ohtani's jacket

I'm about half way through the second episode and got name dropped so I thought I'd chime in. Firstly, I loved everything Jimmy said about Fujiwara. I agree with everything she said about the way he move around the ring, his defense, mannerisms, sight gags and goofy headbutts. I love everything about Fujiwara. I love the fact he's a better wrestler than everybody else. I love that he drinks harder than anybody else. And I love that he swears in English during his fights. He would have made my top 10 and vied for No.1. It warms the cockles of my heart to hear people finally praise Pat Roach. The thing about Roach is that no matter how angry he gets in the ring when he picks a mic he's this incredibly articulate English gentleman who'll deliver the sincerest, most softly spoken promos you'll ever hear. Total juxtaposition to his angry "bear with a sore head" ring style. Pirata Morgan doesn't get enough credit for being a true all-rounder. There was a period in the late 80s where he could do it all. I think that's something that hasn't been conveyed well by lucha fans and instead he's just known as an apuesta guy or a brawler. He could work any style in his prime and was a truly dynamic guy. He seems to get lost in the shuffle a bit because he doesn't have the go-to matches of a Chicana or a Satanico, but he was supremely talented. Finally, Myers. What people probably don't realise is when I think of early Myers I think of him as a West Indian. The West Indies was (and still is) part of the British Commonwealth and during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s they produced a number of exceptionally talented cricketers. In fact, during the period where we have the most WoS footage (1974-85) the West Indies was the best cricket team in the world. Joint Promotions had a large contingent of workers they billed as being from the Indies even if most of them were born in England and had never been there. There was Myers, Caswell Martin, Bond, Kincaid, Lenny Hurst, Kid Chocolate, Jamaica Kid, Jim Moser, and probably others I'm forgetting. It's impossible to watch those guys and not think of the great West Indian cricket team. And that West Indian cricket team was full of the coolest motherfuckers you will ever see in sports. When you think of West Indian cricket, you think of Viv Richards. And when I think of early Myers, I think of a guy who must be like Viv Richards. Myers actually wasn't anywhere near as cool as Viv since he wasn't from the Windies and didn't have that cool Caribbean accent and shit, but that's the parallel I made in my head. I don't know why he adopted the Iron Fist gimmick. It had something to do with the Bruce Lee/Kung Fu boom in the late 70s and the fact that he was an arm wrestling champion. Some of his stuff from that period is flashy and exciting. A lot of it is downright disappointing. He still has great matches with Grey, but everybody had great matches with Grey. He still has moments of great selling and he had tremendous, tremendous upper body strength, but he goes from being a slick ass grappler to a guy who changes his wrestling stance to a stand-up fighter essentially and that's not cool. I mean it's cool in Japan but not in UK halls. And I don't like the pants, the shoes or the headband. I thought he was cooler in trunks. I can understand why people think he's still a good worker in the 80s because he is a good worker in the 80s, but contrary to what Matt said, Joint Promotions was a place where no-one moved with the times and he could have easily kept being plain old Clive Myers and no-one would have blinked. When promoters like Orig Williams started repacking guys it sucked. Aside from Paul Lincoln Promotions in the 60s, repackaging guys isn't something UK promoters did well. But he probably spent more of his career as Ironfist than in a regular pair of trunks so it's something that can't be helped.

Rocco and Kyoko from their peak years ('76-79 and '92-94) don't deserve to drop that far, but I guess there is a lot of dreck that comes with them. Still, I'd sooner watch a Kyoko or Rocco match than the majority of the workers who'll follow. Asuka and Samurai fall into my "don't care" basket. I probably would have voted for O'Connor and Nishimura. Haven't watched a lot of the Fantastics and what I have seen was years ago.

I actually like Shemus, but on what planet is he the 224th best wrestler ever? Have NASA built a telescope that can see that far? At least he wasn't overlooked. Thank God Chono dropped.

There's a million workers workers whose careers wouldn't have been half as good if they'd worked somewhere else. I find that argument kind of flimsy. The majority of workers are inextricably linked to the promotion they became famous in.

Man, that Inoki vs. Great Antonio work-turned-shoot was so surreal I had to watch it twice to fully get it. And read YouTube comments. And turn the sound up.

