ohtani's jacket

Kitano is a famous TV host and comedian. It's not an entirely accurate analogy since Kitano is also a filmmaker, writer, and outspoken media pundit but the comparison that Dave is going for his late night TV host.

All right, let's see if they can make a believer out of me... General impressions: I didn't find it excessive nor did I have a hard time getting through it. I didn't love it but I did have plenty of respect for it. It was an absolute war and from the point of view of a big match between rivals they delivered in spades. Kobashi vs. Akiyama is never going to be a match-up I like as much as the other big feuds from 2000 but they laid it all on the line and I think they deserve MOTY consideration. I liked how they tried to work a different style from their All Japan days. The digit manipulation was particularly appreciated and immediately seared into the memory banks as a match where fingers get worked over. There may have been too many suplexes but the selling was good and there was a constant focus on damage, If anything it was the early build that was too long and could have been shortened. Kobashi continued to hobble about and it was clear he was in pain but he did his best to block it out and deliver a match that lived up to his standards. The black eye was a hell of a visual and put this over the top. Any match where you work that hard and get a swollen eye for your pains has to be worthy of praise. The first NOAH classic?

This was an excellent match but I didn't think it was a classic or a MOTYC. The to and fro between Kawada and Nagata was extremely exciting but the match stalled every time Fuchi or Iizuka were involved. With this and the RWTL Final fresh in mind, I can safely say that Kawada and Fuchi had very little chemistry together. In fact, Kawada more or less ignores him as a partner. After some standard matwork, Fuchi opted to work as a heel. It seemed like the right thing to do in foreign territory but the heel work was weak by Fuchi's own standards. Kawada worked stiff but didn't follow suit with the heel work so it felt like Fuchi was going out on a limb. He couldn't hang with the American big men and he can't deal with the New Japan workers without cheating. It makes you wonder why Kawada is tagging with him if he's such a liability. Shoddy teamwork aside, the exchanges between Kawada and Nagata were worthy of their own match. Nagata is one of those guys who is never as good as I want him to be but he was excellent in this. The crowd seemed warm to the idea of a singles match and embraced their one-on-one battles as though they were one. The finish was the best part of the bout. Time limit draws are notoriously hard to execute. This was about as good as it gets. The final minute was one of the most exciting things we've seen all year. Nagata was pissed at the end. He kept complaining about All Japan's "strange" tactics. That was on top of the commentator describing the bout as Strong Style vs. old-style pro-wrestling and, of course, Kawada's big win over Sasaki that had embarrassed the promotion. New Japan always wins these interpromotional feuds but it's nice to see Kawada getting the same type of treatment that Tenryu got several years earlier. It really has turned Kawada's year around and probably made him the #1 guy in Japan in my eyes.

This is the type of match I would usually skip but since it was the final of the Real World Tag League I felt obliged to watch it. And yes, there was an actual final in 2000. Kawada spent a large chunk of the opening 10 minutes working with Dr. Death and Mike Rotunda. He spent such a long time in the ring that when the Americans took over he was worn down from being on offense for so long. I'm not sure what the logic was in not tagging Fuchi. Perhaps he was trying to soften up the big foreign dudes so that Fuchi stood a chance, but you've got to trust your partner. The team had made it this far so I didn't see the point of hiding Fuchi on the apron. In the end, the Varsity Club's power moves were too much for Fuch, but the key moment was a huge spike piledriver on the outside that left Kawada incapacitated. The match was decent considering how washed up Williams and Rotunda were. Williams, in particular, was a battered war horse and struggled to get in and out of the ring, But the booking was odd. It wasn't a match-up that anybody wanted to see at Budokan and Wiliams and Rotunda winning didn't have much upside. The original plan was for Tenryu to tag with Onita and I guess that would have made a better final. Kawada looked pretty good in the ring continuing his second-half surge up the worker leaderboard. He's now approaching the likes of Delfin, Togo, and Ishikawa for Japanese worker of the year and there's still the big tag match to come. Stay tuned folks!

