Loss

Sam Houston is a man among men.

The Watts family wants FIVE MILLION DOLLARS for the Mid South library? That's more than it cost to buy the entire WCW organization. Crazy.

You SO wanted to name drop TD91 when talking about GLOW. Ivory owning that library is hilarious! Good show, very informative. I wasn't even aware of the $1 Wal-Mart DVDs. Has anything good surfaced on any of them?

Cool. I'll listen to this when I get home.

Yeah, I have a membership that keeps auto-renewing itself, so might as well enjoy it. I'll probably stop trolling BA now, though. Now, anyway.

I haven't been on since yesterday afternoon. Hmmm ...

Yes, Misawa finishing Taue off is the finish. It is 4/20/91.

They also never say violent, they say physically intense. For violence, they say physicality.

WP, I thought of you and almost mentioned Cuban Assassin, but then I remembered he was pushed in most places outside of the NWA that he wrestled. Wasn't he fairly pushed in Stampede?

Dan Ginnetty found a version that shows 48 minutes of 51:32 that aired on a Midnight Special last year. I picked it up from him as a bonus when I picked up the full season of '91 AJ TV, which is all in EX- VQ from Beta masters transferred to DVD.

Added: Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada & Kenta Kobashi v Jumbo Tsuruta, Akira Taue & Masa Fuchi (AJPW 04/20/91) ****3/4

I used to LOVE seeing Rocky get destroyed on NWA TV Saturday mornings. He sold every move like utter devastation and flapped around like a fish out of water when he got hit with ANYTHING. It was so over-the-top it was comical. Seeing him take full-on somersault bumps off of Nikita Koloff's Russian Sickle was the highlight of my youth. Rocky King even got a brief push in 1990 against Flair and Ole Anderson, and he later was repackaged as Little Richard Marley and started managing The Freebirds.

Yeah, I'm going through '91 AJ TV right now, and felt the same way when I saw Rick Rude gyrating his hips ... before a match with Misawa, Kawada and Kikuchi. Bizarro world indeed.

Can't believe I didn't mention the whole Rick Steiner/Woman thing, which played out over 6 months of TV and started with her as a dorky girl in the audience who just liked Rick Steiner slowly morphing into a very different "Robin Green" and finally becoming Woman and having a feud against the Steiners. That whole angle was so brilliant from start to finish.

You never knew when George South might have a competitive match. Lee Scott was a crazy bump machine. The State Patrol was amazing for being jobbers in the NWA with a WWF-style gimmick. I hate to count Joel Deaton since he was competitive in AJPW, but he was a great jobber on TBS during the Crockett era too. My favorite jobber angle has to be with Lex Luger and Lee Scott in '89. Luger has just turned heel and comes out and offers to make the match a US title match out of the goodness of his heart, Scott signs the contract and WHAM!, down for the count. Luger was still getting cheered after his heel turn at first and I think this angle was good for him. Anyone else have favorites or standout moments?

I think my favorite thing about that match is Barry Windham bleeding about 90 seconds into it. He sure didn't waste time. War Games was great. It was always like the heels had some weird contest among themselves to see who could bloody themselves up the most and sell the most.

The fightingest champion in WWE history was the victim of a heinous attack and has been taken to a medical facility.

I don't recall Owen Hart ever working lucha libre or shoot style. He did work British style though.

Flair had the belt at that point for no other reason than ratings were down and they wanted someone to blame for it. Bischoff said as much on WCW Live at the time.

Doc never worked Mexico or shoot-style, and his US matches aren't near Vader's. He's a guy who was good at times in Mid South and great at times in All Japan, but mostly just there. I like him, but he's no Vader.

Jericho did a lot of jobbing too, but most of the time it was at least to set up a future match. Rey just did random jobs without retribution on a regular basis, like any other midcarder.

Lita taking those chairshots was pretty awesome at the time. Hard to say what was better between that and the miracle match with Dean Malenko.

The Hardyz sold so much merchandise and had such a money-spending demographic in their hands from '99-'01 or so that I'm curious if they could have made that Austin/HHH feud work with more time to build it and Austin and HHH willing to sell.

I should clarify -- apparently that was Meltzer reporting something someone sent him yesterday in his news update, not something he was criticizing Monsoon for himself. Here are his direct words on Monsoon from an e-mail: