ohtani's jacket

Bret reminds me of Pearl Jam, since he was a fan of theirs and reviewed their Vitology album in WWF magazine.

The matches I watched were from World Pro Wrestling on TV Asahi. Ditch would know better than me, but I believe Ohtani/Dragon, Wagner/Kanemoto, Liger/Sasuke and Kanemoto/Wagner vs. Ohtani/Takaiwa are available in full on commercial tape. Most of the Super Juniors stuff was clipped even on the commercial release.

Reading through this thread piqued my curosity about the juniors in '98, but honestly their matches are so badly cut that I think it's going to be a great source of frustration when it comes to putting the yearbook together. Anyway, here's what I could track down: This was nothing special. The only reason I can think of for including it was that it happened on the Jan 4th show. Standard New Japan trios action. About 7 minutes aired. Match isn't notable in any way, but the action is good. Doesn't build to either of the Liger singles matches if that's what you're thinking. Less than ten minutes aired, but what was shown was really great. Really boring. Not an interesting match at all. Excellent match between these two, as you'd expect. Not as exciting as their February match but more is shown. Didn't care for this much, but I guess if you're interested in the '98 version of Liger vs. Sami it's worth sticking on. Around half the match aired. Nothing special whatsoever. The February six-man was much better. Only five minutes of this aired and it was the same recycled Liger/Ohtani shtick. I'd say this is worthless.

Caudle had a professional sounding voice and his delivery was good. I never really had a problem with him. Having a good voice is pretty much key. I was watching a Bret/Dibiase match where some guy on youtube overdubbed his own commentary and in the comments he was going on about how he had more talent than Michael Cole. Needless to say, the guy better hang onto his day job because his voice and delivery were awful.

What I mean is that when it comes down to the business end of a match, the third act of a Ric Flair match is generally more exciting than the third act of a Bret Hart match, if you'll allow me to use that term. I find the stretch run of whether Flair is about to lose the heavyweight championship of the world more exciting than whether or not Bret will be able to apply the sharpshooter, even though I know that Flair will retain his belt through some crappy finish. I think the reason for this is because Flair is a better actor and performer than Hart and sells the finishing stretch well, and I also think there's more of a change in Flair at the beginning of a match where he's cool, calm and collected to Flair at the end of the match where he's wild-eyed and desperate. Bret goes through subtle changes, I'm sure. I used to be a big fan and big fans notice those sort of nuances, but generally speaking I think big is better. This might sound a little stupid, but Bret never really made a lot of noise in his matches. He rarely spoke during a match and he wasn't that audible a seller, either. Compare him with a Flair or a Hokuto and he's down right mute. Personally, I think Flair begging off deep in a match when he's exhausted and covered in blood is more striking than Bret doing his Gretzky "I'm the best athlete" routine, but again it's something I appreciated in the past and may do again if the wind changes.

Nakamura looks one of those guys who goes around hawking young girls for hostess club jobs, but the strikes in that match were pretty bad ass.

The main criticism of Flair is that he wrestled the same match no matter who his opponent was. It's a criticism that Loss and others have gone to great lengths to disprove, but that's the criticism. No matter how true it is, there are patterns that one sees in Ric Flair matches and I don't quite see how they can be random. Instinctive and habitual, yes, but not random. Personally, I think Flair's matches build to a much bigger payoff than Bret's even if the finishes are usually shitty. The arc in a Flair match from beginning to end is generally wider than in a Bret match because he was a much more dramatic and demonstrative performer. Bret had a kind of working for the front row Misawa vibe to him without Misawa's ability to sell that he was dangerously close to losing the match.

AJW laid an egg with Big Egg Universe. Dream Rush and Dream Slam I were much better shows.

So what is the consensus on Hashimoto's best matches? Because I'm kind of struggling to find new stuff of his to watch.

I really love this match. Eaton made Steiner look like fifteen thousand bucks here.

