ohtani's jacket

Originally, I didn't intend to re-watch this as it was already cemented in my mind as an all-time lucha classic. But since I've watched so much footage from the year I thought I would cap things off with the two Monterrey matches. What a beautiful wrestling match. This is exactly the type of match that folks should watch when they're first getting into lucha. For longtime fans, it's a gem. A payoff to all those tag matches and trios matches where Panther and Santo squared off and showed us just how beautiful lucha libre can be. In the past, people found it unfortunate that the match ends cheaply but by Monterrey standards it was clean. If not for Villano and Atlantis, this would have been the lucha MOTY for sure.

This was pretty average. The exchanges between Super Crazy and Tajiri were good but the rest of the match was weak. ECW did such a poor job with its presentation. The commentary is ratshit. I would rather watch a legit indy from 2000 than a wannabe national promotion. At least the indy will have some charm.

Nothing like a death match in the morning to get your day started right. Actually, this wasn't much of a death match. There were tables and chairs but that could describe a regular match in 2000. It was a lot of fun, though. It could have been a sprawling mess but they kept things surprisingly tight. Both guys are charismatic which helps. I love Kanemura. He looks like the type of Japanese comedian who'd advertise plus-sized clothing stores but instead of making people laugh his calling in life is to brawl like a motherfucker. Another cool BJW match. I've now successfully cherrypicked BJW for the year. I enjoyed the highs that the promotion had. I've probably watched more garbage wrestling from 2000 than I have from any other year in wrestling history. I won't be jumping through barbed wire anytime soon but I do feel enlightened. Thanks for taking me on the journey (pun intended.)

If you like the NOAH cast you'll like this. Personally, I think Kobashi has taken a step back in NOAH from the best wrestler in the world to an also-ran. and I don't think that Akiyama has really found himself as a heel yet. If you look at guys like Jumbo, Tenryu, and Kawada, they were all heels but all different in their own way. Akiyama pinches most of his heel spots from Kawada but can't summon the same sort of attitude. He doesn't have the rage that fueled Kawada. He's still the same punk ass kid that he ever was. And for that reason, I'm not feeling Kobashi vs. Akiyama. It should be an intense, personal rivalry but it doesn't come across that way. Tenryu vs. Kawada blows it away, if you ask me. This match did have a fabulous finish, however, centered around Shiga vs. Kikuchi. They produced exciting action all match long and it culminated in a cracking finishing stretch that was probably the most fun I've had watching NOAH thus far.

This had a pretty intense opening. Williams appeared hellbent on proving he had something left. Unfortunately, the match lost steam as it went along and turned into a regular-sort of tag match instead of something special.

This was cool. Tokyo has a lot of live event spaces like this and it was surreal to see one of them being used for a barbed wire match. The shitty cover of Wild Thing that Onita uses reminds me of that old Swamp Thing cartoon. I don't find Onita as charismatic as others do but I have to admit that his entrance was pretty cool here and if you can pull that off in a club with 200 people as easily as you do a baseball stadium then you must have a fair amount of charisma. I like his look at this time as well. He reminds me a bit of veteran rocker, Eikichi Yazawa. I LOVED how this was worked on the mat. It probably went on for too long, and Onita is another of those Japanese workers who make strange breathing noises to keep from running out of breath, but I was frankly surprised that Onita could work the mat so well. I guess he hadn't forgotten his All Japan training after all. That was actually the catalyst for them to ditch the matwork as Onita started tossing some verbal grenades about it being a stalemate due to his All Japan background. They finished things off with a series of nearfalls that were fitting for the locale and the fans got right behind Takagi. Y'know when I'm looking off the match listings and Chad's star ratings, this is the kind of match I would scoff at and think "I can give that a miss" but it ended up being one of, I dunno, the 50 best matches in Japan in 2000. A large part of that was how unique and interesting it was but they really worked an excellent match in such a tiny crawl space and I liked it a hell of a lot.

I don't think this flowed very well. The men didn't seem comfortable working with the women. When they made a save they would break the girls up like they were children fighting and every time they did intergender stuff the women got all the offense. Surely, they could have done some exhibition-y stuff where it didn't matter too much that the women were bumping for an arm drag or something similar. I'm pretty sure the Apaches vs. Hamadas was less stunted than this. Yagi was fun to watch but that's a given on most nights. She got way too much offense against Sasuke but that was due to the strange nature of the match. The finishing stretch wasn't bad but the match would have been better if they'd done more double teaming to make it a more competitive bout.

