NintendoLogic

Haha, that's a good one. But no. Counterpoint: if you're looking at douchery, burying Booker T is pretty far removed from making a deal with a dictator to bring 150,000 starving peasants to your show at gunpoint.

I watched the 8/22/85 Devil/Chiggy match again last night, and it occurred to me that it's the best possible New Japan juniors match. There's a pretty long stretch of matwork at the beginning, but it feels like an actual struggle and not something out of Cirque du Soleil. Just as importantly, it felt like the matwork was necessary to wear down the competitors to open them up for the bombs that came later in the match. And there were actual transitions to the bombs instead of them just being thrown around your-turn-my-turn style.

So are Misawa and Kawada. See, that's the problem. US-style rasslin'/sports entertainment is your only frame of reference, and you're acting like anything outside of that doesn't exist. It's kind of like saying that film is inherently limited as an art form and only talking about Hollywood blockbusters.

So jdw's a fan of ManU, Duke, and the Lakers? Dude...

I don't think I can imagine a human being more obnoxious than Pettengill. Mooney wins by default. See if you can figure out the connection besides the obvious one: Vader or Andre the Giant?

What to make of the figure-four then? He almost never won with it, and on at least one occasion (vs. Steamboat at Chi-Town Rumble), going for it was directly responsible for him losing the title.

This plays into something I've been saying for a while now. I think the Cena backlash is largely rooted in the fact that he works so many matches against guys who are smaller than him. Working from underneath against Umaga is quite different from working from underneath against Shawn Michaels. Recall that during Cena's first feud as champion, against JBL, the crowd was behind him. They started to turn on him during the Jericho feud, and the full-blown backlash began during the Angle feud. But later on, I recall he got the crowd back behind him during his feuds with Umaga and Khali. And they seemed to be behind him last night when he saved Zack Ryder from being dragged to Hell by Kane.

I think 2005 is a good starting point since it really represents the beginning of the modern era of the WWE. The period from 2002 to 2005 is the most "workrate" (in the Meltzer/SKeith sense)-centric the WWE has ever been, with at least one of Angle, Michaels, Benoit, Guerrero, and Jericho being prominently featured at pretty much every PPV. Starting in 2005 and continuing over the next couple of years, guys like that start to move into the background/leave/drop dead. This coincides with the elevation of guys like Cena, Batista, and Orton, who represent a completely different style of worker, into the main event.

Yeah, doesn't Angle do the pop-up into top rope belly-to-belly in like every big match? Also, CM Punk did a top rope hurricanrana at MITB. Speaking of which, does anybody outside of Mexico ever do a hurricanrana that actually ends in a rana? All the so-called hurricanranas I see are just headscissors takedowns.

Ric Flair's a gunslinger, daddy. He's like a kid out there in the ring.

Watching some Jumbo reminded me of another one. Nobody does a Thesz press as a pinning predicament anymore. Well, Jushin Liger does according to Wikipedia, but I haven't seen any of his recent matches. Everybody else uses it as a setup for a flurry of mounted punches.

CM Punk has clearly watched a shitload of tapes. I'd say that's true for most of the guys who have spent a significant amount of time in ROH, actually. It's just that most of them seem to be looking for cool moves and spots to lift rather than a better understanding of storytelling.

I agree with your overall argument, but I don't think this is entirely fair. Yes, Rey is trained and highly skilled. But so are John Cena and Randy Orton and Big Show and Khali (from a kayfabe standpoint). For Rey to be credible, he has to be presented as so much more skilled than his opponents that it makes up for the size handicap. It's true that wrestling shouldn't be seen like a shoot. But it isn't entirely fanciful, either. Just because people can buy Wolverine taking down men several times his size in a comic book doesn't mean they'd buy something similar in a wrestling ring. Hornswoggle could be the most skilled wrestler who ever lived, but presenting him as a legitimate threat to the heavyweights would stretch suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. Also, the idea that a larger fighter has an advantage over a smaller one isn't something that Vince McMahon created out of whole cloth. The adage "a good big guy will always beat a good little guy" has been around in boxing for decades. That's why non-worked combat sports have weight classes. And in Japan, where the masses haven't been subjected to Vince's propaganda, guys like Jushin Liger and Naomichi Marufuji have struggled to get over when pushed in the heavyweight division. Totally agree. It's an effective spot. The psych is that Ric is a Dumb Fuck, tries something, and the face out smarts him to catch him. Effective comedy spot the fans love. On a deeper level if you happen to watch 10 matches where Ric gets tossed off the top in all ten? If you think a second about it from "Wrestler Ric's" perspective rather than Worker Ric's perspective, it's kind of stupid: going to the top fails to work roughly 95% of the time for Ric. If Ric were truly the best wrestler in the world that he claims, he wouldn't try something that fails 95% of the time. But like I said... the pysch is that Ric is a Dumb Fuck. John FLIK and Gregor's responses when I made this exact point a couple of pages ago is a textbook example of the intent versus interpretation debate. I'd say they were over-intellectualizing something that Flair himself never seemed to put a great deal of thought into.

