ohtani's jacket

JWP has had some decent wrestling in 2000 but it lacks the one thing the promotion always had --- heart. There's no heart and soul anymore now that most of the girls have retired or drifted toward GAEA. From what I understand, Bolshoi is the one keeping the promotion afloat but the promotion sorely lacks the chemistry of the previous roster and that close-knit feeling the workers had. Hyuga hadn't really bloomed in her role yet and I thought she looked far from world class in this but it was a pretty average match all round. The comedy between Reggie and Kyoko didn't do much for me and nothing really clicked offensively. Skippable.

There is a massive jump in those recommendations from 2001 to 2011, Watching Parka in Monterrey in 2000 he isn't a great brawler by any stretch of the imagination. I'm interested in revisiting that Santo match to see how much of a classic Santo brawl it is vs. a great Parka performance.

Am I the only one who is reminded of Gordi every time I see Thanos pop up somewhere?

Fun and energetic match feat. the dominant pairing of Chigusa and Satomura. They really should be on opposite sides from each other at this point. Chigusa sold a lot for the overmatched girls while Satomura took on the role of finisher. She wasn't as clinical as Chigusa may have liked (in both a kayfabe and a non-kayfabe sense one feels) but got the job done. Uematsu was a joy to watch as usual and The Bloody took the fight to Chigusa. Enjoyable while it lasted.

This was a decent 6-man that had Korakuen rocking at times. Hoshikawa showed his versatility in playing the FIP although it wasn't 100% natural. He did pretty well for a big ass-kicker, though. It made sense for the heels to try to work over the opposition's biggest weapon and played into the rivalry between Togo and Hoshikawa but it left the face side looking a bit thin. They had some decent shine spots but looked a bit weak in numbers. The action was pretty good -- as we've come to expect from Osaka Pro -- but it was too short for a main event bout and the finish didn't quite click as Hoshikawa regrouped and recovered too easily from being the man in peril. I wasn't expecting a classic overcoming the odds story (or anything close to it) but I do think if you're going to make FIP something more than time killing you need to work the finish a bit better than that. Not up there with the better Osaka 6-mans of the year.

Osaka Pro in Tokyo? Say it ain't so! This lacked the familiar atmosphere of their Osaka matches but it was still a pretty good wrestling match even if it did feel like a tour match at times. There was a difference in quality depending on who was in control since Delfin was masterful at this stage of his career and Murahama was still a bit raw, but Murahama has so many cool moves that you can forgive him for not passing his offense that well. The botched dive was bad and the stench lingered for a while afterward (Murahama's nervy response not helping matters) but they put it behind them and finished well. An exhibition match at heart but Delfin looked great. It will be hard for anyone to topple him as the year's best Japanese worker.

I don't think this match delivers on its amazing buildup. I wish they hadn't gone the PRIDE route and instead had a classic BattlARTS match. The outside brawling was weaker than in any of the tags prior and felt out of place in the style of match they were going for. It's strange to me that there was more memorable snoot style stuff in Osaka Pro than there was in BattlARTs in 2000.

Worked my way through the available footage from 1930. Most of it is newsreel clips of the finish. The standard finish to a bout in 1930 was guys throwing each other, and knocking each other off their feet as many times as they could, to ear their man down for the body press. Some of the finishes were wilder and rougher than others but that was the general gist. The finish could come after an hour or more of wrestling, though, so the real gems from the 1930 footage are the longer clips of Gus Sonnenberg vs. Count Zarynoff and Shikat vs. Londos which show you what the body of the bout looked like. There wasn't a lot of matwork shown presumably because the men filming the bouts wanted to save their film for the standup portions which promised to be more exciting. There was a strong emphasis on the tie-up in 1930. We're used to seeing a tie-up or a lock-up to stand a bout but they constantly returned to it in the early 30s as a means of throwing their opponent and further weakening him. There were a lot of cool escapes to avoid being thrown and a lot of cool work leading to the tie-up especially in Londos/Shikat where they kept giving each other shots to the face and head before the tie-up. I also noticed quite a lot of European flair from workers like Count Zarynoff which was cool to see. Also, I must add that Paul Boesch commentating over home videos of himself wrestling in the 30s is one of the treats in the 1930 collection.

