KB8

I haven't, no. Is that one from '92 as well? I'm watching just about anything involving him that sounds interesting to me right now, and that definitely sounds interesting.

I'm not really a fan of either guy, but KENTA playing belligerent junior punching above his weight against heavyweights was pretty close to a can't fail prospect for a while, and I enjoyed him in that setting far more than I enjoyed Marufuji in any setting. Irrespective of how stiff they worked, Marufuji's offence at its worst looked like a contrived street dance routine.

I've watched too much awesome Fiera stuff lately not to rank him. I was on the fence with him, wondering if maybe there wasn't enough footage to justify his inclusion, but I don't think there's any less Fiera footage floating around than there is Sangre Chicana footage, and there's not a chance in hell I won't vote for Chicana. I still haven't seen a couple of his matches that made the 80s lucha set (because I'm a shithead and never finished it), but he was great in everything I did watch. Often right on the level of guys like Chicana and Satanico in those brawls, punching folk with his spiked glove and drinking their blood, recklessly flinging himself into the second row or almost killing himself with ridiculous dives nobody else would try, etc. Then there's his run in 1992 that's pretty fucking awesome. It's been a few years since I watched the Atlantis title match, but he went from teaming with Bestia Saljave as part of the Bestia/Huracan Sevilla feud early in the year, to his own feud with Dandy towards the end of the year. Sevilla seemed to bring a bunch of scrubs with him to those trios matches so any I've watched have basically been rudo gang maulings, and Fiera has always been the best or second best guy in that setting. Hijo del Solitario must've hated his life around then because Fiera abused him any time they were within forty feet of each other. During one of the January trios Fiera picks him up and basically slams him forehead-first across the ring apron board. Then there's the Dandy feud. He's a total wrecking ball in that feud. I haven't seen the hair match yet, but the trios leading up to it have been full of awesome rudo thuggery. It actually feels like the tecnicos are being bullied a bit TOO much at points, but when Fiera is wreaking havoc left, right and centre it's kind of hard to complain (and it's hard for the tecnicos to make their big comeback when Fiera is getting matches thrown out for kicking people in the balls out of sheer belligerence). There's one match that's a little disappointing relative to the other trios, from November 6th, but it starts out with Fiera instigating a near-riot and trying to hang Dandy over the ropes with his chain. He teams with Casas and El Supremo in October, but it's him that manages to project this aura of unquestioned leader of his team, which is saying something considering Casas will sometimes end up being the centre of attention just by virtue of his ridiculous charisma. I'm lowering my expectations a bit for the hair match, but the build up has been great and Fiera has been inspired every time out. And all of that says nothing about random other smatterings like the Tiger Mask II match in All Japan, his matches in WAR, the Jerry Estrada massacre in Monterrey, other random trios where he's second or third string but still acts like a vicious scumbag, etc. I'll watch the '94 Casas match and any lead-in trios that might (hopefully) be out there as well, but right now it's definitely a question of how high he lands rather than if he lands at all.

Oh settle down, I was only kidding. Steamboat's armdrags are excellent and I doubt there are more than ten wrestlers in history that did them better.

Steamboat's armdrags are pretty great, but there are about 250 luchadores who did it better.

Who had the best 10+year run and when was it (pick your own parameters)? - He had downtime at points and there were stretches where there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of notable footage, but Tenryu from around '85/'86 until the end of 2002 is probably my favourite lengthy run of anyone ever. I haven't really looked at his late-90s run after WAR pretty much died, but based on the 2000 All Japan comeback I can't imagine he sucked in '98/'99. Then in 2002 he might be the greatest cantankerous old bastard in wrestling history. He was still showing up and being awesome in New Japan and NOAH in 2004-2006 as well, whether he was being a cranky old bully to Tanahashi in the G1 or throwing water bottles at Kobashi's mouth before getting his chest caved in by chops, but I wouldn't argue he was one of the best wrestlers in the world at that point (whereas I would for 2002). Who had the best 10 year run and when was it? - I feel like this might be Tenryu from, say, '86-'96, although that run includes a couple years where he wasn't necessarily amazing. '87 had a lot of on-paper stuff that disappointed to some degree, and he unfortunately he doesn't seem to have that much from '94/'95, which is especially frustrating considering he might've been at his peak around then judging by the incredible '93 and awesome '96 those years are sandwiched in between. Fujiwara from '84-'94 is probably up there, though I've seen almost no PWFG post-1992. Maybe he was doing less after 1991 than I'm remembering as well. Actually, maybe it's Fujinami from '80-'90. Yeah, probably that. I'm not huge on All Japan the further into the decade they went, but I wouldn't really argue too hard if someone picked one of the Pillars. Who had the best 5 year run and when was it? - Lots of guys have cases here. Tenryu '89-'93. Both Kawada and Misawa '92-'96 (or any five year stretch between '90 and '97, I guess). Hashimoto '92-'96. Pick a five year stretch from the 80s and put Fujinami's name next to it. Ishikawa/Ikeda '95-'99. Fujiwara '86-'90. Who had the best 3 year run and when was it? - Tamura '97-'99. I'm down on him pre-'86ish, but Jumbo from '90-'92 was a hell of a run. Who had the best 2 year run and when was it? - Maybe Misawa in '94-'95. Or Tamura in '98-'99. Who had the best single year and when was it? - Tenryu in '89 or '93, Fujiwara in '86, Ikeda in 2010, Hashimoto in '93 or '96, Misawa in '95, Kawada in '93 or '96. I'll go Tenryu in '93 (that's my favourite, anyway).

