Matt D

I'll agree with that. Even if a work day is going poorly, there's always the surprise of the new upload to look forward to.

Yeah, this was the stuff. What a great sense of struggle between these two. Mr. Wrestling II was just great, really selling desperation in the first half and cruelty and that self same desperation in the need to control and contain Magnum in the second. Every time he took over offense or managed a cut off it was timed so well and so organic and logical. Magnum was just full of fire and aggression and star power. The back half of the match, with the arm work, was really memorable on the strength of 2's tenacity and focus and Magnum's broad selling, aimed at the last row. The comic timing on the finish was spot on too. I'm with Pete. Great match.

I think the visceral impact of watching wrestling matters. If a match can be delivered with effective visuals, that counts for something, even if it's not enough to carry a match on its own. Sure, it counts for the 45th best AWA match of the 80s.

How many real babyface main event pushes did Sid get?

He gets his win back vs Bryan.

Train of Thought Review #2: Les Kellett vs Steve Haggerty 1974-11-30 Haggerty is billed as the Irish Canadian. That gets him booed. He has a glorious robe. Well, it's sparkly at least. Les Kellett's jacket is great. It weirdly ribbed and looks like something the New Breed might decide to wear. This is the main event. Haggerty has the weight advantage (I think. Stones, come on? He's giving away "very nearly a stone." it's enough to matter). Kellett goofs with the ref during the instructions to begin. Then he gets right to it, with a clean break against the ropes (they had a nice handshake to begin), and a leg trip and twist. He turns that into a lifting leg smash, but, in a spot I've seen quite a bit in the UK, Haggerty lands on his feet. Kellett feigns appreciation, shakes his hand, and flips Haggerty with the flip. The crowd laughs and Kellett looks quite pleased, but in a good-mannered way. Kellett offers an apologetic shake but Haggerty is too smart to take it, backing off and coming back in with a headlock instead. They work this well, grinding down, with Kellett trying to push off, Haggerty grunting and groaning all the way. Eventually, he scores the top wrist lock, only to get shoved off with more Haggerty grunting. This is taken with amused awe by Kellett, who leans right back in with a double shoulder squeeze. Haggerty turns that into a hamerlock and Kellett casually walks him around the ring, picking up speed until he sends Haggerty flying. Probably the first big laugh of the match. Haggery comes back in with a test of strength invitation. Kellett backs up and slaps him in the face. Haggerty, frustrated, slaps on a modified cobra clutch which instantly becomes another canvas for Kellett comedy, bumping into him as he gets throttled, and keeping eye contact, unnerving him left and right with the stares until he just breaks the hold in derision. Haggery comes back in with a front facelock. Kellett wiggles (literally) loose with another arm flip and then slaps on a full nelson. Despite the comedy, he definitely works it, the stress seen on his face as Haggery forces his way out. Kellett is back in with a top wristlock (mean fingerlock?) though, with Haggerty leaaaaning his face back. Kellett puts the pressure back on, though, with such a smug look upon his face. It's become a real fingerlock now, Kellett just cruelly yanking them back. Haggerty tries to turn the head and gets his already pulled back fingers slapped harshly for his trouble. He goes for a punch and Kellett just ducks, sending him spinning. That's, maybe, the most interesting thing about these. Kellett is uproariously funny but in the midst of it, he's doing really malicious harm to his opponent. That's somehow part of the joke. Haggerty spins around to get his own punishment upon Kellett's fingers, leaving him screaming at the bell ending round 1. When Haggerty doesn't break, Kellett steps on his foot for good measure to the crowd's delight. He then follows up with a European uppercut playing, once again, that he didn't know the fall was over. It's fun that he did this in a totally different way than he had in the South match (where he had been the one with a hold on). Round two starts with Kellett reaching around with a double wristlock in the back position and Haggerty increasingly lifting him up and moving him about, ending with Kellett being positioned directly on the ref's foot, which leads to another great facial expression from Kellett and an irate ref and a brief argument about whose fault it was. Haggerty locks ina cravat with Kellett trying to work out but ending back in. Once again, they're back to really working this, with Haggery grinding him down before Kellett can slip out with a grounded hammerlock. Kellett stands high with this, pressing in and controlling the leverage as Haggerty grunts in pain. It's such a simple hold but they're working it well enough that you'd buy a submission here, just on a hammerlock. Finally, though, Haggerty works it into a mere wristlock but can't reverse it, choosing intead to open hand slap Kellett on the shoulder three times until Kellett slaps him dead on in the face, breaking the hold. From there, it looks like Haggerty's going to get an honest chance to lock up and get back into the match but Kellett ducks under, causing him to stumble, then leans back twice, steps back a third time, fakes him out once or twice with a whoop, and moves right out of the way to send him into the ropes. He ends it with a headlock, lifting his hand to punch but having to scratch his head instead when the ref notices. That lets Haggerty toss him off as the crowd laughs again. Kellet milks the fall, and when he finally gets up, Haggerty is there with a European uppercut, just a brutal one, and then, once Kellett gets up again, with a nasty clubber as the bell rings. Kellett stumbles into Haggerty's corner, so Haggerty taps him on the shoulder a few times and then whips him across the ring to his own corner, "helping." Again, the brutalness can