William Bologna

You mean when he was making the exact same referee-related gesture as the other referees, including a black guy? When he was obviously indicating a three count, and the same mania that got people all pissed off about a Jeopardy contestant took hold? No egg on my face; I'm not the one who got trolled into hysteria by 4chan.

I just re-read Seanbaby about talking Fujita's impossibly thick head, so I'm ready. What should we watch? I remember kind of liking a title match against Nagata, even though he was doing a Goldberg impression.

Thank goodness they got Mox and Kingston out of there to clear the way for the Canadian Dork Show.

I went looking for some Dick Murdoch content, and I found Murdoch vs. Steve Williams (which was great). Ross immediately - immediately - started talking about football. It wouldn't have been any different if it had been Ed Ferrara doing commentary.

I recently watched the Wrestling Classic. I wouldn't recommend it except that Ventura is just off the charts great through the whole thing. He's a heel, but he's always right. And there's just something about the way he says "Gorilla." They really did us a disservice when they had him edited off the tapes. You might be right about Heenan. I remember getting pretty annoyed at him in that Rumble, and I was shocked to see it talked about as an all-time announcing performance.

Edge looks like he’s 500 years old. Flair would look better in that spot.

Kimura wrestled into the 21st century, but I was thinking more prime Hart time-traveling into prime Fujinami's position. I'm always surprised at how many people on PWO think so little of Bret. He did pretty well in the GWE voting, but the thread about him is a lot more negative than I would have guessed. I'd be interested to hear some detail on what you mean by dyed-in-the-wool WWF worker. He worked fine with Flair (I want to say better than Fujinami did, but it's been a while since I've seen Hart vs. Flair); he wasn't out of his element when Hakushi was doing Space Flying Tiger Drops on him. I can understand that Hart's character might not land for someone (I have a similar block with Kenta Kobashi), but your comment that he was subtle and nuanced gets to why I prefer him. I don't find any nuance in Fujinami's work. He does a pretty good fighting spirit babyface, and that's the extent of it. And as far as the actual work goes, I cannot imagine the guy who wrestled Owen at WM10 having a bad match with any of the more technically-minded NJPW guys. I'm thinking Hase as the dream opponent, and Hashimoto as the worst case. I don't know that I've ever seen a Hart match built around him getting potatoed, which is an area where Fujinami excelled.

Why is that one bad match his fault and not Misawa's? The idea that Bret Hart couldn't have a good match against Kengo Kimura beggars belief. He wrestled Choshu a bunch of times. Maybe I missed it, but nothing in Fujinami's work suggested any progression in his character or his attitude toward his rival. The one time he's supposed to show anger, getting himself disqualified for being too vicious, he can't muster the fire he needs to make it convincing. In his matches with Choshu and Inoki, the other guys are a lot more memorable than Fujinami. For a top guy, he was too often a bystander in his own matches.

Speaking of Shawn Michaels being a subtly unprofessional prick, did he undercut/sabotage Diesel at WM 11? I haven’t seen that match since it happened, and I don’t know the provenance of the claim.

The whole OK sign thing is a damn semiotics class, with an emphasis on working a work and working into a shoot.

You're moving the goalposts, because you realize that it's ridiculous to accuse the black guy being a white supremacist for doing the exact same gesture as Wuertz. The OK sign is supposed to be a white supremacist signal, not a QAnon one. They're not synonymous. It is possible for people to have some bad ideas without subscribing to all of them. We have two people in the same line of work wearing the same shirt making the same job-related gesture, but we're to believe that it makes one of them a white supremacist. I'll also note that while I couldn't imagine counting to three with my middle, ring, and pinky fingers, a majority of the people in that image are doing so. Maybe they don't realize they're QAnon white supremacists.

He is making exactly the same gesture as the second guy from the right. You seem to be assuming that because he has some opinions you don’t like, that means he has all the opinions you don’t like.

I went Brent. I watched a whole lot of Fujinami matches, and I enjoyed it, but at no point did he establish himself as a compelling character. Bret Hart the worker never did anything that Bret Hart the character wouldn't do, if that makes any sense, and I always wanted to watch that character. Fujinami probably has the better CV in terms of volume of good work (in large part because Hart got Goldberged out of having a late career), but Bret was better at being a pro wrestler. I think Bret could have done what Fujinami did, and I don't think the reverse is true. Put Hart in there with Kimura, Hirata, etc., and he'd be perfectly capable of wrestling good matches with them. Could Fujinami have pulled off the double turn with Austin or the feud with Owen? And I use those examples because, while there were promos involved, the storytelling was largely physical. That is exactly the kind of thing Fujinami wasn't any good at.

