ohtani's jacket

The Morgan/Oro match is for the NWA World Light Heavyweight Title, which just goes to show how difficult it is to remember which matches are title bouts.

I re-watched the Toyota vs. Ito match from 8/17/01. It's an awesome match that's pretty much a typical Toyota match except it has a harder edge because she's playing a bitchy veteran heel. There were a couple of things I didn't like about it such as the crowd brawling and the fact that Ito seemed like she was wrestling The Legend that is Manami Toyota instead of stamping her authority on the match as The Woman in All Japan at that time. But the stretch run was great stuff. Toyota proved she could sell with the best of them and even when she popped up for stuff it was exciting. I'd chalk the whole thing up as a great post prime performance.

I think they created CMLL as their governing body when they split from the NWA, but don't quote me on that.

I'm not really sure about modern CMLL. In the early 90s, EMLL changed its name to CMLL and overhauled all of its titles. Prior to that most weight classes had two championships contested -- a national title and an NWA world title. The NWA titles were generally more prestigious than the Mexican national titles, though the national titles were important too because of how wrestlers were pushed through the lucha mags. Generally speaking, holding a title of any sort meant you were good enough to be a champion and in those days being a champion carried a lot of weight. I would say that traditionally the best workers competed for the welterweight, middleweight and light heavyweight championships and generally moved up through those weight classes. Unlike in other countries, the heavyweight championship was never that prestigious and neither were tag titles. Trios titles came along a little too late to be as prestigious as the singles titles. There weren't Mexican National Trios Champions until 1985. I would say mask and hair victories far outweigh the significance of the national heavyweight title in Mexico. Hope that helps somewhat.

Watched the '92 Hansen vs. Kawada match. Pretty much what you'd want and expect from those two. A very simple and direct bout, but it built well, Hansen's selling was top drawer, and Kawada looked like he had a shot at winning until Stan got mad. The most interesting part of it was the structured build and how Hansen adapted to the apparent change in the house style around this time. Whereas the Tenryu bouts were aimless a lot of the time, Hansen really stuck to the script here. If you watch enough of this stuff it starts to get formulaic as you see the patterns emerge, but Hansen's selling keep this organic and reasonably free flowing despite an almost layer by layer approach to building the bout. It looked like a fight and felt like a contest and that's enough to satisfy most folks I'd say. Kawada was good without being great. I don't know how far I'll go with this, but I'd be interested in finding the point where he becomes undeniably great.

THE ARTHUR PSYCHO HOUR Ep 34 Johnny Kidd vs. Ian McGregor (2/5/85) Decent WoS bout wrestled in the classic lightweight & welterweight style. McGregor was easily the best of the 80s teenage wrestlers not because he was especially charismatic, but because there was nothing cringe worthy about him. I'm not sure how far he could have gone if wrestling had remained a mainstay on British television, but to me he doesn't carry any of the stigma that the other "boy apprentices" do. Dave Finlay vs. Franz Schumann (Merthyr, taped 2/4/92) It's possible that Dave Finlay's post-Paula era is worse than his Princess Paula era. Franz Schumann was kind of like a poor man's Austrian version of Chris Benoit, at least on offence, but boy was he disinterested in selling. This had some hard hitting moments, but everything in between was a bore. Finlay was an awful worker at this point. Possibly the most glossed over awful period of all-time. Has there ever been a more noted worker who had a period this bad? Drew McDonald vs. Tony St. Clair (Caernarfon, taped 2/27/95) Drew McDonald had gotten pretty fat at this point. He looked like a tattooed version of Adrian Adonis. For some bizarre reason, Williams was billing him as Scott Chippendale, or something equally ridiculous, and he had a manager in a bowler hat doing a Bill Dundee Sir William rip-off. Ah well, it was 1995 Reslo. The most notable thing about this was Tony St. Clair busting out top rope moves he could have only learnt in Japan. Shaun South vs. Boston Blackie (Newcastle Emlyn, taped 2/5/92) Blackie without a moustache is weird. His stock has fallen pretty fast for me, but he was really just a victim here to set up the cool South vs. Schumann chain match. The ref was ridiculously lenient in this bout. Mindbogglingly lenient, in fact. Tony St. Clair vs. King Kong Kirk (8/30/86) This was from Screensport. On one hand, it was psychologically sound and a fairly realistic heavyweight bout between the newly crowned World Champ St. Clair and the heavier Kirk. On the other hand, it was slow and there was a type of fatalism to it that it wouldn't mean anything by bout's end. Which it didn't.

