Matt D

What makes the Can-Ams match work so well for me is the character work of the old champs fucking with the rookie and then being almost surprised when his partner, nominally their peer, takes such umbrage to it. They try to backstab him and kick him out of the champions' club in response but Martel is just too damn fiery for them. It's a great intersection of work and story. But I can see how it might not rise so high considering how stacked that set must have been.

Timothy Thatcher vs Chris Masters - October 12, 2012 So, hey, I wanted to see Thatcher vs someone who could sell, because that seemed like an awesome proposition to me. And I'm not entirely sure that there's a better seller in the world than Chris Masters. If anything he might focus too much on his selling given his role, especially on the indies, where he really stands out, which is to say that he could probably accomplish a certain job if he was less conscientious in his comebacks, if he was more Hulk Hogan. Which is a testament both to how good he is and also how "good" might not always be best. Let's start with Thatcher. This was a beautiful performance. It's a twelve minute match or so which much lower aspirations. Shine, Heat, Comeback. Thatcher was a defending champ, chickenshit heel to start with a wonderful vicious streak. He was almost completely opposite from his performance in the Busisk match. He was refusing to lock up, was taking a powder and jawing with the fans (including a kid which was great), was rushing to the corner when they did lock up, was complaining to the ref about Masters' being greased up. He grabbed the hair to keep a headlock on and dove out of the ring after eating a shoulderblock off the ropes. Range is important to me and if you watched the two matches, you'd see similar qualities and know it was the same guy but he was coming at the two matches in completely different ways. He was effective and appropriate on offense, first sneaking in a knee and locking on a cravat, and then, thank god, getting to show off the limbwork. I was worried it wasn't going to happen, but after ducking out of the ring again, and jawing with a couple on the outside, Masters grabbed his hair from the inside out (and the look on the faces of the fans he was jawing with was golden) and he draped Masters' arm over the top rope. What followed was exactly what i wanted from the match, a few minutes of wrestling beauty. Masters was such a pro at working from underneath, and would try to fight back with his good arm only for Thatcher to just find another interesting way to do damage to the bad one. I almost bet you that Masters was excited to be in there against a guy who could hone in so well. I especially loved the root rake across the arm. I don't think I've ever seen that done exactly that way. When it comes to his side of the equation, Thatcher seems very good at making a few minutes of limbwork really feel like it matters. The comeback was just great, and maybe some of that was that this was a far simpler paced and structured match, but a lot of it was Masters too. When he finally powered up out of an armhold (timed perfect to get the crowd into it) and hit his inverted atomic drop, he sold both the leg and the arm. When he cemented the comeback it was with this picture perfect one armed powerslam. Mostly every wrestler alive, especially ones able to hide behind the look and name of Masters, would be lazily blowing through their comeback offense here. Not him, though. He sold not just in trying to put the Masterlock on but in the pose before the try. This let Thatcher slap on the Fujiwara arm bar again, but when Masters rolled through (on his good arm), he was able to slip that good arm through, hooking the Masterlock with it first and then bringing the bad arm around. A ref bump, low blow, and cheap roll up followed. Really good twelve minute vulnerable but dangerous local champ vs travelling name match. Again, lower level of difficulty than what Busisk and Thatcher were trying to accomplish but it was really satisfying and Thatcher showed me far broader and entertaining character work than I was ever expecting out of him. It scratched totally a totally different itch than the last match but it did so extremely well.

You should probably list your priorities again and maybe break out what you HAVE seen in each at least in a small way.

And frankly, the point for me will be to be encouraged to see a lot of wrestlers I haven't seen enough of.

I'm not sure I entirely saw a "cosplay" element to him but I have less experience with some of those older guys outside of Robinson. What I'll say instead is that the best way to avoid that sort of thing for me is to have it so everything feels like it's being done for a reason and it has consequence, and that's very much why I had such a problem with Busick's selling in the match, because it hindered that feeling of consequence considerably and then you're just doing things for the sake of doing them or because you think you're supposed to.

I liked how Thatcher MOVED around the ring too. There was sort of a "pug" element to it, if that makes any sense. It might not be the right word.

I heard Rikishi's 2000 Timeline shoot, and he didn't even seem to understand why they gave him the belt.

