Matt D

I watched it before the set. It was the very first title match i saw so I'm looking forward to going through it again now that I know a little more. It was also my first Satanico match. I did do a write up of it. Let me find it. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?show...t&p=5557495 In the exchange that follows, I'm a glorious, reprehensible ass to OJ too.

Isn't another problem with UK workers the nature of the UK wrestling industry? It's tough to prove anyone's a "draw," no? That sort of means everything has to be work and historical significance. You can't make a Ken Patera argument for a lot of these guys, basically.

So far, to me, the hard part isn't necessarily "keeping up," though that's obviously hard. It's keeping up while still making the matwork actually feel like it means something. I feel like the matwork's been good in all of the title matches on the first two discs so far but it's only felt like it mattered on about half of them. That's what I was trying to say.

One thing Will says here is that you can't criticize Super Astro's comedy magic if you're going to criticize Chikara's comedy magic. I kind of feel like you can extrapolate that to some of the spottier stuff on the set or some of the bloodier brawls/cage matches on the last set and maybe some of the stuff here relative to other current indies. I also am with Will that the selling (and thus in a lot of ways the psychology) is stronger in the brawls. If you just explained things to me on paper coming in, I would have thought I'd like the title matches far more than the brawls but it really hasn't been the case. The lucha brawls are really primal and logical. Maybe I'm still not reading the psychology in every title match, but about half of them really do have good storytelling that I can pick up on and the other half feels like it has a lot of matwork done for the sake of matwork, basically. It's cool matwork but I'm not 100% sure I want to just write off some of the "this is just the style in a title match" excuses when about half of them really feel gripping to me.

Maybe how it felt to get the pop he did on the last WWE Europe tour?

Shawn vs El Torito would be awesome. He could put on camos and try to hunt him.

I think the MSG crowd would have gone absolutely nuts.

Which again is why I think Edge would have been a better choice. It's not like they really used Austin at all much after that.

I always think that if they knew both guys were gone they should have sent out the returning Egde at the end to take them both out. I think he came back a week or two later.

Easily the best part of this show was picturing Kris, Phil and Johnny doing an It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, World race across the United States to get Will's collection after he dies in Mexico.

Buddy Rose vs Roddy Piper - 9/13/80 - 2/3 Falls - Title match Buddy's finally done with the wig and has shorter brown hair and a 1980 mustache (Piper had taken the mask off RIGHT after Buddy declared he'd keep it off if someone could take it from him). He cut a great promo this same night going over what he and Piper had done in the last many months to set up their loser leaves town match on Tuesday. I love Don Owen's passive aggressive griping about loser leaves town matches and how they hurt his bottom line. Obviously this match is to set up the next card, so we'll see what they do with it. One of the real stories of 1980 to me is how great a babyface Piper was. Buddy has three shirts on. One is the Superman Logo, one is "Champion" and one is "Truest Champion." Buddy rolls out and stalls to begin, jawing with the crowd. He does it again, with Barr stopping Roddy from giving chase. Crowd is chanting Bye Bye Rose. They lock up and Buddy cheapshots a turnbuckle treatment instead o a clean break. He manages a few more such assaults before locking on a chinlock in the middle of the ring. They keep working it, with Piper trying for the hair, only to get stopped by Barr. Rose moves right into a neck clench, but Roddy turns it around and punches to the midsection and thumbs to the face before unloading with a flurry finished with a running punch in the corner. He hits a double eyepoke and Buddy's sell is great, and then starts the boxing before finishing it with the sleeper. Again, they work it with Buddy trying two rams in the corner. Roddy hangs on and puts him to sleep for the first fall. This was fine but just a taste of what they've given us before. My guess is that they're giving the fans sort of an elated high since Roddy was going to lose on Tuesday. Sandy Barr seems to have woken up Rose between falls. This means that Rose is ready for an ambush as Roddy comes back. He slams his head right into the ringpost and Piper bleeds. Buddy gives him the Goodhelmet special and attacks the wound with clubbing blows, jabs and biting. Roddy kicks out of a lazy cover and it looks like he's about to do his trademark punch drunk comeback but Buddy just keeps on him, including this great flurry from behind on the ground. After another cover. Roddy finally snaps and starts to fight back, kicking and punching over and over. He's still bleeding and groggy though, so Buddy catches him with a kick and a slam. After a cover, Buddy goes for another fall but Piper sneaks out the back and rolls him up for the pin, and in two falls, the title. Buddy, pissed off, goes for a chair attack but Piper gets it and fights back. Eventually, the faces come in to try to stop him and he just unloads on all of them too. This is a great last hurrah for Piper and is a good showcase of how over he was here but they've had plenty of better matches.

I will say that I was a hell of a lot more emotionally involved before so many of the wrestlers I was so emotionally connected to died tragically, turned out to be monsters, or both. I had to learn a new way to appreciate wrestling, and I did.

I always feel that way about "Greatest of All Time." There's no set criteria.

It was a shame you didn't make it but that doesn't mean I don't want to hear your thoughts at length, Kevin. You always seemed to give historical info and what not but not a ton of how you felt about all of this, save for glad that people were getting exposed to it. For instance, do you have the same connection to Rockers vs Rose/Somers that you do for the earlier stuff or do you feel it's somehow less "AWA-ish" and it really dominating the top half of the ballot is unfortunate, etc or do you maybe have a tighter connection to the Vegas years because of more vivid memories so you're glad about it? That sort of thing.

No one as obstinate as us though.

I'd say 90% of the Buddy stuff I've seen in Portland in 80, at least, has been universally better than my bottom half of the AWA set (and I still liked a lot of that stuff). I'm not sure how many matches it ultimately turns out to be before he leaves (I think I've seen 18 or so for the year though some of the Piper stuff is really good too) and I also don't know how much stuff exists from Buddy coming back after AWA and how that holds up though.