This was pretty good. I'm sure there have been dozens of matches in the record books of similar quality to this so I would call this standard quality for a mask match. The elimination period was a bit too long but once the final pair were decided this was old-school mask vs. mask wrestling with plenty of great visuals and some nice dramatic moments. There was a time when Fishman's mask was one of the most valued in all of lucha. He probably waited a bit too long to drop it but those are the choices people make in life. I was surprised by how bald he was, to be honest. He looked like he could have snuck down to the local supermarket without anyone guessing he was a famous luchador. A really "quiet" unmasking compared to VIllano III given that they were contemporaries in the UWA but at least the action was worthy of a mask vs. mask match and carried the tradition into the new century.

And then there was this... This was some Escape From New York shit right here. I don't know if it was any good but this is what wrestling will look like if a world leader ever pulls the trigger.

This was cool. Death matches aren't my thing. You know I'd rather watch Lou Thesz work a headlock for an hour than watch a death match, but I thought this was a cool title match. Sure, the crowd brawling was shitty, but it was 2000... everybody was doing shitty crowd brawling in 2000. You need to write that shit off and not let it bug you so much. I liked these guys and liked the effort they put in. Maybe I'm in a good mood because I think it's great that Yamakawa uses Journey as his entrance music but nothing about the bout felt convoluted. It flowed pretty well and the setup to the board spots was okay. There was a bit of wrestling here and there and some decent selling. Other people may have been expecting a classic but for a guy like me who is predisposed toward disliking this type of match, it wasn't bad. Not bad at all.

Men's Teioh had an interesting career. People always talk about Sano's career but Men's career is just as interesting. This was a solid juniors tag. I reminded me of those New Japan tags with Makabe and Tanahashi. What is with these young lions being so jacked? I guess the young guys were more interested in bodybuilding than their seniors. I loved it when Journey started blaring after Yamakawa won. I may not be able to watch another Big Japan match without listening to Separate Ways.

This was okay. I'm not familiar with these workers so I wasn't surprised one way or the other. I thought it was a bit move heavy for a Southern Style tag. Where was the heat? And the selling and the FIP in stuff? There was a lot of double teaming and innovative tag wrestling but it didn't seem to matter that Thompson was worked over. The commentators were trying to add a bunch of psychology to the match but it didn't mesh with the in-ring action. I'm sure Southern style tag with an indy twist has been done better n other matches. This imitated a Southern tag but I don't think it got the details right. But I guess what Chad is saying is that it was miles better than what they usually did.

This was pretty good. I liked how it was worked as an apuesta match in the beginning and not some watered down shit but I did have a few complaints. First of all, it should have been a 2/3 falls match. That would have eliminated the need to have a restart. SUWA could have simply won the first fall and Dragon Kid could have battled his way back. Secondly, in this sort of match Dragon Kid needs to be pinpoint accurate with his offense. And he wasn't. Not by a longshot. Thirdly, there was no need for Crazy Max to interfere. SUWA was kicking ass and looked like The Man. He didn't need anyone interfering. Lastly, when it was all said and done did Black Dragon (or whoever it was) need to attack Dragon Kid? That was pretty stupid especially since GAORA cut to Dragon Kid cuting SUWA's hair as though nothing had happened. The GAORA commentary was terrible but at least SUWA pulled a Fuerza Guerrera-level cheapshot at the end. That was class personified. SUWA was great in this but it was poorly booked compared to the Arai bout.

If I'm ever going to get into FMW it has to be with a multiple-man match, right? Right? I liked how this bout provided everyone with short bursts of action that masked whatever flaws they might have in singles matches. And the injury to Oya gave them a focal point during the tricky middle period where the heat had worn off, and while the Shinzaki turn didn't make much sense to the casual observer at least it was a guy trying to aid the face side instead of his rudo partners turning on him. Entertaining bout.

This was a nice match. For a guy who is supposed to be the enforcer for Crazy Max, I was impressed with how well SUWA called this. Arai seemed a bit weedy at first but he had incredibly plucky offense and I loved that unique diving headbutt of his. I also loved how it seemed SUWA would put Arai away to send a message to Dragon Kid until Arai upset the apple cart. I also think more Japanese wrestlers should celebrate with sake. They usually have a cup backstage but Arai spraying sake everywhere was awesome. This was a well-booked, well put together bout.

I had no idea what the story was here and couldn't be arsed reading up on it. The beginning to this match was as heatless and rudderless as you could possibly imagine. I actually thought it was pretty terrible pro-wrestling. Then Tanaka woke me from my apathy by absolutely abusing Hayabusa and after that they threw some decent bombs. The match as a whole felt like a failure, though. I don't know what it is with Hayabusa. He aims for the sky with every single match and always falls to the ground.