Watched a couple of matches of the amazing hypnotist and wrestler, Dr. Lee Grable. The first match was a short match against JTTB and journeyman, Ivan the Terrible, which didn't tell us a heck of a lot about Grable. The second was a long main event tag match with Grable and Sandor Szabo vs. John Tolos and Hans Schnabel. On paper, it looked like it might be a bit vanilla but it ended up being fairly solid. Grable was the smallest man in the match but worked with a ton of fire and had some great forearm smash spots and energetic work off the ropes. The bout was a good chance to check out a young and handsome John Tolos years before the Blassie feud and a pretty decent look at Szabo too, whose suplex hold was heavily featured. I appreciated the steady commentary of Bill Welsh, who took the time to explain between falls the mechanics of the suplex, Szabo's background in wrestling and how the Szabo/Grable team came to be. There were some neat post-match interviews too where Schnabel (who sounded more like a longshoreman than a German heel) slyly explained that the suplex is, in fact, a chokehold or stranglehold, and another from the babyface team where Szabo expounded on some wrestling philosophy explaining the differences between tag wrestling and singles matches. I can't remember being overly sold on Szabo before but listening to him speak I began to like the idea of a Hungarian Greco-Roman wrestler coming to the States to work the catch-as-can style and his suplex was nice, especially the one on the larger Schnabel. Tolos was good in his role as a young heel and Schnabel was solid as the wise old head in the corner giving him instructions. Pretty decent look at everybody and a good match to boot.

This was a decent match but there weren't any standout moments worth getting excited about. It was nice that Liger got a decent amount of offense before the inevitable tap out.

Well, this wasn't awful. It was perfectly acceptable meathead power wrestling. The match sagged in the middle as matches often do when there's a hot beginning and a hot finish but No Fear beating the crap out of each other was worth taking a look at. Then they staged another angle. I guess they are going for a 1980s All Japan feel with these chaotic finishes. Taue taking his shirt off has to be the least intimidating enforcer moment in the history of professional wrestling. And the backstage segment was weak. Taue threw the vending machine trash box at Omori and all these cans spilled on the floor. Listening to people step on them was grating and the entire thing was poorly filmed and poorly staged. It's not like they've had a lot of experience doing this sort of stuff so I can forgive that but there's no way that these are hot angles. Necessary perhaps (in terms of a different direction) but not great by WWF or CMLL standards for 2000 era booking.

Someone needs to repost that video about what they don't teach you in wrestling school about how to get over with a modern audience. it's buried in a thread somewhere and I can't find it.

This was a disappointment. I tried to curb my expectations since it was just a Super Libre mano a mano and not an apuesta match but it was still frustrating. I don't think Parka had fully developed as a brawler at this stage and while Shocker has taken 2000 by storm it's not really clear how good a brawler and/or apuesta worker he is. We weren't given much of a clue since this bout revolved around outside interference and a steady dose of Monterrey bullshit. I guess Parka starts coming into his own as a brawler in 2001 since that's when his first classics appear. Shocker may not have been the right opponent for the type of match I was hoping for but this fizzled a bit like Dandy vs. Antifaz. I still think Shocker is in the run for WOTY but this didn't help his case.

This was the most fun Monterrey's been in a while. It was a classic Monterrey undercard bout with Los Orientales being a trio gimmick that reminded you of the Ninja Turtles and Thundercats and all of the other cartoon themed trios teams of the territory's heyday. The workers flubbed a lot of spots but that added to the charm. It was simply fly by the seat of your pants undercard lucha. At the heart of it was a right scrap between Sangre Azteca and Ricky Marvin. They went at each other hard and a lot of their work looked super modern compared to most of the lucha from 2000. Their standoff at the end wouldn't look out of place in a 2018 bout if you ask me. This was a great match to watch if you're a Ricky Marvin fan as he wrestled with an intensity that's impossible to summon in his overseas bouts. In fact, this may have been the best undercard match of the year when you consider that none of the others had a pairing as strong as Azteca vs. Marvin. I really enjoyed this and would shortlist it on a matches worth watching list for 2000 lucha.

For the record, there is a 1992 trios match on tape that is the oldest Lucero match out there.

Oh yeah, Charlie Lucero... This was a classic example of how one matchup can make the most inconsequential of matches worth watching. Charlie did some lovely stuff with Silver Star to lead things off (years before their maestro matches), and later on, they came back and had a phenomenal brawling sequence that was straight out of Satanico's playbook and left me clamouring for a singles match from this era. The rest of the bout was largely crap, especially the shit with the pool cue and Damian's balls but those Lucero vs. Silver Star exchanges are something I won't forget when I look back on the year.

Waste of talent, really. Santo held it together and made it fun by being Santo, basically, but if you've seen a Santo match before that's not going to wow you. The Tarzan Boy angle is starting to get irritating but I did like how pissed Porky was at the end.

Charlie Lucero is one of my favorite maestro workers so I was looking forward to this. I'm used to seeing him work as a tecnico so I was surprised he was on the rudo side here. He's not the most fiercely charismatic wrestler but he gave it a go. He had a neat exchange with Emilio to start things off. Emilio has been struggling physically in 2000 but he's still chugging away. The rest of the bout was built around the tecnicos' contempt for Pimpi. Niebla was a bit too spiteful for my liking but there were some quality Pimpi spots and I liked the dynamic between Pimpi and Brazo de Oro. I'm sure you've all seen the George Kidd spot where Johnny Saint and Steve Grey roll themselves into a ball. At one point, Pimpi did perhaps the most disturbing ball in wrestling history. Then he proceeded to sit in the lap of one of the local men which didn't please the old guy sitting next to them. The match wasn't really heading anywhere but I still hated the finish. Tecnicos faking a foul is one of the worst finishes possible and made Niebla seem like even more of a dickhead. Oh well, at least I got to see Charlie.

