ohtani's jacket

Les Kellett, total comedy act that disguised the fact he was the hardest bastard in the business and probably the meanest too: "Gold Belt" Brian Maxine, wrestling's Country and Western recording star and self-proclaimed King of Wrestling:

All right, since people have expressed an interest in watching more World of Sport and the Veidor/Davies match got some pretty positive feedback, I decided that instead of nominating a bunch of workers no-one's ever heard of, I would choose an intro match for each of the stars and if you like the wrestler you can watch more of their matches and nominate them yourselves. In order not to break anyone's heart, I will try not to pick workers whom we only have one or two matches of. Let's start with the perennial villain Mick McManus, who maintained that hair of his through a forty year career. Here's a vintage McManus performance from 1976 against a then masked Kung Fu: The Hungarian heavyweight wizard, Tibor Szakacs, who is the closest thing to a WoS Volk Han that you'll get. Watch for his back handed chop:

Maybe he's the captain not a sailor. That's funny stuff.

The best way to do it is to watch Casas/Dandy from '92 and all of the trios that surrounded it. Usually the trios come before a singles match, but I think they happened afterwards in this case. Gregor would know for sure. I'd really like to encourage people to watch all the trios matches surrounding notable singles matches from the 90s as they are a huge part of the fun.

I decided I wouldn't talk about recent Casas for this poll. What's been great lately is that there's all this '92-94 Casas popping up online that previously you had to go out of your way to order from Lynch, and I guess only Bihari did that to any great degree. We're very lucky in this day and age as ten years ago lucha matches online were as rare as hen's teeth and certainly not the hidden gems ilk.

Christ no, my head just exploded and I don't have anything around the house to piece it back together.

Keep it coming, elliot. Taking a look at Satanico's 2001 is enticing. If there were more of it on YouTube I would hand it to Matt as a project.

Today's Vintage Negro Casas of the Day is quite a long entry about the '93 Casas/Dragon title match which just surfaced on RubeTube. As usual lots of rambling, plenty of tangets, and no proof reading whatsoever - http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/blog/8/entry-433-vintage-negro-casas-of-the-day-9/

The master stylist. I suspect a lot of people would find the Wigan trained heavyweights like Billy Joyce and Billy Robinson boring as bat shit, and there are a lot of other heavyweights out there who are dry and technical and a bad place to start. Veidor had a flair for making his bouts exciting and is the perfect gateway for the British heavyweights. There are a bunch of his matches on YouTube so you can start with the Davies bout and get stuck right in. My other favourite is against Tony Charles.

The other match is against a guy called Dennis Mitchell, who was one of wrestling's first golden boys in the 1960s. He's right at the end of his carer and I don't remember much about it. It's on YouTube. Boscik and Grey had a whole series of matches some of which aired on TWC and some from the original broadcasts. They had tremendous chemistry.

Ozaki worked Yagi's arm early on, which Yagi sold extremely well, but the only time I remember Yagi putting a hold on Ozaki's arm she was kicking the ribs with her heels. I'm not sure there was enough arm work for it to even matter if it was blown off. It certainly wasn't a focus. I don't remember an Ozaki pop up, but she was clutching her ribs on everything. Transcendent is a pretty big word, but that was a great selling performance for a regular TV match. I could see a lot of people going ga ga over that if it happened in a TV match these days. But even if it didn't seem that good, you don't usually see that kind of psychology in Joshi so I thought it was great detail work.

I'm glad you liked it.