be striking in contrast, both of Kellett's punishing holds and when facing an opponent who's not quite on the up and up, the opponent's offense that takes his grief off on Kellett. I also think Kellett's good at gaining sympathy through it, even if he makes sure never to take it seriously for TOO long. So we are on to round three, and he was selling big to begin, until the ref counts, and he starts making faces at him, popping up at nine and crisscrossing Haggerty's arms to set up his big tee-up kick that sends Haggerty flying. He's back up at six though, only for Kellett to take him down and start on the knee claw. Now I'm starting to see some of the sameness OJ mentioned before, but it's Bret Hart sameness, a lot of the same signature things, but layered in different ways and in reaction to different things. Familarity, not sameness. I could be wrong though. Here he locked in the knee claw as a response to getting hammered a few times at the end of the last round. Haggerty kept trying to kick him off but they were working it. He was definitely making noise and selling it with some great expressions like it was a horribly painful hold. It's interesting here that Walton notes how the fans like mat wrestling but only some mat wrestling and that this was going on quite a while. Kellett had to be aware of this though. Eventually, he does get kicked off, only to his that richochet headbutt, the one that ended South in the first match. Here, it just knocks Haggerty down, which goes back to what I said before about familiarity, not sameness. Haggerty makes sure to sell the leg on his way up, and goes into the headlock, hiding the punch, still selling the leg, even as he runs across the ring with another two European uppercuts. He follows up with more hidden headlock punches and some sharp kicks to the ribs, keeping it up after the bell to draw a public warning. The match really seems to be occilating between Kellett having fun, Haggerty punishing him in response, and Kellett getting serious in response to that. The fourth round begins with Haggerty pummeling him with European uppercuts in the corner, and then bringing it back down with a double trapezius hold, a mare as he didn't get an immediate submission, and then one big, last European Uppercut attempt, running across the ring to set it up. This time, in a nice moment of built up transition, Kellett moves, causing Haggerty to go flying out of the ring. Kellett helps him back in only to get cut off by a back elblow by Haggerty who makes a three count of it. It was a nice, sudden, unexpected finish to the fall, very sudden but also very well timed. Round five starts with Haggerty up 1-0 and taking advantage of how the previous fall ended by staing on Kellett, with stomps, european uppercuts, and more hidden headlock punches. Eventually, though, he went for one too many and ended up hanging himself on the top rope. When he charged forth again, Kellett just dropped down in a near collapsed and hugged a leg to take him down. He followed it up with his signature inside deathlock, and there was this almost drunken ease to him locking it in which was believably unstoppable, like a ladder slowly falling off the side of a building to leave someone stranded up there. You can see it happening. There's just nothing to be done about it. Insult to injury: he combines the deathlock with the knee claw once more, and a nasty smile to boot. Haggerty gets out with an open palm strike, making sure to limp into his trap hold once again. Kellett wants nothing to do with this, though, and does a double chop to either side before whipping Haggerty into the post hard enough to shake the ring. that draws applause and he does it again, Haggerty doing a great job selling it. Once he's up, Kellett sneaks another arm-hold and just launches a huge punch just outside the ref's view. He knows, though, but only yells at him, not giving a public warning. It was somewhat Haggerty's just desserts, or at least Walton convinces me of that. Of cousre, then Kellett does it again and there's the public warning and a shot at the granny who said he only did a palm strike. Haggerty comes out this, deciding that it's a good idea to make the Brock Lesnar guy pose and scream. Kellett mocks that for good measure, dodges a corner charge, and slips in a kneelift, before putting on a trap hold of his own. Haggerty does the double side chop to get out, but when he goes for one of his own, Kellet's gone and he falls on his face at the bell. Between falls, Walton goes on about how he was talking to Kellett about inflation. Haggerty's out of the corner with another European uppercut to start round six. Then he gets a revenge whip into the corner for good measure. Kellett reverses the next one though and Haggerty takes it stomach first, bumping huge and then completely unable to get up to meet the ten count. There's a bit of sameness. He won against South in as similar way after giving up a fall. All in all, not that strange but in the few dozen other matches from this period I've seen, I don't think I've seen anyone else's matches end with that sort of a just barely knock out. I don't think this was quite as fun as the South match, but in some ways it was more competitive and better worked. It's still well worth watching.

I think people tend to overvalue "violent wars," and excuse a lack of a strong narrative in them where they wouldn't in other matches that were laid out the same but with different tools used, but I'll certainly agree that this isn't the place for the discussion. Back to El Dandy. What I would really like, and this is if Parv is willing, would be for Parv and Chad to do a short podcast, just one match, with the two of them watching the Satanico vs Dandy match from 90 that Chad really loves, and Chad sort of walking Parv through why he loves it at every point. That, to me, would be interesting, would come from a familiar place where Parv can feel secure and safe and not under attack, would be channeling a real passion for Chad. When I was first trying to get into lucha, he gave me that background for that match, at my request.