The things you guys are mentioning happen in just about every trios match. If they happened irregularly then they'd be chaotic. It doesn't take long to figure out there are three basic types of trios matches -- technical bouts, brawls and comedy matches. There may be variations on those categories but they're basically subsets of each genre. Sometimes a bout can start out as one type and finish as another but that's what is great about trios wrestling. There's a framework and once you master it you can play with the form. Matt has written in depth about the different trios patterns. Basically a fall can be dominated either by the rudos or the tecnicos. If the rudos dominate it then it's generally either a beatdown or a brawl. If the tecnicos dominate it then it tends to be cleaner (either high flying or technical.) The majority of the time the side that dominates takes the fall. Occasionally, they pull a swerve and the opposite side wins. In a tightly structured trios match, the side that wins the opening fall will continue to dominate early on in the second. I usually refer to this as overlapping. Then there will be a comeback from the side that lost the opening fall. The quality of this comeback depends on the ingenuity of the workers. The same overlapping carries through to the final fall and after the second comeback there is almost always 50/50 back and forth action until the finish. You can shorten or lengthen each fall, you can end a bout in straight falls and you can go a beat beyond the move that typically ends a fall and have the bout continue. I don't think any of this is difficult to pick up. If anything the majority of trios wrestling is generic. When t's great it's because the comebacks were outstanding or the work was particularly polished. The vast majority of trios wrestling, IMO, is bad because of how dull and repetitive it is, but that's because of how common trios bouts are. The good ones stand out like a diamond in the rough. Having said all that, I generally don't care about the rules and hardly ever notice the refs. Stuff like the finishes where guys rush the ring is like water off a ducks back after X number of trios. It's just what they do. If it's a hang up for you after a dozen trios matches then you're probably going to always have that hang up. The captains you can identify during the introductions if it really matters that much to you. I guess the rules help to understand the standoffs in the third fall when it becomes a one-on-one situation, but I honestly believe you'd have to be fairly resistant to what you're watching to not *try* to figure that out. Chaotic to me is interpreting the booking. X doesn't lead to Y in lucha the way it does in other styles of booking (when they're booked right.) And if you value continuity in your wrestling then lucha is not for you.

That's a pretty good ranking for Cortez. Maybe the first case of over-achieving for the Brit sect.

I actually thought Gotch was one of the better picks in that glut of votes. You'd think the workers would be getting better as we approach the top 200 but that was some rut. The irony in Solar dropping so far from 2006 is that the amount of Solar footage that's surfaced in the last ten years dwarfs what little we had of him in '06. So much for the credo that footage changes everything.

So, apparently Akram tried to shoot on Inoki during this bout and Inoki ended up breaking the guy's arm when he wouldn't submit to the chicken wing arm-lock. I Because Akram was the nephew of the Great Gama, Inoki returned to Pakistan a few years later to help restore the family's dignity. He let Akram's 19-year old nephew, Jhara, manhandle him for large portions of a five round draw and symbolically raised his hand at the end. I didn't know any of this. I actually thought the younger Pahalwan making mincemeat out of Inoki was a sight to behold until I read up on it. When I realised Inoki wasn't putting up a fight the bout took on an entirely different light. One thing I'll say for Inoki, he may be a charlatan but he wasn't afraid to stick his neck out. And if you've never seen a Pakistani in-ring celebration you really should.

I don't think there's any shame in voting for Mascaras. There are two Johnny Saint/McManus matches. They're both good.

We don't have an expression in British English that means diaper-headed. Parv probably means textured.

Trios wrestling is completely formulaic. The chaotic elements of lucha involve the haphazard booking. If you do the legwork there is nothing confusing about lucha trios matches.

He wasn't dumb, but he was more of an exceptionally hard worker than a guy who was ring-smart.

Nice stuff, grover. I always did like the cut of your jib.