These are great, @The Thread Killer. Thanks for doing them. Interesting contrast between the two interviews back at which Eric is firing. In the Cornette one, someone is lying, and I think it's Jim. You know how in fake stories, the narrator/protagonist draws himself off and righteously tells off his enemy? It's always a full paragraph, and there are no interruptions or even usually a rejoinder. It often prompts bystanders to applaud and offer presents. This is one of those stories. The Hart thing is more of a difference of opinion. Eric thinks Bret was a sad sack loser, and Bret says "Nuh-uh!" There's a lot of gray area in something like that.

Magnitogorsk is the new Maritimes. Can't judge a worker until you've seen his work in Magnitogorsk.

“Ron Simmons” by Action Bronson is a banger. Guest appearance by Jim Ross.

Various Winners and Losers Johnny wasn't the only guy in these matches, and if we're being frank, you almost always come away with a stronger impression of the other guys than you do of Johnny. So here are some wrestlers who came out of this thing looking better than they did going in, and vice versa. Stock up Stan Hansen - Half of this thread was about Hansen, so there's no need to belabor it here. He was just great. He made a lot of potentially dry six man tags work through sheer force of personality. Steve Williams - I was never a Williams fan. I've always found him overhyped, and he and Gordy bore the hell out of me every time out. But he killed it in the Johnny Smith Project. No long singles matches, no Oklahoma Stampedes, not much Gordy. Lots of face punches, a couple backdrops, and plenty of brawling with Hansen. Owen Hart - I'd never seen young, pre-knee injury Owen, and holy crap. He was incredibly graceful and athletic. I wonder where he got it. I didn't enjoy much about all that Stampede I had to watch, but Owen's bodypress sunset flip almost made up for Ed Whalen. Johnny Ace - Long-haired Johnny Ace is dope. He just went full tilt into everything, including shoving his own face into kicks. That's not to say he let anyone off easy; he was lucky to be working a style where being so physically awkward that you stiff everyone is a plus. Definitely a Samson thing going on with him. He was nowhere near as compelling after he got the haircut. All Japan Pro Wrestling - All Japan had a deeper bench than I thought they did. The rap was always, "They have the best handful of wrestlers in the history of the world and not much after that." I attribute this to a couple of things: At the same time New Japan was piling up Meltzer stars by doing increasingly implausible shit off the top rope, All Japan's junior heavyweight division consisted of the same couple of unpushed short guys wrestling each other or an equally unpushed foreigner six times a year. They put the old man comedy match on TV an awful lot. Meanwhile, they were rolling out these really solid mostly-foreigner multi-man tags. They didn't really matter; there was nothing on the line, they weren't advancing storylines, and they didn't even have consistent factions, but I liked every one of them. You had Smith, Patriot, Furnas & Kroffat, the Youngbloods... RVD would pop up now and then. Albright had his moments. I mocked Wolf Hawkfield a lot for having a stupid name, not being very good, looking like Dee Snyder, having another stupid name, and pretending to be a Virtua Fighter, but he usually did enough not to ruin anything. Stock Down Davey Boy Smith - Got completely outwrestled by his fake brother. The Bulldog was my favorite wrestler back in the 90s. He had a title match against Diesel that was so bad everyone involved apologized to Vince, but I didn't notice because I was cheering for him so hard. Maybe he wasn't actually that good. He didn't do anything of note when Johnny was around. I watched what I could of him in the 1994 Carnival, and he wasn't any good in that either. A suspicious number of my favorite Davey Boy Smith matches have Bret Hart in them. Mike Awesome - Awesome's schtick in general hasn't aged well. It's all bumps for bumps' sake, and when you consider what became of Mike Awesome, it's hard to justify the recklessness. Toshiaki Kawada - I discovered that my favorite wrestler is a lazy sack of crap! I mean, did he have beef with Johnny or something? He just wouldn't work with him. Kawada figured into a lot of these matches, and he spent a lot of time just sitting on the ground like . . . well, like a sack of crap.

