Sean Liska

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Assassin #1 always cracked me up as a promo. Here’s a fat guy wearing a mask who talks eloquently about how he doesn’t appreciate Dusty’s “arrogant manner”. But it worked. Gordon talks about how they were all duped by Assassin pretending to be a mayor from a small fishing village in Mexico and they show clips of the famous Santo angle. Good stuff.

We get the last five minutes and it's hot action. I've always felt like Piper is underrated in the ring. He's not the most athletic and graceful guy but so many of his matches end up over-delivering and being entertaining, he conveyed the fun of his character in the ring. Piper is getting heat when we start, Steamboat makes the comeback with his great offense, and fun back and forth down the stretch.

Memphis is my favorite wrestling ever and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this so we’re off to a fantastic start. The lights go out, the Superman theme plays, and Lawler rappels from the ceiling! This has to be the coolest entrance of the 80s. Lawler gets more early offense than you would expect in a Lawler vs. monster match. We get clipped and skip to the strap coming down and comeback. This doesn’t seem like a great Lawler match, haven’t seen enough LeDuc to know if I should be disappointed. Cool post-match stip. Hart gets to whip Lawler 10 times, and at any point Lawler can agree to leave the territory to end his beating. So it’s the Sandman-Dreamer caning dynamic. At 9 whips, LeDuc grabs the belt and starts hammering Lawler, leading to a chaotic brawl. The match wasn’t much but the entrances and post-match are quality Memphis.

I know it has no chance against Okada-Omega but New Day-Usos is easy feud of the year for me. Easy, even has great mic work on top of the parade of spectacular matches.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I love Shane as a performer. No, I don't want to see him wrestling on TV every week. But in an era where hate-filled grudge matches are often just guys wandering from table spot to table spot, Shane brought this relentless intensity to the match that is so refreshing. Dare I commit sacrilege and and call it Hansen-esque? Not in quality, but the fact that he treated the whole match like a fight, he was always going for offense, if Owens let up on him, Shane would start firing off punches, forcing Owens to respond and cut him off. I miss that stuff so badly in modern wrestling. He sold everything. Really, outside of people not liking how his punches look, which I can't say I have a problem with, I don't get what was bad about his performance except that he's a McMahon.

Shit I miss Lance Russell.

Sometimes I get irked when WWE will do a DQ finish in the second match of a PPV , to extend a program another month, while the main matches on the show have decisive finishes, but Meltzer kills them for it. To me that's allowed, you can do the occasional BS finish to get another PPV out of a program as long as you're not like late 80s JCP and screwing the fans all over the place. That's American wrestling. Otherwise, I love Memphis, ECW, Dundee Mid-South, yeah I don't like the idea that 90s AJPW is the only booking style allowed.

Dave Meltzer just put up a show on Lance - if you're a subscriber it's great stuff. His affection for Lance is touching, it's so cool that the guy we loved on TV was just as great in real life, that's pretty rare.

I believe one of our fellow posters here (or maybe at DVDVR) compared him to Kermit trying to maintain order during an episode of the Muppets. I've spent hundreds of hours watching Memphis TV and never did it feel like a waste of time if Lance and Dave were announcing, even 1980 stuff which was a weird year creatively. They were the most warming and welcoming figures, poor guys always just wanted a nice clean morning of pure wrestling matches, and it never seemed to work out that way. Memphis is my favorite TV show ever and so much of it was Lance and Dave, there's never been an announce team that was as important.

For me, tied with JR as greatest announcer of all-time. And maybe gets an edge because he also was so great at conducting interviews and holding the show together. One of my all-time favorite wrestling memories is driving from Chicago to Memphis for the sole purpose of shaking Lance's hand. Here's the pic - https://twitter.com/SeanReedy16/status/512937649431388160.

It really feels like NXT is getting back to 2014-2015 peak form. It's just a fun show again, easy to watch, lots of things to look forward to, good stories, matches, etc - Full Sail has even had some life the past two weeks! If they can produce amazing Takeovers when the product is cold then the next few should really be great. And yeah, everyone watch Lorcan-Lars. Lorcan is amazing whenever they put him on TV, he's their secret weapon.

"Absolutely fucked" is a bit strong but they would have to make a lot of changes to their business. But if they become a $600 million company instead of an $800 million company, it's not like they're going to be taking the water coolers out of HQ like in 95. Vince is a fighter, he'll figure it out. At least we had guys like Punk/Owens/Ambrose/Joe etc emerge from the indy boom of the early to mid 2000's. I don't know who on the indies now is known for having a great character and storylines and promos anywhere near the degree that Punk was. I'm a little worried about what American wrestling will look like in 10 years for that reason.

I really wish they would televise this. Even if they don't I bet that match turns up on YouTube courtesy of a fan and we get to see its greatness. Don't let us down, people of Greensboro.

This isn't an unfair categorization of how Dave responds to disagreements with his ratings. I'm telling you guys, between the 100% faith in the correctness of his opinions, the big weightlifting habit into old age, the obsessive work ethic, Dave saying he has no plans to retire, there are Meltzer/Vince similarities that we could go into.