ohtani's jacket

This was a pretty crappy brawl that went all over the arena, outside the building, and into the men's urinal. I hate this type of wrestling. The in-ring action was just as weak. It's unclear how this promotion is trying to position itself in the market. I'd prefer something closer to old-school Florida wrestling than an ECW retread.

There was one brief exchange that gave a glimpse of the incredible potential of a Yoshida vs. Bolshoi match, but this was more of a standard Joshi tag match than a mat clinic. Akino vs Yabushita was pretty cool.

I enjoyed this a lot. In a sense, these Kobashi title matches are just as formulaic as WWE matches, however the slow pace and the incredible attention to detail almost makes them feel like novels. There's so much packed into these matches that you wind up getting more of them than any other style of match. I had my "Taue is the best of the pillars" phase years and years ago (it seems everyone goes through one), but I lost interest in him over the years. It was genuinely heart-warming to see him give such a great veteran performance in this match. Love that dude. Kobashi may have edged Eddie for WOTY given that Eddie is being dragged down by the Angle feud.

Did you watch the Yoshida/AKINO vs Bolshoi/Yabushita tag from 2004?

I love me some Dean Malenko.

The comments you're quoting are outdated, but I don' believe Steve Wright was in full Wonder Kid mode in the Maxine bout. Apprentice, to me, implies a boy or girl who has left school to learn a trade, and Wright is still very much in that phase at the time. You don't see a lot of teenager wrestlers in the States, so I was using boy apprentice in quotations to distinguish this type of bout from the norm. Outside of Mexico and All Japan Women, it's not that common to see teenagers wrestling in the ring, and while it's semantics, I don't think the teenagers that appeared on ITV had passed their apprenticeship yet.

Bob Backlund vs. Pat Patterson (WWF, 9/24/79) This was more of a traditional back and forth WWF cage match with both men desperately trying to escape. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Patterson created the template for how to work a WWF style cage match, since he was no doubt involved in booking the cage matches I grew up on. I'm not really a Pat Patterson guy. He's more of a Buddy Rogers type, which isn't my thing, but if you like that type of worker (and I figure most people do) then this is a consummate performance. Bob Backlund vs Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka (WWF, 6/28/82) I've never really gotten a feel for the phenom that was Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. I remember when he made his return to the WWF in the late 80s and them hyping him up like he was a big deal, but you really had to be in New York at this time to appreciate the impact he made. Personally, I've seen so many Polynesian wrestlers in pro-wrestling that Snuka isn't that unique to me, and I come from a country with a large Pacific Island community to begin with, but there's no denying that Jimmy Snuka is the reason why people jump off the top of the cage in WWF cage matches. It costs him the match here, as it so often does in WWF cage matches, but it looks spectacular. Bob sure loved falling out of the cage door backwards. It's a cool looking bump but he ended so many of his cage matches that way.

That Dory/Robinson match was good. I have more time for Dory than most and enjoying watching his post-NWA champion phase. And t's always good to see more Billy Robinson, even if it's not prime Billy Robinson. It helps if you adjust your mentality to the fact that both men were well past their primes. Ten years earlier, this may have been a MOTY, if not MOTD, contender, but it's still pretty frigging cool as a competitive maestros bout.

Sgt. Slaughter vs. Bob Backlund (WWF, 1/10/81) For my money, this was much better than the cage match. Slaughter got to work Bob until he bled like a stuck pig and Bobby made a fantastic comeback and beat the shit out of Sarge until the screwy finish. I realize that Backlund cage matches are more about locking the heel inside a cage so that Bob can make mince meat out of them, but I prefer the heel to have a bit more shine. I've got to admit that the Gomer Pyle stuff was lost on me until I did a search, but that's the type of reference you don't see a lot of anymore in wrestling where they pretend they're in some kind of self-contained universe.

Big occasion, and another cracking installment of the best feud in wrestling. Perro alternated between brawling with Santo and Casas and both match ups ruled, but it was Casas vs Perro that caught my attention. This may be the best feud that Casas has been a part of in the 2000s, and definitely the best opposition he's had outside of GdI. Los Perros del Mal are a fun trio and business in CMLL has definitely picked up. Shocker was the odd man out, which is strange since he's been The Man for most of the 00s, but at least he had some history with El Terrible to play off.

Why would you hold onto a submission that's not getting you a submission? It's clearly not working.

This is some kind of Florida indy with commentary from Nulty and the ROH dude. I guess it was related to Ring of Honor somehow. It was an excellent technical bout up until the finish. The promoters probably thought the finish was old-school wrestling, but it came across as 100% sports entertainment, which was the shit indy wrestling was supposed to be rallying against. It was a really good bout, though, up until the crappy finish.

Santo vs. Perro Jr is the best feud in wrestling since Eddie vs. JBL, but I love the fact that they haven't forgotten that it was Casas vs. Perro that started all this beef. They had some fantastic exchanges in this trio, and Casas bust out his kicks. I love it when Casas starts kicking opponents like he's a shooter. Park got in on the act with some stiff sounding strikes and a fiery exchange with Ultimo, who's been his best opponent in CMLL. Kick ass TV match.

