ohtani's jacket

Period!

Cassandro/Rudy Reyna vs. El Matemático/Ninja Sasuke (UWA 1992) This was from the tour to Mexico where Murakawa Masanori first donned the Great Sasuke ring attire; going by the name Ninja Sasuke. For a Japanese wrestler in Mexico, he certainly looked the part. It helped that he looked like Octagon or one of the Fantásticos (Blackman, Kung Fu, Kendo, and later Avispón Negro), but he had the agility and suppleness to do similar speed work, and he was working Cassandro, who at just 22 years of age was a brash young worker full of confidence. Reyna, on the other hand, looked like a washed up transvestite trying to turn a trick. He spent more time fixing his outfit than doing any serious grappling, though he did have one amusing spot where he used the martial arts to poke Matemático in the eyes. El Matemático was probably the most impressive guy in the match from a nuts and bolts perspective. Just a solid vet, who did the sort of things that would make him top five if he were around today. The match was your breezy, all-action undercard filler that was common in UWA at this time. There was nothing remotely outstanding about it. The only difference between this sort of match and the modern style is that the timing was slightly better. It was several notches down from the up-tempo, all-action midcard bouts of the 80s, but an easy watch. The way UWA used to edit these matches for TV is that they'd cram the entire thing into a fifteen minute slot, so there's never any time to let it all soak in. Still, I'd sooner watch Sasuke in Mexico than Ultimo Dragon, so it's not a complete waste of your time, provided you don't have too many other things to watch, which is always the case I guess.

I don't have a problem with that opinion, but there's a lot of things in pro-wrestling that amount to gimmicks. It seems anything goes in pro-wrestling except shoots. Once you start talking about shoots, people get all twitchy. Suddenly, MMA is a sport. Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't MMA fought for its legitimacy as a sport? Surely, there are people from the fighters' respective backgrounds who see it as a circus. My argument isn't that pro-wrestling and MMA are one in the same, it's that MMA is a way for pro-wrestling people to make money. PRIDE was never regarded as a stand alone thing in Japan. It was lumped in with pro-wrestling, boxing and every other type of fighting. It was born, for the most part, out of UWF-i going belly up and Kingdom folding. It was not a clear cut alternative to pro-wrestling in Japan, it was essentially the new wave of wrestling promoting in Japan. Had it started like K-1, perhaps I might view it differently (though K-1 was certainly on the radar of Japanese wrestling fans.) The fact that PRIDE ended up folding in the same manner that all the shoot style promotions did highlights to me that it was just another promotion. There were a large number of new fans who were drawn to PRIDE, but it wasn't a completely different market from the one they were already operating in. I know people who went to UWF shows in the 80s and then went to every single PRIDE show. To me, it's like the film business where studios latch onto whatever genre is making money. This isn't the case for UFC, I believe, so you can't talk about it in general terms. There will always be guys who were out and out pro-wrestlers. Then there's other guys for whom switching being works and shoots wasn't that big a stretch, like Funaki and Shamrock. If you watch UWF/PWFG and then Pancrase, it is not night and day.

Isn't all pro wrestling worked shoots? It depends whether you define pro-wrestling as a worked shoot or as a style of promoting. If it's the latter, then any content can be pro-wrestling.

Uh, they're all football codes. There's been guys who've switched codes and been successful at more than one. There's been guys who've failed at switching codes. The only difference between switching football codes and going into an MMA environment is that pro-wrestling is worked.

I'm sure a lot of guy's reps are bullshit, but people always cherry pick what suits their argument. If a guy looks legit in a pro-wrestling environment, that's generally a plus. Strikes, matwork, whatever. Some people don't care about that stuff and that's fine, just like some people don't like shoot style, but pulling or throwing a strike doesn't make a world of difference and neither does the difference between a work and a shoot. Sakuraba trained to make a work look like a shoot. Then he trained to shoot for real. That, in my books, makes Sakuraba a better overall "worker" than he otherwise would have been if he'd stayed in the works only scene. That no doubt sounds stupid to others, but again I say people are only too happy to legitmise pro-wrestlers through their amateur background whenever it suits them. Pro-wrestlers are not created equal. This is one of the fundamental problems with the WON HOF. People are always saying "well, where's the equivalent who's already in the Hall?" Then they go off on these wild tangents saying if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck should it be in the HOF? No, use your discretion.

All our debate goes down to this actually. Once you've said you consider PRIDE as pro-wrestling (which I already knew), it sums up pretty much everything there's to say on your part. PRIDE did promote some worked matches which were pro-wrestling matches, but that doesn't make the company pro-wrestling. Like some pro-wrestling promotion did promote some legit shoot matches (like the kickboxing stuff in early ARSION cards) but it didn't made them legit fight promotion. Nobody in this thread is going to change their stance, but pro-wrestling to those people was whatever drew. HUSTLE is a good example of that. My argument is not that the fights were pro-wrestling fights, but that the company was a pro-wrestling outfit. They saw an opportunity and exploited it. I don't see the underlining difference between PRIDE and a gimmick fed.

