ohtani's jacket

It was originally called the UWF then it changed its name to Universal Pro-Wrestling Co. Ltd. The company generally referred to itself as Universal.

Here is some info about the original UWF -- http://www.prowrestlinghistory.com/shoot/uwf/uwfabout.html It was born out of the 1983 New Japan coup described here -- http://wiki.puroresu.com/Universal_Wrestling_Federation Basically, it was originally envisioned to be a new version of New Japan broadcast on rival station Fuji TV and that's why it was similar to New Japan in both presentation and roster prior to Gotch's students taking over. Hamada's UWF was actually covered the other day -- http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/31220-hamadas-uwf/

I thought this was extremely good for what they set out to achieve. It was a much more minimalist, stripped back style than the wrestling that was in vogue at the time, and the beginning was largely masochistic with both wrestlers challenging each other to hit them as hard as they could. That might not be to everyone's tastes and was a precursor of a lot of the modern forearm exchange spots, but Tenryu and Hashimoto tend to be a lot more violent. The complexion of the match changed when Tenryu became injured. I thought the commentators did a good job of foreshadowing the knee injury and Tenryu sold it pretty well except for the spot where he was struggling to reach the ropes. Not really a natural spot for Japanese wrestlers that. The crowd was super hot for his comeback which made for a fantastic atmosphere and though some of the stagger selling was weak, this was a much better example of how to do a Cena/Owens match well. Hashimoto was even using Tenryu's moves ala Owens. I really liked how Hashimoto bled from Tenryu's tsuppari attack, and even though in isolation Tenryu's big spots are ugly as sin, with that crowd behind him, the knee injury to overcome and the difficulty in keeping that fat man down you couldn't help but root for him.,

I thought this was extremely good for what they set out to achieve. It was a much more minimalist, stripped back style than the wrestling that was in vogue at the time, and the beginning was largely masochistic with both wrestlers challenging each other to hit them as hard as they could. That might not be to everyone's tastes and was a precursor of a lot of the modern forearm exchange spots, but Tenryu and Hashimoto tend to be a lot more violent. The complexion of the match changed when Tenryu became injured. I thought the commentators did a good job of foreshadowing the knee injury and Tenryu sold it pretty well except for the spot where he was struggling to reach the ropes. Not really a natural spot for Japanese wrestlers that. The crowd was super hot for his comeback which made for a fantastic atmosphere and though some of the stagger selling was weak, this was a much better example of how to do a Cena/Owens match well. Hashimoto was even using Tenryu's moves ala Owens. I really liked how Hashimoto bled from Tenryu's tsuppari attack, and even though in isolation Tenryu's big spots are ugly as sin, with that crowd behind him, the knee injury to overcome and the difficulty in keeping that fat man down you couldn't help but root for him.,

I'm in the dark on Psicosis, someone mentioned him for his AAA ork and I asked Zellner who said people spoke highly of his pre-AAA work as well. I guess you could argue that he was great right out of the gate in AAA since there isn't any Baja footage (at least not that I know of.) There is a 1992 Psicosis match on YouTube I might check out if I have time. If we're allowing for unseen footage, Jaguar Yokota was pretty great at an early age and Dynamite Kid was by far the best teenage wrestler I've seen in British wrestling.

That sounds a whole lot like forcing yourself to eat your greens. I can't think of many things worse than watching something I hate so that I can form an objective opinion on it. Having said that, the more I watch a guy I don't like the more I tend to soften on him and in some cases come around on them. I just watched a decent batch of Danny Boy Collins, which amazed me. You do lose that possibility if you succumb to your frustration.

Psicosis made his debut in 1989 and was around for a good three or four years before anyone saw him so that's a pretty liberal example. Another one people used to mention a lot was Mika Akino.

In that analogy, Orton would simply be a bad artist, but he would still be an artist.

Can't an El Gigante fan say "I know he sucks but I like him anyway"?

I don't get that Prince example. It's possible to tell whether Prince can find a note if you have musical knowledge. If Primce can tecnically speaking find a note then the person is just talking shit because they don't like Prince's music, which is what people are doing half the time behind the veneer of subjectivity.

There are Indy workers who will work for nothing just for the opportunity to wrestle just as there are actors who will work for nothing for the chance to act. And when both actors and wrestlers are washed up they'll again work for cheap. They're comparable professions in many ways. I'm sure there have been instances of a wrestler taking a lower pay day to support a promoter in some stage of their career, but it's not an easy analogy to make as the cost of even the tightest Indy budget dwarves a wrestling show.

