ohtani's jacket

The second Kansai/Ozaki street fight is the less violent, less grotesque of the two. Crowd brawling is never gonna be my thing, and some of the transitions weren't the flashest, but there was a lot of cool shit in the bout like Kansai's chained fist shots and an awesome submission counter from Ozaki. The finish was fairly inventive even if Ozaki's offense wasn't that great and I liked a lot of the nearfalls despite an aversion to table spots. It's funny the things you tolerate. I didn't mind the chain, or Ozaki using the broken top rope to strangle Kansai, but other props just annoy me. I wonder what started the push toward street fights in '95. If it was something as simple as the success of Onita in FMW or a push away from the increasing over-exposed women's style. Whatever the case may be, they positioned Ozaki strongly as Queen of the Street Fights and could have done a lot more, a lot sooner with FMW and Kudo.

The second Kansai/Ozaki street fight is the less violent, less grotesque of the two. Crowd brawling is never gonna be my thing, and some of the transitions weren't the flashest, but there was a lot of cool shit in the bout like Kansai's chained fist shots and an awesome submission counter from Ozaki. The finish was fairly inventive even if Ozaki's offense wasn't that great and I liked a lot of the nearfalls despite an aversion to table spots. It's funny the things you tolerate. I didn't mind the chain, or Ozaki using the broken top rope to strangle Kansai, but other props just annoy me. I wonder what started the push toward street fights in '95. If it was something as simple as the success of Onita in FMW or a push away from the increasing over-exposed women's style. Whatever the case may be, they positioned Ozaki strongly as Queen of the Street Fights and could have done a lot more, a lot sooner with FMW and Kudo.

So, is Thesz the Godfather? The Granddaddy of them all? I started watching matches to find out. The Don Leo Jonathan match from Chicago was a decent watch. DLJ was a fun big man and not really spoken about enough as we all know. I loved the way he pinched Thesz' cauliflower ears during the ref's explanation. That set the tone for a World of Sport style bout where there's plenty of needle and finally they start with the forearm smashes. That's been my favourite style of Thesz match so far. I don't find his matwork super impressive, but I do love the way he retaliates to inside moves. I think the crux of it is that because he's a hooker he knows dirtier moves than the heels and more ways to hurt people. DLJ was spry for a big man, but I don't think that matwork was truly his game. Still, he gave it a decent shake. Next up was Thesz vs. The Mighty Atlas. Atlas had this neat little moustache and gave a much better all-round performance than in the Snyder bout. It was all shtick, but effective shtick for the era he worked in. Thesz didn't appear to have any misgivings about working this style of bout despite his grumblings in later years. Interspersed between longer bouts are the numerous shorter clips of Thesz from YouTube. Highlights against Rocca, Gene Kiniski and Mr. Moto. There's not much to be gained from watching these unless you've seen a lot of Thesz and know what you're looking for. To me it was just a blur of holds. I did enjoy the short Vic Christy bout from Los Angeles where he gave Christy quite a bit of offence for what was essentially a squash. The Moto bout was filmed like a movie and had plenty of unusual angles for a filmed match.

Giant Baba vs. Bruno Sammartino (JWA, 3/7/67) Bruno Sammartino isn't the best place to start for an in-depth look at early Baba but their matches are some of the longer JWA stuff we have on tape. There were a lot of simple holds in this. The kind of holds you'd expect from a guy the size and strength of Sammartino trying to wear down a bigger man in Baba. A lot of bear hugs and strength holds, and plenty of arm work from Bruno to try to render Baba's chop useless. Stuff that made sense from a psychology standpoint even if it didn't produce a timeless classic. Baba's selling was good but his execution was sloppy at times and that's accounting for fatigue. They went to the well way too many times on the double knockout spot and in fact drew on it too early. That said something to me of their limitations, but it could have been a much more boring bout whereas this was more than passable. You know what you're getting from Bruno Sammartino and you get it in spades here. Let's call this okay to decent.

It seems there are just as many second generation female wrestlers in the business now than there were second generation males at any point after the death of the territories.

Man, Snyder's 70s work is disappointing. I was expecting him to be either a hard-nosed veteran or a wrestling maestro. Instead, he was sluggish and out of shape. He worked the holds from his youth but with none of the athleticism. There was a match against Robinson where he looked inspired however the rest of his stuff was pretty bad. His matches from his WWA territory were particularly bad. To make matters worse, he was billed as "The World's Most Scientific Wrestler." I actually read up on why he was so bad in the 1970s and the consensus seems to be that he was more interested in his family and business interests than in breaking his neck wrestling each night. That's fair enough, but it makes him a difficult wrestler to place. We have these matches of his where he looks like a great young wrestler but nothing from his prime and none of his really important matches. Then we have these 70s matches where he's pudgy and smoking two packs a day, allegedly. It seems Snyder is a bit of a mystery. Unless some more Chicago footage is unearthed we may never know how truly good he was.