This was the type of no-frills action we've come to expect from the new All Japan. Kawada and Fuchi spent most of the bout working over Araya with punches and kicks to the face while Tenryu grew increasingly frustrated on the apron. Tenryu had a couple of good flurries and some exciting exchanges with Kawada but he couldn't turn the tide and the All Japan pair continued to pick Araya apart. Even a couple of slaps from Tenryu couldn't give Araya the strength he needed to overcome the orchestrated beatdown. This was a tournament match so it had its limitations but the action was face crushingly solid and I guaran-damn-tee that it was better than any NOAH tag from the year.

It pains me to say this but this wasn't very good. It was fine when they were striking each other but otherwise flat. Omori's comeback was crowd-pleasing but weak offensively and Hashimoto didn't put him away with anywhere near the authority you'd expect. This was meant to be the start of some huge Zero-One vs. NOAH feud and Hashimoto vs. Misawa dream match that never materialized but we've seen these "invasion" angles done so much better in the past. Hashimoto looked like he was still shaking off the cobwebs from all his downtime this year and his aura still seemed damaged to me. I love Hashimoto -- everything about his presence and his aura give me the chills -- but this was a terrible year for him.

Looks like this is the only time we'll see the Osaka Pro guys in December which is a bummer. It's a bit boring watching them plug into a New Japan juniors match. I'd rather watch them in their own setting. The action was okay but watching my boys fed to the new Golden Boy was hard to swallow. And he's not even a homegrown Golden Boy either. Liger has been painfully average all year. He did some decent things here but was straddling that fine line between taking a back seat and being the Ace of the entire division. Delfin also took a backseat and they seemed to deliberately avoid any sort of serious throwdown between the two. Murahama was feisty. Match could have used some Kanemoto, or Ohtani if he were still a junior. The juniors division hasn't been the same since Ohtani left. The finishing sequence between Tanaka and designated jobber Tsubasa was fun. Not bad but not really Osaka Pro-ish either.

What a Christmas present from Saitama Pro. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Pretty weak gimmick but the girls did their best with it. It wasn't the hardest of hardcore matches but they did do a lot of cool spots with the chairs and Sakai took one neat tumble off the ladder. Suzuki was a beast with her STOs and suplexes and battered Sakai until she couldn't take anymore. Great selling from Sakai at the end. She really was a gusty wrestler. This ended up being better than I expected because of Suzuki's throws. A nice surprise since i had zero expectations.

Pretty intense while it lasted. Garbage-y but hard fought. I'm not a huge fan of KAORU but she elicits a lot of hate from her opponent which is a good thing. The finish led to the return of Lady Zero later in the show.

This was really good. Hokuto and Ozaki brought the attitude you'd expect from a pair of bitchy veteran heels and Nagashima and Sato wouldn't back down an inch, especially Sato who looked like she was ready to take on an entire army. It's a tag title match so it's high stakes the entire way. Most of the action centers around Nagashima vs. Ozaki, one of my favorite pairings in Joshi. We've seen mentor/student relationships a thousand times in Japanese wrestling -- it's a popular archetype with deep connections to Japanese society -- but rarely have we seen a mentor and student so desperate to beat one another. Nagashima has that extra bit of fire when she wrestles Ozaki and grows with each encounter. No matter how many times they square off, you always see a new counter or a new move, and Ozaki benefits from working with a smaller woman and being able to execute her offense properly. Hokuto was kayfabe injured early on in the match but came back to deliver a strong offensive performance. It was definitely one of her better performances in GAEA. Sato was rock solid in her role as big girl power worker. She was very much the Nanae to Nagashima's Momoe and added muscle to her smaller partner's flying. There's an interesting comparison to be made between those teams. Nagashima and Sato probably shade Momoe and Nanae as workers at this point but it's close. What's great to see is young girls making their mark across the board in 2000 Joshi. it feels like there are lots of promising young stars in spite of the rot. Ozaki and Hokuto had a bit too much guile on this particular night and the Showa faction celebrate afterward with a magnum of wine. Then Asuka and Chigusa show up and do some annoying GAEA cosplay. Hokuto and Ozaki don't give a fuck afterward because they've got the money and the tag belts and are heading into the new year as champs. It's good to be a Showa girl.