Closing Thoughts I embarked on this project to get to the bottom of something I'd wondered about since 1997. In one of the first All Japan matches I ever saw, Johnny Smith looked like a genius wizard of professional wrestling, but you'd be hard pressed to find a wrestler with a comparable resume who was less talked about. What, I asked myself, is the deal with that? Well, it turns out Johnny Smith was a technically sound but colorless wrestler who just didn't leave much of an impression on people. What a revolutionary discovery! I spent the better part of a year figuring out what everyone else already knew. But hell, it's not like I had anything better to do, and I got to watch an awful lot of All Japan. I'm trying to pass Bulldog Bob Brown on the Most Time Spent Talking About Johnny Smith List, so I'm going to muse for a bit. Smith was miscast in Stampede; used almost exactly wrong. There are two main things about Johnny Smith: Good worker Seems like a nice guy So here he is trying to keep up with Dynamite Kid, who was a perfect Stampede heel. For one thing, he was a shoot bad person, so the heeling came naturally. Also, Dynamite didn't have to do any actual wrestling to make a match work. A Stampede heel is allowed only to punch and stomp; Dynamite is an absolute top tier punch-stomper. Then you've got Johnny over there with his nifty holds he's not allowed to do and his resting nice guy face. Giving Johnny Smith a post apocalyptic haircut isn't enough to make him a convincing heel. So Johnny heads to All Japan, which was the ideal environment for him. You get to wrestle there, and you don't have to pretend to be a Scouser thug. Smith thrived there, but it took him a while. I think his problem is that he's tentative. In his early AJPW stuff, he does fine, but you don't remember him. It really hit me in the ECW series with Taz. The submission match in particular was almost really good, but Smith was in a new environment and came off like he didn't want to offend anyone. So it took him a while to get comfortable, but when he did (late 1997 at the latest), he's consistently good in consistently good matches. I'm going to overrate things a bit here because it's my favorite promotion and favorite style, but I enjoyed the tag league match against Misawa and Akiyama (11/15/1997), the Dome match against Gedo and Jado (1/5/1998), and the bout against Kobashi and Ace (1/26/1998) more than anything in the Fujinami project. And they all had Wolf Hawkfield in them! The neat thing is that he got pretty popular. It certainly wasn't love at first sight, and - other than the Misawa/Akiyama tag league match - I can't say I ever observed a burning passion on the part of the audience, but by 1997 there's real affection borne of years of hard work. It's not just the Korakuen diehards popping for the arm pump. Smith got better and more interesting over the course of his All Japan career, but it's not like he was suddenly full of personality. I think a couple things happened: All Japan got very tricky over the course of the 1990s. The guys started to fill time with sequences – they did a lot of reversals and started playing with the patterns you expected to see. To give a Johnny-type example, he'd been doing the missile dropkick/kip-up/clothesline sequence for years. People expected it. You see them start to tinker with it so often that he basically never got to do it normally. Misawa caught him after the kip-up and turned his clothesline into a Tiger Driver – that kind of thing. Smith never excelled at filling out a match like Stan Hansen, but he was pretty good at this kind of thing. Smith refined his moveset. I was expecting when I started this to see all kinds of Zack Sabre stuff. Joint holds. Flipping a guy over just by grabbing his wrist. A dude who looks like a CPA making like a vicious English octopus. There was plenty of that in World of Sport, but once Johnny decamps to Canada, it's all punch/stomp/cheat. He gets to All Japan, and it's like he forgot where he came from. His work was generic. He wasn't bad at anything, but his repertoire lacked personality. But by 1997, he's worked some of it back in. He's not doing full-tilt World of Sport, and it's the same couple of sequences every time, but it's distinctive enough that he stands out a bit. King's Road with an English accent. Johnny Smith was a really good wrestler. He's so mechanically solid that you take it for granted, and he seldom does something he can't do well. Thinking back to the embarrassing screwups Fujinami used to ruin finishes with makes me appreciate just how solid Smith was. And he wound in up in a great place for him to do great work; he became a really solid system player in late 1990s All Japan. So, in conclusion: Nice work, Johnny. I'm glad you got out when you did, and I'll never forget about the time you kicked out of a Tiger Driver and made everyone scream for you.

