dawho5

This is good, but I didn't find it mind-blowing. Murakami tries his damnedest to get Nagata out of his comfort zone, but Nagata's offense is cookie cutter Nagata. I'm not saying it's no good at all, because Murakami really delivers here. But Nagata could have done a little more than what he did leading up to the finish. Definitely right up there with the best Nagata matches I've seen. Still not up to the Taue match or the Tanahashi match from 07 for me.

I've seen that 3 way ladder match from the last disc before. I have a hard time believing it tops most of what is on disc 2. I mean, Sting vs. Vader is coming up on disc 2.

This time it's 1993 and Austin is facing Dustin Rhodes in a 2/3 falls match. Really liked the work by both and how everything played out in a way that catches you off-guard watching it for the first time. Just when you think Dustin has Austin, he's foiled in a way that leaves you thinking he deserves better. Great work and great booking. Next up is Road Warriors vs. Arn/Tully from 1987. Man is the crowd rabid for the Road Warriors and they get a great extended shine. Arn/Tully build heat on Hawk, but not for long enough if you ask me. Finish works for everybody, Road Warriors get a sense of triumph and the Horsemen get to keep their belts. Good booking, match could have used about 5-7 more minutes for a better heat/finish. Rey vs. Liger from 96 started out great, with Liger understanding his role perfectly and laying in an awesome heel beatdown on Rey. Crowd starts coming around when Rey gets his big comeback spots, but the Misawa-esque (no elbows though) extended comeback is all kinds of spotty. Liger gets a little more spotty as the match progresses as well. I really preferred him as the base with Rey getting his hope spots to the back and forth spotty stuff. Honestly, I thought the Austin/Rhodes match was the best of the 3 despite being ranked lowest.

More Best of Starrcade. Hogan vs. Piper was a watchable brawl with a (wait what?) clean win for Piper over Hogan. I had forgotten about that part completely. Nash vs. Goldberg was better than Piper vs. Hogan up until the interference/taser stuff. Then came the first Battlebowl. Which was supposedly better than both, but I have to say it was pretty crappy even as battle royales go. Didn't seem like anybody really knew what was going on with the double ring setup or eliminations for a while. Awful.

Didn't Loss have a section of his e-book dedicated to the Snowman and his quest for acceptance in the racist Memphis promotion that was more than a little bit of a shoot on both sides?

Yoshinari Ogawa after watching his big matches from late 90s All Japan and NOAH in the 2000s was something of a surprise discovery for me. Never thought much of him, but the guy is a really great wrestler when he wrestles heavyweights and has to empty his bag of tricks just to survive.

Started watching the WWE Best of Starrcade DVD. Muta vs. Sting from 89 was pretty good, they started with the feeling out process that went into bursts of offense for both. They kicked it into gear pretty quick, but it made sense for a 15 minute time limit. Muta goes to the top one too many times and takes a dropkick while he's up there (good height by Sting) leading to a superplex for the win. Loved how simple moves were presented as dangerous and legitimate pinfall attempts. Windham/Pillman vs. Steamboat/Douglas from 92 was pretty good. I liked the extended shine on Windham by the pissed off faces a lot. Windham and Pillman beating up Douglas was the highlight of the match for me, good hope spots (including a literal revenge spot for Steamer), good cutoffs, ended exactly where it ought to. Windham cutting off Steamboat after the hot tag was good, because I think Steamboat as a hot tag was where he was weakest offensively. Douglas didn't have near enough time to recover before he was chomping at the bit to get back in though. The finish was too quick, especially for Pillman (the heel who had taken the least amount of damage) taking the fall. Either get the fall on Windham because he took a good amount of damage as the match progressed or cut out the Steamer heat and go to a few quick tags between the faces to do some damage to Pillman. Edit: Two random things that caught my attention in the Muta/Sting match I forgot to mention. Muta busting out a cattle mutilation in 1989 was kinda cool. And when he hit his running elbow, Muta took a moment to deal with the fact that he got no crowd reaction at all.

That counting is the ref "keeping control of the match". If somebody is doing something illegal, the ref gives them up to a 5 count to stop. I'll agree that after a certain amount of infractions, I think you would just ditch the 5 count and DQ the guy for continually breaking the rules despite warnings. Also, I've seen the ref use the 5 count like that in no-DQ matches, which makes no sense at all. He can count forever, there's no way he's gonna DQ whoever is doing the illegal thing, because he CAN'T.

To my knowledge a closed fist has always been illegal, as has choking. I don't know that the first has ever been anything other than a not-interesting-at-all thing for the commentators to whine about in Western wrestling. Choking has always been used as a heel tactic (or an adopted retaliatory face tactic) that I've seen.

Now that is a goofy rule right there.

Also on that rope thing, I remember a lot of times in All japan where a guy would grab the rope, but the opponent would somehow get their hand off the rope and just drag them back to the center of the ring in the same submission with no break. That always seemed a little shady to me.

