Matt D

I'm personally much more interested in people who come up with interesting transitions or integrate narrative bits that you didn't see much before them or that use old moves in new ways than that come up with new moves. Even when it comes to new moves, it's much more about how those moves are utilized and the effect they get out of them as opposed to moves for the sake of moves. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where "innovation" is ultimately detrimental and influence can be negative. So it's going to be on a case by case basis.

The Saint comparison isn’t bad for Chemoul. His stuff has hit and resonated in the moment more for me. Lots of people love Saint though and I imagine people who love Saint will love Chemoul. One reason I’m hesitant to rank a lot of the Catch guys is that the style lends itself to me giving people a pass for things I wouldn’t in WoS, where there are plenty of guys where I wouldn’t need to give a pass. But I’ll flesh that out more in months and years to come. For now, I really want people other than the four of us to delve into this footage and break things down.

Arroyo has been pretty good in the French footage! I want to go and see that. 1. I'm going to have to make a list of all the Catch we've watched because the blogspot design isn't the best. I'll do it in the next month. That'll be the best place to find the matches too. 2. Having been at this for a few hours, I've learned immediately that I have zero desire in 2021 to rewatch anything from 2012-2020 that I've already seen. Zero desire. The idea of watching stuff I liked at the time, like the Shield six-mans is just absolutely nil. That surprised me a bit. There's plenty of time and I just want to focus on what I've been focusing on, all of which is new to me, or at least new to me in context. It means it might be hard to get into certain discussions immediately though, but hey, we have time.

I'm going to GLF that at some point to see if reality hasn't warped in the last seven or eight years.

So much of that match was that they went short since he was wrestling twice. Cut ten minutes off of every HHH match and see what happens.

As of March 65, we disagree strongly with OJ on this.

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.