ohtani's jacket

It depends on the type of wrestling. For the most part I'm interested in watching great matches from my favourite workers, but if there's a style, promotion or era I'm interested in then I'll watch everything from the point of view of the style/promotion/era.

A heel technican who didn't take liberties would be a pretty shitty gimmick.

All New Japan workers spent a significant amount of time on the mat. Does that mean they were all technical workers? It was a prerequisite. Obviously, in Liger's case it's part of why he was considered the world's finest technical wrestler (when the matwork wasn't cut from TV), but I'd be willing to wager that moves played a far bigger part.

AJPW simply didn't do that kind of thing. Don't be too reductive. That fucking terrible Bret Hart vs Tiger Mask II match was as close to Wigan-style counterwrestling as Misawa was ever gonna get. It just wasn't one of his strengths. Nobody's perfect. Misawa was not a great technical wrestler, he essentially left all that behind to build his own style. Misawa had a solid amateur background, the same as Kawada. The pair of them were at least as good as Liger. The difference was the promotion. Liger was voted best technical wrestler in the WON for a few years before Benoit took the award and I ask you whether either guy was a great mat worker or whether it was a matter of execution. Misawa as the ace of All Japan was supposed to be a technical wrestler.

The way Kawada executed his kicks and chops wasn't martial arts style. Even the shoot style guys didn't really execute their kicks in a martial arts style. Later on, RINGS fighters mimicked a stand up game more closely, but Kawada didn't have any sort of martial arts stance and he sure as hell didn't display any sort of martial arts etiquette as he would kick a downed opponent and so on. We'll have to disagree about whether you can be a technican without working the mat, but if Misawa isn't a technical wrestler then what is he? Part power wrestler, part brawler, part flyer, part strongest fighter, part Kings Road/Four Corners of Heaven whatever?

I've watched a ton of Brody in recent years from St. Louis, Montreal, Puerto Rico, AJPW, NJPW, Texas and the AWA. You can find islands of selling and even some good matches (for example I really enjoy the Abby match from the Texas Set). But they are rare, rare exceptions. I watched the Blackwell/Brody matches and he sold again. Not very well, but it was still selling. Brody kind of sucks, but I wonder how much of it is Brody not being very good at what he did as opposed to not doing it. Blackwell smoked the absolute fuck out of him and it seemed like Brody had no idea how to act in the ring. I mean, Blackwell is just kind of shaking his body a bit while he makes a comeback and Brody couldn't even send those kind of signals to a crowd. I did kind of wonder, though, that if everyone had historically said Brody sucked whether anyone would try to defend him as dumb but fun.

I don't see this. When did Misawa ever demonstrate mat skill? About the only time he ever went to the mat was to apply the facelock. And he never worked his way out of holds that were applied on him, he just made the ropes. It wasn't his technique that got him out of trouble, it was his elbows. If you've been following the discussion you'll know that my claim was that as matwork became less prominent execution became a driving factor behind who was perceived as a technical wrestler. Misawa was noted for his execution. He executed state of the art suplexes with a high degree of difficulty to win matches and even his elbows were meant to be effective because of their precision. That's fantastic, but you can work like a brawler and not have a brawl y'know. Kawada's offence was mainly based around kick, punch, elbow, chop, knee. It was very deliberate and meant to play off his character. When you watched All Japan you were meant to think that Kawada had the temperament to kick a man in the face, which is an attribute of a brawling heel to my mind.

It just means what we think of as technical wrestling has changed.

