ohtani's jacket

How can you get over what a lowdown heel you are while working an incoherent match? Wouldn't a successful portrayal of a lowdown heel add some coherency to the match? Both A and B sound like crap, though.

Yeah, it was me who fucked up. I watched his debut on Prime Time Wrestling and they called him "The Widowmaker" Barry Windham.

I wouldn't call him dumb as he always managed to escape with the title or win it back again. And I wouldn't call him weak either, since the last Flair match I woatched was an '85 bout against Garvin where the beat the shit out of each other. I just think that Flair getting caught off the tope is a different part of his characterisation from the cocksure promos he delivers beforehand.

Cheers, I'll check out that Beefcake/Steamboat match once I'm done with this Tito stuff. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #20 -- "The Incredible" Hulk Hogan This was awful. Hogan was by far the worst of the opponents I've watched. Just shit. Granted this was from 1980, but he was so ungainly and clueless in the ring. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #21 -- "The Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase These two could've had a really good match had the WWF promoted really good matches in the late 80s, but I guess the closest we got was their 1988 Prime Time Wrestling bout. Decent TV match that's really just an excuse for Hercules to do a run in as this was during Herc's babyface turn where Dibiase bought his services as a slave. The other Tito/Dibiase match I watched was from 1992 but was a Sherri manager cam match. If I hear her mention her Teddy Bear one more time I think I'll scream. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #22 -- "The Mighty" Hercules Their 1986 match takes place after The Honky Tonk Man has laid Tito out. Hercules spends most of the match working over Tito's knee before Tito makes a comeback and the Brain leaves the broadcasting booth to interfere. A difficult match to gauge anything from. I also saw a match they had from '91 but it was so boring I gave up. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #23 -- "The Narcissist" Lex Luger This was all right. Nothing to write home about but Luger has had plenty of worse matches. I can't understand what the steel plate controversy had to do with a narcissist gimmick, though. Seemed like a stupid way to bring Luger in. I can't figure out why they didn't bring him in as a face. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #24 -- The Bolsheviks This was a pair of separate matches -- a Nikolai Volkoff match from '87 and a Boris Zhukov from '89 -- but they might as well have been the same match. Tito went through his whole routine and took the matches seriously, which suggests he was a pro I guess, but singles matches against the Bolsheviks. Who watches these? Why were they uploaded? Crazy. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #25 -- The Honky Tonk Man This was actually a lot of fun. I don't know how much HTM I could stomach on a regular basis, but I dug his schtick here. The match sort of ended just as I was getting into it, but for a match I thought would be awful this was a pleasant surprise. My favourite thing about it was Jimmy Hart telling the crowd if they didn't shut up HTM wouldn't sing for them tonight. Awesome. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #26 -- The Widowmaker This was far from vintage Windham, but it was better than a kick in the teeth. They probably could've done a better job with the amount of time they had, but I wasn't expecting much. Windham didn't really fit the WWF formula that Tito liked to work and this was kind of a hybrid between a WCW TV match and Tito trying to do his thing, but at least that made it interesting. Lord Alfred Hayes kept fucking up and calling the Widowmaker Windham. I am really sick of Lord Alfred.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #17 -- "The Birdman" Koko B. Ware This was a face vs. face match-up from early '91 that like most Tito matches could've been so much more than it was. Some decent spots in between a failed attempt at Koko being the one to flare things up. Skippable. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #18 -- "Outlaw" Ron Bass Rewatched their 8/22/87 MSG bout and definitely think it's one of Tito's best matches. I haven't seen much of Bass and don't know if he ever had a reputation as a good worker. He seems a Stan Hansen/Blackjack Mulligan cowboy clone to me, but if he wasn't a decent worker at some point in his career (which he probably was), he was having his JBL moment in this match. Really entertaining brawl with great selling to set it above the usual Tito fare. Their early Philly match (6/20/87) isn't anywhere near as good, but worth watching if you want to see some more from these two. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #19 -- Brutus "the Barber" Beefcake Man, I knew that 1985 was the peak of Brutus' career work wise, but that didn't prepare me for how good their 5/18/85 match was. It's got to be the best singles match I've seen from Beefcake; hell, are there any other contenders? If the finish had been better I would've been pimping this even stronger, but as it is this is proof that everybody was good at some point.

