July 2000

This was the night after Tarzan Boy took Satanico's hair for a second time at Arena Puebla. Satanico went after him a bit but not with the fury you'd expect, He wore a do- rag to begin with but lost it after the first caida and I think this is the first time that I've seen Satanico completely bald. Tarzan Boy trash talked him a lot. You can see the seeds of rudoism were always there when he does that sort of thing. The match is mostly a showcase for Porky. Did he need another showcase? Your enjoyment of this will depend on how interested you are in seeing Porky dance to his theme music for the hundredth time this year.

They gave us just enough of a taste here to make this match seem much more anticipated in the future. Some great power spots and the Goldberg press slam into powerslam spot was amazing. The finish did a pretty great job of setting up a 3 way with Goldberg spearing both Booker and Goldberg and Booker looking strong as champion. Then of course, drunk ass Kevin Nash beer and all comes out and jack knifes both Goldberg and Steiner in a ridiculous manner that doesn’t lead to much of anything. **

This was really the night where they tried to push Lance Storm as a big thing. Awesome still has been much improved in this role than in ECW even in the short snippets of the matches we have seen. Storm possibly could have been a decent factor of the upper mid card and we will track his plight from now until the closure of the company. *1/2

We get a five minute video to Sarah McLaughlin’s “I Will Remember You” showing clips of Shane Shamrock’s life. This is terrible that they present him as such an upstanding citizen given the way he died. What is even more tragic is that we see video of Christmas Day 1997 featuring the baby that was also in the house when Shamrock was gunned down by police. Some epic 2000 themes here from Intergalatic to Last Resort from Papa Roach. This is a cool collection of ECW castoffs and indie talent around the area that we haven’t seen a ton of so far in 2000. Opening has the guys pairing off and we get some butt ugly botches featuring Creed and Chetti. The York vs Flash Sequence wa…

Buff’s acting is terrible. Also, how dead and lame does the Nitro Grill look? We get a clip from Nitro when Kanyon gives Judy Bagwell one of the worst Diamond Cutters in history so this epic angle has arrived. Storm has put the Canadian flag sticker on the US belt already which was a nice touch. Buff and Awesome interrupt OH Canada. Buff and Mike Awesome is quite a weird face team. We don’t get much time for a match here but still long enough for Buff to botch a Blockbuster. We get a ref bump because, Russo and Kanyon ends up beating Awesome which is a bit of a surprise even with the screwy finish at this point. *

Rick says he is looking to retire those wannabes once and for all. Madaja is in the corner of Steiner and Jarrett so that pivot has happened. Jarrett is really trying to get slapnuts over. Stevie Ray calls Madaja a hoochie. Cat is on commentary and I continue to be baffled at how much praise he received in real time. I guess he is at least charismatic in a way. Madaja climbs the top rope and Cat tells her to get her ass down. He busts out some handcuffs and handcuffs himself to her. Steiner and Jarrett don’t have any chemistry at all. Bobby and Tony seem pretty cordial with each other this late into the run at least. Booker gets the hot tag and runs through his offense. J…

I have no fucking clue what I just watched here. Also Sprach Zarathustra blares out of the speakers as a body bag is led to the ring. From there, the alien emerges and the match is on. I will say the actual action after that is a lot of fun. Tons of springboards and big dives but almost everything is hit cleanly. In all honestly, I think this could be compared a bit to the Thundercats match from 1991 that has a ton of fans. I enjoyed it for the absurdness and it did surprise me with the athleticism of the competitors. The Japanese indies everyone. ***1/4 (6.3)

This was a fun match between a low ranked BattlARTS guy and an indy nobody. Nothing BattlARTS here as it's just a technician vs. Flyer match. They do some fun mat based arm work early on, junji has really fun ways to spin into armbars. Azteca impresses me by being shockingly decent, able to go on the mat, selling his arm, taking a really nice whiplash bump for a Junji flying clothesline, taking a nasty kick to the gut and doing a fine job at imitating a graceful luchador in some of the sequences here. Perfectly good down to earth junior match, having matches like this is the reason why BattlARTS was such a fun quirky fed.