There's not that many title matches from the 80s available. These were the highest ranked matches on the lucha set: Gran Cochise vs. Satanico (9/14/84) Mocho Cota vs. Americo Rocca (1/27/84) Mocho Cota vs. Americo Rocca (2/3/84) El Dandy vs. Emilio Charles Jr. (12/1/89) Pirata Morgan vs. Brazo De Oro (11/17/89) These matches rounded out the top 50: Villano III vs. Perro Aguayo (10/7/84) Lizmark vs. El Satanico (April 1984) Atlantis vs. Emilio Charles Jr. (8/12/88) Not sure about the date on that last one. Some of the dates on the lucha set were iffy. For the 90s, Bihari's old 4 star lucha list includes title match listings -- http://www.luchawiki.com/index.php?title=Top_Lucha_Matches_of_All-Time Dandy vs. Azteca, Dandy vs. Casas and Dandy vs. Llanes have good reps. Loss really likes Dandy vs. Black Warrior as well. The list doesn't include Santo vs. Espanto Jr from '92 which surfaced after it was made. The most underrated match on the list is Rayo Jalisco Jr vs. Apolo Dantes

Ditch made the same mistake.

This could change at the drop of a hat, but I'd go Fujiwara, Han and Tamura. Fujiwara had the longest run (from '84-94) and had great shoot style matches in three different promotions (UWF, UWF II and PWFG.) Tamura was by far the most athletic of the three, but held back in UWF-i the same way Sano was. Han, on the other hand, was able to express himself freely. As I hinted to before, he had less to prove and wrestled with the same sort of sagely tongue-in-cheek style that you'd expect from a master schooling young apprentices. He was good and he knew it whereas Tamura was hell bent on proving the world wrong.

It could be something I'm remembering strangely, but to me Volk would do walk-off home run finishes like the '95 bout I mentioned that were incredible to me.

This is sheer brilliance. Now I have a mental image of Parv as Vivien Leigh in Waterloo Bridge.

Yumi Ikeshita is a tough one to make match recs for. You kind of have to just sample here. I can't remember which Black Pair tags are the best and even a noted singles match like Ikeshita vs. Hagiwara is clipped to shit, which I imagine will be frustrating for you. I love Yumi Ikeshita, but I'm not sure she is top 100 worthy unless you throw a bone to personal favourites.

The Hiro Saito match from 2006 isn't anywhere near as good as the Fujinami bout, but it's actually a better watch in terms of what Nishimura brings to the table. Instead of being blinded by a phenomenal performance from Fujinami, you've got Nishimura working a longish bout against a pretty generic tough guy Japanese wrestler. The focus here as really on leg selling. If you like matches where guys are targeting a body selling and there's a near perfect internal logic to the work and consistent, long term selling then you'll lap this up. Nishimura really does have a sweet European uppercut. I don't think he uses it as well as the Europeans did with their forearm smash contests, but it's a sweet imitation.

Well, I don't think her work was at its peak, but physically she was in her prime and those were her peak years on top.

I've always found Volk charismatic. I agree he was cavalier in the same way that Fujiwara was. Both of them had a great sense of humour and didn't mind popping the crowd with a sight gag. Tamura's urgency seemed to stem from a constant need to prove himself. First as a young boy then after his split from UWF-i and in his efforts to draw. One thing I don't think Tamura did as well as Han were finishes. I can't remember a Tamura bout that has as exciting a finish as the '95 Han vs. Yamamoto bout.

I totally agree that if Toyota had remained the solid worker she was from '89-91 she would have had a career not unlike Suzuka Minami. The others all had something going for them. Kyoko was charismatic and a joker. Hokuto had indomitable will power. Aja was bigger than everyone, and Yamada was a "shooter" and Chigusa clone. Even Hotta was like Omori mach 2. Toyota was a shy, soft spoken girl who needed to do something to stand out and that something was to go a million miles an hour and do moves no one else was capable of. Don't forget that Toyota was 21 years old in 1992. How many all-time great matches do we know of that feature 21 year olds? If you watch some of the vignettes a lot of the girls are ridiculously immature outside of the ring, particularly the younger ones like Hasegawa, yet in the ring they're deadly serious. But we're still picking holes in the psychology and work of 21 year olds. I think her work from '89-94 is enjoyable. I don't like her peak years '95 and '96, but I don't really like much about AJW as a promotion at that point and would rather watch GAEA and JWP. Her '97 and '98 post-peak work is more to my liking. One thing that Loss didn't cover was that she played quite a good bitchy heel. I know she got praise for that during the brief AJW resurgence in '00-01, but it was present in her late 90s work as well.

BTW, I'll send out the lists when I get home from work. For some reason, this thread is starting to remind me of efforts to reinstate the Macho Man.

