ohtani's jacket

The cool thing about that Toshie match is how much she cares about that WCW title. It's a neat undercard match. With AJW you'll need to capture the story of LCO vs. Ito and Watanabe. With JWP it's the Yagi matches before her retirement and the Kansai/Fukuoka title match. With Jd' you'll need to concentrate on the Jaguar vs. Lioness feud. I would be extremely wary of Lorefice's star ratings and instead try to plot how the year went for each fed.

How so? As the 90s wore on there was a real push towards show topping matches. In Japan in particular there was nowhere else the matches could go expect bigger and longer. And with things like the sitdown interviews with Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels there was an effort to present them as real people not just characters. The fact that they were real people connected to their work made their matches seem more like personal accomplishments. Michaels was supposed to the show stoppa and this great entertainer who had classic matches long before his comeback, and JR was beating us over the head with how emotional everything was long before the current era. The whole manufactured classics thing really isn't special to WWE, though. CMLL and the Japanese feds are just as bad. Wrestling was always going to evolve into something that tried to outdo what had come before in the 90s and the 90s was an incredibly bloated decade in terms of upping workrate.

Michaels is an awful actor and I don't like the manufactured classics, but it's not surprising that wrestling evolved that way. You can see the roots on the 90s yearbooks.

The Rude/Dustin match I liked from '93 was in May, I think. They had a lot of poor matches that year so you have to be careful. EDIT: Checked the Smarkschoice WCW results and it must be Dustin Rhodes vs. Rick Rude - Worldwide 5/15/93.

Ricky Steamboat vs. Brutus Beefcake, 5/26/85 I've been meaning to watch this for a while as Beefcake had a shocking decent run in 1985, but this was dreck from Steamboat. There are some guys who can go through the motions and still be reasonably entertaining but not Steamboat. His schtick was so heavily built on fired up babyface selling that if they're not working at a certain speed and adding fuel to the fire his shit looks hokey. We'll call it the Tito Santana conundrum, in that Tito needed to be fired up for his matches to be good, but unlike Steamboat, Tito's selling wasn't goofy looking when the match was tepid.

He also had a great match with Dustin Rhodes in 1993, but his '92 is head and shoulders above any other year in his career.

I don't really care about objectivity in these arguments; I think it's more important to understand why you like something. I like soul music more than rock music. I used to like rock music when I was in high school, but in my early 20s I got into funk, soul, jazz, blues, gospel and hip-hop (i.e. black American music.) Because I like these genres I dig a little deeper than musical styles where I only have some general knowledge of artists and albums. Now maybe it would be fun to say "fuck Sabbath, this Johnny Guitar Watson album is fucking amazing", but I don't really like Johnny Guitar Watson because he's better than Black Sabbath. I like Johnny Guitar Watson more than Black Sabbath because I like funk/soul/blues more than rock or metal. But if you really want to get into it -- who's better! Johnny Guitar Watson or Black Sabbath! -- I think it's stupid to use personal taste as a determiner. What makes me the arbiter of who's better? Besides, it's a pretty short argument: Johnny Guitar Watson because I like him more. I just think you need to stretch yourself and challenge yourself a bit if you want to make such arguments. I mean nobody's really forcing anybody to compare Shawn Michaels and El Dandy, but rating Michaels above Dandy because you don't like watching lucha is a bit of a cop out to me. I like watching lucha but that's not the reason why I'd rather Dandy over Michaels. There might be a fair number of luchadores I rate above Michaels because I like lucha so much, but really Dandy is better than Michaels for the same reason that Fujiwara is better than Takada and Tibor Szakacs is better than Marc Rocco or Johnny Saint in my eyes. It's more about my take on greatness than personal likes. I actually think the standards I would apply to artists within the genres I like is the same I would apply to wrestling, so if I like an Ann Peebles or Millie Jackson more than Aretha Franklin or think Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder are overrated it's comparable to the way I compare wrestlers. I'm not really sure wrestling breaks off into genres as distinctly as music does. Don't know that any of that made sense. Sorry for so much name dropping.

I'm not trying to defend Joshi. It's something I watched a lot of at one time, but I can barely stand it myself these days. I guess the point I've been trying to make is that you can't expect it to be something that it's not. You're not going to turn on a match and see some kind of Toshiaki Kawada selling performance.

You'd obviously think so because you're a lucha superfan. For me, it boils down to "who would you rather watch." I'd rather listen to a decent metal band than the greatest reggae band of all time. Sure, but if you had to argue which is better, the metal band or the reggae band, what would you do? I'd rather listen to the 23rd best soul album of 1970 than Black Sabbath, but it would pretty outrageous to claim that Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia is better than Paranoid, and I'm a guy who loves making outrageous claims. Now Wilson Pickett in Philadelphia is a pretty good record, especially if you're a soul collector like me, and I'd just as soon ignore Sabbath and listen to my soul record just like I watch Dandy matches and ignore Shawn's matches, but in the spirit of endless comparisons it's not like comparing Sabbath with a late career Wilson Pickett record. We're not comparing Shawn and say Javier Cruz. Dandy and Michaels is like comparing Stevie Wonder and Sabbath (not a Stevie Wonder fan, but it's musical heavyweights.) I don't really care about objectivity in these articles, but it does require a bit of thought and more consideration than which you'd rather watch/listen to. Dandy tore shit up in 1990. When has Shawn ever torn shit up?

