Matt D

That list is already incomplete, though, right? It doesn't have some of the other Thornton matches or Harley vs Andre, just to name a couple. It only has one Bock vs Brody too, and none of the Bock vs Dusty (can't remember if the one we had was a title match or not).

Hell of a trick. Can only do it once:

Also, I'm wondering when that Mephisto match is from. I don't see anything from 77 on. Most likely feels like 74 as he feuded with Lothario for the Texas title that year. Results are more scattered in the middle of the 70s though. Could be very cool.

It made me want to see the cage match, so we have to give it that. It's always really uncomfortable to see Gary Hart in physical peril post-accident. Lewin is the Randy Orton of 1979. He bores the crap out of me as a heel but I kind of love him as a cartwheeling babyface.

Someone somewhere (maybe here) said that Kendrick was wrestling exactly like they wanted Ambrose to wrestle, and I'm completely on board with that. It was pure up desperate hobo wrestling and it was awesome. Boxcar Kendrick.

While a match can stand on its own, so much of how this should be looked back upon hinges on the follow-up. As much as I think there's benefit to running with Ambrose as a strong babyface/tweener champion who wins for a long time (even if he's not exactly producing in the ring), there's much more upside to pushing Styles as a long-term champion stemming from this. We've seen the card for Backlash. Smackdown needs consistently high-quality main events to carry cards and to take up large chunks of the temporal real estate. They just don't have the roster size and depth to fill out cards. Styles, built up in this specific, definitive way, is a very workable solution to that problem.

I hadn't really watched this back at Summerslam and people's comments led me not to watch it after that. I was perfectly okay with this. I loved the teases for the top rope AA. I thought the submissions sequence was good though I wish there was more leg selling from Cena after the fact. They were even talking about how it hurts his strength and he wasn't selling it. Mauro may be my least favorite play-by-play announcer ever. He hurt the match at a number of points. I was, frankly, expecting a lot more in the way of finisher spam. It's pretty broken up. We've seen matches a lot worse in the last few years. It's certainly far better than most of the BS Brock does (and that his very presence creates). The ending felt appropriate. You can even say it was Styles constant struggling (and he made Cena earn almost everything) that let him kick out of the top rope AA. He was elbowing him in the skull the entire time. Things like that matter, if they make them matter. I think they did in this match. All that said, and this is going to sound absolutely crazy coming from me, but... All that said, I think the most important part of the match was the execution. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Cena match where all of his stuff looked so good. The Code Red was absolutely crisp. I loved his goofy dropkick early on. The top rope leg drop thing was picture perfect. He didn't bother with the stupid stunner, but his body cutter thing looked exactly like it should. He had that one clothesline which took off Styles' head. And Styles was just as good if not better. The forearms both hit dead on. I don't even understand how he managed some of the submissions reversals. Part of the calf crusher's visual effectiveness is that it comes at a weird and unsettling angle in the set up and that played into those submission reversals so well. There was a snap and a zing to everything. I'm not sure if without that, the match would have held up in that sort of dream match, top of the top, two men at the very best of their game, way that they were presenting it, and you need it to hold up to justify what they were doing. And while I didn't love all of the specifics of the selling, they sold the overarching story of the match and that was struggle, oneupsmanship, and perseverance. I thought the end worked as well as any match in the modern era that was so heavily carried by self-conscious WWE acting (and a lot of that was JBL hitting his mark and it actually representing what Cena was expressing in the ring as opposed to earlier points in the match where they'd bring something up that wasn't representative of what was happening).

Do we even have a singles Wahoo vs Race match on tape up until now? There's some garbage footage of tags, I know.

I do find it interesting that there is very little discussion of the individual aspects Roman brings to these matches to help make them great, especially when it comes to looking for patterns from match to match.

Lucha Underground and The Ultimate Fighter both count, and TUF has won. Would Breaking Ground count?

Does Lucha Underground count?

Made it up to this one. In the Hayes interview he outright said he was going to MSG. Not sure if that's referenced later by it plays into the questions about David Wolff. Also, the Hayes vs Williams NWAOnDemand cage match is that great match/performance that was missing from the talk/reevaluation of him. I feel like that this is a skeleton key to his heat seeking ability in ring. Curious if that moved the needle.

I hit the five minute mark on this and was a little worried. Yes, they were chopping the hell out of each other. Yes, they were headbutting one another like billygoats without any abandon. Yes, there was just the tiniest sign of working that made this art and not idiocy of two people hitting each other as hard as they could, like Terry getting rammed into the corner, but I was worried this was going to be one of those matches where two guys kill each other and there's simply nothing to latch on to, a gritty realism and violence, but no narrative, no story, no heart. There's a place for senseless violence, but I so much prefer sensible violence. Then they got in the ring and I had nothing to worry about, because Black Terry, just by the nature of who and what he really is, due to the nature of the limitations of his age and the endless skill that he's garnered over the years, grounded all of this perfectly for me. This is an old warrior, one that doesn't get those plush Friday night bookings, who's been in Arena Mexico wrestling twice in the last five years, who has nothing left but the fight and the adrenaline. That's the only thing that lets him push past the pain of a career of blood and bumps. All he has is the thrill of battle, bouncing from one struggle to the next, one arena to the next. So he goes and challenges the best and the worst, all in their own styles, because he is the old master of a thousand wars, has seen it all, and it only matters if he meets them half way. He has all all of the old tricks (be it pulling an opponent off the apron or what), a gruff seriousness that prevents distraction (and Wotan suffered so much for celebrating in the ring when there was a chair in Terry's hand) and the ability to go over any line, because he'd been over all of them before (just like with that bottle). Wotan is at least twenty years younger, though the mask makes him somewhat unknowable. He's more agile, more physically resilient, more able to snap back from what Terry gives him. He's been the holder of multiple "extreme" titles, and may well represent, in this match, that more hardcore style that permeated into Mexican indies over the last two decades, that are wholly represented in Pagano and all of his localized, and increasingly mainstream star power. And Terry, as only he can, sinks down to that level to meet Wotan down in the gutter but never forgets who he is and all that he's learned, using every bit of it to fight for his life, once again against the odds. I can only think of one other wrestler so versatile, one other who can do so much, so well, and with such visceral meaning, all without foolish human constraints like "age" holding him back, and that's the person we voted as #2 ever in the GWE poll. Amazing spectacle, yes. But heart-pounding and emotionally gripping too. And that is the magic of Black Terry.

