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Austin cuts a pretty heelish promo, dumping on the fans who cheer for him but didn't actually do anything to help him, then cuts a heel promo on Undertaker. Good move on his part--then we take a very eerily prescient turn as Austin discusses what kind of role model he would(n't) be as WWF Champion, directed straight toward Vince. He doesn't get a chance to wrap up as Owen and the Bulldog attack him, but Shawn saves again. Right as things are about to wind down, BRIAN PILLMAN re-emerges from the audience and gets in some licks himself with a chair. He's about to Pillmanize Austin but Shawn makes the save again (and man was I getting sick of seeing him). A legendary show, as we begin a period where Monday at around 11pm was the worst possible time of the week, every week--the longest possible period before more wrestling.

I feel like I'm saying this with practically every new episode, but we have a new best segment in Raw history--maybe THE best to this day--I certainly can't think of another contender until the Tyson and McMahon stuff starts in '98. The street fight itself is an awesome intense spectacle, with Austin going nuts with a chair on Bret's knee and wrist, both of which had needed surgery which is what set this angle up. Then the WWF does what it's done a great job of the past few months--booking a hot angle and not resting on their laurels, but going, "Okay, now what can we do to add to this?" In this case, it's Austin being thrown out of the building by Monsoon in one of his last moments of relevance, only to hijack the ambulance and attack Bret again.

Vader is still in Kuwait after threatening the host of a morning talk show over the dreaded "fake" question. A concerned Lawler has a drawing of Vader shoveling camel dung. Yeah, this pretty much sinks Vader as any kind of main event threat. Shamrock cuts a promo, hyping a no-holds-barred match with Vader at Cold Day in Hell, then issues a challenge to Mike Tyson. Yeah, I don't think there was ever anything to this. Ken is starting to get better as a talker.

Of course these two are gold together. Austin wants Bret in a street fight, but after teasing a no-show, Bret accepts but only when he's good and ready. Bret complains about Austin getting a title shot at the Undertaker and promises to send Austin to hell tonight. "If I'm goin' to hell, I'm damn sure takin' you with me!" Bret's cool-as-a-cucumber reaction to Austin psychotically trying to break down his locker room door is tremendous. "Can I have a little bit of respect here?"

This will never really get a lot of attention in the face of Survivor Series and WM13, but this holds up very well in the face of both of those matches. All 3 matches have felt "different." This had a lot of brawling that would draw a DQ in a more routine match, but they change the spots up and emphasize the body part work and down-and-dirtiness of it, rather than going for an "epic." There are still some fantastic dramatic moments here--Austin using his discarded knee brace as a weapon to block the Sharpshooter was a markout moment for me. Ditto with blocking the attempted post-match bell shot with a chair to Bret's leg. Austin goes to town on the knee during and after the match, I think to cover for legitimate surgery and of course setting the stage for Bret's Ironside-like role for the next month or so. As the crowd reaction shows, Austin still wasn't Austin yet--he couldn't spellbind an audience just by his presence, as the last-minute nature of this match set-up hurts it in terms of heat. But it's still a worthy addition to the rivalry in every other way.

Pretty good closing stretch, with Mankind losing his mask for the first time and taking an absolutely insane bump headfirst through an announce table. The post-match is kind of a mess--Bearer is so hideously fat that he can't even do a proper chase, and then the disaster with the non-lighting fireball. Undertaker manages to cover this as well as he can and we eventually do get the payoff, but man oh man was that painful. Plus with him having to do it himself, he comes off as almost heelish. The original booking at least gave him an "out" and made Bearer the heel for blaming him anyway.

Okay-ish match, with Manny busting out some new surprises despite being near 300 pounds. Couldn't believe he did a twisting somersault off the turnbuckle. This is the very first true '00s-style Smark Crowd on a Yearbook--somehow I don't think even the ECW Arena would be chanting "this is not the '80s" and all that other shit. Maxx Justice runs in and they DDT Thompson off the turnbuckle through a table, before Mike Modest makes the save because he hates foreign objects, or something. Thompson was raw, Manny held it together, but overall not bad.