Shocker burns Parka's mask at the start but Parka doesn't care and dances with some chicks in the crowd. Shocker vs. Parka is a good thing but this was a boring bout. They went through the motions of a rudo beatdown and a tecnico comeback but there was no edge to it. These matches work best when the other wrestlers hate each other too but we didn't get that level of intensity here. Casas tried hard to be a traditional foil for this sort of match but the rudos were on autopilot. Parka's humiliation wasn't quite severe enough and his comeback wasn't inspiring. They progressed the feud from the week before but I've seen tons of lead-in matches that were better than this.

It's hard to judge from short clips, but judging by the footage we have, Gus Sonnenberg doesn't strike me as anything special.

I keep waiting for a match where Fuerza takes over and delivers a performance of old but it never happens. This was probably his best performance all year which isn't saying much. I don't know what happened to post-96 Fuerza but his charisma took a nose dive. It's weird because he still looks like he has the physical tools. Some decent stuff from Pimpi as usual but Felino was more interested in doing his pissing pose than tearing it up on the mat with Fuerza and the others were window dressing. Monterrey really is like diggin' in the crates compared to IWRG and CMLL. Hopefully, we can unearth some hidden gems in time.

This started on the best possible note by having El Dandy square off with Casas. Remember their classic from '92? Well, they had the same chemistry eight years later. Their exchanges weren't blow away great but they were creative and original and the kind of exchanges you only see when two masters of their craft square off with each other. There was a noticeable difference to how Dandy approached the Casas exchanges compared to his work with everyone else and it was one of the few times all year that he's looked like the Dandy of old. Following on the heels of Casas and Dandy were Zumbido and Antifaz and Panther and Tarzan Boy. Something appears to be stewing between Zumbido and Antifaz as they were paired together a lot during the bout. Their work was okay but not as engaging as the others. Tarzan Boy earns my vote for Most Improved Worker. If you'd told me at the beginning of the year that he'd be holding his own in technical exchanges I would have never believed it. Least of all with Panther. He was doing his Arena Mexico shtick of wanting to roll with the rudos which overshadowed his contribution to the match but he had one other polished exchange with Dandy that supported my claims. The last pairing was the main course, Shocker vs. Parka. It was strictly comedy but the good kind that cracks you up. I loved the stooge spots especially the face plant on the apron. After a long primera caida where everyone worked respect pairings the match ran out of steam. It was too long and the heat segment meandered with the rudos strolling about while the crowd waited for a tecnico flourish that never really came. I liked the opening fall but the match died on the vine when the rudos took control. That's too bad given the talent involved but there are no guarantees when you watch a lucha trios. None whatsoever. You can have a great match between unknown workers or a mediocre one between star talent. You never know. Still, it's worth watching the first fall here if you're a guy or a gal who likes a lucha exchange. Or if you wanna see a wee bit more Casas vs. Dandy and even a bit of Casas vs. Panther. If you're a lucha fan you take that kind of stuff whenever you can get it. So I wouldn't say this was a total loss. Just a missed opportunity to have the best trios match of the year, potentially. For the record, I would say that bout where Pierroth electrocuted Villano III would probably win my vote for trios MOTY.

This was worth watching just to see Cerebro doing his thing. You can pretty much just track him the entire time and he's always doing something of interest. He had worked a title match with Fantasy a few weeks prior after Fantasy beat him in a mano a mano but there didn't seem to be any meat to their feud. Instead, Cerebro worked mostly with Mike Segura and Star Boy. The two pairings couldn't have been any further apart as Segura was a talented guy who matched up well with Cerebro while Star Boy was awkward as fuck and constantly off with his timing. Cerebro shined in both pairings but the Segura exchanges were obviously the highlight (that dive, my God, and Cerebro's sell!) The Megas were no mugs either and brought their working shoes like always. Another solid IWRG midcard bout.

This was a fun atomics match. It had all the hallmarks of undercard lucha -- some fun gimmicks and neat workers and a mix of traditional lucha exchanges and exciting dives. On the rudo side we got to see two members of the very first incarnation of Los Oficiales which was cool. They were more of your classic journeyman team that the fluid and dynamic trios unit we'd see later on but I liked the original Oficial. He could've been mistaken for just about any corrupt police captain in Mexico. Hijo del Gladiador continued to engage his role as the midcard veteran and Bombero is always busy doing his thing. On the tecnico side there was a nice mix of masked guys. Olimpico didn't shine as much as I was hoping and seems to have gone backward throughout the year. I liked Mascara Magica the most. he wasn't flashy but I thought he showed solid fundamentals. IWRG is very good at keeping these undercard matches short and snappy. None of the matches outstay their welcome and the guys entertain you while they're out there. Solid bout.