Ric Flair claiming to be the best wrestler in the world and proceeding to out wrestle his opponent doesn't work in a pro-wrestling context because the crowd wants the exact opposite. Flair claiming to be a better wrestler than his opponent was a form of intimidation. At the end of the day what he really meant was that he knew all the tricks, and since his definition of being the best in the world meant wearing the gold, he would do anything to retain his title. The whole sports analogy falls apart for me for the simple reason that when he was a face he hit moves more often than when he was a heel, and most of the time he came off the top in a blind panic. The whole point of Flair's schtick is that it all unravels and he looks like the Emperor with no clothes. It just doesn't work as a sports analogy and there's no point thinking about it like that. If you wanna kayfabe it, then I think he panicked when the pressure was on. The real reason is that people wanted to see the spot in the same way they wanted to see James Brown get injured and leave the stage, etc., but most of Flair's matches involved an escalating sense of panic. Early on in a match, he'd beg off to trick his opponent into an inside shot, but as the match wore on the begging off more and more legitimate. You could probably write an entire treatise on Flair choking.

Virus vs. Stuka Jr., Arena Coliseo de Guadalajara, 8/30/11 Wow, after crying out for CMLL to give Virus more time to work they finally went and did it. Thank you, CMLL. This was a wonderfully old-school match. The matwork was short and not much more than a feeling out process, but the rope exchanges and transitions were classic lucha and the slower, more deliberate pace had a strong resonance with me. The match didn't have a big arc, but in this particular case the simplity of the match outweighed the need to make it dramatic and I liked the fact that Virus was able to end the match cleanly and simply from a series of moves that Stuka should have kicked out from. You could probably argue that it made Stuka seem like more of a jobber than is usually portrayed in lucha, but it was worth it to be free from the trappings of the modern day style. I didn't really follow lucha last year, but more matches like this and I think I'll enjoy catching up on it over the New Year period.

Thought the first Philly match was mediocre, and had high hopes for it. Haven't seen the second one yet. John If you didn't like the first match then there's no reason to watch the second. It's the exact formula Matt D and Jingus were talking about in the psychology thread. I just liked it because I think the Sheik is fun to watch. It would've been awesome if the matches had been on the level of Sheik's feud with Slaughter and Santana's work with Valentine and Savage, but I've kind of given up on the idea that Tito hit those high points against anyone else.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #14 -- The Hart Foundation Is it just me or did the Hart Foundation suck as heels? Bret was unconvincing in his role as cocky young heel, Neidhart didn't even appear to be making an effort to play heel and Jimmy Hart didn't seem to give a shit. I watched three matches these teams had from '87 and two from '88 and all of them were worthless. They're not a very good showcase for Tito either as he tends to play FIP while Martel does all the work. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #15 -- "The Russian Bear" Ivan Koloff This match from MSG (12/26/83) is missing about a third of what would make it a great match, but I liked it all the same. It was a slower, old-school WWF bout, but had plenty of nice touches like Tito using a full nelson to ram Koloff's head into the turnbuckle. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #16 -- Bad News Brown I like Bad News more than most so I thought this was perfectly decent. It didn't really go anywhere as they weren't feuding at the time (to the best of my knowledge) so it was just a run through of Bad News' heel schtick. Tito retaliated quite a bit in reply, which was better than watching a meaningless stretch of Tito in peril. It's too bad Gorilla was in one of those belligerent moods where he wouldn't shut up about the referee.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #11 -- "Nature Boy" Ric Flair As fate would have it, there are Flair vs. Santana matches from the beginning, middle and end of Flair's WWF tenure (Royal Albert Hall 10/3/91, SummerSlam Spectacular 8/23/92 and Monday Night Raw 1/18/93), so you get to see the evolution in Flair growing his hair back out at any rate. I don't really care for Flair after his 1990 feud with Luger and I think his WWF run is more interesting for his promos than ring work, but these were okay. The SummerSlam Spectacular was the most enjoyable match even if it was just an excuse to show what Perfect was capable of as the perfect manager. A houseshow match between these two might have been the best chance for a strong match, but as with most Tito matches no beef = no lasting impression. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #12 -- The Iron Sheik Saw two matches between these guys. One was a WWF title match from the Spectrum (1/21/84) and the other was an IC title defense from the same venue (2/18/84.) The WWF title shot is apparently one of only two title matches Tito ever got. Does anybody know the other? It was worked less like a heavyweight title match and more like an affronted babyface sticking up for the red, white and blue, but neither guy minced around and since fired up Tito is the best Tito I appreciated the energy levels. The Sheik was a really fun worker and so I enjoyed this particular match-up. Worth checking out if you have some time to kill. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #13 -- Sgt. Slaughter I would've preferred to see one of their matches from the early 80s, but all I could find were their Survivor Series Showdown match and their 11/24/90 Superstars match which were both taped at the Indianapolis Market Square Arena on 10/29/90. The Sarge was still a fun worker in his early 90s run and took some great bumps. The Survivor Series Showdown match was a bit slow, but the Superstars bout was a decent little match. It ended with Tito tied up in the ropes and Slaughter insulting all the immigrants in the US and ordering Tito to salute the Iraqi flag. Tito spat at the flag and Duggan made a run in to save him from the beating Slaughter was giving him before delivering this oddly eloquent speech about US immigration and the Gulf War situation and leading off chants of "USA, USA, USA" with Vince screaming crazy shit about sticking it to the country of Iraq. Just the sort of thing El P would dig.

