Matt D

Me too, absolutely.

I LOVE the reaction of the kids in the crowd to Sting as he comes out. They were so into him.

Wrestling should be better than these other things because in wrestling, they can shape and control the narrative.

Mooney/Lord Alfred was a great team. Hayes is a guy who I thought was terrible when I was a kid and who I've come around on 180 since then through actually watching matches.

Obviously, the purpose of the figure-four is a set up move making it harder to kick out of the cheap roll-up later. (I'm kidding, mostly). Also, I don't watch sports regularly (not even MMA), but I do watch wrestling. The serialized elements appeal to me just like they do on a show like lost or in comics, and I definitely see a lot of what happens as wrestling as symbolic/mythic. what matters isn't how it relates to basketball or boxing but that it stays consistent within itself. Wrestling has way more in common with Rocky (or a longform serialized TV show ABOUT Rocky, like some of the sports anime, I would assume, than actual boxing.

Having a bunch of moves isn't nearly as important as knowing what to do between those moves.

Where would that be a heresy? http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/index.p...all&st=1860 For instance, keep going back pages and see all the FoF polls.

There was a lot of other stuff going on with that match, though. Context. No one really wanted to see Gibson fight Morton. And those poor bastards had to sit through a PN News Scaffold match first.

I really like Tito vs Barry. It was super back and forth but totally believable.

We can never know intent. Even when they TELL us the intent in a shoot or interview or commentary or what have you, we still can't know it. All that we can judge on is what we see. If that means we end up connecting dots that were never meant to be connected, well, it means something that the dots were there in the first place. And if those dots are there over a huge run of matches? Well, that probably means something. To me, having a "great match" doesn't mean nearly as much as a large body of work that shows signs of things I like. A match like Hogan/Warrior at WM VI was absolutely laid out by someone like Pat Patterson. Should that fact matter? Savage faxed a script long enough to be War and Peace to Steamboat pre WM III. Should that matter? Intent is a bitch and context makes things interesting and is worth knowing BUT art is in the eye of the beholder and all that. i know to me, I like watching a lot of work by a wrestler, in context, and then I judge more on the whole of what I've seen the wrestler do than any specific match. I don't look for great matches. I look forand tend to appreciate great work in context. I also lean away towards stuff I know are least likely to tell a story, because at this point of my viewing life, I know it'll just frustrate me. That's just me. It's ultimately subjective. Some people might enjoy moves and action and spectacle, or yeah, pacing might be the most important thing to them, and they're no more wrong or right than anyone else, but it sure makes discussion tricky sometimes.

That would be assuming that the Press was the only move Ric did off the top. It wasn't. I'd also say that a 2 Wins for 500 Getting Tossed Off The Top isn't exactly something that evens out in any sporting context. Can you think of anything where a 0.4% of success is consider good odds in sports? I can't think of one that comes to mind. John Still, if you only win 0.4% of the time and at least one is the whole kit and kaboodle that gets your name in the history books.

I actually asked Page about that once and he said that he actually taped over the last night's match every night instead of building up a library, thus now instead of having a treasure trove of lost house show matches he's got nothing.

To me, a more important aspect isn't whether or not they play into the over riding single story of a match, but whether or not they can be logically chained together to create something at least feasibly coherent. At the very least a framework. Does one chapter somehow lead into the next? After seeing the whole thing, does it feel like it all had some point? Or did it all just feel haphazard and disjointed?

I do tend to believe/agree that even when a bit of storytelling in a match really stands out, it's still only rarely because wrestlers were thinking of a bigger picture/story/"the why of the what." I think a lot of the time they were either protecting themselves/their character/their image or simply doing what they knew worked. So sometimes when a match really sings storywise, it's because of the combination of those things (that is, sometimes, when both participants in a match are trying to make themselves look good, it creates a logical sort of competitive story/chess match OR things that move the crowd tend to move them for a reason, and sometimes it's a narrative one). But I just can't believe it's like that all the time, or that it's just subconscious in the wrestlers all the time. Sometimes some wrestlers had to be thinking about it and it shows up in some wrestlers' work. That said, at the end of the day, what really matters, I suppose, isn't the intention of the wrestlers but the match itself, and then how you as a viewer choose to watch and enjoy it. I like matches where I can overlay coherent narratives more than ones where I can't, all else equal. I think those matches are (subjectively) better than ones where I can't, all things equal. That's just me, though, but if I am going to discuss a match with someone, that's my bias.

