ohtani's jacket

Since when did the first two falls being short in lucha matter?

Sting/Flair matches suck. Even the worst Luger/Flair match is better than a Sting/Flair match. Sting was never a great worker but he reached that point where he "got" what he was supposed to do and did it well. Luger was awesome in '89 and even into 1990 and is so ridiculously fun to get behind.

Piper was awesome on commentary when Virgil won the Million Dollar belt. The best heel commentator among active wrestlers was definitely Owen. Never heard anyone in WWF or NWA/WCW who compared.

Akira Fukuzawa says hello. I don't speak japanese, and as it is I would rank him pretty much at the top along with Lance. Ross over excitement during finishes post 1999 just makes him unbearable to me during big matches, he sounds like he's having a panic attack and it's just as ridiculous as Joey Styles infamous screamed lines (and I like Joey as much as anybody). Basically Ross ranks that way to me : WCW Ross > WWF (1993-1998) Ross (at his best, really great, and excellent most of the time) >> UWF >>> WWF post 1999 (could be just plain terrible and annoying, oversells everything by gawd!) Fukuzawa does the same thing as Ross and Styles only it's cool because it's like a crazy Japanese TV commercial.

What is all this crap? Tony was a million times better than Ross in WCW and Tony and Jesse were the best WCW commentating pair of the 90s. Jesse was better in WCW than he was in WWF, and Gorilla with Jesse or Heenan was much better than the montones of Vince in WWWF. The winner in all this is Lance Russell who I will stauchy argue was better than Kent Walton in the battle of the all-time greatest announcers.

Cerebro is 39 and made his debut in 1996. The Traumas are good, but hardly constitute the "young guys coming through."

Off the top of my head, Clive Myers, Honeyboy Zimba, Johnny Kwango, Johnny Kincaid, Dave Bond, Kid Chocolate, Lenny Hurst, Jim Moser and Caswell Martin. That's not counting the Indian and Pakistani wrestlers they pushed, either, which you don't see much of in other territories.

Los Infernales and Los Brazos. Trios wrestling is after all tag wrestling.

I love Black Terry and Negro Navarro and Solar and all the rest, but the only reason they're "the best in the world" is because the young guys coming through are crap. On the flipside, they've made me go back and appreciate veterans from all eras which is a new way to watch wrestling.

Dale Martin/Joint Promotions probably pushed the most black wrestlers of any territory in the 70s.

MJH's point about the TV director is spot-on and something that's almost never mentioned. Well done.

That Demolition vs. Brain Busters match where the Demos get themselves deliberately DQ'ed is as fun as anything on NWA TV at the time.

I don't know if that was directed at my comments on blown lucha spots, but even if it wasn't I feel the need to clarify. High flying lucha is what I tend to have issue with. Heavyweight style lucha is one of my favorite styles to watch, but the high flyer guys just kill me with how they tend to turn every match into a "can you top this" contest. Dives are cool, flippy spots are cool, but like I said before I prefer wrestling of any style or origin to at least have the pretense of two guys engaging in an athletic contest rather than an Olympic floor exercise. I wasn't trying to direct my comment at anyone. I just saw lucha being lumped together with highflyers and cruiserweights. Some of the breakneck stuff can be good like minis matches in recent years. It's a matter of doing it well, really.

Well, I've been trying to watch Demolition and PG-13 matches. The Demolition matches aren't great but they're not exactly bad either. I don't think their offence was a problem but by the same token their structure wasn't fantastic either. PG-13's USWA matches were far more entertaining even if the ones I saw were basically angles, but I'm not seeing how they're anything more than good at their bit. The most interesting thing so far was the Rock 'n' Roll Express working heel.

There are a lot of different reasons why a wrestling match might be good and I don't really see the need to pick one element over another. If pressed, I would probably say selling since that's what matters to me most, but my definition of selling encompasses quite a lot. In the past I broke it down into acting and selling with the end result being everything they do to put the match over. This isn't the only wrestling I enjoy, however. If you watch a lot of wrestling, as I do in phases, you'll know that there isn't one particular way that works. There's a few comments in this page that suggest that all lucha is the same, but "lucha" isn't a style in the same sense that "puroresu" isn't a style. Ultimately, I think it's better for wrestling fans to dig deeper, look harder and have less preconceptions about what's good and what's bad, because wrestling for the most part is imperfect and being a fan is about finding good matches in whatever form they come.