From what I've watched, many wrestlers still take backdrop bumps that make me think of the "7/10" thing that some wrestler said about Misawa's last bump. I realize it was probably due to the amount of stress he had taken on his spine over the years, but you would think somebody would learn.

Watched a Finlay/Regal match from WCWSN and it was a great little brawl. Shiryu/Delfin was underwhelming, but the two tags that followed were absolutely phenomenal. Otsuka and some skinny kid with a lot of fire vs. Ikeda/Ono and a MPro 10-man, both looked to be from the same dome show on 12-1-96. That Mpro 10-man was off the charts amazing. If you're going to do spotty juniors wrestling, THAT is how you fucking do it. No disrespect to Toryumon/DG, but I'll take 90's MPro Sekigun vs. Kaientai over that any day of the week ending in Y.

Battlarts from the 90s would probably be a good start. Ikeda, Ishikawa, Otsuka and Ono are the guys to look for from that promotion. It's a mix of pro wrestling and MMA. Early 90s All Japan say 92/93-1996 (the Akiyama vs. Kawada stuff is gold, Taue vs. Misawa is fantastic, but most of 96 is at most average). But 92-95 were the years before the head dropping and adding length to matches just to add length came into play. Lots of realistic striking, good teasing of finishers early, great storytelling, and a very no-frills approach to things were the hallmarks of that for me. By 95 you start to se some of the invincible Misawa who people had to kill to even hope to compete, which is one downside.

I would guess Tanahashi's injuries are more from other people's offense. His style is pretty low impact, so I doubt many people get injured by something like a sling blade or high fly flow.

It's happened in Japan more than the WWE though. Not exactly in the same fashion, but all the head drops and uber-stiff shots to the head are going to take their toll on a generation of wrestlers a lot earlier even than it did the main All Japan guys. 5-10 years from now, a lot of the big names now will be retired for all the stupid things they do now. Could be that Tanahashi fellow has the right ideas about how to work a match after all.

Anyone want to take bets as to how long this argument over things that nobody is changing their mind on goes on? As long as we're talking definitions, let's define the word "troll". Does one have to intentionally be engaging in "trolling" to actually be doing just that? Or at a certain point does an argument over something that comes down to how you personally feel about something (something like, say, who was right in the Bret vs. Vince situation), is there mutual egging on going on by both sides because they refuse to quit? Also, I question whether a certain poster is, in fact, unintentionally trolling. And i'm not talking about jvk.

Is it just me, or has Shining Wiz been excessively contradictory in every thread he has posted in?

Seems like Vince is the bad guy legally. If Bret hadn't been such a douche about things I'd say he was 100% in the right morally. As it is, I'd side with Bret, but not have any sympathy at all for what happened to him given his behavior.

Job him out to Kane on the next RAW?

So the way that standards change is in judging the "language" the wrestlers are using in telling the story, not in the storytelling itself is, I believe, the argument presented. I'm not 100% behind that as I think there are folks out there who judge wrestling by the standards they did in a time period they particularly enjoyed rather than a more modern viewpoint. Like I wrote earlier, I think that there are certainly more ways of looking at a wrestling match now due to the accessibility of many, many different styles with the use of youtube, tape trading, DVD trading, bit torrents, etc. With this access to multiple wrestling styles from around the globe, people will develop different ways of judging the storytelling methods based on what they have watched. Where before, you had limited availability of wrestling that wasn't on TV in your area or actually taking place in your area. So your standards were limited by what you had access to. I think that it just adds more variety to the standards people use, not as much a wholesale change. People will take pieces from different styles that they enjoy and add them to what they already had in place, probably changing some things along the way but staying very similar at the core of it. I also think that you have different levels this question works on. If you look at the most basic level of things, standards are exactly the same as they always were. Does the story the match tells appeal to you emotionally? Then there is the question of what kind of wrestling hits the right notes to do that for you. That is the one that changes over time. And I think that has changed for every one of us as we've watched, rewatched, found new wrestling, whatever it may be. That's why I love PWO, because there are a lot of folks who post here that can eloquently sum up their feelings on wrestling in text form. It's not always something I agree with, but I like seeing how other people view wrestling. I also like reading when people write about matches that really affect them, because you can sometimes see shades of how they view that match in how they write about other matches. So yes, standards change all the time in that respect. They are also very much individual standards also. But without that, places like PWO would be unnecessary. We'd all like the same stuff because "this is the good wrestling."

Yeah, the variation where a guy puts his feet on your side and pulls straight towards himself like a madman is the one that would attack the shoulder. An armbar would be attacking the elbow.

I'd guess that you'll find more varied "standards" as to what moves/styles make a good match now than you would before. But I would agree that the things people are looking for at the most basic level has not.

Well yeah. That's why I like reading yours and Graham Crackers' reviews of matches I have seen. I know what I thought about them. What's interesting to me are the differences more than the matches we both praise.

That Tajiri vs. Nishimura MUGA match is great. I thought the Fujinami match from 2006 was better, but I'm surprised that the Tajiri match didn't make the 2007 voting. Nishimura is fucking amazing.