The Art of Writing Match Reviews

[Exposer]

I used to write terribly long reviews and it actually became a chore. Now I put in a paragraph analysis. The negative of not doing in-depth reviews is forgetting important pieces of matches, but I can live with that. I also want to mention that I never take notes or do anything else while watching matches. I've seen Dylan do that shit multiple times and I never understand how he even catches a single moment of a match. I have to put my full attention into a match. Although I did take notes in college because every exam was straight from the damn notes.

[supremebve]

Read my Trish microscope thread for how I write reviews. I've never put that much though into a writing style for that to be honest, It's just a wrestling review.

 

I usually don't do PBP unless it's a match I doubt most of those I am writing for have studied or looked at beyond a cursory glance. Anyone doing PBP for the 3 match Flair-Steamboat on here at this point, I don't see the need.

There are two sides of the Flair-Steamboat coin. The first is that it is extremely difficult to write about something that everyone has already written about. The other side is that there is a reason that everyone has written about that subject. How do you write about a subject that is worth writing about, but has already been covered to death? I wrote about them the other day, but initially skipped over them, because I didn't have anything new to say about them. My review was trying to be some combination of a review for someone who had never watched the matches, and a review for someone who had watched them 20 times each. I don't know if I succeeded at either, but I felt like my writing would always incomplete if I didn't at least try to put those matches in perspective.

[dawho5]

I used to do long, long PBP reviews. I'm usually down to a short paragraph now where I include what I liked and what i didn't. Then just a sentence or two to summarize. I try to give a general feel to how I felt the match went rather than try to explain the whole thing in a review. I enjoy reading reviews of matches from a lot of people though. Marty Sleeze (note the spelling) tends to do a lot of PBP stuff in his, but he keeps it really entertaining. I like reading Chad and Parv's reviews a lot because their personality comes through in most of them. And after I've watched a match I always like to see a good amount of reviews for it. Everyone notices different details about a match and it's fun to go back and try to find the things you didn't catch sometimes.

[fxnj]

I read reviews to get a new perspective on matches if it's about I've seen or to get a feel for if I'd like the match if it's about something I haven't. I don't care much about what the consensus on a match might be or how my opinion of the match falls in line with. I don't think it's any different than writing literature criticism. I could completely disagree with a review but if it's well-written and gives me a new way of looking at a match I'd call it a great review. The "what more is there is there to say" just seems like a ridiculous cop-out to me since there's writings that have literally thousands of long journal articles published, so if someone reads 5 or 6 reviews and can't think of anything else to add that's more an indictment of the person as a reviewer than it is a statement on a match's popularity.

 

On the play-by-play, I think it's gotten an unfairly bad rep because of the style used by Meltzer and his imitators where it's just list off the moves and crowd heat then tack on some snowflakes. I agree that's a horrible way of looking at a match, but play-by-play can be great if you're taking the effort to string those moves into an overarching narrative and giving your own bits of interpretation along the way. For the more complex matches, I'd argue that play-by-play style is actually far more effective (though much more difficult to do properly) than just a quick opinion paragraph.

[ScToTeE]

I used to write terribly long reviews and it actually became a chore. Now I put in a paragraph analysis. The negative of not doing in-depth reviews is forgetting important pieces of matches, but I can live with that. I also want to mention that I never take notes or do anything else while watching matches. I've seen Dylan do that shit multiple times and I never understand how he even catches a single moment of a match. I have to put my full attention into a match. Although I did take notes in college because every exam was straight from the damn notes.

 

Taking notes on the fly is an important skill for ethnographic fieldwork, so I directly attribute my pro-wrestling reviews for making me a better researcher. It's a very handy skill.

 

That said, lately I usually watch the match first to get a feel on the flow, pacing, story etc. The shorthand notes mean I can leave the type up for the next day as well.

[Johnny Sorrow]

What people forget about when writing reviews is to be fucking entertaining.

THIS is good reviewing.

 

 

 

SATANICO vs. SANGRE CHICANO – 5/26/1989

(DEAN RASMUSSEN)