My favorite Taz promo yet--he loves that Sabu has now given him more fuel to hate him more, threatens his puppet RVD (interestingly the "Monday night" talk centers around the fact that RVD going to WCW seemed to be all but a done deal at this point), and Fonzie. Taz ain't no hokey babyface beggin' for support.

More good stuff from the Funker, who's been the unquestioned highlight of ECW for the first part of the year.

I liked this match more than anyone here, though all the criticisms of it is stuff that I can't argue with. I think the overall "atmosphere" and larger booking is a bigger issue than the work itself, which was really strong and really worked to undo all of the misgivings I had about the matwork in the first match. The arm work is really, really good and heated here, paying off what happened in the first match. In a vacuum, this is a very strong match. In a larger sense, I think AJPW's bubble-riffic style has never been more of a liability than it is here. These Yearbooks make it apparent why New Japan was generally ahead of AJPW business-wise: New Japan cards took the 3-ring circus approach that would give you a little bit of everything. If you think flippy junior wrestling is overrated, here's a crazy brawl. If you don't like blood and guts, here's a shootstyle match. Here's two hosses beating the shit out of each other, etc. All-Japan has made token attempts to get out of its shell, but the matches like the Albright/Takayama tag simply weren't that well-received by the fanbase at the time (even if I've personally liked them) because stuff like matwork and cross armbreakers and submissions in general and brawling had been so de-emphasized.

I really liked the pre-match bit with the drawing of letters and the explanation by the announcers, especially the crowd reactions. I don't know if this was "news" to them or not, but it felt like it. You know it's a good talking segment when it transcends the language barrier. So happy to see Loss compare Misawa vs. Kobashi to a WrestleMania main event--that's EXACTLY how it came off to me down the stretch. Bomb, sell, bomb, sell, repeat. It was really good, but it didn't really feel substantial the way the 1/97 match did. Kobashi's arm injury was really well-sold but it didn't feel like the real game-changer that it was in the January match either--it came off more as something else to get in each guy's way so they could fill 30 minutes. I actually liked the matwork at the beginning, but I agree that it didn't really engage the crowd. Misawa's facelock sometimes draws a pop and sometimes gets no reaction at all, and here it was the latter. And dittos again on the Kawada match. It made perfect sense psychologically, but Kawada's first singles win still comes off as a total anticlimax.

I don't know why they felt the need to clip this, but this was another smartly worked death match with two ladies in their element and good build to the big confrontations with barbed wire, particularly the beds on the floor. Even with all of the weaponry surrounding them, they take a less-is-more approach to both the big bumps and the match layout itself--it's simple, right down to the finisher-trading at the ending, but simpliicty works. Toyoda and now Kudo retiring definitely leaves FMW with a major void.

Funny, the match I wanted to see the most coming out of that 6-man was Abby vs. Tiger Mask.

Going back to that Baba quote, it was something Hisa posted on WrestlingClassics way back. I don't have a more concrete source than that.

The thing is: every single thing you're listing, from the lack of legally-available tapes to the lack of foreign wrestling on television to the language barrier to being in a bubble: all that stuff applies just as well to American wrestlers watching Japanese stuff. Yet clearly they managed to do exactly that, a lot. "Watching Japanese tapes" was the most popular thing for young wrestlers in the late 90s to do together. Why would it work so differently in the other direction? Aside from available pipelines drying up, one of the reasons Baba stopped sending young boys over on learning excursions is (and this is an almost-exact quote) "there's nothing more that can be learned in the US." Think about it. And we've rattled off HOW many U.S. stars who didn't know what was going on in Japan? Flair probably doesn't know anybody in the post-Jumbo era in AJPW. Bret Hart in his own book seemed completely unaware that the poor Tiger Mask imitator he dumped on would go on to become a legend. Jim Cornette used to dismiss the Thrillseekers trying to incorporate "Japanese shit" into their SMW matches. Who is "they" in "they managed to do exactly that"? Obviously it was some people, but it sure wasn't everyone. Who was the Japanese equivalent to Dave Meltzer or even Herb Kunze, relentlessly reviewing and pimping American matches to Japanese fans?