I haven't seen a ton of Orton, but I first watched that Steamboat match years ago (pretty sure it was on Will's Steamboat set) and thought it was a total blast. I've watched it once or twice since then and it's always held up. It's one of my favourite *Steamboat* matches, never mind Orton matches.

The thing that surprised me about the Hashimto/Fuyuki match is that it's largely all matwork (or at least that's how I remember it. It's been five years since I saw it), and Hash/Fuyuki doing matwork for fifteen minutes doesn't really seem like a slam dunk on paper, but there's a constant and palpable sense of contempt between the two the whole time. Then they stand up and smash each other in the face for a bit before going back to the mat, and every time they do that the hate seems to build to even greater levels. They communicate this through really gritty matwork (and obviously through the face-smashing). As good as he is, matwork isn't necessarily something people point to as a thing Hashimoto is excellent at, but I would rather watch him work the mat than Mutoh or Chono a hundred times out of a hundred, just for the fact that with Hash there's always the sense that the match could just take a turn any second and the matwork would turn into a slaughter. It might very well still be "time killing matwork," but it never FEELS that way with Hashimoto, at least not to me.

Man, Hector v Terry Funk is sort of a dream match I never even thought about. Cool find.

Which Japanese wrestler will you rank highest? - Tenryu. Which Japanese wrestlers do you expect to make your list? - Tenryu, Fujiwara, Hashimoto, Tamura, Fujinami, Misawa, Kobashi, Taue, Choshu, Maeda, Ishikawa, Ikeda, Otsuka, Ono, Jumbo, Liger, Sano, Fuchi, Anjoh, Yamamoto, Yamazaki, Aja, Hokuto. They're not ALL necessarily locks (some of them most definitely are), but they're close enough. There's a bunch on the bubble as well. Who was the best of the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s to come out of Japan? - 70s: I guess Jumbo, but I've re-watched a chunk of 70s Jumbo over the last couple months and I'm really not huge on him pre-'86 or so. I just don't remember seeing much of anybody else recently enough to give this to them. Maybe Baba? Honestly not sure. - 80s: Fujinami. - 90s: Hashimoto. - 00s: Kawada, though a lot of that is down to the first half of the decade. - 10s: Pretty much a blind spot for me, but it feels like Akiyama from the limited stuff I've seen. Who was your favorite Ace? - Hashimoto is pretty much everything I think of in an ace. Who was your favorite top challenger? - Kawada, I guess. Who was your favorite under the radar guy? - Would've said Anjoh, but he's already been mentioned so maybe he isn't as under the radar as he used to be. Maybe Yamamoto? It's hard to find anyone who's all that under the radar at a place like this. Who was the best at their peak? - Maybe Misawa, but guys like him, Fujiwara, Hashimoto, Tenryu, Tamura, Fujinami and Kawada have all had stretches of a couple years where they were unreal. If I go by who I'd want to watch at their very best, then either Tenryu or Tamura, probably. Who has disappointed you the most? - I guess it's Jumbo after how flat he left me on the All Japan 80s set (when ten years ago he'd have possibly been my #1 for this). In terms of guys that used to be personal favourites that I've since gone way down on (Jumbo was never really a personal favourite as such), then probably Liger.

Holy fuck, another Hector/Lothario match? The Mexican Death Match is unreal and my favourite thing to come out of Classics so far, so I'm hyped beyond belief for this. Jose has been a total revelation on all of this stuff, but Hector Guerrero was awesome at the pro-wrestling and I'm excited for every bit of footage involving him that comes out.