This was clipped, mercifully so since it started out like every other LCO match in history. The footage was mostly LCO working over GAMI. I'm not sure if GAMI ever tagged out but she got a nice submission on Shimoda that looked like it might win the bout before LCO finished things off. Nothing to write home about.

Not bad. Asari's reinvention from a young flier into a hybrid submission wrestler is arguably as interesting as Yoshida's and has a Plum Mariko/Command Bolshoi element to it. Akino is clearly a good worker but there's not a lot of upside to her aside from being the next Toshiyo Yamada. I'm not convinced it would have been any better in full than it was clipped. Can't really comment on the rhythm without having it in full tho.

Ayako has been one of the stars of 2000 but she gets picked apart by Aja for most of this bout. I had no recollection of how it turned out so I kept thinking "this is a weird way to book your young star." I was kind of resigned to this being another bout where Aja uses bully tactics to reassert her dominance over the women's scene, though in fairness to Aja her tactics were brutally effective. It would have been nice if Ayakao had fired a shot, but Aja was merciless. I started thinking about how Japanese this was -- the underdog gets the shit beaten out of them and everyone praises her fighting spirit -- then Ayako pulled off a near miracle. It wasn't quite the Miracle on Ice or a walk-off home run to win the World Series but in her fledgling career it must have felt like it. Kind of a difficult match to rate. Aside from one spectacular moment, Ayako wasn't at the races and the shock finish had minimal emotional build to it (aside from shouts of "ganbatte, Ayako-chan!") Perhaps if Ayako had worn her emotions on her sleeve a bit more then this would have been comparable to Satomura/Kong but it wasn't really close. Hell of a year for Ayako, though. She was on top of the world in her sphere of Joshi.

Tamura was one of the leading Joshi talents of the 00s but like Azumi Hyuga she hadn't really arrived yet in 2000. This wasn't a bad match. I liked the strike exchanges and the submission work but ultimately it's Tanny Mouse and that means it's a plucky squash but a squash all the same.

This was the final of the BattlARTS Tag Team Tournament. Prior to the final, we get a look at the tournament bouts in digest form which is an interesting glimpse at the BattlARTS guys working hard night in, night out instead of the regular once a month on television. The final is short but competitive. It doesn't reach any great heights but it ends the year on a positive note for BattlARTS and there's some typically good work from Ishikawa, Malenko, and Usuda. Hijikata is fine in his role. He had been carrying a shoulder injury for the entire tournament and spent most of the matches working from underneath. He wanted the yusho badly and didn't take it well when Malenko forced Ishikawa to submit. He even got in the bosses' face and disrespected him. Ishikawa seemed to realise that Hijikata was caught up in the heat of the moment but Malenko didn't like it at all and took it upon himself to sort Hijikata out. None of this goes anywhere long-term. BattlARTS run fewer shows in 2001 and Murakami returns to reignite his feud with Ishikawa but it was a decent way to cap off a solid year from the promotion.

I can't remember if I watched this pay-per-view or not. My relationship with the WWF was strained at the time and the shit with Austin and Rikishi made things worse. Triple H being the accomplice was about as satisfying as Vince being the Higher Power and led to a rehash of a feud that nobody wanted to see. Truthfully speaking, the match wasn't that bad. It was a generic WWF main event brawl but Triple H and Austin were solid main event brawlers and went through the motions pretty well. It was the least interesting match from Triple H's 2000 run but it wasn't due to a lack of effort. Hunter took some big bumps, sold his ass off and gigged his forehead. Austin had promised an ass whipping and that's pretty much what he gave him but something felt a little off. Perhaps it was because Austin took too much of the match, but it never really felt like a culmination of the hatred they were meant to feel for one another. The finish was stupid but I can understand why they wanted to create a payoff for the hit and run the year before. The worst part about it was that it came across like a mini-movie that was filmed while the rest of the show was going on. And it took the crowd completely out of the equation. But it wasn't as awful as you'd imagine and overall I thought the match was passable. Although "passable' is quite a dropoff during Hunter's stellar year.