Battle Royal (AJPW 1/2/1999) This one is famous for Vader beating up and bloodying Kobashi and then going after him after he's eliminated. Pretty intense! But once we get that out of the way, it's all good clean fun. An All Japan battle royal allows you to be eliminated by pinfall, and everyone's in the ring at once. Therefor the tactic is for everyone to run over and climb on top ofanyone the minute he goes down. I've always liked this because it's goofy yet makes sense. So, for example, Mossman goes out after a vertical suplex. It wasn't the move; it's that he has ten guys preventing him from getting his shoulder up. We get all kinds of hijinks built around this. Momota or someone bridges out of Shinzaki's powerbomb attempt, and everyone jumps on Shinzaki and pins him. Then, since they're already there, they do the same thing to Momota (or someone). Johnny Smith and Wolf Hawkfield try some teamwork: Smith sets his boot up in the corner so Hawkfield can fling Tamon Honda into it. But halfway through the move, everyone else jumps on Wolf and pins him. Johnny makes the final four. But, you know, this isn't a Royal Rumble. Making it to the end doesn't mean much. The other survivors are Kimala, Jun Izumida, and some guy I don't know - either Masao Inoue or Satoru Asako. I won't take you through all the twists and turns, but there's a lot of human drama here. Alliances formed and promises broken. The big lesson is not to trust Jun Izumida. He betrays Kimala, his own partner, to help Inoue/Asako, and then betrays Asako/Inoue to help Kimala crush him into jelly and win. This was a hoot, and now I really am done. 83 Johnny Smith matches. I'll wrap things up shortly.

Johnny Smith/Tom Zenk/The Eagle vs. Giant Baba/Jumbo Tsuruta/Dory Funk, Jr. (AJPW 10/22/1994) I wonder who's going to win this one. This is as bad as you would expect, but they didn't book this match for the work. Dory takes most of the match for his team, and it's not the worst thing you've ever seen. His reach exceeds his grasp, but he does a couple nifty things and you have to appreciate the effort. He kept wrestling long after everyone else in this match was done, by the way. Johnny Smith went away and stayed away; none of that for Dory.

The Johnny Smith Book Report The Last Outlaw by Stan Hansen Johnny Smith is mentioned twice: Once in a list of people Hansen tagged with in the 90s, and once as a bystander in a match where Stan's back hurt. Those two were coworkers for a decade and shared a lot of ring time, but I guess Johnny didn't make much of an impression. Pure Dynamite by Tom Billington Honestly, there's not even as much about Smith in this book as I thought there'd be. Still, we get quite a bit: Smith was soft-spoken and not given to practical jokes (this speaks well of him, given that Dynamite's accounts of his hilarious pranks sound like jailhouse serial killer confessions). There actually was an issue getting him from New Japan to All Japan. DK wanted to bring him in, but Smith had done some NJ tours (I have not been able to find any footage), and Inoki and Baba had reached some kind of détente after the defections of Choshu and his guys, along with a bunch of foreigners including the Bulldogs themselves. Dynamite kept calling, and eventually Inoki allowed it. Smith never asked for money. DK got him a raise when he came into All Japan, but he pointed out that if you don't ask for money you don't get it. Smith was maybe a better worker than Davey Boy Smith, but Dynamite's timing was better with David Boy. They had worked together so much that it wasn't as smooth when he worked with someone else. Smith got into the 1990 RWTL as an emergency backup when DBS went back to the WWF without telling Dynamite he was going to do it (we saw them take on Abdullah and Kimala from this tournament). Davey Boy emerges as the halfwit, childlike villain of Pure Dynamite. Dynamite was asked to do a tour of New Zealand and was going to skip it because his shoulder didn't work. But Johnny called him and said he was broke, so he couldn't afford not to. DK mused that while he wasn't broke, he wasn't far off, so they went. The story about the Japanese fan making him the “Jhonny Smith” jacket wasn't in the book, so I don't know where it came from. A couple other notes: He liked Fujinami, calling him a great wrestler and a gentleman. He told Dynamite “You always blow me up.” He's overshadowed in the book by Sayama, whom DK really, really likes. Sayama tried to get Dynamite to come to UWF with him. He talks about a singles match against Tenryu where he elbows Tenryu in the chin so hard that he draws blood. I think I would enjoy that match. He described that “last” match against Johnny Ace and Sunny Beach, and all the dudes in tracksuits giving him presents and throwing him in the air. It was nifty to read that, since I watched it not long ago and his description was dead on. He seemed not to like Misawa, though he didn't go into a lot of detail. He wasn't agile enough to pull off the Tiger Mask stuff. He liked Kobashi a lot, which he and Hansen have in common. Speaking of which, I basically consider it gospel if I read the same thing in two wrestlers' books. So Kobashi is great, Abdullah's a good dude, and Tiger Jeet Singh is a piece of crap. Also Bad News Allen is scary. Dynamite's book is just great, by the way. It's only 200 pages, and I finished it in a day and a half. Couldn't put it down.