I wanted to pick something from left field for Joshi and so I chose the Ozaki/Yagi match because it's a longish Ozaki match and I'm interested in what people think of her these days, plus it's from the JWP TV run that Jerome and Todd and others loved so much, wasn't on the yearbook, and features the as ever unheralded Hiromi Yagi. Man was this a pleasant surprise. Ozaki came into the match with taped ribs and the commentator mentioned it was her return bout. I don't know if her ribs were still hurting, but she sold them throughout the match and constantly had one hand clutched to her side. The limbwork Dylan mentioned was actually targeting the ribs and Ozaki sold it beautifully. This match reconfirmed for me that she really was one of the great sellers of all time. Just a beautiful seller. Yagi was in an unnatural position of being the aggressor, and I don't think it works when she takes an opponent to the outside, but on the mat the way she worked her fist into the ribs or kicked them with her feet while applying the armbar was awesome stuff, and the double stomp to the ribs was the most painful looking thing I've seen in wrestling since god knows when. Ozaki was an amazing seller. It bears repeating. I don't think she blew anything off, because her ribs were hurting her the entire time and she really didn't pull out that much offence during the stretch run. I don't think she needed to go to the dragon sleeper three times (the first time would have sufficed for me), but I understand her wanting to make sure Yagi hung on for long enough before the referee stopped the fight. This was a great TV bout, I thought. It got me right back into Ozaki. I feel a bit bad nominating a match for myself, but somebody else can choose the Joshi pick next week.

They didn't start airing EMLL on television until 1983 so there's nothing from before then. I haven't watched his 00s work or any of his recent stuff against Dandy. Please pass along anything good you discover.

This is the Ultimo Guerrero match: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i95WsMehcfQ

Well, I watched them both back-to-back and would probably put Chigusa/Dump at *** 1/2 and the Funks tag at ** so we are not on the same book let alone the same page.

It would sometimes lead to a DQ. It depended on how much the wrestler had been doing it, how many public warnings they had or how blatant it was. Literally everybody did the concealed punch spot. The public-warning system is something I take for granted these days, but there was also an unwritten rule that the ref would allow a certain amount of retaliation if he felt like the opponent had been using inside moves. They would also issue private warnings and would even give the faces public warnings so that Walton could exclaim how he'd never seen wrestler A receive a public warning to piss off all the nit pickers at home like me. The DQ for a punch is actually one of my least favourite finishes. Nine times out of ten it makes the heel look stupid as opposed to getting his just deserts.

I thought I'd do some of the homework too. The Funks tag did just about nothing for me. The visual of both Funks bleeding was strong and I liked their comeback, but the heels weren't domineering enough for me and I thought it was odd that Dory ended up being more psychotic and vicious than either of them. I'm not sure it was even a match, to be honest. It was as though the match never really started and just descended into an out of control brawl. I can appreciate Parv's review and his feelings on the match, but I don't really see how the stakes were high enough for Dory to go so crazy in the match.

Am I watching the wrong match or did Abdullah do even less before busting Terry open than Dump?

It happens a lot with 70s workers. Veidor at least has 21 matches on tape.

Unfortunately, there's only three Gwyn Davies matches on tape. We're pretty lucky to have the Veidor one as it was from the Royal Albert Hall, which wasn't usually taped.

Okay, for anybody else who watches, keep in mind that it was really a huge upset. Most people would have picked Chigusa to prevail in a close fought bout, but it wasn't even close really. Dump steamrolled her and the loss sent shockwaves through the audience at home.

Bull was basically a good worker from the beginning. Once she over the fact that she had to be a heel (legend has it she cried when they cut her hair since nobody really wanted to be a heel in those days), she quickly blossomed. Her most difficult growth period was when they first pushed her as the top woman before she gained all the weight. She didn't really have the tools to be on top at first and there were some growing pains. She had been very comfortable in her tag roles up to that point. The Bull/Condor team was a strong mid card act and I remember enjoying a lot of their matches. The entire 80s mid card is underrated/unknown. You have to be into your Joshi to enjoy it, but they became a great crew around '87.

Why do you need to do more than have your forehead repeatedly stabbed with a pair of scissors to bleed? Dump works the cut open after Chigusa has tried to cut her hair, and Chigusa tries to cut Dump's hair because she's actually being owned on the mat and having all her comebacks cut off. She doesn't resist the hair cut at the end either. The crowd and her team don't want her to have her hair cut and especially not by the heels. I think the comparisons to Magnum/Tully are a bit off because it's not the blow off match. That was the second hair match. This match was designed to purely shock.

Slater vs. Roberts with Dark Journey in the cage was good, though it did expose Roberts' weakness as a worker. He was simply boring working from the top. The match doesn't get good until Slater takes over and Roberts begins selling the arm. The commentary dropping in and the crowd noise dropping out was a travesty, and the finish wasn't really the payoff the crowd wanted, but overall it was good stuff.