Matt D

From the outside (and I mean FAR outside) looking in, I think it comes down to Sofia, right? That's the only thing that's changed between now and a few years ago. There have been these weird little hints of things shifting one way or another over the last two years, but in the end, CMLL remains CMLL. So we'll see. Either Park does something to get himself kicked out in a few weeks or he does something and DOESN'T get kicked out. That's how we'll know.

He should have bought the Houston footage then.

I feel like even deep into the 00s, there were allusions for women going on certain WWE tours "for the boys'" morale. I wonder if some of this is just an issue of semantics, whereas Moolah, who up until the late 80s with Vince, was getting the lump sum for her women and part of the money she was getting (or, to put it differently, why she might have gotten more than if she was providing the midgets, for example) was for assumed additional services rendered. That's less dramatic than the business-who-takes-passport story, but bad in other ways for the matter-of-factness of it all.

I have a 7 month old, two other kids, and a 90 minute commute. Yeah, I consume a lot of caffeine. I wouldn't say I was necessarily addicted to one specific drink though. Diet Dr. Pepper is my soda of choice. While I have a small frame and am not wildly overweight or anything, I do eat more than I'd like (and stress eat). Some of it is that my body starved itself for years without me realizing. I was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012 after an endoscopy after some ulcers. They caught it early due to the ulcers so damage hadn't been done yet but it turned out my body had been starving itself for a few years. I never quite regulated so it takes a lot for me to feel full. Generally I can exercise (I watched a lot of wrestling while on an exercise bike) but the new baby makes that nigh-impossible.

I'm on board with the Bischoff stuff right now, would only listen to a Tony episode if there was real novelty to the topic, and wouldn't listen to a Bruce episode unless you guys specifically told me to.

People were doing this in 98 though. Some of it is easier now but we were all staring at quarter hours in the late 90s.

You're right as in they brought him in at the very end of November with a promo talking about how the Sheepherders hurt him 9 months before in New Zealand and then he had a couple of multi man tags against them in the weeks that followed, but this was still within his first couple of months. I went through pretty much all this stuff back in 2013: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15074-buddy-rose/page-8 with aggravating train-of-thought reviews as I was watching but the board getting upgraded destroyed the formatting. I'm sure I'll pop in and out when I can revisit something or want to talk about Stan Stasiak. Maybe I'll even jump in with 82 which I don't know as well. In the meantime, Portland's amazing and you guys are going to have a blast.

We know the least about the 60s and 70s, so that's what I hear the most about, working in the Gulas/Welch office as an assistant in the 60s for instance.

The real key to understanding this match was that it was Martel's introduction to the territory. He was going to be their big babyface going into 1980 and he came with a few detriments. He was relatively unknown. He couldn't speak well (in English at least), even though he had the right look and was technically sound. This was part of a campaign to get him over and establish him. It was a big deal for anyone in a territory to face the NWA champ. I can't think of any other situation where the promoter used it to put over a brand new talent instead of heat up a preexisting one to make his own promotion look important. Martel not just faced him but more than held his own, completing controlling in the first fall. That meant something. One thing you guys will find with Portland is that while we have a lot of the Saturday matches, a wealth of them, a trove of them, and thanks to the sponsors (in part), they're pretty much the best thing we have from 1980 and maybe the best TV in the country, the big blowoff matches were all on the Tuesday Night shows and we have so many of those. They'd do other things to get Martel over, by the way, like announcing special kids' tickets promotions were because he went to Don Owen and demanded them. This match worked. The promotion worked. Martel worked. Hell, in this one situation, Harley worked too (even his usual detriments were a strength for what they were trying to accomplish).

I'm an hour in to the Bret one. Does he ever explain why Nitro vs Thunder never happened?

I am discombobulated by the flurry of people who are apparently starting the Portland set all at once. Is this your doing?

Sounds good. I'm happy to give everyone the weekend.

http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/21780-jun-akiyama-vs-masao-inoue-noah-spring-navigation-042306/ - Akiyama vs Inoue feels like the sort of match everyone on the board should watch and have an opinion on, one way or the other. Just to tally: it looks like, oddly enough, IpponDropkick and oldbirds didn't give each other matches and DR Ackerman and dawho5 didn't give each other matches. JoeG hasn't given NintendoLogic one. Everyone else came through, but some just recently though, so I'm giving things til Monday for people to watch those. It means we slip a week, but I think that's ok.

I do see the parallels to Ogawa vs Kobashi. This seemed like a slightly more unfocused version. I didn't get the same desperation to win out of Inoue. Instead, it felt a little more like a cry for attention. That's not a value judgment, necessarily, just a point of comparison. He certainly got Akiyama's attention, and the fans' as well. Where I feel Ogawa really makes the Kobashi match, here it was Akiyama's reactions which will stick with me here. I loved his frustration after the fans wouldn't condone him stooping to Inoue's level with the revenge eyerake, for instance. The back half still works for me, even with the slight excess. If you want to elevate someone in 2006 NOAH, this is as good a way as any: plucky sympathy early on, dogged survival in the stretch. The excess is acceptable because you get the idea that Akiyama could have put him away earlier. There was no harm Inoue getting up again and again to show his spirit when the narrative responsibility was on Akiyama simply choosing not to finish him. I will say that the figure four stuff felt a little out of place and threatened to make the match feel more like a series of thought experiments ("How far can we get with just eyerakes?") than a cohesive whole. The match probably would have been better without it. In general, though, the match is an excellent little piece of story and reaction.

