ohtani's jacket

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 39 Zoltan Boscik vs. Kid McCoy (9/3/86) Boscik was another of the aging television vets the promoters leaned on in the mid-80s to break in the next generation of talent. He was pudgy and middle-aged at this point, and a shadow of the worker from those great Steve Grey matches, but his carry was effective enough. Not as good as some of the latter day Tally Ho Kaye stuff, but McCoy was only 15 here and Boscik fed him well. Perhaps too well as it was a bit anti-climatic when Boscik won. The Kid did go on to beat Boscik in the final of a Christmas knockout tournament in December that year, but Walton didn't link the two bouts together. Danny Boy Collins vs. Jacques Le Jacques (12/11/85) This was a European Welterweight title bout. Not a patch on some of the classic WoS title bouts, but an interesting bout to watch, which is all you can really hope for when you're combing through the dregs, or to put it more nicely, the B-sides and rarities. Jacques Le Jacques didn't really work a classic catch style and was obsessed with working his opponent's legs like few workers I've seen, but he was a decent enough hand. He tried to work heel, but couldn't really bait the crowd. Walton mentioned that if Collins successfully defended his European title he would be in line for a title shot against the world champion, referring to him only as "the Mexican." Not sure whom he meant by that, but the world champ at the time was actually El Dandy. Le Jacques went for the leg a lot, but this was decent enough. Big Daddy & Danny Boy Collins vs. Scrubber Daly & Lucky Gordon (7/25/84) The enjoyment factor of these Daddy tags is totally dependent on the heels. Scrubber Daly and Lucky Gordon were extremely competent Daddy opponents and the dynamic of young Danny Boy Collins being Daddy's partner and being given the room to shine (ha) made this an entertaining 10 minutes. People have commented numerous times about wrestlers like Collins having to carry the load in Big Daddy tags, but I can't imagine a 17 year old Collins being disappointed at wrestling in front of such a hot crowd and getting this much heat so early in his career. Another fun thing about these tags is the way the ring literally moves two or three inches every time Daddy or Daly are posted. It seems like Walton is exaggerating until you actually pay attention to it. Tally Ho Kaye vs. Steve Fury (2/5/85) Fury's television debut. Kaye tied him in knots during a one fall, ten minute time limit. Danny Boy Collins vs. Eddie Riley (10/9/84) Riley was a trainee of Marty Jones and a decent worker. Walton was high on him (undoubtedly because he was a trainee of Jones') and put over how quick and decisive he was with his decision making while lamenting the fact that he kept running out of mat with his pinning maneuvers. Some good action here but nothing overly special.

I don't get how people can say Watts' WCW was a failure compared to the rest of WCW's existence. I'd rather watch something from Watts' run than 1994, '96, '97, you name it.

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 38 Marty Jones vs. Mark Rocco (6/8/88) Rocco cut a pretty decent promo before this. Jones' wasn't bad either if you can appreciate the charm of a straight talking, cross-eyed Marty Jones staring at the camera in different directions. There's two ways you can view this bout (no pun intended): you can either view it as a bastardised version of their 70s classics and you can look at it as one of the better bouts of 1988. Jones and Rocco hadn't squared off for quite some time as Jones had stayed pretty loyal to Max Crabtree and Joint Promotions while Rocco had been one of Brian Dixon's key draws for All-Star Promotions. Toward the end of the television era, there were a lot of guys moving back and forward between the promotions for bookings and hence we got one last chapter in this feud. It was pretty much wrestled in the All-Star style. Short flurries of action were followed by contentious moments and style ruled over substance. Rocco had gone through major back surgery a few years prior (and was at death's door for a number of days according to Walton) and was slightly less mobile than in his prime. He was still a madman but his back looked stiff. Jones provided some sweet looking offense as you'd expect. He'd packed on the pounds since the last time they fought, but if there was anything resembling their classic fights it came from him. Rocco bled in this, which was rare on British television but tended to happen in bouts involving Rocco (hmm.) The finish was the kind of Americanised stuff Dixon made his coin shilling. Both men were DQ'ed for hitting the ref, Jones got on the mic demanding the bout continue and they half-arsed their way backstage where the "brawling" supposedly continued. It's actually an insult to American wrestling to call it "Americanised" as they did such a piss poor job at emulating US style wrestling. Dave Finlay vs. Boston Blackie (Ladder match, Caernarfon, taped 2/27/95) This was interesting. Finlay looked almost exactly the same as the guy who showed up in WCW and attacked Steve Regal, and his work was better than it had been in nigh on a decade. I can't stand ladder matches as a rule, but was taken by the fact that Finlay looked so good. So there you go: at some point before entering WCW, Finlay shook off his malaise and fixed whatever it was that was blogging down his matches. Kung Fu vs. Lucky Gordon (11/5/86) I'm surprised Kung Fu ever graced a Joint Promotions ring again after walking out on them ahead of the big Rocco match at the Royal Albert Hall. The 1985-86 period is better than I've given it credit for in the past as there was plenty of good stuff on the early stand alone shows, but matches like this show how thin the talent roster was. Lucky Gordon vs. Kung Fu didn't really mean anything to anybody in 1986 and wasn't going to get anyone excited about the crappy new time slot. That said, Kung Fu did enough to at least make it painless to watch, and as limited as Gordon was, he was a pro at putting guys over.