Casas, Satanico, Dandy, Santito, Blue Panther, Virus, Fuerza, Sangre Chicana, Pirata Morgan, LA Park, Emilio Charles Jr. Those are the locks. Villano III, Atlantis, Fiera, MS-1, Espanto, etc. (pretty much echoing everyone else at this point) either feel like guys I need to see a little more of to be sure one way or the other, or in someone like Atlantis' case decide if he makes it into the bottom quarter of the list out of the fifty or so people I have in that particular pile.

Only thing I've really used YouTube for, at least in regards to this project, is to check out WoS footage. Everything else is on DVD (Will's comps, yearbooks, all the other discs I've had sitting here for around a decade), and I guess NWA Classics. I probably will use YouTube, Dailymotion and the likes a little more over the next couple months, though. I don't intend to buy a bunch of DVDs in order to check out US indy stuff from the last five or so years, for example.

I nominated him and will almost certainly vote for him in my bottom 20 somewhere. I'll be honest, he mostly stands out to me because I find him almost eerily similar to Eddie in a lot of respects, and Eddie is my favourite wrestler ever. Watching the Houston footage from NWA Classics he's been fun as hell in all of it, and if you squint hard enough you'd think it was 1997 Eddie in there rather than Hector. The way he begs off, the way he takes a backdrop, even the way he moves around the ring - he and Eddie were almost identical, and it seems pretty clear Eddie based a lot of what he wound up doing on what Hector did. I mean, I didn't nominate him solely because he reminds me of his brother, because that would be silly, but it's something I thought was cool. For Hector performances, the Texas Death Match against Jose Lothario from 6/8/84 is the first one I'd go to. Hector starts out acting like a good sport, but he does it in this subtly disingenuous sort of way where you know it's only a matter of time before the charade crumbles. Then when it does crumble he turns into a vicious bastard, just headbutting Jose in the face and busting him open on the ring post. He also sells Jose's incredible punches in really spectacular fashion; especially the big uppercut. I thought the whole match was tremendous and it would've made my top 10 for the Mid-South set had it been available at the time. There's also plenty of good stuff where he's tagging with Chavo. You can't really go wrong with the Lothario feud there, either. Pretty much anything involving Hector and Lothario is worth watching. There's also a really good Hector/Buddy Rose match that made Will's Rose set that I think is from '79.

Hector Guerrero They're taken from my blog, but there's a bunch more pimping of him in the NWA Classics thread.

He'll be on my list, though not sky high. I love Shawn as a tag worker, and there's still a good handful of his '92-'98 singles matches that I like a lot (and Mind Games has been my favourite match ever for about twelve years now). Post-retirement I'm pretty whatever on unless he's in a tag match, but there's some singles stuff there I'd probably find enjoyable enough as well. He mostly gets in for his tag work, though.

Yes yes 1000 times yes. Everyone thinks of Anjoh as a surly punk who throws stiff strikes but he also an incredible mat worker and everytime he gets in the ring with Tamura is absolute magic. Anjoh is flying up my list and I might look into doing a Complete and Accurate Yoji Anjoh when I'm done with this project. I've always liked him but he is flying up my list. I became a massive Anjoh fan a few years ago and actually started a C&A on him myself: http://whiskeyandwrestling.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/complete-accurate-yoji-anjoh.html It kind of fell by the wayside like every other wrestling-related project I try and do, but I make a point of updating it if I watch an Anjoh match and feel like writing about it. I really need to see all of the early Tamura matches, evidently. This is an awesome thread, btw. Tamura's knocking on the door of my top 10 for the GWE poll and it feels like this is the kind of serious look that could push him through it.

I'm actually in the process of watching the Hogan/Piper build up on the '96 yearbook, and I'm with you (Grimmas). I'm not expecting the match to be very good, but the build to it has been tremendous fun (I even watched any Piper and/or Hogan segments that never made the yearbook by hitting up Nitros on the Network).

Reed v Wrestling II. Hot damn.

Yeah, Fuerza is one of my five favourite wrestlers of all-time and he's a stone cold lock.

Chavo v Buzz and Gordy v Koko could both be pretty great (though I don't remember Koko ever being pushed all that strongly in Mid-South, so the latter might not be all that competitive). Count me among those that would be down for the whole tournament being released as a whole.

