ohtani's jacket

Rimi Yokota vs. Yumi Ikeshita, 3/15/80 Clipped for TV but looked to be an in-ring focused bout worthy of both women's talents. Jackie Sato vs. Nancy Kumi, 12/80 Clipped to the point of being non-rateable. Jackie Sato vs. Tomi Aoyama, 1/4/80 Jackie vs. Jackie Jr. Worth watching if only to see the difference between Sato's more 70s style spidery matwork and the style of work that Jaguar and Chigusa were ushering in. The highspots were decidedly unspectacular, but it came across as an important contest and it's better to watch Sato wrestle than fuck around with heels.

El Hijo del Santo & Black Shadow Jr. vs. Espanto Jr. & Eskeletor (12/1/85) This is from the Plaza De Toros Monumental bullring in Monterrey and was on the undercard of the El Solitario vs. Dr. Wagner mask vs. mask match. It was part of the build to an El Hijo del Santo vs. Eskeletor mask match on 12/22, at a time when Santo was taking masks all around Mexico. Eskeletor’s partner here was one of Santo’s great career rivals, Espanto Jr., while Santo’s partner was the worked son of one of the most legendary luchadores of all time. Espanto Jr. (Jesus Andrade) was the son of El Moro, a Laguna based wrestler who trained all seven of his sons to wrestle in an effort to keep them off the streets. Andrade made his debut at Arena Ferrocarrilero de Gomez Palacio in 1971 at the age of 14, and recalls the crowd laughing at him for being so skinny and nervous. Like many luchadores, he drifted in his early days, winding up in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where he began working for Gori Guerrero, who had become a local promoter in the Cd. Juarez area. Over the next few years, he worked Juarez to Monterrey under the guise of various different gimmicks. In 1978, with no other profession or studies to fall back on, he began working for EMLL at the Plaza de Toros Torreon in Chihuahua, where he worked his way up to the third match on the card, and by 1982 he was working Arena Coliseo in Mexico City. Andrade’s preferred gimmick was as El Moro II (or sometimes El Moro), but promoters changed his name practically everywhere he wrestled. Supposedly unhappy at EMLL wanting to change his gimmick to Negro Andrade, he returned to Gomez where he wrestled locally until promoter and journalist, Hector Valero, suggested he return to Mexico City as Espanto Jr, part of la dinastia de los Cisneros: José Vázquez Cisneros, Espanto I, y Fernando Cisneros Carrillo, Espanto II. With the blessing of Espanto II, Andrade was given permission to work as Espanto Jr. and made his debut in 1984 at El Toreo, tagging with Blue Panther against El Hijo del Santo and Black Shadow Jr. Black Shadow Jr. was a Monterrey native who was considerably older than either Santo or Espanto Jr. having made his debut in the mid 60s. He was already working El Toreo as Pequeño Solín, a gimmick believed to be derived from the famous Mexican comic book Kaliman, when he approached the original Black Shadow about wrestling as his “son.” Since none of Black Shadow’s sons had wanted to wrestle, he gave Solin his permission and Black Shadow Jr. made his debut around the same time as Espanto Jr. And in another striking parallel to Espanto, Black Shadow Jr. would go on to have a bloody mask match against Santo in this same arena some six years later.

Body part work is a wrestling cliche. If wrestling were a work of narrative fiction it would be the equivalent of "it was a dark and stormy night."

The Shield vs. The Wyatts (Elimination Chamber) 2/23/14 This was the first time for me to see a Shield match, so it was never going to resonate as much with me as it did others who've been following their development. The early stuff was okay. There wasn't anything particularly outstanding about the Shield's double and triple teaming or the Wyatts' brawling and big man spots, but the match built well and picked up steam when they started doing what I assume were sequences they'd laid out with the road agent. Said sequences were a bit too choreographed, but the crowd was molten and seemed like it would come unglued at any time, which gave the match a tremendous energy. I couldn't in good faith rate it as highly as some people have as I think there's been much better six mans with better workers over the years, but it was certainly memorable. No-one struck me as a great worker and I was surprised by how poor the Shields' offence seemed, especially Rollins, so I wonder if this wasn't a terrific piece of booking. Elimination Chamber (Elimination Chamber) 2/23/14 This was pretty good up until the eliminations began then it became sports entertainment fluff. There's no way I can buy a match with that much outside interference as great, especially when it ate up so much of the stretch run. Cesaro, Shemaus and Christian added the best stuff to the match, but it wasn't as good as their non-gimmicked stuff and they were all off on spots at times. I liked the brogue kick into the pod. That was the highlight of the match.

He doesn't have a hair metal gimmick. He just does shitty air guitar poses.

