The Microscope

I have become fascinated with 1980s US Wrestling. The territory system and the mystique of so many of these larger than life stars has ensnared me again. I think Parv did a deep dive on this footage with Pete maybe in podcast form. I have flickers of memories of this, but I could be mistaken. The famous Larry Matysik's St. Louis 12 disc set is on Impact+ Streaming Network of all places. My free trial rolled over and I figured I should get my money's worth out of it now. I hope to watch a disc a day, we shall see! Shorter form notes than my usual long reviews: Larry Matysik's hair in 1979 is I dont know how to describe it. I will say this I dont know how any hum…

I can't find a thread for them so I'm starting one. Is there ANY doubt that this team is one of the top 10 tag teams off all time? They stayed near the top or on top of every territory that they ever worked in, they left there mark in Memphis, Mid South, NWA/WCW, SMW, & had great showings in the AWA & WWF. I always thought Ricky carried the team & Robert was lucky to just have a spot but thats just my opinion, what do you guys thing of the Rock & Roll? I think it is an absolute abortion that they are not in the Observer Hall Of Fame!

Didnt feel like St. Louis so decided to watch a random episode of AWA TV. I watched All Star Wrestling was this the A-Show or was it Championship Wrestling? I have seen a lot of great AWA promo with Mean Gene, but there were promos on this episode. It was 35 minutes long, usually an hour of TV is 38-42minutes run time, do people think the promos were cut or did All-Star Wrestling not show promos? Also where was this taped? Twin Cities, I presume? Spacious venue. August 2, 1981 AWA All-Star Wrestling AWA World Tag Team Champion High Flyers vs a Mexican/Puerto Rican jobbers. Heel jobbers go after Greg's eyes and try some roughhouse tactics on Brunzell in the sec…

- Great worker. One of the best in history. - Can ground and pound with the best of them on RAW Underground (R.I.P.), baby! - Former WWE 24-7 Champion. - Ranked 412 out of 500 in the 2017 PWI 500. - Somehow outlasted his former tag team partner Tino Sabbatelli, who has a better look and more charisma in his pinkie finger. That just goes to show you what an exemplary worker Riddick Moss was, is, and always will be. - Their team name was the God Gifted Athletes, which is exactly what Riddick Moss is. - Google lists him as "Trained by: WWE Performance Center." Can't beat that, even if you tried!

Chigusa Nagayo vs. Leilani Kai, AJW All-Pacific title, 8/21/86 This was always one of my favourite Chigusa matches and it holds up really well. It starts off with Chigusa doing a lot of her shoot style kicks and submissions and Leilani not having much defence against them. Then when Kai finally does get a takedown on Chigusa, she launches a pretty vicious assault on Chigusa's leg and the match becomes this gritty brawl with Kai even working over Nagayo's fingers. There's some pretty innocuous outside inference at points, but it's more or less heel girls running in and getting chased out by the AJW ring girls. In the main, it's a fight, and even the high spots section …

Thought I'd start this off with all the McManus I've watched. Some of these are just short notes: Mick McManus vs. Jackie Turpin (1/9/80) Fun performance from the veteran rudo. Jackie Turpin was a boxer turned wrestler and a decent foil for McManus. The finish was well booked. Seemed like the ref was going to stop the match, but Turpin got an equaliser and McManus was DQ'ed. Good stuff. Johnny Saint vs. Mick McManus (11/20/75) Classy match, especially after the equalising fall. Great performance from McManus, considering he was already 50 here and making overtures about retiring. It was a similar sort of bout to Saint's matches against Breaks in that Johnn…

Hello, everyone. Recently I came across this very peculiar Twitter account https://twitter.com/ThatsOurMongo It reunites many of Mongo's best moments in WCW, and while there are some... questionable events there, I must say that things like him catching Eddie for a Tombstone Piledriver and his suicide dive against 'Berg are actually rad. So, I must pose a question to you, fellow wrestling watchers: is Mongo the best of the worst wrestlers ever, or he's passable enough to not even be considered a bad wrestler? How does his overness get justified? He's fascinating in so many levels.

