ohtani's jacket

Harley Race vs. Dusty Rhodes Just now, I watched as much Dusty Rhodes vs. Harley Race footage as I could find, which boiled down to the 8/21/79 and 6/21/81 NWA title changes, the 12/6/75 match from All Japan and a short clip of Murdoch/Rhodes vs. Race/Roop from 9/13/75. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this footage as I assumed that Big Dust wasn't much of a worker, but fuck me was this shit great. The 8/79 match is helped by being clipped to the best stuff (Race's headbutts, Dusty bleeding everywhere, the bionic elbow, etc.), as well as Solie and Rhodes commentating over the top of the film, but I was surprised by the shape Rhodes was in, the reaction of the crowd and the younger fans flooding the ring like a Florida team winning a Super Bowl or NBA championship. The '81 title swap was equally great and shattered any illusions I might have had that Dusty winning the title didn't really match the legitimacy of the title to date. In all honesty, I can't understand how Rhodes invited the Dusty finish when he experienced what a real title switch was like. The All Japan match I hated on at first because of the crowd, but I thought Dusty was brilliant in the way he fleshed out his audience and understood what made them pop. The tag match is really short, nothing even, but Dusty's commentary was AMAZING. I marked out more than I have since the Microscope began. I immediately rushed to my James Brown collection and began playing his records I was so pumped. I'd consumed a six pack by this point, so I had a little lubricant, but this really made me want to drink more. Check it out -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl9wTfWg6ls

There are two more Tully/Wahoo clips on Youtube that I missed the first time round. One is a street fight from SCW that isn't much of anything and the other is an NWA houseshow from '85 where the crowd chant "I quit" at Tully the whole match long. It's a pretty fun match with the usual asskickery. I also dug the promo I saw of when Tully and Wahoo joined up as partners in Mid-Atlantic. I love it when they have the heels commentate over footage of what they did they've done to the faces. Wahoo was pretty solid on the mic and Tully was class dropping Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes impersonations into the mix. Tully Blanchard vs. Eric Embry, SCW 1/31/83 This was a lot of fun. Bob Sweetan made it work with his guest commentary and the awesome promo he cut at the end holding Embry's bloodied head up for the camera to take a good look at, but this was Tully the bastard as opposited to Tully the brat. We got to see a lot more of Tully's offense here than the usual cat and mouse stuff and he really went to town on Embry. If you're going to beat the shit out of some poor unfortunate kid to drive home a point to your rival then this is the way to do it. I'd like to think that Tully honed his craft working these studio matches for SCW, so I'm gonna roll with that idea unless corrected. In some ways, SCW was bush league, but on the other hand Tully made it seem like compelling viewing.

World of Sport was cancelled in '85. The shared slot didn't start until '87, but All Star Wrestling appeared on the cable channel Screensport in '85 and '86. I'm not a big fan of ASW, but I imagine it will make the set. I'm fine with WoS as shorthand for the style, but not really the promotion as Joint Promotions was made up of Dale Martin in London and other promoters in Yorkshire, Liverpool, Manchester and Scotland.

World of Sports wasn't a promotion, it was the name of a television show on ITV. There's also far more 80s footage available than there is 70s footage and the 80s set is a Europe set, which means it will include Germany and Wales.

Tully Blanchard vs. Wahoo McDaniel Youtube has three Blanchard vs. McDaniel matches, two from Southwest TV and another from a Crockett houseshow. The Southwest matches are the ones worth watching, though they only give you a little of the Tully vs. Wahoo not the whole Tully vs. Wahoo, as the Macho Man would say. These guys were a good match-up for each other. The Chief only had one direction and that was forward. He looked like he'd chop his way through a forest or a mountain if you stuck it in his way. Tully, on the other hand, was a hyperactive worker who would gladly throw cheap shots and run and hide all bout long if he could rope a dope his way through a match. There's plenty of hard hitting action in these bouts, as you'd expect. I love Wahoo's hip toss. It looks awesome when a guy that size slams someone into the mat with a throw like that. The commentator for SCW was pretty crap, but these are still fun TV stips with Tully being forced to wrestle McDaniel against his will. Tully is great in his role of brat. Did these guys ever have a definitive match together? And is it just me or did Blanchard wear mascara ala Isiah Thomas? It always seems that way to me. Got to love how you can watch this on youtube and end up watching a bunch of awesome Ernie Ladd promos. His anti-whiskey drinkers in wrestling schtick is a riot.

