ohtani's jacket

It just struck me that the Phil Ochs to Funk's Dylan might be a better comparison. Here's one of the Magnum matches:

Mask vs. mask is usually worked a little differently from hair matches, and there's certainly a gritty title match element to them, but I'd still classify them as brawls.

I think Jetlag is comparing apuesta matches where Santo has always had the bloodier, more violent bouts such as the Brazo de Oro fight, the mask match against Espanto Jr, the Dandy hair match, and so forth. Casas is a good brawler but many of his apuestas have been bloodless.

It's considered a style because it was a breakaway movement (although it should be noted that when they first broke away the plan was to be New Japan Mach 2.) You won't find it all that dissimilar to earlier influences like Inoki and Robinson (particularly since Robinson was from the same background as Gotch), but I don't think Billy or Inoki shared the same philosophy or goals as the shoot boys. Windham has a lot of awesome stuff in the 90s that surely bolsters his case. Who cares if it was on TV? TV was a massive part of WCW's output. And who are all these people bringing their A game on late 80s-early 90s PPVs? That didn't happen. The "Best of Ted Dibiase in Mid South" on the DVDVR sets vs. WCW PPV matches argument is not the level of scrutiny demanded in the Blackwell/Andre threads. Jimmy, the DiBiase/Magnum matches are cool. I don't think they'll shoot Ted up your list or anything like that, but they're great stuff. I wonder what the musical equivalent of Ted is -- maybe the John Cougar Mellencamp to Terry Funk's Springsteen or something like that.

I don't think she was underrated at the time when we made the original list as we had enough Joshi fans to also run a Greatest Female Wrestler of All-Time list some months later. Joshi fandom has kind of fallen by the wayside since then (or branched off), and I kind of doubt there's people watching 1996 JWP in 2016. If you don't watch the JWP then she's just a face in the crowd and not the multi-faceted performer you've described. I think the JWP stuff is key.

I don't think Marty will do as well on the final list as he should, but that's where we're at in 2016. Glad you enjoyed him, though, Jimmy.

On pure talent and ability alone she'd be in my top 30. The two problems with Oz are that she was sloppy at times ala Tenryu and that she's produced 15 odd years of dreck since 2000. The latter I don't really care about since I was always more concerned with how good workers were at their absolute peak, but it's a long period to ignore. As an actress (in wrestling), I think she was unparalleled. As a character, there were few better. As a seller, she's in my top five all-time men or women. I would sooner vote for her than most workers who will end up in the official top 30, but again it's whether you can excuse the second half of her career.

It feels like the book is closed on Eddy. I can't imagine people re-evaluating him too much unless it's his early stuff or the period between the end of his WCW run and 2004. He's a worker that most of his grew up with as opposed to someone we discovered later in our fandom and there's not that much to rediscover.

This came across as way more important than it should have been given Scorpio's standing in the company and Benoit's relative obscurity. The commentary wasn't flawless but it did put the two over and carry us through the 20 minutes. Benoit was more restrained than in his Japanese matches and his subtle heel work gave the faintest of edges to what might have been a juniors workout without a primed Carolina crowd. More enjoyable than great, but definitely a match that holds up.

I haven't seen the earlier Honaga/Liger feud. I have a feeling I've seen Honaga before on a Liger comp, but I don't remember him looking like this. He didn't look like much of a junior but had an awesome scuzzy look. I'm guessing that juxtaposition made him an interesting Liger opponent. Liger's a guy who leaves me feeling pretty hollow these days. He strikes me as an offense first guy much the same as Angle, Benoit, or anybody you care to name. Here he put in a selling performance. It wasn't an all-time great selling performance but he stuck with it. I couldn't really gauge from this why Honaga had been such a thorn in Liger's side (other than they needed someone to be a thorn in Liger's side), but this was tidy.

Yeah, I think it's on dataintcash's channel.

Have you seen the Christmas trios where he pisses off Porky? That's some fun interaction.

Orton vs. Steamboat was alright given the parameters they had to work with, but you're seriously overrating Steamboat's armdrags. I was expecting them to be much deeper.