If you want to argue that there's a connection, go for it. I don't really care whether I'm right or wrong about this. I have never understood why works and shoots should be kept separate. If you ask me, Funaki was the hottest pro-wrestler in Japan in 1996 and his match with Rutten was the best fight -- worked or shoot -- that year. I also think Tamura's best shoots ought to be included in his list of best matches, and that from a work perspective if you're a good shooter that makes you a better wrestler in general, pro or otherwise. I don't understand how you can praise guys for faking a fight and saying how great their matwork looks etc. and then suddenly if they're fighting for a real submission it's completely separate and unrelated. Bullshit. If Yoshiaki Fujiwara had wanted to, he could've hooked on a submission for real (or maybe he couldn't have, but let me keep my fantasy.) The fact that this doesn't apply to Hulk Hogan or Dusty Rhodes hardly matters.

It depends. I imagine Dave will support Lesnar's candidacy and I imagine there were be a ton of debate over it. Personally, I don't care. I don't subscribe to the WON, I just have an outside curiosity about the whole thing. But for every Japanese fan I know, and I mean hardcore fans, Sakuraba is a no-brainer. I don't see why you have to apply the same standards for each candidate. That doesn't make any sense. Basically, this argument comes down to how you feel about pro-wrestling and MMA, and to a lesser extent how you feel about Dave Meltzer. Lesnar had a more successful pro-wrestling career than Sakuraba and may have a more successful MMA career too. That may make it difficult to leave Brock out since Sakuraba and Funaki have already set a precedent. The key difference, I would imagine, is that US pro-wrestling fans and the media (whoever they are) haven't exactly flocked to Lesnar as the biggest thing in pro-wrestling. If New Japan had been in the position that the WWE is now, perhaps Sakuraba wouldn't have been quite as big a deal, but you never know... Japanese people eat this shit up. When a Japanese baseball player goes to MLB, it's massive. When a US player comes to play baseball in Japan, it doesn't cause a ripple in the States. There's not that many direct comparisons you can make, because you're dealing with two different countries. PRIDE was more or less a pro-wrestling promotion in my eyes. Look at one of the major guys behind it -- he went and started HUSTLE which is the flipside of the same coin. Anything that has Inoki involved is not going to be on the up and up. People can talk about trying to legitimise pro-wrestling, but let's not legitimise PRIDE too much.

Who says Sakuraba's career was unsuccessful before MMA? If Sakuraba hadn't worked in UWF-i or Kingdom, then no, he wouldn't belong in the HOF. Fedor doesn't belong in the WON HOF and neither do Silva or Nogueira for the simple fact that they were never pro-wrestlers. Would it work the other way? No, that doesn't appear logical, but if the MMA people suddenly saw money in it things could change. I don't follow MMA all that closely, but my understanding is that right now the UFC is making money. So long as they're making money the only aspects of pro-wrestling they're going to touch are presentation, booking and perhaps some similar marketing. Were their financial situation to change, they might start rigging fights (if they haven't done so already.)

All it really says is that celebrities fighting, whether they be pro wrestlers, Olympic heroes, yokozunas or comedians draw money. Which sounds awfully like pro-wrestling in other words.

I'm afraid that swings both ways. For every wrestler or fan who is ultimately embarrassed by being associated with something as inherently silly as pro-wrestling, there's a person who derides pro-wrestling as being inherently silly and not worthy of being legitimised or made credible. Your argument may be true, but the whole Sakuraba angle was based on him legitimising Japanese fighting, which the fans and media ate up. The whole Sakuraba thing is simple. If you take a guy who was doing worked shoots and make him a star doing MMA fights, aside from the angle that you spin on it, it doesn't matter what he does in the ring. It could be real, it could be fake, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that he drew pro-wrestling fans and new fans to a different sort of promotion. People in this thread are advocating a guy who did 3-5 minute matches that consisted mostly of body checks. The fact that Big Daddy did works is not part of his candidacy. His matches, for the most part, are irrelevant. If a guy can get into the hall for being a huge draw and being good on the mic then a special case like Sakuraba or Funaki is not a stretch of the imagination when the business works differently in Japan than it does from the US. Whether Lesnar is the same sort of case is up for debate. Let's say a mediocre wrestler goes into boxing and wins a title. That in itself is not grounds for being in a pro-wrestling HOF. But if pro-wrestling people put him into boxing and manage him to stardom, then it gets a little blurry. If Vince started up his own boxing promotion or latched onto it somehow, and started sending his workers in to do real fights, people's heads would explode.

I wouldn't vote for him. Politics, for the most part, is unrelated to pro-wrestling. MMA is related.

