel, being probably one of the greatest big-man bumpers ever. Was also gifted enough technically that he could wrestle 30/40 minute matches without it ever seeming boring or out of touch, especially impressive since this was a guy wrestling in a time when dropkicks were considered a novelty. 50s discoveries have also further established his case since they show him in his prime having incredible showings with some of the best to do it, so we have even more reason to consider his case beyond some AJPW tours. vs "Tiger" Jack Moore (10/22/1954) vs Roy McClarity (01/24/1955) vs Verne Gagne (04/15/1955) w/ Hans Schnabel vs Argentina Rocca & Roy McClarity (06/10/1955) vs Lou Thesz (10/28/1955) vs Strong Kobayashi (05/02/1972) vs Mr. Wrestling (12/09/1975) vs Dory Funk Jr. (12/17/1975) vs Otto Wanz (07/12/1980)

Taue absolutely had natural talent in regards to being his size while also doing topes and top rope spots, not to also mention the fact that he barely if ever actually seriously trained as he himself has recounted. He didn't take to wrestling perhaps as easily as the other Pillars (nor had their tremendous peaks) but made up for it by his physicality and wide range.

Don't diss Izumida!!!! For real through how does Taue have less chemistry with him than Giant Kimala lol

shameless shilling for the Amano Complete & Accurate The first few minutes of this had the two do some fairly nothing grappling; Asuka's background means that she more or less controls these until Amano starts to take a small lead via negotiating into an Achilles Tendon attempt. Rather than humouring this, Asuka immediately goes into super disrespect mode by backhanding the shit out of her and throwing out big stiff PK's whenever possible to really hammer in the frustration at almost getting out-grappled by a pipsqueak. Asuka was never really known for her particularly striking grappling capabilities (at least in terms of match entertainment, anyway!) but her trying out for legit tight facelocks like she's in MUGA was pretty cool. Amano works especially well with these kind of David/Goliath matches where she needs to grind out advantage by being vicious or smart (sometimes just both! ) seeing her force an extended cross armbar by resorting down to biting Asuka's clamped hand or trying to escape being driven into a Fujiwara armbar shoulder first with Nishimura-style handstands to reverse the leverage are two VERY different counters stylistically, but only really make sense paired together by her alone without seeming bizarre. The grappling definitely got much better despite Asuka's limitations when they started pushing the pace, helped by Amano's eccentric antics in places as mentioned above before they hurled themselves into a short Korakuen brawl which had a couple of outside submissions applied and Asuka giving Amano's head a tour of the signs there, always worth following tradition ig. The striking exchanges they engage in afterwards were super fun, with Amano's high-energy stiff forearms and headbutts paired with Asuka's no-nonsense and equally as stiff heavyweight style making for a striking juxtaposition that got the crowd super behind the underdog Amano here as she had to get bolder and bolder to stand a chance here. They bring out the usual late-Asuka trash table antics however it thankfully is only used for I'd say one real spot (the top rope stomp) before they wisely go back to the meat and bones of the match with bombs and whatnot. Counters here for the record rocked, there's one near the end especially where Amano manoeuvres out of a Tower Hacker into a armbar submission that despite some sudden awkwardness setting it up looked killer when it actually happened, truly a epic moment at least on comparison with some of Kendo Kashin's wackiest transitions. My only real issue is that I think they spend a little too much time sitting in the actual armbar holds themselves (which was always a flaw specific to Asuka, Chig usually sold them much better since she added in more franticness that made it seem like she was legitimately going to have her arm broke) that it kinda negates the tension from them and makes it a bit too obvious that she wasn't going to tap. It builds up nicely though to Asuka relying on her brute strength to power out of another attempt into a Tower Hacker near fall alongside a couple of sharp heel kicks + the LSD to finally get the pinfall. This is a match that's REALLY helped by the fact a non-clipped version exists; without knowing of the first half's existence in regards to the more measured pace between the two and how that explodes into the brawling we see later you'd just think this was a sloppy late-Asuka brawl that only gets truly great at the end without those gimmicks in play. With that added, we have not only solid grappling bits between the two that translate to getting over Asuka's disrespect of the upstart opponent (and then her comeuppance when she almost loses numerous times) but also establish the counter-heavy dynamic behind Amano's success here as she found multiple ways to get back into the match despite the hierarchy difference between the two. I thought as a whole this was a pretty well constructed match; probably one of Asuka's last truly great performances in-ring despite her clear physical limitations being quite apparent here as she mostly kept to the greatest hits and didn't take too many crazy bumps. Amano really could not have a properly bad match for the 2000's, it seems.

been randomly searching out GENTARO content and yeah I'd agree with Jetlag wholeheartedly, he's a super versatile worker. One video has him doing sleazy indies as a weird Shawn Michaels/Bret Hart composite (even down to doing the Sweet Chin Music for a finish) the next will have him do a 30 minute technical epic a few years later as if there's no difference between the two. The man is somewhat deranged in that regard, but there's no denying his talent.