Fujinami is a wrestler I've long thought I'd like without ever seeing much of his work. As a longtime All Japan mark and all-around wrestling philistine, I've never had much occasion to dive into the work of a man who is, according to the inarguable dictates of science, the 20th greatest wrestler of all time. Of all time! But I have an NJPW World account and some time to kill between their last letdown of an event and upcoming, dog-ass awful tag team tournament, so why not watch every Fujinami match on the service? They didn't make it easy (I hesitate to blame Gedo personally, but who else is there?). Normally a wrestler has two entries in the tag list; one in…

Just happened to watch two of his performances as The Genius recently: the Beefcake match from the 90 Rumble and vs. Hogan and Warrior on SNME before Mania 6. Struck me, not for the first time, that the dude was fucking incredible. I reckon he did that schtick better than Georgeous George. Think he deserved a much much bigger push, think of the matches he could have had in, for example, Honky Tonk Man's spot. How do people rate him here? To me this is a guy that totally gets it like Heenan. I mean everything he does is good, nothing wasted. Played his role to perfection.

This post is somewhat inspired by the recent Cageside Seats Evaluation piece. For years Dave Meltzer has called Gorilla Monsoon one of the worst commentators in the business. I believe he was even voted as such by the WON readers on a few occasions. But I think we all realize Meltzer sets the tone for those votes and significantly influences them - whether he realizes it or not, means to or not. Needless to say, a lot of people disagree with Meltzer. In fact, it seems to me that most wrestling fans online (and off) have nothing but fond memories of Gorilla Monsoon. Meltz seems to think his word is irrefutable gospel when it comes to this stuff - he even criticiz…

Dylan, Bill Thompson and others made a case for him in the GWE forum and Dylan brought up Jericho. I am going to make a case for Jericho this week but wanted to get the ball rolling. Anyway... Y2J or V1?

From pure talent alone, Barry Windham is one of the most talented wrestlers I've ever seen. He's basically good at everything. He was a great heel, a great face, great at selling, great at bumping, great at timing, great at structuring a match, great brawler, great charisma, could be really good on the mat, could work any pace, and is arguably one of the greatest tag wrestlers who ever lived. Starting as far back as 81 and through 93 Barry was absolutely tremendous a lot of the time. Once he went off to the WWF to do silly gimmicks and went out of shape he lost some of his awesomeness but I do enjoy some of his 99 WCW work. So, is he regarded by people here to be one of t…

It was his birthday yesterday. I met him years ago, at a Vancouver All Star Wrestling event... then a couple of years after that I moved to Japan and met him again, and he remembered me from Vancouver. We've been drinking buddies for eight years now. He's a great guy, a great wrestler (in my opinion, one of the absolute best veteran indie wrestlers in the world) and a true friend. Hopefully I'll have some Kuuga-related drinking and wrestling stories to tell in the new year. Here are a few pictures from the past 8 years: This is the bar where about 40 of Kuuga's friends had our year-end party. It was three hours of all you can eat Chinese food, and all-yo…

Watched some early 1990's WCW today and Arn's great performance in the 1/26 Flair/AA/Sting vs Sawyer/Muta/Dragon Master and the 2/18 Flair/AA vs RnR had me thinking about the definitive Arn match. For tags, a top candidate is the 11/19/91 Arn/Larry vs. Steamboat/Rhodes from the Clash. But what about singles? Tully had the Magnum I Quit and Garvin WWW matches. Flair has the Steamboat, Windham, etc. to choose from. Windham had the Too Cold Scorpio Clash match. But did Arn have that one really great singles match?

He's one of the most maligned wrestlers in modern times, widely regarded as the worst wrestler ever to win a world title. But I've also heard so many wrestlers be praised for "getting a good match out of The Great Khali", so could he really have been that useless? I do rememeber him having a really good match with John Cena in 2007. So to get to the bottom of this, I'm going to go through his televised singles matches and watch stuff that looks too long to be a squash, or is with wrestlers I recall being praised for doing good work with him. The Great Khali vs. Rey Mysterio - Smackdown 05/12/06 We start the match with a staredown. That is, Rey Mysterio staring a…

Tetsuya Naito for the past several years has the most beloved wrestler in New Japan but is he one of the best wrestlers in regards to his matches? Some people would call him the best, some would call him terrible and sloppy at times. I think he is something inbetween. I find his work to be inconsistent. He can have these great matches, like the Tanahashi trilogy in 2017 and the Omega matches in the G1, which I thought were great to watch. But then just look like he is sleep walking his way through a match, like his Minoru Suzuki matches. I find him best when he is playing off his opponents rather than being worked over (I'm going to use Suzuki mat…

The Triple Crown Heavyweight Champion and undisputed ace of All Japan, Miyahara has had some hype as one of the best in the world this year. Dave was pimping him as top three, alongside Okada and Will Ospreay. I've noticed some others in the wrestling journalist/podcast sphere pimping him as a great big match wrestler in title matches. I'm completely unfamiliar with modern AJPW though. What do people make of the guy and the claims that he's one of the best in the world? What matches stand out to make that case? I'll eventually get round to watching some of the pimped matches and posting about them myself but I'd love to hear from some of you who are more …

This thread has been taken over by the GWE project in 2014. The journey starts here.