When you were young and your heart was an open book, you used to talk shit about the old guys in the Lucha Libre. You didn’t know that the point of Lucha Libre was a lot closer to a Chicky Starr Puerto Rican Street Fight at Roberto Clemente Stadium than a Chikara Trios Tournament Final (not that there is anything with enjoying your Chikara. You (I) are (am) not your (your) mom.) Your eyes were opened when in the mid-90s, you actually watched the EMLL at the end of all your AAA tapes. You then noticed that the best guys in AAA were the guys following the lead of El Hijo Del Santo and basing every match on violence and hatred. You notice the subtle nuance of the greatness of Los Pandilleros coated in their own blood as they tried mutual triple homicide with Los Destructores. Then you realized that you realizing the subtle nuances of wrestling is bullshit. When you were a kid, you didn’t care about Nelson Royal’s European uppercut – you cared about Nelson Royal’s uppercut because he was hurting that motherfucker Johnny Valentine – Valentine who motherfucking SMILED when he wouldn’t release the figure four on Tim Woods – breaking Woods leg right there in the ring as Valentine laughed! FUCK YOU, JOHNNY VALENTINE! YOU ARE EVIL! TIM WOODS WILL DON THE MASK AND BE MR. WRESTLING! AND YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FEED OFF THE PAIN IN HIS FACE ANYMORE, YOU SICK MOTHERFUCKER. AND THE GOES DOUBLE FOR THOSE SADISTIC FUCKS – THE MINNESOTA WRECKING CREW! OLE – YOU SACRIFICED YOUR OWN BROTHER TO BUST OPEN MR. WRESTLING’S HEAD WITH YOUR OWN BROTHERS HEAD! TIM WOODS HOLDS UP MASK COATED IN HIS OWN DRIED BLOOD! YOU SICK FUCK! Ole then said, “To hell with what you people think, I know that Gene would do the same thing to me if he knew we would win the match.” You realize that the beauty of a tope isn’t the prettiness of the gymnastics but how much it much have sucked to have Ciclon Ramirez’s big fat ass drive you back-first into the family sitting in the fixed seat of the front row. The best luchadores can bring the illusion of kicking your ass in an ally after drinking a fifth of scotch into the ring. THUS. THIS MATCH. First one notices that both of these guys and yourself were much younger and thinner in 1989. The other thing you notice is something completely lost to modern wrestling- disdain and animosity in a collar and elbow tie-up, where you make hateful faces at one another while the ref tries to make you break it up in the ropes. So then they move straight to punching each other in the face and I now realize why Schneider wanted me to watch this. Man, Satanico will just knee you right in the stomach. The closest I will come to this kind of stomach pain was last Wednesday when I tried the one dollar McRib knock-off at Burger King. Sure it was good, but… The first caida is big mostly for the manly punches but you do get the moment where the ref brings the nasty crossface to break up Satanico putting his heels to Sangre’s face. The ref does this throughout the match and its a cool spot as Satanico fights harder against the ref each time to make sure he is getting added pain infliction on Sangre. Second fall is Satanico getting pissed off at Sangre and they crank up Punching To The Face Machine and it’s truly starts rolling. Satanico would deeply kick your ass HARD in a bar fight. Second caida is as fast as the first caida – as Satanico procures the submission after hinting at the ass-beatings to come. Third fall starts in the crowd and goes back to the for one more Satanico versus the ref spot and then it spills back out to the floor and you remember why Satanico is so fucking awesome. The brawling leads to matwork which leads to submissions and then they repeat each in longer sequences- each getting more intense. Sangre Chicano is awesome just burying his fists into Satanico as Satanico flops around the broken fixed chairs. Satanico fires back like a motherfucker, crushing the last drops of handsomeness out of Sangre’s face. Sangre Chicano then just CRUSHES Satanico with punches to the face. And then they kind of mill around until the count out. Come for the punches. Your longing for blood will go unquenched.

[cactus]

My main gripe with the majority of reviews I read is that they usually spoil the ending and reveal the winner and how they lost. I can't stand PBP reviews either. What's the point of watching the match if you're going to tell me every little thing that happened in the match? I get that analyzing everything in a match is something that people enjoy doing, but for me, I don't want to hear about when I'm reading up to see if a match is worth my time.

 

Ditch's short reviews of the matches he hosts on his sites are great. They're short and snappy and show genuine enthusiasm.

[Matt D]

I've thought about this a little, but just haven't had time to post. The main thing I'm trying to do with a review is to answer the question of "What can we learn from this match?" What can we learn about the wrestlers, about the style, about the point in time? "This is a good match" is something that can be learned, but it's by far not the only thing that can be. Eight times out of ten, it's probably not about what can be learned so much as what can be reaffirmed, and I think that's okay too.

 

I can't slip in all of the pop references that someone like Eric does. I can't craft mine to tell broad sweeping tangentially related entertaining stories like DEAN or Raven Mack. I don't utilize star ratings. But I try to distill something from the match that I think people should know about it.

[TheDuke]

I just wanted to bump this thread, not because of any particular great insight into the match reviewing process, but just to say that my favorite play by play match reviewer to read right now is Superstar Sleeze. He has posted a lot of match reviews on the board here recently, and for some reason I find them very entertaining to read, without him having to resort to too many jokes or gimmicks. I am not a professional writer at all, but I find where a lot of people just have a list of what wrestling moves were used in which order, I feel like Sleeze is framing the action like a story, or a comic book, and its just easier to picture the match in my head, especially for ones I haven't seen.

[Ricky Jackson]

Sleeze rules!