ohtani's jacket

This was pretty hard-hitting for a juniors match. Ohtani and Takaiwa beat the crap out of Kanemoto who seemed to lap it up. It's been fascinating to watch the evolution of Ohtani from crybaby to ass-kicker. It feels like he's finally out from under the shadow of Liger and has taken on a senior role in the juniors division. It's too bad that this period of his career is glossed over when discussing his worth as a worker but I guess people were burnt out on New Japan juniors at the time plus there was a lot of clipping going on in the television broadcasts. I'm not a Tanaka fan by any means (his fans being mostly ladies) but they did a nice job putting him over as the rising star of the division and his performance fit the bill on this occasion.

This was good stuff. I dug all the exchanges with Murahama. Delfin wasn't as amazing as he has been in other matches but he spent a lot of time on the apron. Murahma was a workhorse in this. He put in a huge shift. It amuses me how much better he is than Ogawa and Murakami.

The end of an era. Pretty decent match albeit in a formulaic All Japan way. A hurt Taue gave an impassioned performance while Kawada took care of business in the ring. The finish was weird, especially by All Japan standards.

Not my favourite style of wrestling and not my favourite pair of workers but the intensity was off the charts and KAORU was once again involved in one of the best Joshi matches of the year. The finishing stretch could have been trimmed a bit for better effect but they tried to put some nice touches into the transitions even if the selling was a bit spotty as Cha mentioned.

Hokuto's hair was awful here and that's saying something since she had some ghastly hairdos during her career. She looked like a demented ragdoll. Really good match with the heels working Chigusa over allowing the younger girls to come to the fore. The commentators pushed it as a "Heisei" vs "Showa" battle -- the younger generation vs. the older generation -- and that was typified by Satomura vs. Hokuto. Satomura/Hokuto was the last great feud that Hokuto had. The young star was able to draw the fire from Akira one last time and she produced her best late-period work against the GAEA prodigy. Their work here was excellent and the near submission of Hokuto was the high point of the bout. I liked the way that Hokuto harkened back to her days as the leader of Las Cachorras Orientales with the triple team spots. The Ozaki vs. Nagashima dynamic was also strong with Nagashima having just quit Oz Academy to return to the GAEA fold. This reminded me of all the fun 3 1/2 star bouts the Oz Academy vs. GAEA feud produced in the late 90s. A bit garbagey in spots but the wrestling scene is like that across the board in 2000. Worth watching if you want to see some good post-AJW Hokuto.

I suppose M2K are just getting their act off the ground but it's kind of hard to get behind them as the guys who are gonna take it to Crazy Max. Not yet, anyway. I'm sure they'll take it up a notch from here but it wasn't the explosive kickstart that I was hoping for from this feud.

This was a fun match in a small ass ring. The only real problem for me from a personal standpoint is that I don't really know the personalities of the M2K faction. They kept fronting Crazy Max and it was clear that they had an attitude and were made of tougher stuff than the guys Crazy Max had been running roughshod over but I didn't get a feel for the individual personalities the way up do with the rudos. Perhaps that will come in time.

I always liked this matchup due to the way it mirrored the backstage politics. The action here was heavily choreographed in typical WWF fashion. The finish, in particular, felt like the most connect-the-dots wrestling I've seen in a while. But the crowd was hot and it was a solid quarter hour.

The old rivals square off once again without breaking any new ground. A lot of BS in this involving the stun gun and the LLPW Black Joker faction. In fact, the entire match seemed like a precursor for Toyota vs. Eagle Sawai, which isn't a direction I care to see the company go in. The finishing stretch was subdued by Japanese standards though Toyota did show once again that she could sell when she wanted to even if it wasn(t in her DNA.

Deflin continues his spectacular 2000 run and Murahama continues to be the biggest prick in Japanese wrestling. What's not to like here? Delfin has been a revelation o on the mat. He's blowing up in my eyes. I look at him now and I think I'm watching El Hijo del Santo. The finish was unreal -- a funk Dos Caras submission with a shoot style twist. Deflin is my new hero.

I'm kind of surprised by the comments here as this was far more conservative than I expected. BattlARTS is often a balancing act between Strong Style and Shoot Style but I thought this veered towards the former and Ono wasn't nearly as violent as I expected. Perhaps I should watch it again.

This was a solid atomicos. I didn't care much for the beef between Zumbido and Antifaz del Norte but there was plenty of other stuff going on to bypass that. Pierroth continues to be one of my favorite performers in 2000. Usually, I harp on about how good a worker is based on how well I think they can actually wrestle. In Pierroth's case, it's 90% charisma. He played the type of henchman role that Emilio Charles Jr or La Fiera used to do in the early 90s and was brilliant at it. Also impressive was Tarzan Boy. I don't know what he was drinking in Monterrey but he ought to have bottled it. He looks like a completely different worker outside of Mexico City and with the crowd behind him he keeps going from strength to strength. I've always said that it's harder to be an excellent tecnico than a quality rudo and Tarzan Boy sure is making strides toward being a credible tecnico. Can he keep it up? What's going to happen to him? Those are interesting questions for me since I wasn't following lucha closely at the time. Dandy was a bit innocuous in his first appearance for the year but the match was good enough that it made me forget that Lizmark Jr was in it.

