ohtani's jacket

Negro Casas vs. Mocho Cota, hair vs. hair, CMLL 9/23/94 This was the main event from the first weekend of Anniversary celebrations in 1994. A show which only drew 4,000 people; a shockingly poor number for a CMLL Anniversary Show. For some reason, the promotion decided to make it an una caida one fall, presumably because of the glut of apuesta matches they ran over the Anniversary Show weekends. I may as well get my first bias out of the way and confess that, outside of tournament lucha, una caida lucha is something I'd usually turn my nose up at. And an una caida apuesta match is just wrong. It changes the entire psychology. The old Ventura talking point of being up a fall and having the leverage to drop one is thrown out the door, so you have guys refusing to give in to holds they'd ordinarily submit to, which stretches out the match and disrupts the rhythm. Luchadores are so used to working two out of three falls that an una caida match presents a unique challenge. The glass half full perspective would be that it changes the complexion of the match and that it's interesting to see how the workers adapt, but to me an apuesta should be a crowning moment and not an experiment. Casas, playing a pure babyface this year, borrowed Dandy's old trick of being beat up while still wearing a jacket. He wore this stonewashed denim jacket with a picture of a tiger on the back, which was a strange fashion choice for Negro Casas but typified how everything about the bout was a little bit off. He bled immediately, and would have lost the primera caida straight away if this had been an ordinary apuesta bout; but instead there was a prolonged beat down which revolved around Casas injuring his leg on the apron and his ankle buckling when he did a back flip off the top turnbuckle. Cota naturally smelt blood in the water and began stomping on the leg before twisting and contorting it into all sorts of unnatural positions. Cota had been pretty good up until this point, dragging Casas about by the hair and giving him these short knees to the head. Casas was a bit patchy. His selling was okay from a distance, but up close his acting wasn't that flash and the cut didn't look so nasty. I didn't like his attempted comeback either. He was pandering to the crowd with a guillotine move to send that fuzz of Cota hair flying, but it wasn't angry enough. If a guy's beating the crap out of you, it's probably better to strike back instead of playing to the gallery. Call me picky, but it was like watching the shine in a comedy match. (I think that's the first time I've ever used the term "shine." Matt D is rubbing off on me.) Next, Casas loosened the laces on his boot, possibly because his ankle was swelling up and he wanted the doctor to take a look at; it was hard to tell because they cut to commercial then replayed the injury. Suddenly, Casas' boot was off and he was hobbling about with one boot on and an extremely exposed sock. Cota went after it well; kicking at the exposed limb while Casas winced in the corner. He never failed to remind Casas or any of the folks watching that it was a hair match as he grabbed Casas by those greasy locks any time he transitioned from stomping on Negro's foot to putting him in a submission hold. There was a nice touch of Negro struggling to get his footing even when Cota pulled him up by the hair, and to Casas' credit he struggled well while in those holds. Casas was looking for a time out in the corner after taking another mangling in the ropes, and when he slipped out onto the floor, Cota flung his boot into the air. Thus began the mystery of what happened to Casas' shoe, which I became preoccupied with the first time I watched the bout. I liked Cota's strikes in the corner and the knees, and Casas' ineffective attempt at a lariat escape out of the corner, which Cota was able to shrug off and keep on his man. All of this was good stuff albeit utterly dominant from Cota and aching for a payoff. Watching it a second time, I really couldn't fault anything that Cota did in the beat down phase. The issue was with how stretched out the fall was. If you're a fan of limbwork -- and they're out there those limbwork fans -- the consistency with which he targeted the leg and focused his attack on it, while still pulling Casas about by the hair, was impressive heel work. As I said, Casas' selling was good from a distance but looked too much like whining close up. There were times when it looked good and times when it didn't, but it was a difficult proposition for Casas as he was forced into prolonged selling in a situation where he should have submitted a million times over. After a while, it went from being heroic to plain stupid as the beat down wore on for far too long and became something quite unnatural in a lucha libre context. I can appreciate the quality of the work in the passage where Casas threw a punch and Cota shook it off and stomped the crap out of the leg again (and man are his boots cool -- check out the rad hand design), but even Jesus didn't suffer that much on the cross. There's just no way that Casas should have been able to withstand all that. Even if you use the rationale that luchadores usually submit because they have a fall in hand (meaning it doesn't make sense to sustain any further damage) and that in fact they're capable of enduring far more pain if the rules are different, which in this case they were, it was still too bloody long! And do you really want prolonged limbwork in your apuesta matches? Hell no! You want a babyface comeback that's just as violent as the rudo's attack. Apuesta matches are part survival, part revenge, and there simply wasn't enough vengeance in this bout. Anybody who's ever watched a pro-wrestling match knows that Casas is going to win after taking such a beating. It wouldn't be just for him to lose or make much sense in the context of this worked sport. The key then is how satisfying it is. This is where they began to err as instead of Cota getting his comeuppance he continued to take too much of the bout. Even when Casas pulled his old rudo trick of a low blow, and smiled to himself in the ropes, Cota sold it ever so briefly and went after the leg again. There was no breathing space on that at all, and he went to the well again on the pin attempts. Cota was an excellent worker -- even the broken down version you see here. He was a weird looking dude, and that was off putting for people at the time, but the shit he does is cool, like that diving stomp from the second turnbuckle, which is the antithesis of top rope moves during the height of the mid-90s workrate phenomenon. Even so, he wore out his welcome here. The idea behind the finishing stretch appeared to be that Cota had been so utterly dominant that each of Casas' attempts at a counter were brushed aside. And Casas seemed to be playing with the idea that he was badly injured and had taken so much punishment in the bout that a flash pin or a submission out of nowhere was the only way that he was going to realistically win the bout. But Bret Hart playing possum he wasn't and the finish was shit. That's what I'm going to call it -- shit. I put some thought into that and I'm sticking with my choice -- shit. You win on back suplex (into a side slam or whatever it is you call that) when the guy was able to fight the waistlock? And he kicked out right after the three. I mean I hate to sound like Monsoon, but he didn't even hook the leg. How could Casas possibly have held Cota down for a three count on that move? It doesn't make any sense. Cota's brushing aside everything because he hasn't been worn down enough and a back suplex and lateral press is enough? Una caida lucha -- not my thing. Sustained selling and limbwork in lucha -- not my thing. Apuesta matches that are light on blood and don't have great selling -- not my thing. Lopsided bouts that end with ridiculous pinfalls -- not my thing. Cota's limbwork was outstanding if you value that sort of thing, and his rudo performance was more than solid. Casas wasn't at his world beating best, but I don't expect people to be quite as finicky about his performance as I was. It wasn't a great bout, and suffered I thought from an unnatural psychology that greatly hindered what you'd usually expect from a lucha apuestas bout; but it was worth watching for no other reason that it's overlooked Cota, and Cota is a guy where we can basically digest everything we have on tape. The mystery of Casas' missing boot was resolved when an old guy tried to give it to him at the end of the bout. At first I thought he was a member of the public who picked it up and kept it safe until the end of the bout, but then I noticed that he took Casas' jacket from a guy in the front row who helped Negro remove it early in the bout. I guess he was the props guy. Come to think of it, I don't recall either guy having a second, which was odd. My eternal thanks to alexoblivion for providing the bout. I'm sorry it wasn't my cup of tea. I imagine there are plenty of people who would enjoy it more than me particularly if they don't care so much about traditional conventions of lucha libre or they're not so picky about whether Negro Casas is making adequate facial expressions or not. Still, 4,000 for the show. What a disaster.