Taira is becoming my boy. The opening 10 minutes of this were all on the mat and Malenko has such a method of just smothering people that it is engaging to watch just to see if the match ever will result in a standing position. I want my shoot style to feel grimy and an uncomfortable experience for the workers and Malenko exudes that. The final two minutes become a kick fest with Malenko showing some kicks you ordinarily don’t see very often and then Taira firing off his usual array. Taira didn’t have quite the precision on his spinning kicks that he has before but the speed was there. He also lands a crossbody which was a pretty alarming spot in a shoot style contest wor…

This was the longest singles match on this show. And it was pretty much a DVDVR dream match, as they pack all their ultra choice swank junior moves into a well worked basic opening match, and doing a really good job at it. Just the way they set up the big dive by teasing a Hidaka dive, then following it up with Saito's headstand scissor to the outside and finally leading into the big suicide dive makes me think these two are better at this stuff than any current non-mexican junior. Maybe it's because I've developed a burning hatred for stupid over the top junior wrestling, but this type of well worked basic wrestling leading into well timed, graceful rollups and submissio…

This was a 10 minute match and pretty much a highlight reel of their stuff. Meaning Ishikawa looks like a superstar on the mat, and Usuda attempts to turn him into a vegetable with rotten kicks and headbutts. Despite the short length and both guys being familiar I was impressed by how well worked and elaborate their exchanges were, and even while being very familiar with both workers I bit on a few of the submission nearfalls. Nifty little bout.

This was like 40% Battlarts, 60% New Japan juniors. It's not really what you want from these two, but you take that 40% when it's there and I guess if nothing else it's interesting seeing how they approach the 60%. There's a kind of novelty aspect to it. It's a little experimental. I don't know man, you want Aquemini André 3000 but at this point you take what you can get and even The Love Below had 'A Life in the Day of Benjamin André.' Ono was actually really fun dicking it up and working full rudo. He went after Usuda's leg for a spell and would hold on longer than necessary on rope breaks, then he went after the arm and approached that the same way. In between he even …

Strong BattlARTS tag match here. Hijikata is someone that I can’t remember much of a highlight from before this point in time but Yuki leads him around here and he looks competent on the mat and even gets in some good near finish submissions with his choke on Yuki as he is able to just position his leg over the rope break. That was integral in making him feel like a threat even though it was pretty predictable for him to go down at the end to the Octopus. Yone picked his spots here which was refreshing and I liked Nagai coming in and adding little touches to the match like kicking away at the aforementioned rope break from Ishikawa. This was very enjoyable and mixed in wr…

Solid first fall with Panther being the ring leader of the rudos. He pretty systematically takes care of Dandy with the highlight being Dandy firing off at Panther with punches and Panther casually but forcefully grapevining his leg to create too close a distance for him to get his punches off and that changing the tide. The falls ends off of a Crazy moonsault. Things are a little more hectic in the second fall with Panther going after Parka and Crazy stomping away at the leg of Dandy. Parka keeps making the rudos miss and makes them show ass in some funny spots. Dandy comes in doing a running limp and pissed off. King and Crazy also come in and have a fun as shit little …

This is the ultimate Onita Pro match. A bunch of grimy, indie scummy dudes going out and fighting for 10 minutes with Onita's charm and charisma carrying the heavy load. This had some memorable stuff including an amazing fire spot with fire engulfing the back. Onita is unable to break a table on three piledriver attempts and of course he ends up picking up the win off of a powerbomb. The match was only 12 minutes long and we got some minor clipping so the action maintained a quick pace for the entire time and had some brutal action to compliment the stakes. Afterwards, we of course get Onita's long ritual of spitting water and engaging the crowd and it is entertaining to …

Another cool Foley opening promo with our final build up to Fully Loaded. Mick announces that if Rock is DQ’d, he will lose the title. That gets some boos but makes sense given that the violence has put things out of control leading up to the PPV and Mick says he can’t be seen as a pushover. Shane, Benoit, Jericho all get some promo time and Benoit locks on the crossface on Jericho. HHH music fires up and out he comes to continue the attack. Rock comes out to run the heels off. This did a good job of setting up stuff for the present tonight and also the future. The tag match is splendid and up there with the better tv offerings from WWF in the year. All of the issues …

Ringo Mendoza was out there doing his thing. He still knew how to work a fired up babyface comeback. This featured spectacular moves from Antifaz and Safari and big-time bumping from the rudos. I'm not sure what happened to the trio of Felino, Antifaz and Safari. They were pushed as an excitement machine during the Summer months but it only last the Summer. This came down to Ringo vs. Panther and I was disappointed when Panther caught him the armbar. The replay showed that Panther held onto the rope 'cos you know Ringo would have quit otherwise. Heart of a champion, Ringo Mendoza.