Johnny Smith/George Hines vs. Steve Williams/Mike Rotunda vs. Mike Barton/Jim Steele vs. Kona Crush/Adam Bomb (AJPW Stan Hansen Cup 7/20/2002) Welcome to the big Keiji Muto circlejerk. On this card he inserts himself into the old man nostalgia match and then gets to put on his Muta costume and wrestle again (he wins both times). And what better way to pay tribute to Stan Hansen than with a callback to his traditional specialty, a shitty four-way elimination tag match full of guys who lost their jobs when WCW folded? KroniK (and this is the last time I'll be doing that capitalization) come into this match as the tag champions because Muto is a goddamn idiot. They also come into this match like the late 90s personified, wearing Matrix sunglasses and leather and accompanied by generic industrial techno. The other six guys jump them immediately, and after they escape they act like they're going to leave while Bart Gunn stands on the ropes and yells at them. I don't know if this is a shoot, but if it's not it would be odd to have your champions act like this, even if your champions are the bottom of the barrel castoff dregs of Vince Russo's creative output. We don't get to see this develop, because is the match is (thank God) all clipped up. Chronic (I decided I don't want to do the spelling either) take out Johnny, and then Williams pins some asshole named either Brian or Bryan with a Doctor Bomb, and we're left with Barton and Steele vs. the Varsity Club. I think I'm getting Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Williams and Rotunda. Williams can't move, but he can damn sure wrestle, and Rotunda is hilarious. He does an actual airplane spin to Barton and then falls over, and we all pop for it. He's shown more personality in this handful of millennial AJPW matches than he did in years of pretending to be a civil servant. But the boring guys win when Bart abruptly hits Rotunda with a cutter. Afterwards, we get some really dreadful postmatch promos. The KISS Demon and Wrath are pretty salty that everyone ganged up on them. They go so far as to call their opponents stupid! Spicy stuff. The Varsities want a title shot even though they lost. Barton does the best - he manages to talk for quite a long time and doesn't repeat himself or stop making sense or anything. Then Steele tries to do an Attitude Era-style personality-based promo, making it clear why no one ever asked him to. So at least we're establishing that the tag belts are important and everyone wants them right? So what happened? Well, fake APA beat Barton and Steele and then vacated them. You're doing a great job, Keiji!

Johnny Smith/Big Bubba vs. Steve Williams/Terry Gordy (AJPW 7/18/1993) This is a handheld, and it's an interesting tableau. It's broad daylight (there's an open door facing the camera), and people are fanning themselves. It seems like a pleasant afternoon, and a perfect occasion to watch some big foreigners beat one another up. Smith's partner is introduced as Big Bubba, but he's in full Bossman mode. He comes out to "Hard Time" in the getup and does some nightstick tricks for everyone. The Chesire/Cobb County Connection (as I have decided to call this team) takes the first half of the match, and once again Johnny follows in Dynamite's steps by working as if he's not a head shorter than everyone else in the match. He's up against a past and a future Triple Crown champ, but they're pretty giving with him. The hierarchy is enforced strictly with the natives, but the foreigners are looser with it. Bossman is noticeably working his ass off here, and good for him. Not everything he does looks great - his punches are still WWF-quality, and he and Doc fumble on an enzuigiri bit - but he's moving a lot and showing nice enthusiasm. I don't doubt that he would have been a valuable player in All Japan if he'd stuck around. He had the tools. Gordy is the only one taking it easy. He spends a lot of time sitting in headlocks without letting it bother him. Williams, on the other hand, is pretty great. They even get around my least favorite thing about him: He tries an Oklahoma Stampede on Smith. Bossman, apparently aware that I hate that move, comes in tips him over for a near fall. Gordy eventually puts Smith away, and we head to back to hose off Bossman, who's been sweating through his Halloween costume since before the match started. This was a fun little slice-of-life match. The setting was refreshing, and three quarters of the competitors worked harder than I figured they would. A pleasant surprise.

Johnny Smith vs. Sumu Hara (CNWA 8/10/1990) Another squash where they talk about Johnny. Pretty good work in this one - Koki Kitahara is a cut above your average western Canadian jobber. The only reason I'm bothering with this is because we get a lengthy post-match promo from Smith. It's . . . well, I wish it were better. He's got himself a catchphrase ("The Bruiser is cruisin' and bruisin'!"), but it doesn't take long for him to start repeating himself and losing track of idioms. Whalen better not be trying to cause any nitty gritty in the relationship between Johnny and Gerry Morrow! Johnny watches Gerry's back just like the Champagne Man watches his. I fear that I will never who in the hell the Champagne Man is. He sounds fun.

I want to see AEW announce a G1-style tournament and then hand the book to Riki Choshu.