ohtani's jacket

The quality of the go-home shows in the WWF is declining along with the booking and matchmaking. Previously, they'd serve up a red-hot match before the go-home match, not some match that was cold before it reached the table. The angle at the end did lead to a great Smackdown main event but the show as a whole left me with zero interest in seeing Austin vs. HHH.

Some nice chemistry between these two but if it was meant to be the blowoff to their feud then it was pretty rubbish.

Austin cuts an edgy promo in Stephanie's face but the angle is still trash. Benoit does a decent job of delivering his lines and we have ourselves a match. Austin tries to outwrestle Benoit in the early going but he's a bit slow. I don't know if it was ring rust or the fact that it had been a while since he'd worked some of these holds. He was beginning to settle into a groove when Benoit took over and from there it was a regular TV bout without much focus on technical wrestling. There wasn't the same chemistry as Benoit's bouts with Rock, Triple H, and Jericho but it definitely had potential as a program. Too bad they ran with it. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Austin went over clean without any interference from the Radicalz.

This was meathead wrestling even with the little guys involved. Not bad if you like that sort of thing but no different from the New Japan heavies. They try to work in a bit of heelwork but Kikuchi being beaten up in 2000 is hardly cutting edge and Akiyama pinches most of his heel spots from Kawada. Still waiting for NOAH to blaze its way through the Japanese wrestling world.

Why were these two fighting in Puerto Rico? When did Bruce Prichard turn into a heel ref all of a sudden? Match didn't have the same vibe with the Puerto Rico commentators discussing JWA angles over the top of it.

Austin's back but I'm not sure he's been missed, It doesn't help that he's back with an absolute turd of an angle and having four-way promos that end with stunners. Rock vs. Benoit was good but the run-ins sucked. The set-up for Benoit vs. HHH was about as innocuous as it gets. The WWF feels like it's cooling off (product wise) and the monthly PPV grind is definitely a factor. I wonder how much better the WWF would have been if they'd cut out some of the bullshit B level PPVs that replaced In Your House. The last quarter of the year feels like they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for match-ups. The booking has also become stale. I guess they were coasting until the Royal Rumble build but the energy isn't the same as the first half of the year.

What is this? Bryan Danielson in a mask? Spanky? Is this part of Danielson's Blue Blazer period or something? The match was pretty good but it seemed to carry weight because it was early Danielson than being a legitimately good match from 2000.

This was some intense shit. I kind of wished the fans would shut up and appreciate the intensity of the bout but I guess that is all part of indy heat. I didn't really get the story stuff at the end but it didn't matter. These guys match up extremely well and bring an intensity to the simplest holds that you wish was true for wrestling as a whole.

I think the moral of the story here is that you don't dance when you defeat Chris Benoit for the Intercontinental title.

This was a fun match but it was too long and outstayed its welcome. Gran Apache was a badass motherfucker and I thought the Vipers were pretty cool too. Weak babyface team, though. Too disconnected from one another and no chemistry to speak of. I agree with Tim that it was too rudo heavy. The crowd brawling was fun though since the audience didn't have chairs and had to leave their belongings behind every time the wrestlers came barging through.

The WWF has really excelled at these go-home shows in 2000 but this one was a little hokey for my liking. I had a smirk on my face when the Rock lost it. It may have been all right if JR had called it but Cole sounded like a YouTuber. Good matchmaking but the execution wasn't there.

Yay, Rock vs. Benoit. This has to be the most unheralded feud of 2000. These segments were less about the match and more about the angle that set up Fully Loaded but it was all go and JR was hoarse by the end of it. Great stuff.

What a match. This is the type of Japanese wrestling I enjoy -- a beautiful mix of pro-wrestling brawling and UWF style submissions. I loved how Takayama would go for a submission after a strike and the simple, direct focus on the head and arm. I also loved how flat out nasty it was. There were times when Tayakama was working a hold and looked like a shoot style guy employing his strategy, and other times when it was straight brawling using the ring post or any other measure necessary. Kobashi gave a virtuoso performance and looked like the best wrestler in the world at this point. His knees were clearly fucked and he was about as slow as Taue, but his selling was beautiful. There was that amazing visual after he had tried to knock Takayama out where he was squinting through the pain and the sweat, desperately trying to catch his breath, and you wondered whether he was puzzled at the ref stopping the onslaught or Takayama continuing to fight. What impressed me most about Kobashi's performance were the choices he made on offense. We all know that Kobashi has a large offensive repertoire, arguably the biggest among any heavyweight to ever enter the ring, but this was a match that demanded a stripped down performance offense-wise and Kobashi was aware of that. He wasn't a guy with a lot of submission holds in his bag but he was able to do spots that looked cool like the Tsuruta tribute spot. And he was clever enough to use his good arm for body blows and shots to the head. He also relied on the lariat instead of throws. Really smart match that made Takayama look like a monster in a way that a standard All Japan match wouldn't have. In some ways, it was similar to Kawada vs. Albright except that Kobashi's star shone brighter than Kawada's. Definitely one of the better Japanese matches of 2000. In the top handful as far as the men go. Highly recommended.

