Matt D

"It's those damn ROH Originals."

Fergal is such a natural name for a heel, especially this one. No light up jacket though. Ok! I'll watch and get a review up ASAP. Honestly, when I started this project the first time, I figured people would be slamming me with modern New Japan matches. This is probably one of the first I've gotten. Thanks.

I think a lot of us want anything to work and anything to be hot and anything to feel meaningful. Wrestling's more exhilarating to watch when the crowds are hot and when they're pushing acts that are getting over. Even if it's a guy we don't necessarily like, it could pump life into everything on the card. Obviously it didn't quite work out, not with Becky, not with him.

So by my reasoning, we had C.S., Jetlag, Nintendo Logic, and myself post reviews. Let's just mix those four and as we get more people coming in with reviews they can be paired off. Jetlag C.S. Nintendo Logic Matt D @NintendoLogic Here's one in the Segunda Caida queue that I'm not sure we're ever going to get to at this point, but it's a ripper of a young boys match.

I do think a more low effort/risk way of doing this might be as a "match of the week" where one person selects a match and everyone watches/discusses. I like the current format because it hypothetically lets us get to know each other a bit more, but that might be less frustrating.

Not listening to the audience, leading them. Subtle difference.

Well yeah, but that's because they were wrestling in front a bunch of.... wait, I think I hit my limit for calm deliberation for the day. We were doing so well too. Let's revisit again tomorrow.

And if you read at how I used it in my post, I didn't say that something was necessarily preferable for its own sake. Instead, I said that they weren't utilizing tools (norms) at their disposal that have been proven to have a certain effect. Do I have a bias here? Sure, my preference, admitted as it is, wasn't the issue at play.

Oh, no way, not at all. There are reactions and reactions are everything. They're what gives the match an emotional weight. They are the investment in the match. They're interacting with the crowd. Now, they use their bodies (which is where we may hit a semantic logjam) to sell and sometimes people might call it good acting or bad acting or mugging or whatever else, but I don't think people put that in the same classification as execution. It's more along the lines of selling but then selling has almost always traditionally been used to indicate expressing the effect of something that has been done to you, not the acting/expressing emotions otherwise. Norms matter. They exist in every genre. There are trappings in a western movie or a Philip Marlowe detective novel. We just watched the new season of Veronica Mars and there's absolutely norms that it follows there and sometimes that norms move away from the logic of our day to day reality but everything works within the logic of the world they're presenting and builds off both our biases and our previous experience. This is a good thing, not a bad thing, and there may be a great benefit of ignoring (or willfully inverting) a norm in the moment, but there's a cost in the long-run, and there's also potential benefits to utilizing the norms that they're leaving on the table. That's how I feel about a lot of modern tag team matches. They get to be more action-packed by not following the southern tag structure but then they jettison a lot of the heat/emotion they could have garnered otherwise. The biases aren't a bad thing so long as we admit them. Moreover, I probably wouldn't find some of those spotfests great even if you would. So past issues of semantics, we also have issues of subjectivity. I don't think we ever get to thread the needle. That's why we're still having this talk, but maybe the talk is worth having in the first place even now?

I refuse to give you that satisfaction, friend. So, what I'm seeing here is that the issue is one of precision in changing times. Classification isn't necessarily just a shortcut, but it does have to be accurate. I think this actually speaks to how much I was willing to agree or disagree with you. Some of that was because you were talking in generalities with specifics that I couldn't speak to well, or that I wouldn't speak to well, but the generalities still struck a nerve, which could well say more about me than about you or your argument. I've argued in the past that everything is a tool and everything works on multiple levels. Execution for the sake of execution only gets you so far in creating an overall effect. The same is true as logic for the sake of logic or spots/moves for the sake of spots/moves. To me, logic is the thing that underpins everything, but you still have to be able to perform the story you're trying to tell in a way that creates the suspension of disbelief, willful or otherwise. Something looking poor (or on the other side of the nexus, excellent, but overly cooperative, for instance) can ruin the effect just as easily as something making no sense as part of a larger story or something not being sold enough and thus not being allowed to have weight and meaning relatively. When everyone's the internet, what's the internet anymore? I don't know. There are still communities, but maybe there's just more of them now and maybe they interface with one another more often. I am generally here and DVDVR and like I said, that feels like a subsection of a subsection (of a subsection?) All that said, I do think that certain traits/tools were undervalued by people, and I do think certain aspects of certain wrestlers needed to be revisited accordingly. I agree with you that we probably need more precision and even that it's something of a shortcut because it's hard to keep putting in the effort here and now. But I think dismissing arguments over semantic choices isn't the way to go about it either.

Tangents are ok. JR repeating stories on a weekly basis or arguing something no one's arguing is less so. There are times where he'll be on such a string/pattern of logic that he'll willfully not understand something too, like the Steamboat/Luger No DQ stip and how Luger consistently dodging it wasn't because of creative team upheaval but instead as a way to get heat on newly turned Luger for looking cowardly and wanting (then using) the easy out.