I quite enjoyed this. People often think of the famous gaijins in Japanese history history and think it's easy for a foreigner to get over in Japan, but that's never been the case. Low Ki bust his ass to make an impression here and did a fabulous job of carrying Kanemaru to a better match than the champ was capable of having on his own. He used a more exaggerated bumping style than we're used to and hit some fantastic looking spots.

This was a fairly decent lumberjack match that made good use of the gimmick. Things were going great until the Big Show showed up and destroyed everyone. Even that was handled fairly well, but I'm not hugely thrilled by the prospect of Angle vs. Big Show.

Ladder matches suck, and this was a painfully mediocre one. This entire card has been poor. Benoit vs. Flair was by far the highlight of the PPV.

There's a difference between taking a break and being off air completely. When I went through the French archives, I didn't get a sense that this was a sport that was continuously broadcast for 30 years. The footage from the 70s onward feels extremely scattershot, and I don't think it's ever been fully explained what that retrospective show was about with Roger Delaporte and friends sitting in a theatre watching old black and white matches. Some of the footage has a very public broadcasting station feel to it, though I obviously don't know the details. It didn't particularly bother me as there were a lot of swimming pool matches and precious little of the Catch I liked outside of the odd tag match or two.

I've been debating about which of these guys is better at this stage of their careers and now we get this great match between them in front of 20-odd people. AJ played second fiddle to Danielson's heel act here, but it was still an excellent contest. I'm prepared to call it even on the basis of this match, but like I said, they were pushing the newly heel Danielson fairly hard.

Well, I didn't mean to watch any entire broadcast of WoS, but rather the matches they chose to show that week (prior to it becoming a standalone show.) These matches are available to a certain extent not from the vault or the matches that aired on the Wrestling Channel, but from the original VHS recordings of WoS bouts. This period covers the late 70s and early 80s.

Man, this Kane/Lita storyline hasn't aged well during the past 20 years. I'm not sure it aged well at the time. At least Kane throws himself into it with gusto. I don't think this was a carry job by Michaels. In fact, it felt like a fairly average performance from Shawn. It was a typical WWE match that was probably laid out by a road agent prior to the PPV. Despite the controversial angle, it's a predictable and boring fight, and Shawn's performance is nothing special. It picks up during the finishing stretch, but all WWE matches pick up during the finishing stretch. It's debatable whether this is better than Kane/Benoit, but I will say that the video package was better than the Triple H/Orton one.

That may have been what Walton liked, or at least what the persona he presented to the public liked, and it's generally what I like too, but it's stretch to say it's what the public wanted. The majority of the audience were into the characters and were there to cheer the blue eyes and boo the heels. Walton was an interesting guy. He could be fairly forthright with his opinions at times and wasn't shy about sharing his views on a wrestler or match. Some of the boys didn't particularly like him and would rib him by feeding him false stories to share on air like that lie about Ivan Penzekoff being a pig farmer. There are times when Kent had to BS about why the fans weren't responding to match he thought was technically excellent, and of course, he had to shill the main events. The way we've viewed WoS over the years has been largely inorganic. It would be more enlightening to watch full episodes than random matches, and fans like myself who have actively sought out the great workers and great matches don't usually put a huge amount of stock in the Catweazles of the world. At its best, there was something on the card for everyone. There tended to be more storytelling in the halls where the promotor would be looking to draw folks to the next show, but occasionally it would seep over onto the TV, especially when there was a title chase or the occasional angle. You have to piece the footage together since it's not week-to-week like US wrestling, but it's not completely absent from the broadcasts. Walton would often mention past bouts if they were relevant to the match at hand.

That's a shame. He was one tough dude.

I should point out that if we had full matches available from the 60s, 70s, and even the 80s, that German wrestling would have as many classics available as any other European country. It's the recorded history of German wrestling that's a mess, not the wrestling itself. Something is better than nothing, and beggar's can't be choosers, but I wish we had a better picture of German wrestling just like I wish we had more footage from Spain and Greece.

We don't have the details about this sort of thing. I'm not sure if we know what the final match was that broadcast on terrestrial television. As far as I know, it petered out sometime around 1987. It's difficult to draw parallels to the UK as it wasn't one promotion being continuously broadcast for 30 + years (including the years where they shared the timeslot with All-Star.) During its heyday in the 50s and 60s, it was different promotions in the time slot. At a certain point, it becomes predominantly Delaporte's promotion. It's unclear whether Catch was continuously on the air during the 70s and 80s or if it would disappear and reappear depending on whether a promoter managed to get TV time. The footage gets pretty random towards the end and some years have little to no footage available. That suggests, to me, that Catch wasn't broadcast continuously and appeared sporadically after the 60s ended. It stands to reason that If it had been on the air weekly throughout the 70s and 80s then there would be far more preserved footage from that era.

This was a decent opener. Evolution have had better matches on RAW, but it's pretty cool seeing Benoit tag with Regal. Old man Flair has honestly been one of the highlights of 2004 for me, and I never thought I would say that. There were plenty of Flair vs. Benoit exchanges in this, and they ruled each and every time. It made me want to check if they had a singles match during this run. Regal was a bit of an odd fit, and not as good as I would have hoped for, but his main role was to square off against Batista, whom he didn't match up with that well. Benoit vs. Flair was good enough that it didn't really matter, but it prevented this from reaching the heights it might have if Chris Jericho or Edge had been Benoit's partner.