Matt D

I think it would have gotten a screenplay award too in that case.

Cross post from SC: I have a bit of a hard time going back to longer Flair matches after watching Bockwinkel. Therefore, I may not be completely fair with this. There are a few things I want to talk about and they don't do the whole of the match justice, so let me try to get to focus on the big picture first. This was incredibly heated. I think Colon looked excellent in it. His early armwork was varied and aggressive. The fans responded perfectly to him pumping the arm in various hammerlocks and holds. Ritualistic, repetitive, crowd interaction is so huge and doing that (or the repeated pumphandle you see more in Portland) is an easy way to engage them. Was some of his spots with Flair as smooth as you'd get from other opponents? No, but they always recovered well. Nothing seemed flubbed. Flair, especially would be quick to throw in an extra punch on something like the late Sleeper attempt when he didn't quite get around him. It made everything seem grittier and better for the setting. You could tell they made multiple audibles on the finish, but that just made everything more chaotic and emotional. As always, it's frustrating to watch 82 Flair and see the things he dropped from his act later on. Here, the two snake eyes style hotshots were just great and helped to cement a long-in-coming transition into heat. It was also a hugely appropriate use of the King of the Mountain to destroy Colon's momentum. Obviously, in this setting, he wasn't going to take very much of the match, so it was important they came up with a way to definitively let him take over, at least for a little while, to build towards a comeback and finish. Unsurprisingly, my biggest issue with the match was the arm work. It wasn't that Flair didn't sell it between holds as well as someone like Bockwinkel would have. It wasn't JUST that, at least. You can't criticize someone for something no one does. People do sell early matwork better, though, especially when going in and out of it. Once or twice Flair would give a little bit of lip service to it, and that was nice, but it wasn't hardly enough. In this match, it was a problem because it took up so much time, sure, but it was a bigger problem because it created a massive inconsistency. Flair spent ten minutes barely selling an arm as Colon went every which way on it. Then, after one elbow drop to the leg, he spent the rest of the match, more or less, selling his leg. Was that a more important part of the match? Sure, but the inconsistency between the two was frustrating. It took me out of the match because the leg selling didn't feel at all earned in comparison to the ten minutes of offense on the arm we'd just seen that Flair didn't really feel like selling. Two working theories: The first is that Flair simply cares more about selling the leg because that builds into his own offense. He has every interest in making even a few seconds of a figure four reversal matter more because that's his move. It also allows him to do things more visually and take bumps, like the top rope one more believably. That'd interest him more as well. The second is simply that Flair cares far more about the back half of a match than the first. His selling (and by selling, I mean the broader sense of reacting to things) was perfect during the comeback, highlighted by the sunset flip attempt by Colon and his massive desperation in trying to reach the ropes to prevent it or even in Colon starting to punch back and Flair pressing his body against him in the corner to try to stop it. Both attempts were futile but they made the moment seem like so much more. That's valid, but it's not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's the difference between a match that has clear, unrelated act breaks, and one that builds from beginning to end. This was far more the former than the latter. This was still a very good match. I just think it could have been better.

Mansfield vs Conway was very solid. Mansfield was that great sort of stooging sleazy heel in the Rip Rogers mold, but I swear his offense came by way of early 80s Randy Savage. He spent much of the first two falls flying off the second rope and even hit a sort of hangman's noose clothesline (slingblade-y) towards the end. Conway was as solid as ever as the sort of athletic local hero with a good punch and who could get a lot of sympathy. They even did a Savage/Steamboat roll up exchange at the end, but it was more novel because it was sloppier, with more of a sense of struggle.

Here's what I posted about that back when it first dropped: Okay, yeah. Conway Jr vs Valentine was some pretty great stuff too. The first fall was back and forth with a lot of Valentine stalling and stooging and a king of the mountain that was full of brutal Valentine shots. There was one slow bit of pedestrian arm control from Conway but in general, it was all enjoyable. It ended with Valentine starting on the leg and the second fall was really good stuff. I wasn't sure what to expect from Conway here but he sold the leg really well, and there was a unique sense of struggle for him to come back that I really haven't seen in too many other matches. It was just paced differently. Instead of hope spots and comebacks, there was this constant flow of him trying to fight back through the pain while Valentine more or less maintained control. Greg was so good here at closing the distance between them and controlling the situation. He also had some really good and varied stuff with the leg. I loved how he just stood on it, for instance. They got pretty heated at times too. I'm curious to see what other people think about it. I liked it a lot. Valentine was made for a 2/3 falls structure and it's a shame we don't have more of those sorts of matches from him. Post match is an interview from the following week setting up DVE vs Valentine for the Texas title. Bruce, please tell me we have that too. --- Bruce said they found one fall, I think, but not the others yet. We've gotten a number of other Conway matches since then, including some very good tags.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRHJt6GAI5M

Have you seen Andre vs Tito from Europe?

