Matt D

I disagree with OJ completely, by the way. If you’re super familiar with the French footage it’s easy to brush it aside but if you’re just very familiar with later Andre, seeing him work a completely different and relatively challenging style quite competently matters. It’s so easy to take the basic difficulty of the French style for granted if you’re awash in it. Watching NWA title matches from the 80s and seeing guys just dramatically power back and forth on a top wristlock exchange instead of flipping up and over and doing complex escape attempts and cutoffs like you see in almost every French match has been so jarring. That's just an aside, though. With Andre, I think it's revelatory in showing how he was trained, the sort of matches he was put in early in his career, their complexity and length, how he did just work relatively normal heavyweight matches of the style (which as I said, was no small thing), while still leveraging his size, and then how he adapted a few years later as he started to face different styles and different expectations in the states. I think they're important for their own sake especially if you're unfamiliar with the style and I also think they're important as a bigger puzzle piece. But I think a lot of things are important with Andre. I think it's important to see how he works a Japanese trios match in early 70s IWE vs 80 NJPW, the way he uses comedy and interacts with his partners and the crowd. I think it's important to see how he works as part of the Colossal Connection when he has huge reputation and connection with the crowd but can barely move. All of that is important as seeing the Hansen or Race matches a dozen times. The keys to Andre are instincts, control, and adaptability, and it's important to see both how the story begins and the matches of potentially highest relative difficulty on a technique level that he was while he was in while he still happened to be in his physical prime.

His 1989 WWF run not accounting to anything (except for a couple of fun PTW matches that no one rated until 15 years later), too.

Ah, if only the bell never had to ring.

Bear with me here for a minute. I was watching a random trios tonight (not random since I'm watching everything in order, but just on paper, it'd seem random) from January 1990: Tenryu/Footloose vs Jumbo/Kabuki/Mighty Inoue. What made that match interesting? Inoue. He was rarely, if ever, in the mix with these guys up until this point. Also, you get the sense from the Takagi feud and how he worked with Tiger Mask II in this period (remember that Misawa was out for most of 89 with an injury) and some of the stuff that @KinchStalker has translated for us that he was a little tired of the endless feud with Jumbo and the usual suspects, that he was very much up for battling new opponents. The first real time they get in there, he lets Inoue come back on him and lets him hit a few things: a monkey flip, a headscissors take over, etc., good looking, interesting stuff that felt earned because it came after a little bit of a beating. At the end? A punch from the ground that just crushed Inoue and that let his team take back over. But he gave him that and the match was better for it. It let Inoue have a presence in the match with some of his stuff, with some of what he could do, with some of what he brought to the table. If Hansen had been in there instead, Inoue would have been fighting to stay afloat with whatever punches and kicks and strikes he could have gotten. Maybe he would have been able to land a few blows and seem valiant; maybe he would have gotten a little bit of shine and he might have been able to express himself due to whatever color of toughness and defiance he had that made him unique. Maybe. And eventually, if Hansen did allow him anything or if Inoue was able to take anything with those blows, it'd end with an eye-rake and it would fit the same narrative moment of the match. But, it would have been the exact same bit that Hansen would have gotten from any other opponent. You'd have barely gotten to see what Inoue could bring to the table except for in the most primal and subtle ways. It might have felt real and maybe even gripping, but if you'd seen it once, you'd seen it a hundred times and it was less, from a worked pro wrestling sense, then what Tenryu was able to evoke in him by giving him an honest moment to shine as the wrestler he was and the wrestler he could be before crushing him with a fist, instead of just making him fight for scraps and reducing him to just another piece of meat in the ever grinding churn of yet another poor bastard facing Hansen. Hansen might have higher highs (and I have a lot more to watch before I can say that) but if I have to watch a whole bunch of one wrestler or another, I'm going to be more interested to see a bunch of Tenryu.

I wish we had more Owen fancans. I was disappointed with the Boy Scouts one we got a month or two ago when he just gave us a cliff notes version of the 92 Rumble tag instead of something goofy.

Yup, it's the old cherry about the ends and the means. The "tools" are just that, tools. They're not an end unto themselves. I think there are a number of voters here and a much higher number of people not here that would, without hesitation, rank someone who had great tools/execution/timing/cardio/athleticism but no idea how to use them to work a crowd over someone who had almost no tools at all but got so much more out of them. That's an extreme obviously, and the guys in the top half of the list should have both tools and the ability to use them, though even then, exactly what "tools" are and the idea of them being used "well" are both open to opinions.

Punk got a hell of a lot out of a hell of a lot less. Owen has years where I'd argue he didn't at all make the most of his talent in ring (just because you can do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do). You can't really deny the talent gap though.

Do you see a difference in sheets-darling Owen pre-94 and more character driven Owen post-turn?

There’s the argument that Tommy Rich never fully recovered from the feud with Buzz. 2010s Brock made everyone around him consistently look worse.

They should make a t-shirt with Drew's back wounds.

She's Mighty Molly. Come on. I'm pretty sure live crowds are going to eat it up though.

That was more about me and how I consumed Breaks matches than the available footage. Also, don’t shortchange the fact that even here, you are exceptional (meant in the best way) in your knowledge.

There's a sort of Bockwinkel that you rarely see as the 80s go on. It's not at all my favorite side by any means but I do think it shows versatility and helps his case. It's how he wrestles Hogan and Gagne (and to a degree Dusty and others), bumping around like crazy for them. Super high energy stooging.