Tanahashi is a better worker than Okada, but Okada has the height. I'm highly skeptical about how good his English is.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030310205420/http://www.puroresupower.com/sheldon.htm

Sasuke staying at Tokyo Inn, a nationwide chain of cheap business hotels:

If the best match is only three stars, then I would say there hasn't been a MOTYC so far. I guess I prescribe to the old-school mentality that MOTYC means 4 1/2 stars or better. I couldn't see a three star match contending for MOTY no matter how novel it may be, though I'm sure I could convince myself otherwise if I really liked the match. What happens when there is a year like 2000 (or whenever) where there aren't any ****1/2 matches? Does that mean that there aren't any MOTYCs? If that were the case then you'd have to lower the threshold. If there were nothing below **** then you'd be stretching to come up with a MOTY.

'This is from the UK gossip website, Popbitch. >> The Masked Shagger Is Sasuke a porn star? Masanori Murakawa is a Japanese wrestler, better known as "The Great Sasuke". By day he's also a local councillor in Iwate, northern Japan. Last week he won a legal battle to wear his full-face wrestling mask in council chambers because, he claimed, "voters know me that way". However, Murakawa is under suspicion of starring in a porn DVD currently doing the rounds in Japan. Viewers say the mask and muscles are identical to the Great Sasuke. Murakawa's response? "It's obvious to anyone who knows me. My tool is not that big."'

This is a funny one -- http://news.3yen.com/2005-07-14/the-great-sasuke/

Haven't seen this. My lucha viewing is pretty selective these days.

He's some type of UFO researcher and has brought it up in public forums: "For the people of Japan, their hard-earned tax dollars at work with The Great Sasuke has led to some important discoveries. Some people worry about North Korea. Some people worry about Iraq. Some people worry about oil prices. But The Great Sasuke is a man of the people, and he decided to take up an important issue recently at assembly hall in Iwate. According to Sasuke, there is a crisis in Japan. Not inflationary rates, not the Yakuza, but instead... there's a problem with aliens. Sasuke recently gave a speech that caused laughter to leak out in assembly hall about the growing number of sightings of UFOs from residents in his district. He relayed his concerns with a straight face, talking about how shiny flying objects were floating in the sky at a super high-speed of zig-zagging. For a half-hour, Sasuke debated with others about UFOs and martians, wondering what kind of threat they would impose on society. He even asked one person if their mother had sighted a UFO in the past."

Cont. Jackie Sato vs. Mami Kumano, 1980 Same old match-up. Face in peril may be a tried and true match structure, but watching the same face in peril over and over again when they could just as easily be wrestling gets old pretty quickly. I zoned out so much during this that I started noticing how long limbed Sato was. Chino Sato vs. Mimi Hagiwara, 1980 Mimi handled this really well, taking enough of the strike to remind folks she was the senior worker while still giving Sato the chance to shine. Yumi Ikeshita vs. Lucy Kayama, 2/21/80 This was a bout for the vacant All Pacific title and shock horror it started off with mat wrestling. It was great to finally be able to see Ikeshita work some holds as she was such a terrific worker. Eventually, she started working Kayama over with a foreign object, but it wasn't too jarring in the context of the match. Both girls worked hard and there was less clipping than usual. They even did a couple of lucha dives to show they really meant business. Very good match in contrast to the usual brawls.

Took a look at some 1980 stuff since Loss has been tackling that year lately. Chino Sato vs. Devil Masami, Guam 1980 Typical Masami match from this period with plenty of cheating and heeling. Nothing outstanding as she hadn't reached that level yet where she was putting awesome details into her matches. Sato was a decent rag doll. Chino Sato vs. Rimi Yokota, 1/4/80 They tried really hard to make this junior title match a big deal with Sato playing the heel and both women upping their intensity, but the bout went too long and Sato in particular started to run out of ideas. Still, you have to admire the effort on some level. Devil Masami vs. Rimi Yokota, 1980 Black Gundam, or whatever they were called this week, spent most of the early portion of the match beating Yokota up, which worked okay in this context as she was a junior being piled on. Then there was a big skirmish on the outside as the good ring girls forcefully escorted Kumano & Co to the back, and from there it was the same Masami act as the Sato bout complete with the old lemon to the eyes trick. These bouts could really do with some wrestling.

If the best match is only three stars, then I would say there hasn't been a MOTYC so far. I guess I prescribe to the old-school mentality that MOTYC means 4 1/2 stars or better. I couldn't see a three star match contending for MOTY no matter how novel it may be, though I'm sure I could convince myself otherwise if I really liked the match. I didn't have a problem with the dynamic of the match, it just didn't meet my expectations based on the praise it was receiving, because when I hear MOTY being thrown around I immediately think it's going to be better than a whole bunch of matches. The question in my mind is whether it was a great TV match and I'm not sure about that. Hashimoto vs. Fujiwara was pared back to an almost shoot like quality and a different kind of match. Cena vs. Cesaro might be better than Rude vs. Rhodes, but it was given a bigger platform. Cena/Cesaro was halfway between a PPV match and a regular TV bout, kind of an odd place made possible by the three hour RAW. Perhaps a direct comparison is that Punk/Cena match from RAW last year. Then again, I'm slow to the party and people seemed to have moved on and are calling Shield/Wyatts their MOTY, so perhaps my criticisms are pointless now.