It's simpler and far easier to generalise than to break down the exact way a guy worked. If someone wanted to say that Ted Dibiase was a technical wrestler who got into a lot of fights in Mid-South then I don't think that would be entirely unreasonable. After all, there were stories and angles and reasons why Ted got into a lot of fights during his time in the territory. Wrestlers are primarily remembered as being either a heel or a face. In Japan they're remembered for a lot of their signature moves, whereas States side they're remembered for their schtick. I think it's fair to say wrestlers are primarily one thing or another, a brawler or a technical wrestler, a high flyer or a big man. Some were more of the all-rounder style and a few of them shifted styles over the years, but as I said, I think it's better to generalise because wrestling is presented in a very simple way to the customer. Take Jim Breaks, for example. Breaks was a high skilled technical wrestler who preferred to needle his opponent all match long with cheap shots. When he was on the receiving end, he'd throw a tantrum and demand the ref do something about it. Invariably, his matches would disintegrate into the type of all-in, forearm contest that Kent Walton so openly despised. Was he a technical wrestler? Was he a brawler? Was he both? I'd say that it was pretty obvious that he was a fantastic technical wrestler who would be unbeatable if he could only control his temper. The audience got this because it was a common archetype for just about any heel who could wrestle. Walton would beat the audience over the head with it any time one of these guys was on the small screen (in that "I'm beating you over the head with this, but it's all right because I have silky smooth delivery and I'm sitting at ringside smoking a cigarette and drinking a gin and tonic" Ken Walton kind of way.) The fun was in baiting Breaks so that he flipped out, but primarily I think he was a technican. As for the All Japan guys. According to Baba, the All Japan style was primarily about absorbing as much punishment as you could handle before making a comeback. The All Japan guys worked according to their body types and characters, mainly. I think Misawa was undisputedly a technical wrestler. He was meant to have the most perfect technique and invariably it got him out of trouble. Kawada was more of a brawler. Kobashi was primarily an athlete. And Taue was supposed to be a big man like Baba or Tsuruta. Hashimoto I think more of as a stand-up fighter and a striker. I think the technical aspects of his work would probably be looked at as the weaker part of his game if you were judging it from a fighting perspective. What I don't think makes sense is to say that guys who worked the mat a lot like Billy Robinson represent the technical wrestlers and that anyone who didn't work the mat as much as a Robinson can't be classified as a technical wrestler, because Robinson came up in an era where it was still considered the mark of a great wrestler to work the mat. The NWA touring champ match as we know it doesn't really exist anymore outside of perhaps lucha title matches and some indie workers maybe trying to replicate it at times. I think it makes more sense to judge things in context.

El Dandy was the best worker in Mexico in 1990, but Satanico is the greatest luchador of all-time (at least on tape and in my opinion.) I don't think there was ever a point where I thought Atlantis or Azteca were better. However, the demands of being a technico are different from a rudo and the latter two really stand out as excellent technicos. Great rudos on the other hand are far more common. I also think watching CMLL TV week to week is better than watching a yearbook, but that's true of every promotion I imagine and not the fault of the yearbook.

I also think you have to take match structures into account. Dibiase worked in an era where nine times out of ten a match would start as a straight contest and would disintegrate into a brawl, and I think most of the time the matches were defined by that pattern as opposed to brawler vs. technical wrestler.

Isn't Jerry from a lit background? If wrestling was taken seriously academically then of course you would break it down layer upon a layer upon a layer.

Steve Veidor is a guy who really grew on me too. Angel Azteca really should have been the Lizmark/Solar/Atlantis of his generation, but sadly after 1990 he's never the same again. He has some decent stuff in AAA, but he should have been a major player throughout the decade. That Blackwell/Mulligan match is pretty cool. Shame about the video difficulty at the end, though.

I think there is some merit in your definitions, but at the same time you're presuming that Dibiase could've worked the mat in the WWF if he'd wanted to but chose not to. I don't think anyone really worked the mat seriously in the WWF from 1988 to 1991 or however long it was that Ted's push as a singles worker lasted. The guy who worked the mat most was probably Bret Hart and he was hardly a fantastic mat worker. In the eyes of the fans he was, but not by my metric. Granted, there isn't much evidence that Dibiase was a great mat worker in other territories outside of the WWF, but I would throw matwork out when it comes to the WWF. I believe there definition of technical wrestler was based on execution. Rude and Orndorff are difficult cases, though. Orndorff I almost want to call an all-rounder in cricketing terms, only I'm not sure he had the all-round skills of say a Barry Windham. He was a body type first and foremost, but his in ring ability defied his body type. Rude to me was a bump and stooge guy since his offence sucked. Again, it's hard to define as he was maybe even a brawler with crappy technical skills.

Dibiase worked as a technical wrestler in the WWF. They were forever putting over his execution on the commentary (textbook suplex, vertical suplex and a beauty, Jess, and so on and so forth.) He was supposed to be a guy who had the skill and wrestling acumen to back up all of his cash and bravado. The definition of a technical wrestler was pretty clear at the time. It was supposed to be a guy who was a strategist and who knew his way around the ring. Someone who would work to a plan and was ring savvy. I don't think it was strictly defined as someone who could work holds as post-Backlund you didn't get a lot of that in the WWF. It was sold as someone who in a kayfabe sense could "work" (i.e. wrestle) even if that simply meant executing moves well.

I ended up randomly watching a Bockwinkel/Brody match which wasn't particularly good, but Brody sold for a long stretch of the match so perhaps the Brody criticisms need to be refined.