Working an arm or leg is the pro-wrestling equivalent of plot. If the workers don't have a story to tell then there isn't one and that plot is simply work. It may be good work, smart work, effective work, great work, whatever, but at best it's just characterisation or more commonly the type of wrestling strategy/psychology that Gorilla Monsoon and Lord Alfred Hayes prattle on about. A wrestling match doesn't tell a story by default nor does it have to tell a story to be good. We all want to see something that is coherent and makes sense, but I guess Jerry is arguing that we shouldn't necessarily praise a match for delivering on those basic requirements whereas everyone else is arguing that they're such rare qualities in a match that those things alone are worthy of praise. To be honest, I don't think a wrestling match making sense is all that uncommon. Moreover, I don't think coherency prevents a match from being uninteresting. To me, the biggest problem with wrestling matches isn't structure or lack of a story but pacing. Most matches are boring because they lack rhythm and are poorly paced. But two people can watch the same match and have a different feel for the rhythm, and you can watch the same match a couple of nights apart and feel differently about it was well. Ultimately, it's the person watching the match who draws the meaning out of it. For some people a heel/face narrative structure is enough of a story element to satisfy them. For some people maybe a coherent match structure. Personally, I don't think you can really tell a story without a significant change taking place. That hardly ever happens because wrestling isn't a great storytelling medium, so I'm happy enough with great acting/performing and/or great work.

I can understand being impressed by a good bit of work and wanting to expatiate upon the bigger picture, but I think there's a limit to how much you can praise this sort of thing. I know you haven't said it's the case, but I don't think Demolition matches are good because they have captivating shine periods. I dunno, it just seems like mechanics to me. But anyway, we all watch wrestling in our own way and care about different things at different times. Tito's philosophy is probably true of most wrestlers. Wrestling really is the same schtick every time, but as people have pointed out in the past it was never really meant to be watched on televisions and computers years after it was worked for a paying audience. Well, except for the forays into the home video market. Those Coliseum videos were made to last a lifetime, I'm sure. I don't think anyone was meant to watch copious amounts of Tito Santana matches in a row, though.

The way I see it, that's just good wrestling. I've been watching these Tito/Orton matches were the work is mostly good, but you'd be hard pressed to say they have any sort of story unless you think Tito and Orton go to a draw is a story. I suppose my argument is that work is mostly just work and only sometimes gets elevated to storytelling.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #8 -- "Handsome" Harley Race, the King of the Ring The mind was willing but the body wasn't. Harley still did some cool things at this stage of his career, but he was so slow. I watched two bouts they had in '86, one from Boston and the other from MSG, and they were both pretty lifeless. Tito wasn't the kind of worker who pushes his opponent to do anything special. A lot of the time it seems like he's along for the ride w/ the heel dictating everything. This was the case here as Harley called these matches rather audibly. Unfortunately, he couldn't really bump anymore but was still using the same old match structure. Hence, the mind being willing but the body not. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #9 -- "Adorable" Adrian Adonis This might have been a good match before the "adorable" gimmick, but Adonis' matches were messy. He never really got how to wrestle well and stooge in the same match. It's very disjointed the way he moves from one to the other. Plus, this match starts off with some good exchanges then turns into a three minute hammerlock. I like some of Tito's hammerlock spots against Don Muraco and Bob Orton, but I'm not about to praise him filling in time in this match. All told a bit of a disappointment, but it would've been a major surprise if it hadn't been. Match was from the Spectrum, 6/28/86. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #10 -- "Cowboy" Bob Orton Orton was a nice opponent for Tito. They worked time limit draws against each other so the matches are a bit measured to say the least, but the work is mostly good. I saw an IC title defense from MSG (7/23/84) and a later match from Boston (8/9/86). Personally, I preferred the MSG match as it felt shorter and tighter, but they're both worth watching.

See Windham, Barry. Also Rhodes, Dustin. BTW, I didn't just pull the Davey/Eddie example out of thin air when trying to give my definition of psych. I purposely used an example where leg work would be meaningful to the hypothetical match. For every match with meaningful leg work like that, there are probably 1000 where it's strictly filler and has no meaning or impact at all. It's not meaningful to the match unless there's something more going on than leg work. Leg work doesn't tell a story no matter how logical it may be. Bret Hart setting a guy up for the sharpshooter involves a logical progression of moves but it doesn't tell a story. Now if the guy he's doing it to kicked his leg out from under his leg and just happens to be his little brother, then you've got some sort of a story.

