Matt D

What should they do with Show for the next couple of months?

"SHAWN, SHAWN ARE YOU OKAY!" If they were going to do this, they should have done it back during month one and then kept Bryan away from Orton subsequently.

It's like having one of those fake twitter robots on the board. "Buy Crest!"

Alright, I just watched the match again. I wasn't watching it with you guys (I got ran off during the last match, sorry), but this time I picked up on a lot more subtext. I'm still not 100% sure on what I saw, but it felt a lot more like what people have described to me when they describe a title match. It may not be my favorite one on the set so far though, because others have elements that are less "perfect title match" but that call to me more. Here's what I just said at DVDVR:

I just saw the first fall of Lizmark vs Satanico and it sure as hell felt like it mattered there. Also, neither here nor there but Wiskowski has an awesome "body dive" where he just does that jumping sit on the neck that Lizmark does here.

How much 77-83 Santana exists?

What about Undertaker vs Hogan for, let's say, people under 25?

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.