The 11/93 Captain Fall Survival War was a classic representation of inter-promotional era warts and all. For the most part I found it entertaining. When I was younger I would have really been into the narrative of two of my all-time favourites with their backs against the wall but these days it's a bit like listening to your favourite band from high school -- you can never quite recapture the magic. Still, there were a lot of solid performances. Nobody hit a home run, but Devil showed the veteran presence we've talked about before, Ozaki had some neat selling and clever escapes, and Minami reminded me of why she was such an underrated worker despite some awkwardness in her in-ring movement and a stinging lack of charisma. Kansai was solid without being spectacular, and Hokuto was likewise good without being truly outstanding. Their individual match-up didn't have quite the edge to it you'd expect. Nevertheless, I dug the basic narrative of Hokuto the She-Wolf and her hellcat minions giving the finger to JWP president Yamamoto and the close-knit family aspect to JWP even if it wasn't one of the more emotional "JWP overcomes the odds" storylines they rolled out during the inter-promotional era. I think I'll revisit Thunder Queen before it's all said and done. That's something I've been meaning to do ever since Loss did a 180 on it.

Are you talking about the character or the wrestler? I am confused. I think the dude is probably a good bit smarter as a wrestler than he gets credit for sometimes (though I never really thought people thought he was dumb), but I think you nailed his character in the 90s. I meant both. The All Japan guys didn't really play characters.

"Ok" is a massive upgrade over how old-man Cota was viewed back in the day, but that apuesta match in particular I didn't really care for.

Myers did okay. He's in some pretty decent company. Cortez hasn't dropped yet, has he? That surprises me. I keep thinking I'm gonna cry into my cornflakes over Grey.

I love Cota as much as the next guy, but his ranking is based on two matches against a guy who didn't even get nominated (iirc) and a bunch of OK stuff after he got out of prison. Porky seems too high as well.

Maybe it's just me, but whenever people lavish praise on Kobashi he always comes across as sounding smarter than he truly was. When I think of Kobashi, I always think of a shy jock with a big heart not some kind of wrestling genius like Negro Casas.

Shiro Koshinaka is a mediocre pro-wrestler so I'm not surprised about that. Dump was viewed as one of the all-time great heels back in '06. You could maybe argue that the lack of a DVDVR Joshi set hurt her, but the matches on YouTube and elsewhere. She just doesn't get talked about enough because I figure a DVDVR set would have really only uncovered some hidden gems. People sometimes act like the 2006 list is some kind of relic from the past. It may be antiquated, but we were savvy enough to have Kohsaka higher than he was here. I've seen exactly one great Adrian Street bout (vs. Breaks) and then a stream of disappointment. If we had more of his WoS stuff that might change, but he left for the indies during his physical peak. I don't think he was as good as his partner, Bobby Barnes, who did the exact same gimmick. I don't think Bobby Barnes was even nominated. I keep waiting for Mocho Cota to drop. How on earth did he get such a crazily high ranking?

Lou Thesz always kind of bores me, but I liked his old man performance against Inoki. It was a neat maestro performance simply to Pat O'Connor's All Japan stuff from the same era. I broke my own rule and watched Ruska/Inoki I. It wasn't that bad actually, though I can see why the martial arts world thought it was a sham. From memory, it drew one of the biggest television ratings of all-time. Ruska heeled it up far more than you'd expect. Inoki vs. Strong Kobayashi was similar to the Sakaguchi match and another strong native vs. native bout from the mid-70s. Inoki bled and there was a cool image of him bandaged up at the end with a blood stained face. I got a kick out of Andre and Inoki working the mat. I doubt armwork is what anyone wants to see from an Andre bout, but given my general dislike for limbwork (or rather the over-reliance of it as an expression of psychology), it was surreal enough to be some of the most fun limbwork I've seen in a while.

I will try to watch those matches later, but it's not unusual for a guy to do nothing in a trios match. There's a slew of trios matches like that for plenty of top lucha candidates. The Satanico vs. Lizmark matches are disappointing. It's a match-up that looks better on paper (and in my head) than in reality. I'm glad there's someone else who loves the Parka match, though. I thought I was out on an island with that one.

Can you give an example of a match where you felt Lizmark was particularly underwhelming?

Watched a bunch of JWP tags over the weekend. Completely nonessential stuff, but it was nice to see an old favourite (JWP) still have some pluck to it. Though I will say that middle of the road Joshi tags can be a real chore to sit through and nobody really did anything to enhance their reputation. Kansai coasted a lot as though it was the regular season and I kind of saw Jetlag's argument about Devil too. The exception was when they worked with Cutie, who brought an exceptionally high level of energy to her boots and a ton of grit as well, which I wasn't expecting. She ended up impressing me more than Ozaki in the sampling I saw.