Matt D

We trust our eyes the most.

Hey, nepotism gave us Gino too.

I'm very interested in seeing more Tiger Conway, Jr. at this point. I thought he looked pretty good in the match we saw and I don't think he'd a name in Houston for so long if there wasn't something to him.

I loved the Lunde match too. "A blast" was my first thought as well. Great foil for Reed's debut. There are a couple of other Lunde matches in the results that sound interesting (Conway, Jr., Williams, Murdoch, Crews, Iron Mike Sharpe(?!)). That Lothario match sounds great. I was somewhat higher on Dusty/Bock than Pete too, but I won't be able to delve into it more deeply until after Thanksgiving.

I don't think it's just preferences though. I think that's where I agree with Parv (though only half way, mind you). There are objective talents. That Hansen does what he does, and does it in a way no one else really manages to is impressive. The personal preference comes in how much we value that relative to other things. So we don't discard it. He's not going to be in my top twenty. He'll be somewhere outside of there, because my preferences lead me to both enjoy and value other elements of wrestling more, but I still respect what he does and have to account for what he does, and that means he'll be higher than a lot of wrestlers who do things I value more, but don't do them as well as what he does well. They're preferences but they're weighted preferences. Where we have to take this on faith is that how we weigh things will be different from person to person. At the end of the day I think this process is more about examining ourselves and one another's opinions than the wrestling itself.

On the bright side they could turn Becky Lynch back into a Riverdancer to be his valet.

Oh, you guys got Khawk. That's great.

Elliott, I still have big issues with him along the lines of creative collaboration and the simple fact that at various points I actively hate the role that he's playing so well, but you made a great defense of the fact that he was playing that role in the first place, and while he won't end up in my top twenty, he will do very well in this project overall, and I'm more than fine with that at this juncture. That said, I think there's a danger in defending roles so thoroughly. A guy who does the right thing for the matches he's in, for the crowd that he's in front of, executed very well? Sounds like Davey Richards to me. A guy who has a following who is financially successful in his role, at least on a minor level. One's based in hardnosed closing of opportunities. The other's based on frenetic opening of them without restraint. Both fit the desires of the crowd they're in front of. When it comes to that defense, where's the line other than the fact you personally prefer the role of one to the role of another?

Hey, at least Goldust is back, and if the roster gets depleted any further, they'll be forced to give him TV time.

Next year at MITB, Reigns should destroy everyone in the match and break all the ladders to make sure no one wins.

Wow, I don't think Bock vs Reed was even on our radar. I'm haven't seen more than three or four minutes of Bock vs Dusty. I'm with Grimmas. Any new Andre is gold. Dusty vs Reed sounds really exciting too. I'm not sure we have any singles matches between them. I know people were curious just in the last day or two about how good Lunde was pre-Arn and that's a good opponent for us to see.

I really want to see Goldust vs Owens for some reason.

Just Dallas then?

The biggest problem I have with the AJPW tags in general is often being unable to find a narrative throughline. In many, the action can be very good (not necessarily Brody matches here) and there's a competitive sense of struggle, absolutely, but I can't add it all up into any greater whole. I wonder if that's something that you handle better than I do because you're more tuned in to sports than I am. Still, I think any specific game has its own implicit story that you can draw out of it. I should probably be able to find that in these tags, but wrestling isn't real. It's artificial and the fact that so many of these tags don't have a finish specifically means that they don't really have to build anything. So you have extremely believable moments but ones that don't come together into a greater whole. Sometimes you do, of course, but a lot of times you don't. Does that make sense?

We'd be better off without Texas and Japan, obviously.