Thanks as always to Black Terry Jr for making these reviews possible. I thought both the 8/1 and 10/13 Black Terry/Negro Navarro vs Super Astro/Solar maestro tags were excellent. In fact, I thought they were the most balanced, best worked maestro tags since Black Terry Jr began filming their matches. That may be time and distance talking since I was so wildly out of the loop last year, but I watched these matches more than once before commenting and enjoyed them immensely each time. They're not story matches and they don't even have much of a narrative, but what I liked about them was that they captured the spirit of pure lucha exchanges. I don't have much time these days and I've been trying to multi-task, so I've been watching these matches while listening to 60s jazz, and while 60s jazz and lucha libre may not have a lot in common, I've been able to get into the groove of these matches. The Solar/Navarrro stuff in particular cranks, but the stories of Super Astro's demise have been greatly exaggerated. He's not the worker he once was, but he rollled around on the mat with Black Terry in cracking fashion and was able to do his tope. I can see folks wishing they'd do more -- perhaps more Terry/Solar or Terry and Navarro being the murders' row tag team that we know they can be -- but when you see some of the counters and reversals that Solar and Navarro can do you can understand why the others clear out of the way and let them do their thing. When I first got into lucha, one of the things I loved most was watching a guy like El Dandy hit the ring. When Dandy stepped through those ropes it didn't matter whether the guy on the other side of the ring was Emilio or Casas or Super Muneco, you knew the exchange was going to be amazing, and that's the feeling I get from these matches. To tie it back into music, it's like this cool bar I went to recently that was stacked with wall to wall soul records. The barman would drop another record while you slipped on your drink of choice and you just kicked back and enjoyed the music. Watching these matches, I kicked back and enjoyed the lucha. I have no idea when Cerebro Negro returned to IWRG and why he was feuding with Dr. Cerebro. I'm not sure I could even recognise him with the look he's sporting at the moment, but I thought their 12/16 match wasn't too bad. Better than a kick in the pants at any rate. There wasn't much to the falls, but the work was direct and physical and the finishes were cool. I could have done without the weapon shots, but they weren't too bad. The match stalled a bit in the third caida and the lightbulbs weren't really necessary, but there was more good than bad on show here. I really dug the spot where Dr. Cerebro was draped over the ropes from the apron in and Negro dropkicked him in the face. That was badass. The doctor turning his submission finish into some form of sitdown driver was ultimate badass too. I always forget that the good doctor is out there being probably a top 10 luchador at any given time. I've got to keep tabs of his work.

Tully Blanchard vs. Carlos Colon (1989?) Here's Tully vs. the man of the hour, Carlos Colon. Youtube has a pretty cool clip of these two grappling in North Carolina, but this is a title match from Puerto Rico. Pretty decent match, though definitely not in the epic category. It's more a case of Tully's schtick meets Colon's schtick more than anything else, and after watching the Hansen/Colon feud I think I've already figured out Colon's schtick. The match moves in and out of the ring a lot, which leads to some dead passages, and there's some weak spots with the ref towards the end, including the finish, but the basic brawling is entertaining enough. I'm not sure if it was an adlib or a regular Tully spot, but he did this desperation diving punch to the face which I thought was really cool. The North Carlolina match had much better grappling from Tully, but all in all not a bad match.

Harley Race vs. Jumbo Tsuruta, AJPW 8/1/82 This was all right, but I don't think it held a candle to what Race was doing in Texas and against Flair. I didn't care much for Jumbo's performance in this match. Something about the way he wrestles small all the time and his selling of the bladejob rubbed me the wrong way. It almost seemed like he was trying too hard. And I'm still not sold on Harley in Japan being any good. The transition here from serious wrestling match to heated brawl wasn't any better than in any of the Baba matches and was missing the cool transitions of Race's American work.