There are a lot of things going on here. Part of it is that there's an incomplete canon with lucha; part of that is due to footage, but there are other factors too. Some of it is that it's just harder to judge someone outside of singles matches, especially when you have so many other bodies in the ring and generally a singular focus to trios matches that doesn't exist in standard tag matches, for instance. Some of it is just the sheer amount of footage we have for Negro Casas spanning decades. There are holes certainly, but it's absolutely overwhelming, especially when you consider that so much of it is weekly and in front of the same crowd. I argue that people should watch everything Buddy Rose does over a span of 2-3 years in front of the same Portland crowd but while that MAY be attainable, you can't do that with Casas and since he's not the guy anchoring the territory, you probably wouldn't have to anyway. Part of it is that the trios were the week to week matches so it's hard to really make them akin to something. Part of me wants to say that it's like watching Arn or Bret due studio/prelim matches every week to build up to a PPV or house show match that we happen to have. That's kind of a tough comparison for a #1 contender relative to the footage we have for Daniel Bryan or Ric Flair or what not. Personally, I think watching Casas in a trios match is always worthwhile because he is one of the most present wrestlers we have footage of. He also almost always does something I've never seen him do before, in every match. I usually point that thing out in my reviews. It could be a reaction, something for the camera. It could be a move. It could be a spot. It could be bit of selling. It could be a taunt. It could be using the ref or one of his partners or his opponent in a unique way. But if you spend an entire match with your eye on Casas, you'll see all sorts of stuff that you're happier for having seen and yeah, at least one thing will be something you've probably never seen him do before. Where I lack and where I struggle with him, as opposed to someone like Rose or Bock (or Bret, sure) is that I don't have a great sense of his career. I can drop in and out and be entertained but I almost always lack some level of context. I have the same problem with Jim Breaks who is another guy who is always on and engaged and creatively in the moment. I think someone should get credit for playing a supporting role in a trios match, but I also argue that what Casas does that makes him special is actually more than that.

Honest question. Is there any lucha candidate you could say that about though? Could you give a comprehensive narrative of El Dandy's career and feuds in order or Satanico? Hijo Del Santo even?

I learned to love Casas watching him weekly in 2013-2015 (maybe 14-16) in random trios, albeit on the path to Rush. That’s what got him to number 2 on my list as much as his big feuds and 90s stuff, so I’m happy to go through a random few months I may not have seen comprehensively and explore if that holds up and explain it to others.

I’m willing to look at him week to week for a few months in a year he doesn’t have an apuestas match, 2005? 2008? 2011? So long as the footage is complete and readily available.

Buddy feels like the middle ground between Flair's ability to make every single moment as entertaining as possible and Bock's ability to make every single moment as purposeful as possible, while sharing the absolute and unyielding presence in the moment that both have.

If it helps, when I watch her in a couple of years, I'll be coming mostly new to her. I am not someone who's going to enjoy/forgive something because it was true to the style or the moment or the crowd or whatever though, but I'm usually consistent to a fault. I'll be coming in with as open a mind as possible and from a place of general ignorance. I will say that I enjoyed the hour long Toyota vs Inoue hour long match way more than I was expecting to (which I mean, yeah, open mind, I guess?).

I've been going back through 87 JCP TV as it's on youtube (when I write this, of course), and I needed to watch something in the background while I was doing some work and the squash match/promos/angles format of JCP studio TV works very well. It cuts out in the middle of July and while I'm sure I could keep going with it through other means, it's easier to just move on to something else. I'm going through the July Bash matches on the side but I thought I'd hit this too since I've seen most of Ronnie's year. The most interesting moment in the match to me is when Ron misses an elbow drop midway through and sells the arm big, because Flair had targeted it for his primary offensive advantage through the match so far. It's an obvious transition moment. It's also paid off much later with in that "flight" phase with Flair moving out of the way but Garvin moving with him and hitting one after the roll. Here, though, Ron obviously sells it and, I think, is expecting Flair to go back to it, but he uses the opening to go for the leg, starting the shin breakers and a figure-four. And I wonder why he did this. There are thoughts that come to mind. Familiarity: It's what Flair goes to. It what he's comfortable with. Both the man and the kayfabe wrestler. It's how he builds the back half of his matches. Arrogance: Garvin had gone for the figure four himself earlier in the match and there's a level of affrontry to that. This match also builds from the last big Flair singles cage match, in July, when he beat Jimmy Garvin after his leg gave out on a leapfrog. He wanted to beat Garvin the same way. Lack of imagination: Flair could have created a different sort of narrative and he chose not to. In the match, it worked. It worked because Garvin was set to win, I think, and because of that, he was able to survive the Figure-Four and had an amazing Hands-of-Steel counter for one shin-breaker too many, which was another turning point. You can absolutely read into this that Flair's arrogance combined with Garvin's ruggedness is his undoing, all because he didn't follow up on the arm, which is actually a feeling I don't get from a lot of other Flair matches where he shifts gears to the leg mid-match. Maybe you needed all of those earlier matches to make this match work so well, but I don't think that's entirely the case or that it excuses the other matches as much. That doesn't mean that the train of thought might not be effective, but I'd argue that because the announcers never bring it to the forefront and because I imagine the fans weren't necessarily thinking about it on that level, especially as they didn't have the luxury to rewatch matches, it's sort of a bridge too far. Within this one specific match, however, it absolutely worked. Why? Because it built so tightly off of the very similar match two months prior and here, he got his comeuppance for it.

The best part of FCW was that you could hear Dusty on commentary again.

If they want to name the current WWE era, “purgatory” is right there.

I’m two in and it’s really good. Conrad is even good and I think a lot of that is that he’s heard a lot of this in bits and pieces before so he knows what follow up questions to ask.

Probably from a May 8, 93 Superstars episode which had that trio vs Kamala and the Nasties. It was the last Nasty Boys WWF match apparently. Just the entrances below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XNj9HMLlU

Yeah, I saw the change and I’m planning on doubling back this summer.