General thoughts about 1996

[PeteF3]

In contrast to 1995, 1996 was by far the easiest watch of any Yearbook so far, and my favorite to date, surpassing 1990 and ’92. How much did I like it? I did more “Supplemental Viewing” by a number of hours than I did for any Yearbook project previously, and even paid additional cash to do so. Even as UWFI, AJW, and AJPW started decaying, everything from Japan was fresh and new to me and we were seeing smaller promotions like Michinoku Pro and GAEA come into their own. The Big Two were hotter than they’d been in 7 years. ECW wasn’t as good as it was in ’95, as their style was slowly starting to get appropriated by the companies they used to mock, but it still provided a good amount of creative and compelling TV. The only thing I really regret not being able to see more of was lucha—no Promo Azteca on the Yearbook that I recall, and there isn’t a lot of non-Yearbook ’96 lucha online either. But CMLL closed the year out on a high note as well.

 

So I go into 1997 as excited as I’ve been for any Yearbook since I sprung for the 1990 set, and in a way my entire viewing project has been building to that year. I can’t thank Loss and goodhelmet enough for this opportunity.

 

Loss actually beat me to this climactic project for this year, but my full Observer Award ballot will follow anyway. Real winners in parentheses, going by the full calendar year as opposed to the November-to-November Observer awards.

 

CATEGORY A AWARDS

WRESTLER OF THE YEAR (Kenta Kobashi)

1. Shinya Hashimoto

2. Genichiro Tenryu

3. Hollywood Hogan

Loss pretty much spelled out everybody’s case already. 1996 was a terrific year and one of the reasons for that was a number of great performances from myriad different wrestlers, so these first two awards really are wide-open. Hashimoto sold the last of the 3 big Tokyo Dome shows the UWFI-NJPW feud centered around and his performance almost singlehandedly redeemed the feud. Tenryu wasn’t as strong of an overall draw as either Hash or Hogan, but he did draw 30,000 for his UWFI match with Takada at a time when UWFI was a complete mess and Takada’s individual drawing power was rapidly waning. And I just plain personally like him more than Hogan, who I can’t in good conscience credit for anything in the first half of the year.

 

MOST OUTSTANDING WRESTLER (Rey Misterio, Jr.)

1. Shinjiro Otani

2. Jun Akiyama

3. Negro Casas

There are 9 or 10 legitimate candidates for this award, including Misawa, Kawada, Shawn, Liger, Rey, and Hashimoto. But I don’t think anyone combined the spectacular athletic and storytelling skills that Otani did, who by the way was also one of the year’s better mat wrestlers. Akiyama wasn’t a legitimate Triple Crown contender in AJPW just yet despite being pushed as a Big 5 member, but it seemed like he was the driving force in most of its big matches, from a work as well as a push standpoint. We didn’t see as much of Casas as some other candidates, but damn did he make the most of what airtime he had.

 

BEST BABYFACE (Shawn Michaels)

1. Rey Misterio, Jr.

2. Negro Casas

3. Lex Luger

I can’t in good conscience give this award to a guy who got booed out of the building when he was supposed to be suffering a tragic loss. The push was simply too overbearing even if the idea to push Shawn on top was a sound one and even if he did draw money, at least at first. Casas was an effective antihero sort of technico, a fresh role for him. Luger is a shock pick but I really think his redemption storyline, climaxing with gaining the first WCW victory over the NWO, was one of the year’s most underrated developments.

 

And to think—just a year later, this and the next award would be totally extinct.