Herb Kunze was some kind of University math professor who wrote a column called Herb's Tidbits. Folks used to eagerly await it each week to read him ravage the WWF product. I remember being bitterly disappointed anytime he was late with it. No need to apologise for your comments. Liger's booking may have been overrated or lacking in some department. I've long felt that 90s New Japan needed re-evaluating. I suppose it's getting that to a certain extent with the yearbooks, but they can only go so far. Workrate was king in the 90s whereas story has been king for a while now among fans, so juniors stuff was bound to take a hit in the same way joshi puroresu has. I don't know if that's universally true as the internet is a big place and I'm sure there's people who still love the go-go-go style, but it is a real turn off whenever I go back and look at that stuff. I forgot about the Barnett comps. If he was taking that from terrestrial TV then it can't have been much more than clips.

Okay, I don't really remember 2000 BattlARTS being spoken about nearly as much as the '98/99 stuff, but it probably was.

My parents always used to comment on seeing Rick Martel in the late 70s when he was mainstay of the New Zealand scene. New Zealand's TV was pretty weak from what I've seen, but I wish we had some houseshow footage from those days.

Man, I totally thought this was going to be about how we were introduced to the board. I was going to reminisce about when it was called New Millenium Blues and we were young and could talk about things other than pro-wrestling, and Will's Spurs were still winning championships. Actually, this is the 8th year of coming here and I think the thing I admire most about Will and Loss is that when things like the yearbooks were just a pipe dream they actually saw them through not like the thousands of abandoned projects that make up the web.

Welcome to the board, TobyNotJason. I think that feeling of "sameness" was a problem for all of the major promotions by the end of the 90s, largely because they'd ran the same match-ups for so long and the only way to keep them fresh was to keep adding spots and trying to make the matches more and more epic. The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is that there wasn't an entirely new generation of workers to push like there was with Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi/Taue, Muto/Chono/Hashimoto, Hokuto/Toyota/Kyoko/Yamada, and indeed Ohtani/Kanemoto/Samurai. There were some decent rookies, but not in the same numbers as previous generations, and I'd argue that the reason for that was that after the major feds lost prime time TV coverage there was a major drop-off in exposure. This combined with the declining population, the sudden rise in popularity of football as an alternative to baseball, and the young generation rejecting the ethos upon which dojo training was based led to a decline in the numbers interested in becoming a professional wrestler which reduced the overall talent pool from which to draw from. The only alternative to the same yearly match-ups was to co-promote, but after a while they milked that cow dry. As far as juniors perception goes, I have never met a hardcore Japanese fan who believed that Liger was as big a deal in Japan as he was in the States, though this may be a false perception that he was a bigger deal in America than he really was. It's also contradicted by the type of crowd responses Liger typically drew. The only conclusion I could really draw was that hardcore Japanese fans were a bit funny about juniors. I seem to remember there being some interest in '98-99 juniors. I think it's important to remember that it was something that happened "live" for most of us, as opposed to getting a backlog of tapes from years prior. I remember following puroresu news at the time through Arnold and Quebrada and 1Wrestling and reading Herb Kunze every week. I also remember downloading '99 juniors matches on whatever that prehistoric downloading program we used to use was called. There was a bit of a shift around that time in that some of the older fans stopped watching and the newer fans were interested in the name shows. Tapes were so expensive that you either bought the most highly recommended shows or you got custom tapes made. I never bought weekly TV, ever. I rented it from a Japanese video store and dubbed it for Stuart when he was first kind of starting out, but in the main I think people of my ilk were still buying the major stuff. And as noted above, the juniors got stupid in 2000. I remember being in Arnold's chat for the J Cup that year and it fell so flat. I feel there were storylines during the peak years. Liger's booking was praised a lot during that era. Going back and watching some of the '98 stuff Loss asked about, Ohtani still felt fresh to me even if realistically I can't have seen his schtick going past the '96-98 mark without getting old. There was a whole faction feud in '97 between Liger and Samurai vs. Ohtani and Kanemoto and other examples of quality booking either in the title match scene or the tournaments they staged. Liger was probably a bit too giving in terms of the jobs he did instead of being the top guy like in the old territories, but it wasn't quite as slight as I feel is being made out. You couldn't follow it commercial tape to commercial tape like the All Japan stuff I suppose, but it wasn't substanceless. It did get kind of boring I suppose, which may have been why Toryumon and BattlARTs were the big things at places like DVDVR, but those "fads," so to speak, didn't last more than a year themselves.

