Matt D

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.

Obviously, I'll listen to this as soon as I can since I've been living in this stuff the last few months. It's behind the AWA results podcast which I'll get through today and tomorrow.

Regal vs Buck should have been an Unmemorable Match

Battle Royal - 8/30/1980 I really enjoyed the last one of these I saw. In there we have Stasiak, Popovich (fresh off of a full nelson win vs Wiskowski who lost a loser leaves town match with .. Boyd? Piper? someone, but who is fulfilling his contractual obligations), a twenty-one year old Eric Embry, Wiskowski, Rick "dellasara?" who I don't recognize, Rip Oliver, Boyd, Ricky Hunter, Chris f'n Colt, Joe Lightfoot (who I haven't seen in the territory before), The Cuban (Cortez), and Rose. I'll bullet point this like last time. - Heels congregate on one side. Faces on the other in the announcements. This is for $20K -Colt immediately bolts out of the ring and Sandy Barr yells at him. Go Chris Colt. He sneaks his way back in and almost immediately gets tossed. Boo. Barr has to elbow him to get him to leave. - My gut tells me they brought Stasiak in special for this. He's mainly targeting Rose and Wiskowski. Boyd is paired with the Cuban who he's had a few matches with lately. -It probably sucked to be Ricky Hunter. It's one thing to be a jobber, but a jobber in Portland? -Buddy went through the ropes and Boyd chased after and they did some fun brawling in the crowd and around the ring for a few minutes before Boyd tosses him back in. Buddy then almost goes out. He's great in these. Just stooging his ass off with big dramatic flailing. They finally do a thing where Rose and Stasiak get eliminated together by Emery of all people. -It ends up with Popovich, Boyd, Oliver, and the Cuban, who Stasiak eliminated but Barr didn't see it. I thought for a second they were going to put Popovich over huge but he gets double-teamed by the army and eliminated, leaving a feisty Boyd to fight against the heels alone for about a minute before he gets tossed too. They had Wiskowki hit the Cuban by accident earlier in the match but didn't make much out of it. Now it's down to him and Oliver so this should be sort of interesting. -Wait, scrap that, for some ungodly reason, they're letting Popovich back in. Anyway, he tries to toss Oliver and Boyd, from the outside helped, and this is a heap of screwed up BS. I've never seen a battle royal where the last two guys had honestly been eliminated earlier in the match but were just allowed back in because, oops, they were supposed to be the last two guys. Ha! The Cuban almost had Popovich eliminated and Boyd casually walked around the ring and pulled him out too. What a BS Battle Royal. Total Portland booking to put him over strong like this. Good thought. They just really messed up the delivery. The last Battle Royal was way better due to more Colt, more Rose, and more Piper.

Presumably Quake also has the Summerslam buy rate on his side.

Apparently I wrote up all this stuff. I think I was thinking of the ladder match; review is from Nov, 2011: Here's what I said about the others last july:

There's a really fun Michaels vs Goldust fancam match from 96.

Fair enough. I fully admit to pulling some of that stuff out of thin air since i didn't feel damned to look at numbers. What's your verdict when you compare the two of them ultimately on which of the two was a bigger draw during their WWF runs then?

The problem here is that this was a direct comparison to Hennig, who bombed as a Hogan opponent which is a worse sin than succeeding as a Hogan partner.

It feels more like an "Oh God, Why!" fantasy booking playground.

It's not hard. Beefcake was close to the top of the card in 1989 including being in the main event of Summerslam and the No Holds Barred PPV special, basically in the Randy Savage in the Mega Powers role. Hennig was almost immediately shunted to the top of the card at the beginning of 90 and bombed worse than any other major Hogan challenger. That would be the crux of my argument. A Meltzer theory at the time was that Beefcake was going to turn on Hogan and feud with him at the start of 90 but I think that was just a guess. Obviously they went with Hennig instead. Anyway, Beefcake also main evented in 85-86 vs Hogan and in 86 on C-shows as part of the Dream Team or on A-Shows as the last match of the night (with Hogan wrestling as the last match before intermission). I'd have to look more to see if he main evented B-shows vs Honky in 87-88 but I think it's absolutely possible. So Hennig has the doomed early 1990 run, a very short run with the IC belt in 90 before Kerry takes it at Summerslam. He spends the rest of the year chasing Kerry and getting swallowed up by the Team Warriors at Survivor Series, gets the belt back at the end of the year, has the Bossman feud which I don't think lit the world on fire, and loses to Bret at Summerslam. Part of me feels like his biggest impact on the WWF was his time as an announcer/manager and between Survivor Series 92 and Wrestlemania IX when he was basically the #2-#3 babyface in the company. Now then, most of that is qualitative. I'm sure John can come back in and slam some numbers down on this stuff, but my gut says that Beefcake was a bigger draw and really, in total, a bigger deal when it comes to this era of the WWF. I'm not saying he SHOULD be talked up, necessarily, just that when it comes to this, maybe he should be talked up more than Curt.

I liked that stuff so much as a high concept that I'm a bit annoyed they've run Bryan vs Orton 3 PPVs in a row instead of mimicking it.