So, I re-watched the 1991 Kawada vs. Jumbo match and remembered why I never liked it. I understand why they felt the need to show some kind of growth in Kawada that he could control Jumbo with a side headlock, abdominal stretch or half Boston, but does anybody really believe that Jumbo couldn't beat the shit out of Kawada if he wanted to? If you're gonna treat a guy as special make it Misawa not Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi and everybody. I know you can't keep squashing everybody competitively, but when you go heat seeking on your post-match turnbuckle celebrations it sure seems like you still want to be top dog. I didn't really see any meaning in the bout. The best thing about it was the pre-match anticipation.

What he basically told him was that he wasn't going to be a guy who's only there to make Fujinami look good, which in wrestling terms refers to a jobber, but to the audience it played to had a wider sociological impact since it related to how they felt about their seniors, bosses and supervisors.

This may not look like much, but this is the December 1982 edition of Big Wrestler magazine where Choshu is first credited with his famous "kamaseinu" line. Over the years, it's been mythologised a bit with people claiming he said it on the mic at Korakuen Hall, but I don't believe that was the case.

Fujinami vs. Choshu has a through line if you have a rough idea of the angle surrounding it and the cultural significance. It's slightly more "Japanese" than something like Jumbo/Tenryu or Jumbo/Tenryu vs. Choshu/Yatsu, for want of a better word. Those feuds are easier to understand in terms of the pro-wrestling narratives and archetypes people grew up with. Choshu/Fujinami is digestible as a rivalry, but there's a bit more going on than Dude #1 in black trunks fights Dude #2 in black trunks in the ultimate show of New Japan Strong Style. It was far more cutting edge at the time than anything Baba was doing.

If you go by DVDVR results, then excluding gauntlet matches and multi-man tags the contenders would be: Riki Choshu vs. Yoshiaki Fujiwara (6/9/87) Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Akira Maeda (6/12/86) Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Riki Choshu (4/3/83) Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs Super Tiger (12/5/1984) Fujinami and Fujiwara featured just as prominently in the New Japan and Other Japan voting as Jumbo did with All Japan.

That's a list of the top 27 All Japan matches of the 80s not the top 27 matches for the entire decade. Of course Jumbo is going to feature prominently on a list of the best All Japan matches. The number of Jumbo matches that would feature on an overall top 20 would be dramatically less. Only match 1 and 3 would be strong contenders.

I can't keep track of lucha comings and goings anymore, but before the period where we were getting semi-weekly IWRG stuff, footage would pop up of amazing Terry carry jobs against guys like Multifacetico. Terry was a great character wrestler and an excellent brawler. I like him on the mat against smaller guys, but in general I thought his technical stuff was weaker than his brawling and he was guilty of "your turn/my turn" on the mat when it came to releasing holds. He was a great trios worker in the period people are talking about and a tremendous bleeder too. Everything I've seen from his younger days suggests he was better when he was older. He wasn't a major player in his younger days and I can't imagine he got too many opportunities to shine unless his singles matches were outstanding, which I have my doubts over.

