Matt D

I forgot Smackdown existed.

I’d love to see @El Boricua try to organize and categorize the 90s and 00s PR footage that’s out there but that’s probably a massive project.

It’s weird that there’s nothing going tonight, right? They could have run two nights of the HOF.

Posting this again : http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2019/09/new-footage-friday-master-list.html?m=1

I agree with Phil. He also suffers a little relatively from being across the ring from Catanzaro or being teamed with Ben Chemoul. The few matches we have gotten were informative to one degree however: I can more safely say that if we magically had 100 more Cesca matches, he'd likely be very good, bordering on execllent, in all of them.

I promise to go back through that stuff and tell you in the years to come. I think my issue was that he was getting a free ride that other people wouldn't have gotten for basically hulking up because he felt like it was what he needed to do to get over as a main eventer. But I'm distant from a lot of these things now. In general, there are nitpicky things that we may raise when dealing with a #1 candidate that we wouldn't when dealing with a guy who might end up as #86 because the competition at the top is so fierce. I will admit not seeing a lot of 2020-2021 wrestling, but Bryan is one of the people who seems to have looked for the opportunities for the empty arena setting and made that work well, which could well be another point in his favor.

I read through all 9 pages here and there are varying levels of criticisms that should be addressed by people. I don't think many (though not all) of those criticisms were adequately addressed five years ago. That said, as I go back through early ROH and other things in the next few years and am potentially put off by elements of the style and the bloated length as I was during the 2016 poll, I do wonder how much i'm going to hold some of that against him. I mean, the guy only turned 25 in 2006. I'm pretty certain that if I were to look at my 2016 list, we wouldn't have age 20-25 footage (maybe a match or two tops) for most of my top 10.

You know. Bulldog Buzz Sawyer. It's how he's best known, obviously.........

I don't necessarily blame him as a human being, but I do feel like the things he listed/focused on were a hindrance for me personally to understand lucha.

I've said this before, but a lot of the problem is that Tenay (and WCW in general) did way more than harm than good in promoting an actual understanding of (traditional 2/3 falls) lucha. We could unpack the why of that (90s sheets writers/readers emphasizing unhelpful things, short distilled TV matches that had completely different goals, etc)., but I doubt it's really necessary.

That's my ultimate suggestion anyway. Just watch it in context for a while and look for the patterns. It's a little counter-intuitive to what we're otherwise trained for. Eventually you figure out that the dives are a means to clear the ring for the finish instead of ends unto themselves. Eventually you get the idea that it's about overall momentum shifts (with a lot of symbolic action as opposed to literal action) as opposed to a hot tag. Eventually you get the idea that most trios matches are built around a central pairing and that the pairing isn't necessarily the captains. It's like a word problem with a lot of extraneous information. The information adds color (and wonder and joy) but you have to figure out what to cross out first so that you can figure out the math you're supposed to do, then you can add all the extraneous stuff back now that you have the equation worked out.

I have pretty strong feelings that most of the traditional tools "newbies" have been given to understand lucha are faulty. My life does not work well for creating any sort of podcasts/video content/live video chat/etc. but I'm thinking about how to help here in a way that isn't patronizing or gatekeeping or whatever else, because I sympathize as I really struggled with it ten years ago. @Kadaveri recently made an excellent gif-laden review, which isn't the sort of thing you can do often but might be something that could be done with a few matches to help connect some dots.

I have marks against Michaels for “evil use of genius” too.

It’s genius used for evil.

Read the guest columns in the Observer in the mid 80s too. They constantly lament pushing people like Bock in the AWA instead of Brody. He was a great bumper but he bumped so that he could immediately jump to to nullify the point of the bump and make himself look good.

Anyway, like I said, we've got 5 years and even if this is over multiple different locations and mediums, it's up to people to make cases and point out aspects and meet these people halfway and bring it to them. I'm not convinced we're going to have a million people around the internet who are eager to do this but who aren't willing to check out a discussion forum now and again.

Isn’t that why Jumbo dropped though? Why Flair was pushed against? Or the idea that Bossman has BOTH better AJPW and WWF output than Dibiase. You can't have it both ways.

Anyway, it's up to us to make the case to people who are less familiar with someone like Martel and to highlight what we find great about him. We get to share something we really enjoy with people who are less familiar. That's great. Hopefully, they'll see what we see and they'll end up loving pro wrestling all the more because of it. I'll want people to be able to back up their lists with footage, but the only thing I'm going to draw a hard line on is Brody. If you're putting Brody high, I want to hear about the specific matches and the moments that brought you to that point relative to his rep and superficial observations. I'm not going to be a real jerk about it, though, just a minor one.

Figured out where I noticed it last: 1/29/82: Nick Bockwinkel/Pat O'Connor vs Jumbo/Baba: I'm sure I saw this years ago but I'm much more familiar with Jumbo now. Here he looked far younger than what I'm used to even though it was just seven years. I liked him in this structure, where O'Connor and Bock really tried to grind down and he was able to come back by unveiling his different suplexes throughout the match. My favorite bit in the whole match was O'Connor trying to headlock takeover Baba, being unable to, and muttering "Ah, you try it." to Bock before tagging him in. Baba was a force here but they did a good job, by using holds and takedowns of never quite letting him be unleashed until it was time for it. Between that and the bullying of Jumbo, it was measured and meticulous, but all in a good, smart way.

I've seen a few older Jumbo matches lately too, and what I will say is that the number of suplexes allowed him (at times; I need to see more to decide if this is endemic or just a couple of matches) to switch things up narratively and build to them in different ways. He could tease one earlier in a match, but then use a different one for a transition or to cement control for a time which let him pay off that initial one later. I'm much more interested in how he used the suplexes from match to match than the fact he had them, at least as it pertains to his earlier work before all the heavyweights started power bombing each other.

I don't know if you can come home again given where you've been and where you still are; just saying. But if you are going to try to come home, for fuck's sake, err on the side of kindness and respect as best you can. Focus on the arguments, not value judgments of people who may or may not be voting. Like I said, engage with the text.

Re: Jumbo. I will say I don't find the "best guy in the best promotion" very compelling as an argument. For one, I'm not at all convinced 70s-80s AJPW is the best promotion even if it had big stars from all other facets. But even if that's true "Best guy in the best promotion" is an anti-argument that doesn't at all delve into his work and what made him the best. Engage with the text.

I caught JBL's speech which was pretty much what you'd want it to be and expect it to be (albeit lacking enough stories). On the phone, I can rewind. On the PC, I can't. So I had a few minutes to pop back in and the Bella Twins reading off a screen and referencing "s-heroes" is brutal in comparison and I can't jump back to the previous one.

Did anyone see the good performance Satanico supposedly had this week in his 70s? I didn't feel qualified to vote for Japanese candidates in 2016. As it is, if I add in joshi, French Catch, shootstyle, 70s-90s AJPW and NJPW, and whatever else I can make work in 5 years, I am going to have to kill so many darlings off my 2016 list through no fault of their own.

Re: Jumbo, I'm most of the way through watching every AJPW match we have from 89 now and I've done conscious sweeps backwards to give me the context I needed for it and Jumbo will certainly rank on my list. I say that without giving a real look to 90 and 91 as well. I don't know if he breaks into the top ten because of stylistic reasons. I do feel like I've fully cracked the narrative structure of 89 AJPW tags, to the point where I could make a flow chart that would cover and categorize almost all of them. So I get how they work. But it's not my preferred sort of pro wrestling storytelling and that'll probably hurt Jumbo for me. For what it's worth, I absolutely loved 10/11/89, more so than 5/7/89.