Pierroth in 1992 was pretty spectacular.

Has Shawn Michaels ever had a match as good as the best Dandy stuff? That's not a very fair comparison for Michaels.

Tony and Bobby were such a disaster as a pairing. Either Tony didn't get Bobby's sense of humour or he didn't think he was funny because he shat on Bobby's jokes all the time, whereas he would crack up when Jesse was around.

Maybe because he did a lot of long matches in 1992 with Steve Austin? Yeah, and none of them were any good. Windham was better at short TV matches and tag matches than long singles matches.

Don't know why you think Windham can do long matches, especially with a 1992 Steve Austin.

Never had a problem with Nikita Koloff in 1992 WCW. Don't get why he's rousing your ire so bad.

From memory, Chigusa Nagayo argues in GAEA Girls that matches are about a succcesion of moves not a sequence.

Rick Rude had awful control segments.

They're not getting a body part worked over; they're just getting stretched. It happens in every Joshi match. The submission sections are as predictable as the outside brawling, the nearfalls, the reversals, the saves or any other component of the matches. It's something they do in the first third of the match. Sometimes it's sold well, but often it's crap. The same is true of every other wrestling formula. I don't know what type of wrestling you like, but I bet we could pick it apart. Working a body part is a storyline in some Joshi matches, but not all Joshi matches. Submissions are a part of practically every Joshi match but not a storyline. Why do it? Because that's the way their working style developed over time? It's not something I really care for, but selling a body part all the time is the opposite extreme. The emphasis in Joshi is that after the matches they're always buggered. Regardless of what was sold during the match, they always put over how fucked they are after a match. That's what you're supposed to take away from it. Jaguar didn't make it faster. She may have made it more athletic, but more so in the context of her moveset. But she actually wasn't alone in doing that.

The CMLL World Heavyweight Championship isn't the top belt in CMLL.

Hokuto, Aja, Kansai and Hotta were there because they were booked to be in the Dome show tournament.

I don't think it was about Hokuto and Kong tagging as much as it was about having four wrestlers in an elimination match.

So, Kawada winning would have helped business in the long term because New Japan drew well when the belt came off Hashimoto? They both seem like short term business decisions to me. The best solution would have been to change the dates of the 6/3/94 and 6/9/95 matches so that the 6/95 match took place on 6/3/94 and the 6/94 match took place on 6/9/95. I think that would have worked in terms of Kawada going over. If Kawada had won in June '94 and they'd transitioned from Kawada to Williams to Misawa again then I don't see how that would have made much difference even in the short term. And if they'd waited a year to have a singles rematch on 6/9/95 and Misawa went over then that pretty much ends the feud no matter how long they continue to drag it out for. Misawa would have won in most people's eyes. I don't see the evidence of Kawada being anymore than a Tenryu who takes the belt off Jumbo and loses it back to him. It's a short term booking plan and doesn't solve the problem of Misawa's health being poor or any of the other compounding factors that led to the company's decline. They needed a new Misawa, but they'd cut that avenue off.

Not really. Tenryu won the TC from Jumbo. Jumbo won it back, and was still the Ace. As far as Daniel's comment about the long term, there was a point at which Baba needed someone else to run on top while Misawa was out for quite some time recovering from years of working injured. Kawada had been burned to the point that the fans didn't buy it, and Kobashi wasn't at the point where he could carry it. The promotion was Misawa-centric, business tanked, they went from one panic move (getting the belt off Kawada to Kobashi), to another (rushing Misawa back way too fast), to another than Misawa didn't at all want that quickly (having the belt go back from Kobashi to Misawa). The handling was dogshit. I know Daniel wants to cling to his notion that the booking when to shit when Baba got the cancer. We've been down his road before and the reality is that the big picture long term booking went to shit when Baba was healthy, much earlier. Daniel likes to ignore it when it's pointed out, then pop his head up a while later like here to go back down that road. John I didn't mention anything about Baba. What evidence is there to suggest that Kawada winning here would have helped business in the long run? How would Kawada have drawn in such a way that the belts wouldn't have ended up back on Misawa by May '95? And what then? You can throw it out there as an alternative, but I don't see how it changes anything... Baba still dies, the promotion still splits, wrestling in Japan still nosedives. The money, or what was left of it, was in interpromotional matches.

What a great thread. Perhaps the barometer is his "here he comes" call.

I don't see how Kawada going over Misawa would have done anything to help All Japan's business in the long term.