The Historiography of the Greatest Match Of All Time

[jdw]

You know what I mean. When did this match go from "one great AJPW main event... among many" to "THE great AJPW main event"? Why is it so strongly pimped above so many others, when it didn't generate that reaction back when it first happened? Who first started championing it as a GOAT, and where and when?

Beats me. It's probably blamed on me somehow. Though I think I've been pretty clear that I prefer 12/96, which gets me in trouble with the folks who like 6/95 as GOAT... but what the heck. I've pimped 12/96 since... December of 1996.

 

I do like calling it El Classico, but that's my homage to it being a Real Madrid vs Barcelona level match: great feud, and the pinnacle of it.

 

In turn, El Super Classico for 6/95 is my joking homage to River Plate vs Boca Juniors trying to one up RM vs Barca in terms of a rivalry. In a sense, 6/95 is a one up on 6/94: two more guys, longer, more of the kitchen sink thrown in.

 

The subversive fan in me long ago dragging futbol references into a wrestling discussions.

 

 

6/3/94 may never have been the consensus greatest match ever, but if you look at any list of 90s All Japan matches, the top three will almost always be 6/3/94, 6/9/95, and 12/6/96 in some order. I'm curious as to when that consensus came about. Also, 1/20/97 usually comes in fourth, but it didn't even get ***** from Dave at the time. Was it because the initial TV broadcast only showed like half the match?

There have been several pockets of fans here and there that have done polls and come up with it. Example:

 

http://www.deathvalleydriver.com/Bestof90s/AJresults.html

 

That was 2000.

 

But if you ran the same poll on the Figure 4 Boards, you'd probably come up with something different... especially if Dave posted some thoughts. If you did it on CM, might get yet another set of results.

 

That's the thing: there is no consensus. You are just running into those pockets where folks gone down that road.

 

John

[Bix]

Did AJPW ever actually market the June '94 & '95 matches as best singles/tag ever for the comm releases or were those all tape trader nicknames? It picked up a good bit of steam around '99.

[jdw]

The matches just got the usual com release. Pretty much all the top Budokan matches got com releases by 1994 due to TV editing matches down.

[Johnny Sorrow]

. Start discussing the Greatest Match of All Time.

Ok. So Tully Blanchard had lost Baby Doll to Dusty for 30 days. She had run away from Dusty and was supposedly in Hawaii. But during a title defense, Magnum lost the US Belt to Tully because Baby Doll disguised as a cop, ran down to ringside and gave Tully a foreign object. Tully then managed to survive a series of rematches with the belt and then said Magnum was getting no more shots. Magnum then is asking for one more shot, an "I Quit" match. The NWA won't sanction it. But then Jim Crockett over rules the NWA and the match is on for Starrcade.

 

Then two guys who are dripping with hate brutalize each other in the greatest match of all time. It ends with the bad guy trying to stab the hero with a shard of wood, butbthe hero manages to knock him away and get the shard, whic he plunges into the bad guy's eye, and the bad guy quits.

 

Magnum is left standing, bloody and enraged, while holding the quivering Tully by the hair. He looks at him with disgust, tosses the shard away, throws the quivering Blanchard down, slings HIS US Belt over his shoulder and walks out of the cage looking back at Tully with a look of disgust and the look of a real man who had the roughest day at work ever, but won in the end.

[Loss]

The matches just got the usual com release. Pretty much all the top Budokan matches got com releases by 1994 due to TV editing matches down.

What he is referring to is that during this time, a lot of bootleggers had "Best Singles Match Ever" as the tagline for the 6/3/94 commercial release, and "Best Tag Team Match Ever" for the 6/9/95 commercial release. Are those personal notes that people just ended up copying and pasting from whomever they got the tape, or did All Japan actually release those commercial videos with those names?

[MJH]

Even ROH wouldn't do that (I hope).

[El-P]

What he is referring to is that during this time, a lot of bootleggers had "Best Singles Match Ever" as the tagline for the 6/3/94 commercial release, and "Best Tag Team Match Ever" for the 6/9/95 commercial release. Are those personal notes that people just ended up copying and pasting from whomever they got the tape, or did All Japan actually release those commercial videos with those names?