I can't believe this is even a debate. I'd be far more stunned that Jaguar would know who Sandman was than I am that Sandman was a Jaguar fan. Jaguar was wrestling, running a business, and training wrestlers. In a pre-digital, pre-Youtube environment she wasn't trading American wrestling tapes.

This is strictly in hindsight, but Baba deciding to pull the trigger and give Misawa the win over Jumbo in 1990.

What would the '90s Japanese equivalent of Sandman be? Would even an American wrestler who's a tape studier be familiar with, say, the Winger if he came up to them?

I have no idea who Kevin Quinn is, but apparently he was a Windy City Wrestling dude who ended up doing spots in Mexico for...who knows what reason. He acquits himself fine here even though he has about 60 seconds of ring time. He's clearly the least of the guys in the match but that's because everyone else looks so good. This builds and builds from a slow start to a blitzing finish, much like a traditional match, as Childs alludes to. Fiera may have been my favorite guy in the match--I dig how he still carries himself as a cocky rudo but just happens to be on the technico side at this stage. And of course it wouldn't be a Fiera match without a loony back body drop bump, and we get one here. Casas and Santo further their rivalry, with the crowd seemingly on Santo's side judging by the crowd chants. Both gets get disqualified as their fight gets out of control, as has happened in so many Survivor Series matches. Eventually this comes down to Felino, a rudo, overcoming 5-on-1 odds to win the whole thing, which may have been a *little* over the top, but if they're going somewhere with it, then okay. Still, Felino's big victory doesn't seem to come off as monumental as I think they were hoping for, and that will hold this back from being a true MOTYC to being "just" a fringe top-10/top-15 contender.

Did it ever mean anything to begin with?

Maybe a low-level MOTYC, and that's saying something considering shoot-style time limit draws are usually something that send me running to hide. This is as stiff and intense as a mat-based match gets, and always verges on the edge of teetering out of control with both guys breaking the rules to subtle degrees--from the foot-biting to kicking while down to being late to break holds--but it never quite gets there over the course of its 30 minutes. Parity is the name of the game here, despite the two different approaches in style, and is a draw that actually works in making you want to see these two go at it again.

The match is whatever but not bad or anything. As soon as Lex begins his comeback he's swarmed by the NWO, as is DDP when he attempts a save. Giant is hesitant to get in with the NWO numbers and Nash holding a lead pipe, but Sting makes his way to the ring with bats for everyone. Nash, to his credit, is the one to get beat up by Sting and the NWO bails. Another strong closing segment making you want to see more. Giant vs. Nash is really a match that should have been built to from the start of the angle, and was something put on hold with Giant's ill-fated turn.

Greene is now buds with Flair despite still having issues with McMichael. Whatever. Piper makes a Congo reference, which is refreshingly hip and modern by his standards. Then we go to Right Said Fred and PeeWee Herman and homophobia and The Godfather and a bunch of other shit. Oh, and Piper is continuing to focus on Hogan even though he's not in the upcoming PPV main event. Greene's promo isn't bad for what it is, even if the talk about entitled NFL rookies is a little whiny. All in all, this really is a mess of a segment, even if there are isolated good parts. Flair and Piper come off as the old-timers that Bruce Springsteen was singing about in "Glory Days"--you can still sympathize them in the face of the NWO, but it's getting more and more difficult.

Still not as hot as either Sunny or Marlena. I remember the Slammy bikini contest mostly for Pettingill saying, as he stood between the Funkettes, "I feel like an Oreo cookie" and Vince absolutely freaking out.

In fairness, this was a time when wrestling was at its most meritocratic--both companies *had* to go with what worked, politics be damned. The WWF would stay that way all the way through the WCW buyout, more or less. WCW would be getting away from that soon enough. Sid has no-showed something or other and is out of the IYH PPV, with the scheduled Bret vs. Sid bout turning into Bret vs. Austin. A hot semi-main event, but one probably made too late in the game to affect buys that much, especially considering no one actually saw this announcement judging by the ratings.