I watched the 4/94 Kawada bout and it's amazing the step up in intensity from anything else I've watched. Suddenly, every hold matters and the attention to detail is tenfold over anything else, and it's not even that good a match. The whole Kawada's a heel thing is all while and good except for the fact that he seldom works the same heel role against other opponents. And even against Misawa, I had a hard time buying him as the straight up heel he's meant to be. Maybe it's a mental block on my side, but the history between the two seems like it has more bearing on the match dynamic than heel/face structures.

The Rutten match was interesting. It was kind of like watching a guy who wasn't entirely comfortable at working a pro-wrestling match against a guy who wasn't entirely confident at doing a worked shoot. Rutten seems like a guy who would have been a natural at pro-wrestling if he'd spent more time doing it. He grew into the bout as it progressed, though at 10 three minute rounds you'd hope he might settle down a bit. Nothing they did blew me away, but it was perfectly solid. Rutten hadn't really moved on from mid-90s Pancrase in terms of his fighting style so it wasn't really cutting edge shoot style stuff, but I enjoyed it.

That's weird because I remember him being all over the WCW shows we got in New Zealand.

I liked the 3/94 Williams vs. Kawada Carnival bout a lot. In fact, it's probably the best Kawada bout I've seen since I started dabbling in his stuff. There were a couple of All Japan tropes that annoyed me like going to the outside early on and the even stevens, not quite my turn, your turn, flow to the bouts. But this was meant to be a bigger deal than the other Carnival bouts I've watched and Kawada's selling was several notches above his standard performance. That lift in selling seems to be a determining factor in how good a Kawada bout is going to be. A lot of back and forth in the finish, but I was hooked and I think if it wasn't a draw and had a definitive finish it would be remembered as more than just an extra in the build to the Carnival final.

I liked the 3/94 Williams vs. Kawada Carnival bout a lot. In fact, it's probably the best Kawada bout I've seen since I started dabbling in his stuff. There were a couple of All Japan tropes that annoyed me like going to the outside early on and the even stevens, not quite my turn, your turn, flow to the bouts. But this was meant to be a bigger deal than the other Carnival bouts I've watched and Kawada's selling was several notches above his standard performance. That lift in selling seems to be a determining factor in how good a Kawada bout is going to be. A lot of back and forth in the finish, but I was hooked and I think if it wasn't a draw and had a definitive finish it would be remembered as more than just an extra in the build to the Carnival final.

I couldn't find it.

The 1994 Hansen match isn't as well known or famous as their '92 and '93 bouts, and probably not as good, but it's a nice companion piece. It may be my imagination, but Kawada seemed a more assured worker in '94 than in '93, though he didn't really stamp his authority on the bout and was still deferring to Hansen too much. The Carnival match against Akiyama is a fun bout, but pretty much a redux of whichever bout of theirs I saw from '93. They even ran through the same sequences. Kawada actually has a pretty standard match pattern and it was interesting that he did similar dropkick sequences with Hansen that he did with Akiyama.

If anybody wants to see an awesome Art Barr match from Mexico I strongly recommend the 7/23/93 trios where he puts on the Santo mask and attacks Eddy.

Hamada's big runs in Mexico were during the 70s and 80s. We don't have the footage to know the extent to which he, or Sayama for that matter, influenced the style. UWA finally got TV in November of '91 and Hamada was still working matches in Mexico at that time, but there's nothing that I've seen that suggests Hamada was changing the style in any way. If anything it was more the case that Hamada adapted to Mexican wrestling than bringing new elements to it. I could be wrong, though.