Hennig was built up as a great worker before the internet had much of any wrestling talk. The WON and Torch and other newsletters loved him going back to his AWA Title reign, which was 1987. I don't think hardcore fans at the time were all that enamored with his Mr. Perfect gimmick, other than it got him a WWF push rather than getting buried in the prelims. I'd also extend it: Dave rambles on about how people in the business (read guys who came along in the past 15 or so years) looked at Hennig as a great worker. Likely because he was something they great up watching, and relative to the WWF he was a worker that "worker based" wrestlers would have liked. Much as in 15 years we'll have a bunch of guys in the business who think Punk and Cena are all time greats... which they may or may not be. The major reasons Beefcake doesn't get talked up is: * he sucked as a worker * he had no influence in the business (since being a sycophant had a long history in the business) * he never drew of note * he wasn't a real top of the card guy There basically is no case for him. I'm tempted to argue that Beefcake was more of a draw in the WWF than Hennig.

You guys spend way too much time thinking about TNA.

Buddy vs Mike Popovich - 8/23/1980 - 1 Fall to a Finish Popovich was an All-American from University of Oregon who just went through Sandy Barr's school. He'd debuted on an earlier card in a special attraction match but since Martel lost a loser leaves town and someone else was injured Owen puts him into a match with Buddy. They make a big deal about Martel being gone and the fact someone gives Popovich flowers before they match. They even made sure to thank the kids for continuing to come out with Martel gone. Buddy starts with an arm bar but Popovich eventually reverses it. He's moving a bit gingerly in there and his arm clubbers look stilted with his knees to the elbow and stomps looking worse but it's a good idea. They're taking things nice and slow. He gets Buddy down but Buddy kips up and they reverse the arm bar back and forth a few times til Buddy makes it to the ropes. Buddy clubbers him on the ropes to intimidate the rookie but Popvich pops him right back and Buddy retreats and takes a time out through the ropes, before suckering Popovich in with a kick. Buddy takes over here with pretty simple stuff, including a full nelson which I haven't seen him try to do for a year or so. Popovich straight out powers out of it and puts him in one of his own. They're doing a pretty good job putting over Popovich's strength and basic wrestling skill. Buddy struggles for a but bit finally drops down with the help of the ropes and turns it into a headscissors, which is a pretty weird way to get out of a full nelson. Popovich does a kip up of his own, but Buddy sneaks around with a beautifully timed sneakshot to the kidneys and starts honing in, culminating in a bear hug. Popovich undermines the arms and puts Buddy into a far bigger bearhug. Buddy cheats to get out but Popovich reverses a shot into the turnbuckle and really takes over. Buddy ends up begging off and getting leveraged out of the corner. He gets a cheap grounded kick in and starts playing king of the mountain with Popovich, kneeling on the apron and punching down. KOTMs get over the face as dangerous to the more desperate heel, generally. Anyway, the big angle here is that Savage (the ref) grabs for the mask from behind to stop this. and Buddy grabs him through the ropes, getting Dutch's leg tied up there. At that point Buddy goes to town briefly on the stuck leg, landing on it off the top before Popovich can come in for the save. They sell this as a potentially broken leg for Dutch and Popovich wins via DQ and then carries Savage to the back. So this was a match. Buddy did a pretty good job carrying the green guy and making him look like an up and coming threat with both power and skill, but maybe not as good a job as I've seen him manage in the past or was expecting. I have no idea just how many matches Popovich had under his belt though. Wrestlingdata.com has this as his first match and Bonnema only mentioned one other. If that's the case, I suppose it is pretty impressive after all.

Curt Hennig was downright horrible in 98, one of the worst worker in the company next to Brian Adams and Stevie Ray. Bret's WCW work is underrated. He's the one who gave Booker some decent matches, not the other way around. Bret had some actual very good matches with Luger the same year. Booker made a decent impression for a few months when he was in the ring with Martel and especially Benoit, but he got worse and worse after his post-injury comeback in 1999. In 2000 Booker was mediocre at his very best and often actually quite the poor worker. Sloppy as hell, shitty timing, really annoying in a RVD way and 100% formulaic and predictable. Luger was pretty good in 98-99, no?

Watching the Piper vs Wiskowski match from 80 that just popped up (which is, by the way, way better than the Martel vs Wiskowski match from the same year), I really wish we had a decent run of Piper in AWA in the early 80s. It was a style that was so good at using a hold for a base and Piper was just excellent of working up out of holds with hope spots to build up his comeback as a babyface. I think Piper's 1980 might be one of the best babyface years of the 80s.

The biggest complaint I have heard about Reigns is that he'll sell by getting taken out of a match for a minute or two and then just be up as if nothing happened.

I'm definitely going to have to go through everything again. You can get a gist of a match this way but I still don't think it's a great way to analyze them. With the lack of commentary I can understand, my general ignorance, and the relative length of matches on the set, I'm glad for the help though. Way I see it is this. If I have time to get through the set a second time, my way, great. Then I'll have a good ballot. If not, I'll at least have a general idea of things. We'll see how it goes. Corleone's frigging awesome in the Canek match (I really like his selling too) but Canek brings absolutely nothing to the table. I thought it had a far stronger first two falls than the Fujinami match, which barely had a second fall at all. That said, Canek brings way more to the table in the Fujinami match and the third fall gets really good so it's probably a more complete match, even if it wasn't a more entertaining one.