I'm not really a fan of either of these guys, but I thought this was a good match. I dug a lot of the shots Vader gave Mutoh in the early going and I thought the stretch run was really good. The finish could've been timed a bit better, but it didn't take the gloss off what was a well put together match. It seemed a little on the short side to be a top 5 heavyweight match, but I haven't seen a lot of 90s New Japan and from what people say about their longish heavyweight bouts the length of this may have trimmed a lot of the dead spots. I often dislike the set-up and execution of spots in Vader's matches as they seem really telegraphed, but the release german and the rest of his spots were cool, and Mutoh was fairly likeable for a change.

Interesting how wrong Dave was about the Wrestlemania III card.

I think the point of the caning spot was that Aja wasn't hitting Bull hard enough. When Bull took the sticks off her and used them on Jungle Jack and the ref she split the things in two. Aja wasn't able to muster that sort of rage at this point as she was still really green. At the end when Bull is taunting her, she spits the dummy and releases some of her anger. That was the point of their feud -- for Aja to summon the kind of hatred and rage that Chigusa wanted from her student in the GAEA Girls documentary. I think this match makes more sense in the context of their ongoing feud and Aja Kong's development than as a stand alone match, although it's entertaining enough on its own. It's somewhere in the middle between what Joshi was in the 80s and what it would become by the mid-90s and I think there's a lot to like about it in the context of this time frame where the matches were a little rough around the edges.

Way off topic, but for some reason I watched an Irish dude on youtube talking about Hashimoto's ten best matches and he pointed out that WAR should be said as W-A-R not war. Never occurred to me.

This match is a total blast. Neither guy is a good enough worker to expect a truly great mask match, so it tends to get judged by different standards. Here's what I wrote about it back in 2008: "This has got to be one of my favourite lucha matches of all time. I don't know if either guy could ever work; the stuff they do here is really simple, but the heat is amazing. One of the greatest things about lucha is that two 40 year old guys can have a mainevent with this much at stake. Where losing the mask really means something. The match is beautifully laid out... Caras attacks Rayo on his way to the ring, smashing him over the head with a guitar & from there it's just heat building. Slow, methodical rudo work & crowd inspired comebacks from the technico. Great lucha. And the finish is fantastic -- it comes from nowhere & may not have been an actual three count, but it means the rudo has to unmask & there's a fucking swarm of photographers jumping over each other's backs. Caras has one of the great unmaskings, as he simply refuses to take his mask off & they end up brawling while the photographers scurry for their lives. Magic."

I don't know that I'd accuse him of selling too much. I just think he sold the same way match after match and it got a bit old in the end. My main point of contention was that it's not great storytelling or psych. Realistic storytelling or psych, maybe, but I don't think he was a good enough actor or performer to really sell the way I think is good storytelling.

Since Hashimoto has never really been underrated, I'm going to take Dylan's argument to mean that he should be rated even higher than he is. I'm not so sure about that. I like Hashimoto a great deal, but it seems to me there were limitations to his style and the way he worked that prevented him from having as many great matches as he perhaps could have. Maybe I'm wrong, but because his matches didn't have the same kind of build as an All Japan heavyweight bout and relied more on atmosphere and energy, those latter two qualities had to be right for the match to be memorable and those things are difficult to produce. I also have a tough time imaging how good Hashimoto vs. the All Japan workers would have been. Hashimoto vs. Kawada and Taue seems appealing, but Hashimoto vs. Misawa or Kobashi strikes me as a bit of a style clash. I suppose it could have worked since styles make fights, but I'm not sure it would have been an automatic slam dunk. Kind of like how Jumbo/Hansen or Misawa/Hansen weren't.