I liked the first fall. Pimpi was in fine form. We've seen a lot of dance-offs in Monterrey but I think I liked Pimpi and Super Calo's the best. The rest of the bout was pointless and unimaginative. But I did enjoy that first fall and Pimpi's comedy so this wasn't a total waste of time.

This was a nice match. At first it looked as though Atlantis and Blue Panther would square off, which had me in 7th heaven since it's one of my favorite lucha pairings, but Dandy stepped in instead. That ended up being just fine as he was in one of those moods where he wants to show that he still has it. We saw the same thing when he squared off against Casas in an earlier Monterrey bout. He tends to save his best for his contemporaries in 2000 but I swear if we saw this Dandy all the time he'd still be among the best workers in Mexico. This was a nice opportunity for Atlantis to get out the working boots too and a match I'd point to as an example of his talent and his capacity to still work at a high level after his prime. And by high level, I don't mean working formulaic CMLL main events but rather working individual exchanges on the level of a Santo, Casas or Panther (to name three highly respected lucha workers among the wider fan community.) As good as Dandy and Atlantis were they couldn't touch Panther vs. Villano. What a masterclass. These two are the frontrunners for my lucha WOTY -- Villano for his rollercoaster from his unmasking through to his tecnico run and Panther for his work, which may be the best of his career. The pair of them were sensational. I remember seeing them square off on a handheld once and that was just as electric. I've found some of Villano's 80s and 90s work to be overrated at times but watching him tie-up with Panther it was clear that he was keen to measure Panther's reputation against his own and both men came across as bonafide legends. Zumbido vs. Niebla and M2K vs. Safari was a huge step down from those highs but tidy enough. The second fall had some hard-hitting, rapid-fire lucha exchanges with Dandy, Atlantis, Panther, and V3 again looking spectacular. We got Panther vs. Atlantis for a brief moment which I appreciated. The tercera caida wasn't the most exciting that you'll see and descended into some bullshit mask pulling but there was enough good stuff to round out a very good trios match. You never really know what's going to be good and what's going to be not good when you see lucha match listings (especially from Monterrey.) This was very much in the good category and ought to be cherry-picked by lucha fans casual and hardcore alike.

This was exactly what you'd hope for from these two workers at the tail end of the year and at this stage of Hyuga's development. They worked the match-up perfectly -- Hyuga was bigger, more athletic, more dynamic while Bolshoi relied on her wits and ring smarts. There was the usual array of hybrid lucha-shoot style spots from Bolshoi and she utilized the shotei to great effect throughout the bout. Watching this I felt she was neck and neck with Super Delfin as far as juniors go and watching her use the shotei reminded me of what a poor year Liger has had in comparison. The match was tightly worked -- not an epic but competitive and a great vehicle to push Hyuga further ahead. And it was a compelling watch from beginning to end with very little in the way of fat or excess. If you like your Joshi to be a bit smarter then this was one of the better examples from 2000.

This started off with a special ceremony to make Rayo de Jalisco Jr.'s 25th anniversary in wrestling. His family came to the ring and he was presented with a plaque. Perro and Villano said some kind words and Rayo wiped a tear from his eye. Then a mariachi band came to the ring to perform a song for him. He held up a bouquet of flowers when suddenly a mariachi attacked him from behind with a guitar. Gawd Almighty King, that's Mascara Anos Dos Mil! Mascara Anos Dos Mil attacked Rayo with a damned guitar! This was some class A WWF. The Capos didn't give a shit about the match and were disqualified in straight falls. Perro bled as usual and everyone had the shit stomped out of them, Afterward, Universo got on the mic and taunted Aguayo. Damn you to hell, Universo Dos Mil!

