Pro Wrestling

Here at SD so I thought I would break the Spoilers to you as they happen live. Dark Match Alex Riley beat someone with a lumberjack beard. Saturday Morning Slam Dolphin Ziggler beat Zach Ryder after a decent match. Wade Barrett beats Yoshi Tatsu in a quick match.

The first name that springs to mind for me is - Mike Awesome This guy truly had it all - size, power, speed, agility, a great physique, a star presence, you name it. His feud with Masato Tanaka was brutal, you could truly believe that these two guys not only hated each other and it brought out that charisma in Awesome, which WCW and WWE (to a great extent), failed to. It's a shame that WWE didn't make Awesome into a big player during the Invasion storyline. He could have had choice matches with anybody, if treated like the powerbomb-vending monster that he was meant to be. Awesome died in 2007, but he left behind a really great portfolio of work, in promotions…

It is Observer awards season and I am always bothered by the candidates that people talk about for the best wrestling book award. People rarely discuss the importance of cover art to wrestling books. Is wrestling book content overrated on the internet? The IWC seems to ignore how important advertising/ballyhoo is to books. Books are really not about actual content (in the end they all are essentially just letters and pictures on paper organized in different ways). This is especially obvious in the case of wrestling books which are filled with careless misspellings, odd grammar, haphazard organization, and self contradicting statements. A wrestling book's value …

I don't want to overly compartmentalize everything. I think the purpose of having subforums is to make the threads easier to find. But I had a few other ideas for subforums that I wanted to hear your thoughts on: * Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame -- All of the HOF discussions could go here. I like the idea of creating a new thread for each person on the ballot, and bumping it every year if the person is a return ballottee. * Philosophy 101 -- We have a lot of these types of threads. About what wrestling should be, and how it should be watched, and what works for us personally. I thought that may make an interesting subfolder, but I also don't want the main P…

Just starting a new thread for those that want to discuss so that others can avoid spoilers.

Discuss? For me personally, I don't feel championships with weight limits belong in wrestling. Sure, from a kayfabe perspective, wrestling is supposed to be competitive, subject to it's own unique set of rules and classifications of wrestlers. This idea is particularly apparent in Puro, where weight divisions are still very much alive and well (although NJPW could potentially phase out the heavyweight and junior heavyweight titles as the top belts, in favour of an "openweight" world title - given the similar popularity of both weight divisions these days). WWE eliminated their cruiserweight division in 2008, prior to this, they eliminated the weight limits on th…

Sure, but as long as we're talking about shit that has nothing to do with in-ring ability, Bret has fewer failed marriages. Is it more important than their number of successful marriages? If not why? If so, why? Everyone knows that it's my cast iron belief that the non-in-ring aspects of a particular worker are as important as their matches. We've had this argument before, but I'd like to have it out again. In my world, being involved in a feud that had a fantastic build with great promos is almost worth as much as being involved in a great match. For example, when thinking about DiBiase's career I'd give that DiBiase-Jake feud the same weighting as I'd give the D…

To my surprise, youtube now has a fair bit of 80s AJW. Some of it I've seen before and some of it I haven't. A lot of it is crap, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about this era and the workers from it. Starting with MIMI HAGIWARA... -- Mimi was trying to make it as an actress, singer and model when she met Jackie Sato (IIRC) during a TV appearance, and that's how she got into wrestling. She made her debut in '78 but didn't get a push until 1981, and in fact, in 1980 a doctor recommended she quit wrestling due to internal injuries. She "bulked" up by 10kg and her break came in 1981 when she beat Yumi Ikeshita for the All Pacific title on the…

With all the talk about tag team wrestling lately I thought this could be a cool topic. The obvious answers of course are Eaton, Arn, and Morton. Eaton and Arn because they were guys who made their bread and butter with a variety of partners and were obviously great and Morton because he was essentially the all time face in peril (in my view a role he was so good at that it shoots him into the discussion with the absolute top names in wrestling history). Setting those names aside I'd like to throw some other names on the dock for consideration. Barry Windham - I actually think he's in the discussion for best tag team wrestler ever. Was good with a variety of op…

In this thread, I'm talking about occasions where two guys hate each other so much that the rivalry seems like its beyond wrestling and getting into the depths of their souls. Where it feels like there is more than just a match at stake but their pride, their manhood, even their entire values systems. This is quite rare. I am not talking about great or well worked rivalries, for example, Austin vs. McMahon as good as it is does not have it. I am talking about times where there's just something intensely personal about the hatred these two men have for each other. I can only think of three examples: 1. Magnum TA vs. Tully Blanchard, not just the "I Quit" match at Starr…

Would like to compile a comprehensive list of NWA TV that centered around 1 match taking up the entire one hour program. 7/19/85 Rock n Roll Express vs. Russians 5/3/86 Tully Blanchard vs. Ron Garvin 1/20/87 Ric Flair vs. Barry Windham 5/14/88 Midnight Express vs. Fantastics Can anyone fill in the gaps (if there are any)?