Wagner and Los Infernales made a pretty cool team. The good bits in this were good but a little bit predictable. Mind you, Televisa is editing it so that you only see the good bits which also makes things predictable. This built to a Wagner vs. Rayo singles match which I don't think we have on tape. That's a shame because it's an interesting match-up and I feel like we got shortchanged on Wagner's best run in the company during the Summer season. No Rayo singles match, no Casas matches, His standing in the year-end awards may have been higher if we'd had that stuff. Heck, we even got shafted on the trios title feud with the Villanos where we're missing a lot of the matche…

We don’t really get the match here but this sets up the big upcoming four way between these guys and they did a good job there with a ton of blood and hate being thrown around here and the segment culminating in Pierroth crashing through the CMLL sign on the entrance way. Ano was incapacitated for the whole segment and tended to by the doctors while Villano and Perro attacked Pierroth. NR

Perfectly fine but a bit generic tag action. Matthews/York do have some flash that makes them an exciting team in the lineage of the Hardy’s and Mamaluke/Guido are able to ground them and bring some semblance of a story by working them over. The match didn’t get a lot of time to develop with a FIP segment until we go straight into the finish. Mamaluke picks up the win with an interesting looking inverted DDT. **1/2

I like house show RVD. He has less time to mug for the camera. UNfortunatly, it is kind of sad to see how much of an after thought Corino is here as he works over RVD well for a bit with RVD selling his back but then RVD starts his comeback and just steamrolls through all of his chair offense that I am not a big fan of and wins with a 5 star frog splash. I get the notion of sending the fans home happy and this was a generic house show but I would have liked to see Corino as more of a threat given how strong an asset he has been for the company overall. *** (5.9)

Certainly an indie cage match but one that had some big bumps and kept the action moving along. Bad Crew still lacks a lot of polish in their execution but for the role they fill in EWF they are effective. I love seeing Hit Squad both throw people around and launch their bodies into the cage. The highlight came in the finale as Bad Crew tapes up one member of Hit Squad to the ropes and then places the other on a table on top of a table. Then Bad Crew #1 cranks up a legit bulldozier and raises it up with him on top to give a big splash for the victory. The spot came off as memorable if pretty contrived. The bit of taping the other member of Hit Squad to the ropes was criti…

A bad effort for these guys. Everything was really sloppy and beyond that, the match didn’t have much of a narrative at all and felt like a series of spots. Rising Son and Taro were the biggest offenders but this was easily the worst Dragon has looked so far. Excalibur was probably the best overall and he hits the spot of the match with an insane tope where it looks like he nearly breaks his neck. Overall, bad matches are going to happen and its nice to see from the standpoint that none of these guys is going to be perfect. *1/2

I had a blast watching this. Throw logic out the window as we don’t get a single tag throughout the entire match and the action falls in line of what cool spots we are doing next. However, for a 2000 spotfest, this was done really well. Acid is smooth as silk and impresses me time and time again with how he can transition from big move to big move seamlessly. Kashmere for his part starts things out with Blade and they do a fairly complicated indie respect sequence flawlessly. Blade trips a bit on the ropes because it is Ric Blade but then he nearly kills himself torpedo’ing down with a shooting star press to the floor. Dewey Donovan gets Liger Bomb’d by the referee and Mo…

I can’t hear a word of Zandig’s promo which is par the course. Executive Vice President Robbie Mireno joins House and Eric on commentary which is a humorous title for him. Zandig does a running powerbomb from the ring to the floor and catapults Pain over the wrestlers that were going to catch him. I liked the opening moments of this a lot and Pain looked impressive hitting a divorce court and doing some arm work on Zandig. Once Zandig comes back, the match comes to a halt. He hits the H8 Club with a barbed wire lobster but then climbs the top rope as the fire alarm goes off. Pain starts climbing the fence area of the arena when Zandig grabs him and powerbombs him through …