Nah, I'm also kid focused like going to Disneyland and such. My daughter will be 6 in October, which is hard to believe.

Wilbur Snyder vs. Mr. Moto (Los Angeles) Mr. Moto came to the ring wearing a gorgeous hakama complete with tabi (divided-toe socks) and wooden geta shoes. He had these round-rimmed spectacles and fu manchu beard that made him look like something out of the Meiji Period after Japan had reopened its borders to the West, but to Californian audiences no doubt looked like something out of a 1930s pulp mag. He also had with him a little servant named Fuji who helped undress his robes and wrap them carefully in a gorgeous silk cloth. Beneath his robes was his garish ring attire: scarlet red trunks and canary yellow tights. We were told he was a master of jiu jitsu, sumo and catch-as-can, which I naively thought for a second meant we'd see some cool holds until he tried going through the pre-match sumo ritual and was interrupted by the crowd. From there it was clear that he was a typical Japanese heel: sly, cunning and devious. Snyder monstered him in the ring and it was notable how short Moto's legs were whenever the pair locked up. America and Japan weren't far enough removed from the war for the commentator to not make cracks about it. He joked that Moto wanted a peace treaty after he begged off. The first fall saw Moto working Snyder over with inside moves before taking the fall with the sleeper, which we were told was a topic of much debate at the time. Snyder spent the entire second fall working Moto over in a side headlock and it became clear that this was going to be the sort of bout where they strap on a hold and work it to death. The third followed suit, and there were probably three or four holds used in the entire bout. Despite the commentator trying to put over the strength it took to keep those holds applied, it was the most dull of the early Snyder bouts. To my great surprise he coughed up the deciding fall and suffered his first loss in Los Angeles. I guess that means that Moto was a heel of some note. It's too bad he didn't have a couple of Fujiwara-like holds to go with his sneaky Pearl Habour attacks. I did like his judo chop counter that felled Snyder. He caught Snyder coming off the ropes with his running football tackle and split him in half. Possibly the only good thing he did.

Mary didn't have a surname, though. She may have been referred to as Mary daughter of Joachim, but surnames themselves weren't used until the Middle Ages.

Are you still going to shows? Dick the Bruiser & the Lisowski Brothers vs Verne Gagne, Wilbur Snyder & Argentina Rocca (Chicago) Six man action time. This was worked corner to corner. When a face was in the heel corner he took a pummeling an when a heel was in the face corner he received his just deserts. The rest of the time was spent fighting in and out of the neutral corners. The faces were animated and worked an even faster pace than in tags and the Lisowski Brothers bumped and stooged with aplomb, but I wasn't as into it as the previous tag. Dick the Bruiser has barely registered a blip with his ring work thus far, and despite some nice snap to his holds, I prefer Snyder in singles action.

Some of these names kind of grow on you with time. I remember thinking The BIg Show was a ridiculous re-branding of the Giant in '99 but who doesn't think of him as Show these days?