Rey was still putting in some good performances in 2010, but I thought the quality of his matches was down on 2009. The Michaels match was okay, but Shawn's selling kind of sucked. I also watched the Undertaker match from the Royal Rumble but it fairly mundane. I think that was a match-up issue more than anything else. Still, Rey vs. WWE legends is another thing I can cross off the list of things I'm interested in. Rey vs. Kidd was the kind of Rey match I like to watch, but Kidd's execution was sloppy and there were too many people at ringside. The Del Rio stuff was okay, but he's a mechanical worker without much soul. I liked the Punk feud, but it wasn't a patch on the stuff with Jericho the previous year. Punk wore his influences on his sleeve, but he did it with conviction and I could appreciate that. I didn't much care for his over acting on the hair match payoff, but that's a standard American interpretation of a hair loss I guess. Their Wrestlemania match was kind of drab, but the rest were solid enough, though the delay during the Over the Limit bout hurt it a bit. Swagger was an awkward match-up for Rey because of the size difference (had no idea Swagger was so long limbed), but their feud was pretty good. Unfortunately, the final image I had of it was a terrible falls count anywhere bout (hate that gimmick) with Kane showing up to chokeslam Rey into the river. Was it me or did he appear at the end of each of their fights?

Yeah, the Puerto Rican guys fit into CMLL better than just about any other foreigners. They were also good in early 90s UWA.

That sounds very much like something the world needs to see.

Artistic works are commodities. There's plenty of people in the music business who see it as a business, as well as in film, TV and any other medium you care to name. The fact of the matter is that wrestling is in the entertainment industry and therefore closely linked to other commodities which are often considered art. There is an "art" to what wrestlers do in terms of craft and the commodity they produce can easily be called a "work." It's not a stretch for it to be classified as a "work of art." The problem seems to be with intent. A wrestler sets out to entertain people, get a reaction from the crowd, maybe get paid more or whatever it is he desires, whereas many people's image of "art" is setting out to paint the Sistine Chapel. Just because it's not of a higher calling doesn't necessarily make it any less of an artform. You can call it pop art or whatever you like. I personally think it's a limited art form (if indeed it is one) that doesn't have the depth of a comic book or even an animated cartoon, but that's because of its storytelling limitations. But it can be visceral and powerful and full of human drama. If it were all about dollars and cents, I'm not sure they would go to those lengths to create such performances. Other forms of show business don't. So, if it's not art it at least borrows from other forms of art -- like narrative and storytelling -- and therefore we can at least say it uses artistic elements even if it's Bobby Heenan doing comedy. I can understand people being careful not to over praise it, but on the other hand I can understand people refusing to undervalue it. Maybe I'll settle on wrestling being pulp fiction.

The 6/14 Hashimoto/Ohara vs.Tenryu/Ishikawa match is another fun handheld. It was basically designed to ratchet up the heat between Hashimoto and Tenryu, which was this festering boil of animosity. Hashimoto lifted his intensity to the next level and I thought it was the best he's looked to date. The other two were punching bags and mostly ignored as Tenryu and Hashimoto kept having a go at each other even when they weren't in the ring together, but they played their roles effectively. Tenryu squaring Ohara up after the bout and punching him for no good reason was a dick move out of the top drawer. His mannerisms in this were great, as you'd expect from a Tenryu match that was all about heat.

John Cena vs. Kevin Owens (5/31/15) I ended up watching this three times, and I've got to say it was much better without commentary. I can't stand the way the WWE commentators step on each other's toes all the time and Layfield peeved me off by claiming that Magic and Bird were already in the NBA while Dr J was playing for the ABA. Also that NBA Countdown style panel the Network has where the wrestler's mimic the same intonation as those ESPN crews is hokey as shit. This was the first time for me to see Owens wrestler so I had absolutely no basis of comparison. At first I thought he was weak on the mic, but his understated delivery grew on me and I dig his accent. The early beat down stuff was pretty generic. It wasn't bad, but there was no hook and it didn't relate to the rest of the match. As soon as Cena mounted his comeback it turned into a back and forward finishers battle with not much in the way of a middle (more of a bridge from the early wear down stuff to the kick outs and near falls.) Owens didn't really brawl as such, but the commentators kept putting over his fighting gimmick so I thought he could have been a bit more aggressive. Cena has some of the worst transitions of any major wrestler I can think of. I don't get how a guy who works such a choreographed style can have such terrible transitions. He also has poor punches, awful moves (like the springboard stunner and that shoulder tackle thing), can't sell very well and has poor pacing and sense of building from one section of a match to another, but it's those transitions that get me. The shuffle step he took after the missed moonsault was the most glaring, but there were two or three other transitions where he "wrote him a letter" as Kent Walton would say. And that's on top of the audible spot calling. I did like the finishing stretch and I thought Cena's first lariat was the best part of the match (especially on the replay), but the finish was weak. I get that they wanted it to be flukey, but I'm a firm believer in escalating near falls and ending a match on the right beat and that wasn't the right beat. In fact, the counter of the superplex probably would have been a better finish even though it didn't involve what I suppose is meant to be Owens' signature move. Or they could have just gone a few more beats instead of having it come after a string of hotter moves. Some of Owens' hybrid Dick Togo/Vader moveset is cool, and I guess his performance was better than Cena's as I don't think Cena was all that good in this bout. Overall, the bout was okay as the first match in a three match mini-program, though at the risk of upsetting people even more, it seems to me that people add a lot more to the narrative than the wrestlers or commentators provide as this really felt like a fair simply May to July mini feud and not overly important in the career of John Cena. But maybe it takes a further turn with Cena's reaction to the loss. I'd go about ** 3/4 stars on this.

