Tabe

Volk Han. His debut was not only the best on the card, he was far and away the best worker on the card. He legit was world class from day one.

It's....OK. He makes some outlandish claims but has an interesting story. Definitely not top-tier but...OK. I would happily part with my copy of it.

All Japan has released the full 7/29/93 house show in HD.

EDIT: I am a moron.

Small correction: 6/22/84 Midnights vs R&R is a double DQ not win by DQ for the R&R. Source: just watched the match

Very well done. As a huge fan of Han, I completely agree with everything you wrote.

I'm 160 pages into "Nitro" by Guy Evans and, so far, it's the best wrestling book I've ever read.

Here is my review of Tim Hornbaker's "Death of the Territories". It was written for Amazon but they think Tim bribed me so I can't post it there: Tim Hornbaker is a writer with feet planted firmly in two subject areas - professional wrestling and baseball history. His biographies of Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson have received universal acclaim and are absolutely best-in-class for their respective subjects and in the realm of baseball biography. Hornbaker's pro wrestling offerings have been much more of a mixed bag. His initial entry, "National Wrestling Alliance: The Untold Story of the Monopoly That Strangled Pro Wrestling" was a dense, scholarly tome packed with a tremendous amount of detail. Unfortunately, it was held back by a lack of editing, mixing of real & stage names, and being out of order chronologically. Hornbaker's history of the World Wrestling Federation, "Capitol Revolution: The Rise of the McMahon Wrestling Empire" featured better editing but its back cover falsely claimed the book covered the WWF up through the late 80s (it actually stopped in early 1984) and it suffered a bit of sameness with regard to material in comparison to his NWA book. "Death of the Territories" is Hornbaker's latest foray into the world of pro wrestling and it largely corrects the flaws of his prior books. Stage and real names used in a way that makes sense? Check. Chronological order? Check. Better editing? Check. "Territories" tells the history of how the pro wrestling industry divided the United States into various areas ("territories") in which promoters would have essentially exclusive control of the wrestling business. Competition between territories was largely non-existent. This format allowed dozens of groups to flourish. Then came Vince McMahon and cable television in the 1980s. Suddenly, fans in one part of the country could see wrestling from another part of the country. The boundary lines became blurred and the rumblings of competition began. McMahon had the foresight to know what this meant for the future of wrestling and immediately began making moves to expand his World Wrestling Federation after purchasing it from his father in 1982. One after another, McMahon moved in on various territories and swallowed them up. This eventually led to wrestling being reduced, essentially, two companies with McMahon's WWF being the far larger of the two. "Territories" recounts this expansion in tremendous detail. There are plenty of dates, attendance and gate dollar figures to satisfy even the most demanding of readers. Hornbaker has always been known for his deep research and that is on full display here. I am well-versed in the subject of wrestling's territories and the expansion of the WWF and I still learned quite a bit from this book. I would think EVERY wrestling fan would find "Territories" educational. If "Territories" has a flaw, it's the inevitability of the story it's telling. We all know how it plays out and where it's going. In addition, there's a certain sameness to much of the detail. McMahon's expansion mostly boils down to something like this: Lure away a couple of star wrestlers, land a TV station in a territory, begin running live events, buy out or force to close the competition, rinse and repeat. That's not Hornbaker's fault - after all, that's how it really played out - but some might find this just a touch repetitive. Also missing are new/fresh interviews with the subjects of the book. Sure, some major players, like Verne Gagne, are no longer alive. But many others - McMahon, Jim Crockett, Bill Watts, Jim Cornette, Greg Gagne, etc - are but they are not interviewed here. We do get quotes but they are all from news stories or prior articles from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter or various newspapers. Hornbaker's style is to do research, not interviews, but I think it hurt this book just a bit. Some additional "color" and stories would have helped balance out the litany of statistics. So what's the bottom line? "Death of the Territories" is very, very good. It tells a well-known story with a depth of detail not previously seen and tells it well. With "Death of the Territories", Tim Hornbaker has hit his stride as a pro wrestling writer. Any fan who was around in the 1980s or has explored that time period at all will enjoy this book and find much information that they didn't previously no. Definitely recommended. Five stars.

Yeah, if you ask people to name famous shoots, you won't get past 3 or 4 nominations before the Maeda/Choshu kick comes up.

A few off the top of my head. Unfortunately, I don't have video links for them: - Akira Maeda vs Kiyoshi Tamura, UWF, 10/25/89 - Tamura comes out firing and Maeda retaliates with legit knees and just kicks the crap out of Tamura. Have heard Kiyoshi ended up with a fractured eye socket and he missed a few months of action. - Koki Kitahara vs 150% Machine, UWFI, 6/26/96 - Just a one-sided squash shoot that is just brutal. - Kiyoshi Tamura vs Gary Albright, UWFI, 6/18/95 - This is more famous than the first two. Albright is booked to lose and doesn't like it. He'd jobbed to Masahito Kakihara a month earlier and being asked to lose two months in a row to guys smaller than his left leg set him off. And he was unhappy with his money. Anyway, he basically just stops cooperating, laying around and deadweighting Tamura. Then he apply holds and refuse to release them while the referee (whose name escapes me) was pleading with him "Break Gary! Break!" over and over. Albright eventually did the job for Tamura but made it clear that he was losing on purpose. Tamura was so upset by the whole thing he cried in the ring. They rematched two months later, Tamura again winning, in a completely normal match in what was Albright's last UWFI appearance.

My exposure to live wrestling is relatively limited but, without a doubt, the biggest pop I've ever been present for was... New Blood Rising, Vancouver, BC. Bret Hart comes out and the place went absolutely insane. I'm not even a huge Bret fan and I was standing on my chair screaming. It was an amazing moment and just about deafening. Watched it later on video and WCW just destroyed the sound, turned it way down and really killed the moment.

This is easy for me - #2 all the way. That gets me UWFI, RINGS, UWF 1.0, UWF 2.0, Kingdom, JCP, and Mid-South/UWF. Absolute no-brainer.

The referee did not count three. He did a 2.99 / 3.00 count. Really, it's just more terrible work from referree Kyohei Wada. Kawada didn't move a muscle it was clearly meant to be the finish. Wada didn't count the 3 for ... some ... reason and so they instead did one more move with a semi-conscious Kawada and that was your finish. I've always disliked Wada for a variety of reasons - his counts give away finishes, he's overly involved, and so on. This match is just another example of it. The worst is a match with, I wanna say, Misawa vs Dr Death where Wada literally DRAGS Misawa on top of Doc for the pin. Seriously. Good grief. I wouldn't rate 6/6/97 as 5 stars either but it's a great match.

Man, nobody loves shoot-style more than me and even I wouldn't put two U-Style matches in the top 30

My favorite part of Abby/Takada is that Takada clearly has no desire to actually make contact with Abdullah. So he barely touches him during the pin, for instance.