Matt D

In Mid South there was more of the sense that he was a heel technician who took liberties INSTEAD of doing technical STUFF. In WWF there's not even that. Either way, he was a heel technician who didn't have technical offense. Tully Blanchard is a much better example of a heel technician who started out trying to do technical stuff and got out matched, at which point he resorted to the cheating and dirty fighting. Ted was punching and ambushing from the get go.

I'm still blanking. I think he needs to write a few more.

Ok so I Watched the Taylor/Dibiase match (I'm pretty sure it was the one from the mid south set, the bait and switch with the Nightmare match), and Dibiase is a shitty, shitty technician in the match, even while JR is going on about how he is one. The story of the first half of the match is that Taylor is a far superior wrestler and Dibiase takes back over when he gets a cheap punch in the corner. When he takes over it's all punches, stomps, chokes on the rope, chokes, clotheslines. The one time he tries even a little bit of arm work early on, Taylor reverses it quickly. When he tries a hip toss, Taylor reverses it into a backslide. He does a quick knee breaker out of nowhere to get the figure four on, but that's really IT. Even the figure four Taylor reverses andthen he starts on leg work of his own before Dibiase pulls out the knucks. But what they sell him as is someone who knows a lot of moves and can execute them, and someone who can make tactical moves at key times. But that has a mean streak. And someone who can do all the moves which is why it's such a shame he uses the tactics he does. I guess, if I was going to say from a working point of view what he was here, it's someone who can work well AGAINST a technician. He eats all the 80s babyface arm offense well. He helped make Taylor look really good, going so far as to really stretching out the knucks shot that ended it with a few near misses all due to Taylor's "prowess." For Herc vs Dibiase I picked a January 1989 MSG match, which is probably deep into the feud so they've been around the loop. It's a Virgil-banned-from-ringside match. Dibiase sells Herc's punches so well. Herc has these cool stalking clotheslines and okay, no, I'm not doing play by play here. Just to the point. Dibiase makes it to the ropes in a clever way with his feet going over the top to break the early full nelson. Again, Dibiase is making his opponent look like a million bucks but there's nothing technical about Hercules. The transition is Dibiase grabbing a hold of the trunks from a prone position and tossing Herc out. When he takes over it's a bunch of strikes, slams,stomps and shots on the outside. This is clipped and when we come back, Herc is fighting out of what looks to be a chinlock. Herc gets a flash small package reversal out of a slam attempt but Dibiase gets up first and stomps. Finish is a series of corner clotheslines by Hercules with Dibiase ducking under the last one and doing a double leg shoot and putting his feet up on the ropes. Ok, here is the concession I'll make. Dibiase is a technician in this one way. He's portrayed as a wrestler with great ring savvy and ring positioning, who can turn the tide at a moment's notice and take advantage of a situation. From a kayfabe perspective I can buy that to an extent. It seems to most show up in his transitions and his finishes. I Could see other wrestlers calling him one because he's so good at bumping and stooging and selling the importance and emotional impact of a move, and I suppose that could be considered a technical element of wrestling? But that's all you get, Von Kramer. His heel offense sure as hell isn't "technical" by any definition of the term.

Different matches on the card have different purposes. Generally. That's a generally minor part of my mindset though. But I've got an attacking six month old here, so I am going to let other people chime in. I've said my thoughts a million times, but I can focus them here, certainly. I think I'm the minority not you though, if that helps! Honestly, I'm just glad you people put up with me most of the time.

Can we just stop and make a blanket statement here?

Now we're going all over the place. The WWF match up I actually want to look at is against Hercules. They feuded for a while and he physically can't do some of the things he did with smaller babyfaces with Hercules. I think that'll be telling. As for mid-south, I need to think what I want to see. Maybe vs Terry Taylor?

I watched the first Patterson match and I think it'd be reasonable to call Dibiase a technical wrestler in it. Stalling to begin and a fiery babyface assault with punches/stomps after that, but then he uses armwork (not wildly varied but interesting enough) to keep Patterson in the ring after he takes a powder, and he capitalizes on a corner posting with a couple of big abdominal stretches. Yes, there were slams/dropkicks, etc, and nothing was brilliant or anything, but I don't think it'd be unreasonable to call him 79 babyface WWF Ted technical from that match. I'll watch the other one later.

I love Gorilla but he was a cynical snark.

We're a little busy here, gramps. We're having a serious internet argument almost solely about semantics.

"A running team" in football used to be the old three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, grind-it-out, Woody Hayes offense--passing only when necessary. Now, particularly in the NFL, you're a "running team" if you rush on 50% of your plays. These things can happen. This is a performance art not a sport. Is this sort of how Nickelback became metal or something? My view is in that in pro wrestling perception is reality. DiBiase in kayfabe terms was a technician--so that's what he is. Then what he does should be what a technician does. Barring some great revelation, a technician is someone who does a few big suplexes (vertical, belly to back, gutwrench) with fairly good execution. Has a couple of other power impact moves (power slam, pile driver, neckbreaker). Has a hold for a finisher. A lot of stomps, etc. And has a bitching fist drop. I'm glad we figured out what a technician does. I'll watch those Patterson matches tomorrow and then we can move on.

I'm seeing Dylan transform before my eyes.

Does the Dibiase/Patterson title change exist? youtube has I know what I'm watching tomorrow.

"A running team" in football used to be the old three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, grind-it-out, Woody Hayes offense--passing only when necessary. Now, particularly in the NFL, you're a "running team" if you rush on 50% of your plays. These things can happen. This is a performance art not a sport. Is this sort of how Nickelback became metal or something?

It's just become less technical.

i made a very honest effort to get DEAN to draw Sandow today.

I'm still not feeling it. If a technical wrestler is one thing, and that thing doesn't exist anymore, then there are no more technical wrestlers. What we have instead is something else.

When we start coming up with terms like "mat grappler" I think we're veering into dangerous territory.

I know I see limbwork or matwork as the key to the word

Which goes back to needing to look at his relatively early babyface work, right? Of which we don't have a ton of?

I think we need to define what the hell we're talking about a little bit better.

He was thought of a future NWA champ when he was a babyface in Mid-South, WWF and Georgia, right? Most of the matches most of us have seen with him are after the Georgia run, no?

Though I'll admit one thing. I've seen a lot of heel dibiase, both in Mid South and WWF, but I've seen less of his face work, especially from Georgia, but also in mid-south. You look at a match like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w-6JVsDr2c And you see some semblance that he did some early (and vaguely interesting) armwork but even more, that when he was using the figure-four as a finisher, he'd set it up on some level in a vaguely technical way? Of course, VON KRAMER is making a mostly WWF argument, so I imagine it's moot.

What i'm saying is that you can at least call Dory a mat technician, whether a good one or a bad one. You can't call Dibiase one, one way or the other.

At least you see where they're coming from though. Ted just didn't do any of that. That's the difference.

Isn't he really more of a power wrestler in WWF (relative to the moves of the time). I'm only partially kidding. More seriously, I think one issue is the definition of "technician." That really needs to be hammered down. But this goes back to what I was saying in the other note. If every wrestler in the world says one thing, and the evidence in the matches say something else, it'd be crazy not to go with the evidence we can actually see, especially in a case like this.