Well, actually you do, since every time you put a new worker on your list somebody has to fall off. If you rearrange your list from last time people are going to rise and fall. If you put Jim Breaks in your top 10, as at one time you said you would, then somebody else misses out on a top 10 finish, which is fairly significant, and it reverberates even further than that with guys missing out on a top 20 spot, top 30, and so on. So you do have to push things down when you're ranking them. Here's the thing that I don't get, Parv: you have fairly strong opinions about what you like and don't like in wrestling, and you're not afraid to be outspoken, yet you seem to think that everyone's collective canon should be the same. In other words, you seem to think that the stuff you like is stuff that everybody should like as though there's some sort of conventional wisdom about these things. That's not the way these boards have worked in the past ten years. You've got guys who've been around the block a dozen times, seen a ton of stuff, rejected conventional wisdom, and found their own little niche, mixed with newer posters who are finding their own paths. The whole process of list making is individual. Nobody makes your list for you, and at the most painstaking times there's no canon to fill in your ballot for you. The canon, or whatever you want to call it, is the end result of the ballots being collected and tallied. It'll be 90% predictable with a few surprises and a few disappointments. It won't be radical. It will be largely conservative as far this circle goes. Jumbo will finish somewhere in the top 10. Flair will finish somewhere in the top 10. So why fret about them? Maybe you can't get that gremlin out of your head when watching Hashimoto fight but the same thing can happen when you pre-read about any worker. Hashimoto isn't an outlandish choice for number one. I don't think he's the GWE, but he's a guy where I can say, "yeah, I can see that" when it comes to somebody else. I think that's obvious to anybody who enjoys Hashimoto. I don't think you're gonna love him. I would be surprised if you jumped on the Hashimoto bandwagon, but that's for a multitude of reasons the least of which is that a few people think he's better than Flair or Jumbo. But here's the thing -- conventional smark wisdom, if you believe in it, says Hashimoto was the best of the 90s New Japan heavies, etc. etc. Let's say you take a dislike to him and decide to reject all that. Maybe you want to push the idea that Hase was the best heavy. What are you gonna do with your canon then? Are you gonna push someone down to push another guy up? One smaller point, I could be wrong, but I think there's a number of guys who watched, or are watching, the DVDVR sets after the voting periods who are formulating their own opinions on the stuff as they work through them for the project. So I don't think it's a case of people suddenly changing their tune about how good Jumbo was.

Watched a bunch of random shit. Gypsy John Kenny vs. Geraint Clwyd (Porthmadog, taped 1987) Gypsy John Kenny vs. Jack Davey (Caernarfon, taped 1988) Johnny Saint vs. Gypsy John Kenny (Caernarfon, taped 1987) Gypsy John Kenny vs. Flesh Gordon (Eurosport circa 1991) John Kenny vs. Robbie Brookside (10/19/85) Kung Fu vs. John Kenny (9/17/87) Kenny is the kind of guy you hope will be a fun journeyman with some entertaining shtick and a few carny holds, but isn't the character you hoped for. He tries, in much the same way that Jimmy Ocean and Ricky Knight tried, but it's all a bit second rate. He was awesome against Orig Williams, and I liked his matches against Palance and Saint, though the latter was Kenny being plugged into a Johnny Saint bout like most Johnny Saint bouts, but he lacked that little something when it comes to showmanship. He was a decent hand who knew his way around a ring, but you can't teach showmanship. His squash matches in Reslo weren't as entertaining as they might have been and his comedy based shtick in All-Star wasn't that funny, which kind of pains me for a guy with as alluring a name as "Gypsy" John Kenny. Blondie Barratt vs. Kashmir Singh (Dubai, 1989) This was a handheld from a Dubai show. Brian Dixon was the ref. Pretty much what you'd expect from a house show bout, especially in a foreign land: comedy, shtick, the heel getting his comeuppance. Barratt was an entertaining performer and made it work. He was doing a rock gimmick (at least on this show) and I liked that he came out to The Sweet. Clive Myers vs. Axeman (WAW 1981) Dave Finlay vs. Billy White Cloud (WAW 1981) Princess Paula & Blackfoot Sioux vs. Lolita Loren & Spitfire (WAW 1981) Johnny Kincaid vs. John Kowalski (WAW 1981) Jackie Pallo & JJ Pallo vs. Adrian Street & Steve Kelly (WAW 1981) Next up is a commercial tape that Jackie Pallo and his son released in 1981. Pallo and his son quit Joint Promotions in the mid-70s to promote their own shows on the independent circuit (prompting a rare send-off from Walton in Jackie Jr's last televised bout.) The name of their promotion was Wrestling Around the World (WAW) and this '81 cassette is noteworthy for a few reasons. Firstly, it's one of Dave Finlay's earliest appearances on tape. Secondly, it shows Princess Paula working as a babyface. And thirdly, it has an elusive Adrian Street match. It's only an hour long, which means the matches are clipped, and the audio quality is amazingly shoddy with the commentary sounding like it was taped in someone's flat, but the Pallos are easier to listen to than those guys on Screensport. Watching Finlay in '81 is like watching a guy ready to explode onto the scene. Billy White Cloud wasn't much of an opponent and the bout wasn't much on its own, but if you were following the scene in '81, I reckon Finlay would have looked like the most exciting new talent since Jones, Rocco and the Dynamite Kid. That's the sort of presence he had about him. I'm not sure when he hooked up with Paula in real life and when they started doing shows here, but she was a workrate blue eye and was hustling about like the better female workers from 1981. In another life, she might have toured Japan. The main event is short but fairly entertaining. Palo Jr does most of his dad's act, but he was a decent worker. Pallo Sr. was dirt old and seeing him do his thing was like watching McManus struggle in the early 80s. But the key guy is Street, right? I forgot how short he is. I'm not sure if Steve Kelly was tall or if Street was really that short, but he looked tiny. It's incredibly weird and creepy seeing him with a full beard while still doing his exotico shtick. The peroxide blonde hair and dark beard make him look like some sleazy Southern worker smeared with make-up. He puts in a decent performance, but nothing overly compelling. I wish we had more of him because to this very day I have no idea whether the Breaks match was indicative of his usual performances or an outlier. A collector I know was trying to source one of his 60s bouts but that'll probably never see the light of day. Aside from the Barrie match, I haven't really seen anything else from Street in the UK I'd consider strong. The mystery continues. Pete Lapaque vs. Patrick Flyer (8/27/86) Flyer was a tiny 5'4" worker from Harare, Zimbabwe, who was clearly supposed to be a bit of a flyer but didn't get to show it much against an obstinate Pete Lapaque. Walton had the strangest way of announcing Tommy Lorne's death. You'd think it would be slightly more sombre but instead it was pretty much "sorry, for the bad news but it's nice to see Pete Lapaque back." I don't know if it was related to the accident, but Lapaque was never the same afterward. Then again, perhaps that was the reason why he was tagging as he didn't see to have the knack for singles wrestling anymore.