Reggie & Stan Lisowski vs. Verne Gagne & Wilbur Snyder (Chicago) Now this was a fun bout. The Lisowski brothers, Reggie and Stan, resembled a classic heel team more closely than any pairing I've seen from the 1950s. They were still no match for the super team of Gagne and Snyder, who were too strong for any mortal tag team, but they way they bumped and stooged and worked together to cut the ring off was tonic for the lack of an identifiable face-in-peril structure. The bout was full of "instances" -- small moments that moved from event to the next. They were connected on a moment-to-moment basis, but there was no over-arching structure, no through line to tie all of the events together. There were examples of mini-FIP segments where Snyder would take a battering and tag out, but they weren't drawn out segments, there was no real peril to speak of, and for as sprightly and animated as Gagne was in these tag bouts, he wasn't exactly a house on fire when he tagged in. These roles didn't seem to exist in 1950s tag wrestling at least not as a well-worn convention. I'd be interested in learning how they were popularised. Even without that structure to fall back on, the bout was still engaging. The Crusher was a great over-the-top wrestling character and his kayfabe brother Stan was the perfect partner for him; a really solid heel worker who bumped and stooged exceptionally well without drawing any of the heat away from The Crusher. I loved their celebration after the first fall where they flexed their muscles and posed for the crowd and their reaction to the finish was priceless. The finish itself was extremely clever. Stan Lisowski had Gagne in the same airplane spin he'd won the first fall with and thought he had him pinned, but missed Verne tagging out mid-flight. Snyder hit a pair of dropkicks and took the bout with a body press, and The Crusher was livid. He tried ripping the top rope out and fell arse over backwards. It was beautiful to watch. It was even better than it sounds as the top rope had come undone again in a Gagne/Snyder bout and the ring crew had scrambled to fix it during the second fall and here was The Crusher trying to rip it out again as if that would somehow make the result null and void. The Crusher really was great fun. I'd watch the Lisowski brothers again in a flash. Snyder was obviously the more junior member of the super team, but it was notable how much of a backseat he took to an almost carny-eque Verne Gagne. Gagne cheated like a motherfucker in this bout. It was all in the spirit of retaliation and giving the heels a taste of their own medicine, but it was still bloody cheating. You wouldn't think this was the same Verne Gagne from those long bouts with the likes of Thesz whereas Snyder was clearly still the not quite rookie sensation. There doesn't seem to be any 60s Snyder on YouTube. It jumps the 50s to the 70s and that's quite the missing link when it comes to appraising a guy who's very prime may have been in the 1960s. But there's still a few matches to go until we come to that gaping hole.

Forgot to mention the finish to the Singh/Casey bout, which was referee Jeff Kaye taking a bump to the outside and selling it like he'd knocked himself out. The second ref Dave Rees refused to take over the contest and the bout was ruled a no-contest. No idea why they booked that finish.

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 56 Dave George vs. Flyer Gibbs (WAW circa 1990) Sweet Euro trash, how I've neglected you. George looks like Terry Rudge if Terry Rudge were your untrained father. He plods about barefooted against a truly awful worker named Flyer Gibbs. Pallo Sr. gets involved at ringside setting up that big Pallo/George match you all want to see. Scrubber Daly vs. Flesh Gordon (Eurosport circa 1991) It's that dipshit Gordon. Scrubber Daly in his prime was like a mini version of Giant Haystacks only mobile and a lot more giving. He wasn't a bad worker for a big man, but was morbidly obese by the time the 90s rolled round. Gordon spent most of the bout making fun of Daly's obesity, the dick. Even morbidly obese he was still a better worker than Gordon. Joe Cruz vs. Rambo (Eurosport circa 1991) I have no idea why this made TV other than a chance for Orig Williams to gloat about how an American found European wrestling tougher than he expected. "Like all Americans, [Cruz] has a lot to say for himself." Feels like Military Industrial Suplex fodder for how American wrestlers are perceived in overseas countries. Kendo Nagasaki vs. Giant Haystacks (Croydon, 10/91) This took forever to get started. Nagasaki's manager, Lloyd Ryan, didn't want Pat Roach to ref the bout and MC Paul Chalmers spent an eternity relaying messages between Roach and the Nagasaki camp. Instead of whetting folks' appetites it just made them restless. Finally, team Nagasaki agreed to Steve Grey as ref. Haystacks and Nagasaki fucked about for a bit and the Croydon crowd grew fairly rabid as they were wont to do. Haystacks bled, Nagasaki did his Kamikaze Crash finisher on Grey, and Stax unmasked Kendo. Nagasaki refused to return to the ring because he was maskless and the belt they were fighting over changed hands on a technicality. Further explanations were needed and Chalmers spent more time gabbing than Haystacks and Nagasaki had done wrestling. Just a shitty piece of business. Tiger Dalbir Singh vs. Steve Casey (6/15/88) This was during Singh's disappointing run as the Joint Promotions version of the British Heavyweight Champion. But it was 1988 and the wheels had fallen off the wagon years earlier. Still the kind of thing that holds Singh back a bit in my eyes.

I've enjoyed the games I've watched so far. The Cavs may sweep the East, but the Warriors/Blazers and Spurs/Thunder series have been good.

Verne Gagne & Wilbur Snyder vs. Dick The Bruiser & Karl Karlsson (Chicago, 7/17/59) This was a wilder, more chaotic affair than the Los Angeles tags. The faces gave the heels an absolute pasting. If you think heels-in-peril was a new thing in 80s WWF you should see this. What interested me was how animated Gagne was. He leapt about throwing himself into everything. Definitely seemed like he was trying to put on a spectacle. Differentiating the tag gimmick from the more serious minded singles fare.

