Loss

Mattel denied this at the time. That was speculated, but never confirmed.

Are we ever going to find out the truth about that damn firing? There has been lots of speculation, but nothing ever confirmed.

Agreed this was a great post! Looking forward to seeing you jump into 1992.

Glad to see Kevin Ridge walking through this. This is one the yearbooks that hasn't had as much staying power as others, and I'm not sure that's warranted. Hopefully Kevin walking through this will draw a little more attention to it.

While it's a completely horrible idea that can be destroyed with even two minutes of thought, I would find a storyline where CM Punk exposed that COO HHH used to pay wrestlers to take dives for him oddly compelling.

From the WON, re: the Windham turn. "I haven't seen this myself, but from every account, the thing was tremendous, especially when one considers that it obviously was a spur of the moment decision since they had cards set up around the country with Barry & Lex vs. Flair & Arn Anderson or Flair & Tully Blanchard on top throughout the month of May." He goes on to say that they did the turn because houses were disappointing at the time.

I noticed there was no mention of Paul E. when discussing managers. Does he rank above Gary Hart during this time period for you guys?

7 minutes! I'm cracking up.

Flair and Gilbert had a match on Main Event around this time. I don't remember much about it, but I think it was about 12 minutes and may be worth checking out sometime.

I'm not sure if you saw the right Windham/Gilbert. They had two matches two weeks apart, both in the studio. Windham won the first one.

I like that the shine went so long in the first MX vs Fans match. The Rock & Rolls were gone and the MX had to go into overdrive to get over the rivalry, and not make the Fantastics come across as a second rate team. So they sold like hell for 20 minutes and then put them over clean to help get the Fantastics over and thus get the feud over.

MX vs Fantastics from 5/14/88 actually went around 50 minutes IIRC. You saw a clipped version, JVK. It took up the entire hour of Worldwide or close to it. No complete version exists to my knowledge, but some versions are more complete than others. In one specific market, they aired a longer match than in others, which I've seen and is worth seeking out.

Good show, guys. One point I'll make is that I don't think the Windham turn was premeditated at all. He turned as a reaction to what was happening in the match. Arn and Tully were surprised. JJ had been hoping it would happen, but he didn't go into this match expecting it. Still listening, but wanted to throw that in.

The '87 Garvin title win I watched recently and truly felt it was one of the greatest matches of all time. I highly, highly recommend it.

I haven't heard anything about Flair since Reid passed. I'm sure he's having a tough time, but has Dave talked about it where maybe I just missed it? Just curious how well he's holding up.

I know. Just throwing that out there. If anything, it seems like we have fans so passionate and knowledgeable about every other type of wrestling out there, so it would be cool to have a few Dragon Gate fans hanging around.

However, fans are welcome here.

Awesome!

I would also add that if Eddy Guerrero looked more credible against Brock Lesnar, he literally had to sacrifice his life to do it. I'm all for the roles in a wrestling match fitting the size and appearance of the wrestlers, but when I hear talk about not being able to buy someone against someone else, I immediately start thinking about steroids and wrestlers dying young, and this mindset being a large part of why.

I always thought they should have re-done this in 2004 with Heel Trish Stratus and Eugene.

Both guys are considered the lesser members of some pretty great tag teams. Gibson has some cool stuff in his arsenal like the Indian deathlock, but I'd think I'd take Fulton in a straight-up comparison. I kinda like him as a babyface hothead, and he really seemed like a guy who loved wrestling. What do you think?

I don't know if he's top five for 1990, but coming up with five good in-ring performances in 1990 is a challenge, much less a top five workers list.