 

BEST HEEL (Steve Austin)

1. Hollywood Hogan

2. Steve Austin

3. Ric Flair

Hogan is about as easy of a pick as this award has seen in the ‘90s. He was a legitimate pick based on the *first* half of the year when he was a babyface. Ramp up every hateful aspect of the character to 11 and ace every aspect of working heel for the first time in 13 years and you have a heel run that kickstarts a sea change in the business. Austin would of course babyface himself soon into ’97, but he wasn’t a heel the WWF had ever seen before, and his effectiveness only increased with the sheer amount of TV time over the fall he got in comparison to the absent Bret Hart. Probably a key factor in his babyface turn, in fact—fans heard so much from Austin and so little from Bret that they soon began to see things Austin’s way. Flair was pretty much forgotten about at the end of the year but that shouldn’t detract from his phenomenal first half. In 1990 we were talking about how Flair was done as a heel for WCW audiences, but here he was 6 years later doing a kickass job of it, thanks to having the right storyline and the right babyface foil.

 

FEUD OF THE YEAR (WCW vs. NWO)

1. WCW vs. NWO

2. Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada

3. El Hijo del Santo vs. Negro Casas

Honorable Mention A: Randy Savage vs. Ric Flair

Honorable Mention B: Undertaker vs. Mankind

Odd how my #1 pick can be so broad and my runner-up so specific. Well, I voted for Tenryu vs. NJPW for ’93, so I don’t feel much guilt about my winner. No individual feud in the program really stood out—Hogan-Savage came closest, but was ultimately too one-sided with a bad PPV main event, and the NWO-Horsemen feud died on the vine. Realistically #2 should be the feud between the two tag teams, but it really felt like Akiyama vs. Kawada was the driver of the program, from Kawada doing a stretcher job to the running story of Akiyama being bullied and brutalized to Jun scoring a pin on Toshiaki for the tag titles to the climax in the RWTL, with Kawada having to take out Jun before getting to Misawa. Casas-Santo is a classic rivalry that like Hogan-Savage got a fresh new setting in 1996, but with better matches. This was actually a really good year for feuds overall—Savage vs. Ric continued to ramp up the intensity with the ballsy Elizabeth turn and the brilliant stuff surrounding Savage’s money, and Mankind revitalized and almost reinvented a stale Undertaker character with his best feud to date.

 

TAG TEAM OF THE YEAR (Misawa/Akiyama)

1. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama

2. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue

3. Steve Williams & Johnny Ace

The Holy Demon Army are turning into the Nolan Ryan or Don Sutton of tag wrestling, putting together a HOF resume but never actually grabbing a Cy Young/Tag Team of the Year Award. Ultimately what drove the matches were Jun’s performances as the slightly overmatched junior partner—plus Misawa & Jun had the awesome little series with Doc & Ace. Domestic tag teams, like managers, are on their way out and will stay that way until about 2000.

 

MOST IMPROVED (Diamond Dallas Page)

1. Shinjiro Otani

2. Masato Yakushiji

3. The Giant

I think DDP’s real improvement came in ’95. The homeless gimmick and aborted Lord of the Ring push was a step back for him that he didn’t really recover from until the NWO came a-courting. Otani was already great but he vaulted to Best in the World this year, and Yakushiji was a tornado out of Michinoku Pro whose best days are sadly probably already past.

 

MOST UNIMPROVED (Hulk Hogan)

1. Brian Pillman

2. Nobuhiko Takada

3. All-Japan Women

Pillman was falling apart even before the car wreck, and while going to the WWF may have been the more lucrative move, the guy who seemed so cool and above-it-all soon found himself completely emasculated by Steve Austin taking his template and perfecting it, using the loose-cannon persona to sell matches, feuds, and tickets rather than just to show off how EDGY he was being. Takada did have a few good matches but also numerous matches and performances I absolutely hated, and the plain fact is going from feuding with NJPW to feuding with WAR was a ridiculous step down for him and his promotion. Plus I don’t think there was a single good Takada match where he was the best guy in it. I struggled with a #3 and probably would vote Randy Savage for a wrestler, but the fall of AJW was even more striking and surprising than the fall of UWFI or indeed possibly any promotion so far in the ‘90s. It did seem to end on a cautiously positive note with the Real Earnest show and WWWA title change, but the lack of heat even for the really good matches was downright astonishing.

 

BEST ON INTERVIEWS (Steve Austin)

1. Steve Austin

2. Hollywood Hogan

3. Ric Flair

Hogan drew the most money in this particular year and Loss made a strong argument in his favor, but I still think Austin was fresher and more consistent, really from the moment he was unshackled from DiBiase. Hogan’s shitty first half can’t be thrown aside even if it actually enhanced his second half, and I was still iffy even on some of those promos.

 

MOST CHARISMATIC (Shawn Michaels)

1. Hollywood Hogan

2. Genichiro Tenryu

3. La Parka

This is possibly the first time I’ve considered, much less voted for, a heel for this award. But Hogan could get trash thrown at him by blowing his nose—that’s charisma, folks. La Parka’s sort of a reputation pick but I think a fairly safe one. He’s the one guy, along with my #3 Most Underrated, who may have been most shortchanged by footage on this set, both the Yearbook proper and supplemental stuff.

 

BEST TECHNICAL WRESTLER (Dean Malenko)

1. Volk Han

2. Lord Steven Regal

3. Dean Malenko

I’ve been down on Dean a lot but I can’t argue with his acumen. He still just has to really put it together over the course of a full year for me to consider him as anything besides a runner-up. I still think he was outclassed on his own big showcase match at the GAB by Regal.

 

BRUISER BRODY MEMORIAL AWARD (Mankind)

1. Mankind

2. Fit Finlay

3. W*ING Kanemura

Actually Foley pretty much laps the field here, as the best parts of ECW were its angles and booking more than crazy-ass brawls, and we had almost no arena footage from the USWA, which was a moribund organization anyway.

 

BEST FLYING WRESTLER (Rey Misterio, Jr.)

1. Rey Misterio, Jr.

2. Shinjiro Otani

3. Psicosis

This is going to be Rey’s award to lose for the forseeable future. Otani is possibly the *stiffest* flyer of all-time, combining grace and height on his moves with a strong “holy shit, he killed him” component.

 

MOST OVERRATED (Hulk Hogan)

1. Hulk Hogan

2. The Ultimate Warrior

Note that this vote is for Hulk, not Hollywood. The brilliant heel run doesn’t erase what an overbearing, hateful douche he was in the first half of the year. Going over 8 heels in one PPV cinches it. Warrior gamely attempted to update his persona to some degree, and *did* get over somewhat with the 1996 WWF audiences, but his return was still staggeringly unnecessary. And truthfully I can’t think of a real deserving #3. Wrestling felt more meritocratic than ever this year as promotional wars heated up around the world, as promoters were almost forced to go with what worked rather than political favorites. Ahmed and Sid finished high in the real-life votes and the Shawn push was kind of overbearing, but I really can’t say that none of those pushes were earned, either. Ahmed and Sid both had that “it” factor, even after all these years in Sid’s case, and Shawn deserved a chance with the ball even if his character and way he was sold on commentary were all wrong.

 

MOST UNDERRATED (Leif Cassidy)

1. Leif Cassidy

2. Psicosis

3. Tomoko Watanabe

Poor, poor Al Snow. I kind of dug the clueless New Rockers gimmick but Jannetty’s heart wasn’t in it and Disco Inferno was doing a better version of that shtick on the other show, and Snow deserved to show his chops as a smartass mid-card heel. Psicosis deserved better than to be Rey Jr.’s personal job boy (good in that role though he was) and WCW glorified jobber. Watanabe was one of the few AJW acts who felt fresh and exciting, even though she was hardly a youngster. She’s the one member of the roster who I need to see more of the most—is she a lost great worker or sort of a 1-trick pony who only looks great in multi-man tags?

 

BEST PROMOTION (New Japan)

1. New Japan

2. All-Japan

3. WCW

I probably enjoyed All-Japan more, but not by much—and New Japan had the better box office and probably better overall booking. I didn’t like the booking surrounding either the UWFI feud or the Triple Crown, but with the former I can at least understand the reasons behind it while the logic behind the goofy Triple Crown changes in the second half of the year is murkier and based more on stupid political bullshit as best I can figure.