I've always been fascinated with Mr. Gannosuke. I've read guys like Loss, Chad and Jerome talk about him but never taken the plunge. I'm guessing a match against Sabu isn't the best gateway to more Gannosuke since it was pretty generic and didn't give him much chance to show off his offense or character. But we'll see what other stuff he does in the early 00s.

For the database purposes, Khaos should be Kahoz. This was supremely weak. I would have LOVED a great minis match but all we got was some sloppy action followed by an angle where Kahoz and Espectro Jr turned on their Abismo forcing their regular-sized counterparts to get involved. Sagrada botching two spots in a row to end the primera caida killed this for me.

I saw most of the build to this so it's only right that I watch the match. I knew there was a chance that it would be bad. There's no guarantee that Perro vs. Caras would have been good in 1991 let alone 2000. I tried to concentrate on it being Perro Aguayo vs. Cien Caras instead of worrying about the match quality. That worked for a while, but goddamn was this match short. I think it may have been a single fall. The crowd was ecstatic when Perro got a cheap win, but it had to be one of the least earned apuesta victories in Perro's storied career. Afterward, Perro and Aguayo brawled in front of Caras while Cien was getting his head shaved. Then Pierroth showed up in a wheelchair, which finally explains what happened to him in the latter half of the season. Pretty shitty main event. I'm beginning to doubt whether the Universo/Perro match is as good as I remember it being.

Fun match. It was only a couple of minutes long but the crowd was hot and it was fun watching Regal sell for Austin. The finish saw Austin accidentally DQ'ed which he didn't take kindly to. He gave the ref a stunner and let Regal know he wasn't finished with him. The look on Regal's face at the end was priceless. He got some beer on his face but reacted as though he'd tasted his own blood. Similar to the Austin/Benoit match it was a bout that promised more in the future but it was cool to see two guys who'd gone up and down the road together in WCW having a match together on RAW.

Well, it all boiled down to this. I suppose the WWF deserves some credit for tying all of its main event storylines into a single match like this. If you enjoy WWF "Over the Edge" style booking then you'll enjoy this as it featured the usual twists and turns. Vince brought a truck to ringside to tear down the cage and managed to rip the door off before Commissioner Foley stopped him. The match sprawled out of the cage and for a while it was Hell on the Cars as they brawled on the PPV set. Eventually, they ended up on the roof of the cage. With Michaels and Foley setting the precedent that someone should fall off the cage or through the cage there was an expectation that something nuts would happen but none of the workers seemed like the type to take a crazy bump. Sure enough, they did a gimmicked fall where Rikishi fell onto the truck that Vince had commandeered. Austin's reaction was the best thing about it. After that, the guys left standing hit their finishers on each other and Angle fluked a win that let all of the heat out of the building. They were ready to explode if Austin or the Rock won the belt but instead the finish went down like a lead balloon. The bout was overbooked for my liking but the WWF had little choice in that regard if they were going to deliver on their own promises and the fans' expectations. Austin and Triple H deserve credit for working hard the entire bout and having a wilder brawl than any other pair. Their work here was better than their Survivor Series bout and it was a decent bookend to Triple H's PPV performances. Interesting too that Benoit and Jericho weren't involved. Instead, they were stuck in a pair of rubbish feuds. It feels like it would have been a more accurate coda to the 2000 WWF main event scene if Benoit and Jericho had been involved.

This felt more choreographed than your typical WWF main event. They all feel choreographed to some extent or another since presumably the road agent, or whoever was in charge at the time, maps out the bout with the workers beforehand to ensure its a match worth laying down your bucks for. Perhaps the Rock had a little bit of leeway the same way they allowed him creative license with his promos but he's a worker who excelled within the WWF formula so I can't imagine him deviating too much what Patterson or another production guy had to say. Angle clearly needed the safety net of a WWF match layout and it was mostly for his benefit that the match felt like color by numbers. The booking continues to be stale but I guess that's what happens when you don't have an offseason. I was surprised that Angle went over here. Even if it was mostly for storyline purposes he was still green and didn't look ready for the big time yet. They didn't exactly stick a rocket on him but he's come a hell of a long way in the six months since Wrestlemania.

Man, I have zero memory of the feuds that Jericho had in 2000 after Benoit and Triple H. Why are Jericho and X-Pac feuding? Why are they having a cage match? There can't have been much to this feud since JR was pretty tame on commentary. Decent midcard bout but it made zero sense to me why it should be inside a cage. Cages are meant to be used for blood feuds or feuds where there's been too much outside interference. This felt like they tacked on the cage match stip because they hotshot the match-up. The match was okay but despite their efforts, you'd be hard pressed to call it memorable.

Decent follow-up to the Austin/Benoit match on RAW but they don't escalate the feud any further.