I liked the heat in this feud early on but the apuesta match was disappointing. The first 2/3 was overbooked. Threeway apuesta matches always have perfunctory elimination falls and that was the case here regardless of how good a worker Cerebro was. Once you've got that out of the way you expect the meat and potatoes of the apuesta match but there was a bunch of bullshit here about replacing the ref and the first big move of the deciding fall didn't air in "real time." Instead of showing Ciclon's tope, the editor cut to highlights of earlier matches on the card. We saw the tope in slo-mo but the impact wasn't the same as if we had seen it in rhythm. The other problem with the deciding fall was that after waiting for the combatants to go at it hammer and tongs, Bombero went the old-school route of working a cut. That's great in a standard 2/3 falls apuesta match but not what we want to see after waiting to see who the final pair will be. I was amped for this feud but there was no real heat in the final exchanges and the result was a lot more meaningless than I imagined it would be after watching the May footage.

I'm not sure if Mascara Sagrada is the real Mascara Sagrada or not but he's bad enough. This was the worst trios match I've seen in a while. There was no heat between Ciclon and Bombero and not a single exchange in the entire match that left me enthused. Extremely average.

CMLL is WAR, apparently. This has to be the most WWF thing they've ever done with the backstage camera and the arrests. It was actually quite well done. It was chaotic and hard to follow just like a real brawl and there were wild scenes in and out of the building. Favorite moments included an out of breath Porky struggling to get back inside and Felino dressed like Al from Home Improvement.

All I could think about during this match was why was Fuerza wearing khakis. The CMLL roster is so loaded at this point that even these clipped trios matches are entertaining. A lot of slick action from the tecnicos in this one with Felino looking spry and Safari and Antifaz working flat tack. The rudos are excellent foils and Panther continues to look impressive in 2000.

Fancy duds for the tecnicos. CMLL match times have grown criminally short but the action is fast. Bestia celebrating with the cowbell was a nice touch and Shocker continues to look like the emerging WOTY.

This could have been a fun little Villanos vs. Capos brawl but Villano III gives up his spot to another wrestler... Uh oh, don't get too excited folks, it's Hijo del Lizmark! He rides to the ring on a motorbike and blows red mist for no apparent reason. lol at the motorbike falling over. HDL has a new mask with his hair poking out the top. It kind of makes him look like Beaker from the Muppet Show. The match has some decent action, particularly when the Villanos are on offense but HDL remains as wooden as ever.

I thought this was a pretty good apuesta match considering we had no idea who Silver Fox was. Was there any buildup to this? It was very much an Atlantis formula match but as we all know that formula has been successful in mask matches ever since the Villano feud. This had an appropriate level of violence. They didn't go all in with the mask ripping and bloodshed but the brawling was good and they sold well. The dives, submissions and pin attempts were all magnified like they should be in apuesta match and the Guadalajara crowd was passionate, especially that one woman who was screaming at the wrestlers while they brawling in the seats. The finishing stretch was sloppy but it wasn't a huge blight. I loved Silver Fox's posse of masked rudos and the joke about how his second, Asesino Negro, wasn't fooling anyone with his mask. There are other touches I liked as well -- like Atlantis' passion for taking a mask and the kids getting in the ring at the end to celebrate with their idol. It was a singles match, so it's easier to get noticed, but I'd put this on the shortlist for the most memorable CMLL matches of the year.

This was a short match but they packed it with plenty of action. I thought it was easily the best that Perro has looked aside from that one match in Japan. He seemed to have natural chemistry with Wagner and the pair worked well together. Satanico vs. Ringo took me back and I loved watching them reenact their battles from 20 years before. No false notes here. It was just too short.

Fun match with both Blue Panther & Santo and Tarzan Boy & Shocker going at it. Honestly speaking, the action between Tarzan Boy and Shocker leaves the Satanico feud for dead. They match up extremely well.

Criminally short and butchered in the edit but can't complain about the action. Rey Bucanero and Ultimo Guerrero are such hard working rudos.They bump their hearts out in a bout that ends with a kick to the balls. That was vintage Casas, though. If you're going to be DQ'ed for a fake foul might as well kick a field goal.

Crowd-pleasing trios that featured plenty of good work to go along with the theatrics. Emilio and Panther produced one of the best exchanges of the month in the segunda caida, Tarzan Boy and Black Warrior added some spectacular highspots, and Alushe getting his revenge on Wagner provided one of the highlights of the bout. Fantastic dive from Emilio in the third caida and then Pierroth makes a surprise run-in to help orchestrate some mayhem against Alushe. Where are JR and the KIng when you need them?

I think the answer to this pretty clearly that Fujiwara had a better singles career than any of those wrestlers. If all Fujiwara had in his resume were multi-man tags during hot feuds like Choshu vs. Fujinami and UWF vs. New Japan then you could make a comparison to someone like Animal Hamaguchi but Fujiwara clearly had a more significant singles career than the names you listed and was an occasional headliner. I do think he is a marginal candidate but he wasn't a career midcarder.