November had some unreal stuff. 1. El Hijo del Santo & Bestia Salvaje & Scorpio Jr v El Dandy & Negro Casas & Hector Garza (CMLL, 11/29/96) 2. El Hijo del Santo & Bestia Salvaje & Scorpio Jr v Negro Casas & El Dandy & Hector Garza (CMLL, 11/22/96) 3. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama v Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (All Japan, 11/29/96) 4. Bret Hart v Steve Austin (WWF Survivor Series, 11/17/96) 5. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama v Steve Williams & Johnny Ace (All Japan, 11/16/96) 6. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue v Steve Williams & Johnny Ace (All Japan, 11/22/96) 7. El Dandy v Black Warrior (CMLL, 11/2/96) 8. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama v Kenta Kobashi & The Patriot (All Japan, 11/22/96) 9. Steve Austin v Mankind (WWF RAW, 11/18/96) 10. Sabu & Rob Van Dam v The Eliminators (ECW November To Remember, 11/16/96) 11. Rey Misterio Jr. v Ultimo Dragon (WCW World War 3, 11/24/96) 12. Volk Han v Tsuyoshi Kohsaka (RINGS, 11/22/96) 13. Great Sasuke, Gran Hamada & Super Delphin v Dick Togo, Mens Teoh & Shiryu (M-Pro. 11/12/96) 14. Shawn Michaels v Psycho Sid (WWF Survivor Series, 11/17/96) 15. Taka Michinoku v Hayabusa (FMW, 11/16/96) 16. Nobuhiko Takada & Naoki Sano v Yoji Anjoh & Gerard Gourdeau (UWFi, 11/23/96) Hell of a month. Top 4 there all feel like potential top 10 for the whole year. Both CMLL trios were incredible. For a lifetime tecnico, Santo really took to brawling like a psychotic rudo like he'd been doing it his whole career. The rematch was as wild and crazy as anything I've seen in ages and cemented Casas and Dandy's places as two of the five best wrestlers in the world for the year. The 11/29 Misawa/Jun v Kawada/Taue match adds another layer to their story and I'm hyped about re-watching the Tag League final for the first time in a decade. I'd still go with Shawn/Mankind over Bret/Austin as the US MOTY by a shade, but the Mind Games match is my favourite match ever so, you know, take that for what it is. I'm not as high on Dandy/Black Warrior as Loss, but it's an excellent match and the fact I only have it #7 for the month speaks to the strength of its competition.

I liked this a lot. Ikeda and Ono have only showed up as a team about three times on the set (so far), but they're a pair of incredible shit kickers. Ono has shed the Vietnamese girl bun and so doesn't look quite as obnoxious, but he still has no compunction about kicking someone in the liver. Ikeda is a total fucking steamroller and I kind of loved how the M-Pro guys decide it'd be in their best interests to isolate him and rip his legs off. Then they try to get too fancy and he mows them down with lariats.

I actually like this more than the These Days match. That one was felt more like an exhibition, albeit a great one, while this felt more like a contest where all parties were close to perfecting the formula. KDX were inspired in this. They had just the right mix of douchebaggery and viciousness, constantly swarming guys, interjecting themselves whenever they could, etc. Yakushiji v Togo is such an awesome match-up, and while there were only brief instances of it here we still got plenty of Yakushiji busting out the killer highspots, including the wild tope that about wiped out the whole commentary team. The mugging of Sasuke in the body of the match gave it some meat that I think has been missing from some of the other M-Pro matches on the set, and this whole thing pretty much rocked from start to finish.

This feels like a pretty nice taster of where the New Japan juniors division would go heading into '97 and beyond. They got extra TV time and started to show the juniors with a lot more regularity pretty early on in '97, right? The division certainly never had the same exposure in previous years and I remember looking through match listings from '97/'98 and finding a ton of tags and six-mans that looked interesting, usually with these guys on opposite sides. That stuff isn't really my cup of tea anymore, but I have fond memories of it and if I'm going to go back and watch a bunch of juniors stuff I'd go back and watch Ohtani and Kanemoto acting like punks towards Liger and his old buddies. Anyways, this is along the lines of what would come in the near future, with plenty of chippiness and dickish behaviour from Ohtani and Kanemoto that eventually leads to Liger blasting someone in the face with a shotei. Ohtani's had that chip on his shoulder almost the whole year and his progression from the Samurai match in January through to now has been really great. In the Samurai match his hesitation cost him, then in the Liger match in March he got ahead of himself and tried to do too much, and that ended up costing him as well. He lost against Ultimo in August, but there was clear progress there -- he lost not because he tried to do too much or second guessed himself, but rather because his opponent on the night was just a step better. Now here he is at the end of the year, totally assured and fully aware of what he's capable of, but that chip on his shoulder is even bigger. Kanemoto's always been an asshole and acts accordingly here. He gets better the following year, though. There was one bit here where he took a spike piledriver and three seconds later decided he wanted to go back on offence (although Sammy shut him down promptly enough), but I think the whole "piledrivers in Japan" horse be well and truly fucking dead at this point, so whatever. Fun match, and a cool look at what's coming next year.