I resented Watts for years for killing the Light Heavyweight title.

That wasn't the only reason people loved it. Just one of many. From my perspective, the excitement stemmed from the stiffness. Oh wait, someone really liked the gameplan that Bockwinkel came in with as it's a good example of how he often did that. Wait again, that was me. Everyone else just went nuts for the stiffness. You can look at the thread in the 80s set folder for it on DVDVR. That backs me up completely......

You mean because we're all going to die before all the good wrestling is watched? Wait, you're saying you don't have a healthy neurotic reaction to the GWE deadline?

What was even worse was when they put her with Hurricane/Rosey and she complained about wearing the mask. With the Dudleys there was always the sense that they could turn on her at any moment so she was supposed to be somewhat sympathetic in that role.

My main point here is that I felt similarly do you do on various elements. We obviously don't agree on everything, but we do have certain overlaps. I was frustrated in that I didn't understand why people were so much higher on it than I was. I wanted to figure out what made it tick. Once I started to see the patterns, I found a lot to enjoy even on some of the metrics you listed above. I don't think you're there yet. It's okay if you want to cut your losses though. I actually think, however, there are a number of aspects to lucha that you'd be more interested in than I am, at least in an academic sense. I think right now we are all in an environment of being on borrowed time which changes the way we look at almost everything.

I'll repeat again that it took a lot of matches, and not necessarily 5* ones for me to feel like I had a handle on everything. I'm still learning too. I had to look for a lot of patterns in good matches, in not so good matches, in matches that happened week to week, in title matches, in trios, in trios title matches, in apuestas, matches from the 80s, the 90s, the 00s. I had to really figure out why they were doing what they were doing. You can't do that by being selective I think. I understand that you don't have the time for a deep dive right now, but it's something to think about for next year. I have things on my list for post-march, too. Akiyama, Hashimoto, joshi in general. Hopefully I can tackle a lot of PR before march, but if not. Etc. But then you almost wonder "should I be watching a hundred hardcore blood matches to properly understand the norms and context? Should I be watching a hundred modern indy spotfests, etc.?"

One thing I personally had a lot of trouble with was the Bockwinkel vs Wahoo match on the AWA set, which people loved because it was very stiff. I tend to see stiffness as a tool, just like indy highspot headdrops or lucha matwork or lots of dives or hitting someone with a barbed wire baseball bat. It's very much about how the tools are used, no matter what they are (which comes back to the use of selling to establish meaning as the most important aspect of wrestling to me) and I didn't think the stiffness was used as well as it could be in that match. That said, some tools "work" better than other and maybe not all styles are equal (which I'd attribute to Dylan, but I'm not sure he believes in copyright). Also, style isn't an excuse for poor storytelling and good storytelling can exist across almost any style. I do think we can come up with some commonalities that define "good storytelling," such as build and payoff, etc. I'm going all over the place here though.

I think I do somewhat better with lucha because I see wrestling as symbolic as much as anything else. The spirit of what's going on matters more than the execution. It has to be consistent within its own world and I have to buy into that world. It's also, in part, why I don't think I do as well with Japan. Which is a broad statement, but I'm still making it. Frankly, unless it's as a way in, a skeleton key, I'm not sure suggesting exceptional (as in matches that are the exception, not the rule) to Parv is the way to go. While it's always good to find a match you like, even in a style you don't, it sort of misses the point. I call that the Brisco Bros vs Adonis/Murdoch rule. It felt weird to me to see that as the #2 match on the WWF set. It'd be like having Flair vs Magnum that high on the AWA set. Sort of an alien entity. You wouldn't rave about Flair vs Magnum or Briscos vs North-South and then say that you really liked a AWA singles or WWF tag match. Sure, there are lucha title matches with a strong limb focus, but that just lets someone be distracted from the other things going on. It doesn't make someone enjoy their flavor if he didn't already. It's like putting a ton of hot sauce on something you don't like to make it palatable.

That sounds more interesting than 95% of heavyweight Japanese wrestling to me. I should check him out at some point.

Here's Bock vs Gagne:

You're never going to get yourself over that way

Video says it's : June 28, 1981. St. Paul, Minnesota. I will fully admit to being a sucker for the big moment of the Baron putting on the claw while in the sleeper. They really built to it. A Martel match from 9/29/83 popped up this morning. I don't think that was on the AWA set. As well as a Verne vs Bock match from St. Paul in 1980 that I'm not sure if I've seen before or not.

Ended up watching Bockwinkel vs Santana (20 mins out of 27), Bockwinkel vs Bravo (about the same), Bockwinkel vs the Baron (10 mins or so), Ellering/Road Warriors vs Blackwell/High Flyers, Freebirds vs Tenryu/Ishikawa, a Misterioso/Volador Sr title match and about half the Puebla show tonight. I caught the ADR/Zeb promo too, which was rough. Otherwise, it was a pretty good night for wrestling on my end.

One advantage with Survivor Series is that they can still get a lot of guys on the card while focusing on a select 2-4 in multiple matches through the magic of traditional elimination matches.

I wouldn't mind them going from 32 to 16 beforehand, though.