GOAT note: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/28836-timothy-thatcher Reviews from the GOAT Nomination Thread: Biff Busick vs. Timothy Thatcher - Beyond Wrestling 4/13 Well, this was a match. Let me talk about a few things. It was my first time seeing either guy. I actually know nothing about them. I like Thatcher. I think there can be a mentality of deepening vs widening and he seems like a wrestler not afraid to go deep. He didn't do a lot of wide varied stuff. There was the matwork, the armwork, and the strikes, but he went pretty deep into each category. I'm not even sure I'd differentiate the matwork and the armwork because he honed in fairly early and he was suitably gritty and kept things interesting whenever he had the advantage. Some of the earlier twisting and bending was downright wince worthy, so good on both of them for that. I also thought he was particularly emotive, both when he was in a hold or putting on a hold and during breaks in the action. It was nothing too over the top, but the character work came through. He selling throughout the match was pretty damn solid too. I wish I could say the same thing for Busick. I can't. Look, you can drop selling in certain matches. There are transitions between one part of the match and the next where you can drop selling without it mattering too much. It's just how pro wrestling works. If you don't it's a plus but if you do, it's generally okay. There are two times where I think you absolutely can't. The first is if you're going to spend some time making it the focal point of your offense, which I think Busick did very interestingly with his one arm strikes, or as part of important transitions (like the first time he tried to go to strikes). The second is if your opponent is going to keep going back to the limb as the prime means of attack. As I discussed, Thatcher DOES do that, to the point where his biggest "near-fall" of the match was the long fujiwara armbar towards the end. He basically started the match with that wrenching and grinding, went back to it repeatedly throughout the match, and finished still focusing on it, which is something I loved out of Thatcher. The problem was in how Busick worked the match, and again, I can't stress this enough. It was only a problem because of the specific match they were a part of. This isn't a universal thing. I thought the early matwork was nicely competive without seeming collaborative. There were a few points in the match where it looked like they flubbed something, but they recovered well which is more important to me. Even early on I wanted some more arm/wrist selling from Busick, not necessarily because I thought it was structurally necessary (this was before I realized all of Thatcher's gameplan would be based around it), but because Thatcher's actual work on the arm looked so good, even from the get go. It wasn't until after the halfway point of the match and three or four various stretches of him working on it that Busick started to sell it, and when he did, he made it the focal point of the match. At that point, I was okay with it because he was doing a good job with it, but i found the ways he dropped it or failed to continue to sell it particularly frustrating: he used the bad arm, while in a hold, to press Thatcher into a near-fall; a lot of his comeback attempts were based on that chinlock, with the bad arm the arm used to put the pressure on the chin; after the one-arm fighting stretch, he followed it up with a backslide and then a dragon suplex, two moves that he maybe should have avoided considering; the maybe best, cleverest looking spot of the match, the dive off the top rope, forward roll, and the immediate chinlock again (which Thatcher sold like a king after getting out of) had Busick both rolling over his bad shoulder (right after another armbar) and then using that arm for the chinlock again. They went to the strike exchange immediately thereafter which, as bucky said, was pretty well built to and not something I had a huge problem with. It's not my thing though at least Busick only used his left for some body shot chops. Then the finish was a sort of side headlock/chinlock, which was well executed, except for the fact that the visual pressure was all on the left arm again. To me a lot of the great work Thatcher was doing, really, the entirety of his excellent focused limbwork, AS WELL AS the really nicely-done one-arm comeback strikes that Busick had done were invalidated by the way that Busick worked the rest of the match. Again, it wouldn't have been a huge issue in a differently worked match, but because Busick tried to be clever in his selling at one, and only one point of the match, and then not only relied on the bodypart he had made sure to sell during that point for most of the rest of the match, without heavily favoring it, it became an issue. All that said, there was a lot to like here. I'd like to see Thatcher against a different opponent and I think Busick showed a number of good things and a number of well-used tools and maybe it was just a lapse. It was a pretty big and frustrating one for this specific match. High effort marks though.

I have every intention on watching some Thatcher in the next couple of weeks. There's just a lot on my plate.