If that's how you want to look at it that's fine (although I disagree). But I would also completely disagree that Bret is using the same storytelling or psychology working against Owen and Diesel. I think if you have a bad wheel and it's hindering your mobility so that you're only working on one leg then you must be the underdog even if you were the favourite before the fight. I think Bret was meant to be perceived this way when he entered the Rumble in '94 and again when he walked out for the Wrestlemania main event. He may not have been the underdog heading into that Wrestlemania but it wouldn't be much of a story if things didn't change from the beginning to the end. I don't think Bret worked that differently against Owen and Diesel. He got beat up, sold a lot and worked towards setting up the sharpshooter. I broke down last night and watched three Bret matches against Bigelow and honestly Bigelow could have been anyone. I'm not going to go through and catalogue every time Bret sold his leg because that would require me to watch a whole lot of Bret, which I don't want to do. I think his knee was a theme throughout his career and he liked selling leg injuries. If I was to be cynical, I'd suggest it was because he liked being the focus of every match, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that it was because he thought it was important and logical to sell the effects of every move or hold that was applied in the ring and to do so consistently and thoroughly. Forgetting my poor choice of words in "underdog" and "all the time", would you deny that Bret went into selling mode in just about all of his matches? You don't think he spent a large part of a match hobbling around and sucking wind?

You're halfway there to being right

The way Bret worked was to target his opponent's injured body parts while selling his own injuries and since Bret usually sold more than his opponent it often seemed like he'd taken a huge beating. He was clearly supposed to be a ring general but he sold so much that he often seemed to escape with a victory. The roll-up finishes also give me that impression. I may be overstating how often he played the underdog, but it was a lot. Perhaps he was trying to go the sympathetic babyface route. I'm not that surprised that people prefer him as a heel as a lot of his schtick suited the cocky heel role, as well as many of his best face performances containing a tweener bit. I like the guy. I just think the way he worked was relatively straight forward and not such amazing storytelling.

If you're injured in a match you automatically become the underdog. Bret sold the knee all the time. He'd do it in random Raw matches like the one against Bigelow in '93. He even faked a knee injury after the match with Hakushi and worked a real knee injury into the Austin feud. He loved to sell a limp and he was forever proud of the fact that he'd come to the ring the next night still selling the injury. He even did it in WCW. The knee was supposed to be his Achilles heel or something.

I probably shouldn't take the bait but that is a curious statement at best. Just looking at his 1994, I can think of only two instances when he worked as an underdog (vs. Yokozuna, Diesel). The Quebecers tag through to Owen re-injuring his leg in the Wrestlemania opener and Bret coming out on one leg to challenge Yokozuna for the title was all classic Bret. He had so many leg injuries he should have retired mid career. That and his tweener work were his go to stories.

Bret's storytelling or psychology, whatever you want to call it, is really overrated. Whoever said he worked underneath as the underdog all the time was right on the money.

The first wave of wrestling smarkdom was in 2000? You're asking for trouble with that one. I don't know that there were that many people touting Bret as the GOAT ten years ago. What I would say is that back in the day there were a lot of Bret vs. Shawn debates and nowdays I'm not sure it's that relevant a debate outside of nostalgia. One thing that kind of hurt Bret is how quickly and effortlessly the WWF moved on from him. Blink and suddenly Austin, Rock and Foley are carrying the company. There's probably a lot of people who started watching in that period that only know the Hitman retrospectively and the Bret era probably doesn't have the same resonance to it if you didn't live through it. The most I ever popped for wrestling (since I usually knew the results ahead of time) was either Bret winning the title at Survivor Series '95 after the monstrosity that had been 1995 or Rey beating Eddie at Halloween Havoc '97 after I'd fallen for the Bischoff leak that Rey would lose. Maybe I'm wrong, but you kind of had to be in the moment. You can kind of get a feel for it by how much people love and remember '97 despite the amount of absolute shit the WWF put out that year. The WWE doesn't glorify the Next Generation era the way it does the Attitude era and the steriod trial era is presented as Vince beating the rap, so that really cuts into a lot of Bret's prime. Plus we're 16 years removed from the end of his prime. Of course he's going to lose his allure a little, but I don't know if his reputation has really taken a hit. People say he's boring -- he is boring if you're not in sync with what he does. People who love how he sells and the logic they claim he brings to his matches will always dig Bret, but I'm not sure there are too many people who think he's a bad worker. Just dull. There's not a lot of avenues left to explore with Bret, though Matt D sure is tempting me to watch some matches. I can't really see a big re-evaluation of Bret at any time, though. Bret Hart is so overwhelming in his Bret Hart-ness that you can't really find matches where he works a different way or that give a different take on his character. Jerome's re-evaluation of his WCW work or maybe the Hart Foundation coming back into style is probably the only places we can go with Bret unless people start suddenly proclaiming him the GOAT.