We got RINGS, U-STYLE, so why not a guide to UWFi? I've been watching everything in chronological order, struggling through Tom Burton matches, and while there are a lot of stinkers, there is plenty to enjoy in the wacky world of Nobuhiko Takada's shoot-style paradise. Here's the "best of the best" by year, starting with 1991. 1991 Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Masahito Kakihara (5/10/91) Kazuo Yamazaki & Tatsuo Nakano vs. Yoji Anjoh & Yuko Miyato (5/10/91) Tatsuo Nakano vs. Yoji Anjoh (6/6/91) Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Yoji Anjoh (7/3/91) Nobuhiko Takada vs. Tatsuo Nakano (7/3/91) Tatsuo Nakano vs. Yuko Miyato (7/30/91) Kazuo Yamaz…

What started as Parv throwing me the scraps when it came to wrestler bios on Titans ("Kelly, I don't have time for DeNucci, would you mind...") has evolved into me becoming pretty excited when a new obscure name pops up on the docket to research for an upcoming show (coming soon...Rick Stallone!!!). If I'm fated to be remembered as the jobber expert, well, I'm going to be the best damn jobber expert out there. I'm going to use this thread to work some things out, going where few fans dare tread, and hopefully retain my sanity. You can have your projects where you view the greatest matches of the 2000's or classic Japanese wrestling, that's easy. You can have your Flai…

To me, Steve Grey is the everyman of British wrestling. A nice, regular looking guy who just happens to be a world class professional wrestler. He was good at football, taught carpentry to old-age pensioners and handicapped people in his spare time, and had the best resume of matches of any wrestler on television. We're extremely lucky with the volume of Steve Grey matches we have. In a lot of cases, we have extremely limited samples of a British wrestler's work, but with Grey we have a fairly sizable chunk of both his 70s and 80s work. For my money, Grey is one of the best babyfaces ever, a feat he achieves by managing to be extremely likeable and an outstanding worker. …

When he first arrived into NXT, I was actually looking forward to his work. His debut match against CJ Parker - Lord rest his soul - was impressive, he was in good shape, and the visual of him bleeding hardway was a very good first impression. With the Sami Zayn feud, he ended up looking like a monster, defeating his former best friend after referee stoppage. It was different, brutal, and made him look like a smart and brutal heel. Then the Cena feud came along, and while the promos were nice, his aura started fading away, and after that program and his losses to Balor (in also underwhelming matches), he was pretty much dead. His 2016, to me, has been the driz…

Parv brought this up casually in another thread, naturally believing Ted to be the better talent. I'm not so sure about this as I think it's a very complex comparison. On face value, you'd think they had very close careers. Both guys peaked in terms of national fame at the same moment and in the same place, late 80's WWF. They are two of the "big four" of more technically talented top heels of that era in the WWF (with Savage and Perfect) and are gimmicks everyone remembers. Their in ring careers ended less than a year apart and both ended up as suited NWO minions towards the end. But on face value I find this to be a very hard straight comparison to make. Fo…

Toward the end of the latest Wrestling Culture podcast on Funk, Flair and Lawler, I started to think about other U.S. based workers who I would put in the absolute top tier. The three names I keep coming back to are Stan Hansen, Buddy Rose and Nick Bockwinkel. I have talked about Rose many times and will probably go on another Hansen kick soon, but for now I want to talk about Bock. Bockwinkel is a guy I have been up and down on over the years. I had always been impressed by his very best matches, but I also saw him as a guy who could grind a match to a halt very quickly and never really considered him on the level of a guy like Flair when it came to touring/ace…

So, one of the goals I've had in the back of my mind for quite some time now is to watch every match in this series. I may be the only person on this forum interested in this series, but I'm not the only one on earth judging by some recent uploads. Here's a quick recap of the matches I've seen so far: