MJH

The arm angle died when Misawa did the kick flurry: even if his arm fell off he could still kick Tosh's ass. Kawada doesn't get any kind of breakthrough until the punches, uses one too many, and pays dearly.

I don't get Bischoff's stance vs. Starrcade as being accurate: Sting/Hogan. That was the big match of the nWo run and they consciously held it off until the end of the year (well, the end of the next year).

What Flik said. I can't remember very many instances at all where Aja, say, blocked getting sent off the ropes. She might switch, she might come back with her crossbody, but the "immovable object" thing just didn't exist in the style. Really, it's not as if Aja or Bull pressed their size difference. You wouldn't get lock up->push-off->flex... they'd throw girls around, sure, but it was more "these girls are tougher, and they will fuck you up" rather than "Toyota/Kyoko/etc can't deal with the size of these girls!". Kyoko might make a bigger deal out of getting them up (or not as the case may be) for the surfboard, but that's about it. Kyoko was just as likely to block a slam/suplex off an undercard girl like Numachi or Shiratori than Bull/Aja were to block hers. IIRC, Kyoko was billed at 170 and Nakano 200 (and Aja 230) so it wasn't like there was a huge size difference anyway... no more than Misawa (255) vs. Hansen (300) or whatever.

I did upload the 2/28/93 show (Terri/Debbie) a while back: the links will be buried somewhere in DVDVR's MME folder. It's more interesting after having seen all the '92 footage because whilst, yes, it's a much better match than Terri should've been having in singles, and Debbie is great, you can see Terri having improved a lot too and it's by a country mile the best performance out of her. She'd work through her shoulder injury to make the Dream Slam shows and then quit wrestling for a few years IIRC, the run in Zenjo banged her up pretty bad. There's quite a few Debbie matches on YouTube (though not vs. Terri for some reason) and Ditch has the 1/5/92 AJW Tag Titles match vs. Takako/Yoshida on his .us site. That is, of course, not withstanding the volume of footage you watch daily from these Yearbook sets, Loss. *** As for this match, yeah, I loved it. The match against the FMW girls at Dream Rush isn't upto much (and Sakie looks very annoyed), so this works as the culmination to Sakie/Debbie's run together (I'm 99% sure that the 1/4/92 show was their first match teaming). They only had three more matches on tape after this by my count (Dream Rush, TLTB'92 Finals show vs. Bat/Nabe, 1/24/93 vs. Terri/Ito) before the injury in March. Debbie does get a tad overrated because she's a gaijin who can actually work with the girls and not drag everything to pieces, but by this point she was definitely in the good-very good range and getting better. I'm not sure of the complications with her leg injury: you figure the company would've brought her back by the time Yoshida returned ("you can work the Tokyo Dome!"), or would've been approached in someway to work with Madusa in WWF... my memories of it are she didn't look that bad at all when she made her cameo in Arsion.

Raw was all kinds of shit last night. Ziggler/Orton was fine, with a good second half, but whilst they made Ziggler look good in losing, who's to say (especially since he's going to be feuding with Swagger it seems) it's going to mean anything down the line. The opening interview was bad on all counts. Punk came off really annoying and sophmoric. Nash was just bad. And then when Hunter leaves, these two guys who hate each other, with Hunter having to restrain Nash, they just stand there looking at one another. It must've looked even worse to the live crowd what with Orton coming out and then both guys just quietly leaving? Seriously, WTF. Mark Henry shouldn't be backing down from the fight. How hard would it have been to have the faces duck a double clothesline, and bump him to the floor with a double shoulder block or something? Or better still have them duck but Christian grabs Cena's feet from the floor and Henry bump Sheamus again to give them more heat... The "big announcement" was, as mentioned, poorly-mic'd, and wasn't even shown to the live crowd to pop (?).

I think you're the first guy in the history of the internet to call Vrij great, Loss. I don't think these matches are particularly "good", but they work, and are fun. And, no, he never wrestled Inoki.

You could pretty much take any Yoshida match from '92 and it'd be, at worst, solid. OK, so the 3/20 tag is messy as hell, but other than that... I also thought, going back earlier, that her and Takako had a nice little "(very) young girls" match on the 8/91 JGP Finals show. IIRC, one works the arm, the other the back, they're equal, full of energy, and one of them takes a *big* risk too far and is done for after that. I'm not sure it's "good", per se, but you can see the makings of her there.

Like I said, it has to be the first worked wrestling match. It's like, "what's the most important day in the history of the world?" "The day it came into existing, duh."

The problem with putting Yoshida #1 (which I wouldn't but I do agree with Flik and Jerome's sentiment that she was coming along really well pre-injury) is that she was pretty non-descript without any great presence to her. Look at how strong some of the character's were around her, look at how distinctive she looked just walking out in Arsion, is it any surprise she fell by the wayside?