I don't see a problem with Nakamura losing his first name. How often do people refer to Misawa as Mitsuharu Misawa, etc? Japanese wrestlers are commonly refereed to by their family names. Also Shinsuke is tough to pronounce.

Hey, long time no see. I haven't noticed anything special about his bumping so far, but the footage I've been watching is mostly from his first year as a pro. He did take a bump to the outside with Gagne in their fight. It was such a stock standard finish to a pro-wrestling bout that I didn't think twice about it, but I'm not sure how common it was in the 1950s. Wilbur Snyder & Sandor Szabo vs. Joe Pazandak & Jack McDonald (Los Angeles, 1st fall only) Wilbur Snyder & Sandor Szabo vs. Jack "Sockeye" McDonald and "Dangerous" Danny Savich (Los Angeles) Tag wrestling in Los Angeles was contested under "Australian Rules" -- four 15 minute rounds, best two out of three falls, with a 3 minute rest period between rounds. It's a different beast from your typical Southern style tag. The heels cheat from time to time, but they don't cut the ring off and work the face over. There's no clear face-in-peril segments. Nobody's playing Ricky Morton, and as for the hot tag, it's tepid at best. Despite the length of the bouts, you don't get the double FIP segments you'd see in Don Owen's Portland territory. Instead, it's closer to French catch from the 1960s albeit slightly less rowdy as the Parisian crowds seemed to have had a few more drinks. Other territories in the 50s may have had smoother, more cohesive tag matches, but these Los Angeles bouts (or rather the second one, the first one appears to have been the victim of some copyright claim along the way) are almost like three self-contained falls that add up to give you a two out of three fall score. Snyder wrestles exactly the way he would in a singles bout instead of being the young sensation in peril or even a "blowjob" babyface to the extent that such a role existed in the 1950s. It may have been that Snyder was green, which I discovered Steve Yohe was quite adamant about when he damned the McDonald singles match I enjoyed so much. In any event, the bout was solid, but a little bit formless for those of you who like to sink your teeth into match structure. Szabo was a Hungarian wrestler and a former world champion in the 1940. I was hoping he'd be my next Tibor Szacaks, but it wasn't to be. He wasn't bad as such, but he wrestled a lot softer than I was hoping for. McDonald didn't reach the heights of his singles match with Snyder and both of his partners veered toward the solid more than the spectacular. Snyder kept doing his thing with shoulder tackles and leg work, but whether it's the influence of Yohe or not, his limitations did begin to appear. More so in character work than mechanics. But I think the majority of this Los Angles stuff is from the same month (May, 1954), so it's not really fair to judge him on such a small and compressed sample from his rookie year.

Is there a version of this match that doesn't have the dubbed over fan commentary? Because that ruined it for me.

I never much cared for the Kansai vs. Ozaki street fights, but after watching the GAEA main event I thought I'd check them out again. The 3/95 one has some good moments, but it's incredibly violent and I wasn't cool with the horrific blade job Kansai did. I know there's no relation but all I could think about was how she got sick a few years later. Don't think I needed to see that shit. Haven't watched the second fight yet.

Punk doesn't really strike me as a regular looking guy in the blue collar sense. Build-wise, sure.