The way I see it, that's just good wrestling. I've been watching these Tito/Orton matches were the work is mostly good, but you'd be hard pressed to say they have any sort of story unless you think Tito and Orton go to a draw is a story. I suppose my argument is that work is mostly just work and only sometimes gets elevated to storytelling. Which is an argument for why it stands out so much and is more than just a "bare minimum" requirement when it does, no? There are a ton of meaningless shine periods in... well, 90% of all 80s tag team matches, no matter what company we're looking at. (likewise with "playing a role." It wouldn't be thought of as anything special for a big man to play his role well, that is to know when to give and when not to give, to have offense that makes sense and uses his mass effectively, proper intimidation, etc., if every big man did it and did it well) Since we're talking about Tito a lot, he had a very distinct view of how wrestling should work and he has voiced it. Basically: In the opening third, he outwrestles the heel (with no exception!), then the heel does something underhanded to get on top, and finally Tito has his big comeback. That seems to be the extent of thought he put into it.

One thing I thoroughly enjoyed about all the Demolition matches I saw was how Darsow and (especially) Eadie's constant pressure, making the babyfaces work for every single inch they got, provided the traditional babyface armwork during the shine period more meaning. In every one of those matches vs the Rougeaus or Killer Bees, it feels like they're just trying to CONTAIN the bigger wrestlers with the armwork, that they're just fighting for their lives because if they let the Demos get on offense it will go very very poorly for them. It's not necessarily about setting up a finish, but to me it was a very clear, logical, and meaningful part of the matches and a lot of that played out in the little things that a guy like Eadie would do, both in selling and in constantly attempting to find a way to get on offense instead of just sitting down and taking it.

I'm sure John is going to come in and call me a rube BUT, a lot of the old timey guys say that during long car rides in the territory days one of the only things they COULD do was talk about wrestling.

Haven't we already seen Ken the Box?

It's so strange to me, on some level though, to realize that so many wrestlers have to be thinking "This is just what I should be doing right now" or "I have to kill x amount of time" without thinking about the why of what they're doing. Don't you think that would drive you nuts as a wrestler? To be doing something and not knowing why you were doing it? I know it drives me nuts on my job. If I don't know what the point of some bureaucratic task I'm doing and how it fits in to the big picture, I go nuts. But then there are people in the office who just want to come in, do what they're told, get paid and go home, so I don't know.

This is a tremendous aside in the midst of all of this but...one of my happiest moments as a wrestling fan was watching a Tully/Arn tag match where Tully hit the standing axe-handle off the second rope on a prone opponent. The opponent didn't get a foot up. It wasn't a transition move. It was an effective offensive move. That's the only time I've ever seen it work and it magically validated, to me, every other time I've seen the counter.

It's more than just Sturgeon's law though! I think most bad books, bad movies, etc... most of them have basic storytelling logic. They're bad in execution, but most bad novels, for instance, at least tell a story. Most bad movies can be followed. Not all, but most. Basic coherence is "square one" element for most narrative mediums. It's a starting point. You almost can't not have it. It's not like that with wrestling. As wrestling has developed in the US, for one reason or another, it's not "square one." It's just not. If you read 8 random novels from this year, I bet at least 7 would make sense. Some might be good. Most would probably be bad, but a huge majority would have basic coherence. as you said, on a card, you might get one match out of eight like that. THAT is why it stands out so much. In almost every other medium, it's a given. In wrestling, it's anything but.

I praise movies for set up. And I get annoyed if something is brought up in the third act when it wasn't in the first. But I kind of get my kicks from script structure (and love todd alcott's website for instance). It's just how I'm wired. That said, it's just part of a whole. If one thing is set up really well and every else is a mess, well.. yeah.

Again, I think it's because so much of it doesn't or didn't. And more than that, so much stuff that was, and IS, wildly lauded doesn't or didn't. For decades the argument was about "action" or "workrate" or whatever. The question of narrative and whether or not it made sense is pretty damn new. Meltzer might complain in years past about a wrestler not knowing how to put a match together, but if they worked hard, was athletic, and did a lot of stuff, that'd be far more than forgiven.

Luger REALLY stands out as just a huge MVP of the first half of 96. He was the most interesting thing on Nitro every week.

There is a list of things I wish happened differently in wrestling. Surprisingly high on that list is me wishing Vader was in this match.