After her negative six star classic with Ozaki, what can KAORU produce against Sugar? Whatever goodwill KAORU generated from the Aja match has quickly evaporated. I can't believe that in the old days when there were battle lines drawn over Joshi that anyone thought KAORU was better than LCO. Not even on LCO's worst day were they as bad as KAORU and that's saying something since LCO had some downright awful days. This wasn't as offensive as the Ozai match but it was still stupid. Why does KAORU even bother with these hardcore matches when she consistently loses? Don't you think she'd realize that jumping off ladders and crashing through tables wasn't paying off? Apparently not.

This match was fucking stupid and brought out the worst qualities in Ozaki. Stick her in a match with Nagashima and she's electric. Put her in a match like this and she's trash. One of the worst matches of the year for sure. It ended with KAORU stuck inside a plastic bag for Christ's sake. Negative a million, billion stars.

Wrestling Aja can seem like an exercise in futility at times, but she did try to show some vulnerability here. There was never any doubt over how the match would end, but Nagashima scrambled well and was able to damage Aja's arm. I thought they would give Nagashima a shot at submitting Aja and that Aja would fight through the pain to hit the back fist, but they went a different route. Even though Nagashima didn't get as far as Satomura or Hamada, she still came out of the bout with her credibility intact and that mattered to me since she was one of the top 5 young stars in Joshi and it would have sucked if she'd be gobbled up in a bout she didn't need to be booked in. So that was a relief.

This was a fun handheld with the heel/face reversal. I think I prefer Jericho as a heel at least when it comes to his promos.

Rock Bottom! Rock Bottom! Rock Bottom! Anytime JR loses his voice on a broadcast it must be a pretty good episode of RAeW. There are a few too many allusions to Montreal in this booking but I guess only a few years had passed. The Rock and Benoit have good chemistry in the ring but this match was never about the Rock and Benoit. There's some other kind of match coming up with some sort of special guest referee. I didn't quite catch it This was another strong go-home segment making me wonder if that was the WWF's forte in 2000.

This was a pretty decent RAW. I'm glad I went back and watched some of this TV. I didn't really mean to. I kind of stumbled into it. It's had an interesting effect, though. Jericho is a guy who isn't that great on the mic, has lousy catchphrases, and doesn't have any signature spots that electrify the crowd, but I'm able to accept him as a player in the main event scene thanks to episodes like this. This was a big night for Jericho wrestling three times in one evening and being the focal point of the McMahon-Helmsley ire. He did a good job carrying his end and the WWF machine did the rest.

Another hard-hitting bout between these two with Benoit busting open the nose that he originally injured at Backlash. I do question why they had Jericho win the belt on Smackdown when he could have just as easily won it at Backlash but the main focus here is the continued intensity in this rivalry.

I must be the only Dean Malenko fan I know. I could watch him gobble up folks on the mat all day long. This match had people fantasy booking a whole new era of WCW style Cruiserweight classics in the WWF. That never happened but it was worth dreaming about as this match represented something rare in the WWF -- a solid undercard bout. Things were changing with the talent acquisitions from WCW, but if you grew up watching the WWF you'll know that the majority of the time they put all their eggs in the main event basket. This type of undercard bout was exactly what smart WWF fans wanted at the time. In some cases because they were just getting into tape trading but were still fans of the WWF or because they wanted the WWF to completely overtake WCW by replicating its undercard, which was generally considered to be one of the few advantages that WCW had over the WWF and something which stuck in the craw of WWF diehards. In the end, I guess it ended up being Dean Malenko's only Light Heavyweight match of any great significance. I wonder what would have happened to Malenko if he'd made it to the Smackdown Six era. Personally, I would have loved to have seen him take on all those guys. But I think my ultimate dream would have been for Malenko to end up in Japan working BattlARTS dates with Yuki Ishikawa and Carl Malenko. Like I said, I'm the only Dean Malenko fan I know.

Did JR say this was going to be a restaurant quality match? Good match but it seemed like they were put off by the lack of crowd heat and had to generate their own momentum instead of feeding off the crowd. The crowd woke up for the finishing stretch and were treated to some bullshit with Tim White. And it wasn't restaurant quality bullshit either. JR was confused about the finish and then Jericho snapped and put White in the Walls of Jericho. He suddenly grew wild-eyed and looked a bit like Emilio Charles Jr. Now I remember why this feud was such a disappointment to me at a time where I mostly watched WWF from PPV to PPV. The detail work was good but the overall arc was poor. PPV matches should be better than TV matches but this wasn't half as exciting as the tag match on RAW. That's a fail in my book, but I don't think it was the workers' fault. The booking swung from WWF at its best on RAW to lazy as fuck PPV payoff. If you want to keep the feud going find a more creative way to do it.

More of the same. The only difference this week is that Eddy is supposedly as horny as Lawler.

This was weak. Eddy had such an outstanding heel persona in WCW that I'm not sure why he had to "build" one in the WWF. And a goofy one at that. These two didn't mesh anywhere near as well as Benoit and Jericho have been, and I blame that mostly on Eddy's lack of confidence. It took a while for him to find his feet in the WWF. When he finally did, he had arguably one of the greatest runs in company history but he was a long way from that level in 2000. In fact, I think you can draw a parallel to Negro Casas. People are always saying that Casas has been one of the best workers in the world for every year of his professional career, and they've said similar things about Eddy Guerrero. But here they are having down years. It just goes to show that most wrestlers have peaks and valleys depending on who they're working with and how they're being booked.

There was some fantastic action in this that paid off the long buildup to the match and set the tone for Sunday. WWF booking at its best really.