The Tag League (ie; Yamada teaming with Hokuto) was a "random drawing" done on the 7/15 (?) show. Yamada didn't pick Hokuto. I'm not sure why you were expecting a Lucha-style hair vs. hair match.

Weapons are allowed at the referee's discretion, ie; not to excessive use. Bull would use her nunchaku too, many guys/girls might use a chair, etc...

As big a fan as I am, I kinda hope it is. I found something very unsettling hearing Meltzer on the WON Radio last night talking about it.

Do Triple-A have a HOF?

What I think he means is that the Champion wasn't presented as being the top guy in the company... Yoko was. Angle in 2000? Not really. Excusing Backlund's 3-day reign in '94 and Vince getting the belt in '99... it's probably Angle. Maybe Show.

I suppose it's to be expected that Dana won the poll, but, given how big a deal Pride was before they took over UFC, the most important guy in MMA history?

The Living Dangerously Van Dam/Lynn match works because it's a "heel" RVD gloating at how great he is gradually realising as Lynn pushes him further that this guy isn't a pushover. The matches after that? Eh...

Yeah, because the posts go "Punk/Cena? Nah. Self-Conscious Epic. Next." At this point, I'm honestly not sure how much further you expect Punk/Cena or HBK/Taker or [...] to be "broken down".

The answer is the first worked match but who knows when that was or who was in it.

Steamboat mentioned it in promos leading into the show. When they released the 20th Anniversary Edition (?) on DVD it had various build-up stuff for Hogan/Andre and Savage/Steamboat as extras. It doesn't show the matches (I think the only match is a Battle Royal involving Hogan/Andre) but Steamboat definitely brings it up on his build-up interviews. In that sense it was "known".

[i recommend seeing Masters/Drew but] that said, it felt like two guys hitting their limit. Everything looked pretty solid but only one or two spots looked notably good, I thought. Masters' facials are just too goofy for me; he looks like a guy who has worked hard to get to the level of performance that he's at, but he looks like he's trying, like he's performing. Yes, he kept selling the leg, but he looked like a guy selling the leg rather than a guy whose leg is/was fucked. His movements look very deliberate like he's counting steps and thinking through all his motions. He's doing all the right things, I just don't think he's doing them particularly well, or, at least, not in a way that looks natural/organic to me. Drew looks somewhat more natural, but I've never bought the character. His face looks as young as Miz', even with facial hair, and some of his movements and mannerisms look forced to me. And I don't think either guy has much charisma to draw me (or the casual fan - that audio is clearly piped) into what they do, so I'm not sure how well they'd fare with a push, though I do agree with people who say they've worked hard to improve and deserve it. Still, it was a good little match that I enjoyed. Obviously with what I've written above it sounds like I'm down on both guys. I'm really not, I like seeing how hard they're trying, how much they're thinking through what they do. It reminded me in some ways of Sanada/Kono from last year's Carnival where they've put a lot of thought into laying out the match really well but, whilst good, aren't talented enough to really pull off the match as well as more gifted workers would. I dug that match, and I dug this, I just don't happen to think either is anywhere near "great" yet (or may ever be). *** That's what I wrote on DVDVR after watching the match six weeks ago. *** Loss finding Drew slapping the table in anger "forced" has nothing to do with whether or not it's a regular thing he does, or a regular part of his character. I'm not sure whether Drew's not good at being short-tempered, or that he just looks so young I can't take it seriously. It comes off nowhere near as forced as Cody Rhodes' gimmick, for instance, but for a big (at least tall) guy I don't think he's ever came off as someone not to be messed with; he looks like a stretched version of Spanky.

Well "he didn't write his own songs, he's just a song and dance man!" has been known to come up. I never had a problem with Jason. Was he a bit off the curve? Sure. Were there times when I was left scratching my head? Sure. But I've met plenty of wrestling fans over the years who've been way more out there. He was always really nice to me and I never doubted his sincerity in defending, say, Dynamite/Sayama or whatever else; he wasn't a troll. Good luck to him.

That might be the best example, yes. At least HBK/Taker, HHH/Taker are Mania Main Events and Punk/Cena was a hot feud.

I hardly frequent said threads myself .

Surely HHH/Orton is the contrast to HHH/Jericho? You can hardly compare a Superstars match (which didn't even air on TV in the US?) to a WrestleMania "main event".

Well TNA/DG matches come up (here) far less frequently, in fairness... Warrior/Savage is "self-consciously epic" though I've also went on record saying how the actual match itself isn't any great shakes, it's the entire thing (ie; the reunion) that makes it a "classic match". Bret/Austin? I'm not seeing it. In a literal sense, sure, they went out to have a memorable match. The Austin facial I don't think as intended outright ahead of time as being "this is the shot". And the match makes much more sense linearly? if that's the word. Bret/Austin is actually quite "small" by both modern standards and world-wide standards of '97, really; Bret was too much a throwback.