ohtani's jacket

Sid Cooper, long time television heel personality. Always reminds me of a heel Ringo Starr. Very similar to Breaks though more of a natural brawler. Zoltan Boscik, another Hungarian mat wizard with a name that sounds like an Ian Fleming villain. Turned into an excellent heel by the late 70s.

Vic Faulkner -- would probably be your mum's favourite WoS wrestler. For heel fans, the biggest smart arse to ever grace a ring. Just look at that shit eating grin. Was a bit of a prankster and loved to pull tricks on opponents. Would get fired up if the tables were turned. Bomber Pat Roach, for my money one of the best big men ever. Also had one of the more interesting acting careers of any wrestler, starring in the classic television series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and appearing in everything from Indiana Jones to Stanley Kubrick.

Cheers, Jetlag. Catweazle, 11th century time traveling wizard or guy who looks a lot like him. This is the only Catweazle match I have ever liked. Colt Cabana shat on it once saying McManus wouldn't give Catweazle anything. Regal agreed with him momentarily lowering my opinion of Lord Steven Regal.

Jackie Turpin Jr was from a famous boxing family in the UK. His father Jackie Sr was a successful featherweight boxer, his uncle Dick a former British and Commonwealth middleweight champion, and their brother Randy Turpin a household name in England after defeating Sugar Ray Robinson for the World Middleweight Championship in 1951. Jackie Jr fought 32 professional fights between 1967 and 1975 and went 24-7 with one draw. He was British Rookie of the Year in 1971 going 12-0 on the year with 11 knock outs. According to his father's autobiography, Jr didn't train hard enough and got caught up in the limelight. After a pair of bad losses, the Board of Control withdrew his license as unfit to box. A court case followed, and three years later Turpin was allowed to box again, but after being knocked down three times in his final fight he quit the fight game and entered the wrestling business. Randy Turpin had also worked professional wrestling bouts after retiring (mostly because he was desperate for cash) and for a while played off his name in the independent circuit. Jackie Jr has been impressive in the matches I've seen him in against Breaks and Grey, so I bit the bullet and got a comp made of his work. Jackie Turpin vs. Tally Ho Kaye (3/23/76) This was Turpin's television debut some five months after he quit boxing. I'll have to see if I can find out who trained him. He was pretty green here. He was trying especially hard to sell properly. Kaye didn't carry him all that well, I thought, but it was one of those bullshit television tournaments (this time team sports, The TV All-Stars vs. The Challenge Team), so it was never going to be a great bout. Kaye looked amazingly young. He aged rather dramatically in a short span of time. The MC was this older guy who always made mistakes about the match length or the number of falls needed. You could hear Walton correct the announcement then throw his head set down and complain that the MC got it wrong. Ha ha, nothing pissed Walton off more than incorrect graphics on the screen and the MC making a mistake. The finish to this saw Turpin instinctively start boxing and get DQ'ed for his lapse. Not an auspicious start to his wrestling career. Jackie Turpin vs. Tally Ho Kaye (8/2/78) Two years later and Turpin had made a big improvement. His selling in particular was much better. Kaye could also work with him more easily here. Kaye was a decent worker though not really in the class of other charismatic heels such as McManus, Breaks or Cooper, but his heel shtick was generally good and he had some great one-liners. The crowd loved to see him get his comeuppance and were riding him on every bump, More of the Tally Ho Kaye show than a standout Turpin performance, but definitely an entertaining bout. Since we were talking about DQs just the other day, Crabtree DQ'ed Kaye here and if you hate referees who over step the boundaries he not only kneed Kaye to break up a hole, but told him to take a hike at the end as well. That was partly down to his MC shtick where he'd lambaste the heels, but I can't see Crabtree being too many people's favourite ref. He did an awesome dismount from the ring afterwards, though, which got a small pop.

Onita was a junior heavyweight in those days not a death match worker.

I'm not a fan of Bridges, but I may be the only person in the world who likes that Nagasaki match. I thought it was goofy and a ton of fun. It's Nagasaki so you shouldn't expect too much. Steele I have a soft spot for, but I can see him boring the pants off most folks. Roach and Roberts are gods among men. I know Pete doesn't like Dalibar Singh, but for me the worst is Count Bartelli.

I'm not the person to ask, but my general understanding is that bloody brawls among other workers became more common after the success of the Funks vs. Abby/Sheik feud.

It took me a while to get into St. Clair as well since I was predisposed to thinking he sucked, but the CSB feud as well as the McManus matches changed my mind on Tony. The heavyweights are more difficult to get into than the lightweights and middleweights, but stick with them. They're all part of the WoS family.

Possibly Kent Walton's favourite wrestler of all-time and one of the great technicians of the post-war era, Mike Marino: Exciting, fast paced heavyweight Tony St. Clair, here embroiled in a heated feud with one half of the infamous Caribbean Sunshine Boys, Dave Bond:

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.