Chavo Guerrero vs Nick Bockwinkel - non-title. We have a lot of Nick Bockwinkel on tape, but most of these matches are in the AWA, with some in Japan. When it comes to Nick Bockwinkel, travelling champ, we have some clipped matches from Stampede and we have his Memphis matches, maybe a little more elsewhere. Most of those latter are against Lawler, and while great, they aren't quite the same thing as going up against a Bart Sawyer or Koko Ware, like we have with Flair. It made for a missing puzzle piece. Don't get me wrong. Chavo was a big star in LA and he was a star in Houston, but it's not quite the same as going up against Kerry or Dusty. Moreover, this was a match with a very specific purpose and a very specific tone. This was the first match of a two match series, the second coming two weeks later. It's not the same as having a travelling champ in for a week, but it's the same idea. So this was a mid-card match, Bockwinkel against a talented regional star (but not superstar), who he had to make look like gold so that the fans would buy into the idea that he might really be able to take the belt during the main event of the second show. Ultimately, then, this was more of a very well-executed functional match than a great match, but it was a pair of great performances and moreover, I think this is an important match that was sort of missing from the Bockwinkel canon. I know there was some problems with the audio here and I'm glad that Bruce and his team got them sorted because Boesch shines on commentary. This was his finest announcing, getting over the story of the match and some of the little moments so well. The story was that Bockwinkel didn't think Chavo was a big enough star or good enough to deserve a title shot. He offered him a non-title match mainly to embarrass him. So after a bit of that, Chavo took over and really never looked back, with persistent, focused offense and with Bockwinkel making it all mean so much. He worked this like the babyface shines against guys like Brunzell, Martel, and Hennig, working in and out of the holds, but really only taking a small amount of the match for himself. At the end, they went for a few high spots, with Chavo hitting the German at a key moment to take the win and set up the title rematch. I want to focus on two sequences in the match that really show the level of thought and skill involved, how they took a simple straightforward story and crafted something very effective out of it through parallels and build, selling, and payoff. Bockwinkel was amazing in the opening minute, completely controlling the pace and being the smarmiest creature alive. That made his early comeuppance all the sweeter. They began with lock-ups, with a clean, amused break against the ropes by Bockwinkel. Chavo then returned it in kind, breaking clean as well. Bock followed this up with a deep hip toss, raising his hand in satisfied victory afterwards and then a big slam, his arm up once again. He was bullying Chavo here, which isn't a role you usually see Bockwinkel get to play, expressing his superiority and how beneath him his opponent was. So, of course, once they lock up again, Chavo hiptossed him twice and followed with a body slam at three times the speed that Bockwinkel executed those moves. Anything Bock can do, Chavo can do as well, better and quicker. That was the idea, and it was a great start to the match. From there, they went to the arm work, and were this a title match as opposed to the match setting up the title match, I probably would have been lower on it due to the fact Chavo took so much of it. This was the intersection of the heel looking vulnerable and the babyface with something to prove, though, so here, it was appropriate, and Bock definitely made it matter. Look at the second exchange. If the opening one was built off of parallels, this was all about set-up and payoff. Bockwinkel would layer comeback attempts in to keep the crowd interested, to make himself look stronger and more spirited, and to make Chavo look better in being able to cut him off. In the first of these, he was working towards a bodyslam, but due to the damage to his arm was unable to hit it. Instead, Chavo fell on him, and then immediately took back the arm, Chavo playing his role so well in working the hold and Bockwinkel broadly selling it. Eventually, though (two comeback attempts later, the next one being bodyscissor focused, since he couldn't use the arm), Bock would get back to a vertical base. Finally, now, he hit the slam. It was a moment that felt like it meant something due to the previous set up. It should have been a triumphant moment for Bockwinkel, but Chavo was unrelenting and immediately went back to the arm. It was pure futility and frustration for the champ and played perfectly into the story they were trying to tell. The fans responded at the end, popping huge for Chavo's win. I'd be really curious to see how well the rematch drew, because between the excellent job they did here and the post-match promos, including a great impassioned one from Chavo, I'm excited for the rematch. Hopefully, that shows up sometime soon.

For me, the most important part of longlevity is that it provides a lot of different situational data points in figuring out just how great the wrestler was. I think we have a hell of a lot of those with Arn, more than enough to understand him as a wrestler from many different angles. I know longlevity matters more for other people for different reasons.

I thought Elliott post was very good, but my take away was that while Hansen probably did what he should have, you could find around 50 other wrestlers who worked in AJPW tag matches in the 80s that would have made that match better if they were in there instead of him, and that's how I feel about most of his many, many tags in that company in that decade. To me, that says something. Maybe I should be hating the game or whatever, but there are tag matches that I DO like from AJPW in the 80s.

Hugely exciting to see Bock against an opponent I've never seen him matched up against. Looking foward to it, Bruce. Thanks for tracking it down.

One issue is a lack of context, certainly. Also a lack of progresion. I can get a sense of it with the 90s stuff, but I haven't watched with any sense of chronological order with these tags. They're all in a bubble to me. You see a number of pairings multiple times and presumably one match would inform the next on some level, like in every pairing ever, but I haven't watched that way. But I do get this feeling every time a match (new to me) appears that looks like I'd be interested in it on paper.

Maybe I should concede the point and just watch more Puerto Rico or something.

You can't not look at Bret's 80s tags. Those are some of the matches that made Bret's reputation. He's not making my top 10, absolutely not. I'm not sure if he's in my top 20 either. Those are a part of why. With Hansen, it's a guy, in his prime, in dozens of matches over a span of years actively making them worse (bad, even) because he's in them. He's doing this through tendencies seen elsewhere in his work. These aren't some obscure matches, either. The Hansen/Brody team was legendary. You could argue that this is the sort of match we have the most from his home promotion in his prime, right? It's got to be close if it's not absolute truth. It's one of the things he's best known for. How do you discount that if he's in your top 5?

Higher than the tags, but I'm with the people who are way higher on Funk than Hansen in the Funk vs Hansen match, for instance.