I kind of want it to lead to Cena/Carmella vs Bryan/Nikki though.

Cena has a lot more to lose from this sort of thing than Nikka has to gain.

I'll happily concede that the biggest problem with GWE, if we were trying to make some sort of authoritative list, was the lack of agreed-upon criteria, though peak vs longevity wasnt nearly as big an issue as the people who wanted to judge on out of ring elements. The second biggest was the name which was simple but could be misconstrued. What was not a problem at all was the fact what we'd never been in the ring with someone. If it was an issue it was due to the name. I agree with OJ that individual lists are worth more than the aggregate. I disagree with fxnj that if you watch 1000 matches of wrestler x and 1000 of wrestler y, you can't have a very educated opinion on which wrestler was better on maybe a dozen different valuable and interesting qualitative metrics.

How many characters survive the jump from NXT unscathed? Alexa did. Maybe Asuka. But every other female from Paige on lost 2/3rds of what made them work in NXT.

Going to reroll on Friday. If you haven't given someone a match yet, get to that.

Look, here's my background. In my senior year of college, I was in a BA/MA program. It meant I had to write a Master's thesis that year. I was getting a degree in Comparative History. The problem was this: in 2003, history had been ravaged by post-modernism. You couldn't do history with women unless you were a woman. You couldn't do history about Africa unless you were African. You had to use literary theory to examine the unspoken biases in sources. It no longer mattered what happened but how it affected movie posters twenty years later. Cultural History was basically everything. Most of that was well and good, except for two things. First, they were all initially deconstructionist and then ultimately reductionist. It became about just one of those theories or another. Really, they should have been integrating all of this back into conventional history to make a strong whole but no one was doing it. Second, I was a medievalist. I literally could not do medieval history based on those new rules and focuses because we were lacking sources. In many ways, they all sprung up because we had too many sources for modern history; we knew too much and academics had to find other ways at getting at what they already knew. I had the opposite problem. I did my research on the naval aspects of the Hundred Years' War. I didn't lead with a theory, but instead took the T to ye olde catholic institution, Boston College and sat in the basement of their library manually going through 200 year old reproductions of 700 year old "Rolls" that the king had sent out to issue fines, patents, gifts, etc. From there, I noted any time a ship or the sea came up and by the end of it, I had a pretty good sense of how Edward III raised his navy. It wasn't exactly what I was looking to find, but it was where the evidence took me. I tend to look at wrestlers and matches the same way. If we continuously get run sheets which let us know the agents, great. That's a good thing, not a bad one. It gives us one more piece of data we can churn through the machine and now we can take a look at how Seth Rollins operates differently in a TJ Wilson agented match than a Jamie Noble one. Over time, we can see patterns there and we can learn something about Rollins as a wrestler. We can take what we learn there and use it as a lens to examine and analyze other matches in his career. It's not that we shouldn't listen to wrestlers when they talk about one another. It gives us other things we can look for. For instance, with Rollins, I'm going to continue to suggest he has agency and interest in putting together his matches even in a heavily agented environment. Why? A few reasons, some indirect like his indy background and long-term interest in wrestling, but also because I know from an Orton interview that it was Rollins who came up with their Wrestlemania finish and talked Orton into trying it. In that same interview, Orton talked about how generally conservative he was in the ring, which is something that we can go back and look for in his matches; and also the reason behind, for instance, his babyface jumping jacks, which gives us another piece of the puzzle, both in working out those matches in specific and him as a whole wrestler. We're never going to get a complete picture, but I do think we can get an ever-more complete one, and most certainly we can get an informed, meaningful, worthwhile one. I find the entire exercise far more worthwhile than just taking a match at it's bare minimum. We can do so much more than that.

We define it and give it meaning. One could argue that the current WWE environment actually has led to the death of truth, and I think people in this thread have occasionally done just that, but I think the discussions we have here all the time about specific matches and wrestlers say otherwise.

CHIKARA Street Fight.

I respectfully disagree with Loss and fxnj but not along lines that would necessarily lead to constructive discussion. Footage is our god and we, possessors of context and learning, its profits, able to interpret it to discern the truth within.

Maybe if he beats Rousey?

I think it's more that people had talked themselves into believing they'd get all the dream matches if/when Bryan came back, and instead WWE is booking him exactly how you'd expect them to. So far:High profile Mania tag vs Zayn/Owens Singles vs AJ Tag with AJ vs Rusev Day Nakamura dark match Rumble Record Singles win vs Cass on PPV Loss to Rusev House show tag w/Tye vs Miz/Cass Looks good to me. Variety of opponents/settings/types of matches.