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 37 Kung Fu vs. Chic Cullen (Unknown location, taped 1985) Some decent action. These two didn't match up especially well, it was blue eye vs. blue eye, and Cullen wasn't as good in '85 as he had been in the early 80s, but the match was okay. Orig Williams vs. Barcud Du (Unknown location, taped 1985) The big grudge match. This was full of posturing, half-arsed brawling, kids throwing trash at the ring, and South walking out on the bout. Williams threw himself to the mat, praised the Lord above, and looked like he'd just survived the biggest match of his career. I'd rip into it more, but it's my fault for not skipping it. Johnny Saint vs. Danny Boy Collins (Denbigh, taped 3/15/89) Outside of his early 70s work, I like Saint's late 80s work better than any point in his career. He still did all his escape holds, but he'd shelved the Vic Faulkner prankster element to his work and wrestled a more straight up version of the Saint style. This wasn't the best example of it and not much of a match, but I still liked what I saw from Saint. King Kendo vs. Romany Riley (11/5/86) Romany Riley looked like he'd pinched Sangre Chicana's tights here. It's so weird seeing a grey middle-aged Riley who looks like any other grey middle-aged Tom, Dick and Harry when he had such a counter-culture look in the 70s. It really is weird, but I guess it happens to everyone. Anyway, I have a lot of time for young Riley, but he was old and portly here and the fake Nagasaki was a tough load to carry. Nothing memorable. Sid Cooper vs. Greg Valentine (12/19/84) Cooper was doing the old £100 a round gimmick here. There's a complete lack of logic to these matches as instead of trying to knock Valentine out so he lasted as few rounds as possible, Cooper works a regular two pinfalls or submissions or a knockout bout and pisses away a bunch of money. But I suppose you've got to forget out that and just sit back and enjoy Cooper throwing a £100 at Valentine between rounds. He was past his best here, but still had a great snare and was a fun character.

It happened over time as more and more luchadores got regular bookings in Japan. It was around 1996/7 that it started having a noticeable impact on the bouts. Prior to that you had Dandy who was a tape watcher and cribbed stuff, but it was really Rey, Juventud, Santo, Casas and Wagner whom ratcheted things up. I would suggest watching the Rey/Juve 3/96 Barnett handheld, the Felino/Santo match from the summer of '97, the Casas/Santo hair vs. mask match from '97, and pre-Japan Wagner matches compared to his '97 work onward. The biggest influence was on moveset, but there were also stylistic elements like suddenly introducing crucifix arm bars and what not. In Lizmark's case, I think he ratcheted up his moveset in AAA to stay relevant as a guy in his 40s in a promotion that was breaking away from tradition. He may have introduced those moves earlier, I don't remember clearly. The classic style is more about arm drags and spinning backbreakers being big time high spots, a cross body block style move off the top being a finisher, and a single dive being built to in the third caida. The matwork is less "Japanese" looking and more Euro style; heavily stylized and full of tricked out submissions.

I had a sneaking suspicion about French New Wave, but it's impossible to like everything no matter how hard you try. I can understand wanting to see and hear everything to get a full picture of what's out there, but most people are instantly dismissive of stuff they're not into and don't butt heads with it as much as you are. To your sprouts analogy, you're choking on your Brussels. I liked Matt's analogy above about limbwork being like adding sauce to a dish that's unpalatable, but if you ever look for another way in, I would suggest strong character work ala Cota and not work driven lucha.

You're not rejecting one match in the canon. You're rejecting an entire style because in your own words you're not willing to change the standards by which you judge wrestling. It's not like you're saying that Godard's Weekend is an inexplicably bad film and that it shouldn't be part of the canon. What you're doing is rejecting the entire French New Wave because it's not like the other genres that take pride of place in your canon. If there's a French New Wave film that you like, you like it, but you don't LOVE it, so it's still okay to reject the genre. The problem with this entire discussion isn't that you buck some trend and declare that Dandy vs. Azteca is a bad match. It's that you can't believe that other people find it objectively great when you find it so appalling and distasteful. No matter what you say that suggests an attitude that canon is canon and people can't be so far removed in their taste. Half the trouble is because you use such emotive language. The other half is a conservative streak. GOTW called it elitist, but I'm not sure that's the case. I just think you're passionate in your beliefs, and Lord knows I listened to Bowie because of you and even listened to all of Dylan's albums because of you, but lucha is a disconnect you've struggled over. The hip hop analogy I had a hard time with since I've listened to so much of the music that shaped hip hop, and I would happily compare it to the music it samples for starters. I also have a hard time thinking about lucha as a "thing" when it's so wildly divergent within its country of origin, but at the end of the time I came into lucha wanting to like it. My buddy, whom I watched tapes with at the time, and I wildly embraced those moments that are quintessentially "lucha" because that was the stuff we wanted to pop for. Others might be turned off by that. I always imagined I'd be turned off by Iron Maiden before I went on a big metal binge. Total immersion in a genre is what Matt was arguing for before. But you've got to want to like it. When I read Rippa and Dean writing about 1989-90 lucha, I wanted to like it. To be perfectly honest, until Loss came along and said (in his enthusiasm) that Dandy vs. Azteca was a 5 star match and a MOTD contender, nobody had much to say about where it fit into the grand scheme of things. We were just happy watching 1990 lucha. Maybe it was because it was different from what we were used to, but I don't think that's a bad thing. Anyway, I'm getting a bit tired of this idea that we should force lucha on you. I think you've sampled enough that it's not for you in November, 2015.