I'm hopeless at keeping up to date with lucha, so I thought I'd throw out some thoughts on what I watched over the holidays. Apparently, CMLL had an awful year business-wise. Personally I enjoyed the in-ring product more than I have in years. Virus vs. Fuego, 10/1 was an excellent, old-school style title match. The matwork wasn't as fluid as classic lucha, but it was similar to IWRG matwork in that both guys seemed to be laying down a challenge. I thought Fuego's bridging spots were a fantastic response to that challenge, and although many of the holds were static, I was impressed that they managed to avoid the pitfalls of "your turn/my turn" through natural athleticism. Fuego impressed me in general. I thought he hung with Virus tremendously well and even added plenty of his own touches. The transition on the outside where Fuego pulled Virus from the apron after the big tope spot was clever stuff. I think that's what I've noticed most about CMLL this year: instead of the same telegraphed transitions in every match, the work has been tighter and the rhythm a whole lot better. I'd probably put this third behind Panther/Casas and that Santo tag at this stage. Casas/Oro, 9/2 was also good. Someone once joked that Casas sleeps upside down in the CMLL booking office like a vampire bat, but I think the key to his longevity is the way he's tweaked and adjusted his offense over the last decade or more. There was a period where I hated watching Casas work these modern matches, but I've got to admit he's really good at the tit-for-tat modern style. This was counterrific and extremely even. Casas gave Oro a hell of a lot, and while I don't watch many Oro matches, I assume he looked better than usual. So it was a job well done. Casas/Maya Jr, 12/25 was soft, though. Some of the spots were okay, but Maya didn't seem up for it. You know it's a bad sign when I'm looking at the grey in Casas' hair and thinking how distinguished he looks. Hijo del Fantasma/Rey Cometa/Valiente vs. Niebla Roja/Puma King/Virus, 9/21 had a typically excellent opening exchange between Virus and Valiente who arguably work together better than any other pair in lucha. The rest of the match was "there" and I had a hard time giving a fuck about what anybody else did. Shigeo Okumura vs. Valiente, 5/1 was a cool showcase for Valiente, who is still obscenely underrated. He's such a fantastic worker. I really have no idea who Shigeo Okumura is, but considering how I usually dislike watching non-luchadores in lucha I thought he did a pretty good job. Match was far from a Match of the Year contender, and I lost interest in the street run partially because the sound was out of sync, but a Valiente singles match is always worth watching. Lastly, the Rush vs. El Terrible, 9/14 hair match. I didn't know anything about the storyline going into this match. I'd never seen either guy and I didn't know this was the main event of the Anniversary Show as I wasn't aware of anything that was going on over the summer. The Rush guy seemed significantly better than El Terrible, but Terrible got better as the match wore on. Usually, I'd have a quiet bitch about how there's no-one who knows how to work a hair match properly anymore and how much it pisses me off, but this was like watching something like Rayo de Jalisco, Jr vs. Universo 2000 on speed and how a cool "CMLL is where the big boys play" vibe to it. And there was even blood, lo and behold. Some cool spots in this one, especially Rush's dropkick off the apron and both men's use of the barricade. The finish confused the fuck out of me as I was expecting all of the bullshit that's surrounded CMLL hair match in recent years and instead it ended clean as a whistle. Had to "rewind" it as I didn't know what was going on. Fun match, but neither guy has quite mastered the type of Perro Aguayo/Los Hermanos Dinamita flair for the dramatics in this sort of big match setting.