I disagree with 45% of this in 45% of situations. It's sort of hard to pin down though. Nothing automatically means anything. Most of the internet still values workrate/execution over most other things. People who feel otherwise are a subsection of a subsection. I don't disagree with the notion that they might have already existed, especially that they existed along the lines you criticize. We've spent a decade here litigating and honing this, frankly.

Glad you liked it. So far it's just been C.S. and myself who have put up reviews. I won't post new pairings until we see at least a few more.

I subscribe every year for one month around Thanksgiving with the deal, and copy all of the old Observers they've posted since my last time subscribing into text files which I then save. It takes an hour or so but then I have a searchable repository.

I should have added the word "only." It's very frustrating to try to get someone to make a coherent, detailed argument AGAINST Roman.

The in-ring arguments that I've seen or heard from others for Rollins relative to Reigns tend to be moveset, workrate, and push. "Reigns only has three moves." That sort of thing.

So @NotJayTabb never gave Edger a match. If you want to take his match and suggest something quickly, go for it. But it'll have to be quick. Otherwise, just wait for Monday-Tuesday when I reshuffle. I think moving forward (mainly at Xmas time if we do it again), anyone who doesn't get a match for their partner in 2-3 days of the pairings will be out the next week. Life happens, but it's not that hard. Here are my comments on the Lightning Kid vs Jerry Lynn match: Global is this sweet spot of my youth was actually a really big deal to me for a kid. I'd watch it after school and distinctly remember being frustrated when it was preempted due to the expansion draft for the Rockies and the Marlins. I was scrawny and the idea of light heavyweights really appealed. I felt like I could be the Lightning Kid, so even though he was a heel and I was 10 or so, I think I secretly supported him. I don't remember the match specifically from my childhood though. The network isn't cooperating with its upgrade, so I'm watching the version on youtube. It's a little clipped but I assume this is the same version as the network. I'd be interested if the network version isn't clipped. Immediately, it was great to hear Craig Johnson who I think had one of the best wrestling voices ever. The early back and forth was certainly cutting edge for its time and it mostly hit. Lynn had this tendency at this age to hit everything but to be just a little off. Because no one else was doing this stuff in the states, it didn't really matter though. No one had a real idea what 'right' was supposed to look like. That was true with Lynn's diving forearm in the second fall. Kid, on the other hand, was a lot further along in his character work, even if some of his offense was a bit beyond his strength and size. The chain wrestling, leading to to the outright heel kick, was fun, and because it wasn't something people saw every day and was so blatant, it worked. The end of he first fall did as well, as it was all about the kid playing to the crowd. In retrospect, I know why they brought him in to WWF as a babyface, but it was such a waste. I love the idea that a tombstone is a lightning strike that can come out of nowhere. Things seemed to fall apart a little in the third fall, with them just laying in a front facelock for a minute for no reason, for instance. It really felt out of place in the match. There were moments which just lacked that level of polish as they tried to get each other into the right place. I would have liked more attempts for the finishes in the match itself. They had a logical tool and they didn't use it nearly enough. They did really play with the fans' perceptions in the end, making it look like they were protecting Lynn with two visual falls and the interference, only to invert it at the end, so I thought that was clever even if the execution didn't quite work. This held up well, I thought. It was ambitious, more ambitious than it could actually achieve and it could have been tightened up a dozen ways, but on this stage, with these players, at this time, there was a lot more to gain by trying to be ambitious than to just coast. They tried to make this feel like a big deal and they succeeded more than anyone else in wrestling would have thought they'd be able to.

I am willing to take sidebets with you deeper into the summer if you have some stuff you want me to see and will review a few matches in return. @C.S. I haven't seen that match in twenty years. Happy to revisit it with adult eyes.

Yeah. I could MAYBE see someone watch one of his Heenan matches just for Heenan but I can't see myself ever watching any of his stuff again personally.

Buck Zumhofe vs. Steve Regal. Larry Sharpe vs. Bobby Duncum. The Samoans vs. Tom Zenk and Steve Olsonoski. Kendo Nagasaki vs. Jim Duggan. Jimmy Garvin vs. Baron von Raschke. The Fabulous Freebirds vs. The Highflyers and Tonga Kid. AWA Americas Heavyweight Title:Larry Zbyszko vs. Bob Backlund. AWA World Heavyweight Title: Rick Martel vs. King Tonga. AWA World Tag Team Titles: The Road Warriors vs. Curt Hennig and Larry Hennig. Ugandan Death Match: Kamala vs. Sgt. Slaughter. With a two hour runtime, we are likely not getting the whole card. The world does not need another Buck vs Regal match.

Paging @khawk20 I know we have at least one Tonga vs Martel match but I'm not sure if it's this one. Any idea what might be new here? Oh hey, it's the show from Highlander too.

Pinging @NotJayTabb to get something for Edger in case he hasn't seen this yet. When there's just six of us, follow up is easier.

I don't know. I only caught bits and pieces of that, but I saw the last couple of minutes, and you watch that and you just beg for something, anything to happen. If the ship is sailing smoothly, you can have fun, light hearted filler. It's not.

It's maybe the best Blonds match. I've just got access to the Network currently.