Master Blaster??? Yep, we're going there. I'll give credit to Blaster/Greene: he's not a very good wrestler but he does well enough here as the stocky heavyweight with clear limitations mostly hidden behind his muscle. What really matters with this one is how they work the match itself. The two push their advantages well: Blaster is the cocky big guy who can easily throw his weight around while Ogawa can only get in little quick bits here and there before he's run over. With the focus on a fairly limited power-wrestler, one would think that the crowd wouldn't care much about this at all....but that's exactly the opposite! Ogawa's work on the defensive with his selling and urgency to try to fight back alongside Blaster playing into the bruising heel shtick get the crowd fairly shockingly vocal with this one, with even actual big boos for Blaster when he keeps trying to mangle Ogawa's poor back. Ogawa himself gets in his usual generic underdog spots, including pulling bit for bit the Taue small package counter from last month's Carnival showing to be used here (and it wasn't as smooth either mind). They're done competently and build to the bigger stuff, like Ogawa doing a huge German suplex on Blaster for a near fall that felt completely bonkers given the sheer difference in size between the two. Ogawa jumps well for a bunch of Blaster near-falls as he keeps getting up despite the beatings he's put under. Blaster's facial expressions as the crowd keep egging Ogawa on are good as well, showing him annoyed as he keeps ramping up the bombs to progressively closer calls. Crowd gets loud for Ogawa pushing though regardless and eventually he outlasts Blaster long enough to take advantage of him being knocked into the turnbuckle, snapping on a classic school-boy to steal the win. Alongside the Abby match this is one of Ogawa's first big shine moments, even if it's on a unaired undercard. It showcases his dynamic already of being the smaller man in a land of giants, and we even get little bits of the sneaky but resilient character he'd play to perfection in the late 90's and beyond. Blaster did his job and this is probably one of his best matches as a result since it's one of the few matches Al Greene had where he wasn't either jobbing his heart out or working a boring squash. Definitely not a must-watch but certainly one to mind if you want pre Rat Boy greatness, this was sweet.

Murakami had a pretty productive 2024 despite appearing barely at all and being in his 50's. He got to be apart of a bunch of enjoyable multi-man brawls, his Fighting Detective appearance was good enough considering he was mostly working with Ishikawa at an age where he's close to being a legit pensioner and his SSPW singles match with Super Tiger was a bunch of chaotic fun despite being immensely short. He's proven that there's still some fire in the old ugly lad yet. It was good enough that I actually had him on the Top 50 performers of 2024 for the Violent People VP100 Ballot (which I WILL shill for the sake of it). Nowhere near his quality stints for sure, but absolutely still relevant for any case to be made for the guy.

I best know of him from his epic 6-minute squash with Bas Rutten, definitely something to consider beyond his (mostly decent) RINGS stint

great gimmick, eccentric guy, super memorable...and totally ass in the ring. You hate to see it!