It's probably terrible that my immediate thought in response to that is how amazing a Raquel Diaz/Tyler Breeze pairing would be.

I think the idea that if you don't like Wahoo/Bock, you don't like wrestling is pretty much bullshit. It's a very distinctive style. It's very sprintish and I can absolutely understand it if someone would prefer something that breathes more or goes to the mat more or works more out of a base or plays more with body part selling or has a much more defined heat segment and comeback. It's very much a vulnerable, desperate heel champ match and I can see why people would like it less if it's not what they want in wrestling. I'm not even talking highspots or anything like that. It's super minimalist and I honestly don't think there's a real build of emotion to it. There's some in the desperation out of Bock, yes, leading to the finish, but I don't think it has as much rounded emotional growth as it could and as as a lot of other matches on the set have. It's all noise and no (or very little) negative space to help reinforce meaning. That said, I don't think anyone couldn't say it wasn't good, whether or not they outright like it. It's super intense. It is an incredible Bock performance and a surefire sign that he's wildly versatile. Wahoo brings such realistic aggression. Heenan plays his role so well. The finish is badass. For people who care about this, they are betting the shit out of each other. I had it in my top third on a set that I absolutely loved and I do like it and I would show it to people as a way to show them how good everyone involved was. There were just 44 matches I either liked more or thought were better on the criteria I care about.

I love the Halloween Phantom stuff from 91. It's one of the more iconic WCW moments to me. I also love the control centers leading up to the PPV when Solie is baffled why they are still promoting Windham on the heel side for Chamber of Horrors.

I'm an ass. My emotional investment for anything that's not current is that I get really excited if someone sells when and how I think they're supposed to. "Yes. Get that bastard!!" becomes "Yes! you sold the leg when you came back on offense, you glorious bastard!" or "Yes! That bit from the first part of the match just paid off!" With current stuff I'm a little better, though some element of that is always "Yes! they actually put the Rhodes brothers over for the belts AND the fans are loving it!!" instead of "Yes! My team beat the other team!!"

One theory about Flair vs Bock is that between the sheer amount of Flair we've all seen and the sheer amount of Bock we'd seen up until then on the set, I think a lot of us were sort of able to mentally fill in the blanks using what we did have to work with in the match. That may or may not be fair, but it was something we probably did unconsciously.

I need to hear the discussion of the 1/17 cage match and that won't happen for a couple of hours but that match gets across a lot of the same ideas in the first match without a lot of the BS flourishes that drags the earlier match down and it ranked higher with far, far less deviation. I think that says something. EDIT: It's perfectly valid that Will read in elements and an overarching story (and what he feels to be a worthwhile one) that I didn't too. I know I did that for the Bock vs Hennig draw and while he thought that was a great match too, he outright said that he didn't see the specific narrative elements I did in that match. A lot of times what we do as watchers is that we interact with what we're watching and pull together a narrative in our head from the composite pieces that may or may not have been directly intended. That's why I do my write ups like I do. I note a lot of stuff, including the transitions and elements of the base and heat, etc, in order to pull it together to see what sort of narrative can and is created. For instance, Will pulls things together with ease in bloody hate-filled brawls in ways that I'm not always comfortable doing where the violence through being intense and heated almost creates its own reality for him and I don't entirely see it. That's more in general though.

So I mentioned my minor regret. My major regret is pretty simple. I really wish that #7 and #6 were switched. That's it. I absolutely get the arguments for the Midnight Rockers cage match and I think Will did an excellent job arguing one point of view for the match on the podcast. I don't agree with it but it's a completely valid way of looking at it, and I should probably keep listening to hear about the January cage match (which I had #11) before commenting more if I do at all. However, like others, the King Tonga cage match was #3 on my ballot and I loved it so I would have liked to see that overtake the December 86 one. That's it. THAT said, thanks to Will for the kind words. I was admittedly a huge nuisance at times on this project but it was a blast to be a frontrunner in the comments and it kills me looking back that I didn't participate in some of the earlier ones like Memphis and Mid-South. But yeah, this was a total blast and I do hope someday they get the DVDVR section back up so that we can preserve some of the back and forth on these matches. I think there was a really high level of discourse on a lot of these and we really didn't let anything fly. i don't know what the discussion was like on previous sets or on other bit projects like the Best WCW Match of the 90s or whatever on other boards, but I can't imagine that there's been a lot of wrestling discussion online, maybe ever, that could have been at a higher level and more enjoyable than at least some of what we were doing here. Great project. I'll finish the podcast when I get some work out of the way.

I am kind of surprised I didn't have the 4/18/82 Cage match lowest. Pretty sure that's the one where I hated the late match shine legwork on and the clipping hurt even if Blackwell's bumping was awesome. I had it at 120. I wonder who had it at 137. I'm glad The Ventura six man did so well even though I had it at 24. I probably need to rewatch the Lawler vs Hennig match at some point. I THINK my biggest minor disappointment is that Patera/Brad vs Badd Company didn't rank higher. I'll obviously mention some other things as I keep listening here. I'm about halfway through. I had the other Martel vs Jumbo match way higher (15) than the one that actually made the top twenty (which I had at 59). The top fifteen of my ballot was full of Martel vs Bock and Hennig vs Bock matches a lot of which ended up between 20 and 30. I had Kerry vs Lawler at 21 and the finish is something I like a lot more when you see some of the post-match promos because then you start to wonder if the ref wasn't corrupt which would also excuse some of the tights-chain-work, which is perfectly fine by Lawler but worked terribly by the ref who basically stares right at it (and yeah, the pile-driver).

Chris, the work you do on this stuff is amazing. Thank you for your effort.