Harley Race/Hercules vs. The British Bulldogs, WWF 1/26/88 Harley vs. the Bulldogs again, this time in the WWF. Harley had visibly declined here but still did some fun stuff with Dynamite Kid. This may not be a commonly shared opinion here, but take the Dynamite Kid from the '83 WoS match against Marty Jones and the Race from the '82 Texas stuff and the Flair matches and I reckon you'd have a hell of a match. After praising a lot of the WWF booking and angles in the Dibiase and Boss Man threads, I have to say that this Matilda angle they had going between the Bulldogs and the Islanders was pretty stupid. Monsoon sold it pretty straight by telling us that Matilda was on the mend and that she was starting to eat more and had gained a few pounds, but Heenan coming to ringside with an empty collar and leash was a pretty weak taunt. Why would two jacked up English men care about a dog when they'd be more likely to get wasted and play awful tricks on it? The match was kind of slow, but not too bad. The angle was a dud.

So, as an offshoot of Harley in Texas I've really been digging Flair in Texas lately. I haven't been able to see his more famous stuff with Kerry since I think the WWE has released it on DVD and therefore it tends to get yanked, but I've dug the stuff with David and Kevin. I especially like how Kevin's barefoot style, obsession with the head scissors and reckless attacking style make him seem like some kind of 1998 Sakuraba PRIDE opponent. One thing I get but don't really get is why the Von Erich kids get so psychopathic in the post match beat downs. I don't think I've ever seen faces behave like that. Oftentimes it's hard to justify what Harley or Flair did wrong to get laid out so badly. Can anybody more familiar with Texas explain this to me?

The commentators loved cracking jokes about Frankie. In one of the matches I watched, Lord Alfred Hayes got all dirty about mating season.

Wha? Like, Freebird Buddy Roberts?!?! I feel like I'm finding out there's no Santa Claus all over again. Yeah, he was born and raised in Vancouver.

I don't like Kroffat, I was just throwing the name out there.

I'll toss out some names: Dan Kroffat, Buddy Robberts, John Tenta, Moose Morowski, Billy Two Rivers, Don Jardine, Leo Burke.

I watched the Hansen/Colon feud one match per night for the past few nights and it really should be required viewing for all PWO members. The cage match is an insane spectacle. Hansen gives one of the best cage match performances I can remember seeing, which for a guy his size is really impressive. This was my first time to watch Colon properly and he was much smaller than I would have imagined. He bounced around like a skinny bean pole at times and the size difference was fascinating to watch. EDIT: I watched the bull rope match again this morning and it really is an incredible match. Hansen's selling is amazing. My favourite part is when he collapses into Colon's arm like a child hugging his parent. I thought they kind of exhausted their spots by the end and the finish was less heated to me than the round of cut-off spots earlier, but it was a clever idea with the back body drop.

I think it's only me who rabbits on about him being among the greatest of all-time. I'm glad more people were exposed to him on this yearbook. He'll feature heavily on the Lucha 80s set and ought to be on the '91 yearbook as well, where hopefully the greatness of Los Infernales will shine through.

I've noticed people commenting on the length of the falls in some of these lucha matches, especially the first and second caidas. These shorter falls are usually completely intentional in lucha libre and not indicative of any fault in the work. It's perfectly normal for one worker to dominate the opening fall and most of the second and for the other worker to make a brief comeback to take the second fall. This is because the control segments usually overlap falls. The momentum gained by the worker in winning the second fall will carry over into the third and thus you end up having a relatively even match heading into the back and forth finishes that typify a lucha match. If Morgan was dominating Faraon in the first fall and Faraon suddenly made a comeback it would signal to me that they were doing something a little different like having Faraon go over in straight falls. When you watch lucha, there's always a "beat" where you know the fall will end. Occasionally, they go beyond this beat and keep wrestling. It doesn't happen very often, but it's one of the tricks they have to play with the rhythm and structure of the three fall format, the same as a long opening fall and a rapid fire segunda caida. I also think people have been putting too much stock in the rudo/technico distinction in these wager matches. A wager match usually occurs because a rudo has done a series of objectionable things to a technico over the course of several weeks (sometimes months, sometimes even years.) For space reasons or because sometimes the matches aren't that great, most of the build-up to these matches has been omitted from the yearbooks. Wager matches are usually a chance for the technico to get revenge. They're not supposed to comply with any rules or moral code. I believe the Spanish expression is to fight fire with fire. So, they're not being rudoish as such, but rather fired up babyfaces as you sometimes see in the States. Lastly, Pirata Morgan was probably one of the best workers in the world at this point. At least he was in 1989.