I took a quick look at the results and seems they did a mixture of time limit draw and the Boston 4/22 angle. HistoryoftheWWE says Tito won a couple of times without specifying how. They didn't wrestle as many times as I would have imagined so I guess it wasn't as big a deal as I thought.

The percentage of great to bad is the same in any medium. The difference between wrestling and other creative endeavours is that at every stage of the creative process be it scriptwriting or songwriting or even shooting a film there is the chance for revision. Basic competency in these endeavours doesn't come easily but you can achieve it by reworking what you've created. If I rewrite a screenplay a dozen times it's going to be a lot more competent than the first time I wrote it regardless of how good I am at structuring a story. In wrestling, you can only really improve your match by doing it again and even if you do the same match night after night on the houseshow circuit you still need to produce your improved performance live. It's a much different discipline. Wrestlers don't labour over a match for a year like writers do with a screenplay. It doesn't take two or three years to produce a match like it does a film. The closest analogy is probably a prolific songwriter, but they still craft their work far more than a wrestler does. But really, most wrestling sucks because it's not important. Aside from matches that disappoint, there's no reason for most wrestling to be any better than it is. Take the Tito/Bossman match I watched earlier tonight. Theoretically, Tito and the Bossman had a great match in them but there was no reason to have one. Thankfully, some wrestling environments are better than others when it comes to the motivation or incentive to have a great match, but 90% of the time it's missing.

Well, if you're into scripts or you're a writer, critic or even a big movie fan you'll probably notice the set-up, but it's like a muso liking a song because of a chord progression. We're all pretty big wrestling fans here so we notice details, but in my opinion wrestling matches require certain conditions to tell a story above and beyond the wrestlers' ability to work. To tell a story either the stakes must be high or there has to be an angle to pay off. It's exceedingly rare that wrestlers create a story out of nothing.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #6 -- "The Model" Rick Martel In theory, this feud should've been as heated as the Valentine and Savage feuds, but for some reason the WWF mishandled it. There's a match from 4/22/89 in Boston that's a nice teaser. Martel attacks Tito as he's coming to ringside and Tito is unable to wrestle so they postpone the match until later in the show, where Martel takes full advantage of Tito's knee injury. Then there's their Saturday Night Main Event match from 9/21/89 which turns into a sort of impromptu lumberjack match when both their Survivor Series teams come to ringside. This was a pretty good match, actually, with plenty of chemistry between the two. It's been a long time since I saw Martel work and I'd forgotten his great facial expressions when taking a beating. Since we've been speaking about psychology in the other thread, Roddy Piper made a great point on commentary in one of their later matches that Martel is the type of wrestler who hates to get hit and will always take evasive action in such situations. This is so true. Anyway, the finish to the SNME match should be pretty obvious considering there's a heel team and a face team at ringside, but it's a good match with plenty of great reactions on the outside from the seconds. There's this great moment where Vince is talking about Martel's team being vultures and the director gets an awesome medium close-up of Bossman snarling. Vince recoils in disgust and blurts out "and there's the king vulture" in classic Vince fashion. But where is the blowoff match, Vince? There's one later match they have from The Main Event dated 11/23/90 that's really good, but most of their stuff from 1990 lacks any sort of spark. They really needed to have the blowoff match at Survivor Series but back then it was strictly the team concept and no singles matches. Really disapponting that there's no definitive match because work wise it's one of Tito's better match-ups. The only bad match I saw (and I watched about a half dozen) was a match from '92. Jim Ross did commentary on it and sure enough the motherfucker couldn't help but talk about Tito's football career. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #7 -- The Big Bossman This was from a special pre-Survivor Series episode of Prime Time Wrestling that featured singles match-ups amongst Survivor Series pairings. I remember these days like it was yesterday. Staying up late on Friday nights to watch WWF, living from PPV to PPV... They say you can never go home again and it's pretty much true with late 80s WWF, but still this was what you might expect from Tito vs. The Bossman without them giving away too much before the PPV or having a better match than the PPV match might be. Can't really fault a match that wasn't designed to be anything special.

You obviously haven't been checking out the DVDVR Best of the 60s forum Regarding "working the leg," I think it depends on what's happening in the match. Most of the time they're doing it because they're in a wrestling match. Sometimes they do it because they're a heel or a fired up babyface, at which point it's a type of characterisation. But if they really hate each other and have some sort of vendetta, then you've at least got the makings of a story. I always hated it, though, because in real life a knee injury would sideline a worker for months and they're right back at it the next night.