I don't really see how an argument of whether there was a counter or not can be subjective. Either there was a counter or there wasn't. You can always argue over how good the counter was, but not its existence.

They wrestle an entirely different sort of match because of their weight class. You wouldn't see a pair of lucha heavyweights have that same match. In regard to your criticisms, it's simply a matter of whether they're fair or not. If you claim a worker released a hold by rolling over and there was actually a counter then no matter how snug the work is that's not a fair criticism.

Parv, all your examples are of heavyweights, but Dandy and Azteca were a pair of middleweights. It seems to me that most of your standards are based on (men's) heavyweight wrestling. Surely, there needs to be allowances made for other weight classes.

It's a bummer that the Kawada match is clipped. Nishimura looked like he took his striking game to another level and I love the shoot-like quality that Kawada brings to his submissions in this sort of environment. Would have liked to have seen how they handled the rounds system. Kawada and Nishimura having a standoff at the end with push-ups and bridges was amusing.

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 36 Don Eagle vs. Steve Logan (9/3/86) This featured some Canadian guy doing a Don Eagle tribute gimmick. Walton said he'd heard a lot of good things about him, particularly in tag, and proceeded to shit on him during the early part of the match where he was giving Logan some "shine" (for want of a better term.) Eventually, Eagle took over on offence and made Walton look a bit foolish. I'm not sure who this Eagle guy was, but he was must have been related to Stampede somehow. He was on TV two weeks in a row and never heard from again. Ricky Knight vs. Flesh Gordon (Merthyr, taped 2/4/92) Flesh Gordon during is the biggest douche in wrestling history. He's such a bad worker as well. I don't think I've seen him hit anything cleanly yet. Ricky Knight was a fun comedy worker, but this is a million miles away from the classic 70s WoS I love. The Super Flies beat on Gordon setting up a tag match that Psycho uploaded earlier. Orig Williams vs. Dave Duran (Unknown location, taped 1985) Having a good match with Orig Williams was an impossible task, but Duran and Steve Fury at ringside tried their best to make this heated. Which it was because if nothing else Williams was over like a mofo. The post-match angle with Williams ripping the shirt off Fury's back showed how pale an imitation Reslo was of the US territories. Steve Prince vs. Doc Dean (3/16/88) Legend has it that this was supposed to be the TV debut of Alan "Spinner" McKenzie, but he refused to appear on TV for some reason and Prince replaced him instead. Walton forgot that Prince had already been on TV getting his arse handed to him by Dave Finlay in one of the stiffest WoS bouts ever. Doc Dean was a good worker and fun to watch every time, but didn't have the build to make it on the international circuit. The Emperor vs. Tiger Dalbir Singh (3/19/88) I think the Emperor was Big Bill Bromley under a mask. This was all right for what it was. Singh had packed on a ton of weight in the last few years of TV wrestling and I don't mean muscle. As always, matches from '88 seem drab with wrestling on its way out the door.

This season feels like one big long coronation ceremony for Steph Curry and the Warriors. What dominant championship run does it compare to?

Princess Paula and Finlay. Objectively speaking it was a success, but man did it ruin Finlay for me.

The Tanahashi bout from 2004 was good. Can't accuse Nishimura of being passive in this one as he was pissed at Tanahashi and took the fight to him. Tanahashi was pretty solid in his younger days though he was already showing the kind of mannerisms that make him annoying like the ridiculous fist bump celebration at winning where his injured leg immediately buckled. I can understand him wanting to sell that way, but it looked so lame. I suppose for Tanahashi fans it shows his passion. Fiesty Nishimura was cool.

Man, did the board hate that post.