Pre-Matador, I meant.

That's Tito's lowest moment.

It's pretty out there.

For what it's worth, there are a few jobber matches in 1992 where Virgil just kills the guy he's in the ring with.

Who had more house show/tv/ppv main events? Just curious.

I need to catch up and hear this to figure that one out. It wasn't one of mine. I remember Tito saving him after Repo Man got involved and then they teamed up at This Tuesday in Texas, but after that Tito moved into the Dibiase feud (including the Manager Cam Sherri match) and I thought that was the end of it.

Slater's probably the best part of 84 JCP, unless you're some goofball who would get a kick out of Dory in a mask.

I think recognizing, admitting, and understanding them is far more important than eliminating them, personally.

I don't want to rank things. Ranking things is such a headache and disc 1 is so full of matchlings and incomplete matches that have bursts of brilliance and one big dumb Ric Flair match (and another little dumb Ric Flair match where Dusty doesn't do anything special at all). I'll swallow the pill and do it but man this set is tough.

I do think I'm going to take a break from it, catch up on some of Flair's interviews, some of Jericho's, etc, on BTS, and then come back to it later. You're always behind and that's frustrating but I'd rather have too much stuff than too little. One of my favorite things about it is how Brian's part of the community but he's from a different area of it, a little more inside, from that 90s indy subsection, whereas Bix (and Kris) are firmly part of that DVDVR "school." It gives a different viewpoint and was one reason he and Bix balance each other so well.

I figured they'd at least talk about him aping the Gullen accent.

I could see them blowing Kendrick vs TJ off over a few week span (starting with the PPV) as a way to launch the brand and help establish TJ, because they really want to move him over to SD, but then I think we want him on SD far more than they do.

That was a slightly unique situation where they had to cover for the Orton injury among other things.

Finally made it up to this point and through it. I can get through about 1.5 of these podcasts a week so it took me a while. What's amazing is that the interview actually lived up to the wildest expectations. There was almost no way that it realistically could have, but it did. And those Bobby Simmons interviews are just amazing too. I want to take a break from these for a while, but on the other hand, I kind of want to make it to the point where the Broken Matt stuff starts and see how Brian and Bix react to it.

How much were the Fabs a draw on their own and how much of it was having Heenan as a foil?

Martel (84) and Slaughter (85-86) would be the only candidates, right? Were the Fabs more of a draw in 84 than Martel?

I would stress that again. It's non-traditional. It's there to establish a character, to hammer home Roode's new persona, to set things up for the future, to give the babyface the moral high ground for the chase. It's a hard match to compare against more traditional stories. I really wonder about why they chose an Ironman match for this. It's making life way too hard for themselves. I think they could have used the time a little bit better. Roode wasn't dynamic. He had performance issues, but I think he deserves a lot of credit for staying on focus. He hit his marks. Maybe someone else could have done it more dynamically, but the match never lost its narrative thread. I also want to stress again that they got a bullshit chant due to a cheating pinfall in the middle of an ironman match (so it wasn't even the final finish) in 2011, in front of a sort of smarky crowd. Not because THEY PUT THAT GUY OVER! but because a heel cheated against a babyface who was outwrestling him. For all of the general deadness of the crowd, that is hugely impressive. You can't sleep on that. It's a great thought experiment and a great way to get heat on Roode and make Styles look strong, both in losing and in chasing. It's a match that was meant to set up a drawing run. That's what wrestling is all about. It doesn't have to be either/or, of course. I think it's more entertaining than people are giving it credit for, but they did probably screw up the last couple of minutes for that last sense of drama. They could have set up Roode running away better. In part, that was the point though. It was about Roode running away and killing the drama. A wrestler isn't supposed to do that. He's not supposed to be able to run out the clock like that. It makes the fans feel robbed in a way where the heat is on the heel, not on the company. Yeah, I'm more than okay with this. Entertaining doesn't trump effective. (Though ideally something is both, but Styles made it entertaining, just not as much so as it could have been).