Sakuraba worked a far more legit style. It's highly unlikely that Sakuraba would've been a success at shoots if he'd been a deathmatch worker. Eh, I think it's a stretch to say that Severn was a pro-wrestler. Shamrock dabbled in it but was more or less unknown as a pro-wrestler before 1997. It's highly unlikely that Tamura will ever get in the HOF, but he'd be a stronger candidate in Dave's eyes if he'd been a more high profile MMA fighter. Right, and I'm saying it doesn't matter whether it's pro-wrestling or not. The entire foundation of pro-wrestling was based on the idea that you took something that was supposedly legit and fixed it so that you could control the outcome and make money. But when a promoter comes along and takes something rigged and makes it real, people balk. Why? It's simply an off-shoot. The fact that in Japan, and even the US, you had guys switching between the two ought to tell you something. This type of argument would only work if WCW did worked basketball games. C'mon, Tamura switched between shoots and works long before Maeda went full time with shoots. Are you telling me he had a split personality? The only real difference between Tamura the worker and Tamura the fighter was that Tamura the worker was a hell of a lot more exciting than Tamura the fighter. Apart from Inoki and UWF? That's a fairly large chunk of Japanese pro-wrestling history. And an important chunk too. What's more, worked shoots go back further than Inoki in Japan. It depends how you look at it. Too many people define pro-wrestling based on the fact that it's fake, but in essence it's a type of fight promoting where you control the outcome. Pro-wrestling belongs in the same fight promoting categories as boxing and MMA. They overlap in numerous ways and why people can't accept that they're in the same business is beyond me. They're all trying to draw crowds, sell merchandise and get people to order pay-per-views on the basis of draws, cards and fights.

It's not irrelevant. The problem here is that people think there's some sort of sweeping critera that covers every candidate. Each candidate is different. Whatever their background is, it will play a part in their overall candidacy. If they have a legit athletic background more power to them. Someone should tell Dave that Big Daddy was a rugby league player. Don't be stupid. His matches were more legit than Onita's. Shamrock and Severn wouldn't pushed as pro-wrestlers doing MMA. If Tamura had been a bigger success in MMA, he'd be an ideal candidate for the Hall. Are you telling me Tamura stopped being a pro-wrestler when RINGS turned to shoots? A large chunk of Japanese pro-wrestling history is based on faking worked shoots, to say that it's not pro-wrestling anymore if they do shoots is ridiculous. No-one in Japan saw it that way, because they genuinely believed that Inoki had pioneered it decades before. It was not a giant leap for mankind. Too many people look at the difference between WWE and UFC and hold that as the distinction between pro-wrestling and MMA, but in Japan the lines are blurred because of the worked shoot movement that began in the 1980s. Dave has a lot of fair points about MMA being pro-wrestling.

He was the biggest pro-wrestling star in Japan this decade. Whether he did this by working shoots or works is irrelevant. Amateur wrestling wouldn't consider professional careers because an amateur hall is concerned with success at the amateur level, not drawing power and the business side of things. Pro-wrestling is concerned with whatever draws, which in the earlier part of this decade in Japan was PRIDE.

Lesnar will be on the ballot and it won't surprise me one iota if he gets in.

Absolutely. We're talking about a HOF where an amateur background carries weight, particularly if you went to the Olympics. If that carries weight, then so too should a successful MMA career, especially if you were billed as a pro-wrestler, drew as a pro-wrestler and attracted long time pro-wrestling fans to shows that were essentially promoted as pro-wrestling. Whether PRIDE was a work or shoot never mattered in Japan. Sakuraba spent his pro-wrestling career trying to create the illusion that his matches were shoots. To say he was no longer a pro-wrestler when he joined DSE is silly. If he hadn't been successful, he probably would've wound up back in pro-wrestling. He was a cross-over star. He wasn't a judo-ka or a rikishi.

Sakuraba should be in the HOF and so should Funaki. I can't understand the argument that as soon as you do shoots you are no longer a pro-wrestler. There is no delineation whatsoever. If a MMA guy does a work is he a pro-wrestler? No, he's an MMA fighter doing works.

Territory seems a bit misleading. He was a national draw. It's a little different from saying someone drew in Calgary or Memphis or Mexico City.

The resistance to Big Daddy is that he was an attrocious worker. In every other sense, he was a HOF level candidate. I have no idea if he was a better worker in the late 50s/early 60s, but he was 46 when he first got the Big Daddy push and a super heavyweight. His whole gimmick was based on a camp ring entrance with a Seekers song, a union jack hat and a whole bunch of other stuff that seems hokey now but was relevant to the times. England went through a major recession from 1979-81.

Not really. How many national TV channels were there in Japan in Rikidozan's, Inoki's and Baba's heydays? Or in America and Mexico when wrestling first appeared on TV there? Not many! That's exactly the point. There's a lot of stuff that did monster ratings when television first began to spread. It's something you have to keep in perspective.

Joint Promotions featured all manner of workers and wrestling styles. To make out that every match was worked in the George Kidd style is misleading. The vast majority of the workers had gimmicks -- technical worker is a gimmick itself. There were gimmick matches, angles and spots. A ton of spots. It's not as though it was Memphis or anything, but it was pro-wrestling through and through. You only have to watch the WOS starting where they do a comedy intro to realise that the Johnny Saint style (or whatever it is that people identify British wrestling with) was part of a larger show. If you watch the catchweight matches, it opens your eyes to the booking side of JP. I dunno, to me it's like pimping AAA's hot period and ignoring what was on top.

The three channels part is pretty significant.

I don't understand where Dave's British readers are coming from. The last two sentences aren't true at all.