1. Tibor Szakacs -- when I think of WoS guys I wish there was more footage of, Adrian Street, Alan Sarjeant, Abe Ginsberg, Peter Szacaks, Billy Robinson and Jackie Pallo all come to mind. But if I was only allowed to choose one guy it wouldn't be a McManus or a Masambula, it would be Tibor Szakacs. To me he's almost like a WoS Volk Han in the sense that even though Hungary isn't that far removed from England there's something really foreign about his grappling style and the way he throws strikes that makes him seem exotic to the audience. I don't know if he was the best mat wrestler in the history of British wrestling but he was surely one of the toughest. 2. Carl Greco -- I'm of the firm belief that shoot style should look like a shoot. I tend to hate anything that looks too juniorish or too much like pro-wrestling (within reason.) I'm not a huge fan of the hybrid BattlArts style but I like the main core of workers and I like it when they wrestle Carl Greco. I don't know much about his background and I've never been interested in finding out really. All I know is that this American guy who featured on and off again on BattlArts cards over the years is probably (no shit) one of the five best American mat workers of all time. I would even go so far to say that he's probably the best American mat worker of the past 20 odd years. I love his short matches with the likes of Ikeda and Ishikawa more than any celebrated BattlArts match ever with the possible exception of the '98 and '99 Ikeda/Ishikawa matches. 3. Rocky Moran -- I'm on a bit of a non-watching cycle lately though the upswing in discussion the past few days has got me all itchy. Moran was my most recent WoS discovery. The Belfast Brawler no one's ever heard of. There aren't too many of the other Irish lads who get too much play outside of Finlay, but Moran could go. He's not blow away great like some of the 70s workers, but when the All Star split occurs and the 80s down period begins he's consistently one of the best performing talents on TV. His title match with Cullen is a certified classic by WoS standards and he's a guy who is now squarely on my radar. 4. Billy Robinson & Nick Bockwinkel -- cheating, I know, but like I said above I'm on a bit of a non-watching cycle and I had a bit of a kick start by searching for these guys on youtube. I've always liked both guys without being obssessive compulsive about it, and I'm slowly starting to chip away at their matches on youtube. 5. Sangre Chicana -- I was going to choose Hogan for the last spot since before I stopped watching wrestling and got caught up in my other hobbies the most fun I was having was watching Hogan's brawling sprints against the likes of Orndorff and Race, but then I realised that it was actually Hogan's opponents I liked since so many of Hogan's other 80s matches suck ass. So I'm going with Chicana since that was the last lucha I watched. To me the quintessential wrestler is one of the great actors and performers like Satanico or Fujiwara, but there's another argument that the quintessential wrestler is a brawler and in that respect to me Chicana is completely unique. There are brawlers like Murdoch and Hansen and Aguayo who brawl. That's what they do. Then there's Chicana, who looks like he goes from town to town, getting drunk, sleeping in the street, getting into some sort of dispute with a local and winds up being one of the great gunslingers of all time instead of just a wino. I mean, on some level we're supposed to suspend our disbelief that these guys get paid to wrestle and that they do it for a living. Chicana doesn't look like he does it for a living. He looks like he wound up in the ring because he fucked the wrong person's daughter and there's a posse waiting for him if he makes it out alive. One of the most sympathetic babyfaces ever and one of the most despicable heels and probably the sleaziest worker I can think of.

The directors voted Tokyo Story number one this year and 2001 joint second. The directors' top 10 films all finished in the critics' top 50 with The Bicycle Thief/Bicycle Thieves finishing the lowest at 33. That's not too bad considering 358 directors vote and 846 critics with very few of the same films appearing on ballots.

It happened after the invasion of Kuwait right before Operation Desert Storm.

Inoki "converted" to Islam in 1990. The batshit part was that instead of calling himself Ali he took the Hussein part from Saddam Hussein. I think this is news again because he's revisited Pakistan.

Flair stopped being Flair when he cut his hair. Or perhaps before that when he started wearing it in a ponytail. I liked his 1990 stuff and don't think it was too much of a step down from 1989.

I don't think you have to be Japanese to understand it. The strong, silent type is an archetype in Western culture too. Think Cary Cooper.

Thought of some more who've annoyed me over time... Johnny Saint, Mark Rocco, Aja Kong, Lioness Asuka, Jim Cornette, Rick Rude, Jushin Liger, Vader and Owen Hart. Did 180s on the Midnight Express, Rock 'n' Roll Express, Misawa and Choshu in recent years.

If Misawa had a run as best in the world it was in 1994 and 1995.

Because in Japan he's being a legit badass. Whether it's a sumo wrestler stepping up to the dohyo, a judoka or Bunta Sugawara in a yakuza film, a poker face is a legit sign of toughness in Japan. Jumbo used to make facials like Arnold Schwarznegger pulling that thing out of his nose in Total Recall, but I think he was just trying to ape the Americans he'd worked with.