There's nothing praiseworthy about a guy working over someone's knee because it was injured on the outside. The other day I watched a great movie called Mamma Roma by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It tells the story of an ex-prostitute trying to start a new life so that she can raise her teenage son properly. Early on, there's a scene where the son and another character talk about whether they're afraid of death and the son says he's not. From that piece of information I'm sure you can all figure out what happens to the son in the end. It's a nice piece of set-up, but that's all it is -- set-up. You don't praise a movie for its set-up and you shouldn't praise a wrestling match just because of a simple bit of action that took place. A guy working over another guy's knee doesn't tell a story anymore than the Mamma Roma set-up.

For lucha, make sure you include the El Dandy/Javier Llanes match as it's mat heavy and one of Dandy's best matches. The Ciclon Ramirez vs. Javier Cruz hair match is okay but not great. I always wanted to see the Stuka vs Jerry Estrada hair match. You should try to track that down. Mascarita Sagrada/Espectrito I and Panther/Mariachi should be locks. This match -- 7/15/94 AAA: El Hijo Del Santo/Octagon/Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Blue Panther/Fuerza Guerrera/Psicosis had a Santo performance that I raved about, but I don't think that's a good enough reason to include it. 1994 was a down year for CMLL and the footage we have is incomplete. This is a desert island match for me -- Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Shinya Hashimoto (NJPW 6/1/94) I marked out when I read "the view never changes" in Dylan's post. What a promo.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #4 -- "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff I never have a problem with anything Paul Orndorff does, except for fact that it's unremarkable. He's one of those guys who is mechanically good but just doesn't excite me. There's nothing about his look that grabs me and there's nothing special about the way he moves or applies holds. But I watched two matches he had against Tito -- MSG 5/21/84 and St. Louis 9/1/84 -- and they were both pretty solid. They were very much "this is how you work a match if you're Paul Orndorff wresting Tito Santana," but the MSG match in particular is worth checking out for a hot crowd and Tito doing a big injury angle. Orndorff was pretty over at the time, which helped sustain my interest, and the matches built reasonably well even if the structure was somewhat generic. They also had a match from the Wrestling Challenge in '85 where they were both faces. They do some nice chain wrestling before things get heated. On the whole it was a decent match-up that like a lot of Tito match-ups needed a hotter angle. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #5 -- Jake "the Snake" Roberts Eh, it's a Jake match. You always think it's going to be good then you wind up disappointed. The Tito match is from 11/26/86 in Houston and doesn't deliver much.

La Fiera v. Jerry Estrada, chain match, Monterrey, early 90s This is the first time I can remember seeing a chain match in lucha. I've got to say it's one of the better borrowed gimmicks I've seen in Mexican wrestling. The thing I liked about this most was how random the match-up was. One of the great things about lucha is that when you think of a chain match in Monterrey, there's probably a hundred different match-ups it would suit, but you look at the billing -- Jerry Estrada and La Fiera in a chain match -- and you think, "yeah, that works." Totally random, totally great. I can't think of another style of wrestling where there's so many match-ups you have to watch in case the match is great. This is a case in point, as long time readers will know how I feel about Jerry Estrada, but there's no way a sane man can resist watching this. I'll give Estrada his props now -- he was badass in this. They both were, really. It was basically a mano a mano match with a prop, but they did a lot of cool things with that prop and there was all of the blood and violence and selling that you'd expect. Brutality aside, I don't know if I'd call it a truly great match as it lacked the type of big finish that kicks the nearfalls into overdrive, but I kind of liked the finish they came up with for the sheer goofiness of it. After the tope and big spill to the outside, the idea was basically that the match was too violent to have any sort of resolution so they threw down the chain and did a double clothesline spot. Estrada barely connected with his clothesline, but it was one of those "only in lucha" moments where throwing down the chain and doing a double clothesline seems like a good idea. Yeah, it would've been better if one of them had tortured the other into submission but the match ran out of gas as a whole. Still, these matches are about atmosphere more than anything else and this definitely had its share, from the torn canvas to the workers bringing extra objects to the fight (for no other reason than they were scheduled to fight that night.) Plenty to dig even if it's incomplete.

Tito was one of the better workers in the company from '88 to '90 and didn't appear as though he had lost anything in his El Matador run. I think the key period of interest is when Bret started working more singles matches in the late 80s and early 90s as there are a lot of easy comparison points such as both of them having a ton of matches against Hennig. Yes, Tito was older and more experienced, but they were in a similar position company wise as midcard faces.