This was short and sweet. Porky did some decent shtick for a change. I really liked the sequence where he almost fell on the fans and he did some great crying shtick as well. The Capos are kind of polished and not that great at the same time but I buy into them as rudos and I'm sure they can ratchet up their act if need be. I wasn't paying attention to the match listings and kept wondering why Tarzan Boy wasn't doing his rudo shit. Then the penny dropped.

Hold the phone, there's more CMLL from November. Trouble in paradise! Satanico still hates Tarzan Boy but his partners have a problem with him roughing up a fellow rudo. This leads to some heated altercations with Satanico going chest-to-chest with the Infernales. There's pushing and shoving and Satanico even threatens to join the tecnico side before pulling rank and ordering the Infernales to back off. Meanwhile, Santo hates Tarzan Boy too and makes no bones about it. He does the "I'm watching you" gesture to Tarzan Boy and Tarzan Boy responds by trolling the shit out of Santo with the same gesture. In between the fun and games is some excellent work between Santo & Casas and the Infernales which has me excited about the future of this feud. In the past, I've been critical of the Japanese influence on lucha around this time. It's clear watching this that Casas and Ultimo Guerrero, in particular, have been influenced by their stints in Japan and are looking to push the envelope on the type of action you usually see in a CMLL ring. I've eased up on my criticism of it being inauthentic. If the work is good then let them push it in a different direction. Here it complemented the story well as Santo and Casas were clearly working harder than the lying, cheating Tarzan Boy and I get the feeling that the divide between the old traditional ways and the new style of the Infernales will play a major part in the upcoming feud with Satanico. Which brings us to the finish and Satanico deliberately fouling when it seemed like the Infernales had the situation well in hand. You don't stir up a hornet's nest when it comes to Satanico, that's for sure. You could already see him steaming and plotting so it'll be interesting to see where this goes next. This was a solid quarter hour. Much better TV than the usual fare and hopefully gets CMLL back on track after a rough few months.

A few bits and bobs... Black Guzman vs. Mike Sharpe was a match from the Los Angeles territory's Wrestling Stars of the 60s show. Guzman was the brother of El Santo and one of the pioneers of the fast-paced aerial style that most people associate lucha with. He was also a successful headliner in the Texas territory in the 40s and 50s. He was well past his prime in this footage but looked like a feisty customer. Sharpe was one half of the Sharpe Brothers tag team whom most people are familiar with from their work in Japan against Rikidozan. The match was a short affair built around the size difference between Sharpe and Guzman. You can pretty much imagine how the bout went. I usually like Jules Strongbow but he kept annoying me with the bullshit he span about Guzman being a former matador. He even made up some bullshit story about how a bull gorged Guzman's leg and forced him to retire. Creative liberties I guess but it added to a certain staleness about the TV product from the 60s. When you watch this stuff it really does feel like there was a downturn in wrestling after the popularity it enjoyed in the 50s. Sonny Myers vs. Rudy Kay is a short bout from Chicago. The only notable thing about it is how much Russ Davis loves Rudy Kay. It seems like Kay was one of his favorite performers for some reason or another. He always gets excited when he commentates a Kay bout. Bobo Brazil vs. Duke Keomuka was the first time I've been able to get a handle on Keomuka. He was your typical stereotypical Japanese heel. Bobo Brazil is Bobo Brazil. Pretty much writes itself. Buffalo continues to be an uninteresting territory and 60s wrestling continues to be a massive step down from the peak 50s stuff. I wonder what the best US territory was in the 60s.

This was incredibly mediocre. The type of match that's a slog to get through. The only thing that piqued my interest was how bad Gigolo was. The rest of the match was just brutally boring.