Well, I didn't mean that Parv literally discovered Brisco. I meant that Brisco has been a discovery for him during the viewing period, as in he's discovered how good a worker Brisco was. Brisco's not a guy who gets talked about a lot around here. I don't think there was a Brisco thread in the Microscope until Parv made one. A lot of folks who come through here weren't around to read what was written about Brisco on The Other Arena, and the stuff being available on YouTube or Ditch's site is not quite the same as when All Japan Classics were in vogue; not to me anyway. Discovery is the wrong word, but Parv's thread about Brisco certainly got me to watch a couple of Jack's matches, and certainly I think the Brisco nomination thread would be dead if not for Parv.

Jackie Sato and Nancy Kumi came out of retirement to start the original JWP, so I suppose they'd be the first veteran workers. We don't have much of that era on tape, though. Devil was the first to transition almost directly from her AJW retirement to working as a vet and then the Jumping Bomb Angels followed suit.

I think you've explained your reasoning well. Anybody who's followed your podcasts or the written pieces you've done will know that you're generally consistent when it comes to these sort of projects, but as the type of voter you refer to throughout, allow me to say a few words. I participated in a 70s music poll where my list was full of nothing but funk, soul and jazz records with outlaw country being the only other genre represented. No, I tell a lie, there were blues records on it too, and a bit of MPB (mostly Jorge Ben), but I ended up voting for an outlaw country album as No.1 on top of a plethora of funk and soul. I ignored all of the classic 70s rock albums for the simple reason that I hadn't heard them. Instead, I went down all sorts of obscure routes and had a whale of a time. When we did the 60s poll, my ballot was so jazz heavy that you might as well have retitled it "The 100 Greatest Jazz Albums of the 60s," but man did I explore every corner of jazz on that one. Again, I ignored all of the famous 60s albums. It's only been this year that I've listened to all those records; off my own back and not for the purpose of any poll. If I ever participate in another 60s or 70s music poll perhaps I'd produce a more balanced ballot, but I'm basically the kind of voter you dislike. If I were voting on the best films of the 40s, I could never, ever, bring myself to vote Kane as No.1. I'd rather put it at 50 and find 49 other films to vote for, or not vote for it at all; that's how bad I am. So, a couple of points: * The same picks always finish high regardless of voters like me. The top 10 in this poll will invariably involve some combination of Flair, Funk, Hansen, Jumbo, etc. regardless of whether people like me vote just as The Godfather always wins, and Strangelove and Vertigo, and so on and so on. * Not everybody approaches these things by starting with the classics and branching out just as not everybody has the stamina to go through the a wrestler's entire back catalogue the way you do. I admire what you do, but people go down rabbit holes; they get into stuff. There are positives in people watching something new or different for the first time even if they don't hit all the must-sees before the ballot's due. Maybe they'll get to them next time, or maybe they'll do what I always do after a film poll -- check out the highest ranked stuff that wasn't on my ballot. * Matt's point about it being a snapshot is really a comparison being how tastes have changed between 2006 and now. It's a snapshot of the last 10 years just as the Smarkschoice poll was a snapshot of how people felt in 2006 and the years leading up to that. There are certainly some of us who are beyond the point of discovering a few of the workers you've been adamant about so far, but the workers who are going to fall furthest on the ballot are easy to predict due to trends on here and DVDVR since the original poll took place, and really it has more to do with a natural process of voters who took part the first time disappearing or moving on to other things than a deliberate, conscious rejection of the norm. * From my own point of view, it always bothers me when there's a music poll and a few token picks like Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder do well. Or a film poll where there's maybe a Kurosawa film or a Herzog film here or there. I understand why people might have a ballot full of punk or rock albums and a few Motown records here and there, but there's a drawback to focusing so heavily on the classics. If the people on this forum had only focused on the classics in the past five or six years, and gone round and round in circles on the stuff where the groundwork was already laid for us, there's dozens of workers who we wouldn't be discussing this time. * "Who would I rather watch now?", to me, is a legitimate tiebreaker for two guys I wouldn't give a moment's thought to otherwise. This idea that Rude and Dibiase are there as these two noted workers and I'm supposed to be ever conscious of how they rank in relation to one another is something I can't relate to. I enjoyed Rude during the WCW poll we did, but that feeling's gone. I dug the Dibiase/Magnum TA matches I watched recently, but I'm not going to pick a match at random to watch from either guy and the way I feel about either of them at any one time is not fixed. Objectively, I could weigh their careers up against each other the way you'd like me to, but what's the point in doing that if I'm not excited about voting for either? That's taking your sprouts analogy to an extreme. I realise you care more about the process than whether folks vote for one guy or the other, but I don't think you're paying enough respect to people defining their own personal tastes and putting their own personal spin on what is essentially their hobby. * And finally, I don't like the Sight and Sound analogy because what we do is nowhere near established as S&S. We're not even two lists into attempting to be the S&S of wrestling criticism. There's a long way to go before an analogy like that can be made, IMO. By which I mean S&S being some kind of bible as opposed to a list that's made once every 10 years.