Titan did some cringe worthy stuff in that match like the cartwheel shit, but his big dives were pretty. Zayn's spots are absurd like that running diving tornado DDT through the turnbuckle post thing he did. Wrestlers do a lot of creative stuff these days, but adding extra rotations to moves or diving through parts of the ring that don't need to be dived through bug me.

That's one thing about Cesaro's stuff. He builds off of previous matches in a way that sort of breaks the MOYTC formula. It means people who have been watching will appreciate things more than people who jump in and out. That's absolutely the case for the Zayn 2/3 falls match. That may be the case, but the Zayn match had such awful spots I have no desire to see them wrestle again.

You often ask why people care about certain things. So I'm going to ask in this case why you care about big match WWE psychology and why you think the lack of it detracts from the match. It was a TV match between a main eventer and a midcarder, not a pay-per-view main event. Doesn't the fact that it steps outside of that formula and gives us something that only these two wrestlers are capable of doing make the match more unique and appealing? And how can you not even comment on Cesaro's feats of strength? I think a MOTYC needs to have a bigger arc with a layout that has a wider scope in terms of the drama it achieves, otherwise it's just a good to very good TV match. WWE has a specific type of big match psychology as seen in matches like the Cena vs. Punk MITB match. Cesaro vs. Cena didn't come anywhere close to achieving that sort of drama. Cesaro is an impressive athlete and I thought the suplexes were impressive feats of strength, but I don't think this was a big time Cena match and I don't see how only these two wrestlers are capable of having this particular match. I'm not sure I entirely agree about the bout being limited because it was a television bout. They choose to work the scale they did. The match was limited because Cesaro is limited in certain areas like acting and selling and so forth. Again, he's a very good wrestler, but they were clearly going for main event formula with the counters at the end and I don't think he has that down pat yet. I assume most people are saying this is the best match they've seen so far this year, but to me MOTYC is a set standard and doesn't evolve from one match to the next.

Antonio Cesaro vs. John Cena, 2/17/14 This has been crazily overrated as I don't see how it's anywhere near MOTY level. As far as TV bouts go, it was all fine and good, but there was nothing about the early heat segment on Cena or any of his comebacks that cried "great match." It doesn't help that WWE commentating is abysmal and that they couldn't flesh out a story if they tried, but I'm not sure Cesaro has his big match WWE psychology down pat yet. His spots look good, especially his suplexes, but he can't really do the whole epic drama thing yet. The finishing stretch was a bit too counter-rific and overall I don't think either Cena or Cesaro were at their best. This was good, but to my mind Bryan/Wyatt has set a bar for this year's WWE and this was well below their match. Sheamus/Christian vs. Real Americans, 2/10/14 Workrate sprint. Fun match, I guess, but still a workrate sprint. Probably more rewarding for weekly viewers or people who sit through RAW for the prospect of matches like this.

Perro Aguayo vs. Sangre Chicana vs. El Faraón vs. Villano III (Elimination Match) (10/84) Skip all the stuff at the beginning and head straight to the Chicana tope on Villano III. That has to be one of the best topes I've seen. An absolute bullet that was made even better by the camera being fixed on Villano III on the outside, and Chicana rocketing into frame at a million miles an hour. For a guy who's mostly known for brawling and selling, Chicana had an awesome tope and the big gamble on a tope suicida is something that really fit his character. This was a four way elimination match featuring Perro Aguayo against three of his biggest rivals at the time. It came down to Perro vs. Chicana, one of the best match-ups in lucha history if not all of wrestling. Watching these two work is fantastic, even in a match like this where they're essentially holding back. I love the theatrical spin they put on every bump and every bit of selling.They get so much mileage out of the kick-punch style that typifies 80s lucha brawling. The nuts and bolts of what they're doing couldn't be simpler, in fact it's very Memphis-like the way they're able to weave a compelling narrative around knocking each other to canvas. I also love how the highspots are missed or teased more often than they're hit. The message is clear on the big tope bailout and the DQ finish: nothing's settled here, but if the crowd's lucky they'll get that hair match sooner or later.

This might be blasphemy, but I find myself increasingly not a fan of the Wargames concept. The fact that the match can't end before everyone is in the cage makes it difficult for me to get invested in anything that happens before The Match Beyond. Plus, even the better Wargames matches are driven more by the booking and gimmick than the individual talents of the wrestlers. What do you expect? It's a gimmick match. And why would you care about the match not being able to finish until the Match Beyond? That's a strange quirk. The whole point of the match is that there are uneven odds up until the Match Beyond, so you have two on one, three on two and so forth.

Philip Seymour Hoffman would have made a good Buddy Rose.

Charles Bronson Mexicano Either a professional impersonator or the occupation that is Charles Bronson.