[1976-12-09-AJPW] Dick Murdoch vs Killer Karl Kox

[Edwin]

If you are looking for big bumps, high spots, fancy matwork and thigh slap happy strikes to the air, then look elsewhere. This is just to chubby, mean dudes punching each other in the mouth, elbowing each others foreheads and caving each other's heads in with nasty knee drops and stomps. Great wild bloody brawl.

[EricR]

This match is our favorite match of 1976:

 

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2015/01/1976-match-of-year.html

[NintendoLogic]

I'm a bit curious as to why this is listed as a no-DQ match (not just here but in other places as well). Doesn't it end in a DQ?

[paul sosnowski]

Cagematch says it is a No Contest

[Jetlag]

Tubby old white dudes punch eachother in the face for 20 minutes and it rules. Jesus why are old fat dudes so much better at wrestling?? Just the sucker punch from Kox alone that opens this is greater than what any skinny young dude currently wrestling can do. Most of the match is Kox beating down and cheapshotting Murdoch, who in turn comes up with all these great wind up punch combos. Despite this being No DQ Kox makes it a point to HIDE THE OBJECT. I guess keeping it in your pants is handier than carrying it around all the time and risk losing it. This is really about two guys with a variety of ways to hurt eachother, and a variety of ways to in turn put over that hurt. Kox is just ridiculous here, bumping huge, whipping his head back anytime he gets punched (a very minor but important thing he does better than just about anyone today). The best moment is easily when he eats the Calf Branding, coming up with the blood from his brow and this „Where am I?“ look on his face, and then he gets fucking kicked in the face with the saliva flying out his mouth... aside from all the great punches there are also some vicious stomps and knees from Murdoch that really look like they land with a ton of weight right on Koxs face. The crowd is really into Murdoch as a babyface, and while the match isn't super heated as a whole they react to all the key moments perfectly. To utter some criticism, the pace of the match (at roughly 20 minutes length) is a little slow, but really... this is two masters in their prime working their craft. And you get plenty of old style Brainbusters to top it off. Million star classic, really.

[joeg]

Just watched this expecting to love it, and didn't. My single biggest pet peave in pro wrestling is  closed fist punches that don't leave a scratch. Two 300 pound men punching each other in the face and head for 25 minutes and neither man hurts their hand. Neither man's face gets cut or bruised until after 15 minutes. And there were over a dozen punches with brass knux before we saw blood. So a 25 minute match worked solely around closed fist punches that takes a long time to get going wouldn't be my cup of tea. It just defies logic and keeps me from suspending disbelief. Once it go going I enjoyed it. However the 10 minute stretch of just punches where they were both selling the accumulation of punches to the face but they weren't bruised or cut just took me out of it. To me this is an example of why closed fist punches should be used sparringly and when they do connect, it should be treated like a big deal immediately. Closed fist punches shouldn't be a way to slowly escalate the match.  

[GOTNW]

I last watched this about 12 years ago when we were doing the "Best of Japanese Pro Wrestling Before 1980" project, and I remember thinking it was really good, but I didn't rank it in my top 20. This was at a time when "two territorial US wrestlers throw worked punches for 20 minutes" didn't sound very exciting to me to say the least. I've softened my stance on the genre and figured I'd see how this looks now.

Well, 12 years later, sorry, this still isn't some sort of super classic. You wanna talk about great punches, there are plenty of great punches here, but unfortunately there's an unignorable amount of strikes which could have by all means been thrown by Triple H, Randy Orton or Seth Rollins, the kind of punch which isn't a ridiculous wide swing and a miss like a John Cena punch, but doesn't actually look good either, and if you're working a match based around great punches, that's gonna take it down a notch. Lawler vs Mantell this was not. Also, if you're having a match based around projecting violence (which is what they were doing, this wasn't an actual display of violence like an Ikeda vs Ishikawa, Hashimoto vs Tenryu, Valentine vs Wahoo), you'd expect it to be treated seriously so that the gravity of the violence is sold. If you ignore common sense in a ruleset for a bit (how preposterous a no-DQ match ending in a no-contest is), this was booked to perfection, with almost laboratory conditions for these two to have the best match possible. A special stipulation which emphasizes violence and a brigade of wrestlers breaking them apart, meticulously isolating their limbs with Murdoch and Kox breaking their grips only to clash into one another again and again. Some of their ideas definitely had potential and could have been executed and dramatized as great moments (like them both falling down after an O'Connor roll attempt and Kox trying to swing at Murdoch but falling down due to exhaustion), but I'm rating this not on potential but on execution, and their execution was such that the crowd ended up laughing at them. That's now how you sell something which is supposed to be a brutal battle of attrition.

It may sound like I am harsh on this, but with the reputation it has, I think it's going to be fine, it can withstand some clarity in criticism. Its strengths are still there (a lot of good looking punches, tight lock-ups, a very focused working style which plays to their strengths and a pool of blood), but as far as wild out of control brawls of the time go, this isn't in the same stratosphere as something like Oki vs Sakaguchi from 1975. Still well worth a watch. Great match, 8/10.