I totally get not liking this match. For me though, I think there's a lot to value. [warning: long ass post below] This is a infamous slog of a match, clocking in at 50+ minutes in length and yes, before you ask, there are versions of this that show it in its entirety if you look deep enough. For one, I can't recommend this to the vast majority of people. Unlike other 50/60 minute matches this takes place mostly outside of the ring, and many minutes are dedicated exclusively to the two brawl-walking through the arena or downtime. What the match DOES give you is extremely well done hard violence that gets uncomfortably uncooperative at points, big table spots that go crazy stiff, and a consistent looming sense of dread whenever they go somewhere else to start swinging. Your mind at points almost becomes numb from the amount of times they hurl a chair at each other's heads going about 50 miles per hour, or the fact that Ito spends a good portion bleeding from the face almost endlessly; you become focused purely on whatever awful carnage the two end up doing and when if ever the match will actually stop. The bloated time and action almost lend themselves into a different form of wrestling where you're not necessarily looking for careful psychology or well-done atheticism but instead the next awful gross moment Hotta will dream up in her twisted mind of hers. One could easily sum this up to the awful blob of shicky overviolence that much of Joshi puro had become at the time; this was around the same chunk of years when GAEA were main-eventing purely off Chigusa/Asuka doing these same kind of trashy brawls, Ozaki was also leaning into this as well and much of the next decade would be very much dictated by those same lows of trashy brawling. I could very easily agree with those claims, but watching this match, I didn't get that same vibe from it; the action in the Chig/Asuka matches still felt "safe"; there was a distance between me and them wherein I knew what they were doing was gimmicky and silly, like with the special branded tables or with the fire-blowing, it's silly and distant enough that even the blood has a layer of transparency where they clearly advertise it as a gimmick, like it's just something there as a prop to add drama. I as the viewer have a sense of intangibility wherein like a piece of fiction I can distance myself from it like mist to air or whatever. This just has blood there nearly from the getgo and......never bothers to milk it. In fact after the first half hour you basically blank it out because it's just in your face at all points. The violence here lacks that same sense of gimmick to it. Hotta drags Ito around with a rope and beats her face raw with kicks; the rope is still a gimmick, but in this case it feels much more threateningly real. No one's going to put you through a table in real life, but someone slamming you on concrete or throwing you off a high height? Those are REAL. It's shit that happens to people every hour of every day. There's no looking through it. And yeah sure there's still the occasional goofy bit like Ito doing huge foot stomps off the top of the ladder, but for the most part like a real fight the glamour is completely stripped, in its place a plodding structure where we see everything from the loose brawling to the chair hurling all at a slow drip. There's some great babyface work from Ito as well as she spends most of this getting her ass kicked; her comebacks are swift but sometimes extended, yet never feel fully confident. She always seems to slip up at the last moment, a flub here and there, maybe even a intentional botch before losing it all back to Hotta who then takes it all for granted with her overconfident control segments. They completely deconstruct the typical hardcore structure by having Hotta do the usual spots but completely nonchalantly, not even trying them as finishes since she in actuality just wants to use the turnbuckle hooks to beat on Ito some more. If this was something of the 90's, one would expect a sense of showmanship there or even extravagance. The kind you'd see from Onita-matches where there's dramatic beats to go with the danger of the spots, but again there's really none of that here. When Hotta wants to swing the turnbuckle hook, she does so like she's done it a million times before; there is no impact to the spot, it's just there with everything else. There's even a really good bit where they have everything positioned at the back of this Kawasaki theatre complex like an actual play; there's even a curtain, only with the pair in front of it. They perform a couple of contrived hardcore spots; a table bump, a foot stomp from the top of the ladder; and when it's done? Hotta is thrown, and Ito dives off it; they plunge from the theatre and back into the miserable pit fight they find themselves both under. And sure this is all (probably) unintentional, but it's a amazing allegory for the complete deconstruction of the 90s hardcore match; even the participants are choosing to willingly leave their comfortable structure to give us something more unseemly, more bizarre. Hotta turns a turnbuckle without ropes into this strange art piece using rope and a ladder; Ito tries using it to climb off, but is then socked stiff in the face and then forced to hang off it and in that moment she's completely lost, drawn into the wreckage of the ring left over. It is within that structure where the finish happens; Hotta wraps a chain around her leg and kicks Ito stiff in the face while she's stuck and then gets the KO count for the victory. I can totally get the issues with this match. It's a fucking mess, and I'd say anyone who's willing to spend 50-something minutes on a match probably has too much time on their hands. For this, though? I thought it was excellent. It's one of the few hardcore matches around this time that felt like it had a soul of sorts, giving us everything it had despite that everything including a bunch of sluggish shit. Hotta feels like the ultimate bully and Ito for one night actually had charisma, what a shocker!

I now have a couple more VGM Studio Isn't Youtube or Dailymotion, but instead from bilibili this time. Namely their Chinese translations of matches, which in turn inadvertently has saved a metric fuckton of 2000's material that is either real hard to find in good condition (NJPW, NOAH) or downright impossible (early OZ, Muto-era AJPW) either way, extremely useful if you want some gems. 飛翔天使221 Awesome old tape collection of early 2000's Dark Age Joshi Puro, like the real heavy stuff that you barely if ever see like GAEA and NEO when they were really on the back-end of business and battling for what little TV time they got. Reliable uploads with a bunch of really unappreciated matches for the time.

This is somewhat clipped but it doesn't seem to be anything substantial, probably like 2 minutes at most. I went and found the unclipped version and it frankly doesn't add a whole lot worth mentioning bar some downtime and brawling. Violento Jack is primarily known for his gory deathmatch schlock which is why it's somewhat shocking that GENTARO not only actually wrestled the guy but additionally did it llave style and pretty damn good to boot. It's nothing like a Masters match or anything, was still quite impressed with what they threw out here, the two clearly knew their stuff. We get a couple of neat sequences where the two basically just go back and forth applying slick holds and counters, Jack throwing out a especially cool chickenwing pinning clutch into a Crossface transition that felt like something you'd see out of a deep-cut ARISON match or something. GENTARO seems out of it until Jack tries for a dive to the outside and gets dodged, eating shit on the floor below and allowing for his opponent to creep back in with leg work. We get a couple of cool counters like Jack countering a kneebar by trapping GENTARO's spare foot to turn it into a no hand toe-hold back on him but it's mostly the other guy in control here, using his heelish antics to attack and bend the legs whenever possible in control segments, fairly decent stuff for what it was. They build up to a couple of quick bombs for near falls, namely a German suplex and backdrop respectfully. Spot of the match comes after the latter as Jack springs up from a near fall 2-count to trap GENTARO in a nifty grounded Octopus Stretch to wear him down enough that he can then recover and immediately pop back into a winning situation with a big package piledriver for the finish. This was pretty solid for what was essentially just a 10-minute TV match, mixing in some fun grappling with GENTARO's ring general antics as a heel to add some colour to the antics here. It's the kind of match that you'd probably overlook in the long run but definitely one that adds immense value to GENTARO's GWE case, especially since he has aplenty of these fun condensed showings.

Thank you for your continued interest! I gave it a quick watch and it absolutely warrants the newfound praise.