Perhaps Will can introduce a politically correct filter to PWO. Something like gaikoku no senshu. Considering how everyone misuses words like puroresu and joshi at least they get the usage of gaijin right.

My daughter was sick and I've been busy at work, so sorry for the delay... I finished off my Boss Man viewing with matches against Duggan, Hercules, Patera and Razor Ramon. Only the 1990 Royal Rumble match against Duggan was anything of note, though the first Hercules match was pretty decent for its length. The Duggan match was shocking good for a Duggan match, though it had its weaknesses. Now onto the comparison: When Matt first dropped the idea that Boss Man was better in the WWF than Dibiase my gut reaction was that Dibiase was the better pure worker and that the only way Boss Man could have been better was if he'd done more with less or put together generic match structures or some other backhanded compliment like that, but the more I watched the more I swayed in Boss Man's favour. I have quite a few caveats, however: * Neither man had a tremendously high number of good matches. That's good matches by my definition, which others have said is stricter than most people, but personally I don't consider "good for what it was" or "smart work" to be enough when judging matches. The fact there weren't a tremendous amount of good matches from either men isn't a surprise since it was the same conclusion I came to with Tito Santana and is indicative of WWF wrestling more than anything else. Overall, I thought both men were equal when it came to high-end matches, memorable angles and feuds, as well as promo ability. * Boss Man had the advantage of having strong heel and face runs. It's to his credit that he was an even better face than he was a heel, but Dibiase didn't have the opportunity to show off the same range of skills. * From my point of view, a good big man is more interesting than a good hand. That's just a personal bias. * Dibiase was always saddled with a body guard or manager. I got really sick of seeing the same spots with Virgil and Sherri. Boss Man had a bit of schtick with Slick during his initial heel run, but his original gimmick with the cuffs and nightstick was often so surprising in its brutality that Slick was quickly forgotten and of course as a face he went it alone. * Dibiase vs. Savage is *probably* a higher high point than anything Boss Man did. I say "probably" because I didn't want to revisit those Boss Man/Hogan matches, which did very little for me when I watched every single one of them during my recent Hogan phase. What swayed me in Boss Man's favour was the fact that despite the limitations of the WWF format, I thought he gave better performances than Dibiase. Early on in his run, I felt he tried harder to adapt to each match situation, whether it was against a jobber, a JTTS, a mid card worker, a tag match or his program against Hogan. You got the feeling that he tried to make each match unique or as memorable as possible given the various constraints. Dibiase was more about getting his gimmick over, which was okay but there was a lot of repeated pre-match mic work, stooging, bumping and selling and schtick. Boss Man tended to sell in a more realistic way than Dibiase, though again he had the advantage of working face, and there wasn't the same problems with the lack of a middle to his matches. Dibiase had the better execution and sometimes Boss Man looked a bit ungainly, but Boss Man wrestled "in character" better both as a heel and face. It helped that he was a big man with big man offence and the odd surprise move, but Dibiase didn't bust out his offence enough despite having a sweet moveset. On the other hand, slow Boss Man matches with too much selling tended to be worse than bad Dibiase matches with too much stooging, nevertheless I would still take Boss Man over Dibiase at this point for general output.

Jerry, I think you should concede the point that the WWF story lines were spread out over multiple cards and not stacked on one show to the next. Even their PPVs were not that well built to during this era. They tended to focus on 3 main story lines while continuing to push various gimmicks on the undercard. The houseshows weren't only about Hogan, however. When I watch WWF house shows I see workers who were over and matches where the audience aren't off in droves taking some kind of break. Loss has mentioned how protected both Boss Man and Dibiase have been on the yearbooks and they're not the only ones. I started watching wrestling post-Wrestlemania IV and there were numerous angles and gimmicks relayed to us via Superstars. The WWF was not special in this respect, their gimmicks simply tendered to be more colorful. I think I would argue presentation over depth.