Nice one Arnold.

I have no idea who PG-13 are. Can someone recommend a match?

That's a lucha spot. I doubt the Michinoku Pro crew had ever seen a Memphis match in their lives.

I was hoping this was that Don Corelone guy who wrestled Canek.

I wish they'd sign more.

The Simmon's interview links to this -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TnSPQGHz7A Forgot how awesome that was, especially the flick of the nose. The botch is amusing as well --

The point isn't whether it was Baba who came up with the specific idea for the spot. The point (and it's conjecture, really) is about whose idea it was to do the spot in the first place. Did the workers come up with it themselves and decide to throw it into the match or was it something Baba wanted them to do for whatever booking reason? It may have been something they thought up to add heat to their match. Heck, they may have even done it without discussing it too much since they weren't exactly on the greatest of terms, but if we're going to pressume that the workers came up with the ideas for the matches without Baba knowing what was happening then we might as well give the workers credit for all of All Japan's booking. In fact, if Motoko ran the show then the Baba you're describing basically did nothing. That fits the image of an "impotent" Baba that some people like to portray, but I think it's bollocks. If you think that's what it's like working for a Japanese company in Japan, I won't persuade you otherwise. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about things like the decision to unmask Misawa and how it was to be done. If we take your line of thinking to the extreme, Baba told them to do something shooty at the end of the match and they ran off like giddy little school children and came up with the whole unmasking thing on the basis of their collective wrestling experience. Baba in turn watched the match and was shocked but pleasantly surprised at his workers' initiative. Look, I don't mean to be childish about this, but it's not some terrible assumption to make that Baba was as involved in booking decisions as a film director on set and not some executive producer floating around in the background worrying about money issues. I'm not saying he was draconian about it since I don't rightly know, but I've read and heard enough to believe that he wasn't leaving it all up to the workers, that's for sure. You mention Jumbo and his 20 fucking years, but I've always read that Baba had very clear ideas about how Jumbo should wrestle and my argument (in a roundabout way perhaps) was that no influence from Baba would've resulted in a different type of Jumbo. I do not believe that Jumbo, or any of them for that matter, worked in EXACTLY the way they wanted to or would have if Baba wasn't boss. Yes, it could've just as easily been Kawada or any of the others, but generally speaking someone has to book the finish to the match and I don't see why you're so reluctant to consider Baba as that person. I can only assume it doesn't gel with what you've known about All Japan over the years. I don't know how long Baba was sick for. It was a secret that Baba was sick at all. But I certainly think that the booking in 1998 was significantly worse than in 1995. My argument was that it would have happened sooner if Baba had gotten sick earlier and that you wouldn't have seen the same sort of matches from All Japan if someone else had been the booker in the mid-90s, but you don't seem to think that the matches have Baba's fingerprint over them so I can't be bothered arguing the point. I'll finish this by saying it was Baba's company and Baba called the shots. He may have looked like some big smiling oddity, but he was clever and shrewd. He was also a wrestler-promoter who would actually get in the ring with his talent both in matches and in training. He was parent, teacher and boss to guys like Misawa and Kawada. If Baba told them to do something they would have, within reasonable limits, done it, and that extends to things as unfathomable to us as who to marry or who not to marry. That's a theoretical example, but possible. Given this type of relationship, the idea that Baba could have instructed them to do something different or special in a match is a very minor thing indeed.

Not feeling that.

There are some good matches on there, but it's not a particularly well made comp. It would be fun to make a better one. I will say that the comp has some of Takada's better matches on it, such as: Nobuhiko Takada vs. Akira Maeda (11/10/88) Nobuhiko Takada vs. Bob Backlund (12/22/88) Nobuhiko Takada vs Naoki Sano ***1/2 (12/20/92)

This has put me off getting the UWF-i set, I was going to get that and the Bryan Danielson or the 6 disk Ultimo set. Don't let me put you off. There are UWF-i matches that a lot of people like. I doubt that they're on the comp, however.