I think it held up pretty well in 98, though. Shamrock all but beating Rocky 3 PPVs in a row doesn't help, certainly, but HHH and Rock made it seem important and the tournament for it felt fairly important as well. I don't remember Shamrock's run in the back half of 98 too well though. I think it was really with 99 and not just the attitude era in general so much as the four way feud and the bait and switch with Road Dogg replacing Gunn and vice versa leading into the Godfather run and what not.

The Russo-tastic quick title changes/short runs in 99 is probably the answer for a lot of these sort of questions, with a secondary possibility being the de-emphasizing that came with having two world titles.

You know, if we could crowdfund this, we could make this whole thing worth it somehow. Apparently a number of the shows exist, unreleased, with English commentary by Bas Rutten and Mauro Ranallo. So, back to the subtitles... I would seriously chip in money to this. I mean, not a ton of money, but money.

You know, if we could crowdfund this, we could make this whole thing worth it somehow.

I do sort of think that the people who feel strongly about this should be on the sidelines and it should be more of an analysis than an argument, but yeah, I'd listen

I actually think a DEPTH CHART: 1981 vs 2014 podcast might be interesting. You'd need someone like Dylan who's pretty well versed in both groups though. Any voice that's just versed in one or the other would end up as noise, I think.

As there are no actual reviews in that note, I'd like to officially file a motion that for Parv to nominate Mike Quakenbush, he has to review three of his matches. Preferably ones with "ants" or "bucks."

This is probably my favorite Randy Orton moment since his freak out over being stuck in Cleveland..

I find modern CMLL very interesting to watch because of the weekly necessities. It's obviously something I love we have so thoroughly documented in Portland with Buddy Rose.

I think Borne's biggest strength is his versatility. He has a number of runs filled with, if not great matches, then very good ones, and very good performances, and they're wildly different. Doink and Big Josh and his Portland babyface character, and his rat pack heel and Borne Again to some degree all feel very different. That takes a certain level of talent.

Which is also useful in examining the "less is more" mentality.

I could also see someone think that Jannetty did less bad things in the tag team and did the good things just as well, if that makes sense. That said, I think his match with Goldust in 95 is unfortunate for a debut match. He took way too much of it. That might have been Dustin's fault, though, or maybe an agent's, but I bet it was Marty trying to have the best match he could instead of one that got over the new heel better.

I'll go out of my way to see some of his TNA stuff. Him and Christian and maybe some James Storm tag stuff.

What I want to know is where the heck is Bill in all this? This note might just be an elaborate set up by him.

We were all a lot younger. Though we have some people here that were probably fairly close to the age some of us were ten years ago. On average we were all a lot younger.

I'm not arguing with your perception. I'm just trying to explain my position so that I can help bridge it and what I'm actually feeling. As for the rest, I do think one problem is that we've been around in circles on all of those guys repeatedly over the years, to the point where when someone brand new comes in, confused and surprised and therefore a bit defensive (because views that they've considered true and honestly believe) aren't only being challenged, but being somewhat dismissed, with any arguments about them feeling more than a little old hat and aggravating both to the people here who have had them a hundred times and to the new person who has no point of reference for WHY everyone is aggravated, that's frustrating. I don't know how to bridge that gap, except for maybe a pinned thread saying "This is why some people don't like Kurt Angle. No, we're not kidding. Please see it from our perspective. We do understand yours, honest. We just disagree. That's okay but it might get a bit stormy in a Greatest of All Time or WON HOF argument. Just be aware of that." that people can see when they arrive. In general, I don't think anyone here is "out of touch." We all interact with other parts of the net. A lot of us read the Observer. Most of us have been through various iterations of different boards over the last 12+ years or know other fans offline or through facebook or whatever. That's another thing I feel pretty confident talking about everyone at once with. We know what other people are saying. In general we either know why they're saying it or have people we're confident in asking about it. Just because there's a consensus elsewhere on the net, that doesn't mean we feel the need to listen to it, respect it, or validate it. Now if someone comes in with a personal opinion, that's different. I couldn't disagre more with the Fedex guy up earlier int his note, but he explained his position well and I respect it because he did so and he seems very earnest about it, but also able to agree to disagree and try to at least understand where I'm coming from. If it was just a matter that "the majority of people on the internet feel this way," well, who cares? Everyone here came to their views over time and through various means and we're all more than happy to talk at length about that.