I like Ricky Morton, but you'd have to be a much bigger fan of tag wrestling than me to rank him this high. Maybe I have a disconnect with the Ricky Mortons of the world because I wasn't raised on the teat of Jim Crockett Promotions, if you wiiiilll. Morton has all the credentials -- best babyface ever, greatest seller ever, literally defined the face-in-peril role in wrestling, and had great runs pre-Crockett and post-Turner. His SMW run looms large in my mind as a massive feather in his cap. Like a huge fucking feather that a pimp might wear. I have an inkling that he has indy work beyond that run too. He may still be active for all I know. The guy's a pro-wrestler, pure and simple. It's the only thing in the world he knows how to do, and like a lot of lifers, there's no corner of the world where he wouldn't lace up his boots and perform. I respect that. I really do. But it doesn't add up to me loving Ricky Morton just like I don't love Doug Somers or Tommy RIch. Trying too hard to like those guys to me would be like trying to fit into some kind of scene. Morton's cool, though, and did well to finish 33. Dustin of the Day was one of the most exciting things to happen on the forums in donkey's years especially for a guy like me who hadn't seen a lot of 1992 WCW up until that point. Early Dustin is really good. I thought he had a case of the "second year blues" in '93 (yeah, it wasn't his second year, but you know what I mean.) A few people vehemently disagree with me about that, but after the feud with Windham goes nowhere, he struggles through the remainder of the year before picking things up again in '94 with the wonderful Stud Stable feud. Just don't subject yourself to that never-ending best 6 out of 11, 7 out of 13 Rick Rude feud where even the one match I liked nobody thought was that good. I've never paid much attention to his Goldust stuff, not even the heralded stuff, so I can't say for certain whether he's too high, too low, or just right, but as a youngster he was a chip off the block of the great Texan asskickers and a strong hand. They see him walk, they hear him talk... I have nothing bad to say Shawn Michaels. I have nothing good to say about him either. I used to be a Shawn Michaels fan but that feels like a lifetime ago. One of my favourite things about the GWE was seeing folks stick up for him. Okay, I lied, I do have something bad to say about Shawn Michaels; he's a horrible actor. Inside the ring he's charismatic, but outside of it he's fucking awful. But he thinks he's so good. That's half the problem. Pro-wrestling hell for me might be Michaels overselling a storyline on an endless loop. I need to bite my tongue on Cena. Formuliac worker whose routine never got old. Pretty to watch. Wish we had more of his UWA work as those unfilmed years strike me as his peak years perhaps because of their mystique or maybe because the majority of wrestlers were working a style of lucha I like. In any event, I'd love to see some more UWA Santo unearthed. Suffers a bit from the burden of expectation. Since he's Santo, I'm always looking for something special from him and can be cruel if he doesn't deliver. Mostly recently, his Juarez stuff failed to impress, but you can find a lot of other work that fits that bill. Doesn't get enough credit for his transformation as a worker during his 1996-97 feud with Casas. I'm a bit of a purist, and some might say a lucha snob, but he incorporated the Japanese influence into his work extremely well along with others such as Felino, Casas and Wagner. Don't think his career as a whole gets analysed enough for a guy who finished 29th, but a ton of positives. Amazing brawler. Classic tecnico. Elegant flier, strong mat worker. Carefully controlled image like Michael Jordan, but a hero to the people. Superhero comebacks and a champion of every style of lucha. Lived up the legacy of his mask and then some.

Wilbur Snyder vs. Verne Gagne (Chicago) Solid match. These guys fought numerous times and I'm guessing this wasn't one of their more memorable bouts as it went to a double count out. Russ Davis was as sombre as I've ever heard him and barely cracked a joke, but he actually gave some pretty good insight into the bout for a change. The story behind the bout was that there was no love lost between Snyder and Gagne, two ultra-competitors, both of whom were champions in their own right. After a long, competitive stalemate, Snyder began targeting Gagne's injured elbow, which Verne didn't much appreciate, and that spilled over into a heated finish and the double count out. Prior to that there more of that cool leglock work and the quality grappling you'd expect from two exponents of the mat game. Both men avoided each other's signature holds and the frustration was palpable. Gagne's personality can be a tough nut to crack at times, but he was a world class wrestler, no doubt about that.

Wilbur Snyder vs. Jack McDonald (Los Angeles) This Los Angeles stuff is good! The commentator mentioned that Snyder had made his debut just a few months earlier. If that's the case then Snyder has to be in contention for best rookie ever. You wouldn't think he was only a few months into his career from the performance he gives here. Jack "Sockeye" McDonald was a dastardly journeyman who knew all the tricks of the trade -- fishhooks, rabbit punches, inside moves, kicks to the head, stomps to the face, scalp massages, you name it. He had a hairy chest, black full length tights and the face of a prizefighter. Snyder, on the other hand, was a good looking boy and the more athletic of the two. McDonald spent a long time trying to disfigure Snyder's mug and Snyder responded with a mix of strength and fury. At one point, McDonald suggested to shake hands and Snyder crushed the bones in Sockeye's hand with his vice like grip. At other times it was the dropkick that punished McDonald. The heel of the hand got some liberal use as well. McDonald had some neat moves too like a back breaker and a sweet little hip roll, but his job was to put over the wrestling's new young sensation and the finish was a cool shoulder tackle and splash. Snyder's leglock work is so cool. That's been my main takeaway so far. They should have kept working the mat like that in the 70s.

Wibur Snyder vs. The Mighty Atlas (Chicago,1/27/56) Someone, somewhere, recently said the Mighty Atlas was a good worker. He's not a good worker by any standards I pertain to and this was below the standards set by the Poffo match. That's not to say it was bad, but it was unremarkable in the grand scheme of a Microscope thread. The match was notable for being Snyder's Chicago debut if I'm remembering right but that's about all.