 

BEST WEEKLY TELEVISION SHOW (ECW)

1. Monday Nitro

2. ECW

Nitro took ECW’s “hardcore” template and ramped it up—not in terms of blood, violence, swearing, or music videos, but in terms of chaos and unpredictability, and treating the viewers like adults—a more important aspect to both companies’ appeal than mere “adult” themes.

 

MATCH OF THE YEAR (Misawa/Akiyama vs. Williams/Ace, 6/7)

1. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (12/6)

2. Shinjiro Otani vs. El Samurai (1/21)

3. The Great Sasuke, Gran Hamada, Super Delfin, Gran Naniwa, & Masato Yakushiji vs. Kaientai D*X (12/16)

4. The Great Sasuke, Tiger Mask IV, & Shiryu vs. Super Delfin, TAKA Michinoku, & Gran Naniwa (3/16)

5. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Steve Williams & Johnny Ace (6/7)

6. El Hijo del Santo, Atlantis, El Dandy, & Lizmark vs. Blue Panther, Felino, Dr. Wagner Jr., & Negro Casas (3/22)

7. Akira Taue vs. Steve Williams (4/20)

8. Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin (11/17)

9. Nobuhiko Takada vs. Shinya Hashimoto (4/29)

10. Kaientai D*X vs. Gran Hamada, Gran Naniwa, Tiger Mask IV, Super Delfin, & Masato Yakushiji (10/10)

11. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (11/29)

12. Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind (9/22)

13. Kenta Kobashi vs. Stan Hansen (9/5)

14. Rey Misterio, Jr. vs. Psicosis (7/7)

15. Rey Misterio, Jr. & Ultimo Dragon vs. Heavy Metal & Psicosis (6/1)

16. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (5/23)

17. Shawn Michaels vs. Diesel (4/28)

18. Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama vs. Kenta Kobashi & The Patriot (11/22)

19. El Dandy vs. Black Warrior (11/2)

20. Shinjiro Otani vs. Ultimo Dragon (8/5)

Of course in the real-life balloting, the RWTL wouldn’t be eligible until the 1997 awards. In retrospect I probably should have just done a top 100 matches each year, instead of letting my ballot grow bigger and bigger as years get better. The winning match was the pre-emptive favorite, which was actually a strike against it as I went into it thinking, “Okay, so-called Match of the Year—show me what you got.” And they won me over anyway. Note three WWF matches on the ballot, which may be a record and certainly the first time it placed more matches than WCW. Its week-to-week action was iffy by comparison, but they certainly brought it when it came to the high-end stuff. It bears repeating what a ridiculously loaded year this was. Something like Combat vs. Kudo would be a top-10 candidate in most years and here it can’t quite crack the ballot at all.

 

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR (The Giant)

1. Momoe Nakanishi

2. Sugar Sato

3. Flex Kavana/Rocky Maivia

GAEA may well be the one promotion with the greatest long-term growth potential as we head into ’96, as they also had a ton of other promising youngsters who weren’t rookies. Nakanishi was one of the more exciting babyfaces of the year and while Sato wasn’t an overly dynamic worker, she was also freaking 18. Maivia was given a loser gimmick to start with, but there really were traces of stardom and charisma from his first appearance in the USWA. Giant won this award last year for me.

 

MANAGER OF THE YEAR (Jim Cornette)

1. Woman

2. Sunny

3. Jim Cornette

The third award that will go away after this year, as the era of the classic wrestling manager is essentially, finally dead after a few premature obituaries earlier in the decade. Sunny was as good as she ever was but was sort of misused as she ineffectively bounced around the tag division then got paired with Faarooq, granting Cornette his greatest fantasy as booker, in a tandem that didn’t really work. Woman didn’t get as much chance to talk as she did in ECW but she was a tremendous ringside presence and she did add to the Horsemen vibe. Cornette was generally booked as an ineffective buffoon, but his classic scorched-earth YOU ARE A FORNICATOR promo gives him a tiebreak over Bill Alfonso, who was mostly living off residuals from his brilliant 1995.

 

BEST TELEVISION ANNOUNCER (Joey Styles)

1. Jim Ross

2. Tony Schiavone

3. Alfonso Morales

Styles started to piss me off again as the year wore on, and Ross had some tremendous match calls even if some of his heel shtick got more whiny and annoying than anything Styles did—he also got some really funny lines he was probably dying to say. Nitro improved considerably once Schiavone grabbed the permanent lead announcer spot—he got the angles over better than Bischoff could ever hope to, and Mike Tenay was around for him to defer to on the more advanced cruiserweight stuff. Morales gets a reputation vote as I’ve done in the past, mostly for his tremendous work selling the Santo turn.

 

WORST TELEVISION ANNOUNCER (Dusty Rhodes)

1. Lee Marshall

2. Eric Bischoff

3. Bobby Heenan

We didn’t get to hear much from Stagger Lee on the Yearbook, mercifully, but my memories are reliable enough in this case. Bischoff got a little better than in ’95 as he backed off on the childish WWF-bashing and cut some good promos on the NWO, but he still wasn’t good overall. I hate to vote for Heenan but I have to if only for his performance at Hog Wild, which was disgraceful and fireable. He still had some good moments but came off as more of a relic than I remembered, and he struggled at times to sell the non-Hogan members of the NWO as people to be hated..

 

CATEGORY B AWARDS

BEST MAJOR WRESTLING CARD OF THE YEAR (Super J-Cup ‘95): Another disconnect between the Observer award rules and mine. Great American Bash takes it for me, with some great, diverse wrestling and the best kind of shock booking.

 

WORST MAJOR WRESTLING CARD OF THE YEAR (Uncensored ‘96): Uncensored certainly had the worst main event but I think Slamboree was a bigger nothing show, with almost nothing in the way of good matches, the most horribly contrived Lethal Lottery imaginable, and a horrible BattleBowl that would be erased from history a mere night later.

 

BEST WRESTLING MANEUVER (Ultimo Dragon’s running Liger bomb): Come on, Dragon’s running power bomb is nice but not *that* spectacular. Rey didn’t do as many of the springboard huracanranas this year, so I’m going with TAKA Michinoku’s spaceman plancha.

 

MOST DISGUSTING PROMOTIONAL TACTIC (Fake Razor & Diesel): Very close call between that and the Pillman gun angle. I didn’t find the gun angle offensive per se, but I did find the execution phony and desperate. In the end I have to go with the Razor & Diesel impostors, since I think the home invasion idea was a decent one executed poorly. Teasing the return of Hall & Nash and bringing out two fakes was not an idea that could be redeemed in any way.

 

BEST COLOR COMMENTATOR (Jerry Lawler): Mike Tenay hadn’t worn out his welcome yet, being kept in his niche of educating us about the cruiserweights’ history and their moves and doing it well. He was a voice WCW needed. Schiavone, Dusty, and Heenan sure weren’t going to do it, though all 3 did get better at calling the cruiser matches as the year wore on.

 

FAVORITE WRESTLER (Ric Flair): Mayumi Ozaki is such a hateful bitch that I regret not having a spot for her in the Best Heel award—also, I’m not entirely sure, but I think I might be in love with her.

 

LEAST FAVORITE WRESTLER (Hulk Hogan): Most of these awards are proof of what a masterful worker Hogan really was, wouldn’t you say? Who says you can’t work the smart fans? 1996 me may well have said Shawn Michaels but now I realize that’s not fair. 1996 me’s runner-up would be Phineas Godwinn, so I’ll go with that. I liked the Sunny seduction angle and subsequent slopping, but that was all due to Sunny. Seeing the WWF give serious TV time to the Godwinns in the face of what WCW was doing pretty much summed up how far apart the two companies had grown in 1996.