During the countout spot, I did a quick check on twitter because I was expecting everyone to cry foul about the edit. I think out of the hundreds of mention of Kendrick or Ibushi there were less than five about the countout edit. Very surprising to me and it says something about people's willingness to avoid spoilers or the way that they engage with this that I wasn't expecting at all. Either they weren't spoiled to the match or they just didn't care because they were enjoying it.

Like The Rock?

Parv would have loved that promo, I think. He'd be referencing it (again, in a blind man touching the elephant sort of way) three years from now. As for 1990 Volkoff, look at how amazingly over he was in this segment (starting at the 8:24 mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOQb5kmfwDA Holy crap.

Someone could probably write an excellent article comparing fandom's reaction to Benoit and Bryan. It could be Bix's life work or something. Can we just move on?

If you won't watch the promo (which is two minutes of Owens being pissed off at the crowd for being everything you claim that they are), will you at least change your Board Profile Title to "Half-right buffoonish curmudgeon?"

You are arguing that the fans will rebel against anyone who is pushed and support anyone who is not pushed. You're wrong. There is truth to be found in there, quite a bit of truth, but you're taking so diametric a view that you're coming off as buffoonish and reactionary. If you took a nuanced view instead, you would come off as cutting and correct.

I don't call you cynical, Parv. I call you someone who is sorely lacking in data. You're the blind man touching the elephant. Now watch the Kevin Owens promo I posted.

The reason Charlotte was hated on the main roster was because people thought Becky and Sasha were better and far more deserving, but that Charlotte was getting the push because of her lineage, her slightly more traditional look, and maybe, oh, I don't know, HHH's connection to Flair? I think we're in the same argument here. It was fine in NXT where everyone was protected and having good long matches. It was less fine on Raw when they were having short matches that paled to what had happened in NXT and where people were getting exposed. It all falls along the same lines. But pretend it was Sasha who was pushed and Charlotte who wasn't. Do you think the reverse would have happened? People in Wisconsin would be confused? Is Sasha pushed as a face or a heel? Is she still getting nothing matches on Raw despite the whole Divas revolution thing? Is she pushed as a chickenshit heel or a vulnerable babyface (like Paige was when she came up) or is she pushed dominant. You have to give me more than that. Details matter.

The reason Charlotte was hated on the main roster was because people thought Becky and Sasha were better and far more deserving, but that Charlotte was getting the push because of her lineage, her slightly more traditional look, and maybe, oh, I don't know, HHH's connection to Flair? I think we're in the same argument here. It was fine in NXT where everyone was protected and having good long matches. It was less fine on Raw when they were having short matches that paled to what had happened in NXT and where people were getting exposed. It all falls along the same lines.

BTW, here's the Owens promo I'm thinking about. Parv, Loss, make sure to watch that since I bet you haven't seen it. https://vid.me/JTj3 Who else on the roster could do that? I mean, maybe Jericho, but he'd toss in a bunch of campy Phantom of the Opera bs.

I can't fully develop thoughts right now, but look at how thoroughly the smart fanbase loathed Greg Gagne for decades; someone who is, in fact, a really good wrestler, with lots of great matches and a history of drawing, but has a stigma of Undeserving and a rather terrible Look.

Re: Look. I'm just not sure. I do think a world champion needs to either A) have a certain athletic look that fans have been conditioned to or b> be clearly branded as talented in specific ways that make them overcome that from a kayfabe perspective. Rey Mysterio was not a traditional champion but his speed and agility and pinpoint accuracy were highlighted (as was his will). Daniel Bryan's skill. Were Bray Wyatt to get the belt, it could be his deviousness and mind games. But then, traditionally, guys with non traditional looks didn't often get the belts. Jerry Blackwell was the most over babyface and biggest draw for a few years in AWA. He didn't get the belt. People didn't rush to put belts on Kevin Sullivan when he was a top drawing heel. That just wasn't the role for those guys and it went against the perceived legitimacy and elements of suspension of disbelief. The issue to me here isn't A, but instead B. NXT did a much better job of presenting Steen as a unique threat. Someone said that he was Vader there, and he was. He's just another guy on the main roster. I do think, as a heel, he's much better at garnering out of ring heat than much of the roster in the PG era, and is allowed to try to do so. Him heeling on the hugely entitled full sail crowd for NXT Takeover being in Brooklyn is the sort of thing no one else on the roster would do. And there are other examples. That just doesn't transfer to the narratives of his matches well, even if he'll do little things to garner heat within those matches. The big picture isn't there from a match to match perspective. I like that he makes it about money, which, again, is something no one else has done in years. I'm almost certain Parv has absolutely no idea about the last two paragraphs, which is why his arguments on this matter come off like underdeveloped generalizations.