Ripstein's Place Without Limits is an awesome, awesome film, but he's one of those genre filmmakers like Robert Aldrich. Not everything is going to be great. The trailer looked too much like Bela Tarr for mind, but isn't it based on a real story about prostitutes and minis? That automatically makes it more interesting.

I was hugely disappointed by that Adonis/Orton match and trust me there was a period in my life where I really wanted to love Adrian Adonis. I'm kind of surprised that you're so high on Orton after so few matches (relatively speaking.)

I think the only match she had with Kansai was the Eight Man Survival Elimination tag from 11/28/93. As far as the blade job goes in the DreamSlam match, the stroy has always been that the ref cut her too deep. As for whether she was a heel, it's complicated. The easy answer is that she was and that in inter-promotional matches she was standing up for her company, but it's not as simple as that. She wasn't a clear cut heel in the way that the Black Pair were, or Monster Ripper, Devil Masami or Dump Matsumoto. Those girls were heels because they cheated and lived to abuse poor helpless girls. Hokuto was a different type of character. She was stubborn, strong willed, bitchy and aggressive, but followed a certain code of ethics and had strong opinions about right and wrong behaviour. She wasn't the first "heel" character to take a more nuanced approach than hair pulling and foreign objects (Bull was arguably the first), but a good way to look at it is either a tweener with an attitude or a heel with a strong sense of morality. During the LLPW/AJW feud, for example, she scolds her kohai, or subordinates, LCO, as much as he lashes out at her LLPW opponents, the same way a sensei would. Heel or face, to me she was Hokuto. She was a force of nature. Her body was basically fucked during her entire run and she was wrestling with her injuries as much as herself, and when she took things out on other people she was often fighting with herself. I'm inclined to sum the whole thing up as she was angry. Every time she was about to get ahead, she'd injure herself. And she never reached the heights she thought she was capable of. It's hard to articulate, but I'm sure you'll appreciate it, Jimmy.