Ok, I've seen the match get praised everywhere. I even ordered the show on demand due to the praise. I felt a little let down by it in general, which I think I mentioned in a thread somewhere here recently. However, I want to keep an open mind, so please... anyone/everyone, sell me on the match's greatness. What am I missing? I thought the spectacle of it was awesome, but the actual in-ring work I felt was very lackadaisical, so have at it.

I just ran through the board a little bit to make sure this thread was never started, as it's something I thought of yesterday while at work and thought it would be interesting conversation. Over the years, there have been guys like Ricky Steamboat, who were career babyfaces and, looking back, if they had ever turned, wouldn't have worked as a heel because it didn't fit their persona or style. Looking at today's landscape, what workers are the type that should never turn, as working from the other side wouldn't fit for them, based on personality or style? My examples in this case are all heels - most notably, Wade Barrett and The Miz. Those two are the type …

I need a positive thread before I turn everyone at this board completely against me forever. So yeah, wrestling is awesome. We all have talked many times about what made us watch to begin with. But I have to say that what keeps me watching is that there's so much buried treasure still out there. For as much "new" (read: old) wrestling has been found and discussed over the past few years, there's still so much more where that came from. This is the hobby that keeps on giving. Wrestling is awesome. I don't mark out like I did when I was a kid as much anymore, but I really love watching athletic performers manipulate emotions of people through a medium of fake sp…

Discuss.

Just wanted to remind everyone about the Blogs function here. Anyone can start one, and I think it would be really cool if one day, that was kind of a calling card for this board. Kudos to Ohtani's Jacket for writing so much about lucha that's worth reading in his blog, which has gotten up to 15 pages worth of material now. I encourage others to use that page as well. Maybe I'll even start updating mine regularly.

So, I'm looking for some new ideas. Every year, at the Royal Rumble gathering at my apartment, we do a standard Royal Rumble pool - everyone throws $2 in and picks numbers at random, and the person that draws the number of the winner gets the cash. It keeps everyone interested in the match as they groan and say "aww man, I got David Otunga/Hornswoggle/Jim Duggan AGAIN!?!", and makes it fun for the non-fans who come just to hang out. What we're looking to do this year is maybe change things up a little bit, or at least modify the current pool that we always do. So I turn to you, the fine folks of PWO - do you guys partake in any kind of pools for the Rumble? And if y…

We have people here who are some of the strongest proponents of the WWE ECW on the internet. We also have people here who put together and/or participated in huge and lofty original ECW projects. Therefore, I'm putting it to the board, which of the two had more high end matches? What was better?

This was humorous and I had to post it here. It was on the F4W site through my Google Reader, but when I tried to link to it directly, there's no content there for some reason. Anyway.

Before heading out for a last drink and celebration with the wife and friends, here's a big shout out and thank you to the PWO crew for making me think more about wrestling and making it more enjoyable -- which is exactly why I and I'm sure others love this place. Brody in 2013!

I'm very excited for the 1991 Yearbook as a follow up to 1990 and because 1991 is one of my more neglected years in terms of viewing footage. Over the past couple of weeks, I have went back to re-evaluate and see some some matches for the first time from New Japan heavyweights. The 1991 G-1 was really eye opening in terms of the career matches several wrestlers put on and is in the running for the best tournament ever. Choshu did a great job handling the booking and worked against Hashimoto in my second favorite match between the two of them. Vader and Scott Norton had an excellent big man's match, with a cleverly booked finish. Muto and Norton had their best sin…

Reading the ECW thread left me wondering...where the heck has Christian been? Is he still hurt? I thought he was cleared for action a while ago? They could definitely use him to fill a spot right now for sure.

"Longevity" is a notion that gets tossed out a lot in wrestling discussions on the web in both discussions of stardom (see the Sting thread at Classics) and in ring performance (see...well every thread ever on in ring performance). I was thinking about Ric Flair today and the debate that has sort of jumped around from thread to thread on the board about him over the last several months and it struck me that in terms of available footage the longevity of Flair as a high end worker is actually lateral to or LOWER than a lot of guys who we would generally presume have "less" longevity than him. Unless I'm forgetting something the earliest we can really get a decent …

For someone to be as much of a wrestling fan as me and not have a favorite wrestler probably seems odd, but I don't. I have my personal opinions on who the best and worst wrestlers are, but my personal attachment is not to wrestlers themselves. It is to matches, angles and promos. In other words, the performance is what grabs me (the message), not the wrestler (the messenger). I just wondered if anyone else sees wrestling in these terms. I'd love to participate in the Fave Five thread pinned at the top of this board, but I don't have a clue who my five favorite wrestlers are. I could list my five favorite matches easily. It's the difference between rating a meal…

The idea that Flair was not versatile is just batshit insane to my mind. Let's talk about versatility. What's versatile? This: The good old potato. You can make them into fries and have them with your steak or burger, or you can put them in a wildly different context like in the main course of a meal at the 3-star Michelin restaurant and they don't look out of place on the plate. And what's more, in both contexts, the potato is doing a lot of the work in terms of making you full and giving you a nice dining experience. You can mash potato, you can make it into chips, you can roast it, you can boil it, you can fry it, you can sautee it. You can serve it with f…