Mike (Lorefice) would do that, I remember clearly browsing through his tape list when I didn't even knew who these Japanese people were, those matches were labelled as such. He got it from John, I can assure you (well, was influenced by John at the very least.).

[jdw]

What he is referring to is that during this time, a lot of bootleggers had "Best Singles Match Ever" as the tagline for the 6/3/94 commercial release, and "Best Tag Team Match Ever" for the 6/9/95 commercial release. Are those personal notes that people just ended up copying and pasting from whomever they got the tape, or did All Japan actually release those commercial videos with those names?

Mike (Lorefice) would do that, I remember clearly browsing through his tape list when I didn't even knew who these Japanese people were, those matches were labelled as such. He got it from John, I can assure you (well, was influenced by John at the very least.).

 

"Beats me. It's probably blamed on me somehow."

-jdw

 

 

John

[Matt D]

For some reason it's always striking to me just how quickly they went to the blood in Magnum vs Tully. And also how nice a dress Baby Doll had on.

[evilclown]

I'm probably among a handful of people who have seen many if not most of your holy grail wrestlers and matches, yet remain steadfast that HBK is one of the best wrestlers I've ever seen.

[evilclown]

Some factors in this:

 

1. Theatricality: I love the broad comedy of a Shawn Michaels match. While others prefer a more realistic style of bumping and selling, I enjoy HBK's ramped up version of the Flair/Race model. He was often put in the position of making his opponent appear to be monstrous and this was a good role for him.

 

2. Big Match Performance: I understand the argument that he dogged it at house shows or when he wasn't interested. I've only seen him a couple of times at a house show and that was after his return and he was playing for comedy. That's okay with me. At a certain point you go to shows just to see your favorites in the flesh.

 

What matters to me is whether he delivered on a show I purchased looking for him to put on the "Shawn Michaels Show." Whether he reportedly had a good match in San Jose or San Antonio on the road is of no interest.

 

3. Moments: I'm a sucker for those Pat Patterson moments that you never forget. I think that's way more important than the body of a match, which satisfies me if it has a couple of clever spots and never drags. I like the pathos and flair someone like Shawn can bring to the table when the match is on the line, when a near fall goes the wrong way, when the surprise heel turns, etc, etc. It's the same reason I'll always take Kobashi over old Crow's Kawada. Give me a sign you've got blood in your veins please!

 

4. Drama: Not just in the match itself. There was always something going on beneath the surface of an HBK match. What were the political implications? Who was going over? What was the mood in the locker room? Shawn's matches always told two stories, the shoot and the work. They were about characters and about people. Was that intentional? A fluke that benefited a legitimate sociopath? Either way—wildly entertaining.

[Victator]

My favorite Shawn moment was when he was being beat up by Taker and ran up the ramp. It was the last show to have the In Your House set. When Taker came after him, Shawn started pounding on the door like a girl in a horror movie.

[Jingus]

Him being slowly pulled into the casket and clawing at the canvas in a futile attempt to stop it (once again, like a girl in a horror movie) at Rumble '98 was another awesome "oh shit, Taker's gonna kill me!" moment from Shawn. He's really good at those. In fact, those moments are so good that Taker unwisely tried to do one with HHH at the last Mania, with that part where he stepped on the sledgehammer just as Trips reached for it. Shawn would have sold that moment like a motherfucker. Hunter barely even tried to act like he cared at all.

[Al]

Shawn's put on the best match of the card on several stadium shows. Wrestlemanias 23-26, maybe Wrestlemania 19. Probably the '97 Rumble. That certainly stands out.

 

And I think it's worth noting the environment of those Wrestlemanias. It's one thing to put on a good match. I think every worker would tell you though that to do it at a stadium is especially challenging. You have to over-exagerrate your movements to get over with the upper deck as well as the television audience. It's one thing to do that with a fixed cam, but with HD programming you're really performing for two audiences at once.