 

WORST (NON-ROOKIE) WRESTLER (Loch Ness): I don’t see how this can be debated. Giant Haystacks was once an at-least passable big fat man worker, but that was 15-20 years before this. Possibly Bischoff’s single biggest (no pun intended) misfire of the year.

 

WORST TAG TEAM (The Godwinns): Actually quite a lot of competition for this. I had Fire & Ice penciled in for sheer blandness, but after deciding on my Least Favorite Wrestler, I don’t really see an argument for them over the Godwinns.

 

WORST WEEKLY TELEVISION SHOW (AWF Warriors Wrestling): Sure. I would like to have seen a token AWF match on this set but I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t want to bump something more deserving.

 

WORST MANAGER (Sonny Onoo): Onoo, incredibly enough, actually improved somewhat as a performer this year. I forget if it was this year or the next where he cut a promo basically admitting his stereotype accent was a put-on, but I always genuinely liked that aspect to his character. So the winner is Cloudy, a much stupider and probably equally offensive idea.

 

WORST MATCH OF THE YEAR (Doomsday Cage Match): Probably some Loch Ness matches were worse, but they were all short. This was a dumb concept with dumb booking that was supposed to carry a PPV.

 

WORST FEUD OF THE YEAR (Big Bubba vs. John Tenta): That was a rough one for sure, climaxing with a pole match with two guys who couldn’t climb a pole. I think Jim Duggan’s taped fist feud with VK Wallstreet was worse, though.

 

WORST ON INTERVIEWS (Ahmed Johnson): Ahmed almost made Leon Spinks sound lucid.

 

WORST PROMOTION (AWF): I wonder if that Tito Santana-Chris Adams AWF match that the DVDVR folks pimped way back when is actually any good.

 

BEST BOOKER (Paul Heyman): Kevin Sullivan did yeoman’s work trying to balance incalculable amounts of ego and corporate meddling and Bischoff’s reactionary personality, while providing some of the ballsiest and most creative angles seen in the U.S. in years.

 

PROMOTER OF THE YEAR (Riki Choshu): It’s hard to argue with Choshu’s business success, but it’s also hard to defend his booking of UWFI. Maybe Eric Bischoff’s booking of WWF talent went to the opposite extreme, but I have to give the devil his due—and he had a much tougher hill to climb than Choshu did.

 

BEST GIMMICK (NWO): Yeah, at least if you confine it to Hollywood, the Outsiders, and Syxx. Not much of an argument for anything else.

 

WORST GIMMICK (New Razor/Diesel/Double J): Not much of an argument for anything else here, either.

 

MOST EMBARRASSING WRESTLER (Hulk Hogan): More of Hogan playing the smart fans like a violin. The answer here is the one guy who could mount a serious challenge to Razor & Diesel’s Worst Gimmick Award, and that’s the Booty Man.

[elliott]

Pete, even before reading this one I wanted to say your yearbook wrap up posts are some of absolute favorite posts on the wrestling related interweb. Thank you for taking the time to do these. They're all really great!

[soup23]

Excellent stuff Pete, as I am halfway through the wrestler of the year competition is really starting to become a bear at narrowing down the field.

 

I also got to say that the quality has really picked up in the past few months. I think 1996 was one of the toughest yearbooks to get through the first three months of, but once it starts gaining steam, it doesn't seem to let up and may become my #2 behind 1997 when all is said and done.

 

Match list looks loaded as something like Kobasi vs. Taue (which I just watched and loved) didn't crack the top 20 along with Kudo vs. TOyota that you mentioned.

[PeteF3]

Kobashi-Taue was the very last one off the ballot. I was just doing my final proofread when I realized I forgot the December MPro tag I loved so much wasn't on the list.

[Badlittlekitten]

Yeah thanks for these. Just about to get stuck in.

[ohtani's jacket]

Pete, even before reading this one I wanted to say your yearbook wrap up posts are some of absolute favorite posts on the wrestling related interweb. Thank you for taking the time to do these. They're all really great!

 

I wanted to echo this as well. Great reads.