Parv, I'm philosophically opposed to the adherence to canon and have long since moved beyond Sight and Sound as a guide to what to watch, but as a seasoned voter in these polls from Smarkschoice to DVDVR let me say this: the enjoyment you get out of these polls can only be personal. The measure of your satisfaction should be how many discoveries you've made since the project was announced not what the final outcome will be and how in line with your thinking it is. I know how frustrating it is to feel like you're the only one who's making an effort or taking the poll seriously, but you wouldn't have signed up for it in the first place if you didn't like polls and didn't like ranking things. If you go the GWE loses one of its pillars. You've been committed to the project more than just about anyone. I think it's a waste of your discoveries thus far not to vote. For every comment you receive in this thread there will be a guy who checks out Jack Brisco, or someone else, because of your hard work. Instead of worrying about canon, why not count the small victories?

He may have had the misfortune of being born as Toshiaki Kawada and not Ric Flair or Jumbo Tsuruta (he says tongue in cheek), but I felt inclined to watch some Kawada. I started with the 1/26/93 match with Akiyama. The quality of Akiyama's rookie work seems overstated to me. I'm not gonna come on here and say it was bad or anything, but when people say he looked like a seasoned pro I have to raise my eyebrow a bit. I thought he looked as green and nervous as any other rookie in this. Like most rookies, he was comfortable on the defensive role and sold with a fair amount of conviction, but offensively he was still finding his way and you could see the clogs working over time trying to keep up with the play. It must be hard being exposed for all the world to see on offence and he clung to the dropkick like a security blanket. Kawada was a bit too passive for my liking. It was only really when Akiyama messed with Kawada's shoulder that he felt the full brunt of Kawada's kicks. Otherwise it seemed like Kawada was working smart rather than hard. I liked him trying to grind Akiyama's mush into the canvas, but there wasn't much to write home about. Meltzer's rating felt spot on (*** 1/4) I think I'll watch the July match next.

Dylan and Childs inspired me to finally watch some Nishimura. What a beautiful match that Fujinami bout was. I had this notion that Nishimura was a latter day version of someone like Osamu Kido, but clearly he was a lot more expressive than that. I thought he sold exceptionally well during the bout and was fantastic, but what a phenomenal performance from Fujinami. If he'd worked that way more often in the 90s and 00s he'd be a dead set contender for the top 10. It almost reminded me of a Japanese maestros bout. In fact, the bout I kept thinking of was the IWRG Dandy vs. Navarro bout, though the Japanese pair were much much more physical. And what an amazing finish. One of the best sold submission reversals you'll come across. Great match. I felt lucky to watch it it was so special.

i guess I'll put these here: Axel Dieter vs. Adrian Street (Hannover 1981) This struck me as a sort of halfway point between Street's American work and the WoS footage we have of him, though admittedly I don't know what he was like in the halls during his WoS run. He was treated as a complete comedy act here and spent more time mucking around with the ref than he did wrestling. Dieter was never going to give him much due to the size difference between them, but it would have been nice to have seen a bit more of Adrian's grappling skill. I wouldn't say "dirt" has surface on Dieter since he died, but people have brought up the comments Dynamite made about him in his book and his son has been ferociously defending him on an online forum. I can only imagine what sort of prick you would have to be for Dynamite Kid to think you're a prick, but from an in-ring perspective Dieter hardly broke a sweat in this squash. Axel Dieter vs. Chris Colt (Hannover 1980) Chris Colt's gimmick seemed to be that he was in no fit state to wrestle. At first, he looked as inebriated as an wrestler I've seen. He could barely stand and had difficulty taking off his shirt and lifting his boots to have them checked. The ref had this real "WTF?" look on his face while Colt swayed to his theme music like a guy trying to find his way home after a night on the turps. Then the bell rang and he snapped into action. Between rounds he'd rock out to the music then he'd be back at it with smooth bumps and fluid movements. Dieter just sort of stood back in his corner and didn't break a sweat again. Axel Dieter vs. Amet Chong (Hannover 1980) Another night, another walk in the park. I'm so used to long Dieter tournament bouts that it's a surprise to see how many nights he had off. One thing I'll say for this is that Chong looked awful in his WoS bouts but was much better here. Fodder for Dieter, but better than his WoS nightmares.

It seemed unlikely to me that Breaks and Wright ever fought since they were different weight classes, but looking through the WoS results I was surprised to learn Wright only appeared on TV a dozen or so times from '69-72. That's far less than I would have expected.