Here's a discussion I think puts the ring/crowd psychology distinction in clearer focus: http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/index.php?showtopic=57396 I think it was Jingus who once mentioned how difficult it is to have a compelling match centered around legwork because one of the wrestlers is spending most of the match lying on his back or hobbling around.

I remember reading a piece on psychology that argued that it was actually two separate concepts: ring psychology and crowd psychology. Ring psychology is doing things that make sense from a standpoint of trying to win a match. An example would be Bret Hart working over an opponent's back to set up the Sharpshooter. Crowd psychology is doing things to elicit a reaction from the audience. An example would be a typical babyface comeback routine. Ideally, you want to have both.

To put it another way, if match quality doesn't matter, and if logic and storytelling don't matter...isn't that essentially Russoism? Or at least a pretty big step down that road?

I think the weakness of Jerry's arguments is borne out by his inability to name any concrete examples. Can he come up with a single great match that doesn't make any sense or tell a coherent story? Or a single all-time great worker who doesn't have any great matches to his name? In the latter case, he tried to go with Ted DiBiase, but even he said that he doesn't consider him a serious contender for all-time top 10, so I guess that shows how far he's willing to take that argument.

I've bitched about simultaneous hot tags in other threads, but there have been a few matches where the heel made the tag first and got the cutoff. I remember Smackdown Six-era Edge doing quite a few flash pin attempts. But speaking of indieriffic movesets, I've noticed that in a lot of cases, indified versions of a move have supplanted the classic versions. For example, except for CM Punk, nobody does a proper bulldog anymore. They all do the one-handed version.

*goes to cry in the corner* I'm kind of reminded of Dave's review of the WCW DVD. He talks about how when Johnny Valentine first came to the Carolinas, he hurt business because he was so different from what fans were accustomed to seeing. But once they got used to him, business ended up being stronger than it had been previously. I'm not saying that'll be the case here, but it does suggest the need for patience.

I regard playing one's role well, like logic and storytelling, as a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Like, it wouldn't make any sense for The Great Khali to do shooting star presses or space flying tiger drops, but that doesn't mean I want to see what he does instead. There are some roles that I simply have no interest in seeing played. As for the original topic, I think Loss put it best when he said that the key for wrestling wasn't to be realistic but to be plausible. Wrestlers don't occupy the real world, they occupy a world where vertical suplexes and Russian legsweeps are effective maneuvers. So the key for me is stuff that makes sense within the confines of the unrealistic reality of pro wrestling. What I want more than anything else is for wrestlers to act in a way that someone who was trying to win a wrestling match would plausibly act. Things like Ric Flair going up to the top rope just to get thrown off and John Cena's opponent throwing a punch just so he can duck under it and do a Protobomb that are totally contrived really turn me off.

Damn it, I arrived too late to put my old Nintendo Powers to good use.

Dean Ambrose's finisher in FCW is an Air Raid Crash, but William Regal called it an Emerald Frosion. If Regal can't keep that shit straight, I don't think the rest of us should sweat it too much.

When I first saw this, I thought it was really good but clearly inferior to 6/9/95. I began to appreciate it more as I learned more about the context, but I still can't put it in greatest match of all time territory. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but it's mainly two things that don't click for me. First off, the in-ring action is a bit lacking at times. Everything from the Taue neckbreaker on is off the charts, but a lot of the early stuff, like the Akiyama FIP segment, is a bit pedestrian. Second, I wasn't really digging the story it told. Instead of Kawada gaining redemption and continuing his journey to the top, we got Kawada not really holding up his end and needing Taue to bail his ass out repeatedly. Again, it's a great match, but it's not in my AJPW top five.

Honestly, this felt like overkill to me. It was paced well and never boring, but they didn't do anything here that they couldn't have done in 30 or at most 40 minutes. It felt like they were just killing time the last ten minutes. I had a similar reaction when I saw the 9/30/90 tag match. I guess 90s AJPW time limit draws just don't do it for me. It seems to me that when they didn't have a specific climax they were building to, they tended to meander quite a bit.

Have you seen his recent stuff? I haven't seen a whole lot of it, but he seems more interesting to me since his heel turn.