I don't know how they rate as Match of the Year contenders, but here are the World of Sport matches I liked: Kung Fu vs. Mick McManus (4/21/76) Zoltan Boscik vs. Steve Grey (aired 5/8/76) Steve Veidor vs. Gwyn Davies (5/26/76) Mark Rocco vs. Marty Jones (6/30/76) Terry Rudge vs. Marty Jones (11/30/76) Zoltan Boscik vs. Alan Sarjeant (12/29/76)

It's fair to say that I like lucha matwork. My only problem with lucha matwork is that there isn't more of it. Lucha matwork is a style of matwork much like European style matwork, shoot style, submission wrestling, amateur wrestling, NWA heavyweight mat wrestling, good old regular pro-wrestling matwork, and so on. It's possible to like one style more than another, or like one style of mat wrestling and not another. I know you're finicky about what you like in your matwork (or should I say particular) and firm in your convictions, but when you're dealing with a particular strand of matwork, you have to appreciate that there are inbuilt expectations that may differ from you'd personally like to see. When I watch lucha matwork, I want to see different things from different workers. I want to see some guys work tough gritty mat contests and some guys work surrealist masterpieces that don't look like anything else in pro-wrestling. The very best guys can do both. Matwork that may look lame to you meets my expectations. Dandy vs. Azteca met a lot of people's expectations. Most people have praised it for its execution and enjoyed whatever tropes it contains; but really the point isn't whether you like the trope or not, it's whether the trope was well executed in the first place. If you time code the limbwork you're talking about on YouTube, I will check it and decide whether I think it's poor or not; but I don't think you can say just because you've watched a lot of pro-wrestling that everything about the match is obvious or apparent. The only way you can learn about a style is by watching as much of that style as possible, making assumptions and getting things wrong and learning through those mistakes. Writing things off on the basis that it didn't look like something familiar to you is unfortunate. Writing things off because they don't stack up to other examples is unfortunate. Like the Dandy/Satanico, Tully/Magnum thing... why should Dandy hate Satanico as much as Magnum hated Tully? There is no basis for such a comparison. Anyway, no-one is going to as you to invest anymore time in lucha than you would jazz at this stage, but telling a lucha fan that Dandy/Azteca is crap is like telling a jazz fan that a great jazz lp is crap. Do you have the grounds to really say so? Generally, people ignore what they're not interested in. Writing off an entire genre in a more verbose way -- while a natural thing for many of us to do -- is an annoying thing for its fans if it doesn't seem like you really made an effort to understand it. Especially, a genre that has always suffered from stereotypes and lazy criticisms. Maybe I'm being overly protective of my beloved lucha, but matwork that doesn't look like it hurts etc is a craw in any true lucha fan's side. But please time code it because it may not actually look good.

Only one person said anything about your views on Dandy/Azteca and that was me. Subjectivity isn't an excuse for unfounded criticisms.

That may have been the case pre-network, but I cannot see how MITB 2015 was one of the biggest shows of the year.

It's a glorified In Your House. Not in the present day where every PPV/special event is pushed as important. Two weeks after the last special event? Cena sure learns new moves quickly. Maybe that was the narrative behind the botch. He hasn't had time to master the all-important Code Red yet.

It's a glorified In Your House.

Why is this one particular guy forcing John Cena to change his game plan? Because he beat him? Is this supposed to have been built to in a meaningful way? In a year's time when people are complaining about the way they company have handled Owens and the whole thing is a flash in the pan are people still going to say it as a strong narrative? Maybe it's good TV on a week-to-week basis. I don't know. I was kind of asking for an explanation how it's different from Cena vs. Wyatt or Cena vs. Rusev, since you'd think (or hope) that Cena having to bust out new moves would be a bit more memorable than a string of B show matches, but I'm not pretending to be in the loop.

He's an indy guy who went through development, isn't he? Money in the Bank is a B-show.