Here is a picture of the original company name on a Japanese VHS tape:

It was originally called the UWF then it changed its name to Universal Pro-Wrestling Co. Ltd. The company generally referred to itself as Universal.

Here is some info about the original UWF -- http://www.prowrestlinghistory.com/shoot/uwf/uwfabout.html It was born out of the 1983 New Japan coup described here -- http://wiki.puroresu.com/Universal_Wrestling_Federation Basically, it was originally envisioned to be a new version of New Japan broadcast on rival station Fuji TV and that's why it was similar to New Japan in both presentation and roster prior to Gotch's students taking over. Hamada's UWF was actually covered the other day -- http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/31220-hamadas-uwf/

I thought this was extremely good for what they set out to achieve. It was a much more minimalist, stripped back style than the wrestling that was in vogue at the time, and the beginning was largely masochistic with both wrestlers challenging each other to hit them as hard as they could. That might not be to everyone's tastes and was a precursor of a lot of the modern forearm exchange spots, but Tenryu and Hashimoto tend to be a lot more violent. The complexion of the match changed when Tenryu became injured. I thought the commentators did a good job of foreshadowing the knee injury and Tenryu sold it pretty well except for the spot where he was struggling to reach the ropes. Not really a natural spot for Japanese wrestlers that. The crowd was super hot for his comeback which made for a fantastic atmosphere and though some of the stagger selling was weak, this was a much better example of how to do a Cena/Owens match well. Hashimoto was even using Tenryu's moves ala Owens. I really liked how Hashimoto bled from Tenryu's tsuppari attack, and even though in isolation Tenryu's big spots are ugly as sin, with that crowd behind him, the knee injury to overcome and the difficulty in keeping that fat man down you couldn't help but root for him.,

I thought this was extremely good for what they set out to achieve. It was a much more minimalist, stripped back style than the wrestling that was in vogue at the time, and the beginning was largely masochistic with both wrestlers challenging each other to hit them as hard as they could. That might not be to everyone's tastes and was a precursor of a lot of the modern forearm exchange spots, but Tenryu and Hashimoto tend to be a lot more violent. The complexion of the match changed when Tenryu became injured. I thought the commentators did a good job of foreshadowing the knee injury and Tenryu sold it pretty well except for the spot where he was struggling to reach the ropes. Not really a natural spot for Japanese wrestlers that. The crowd was super hot for his comeback which made for a fantastic atmosphere and though some of the stagger selling was weak, this was a much better example of how to do a Cena/Owens match well. Hashimoto was even using Tenryu's moves ala Owens. I really liked how Hashimoto bled from Tenryu's tsuppari attack, and even though in isolation Tenryu's big spots are ugly as sin, with that crowd behind him, the knee injury to overcome and the difficulty in keeping that fat man down you couldn't help but root for him.,

I'm in the dark on Psicosis, someone mentioned him for his AAA ork and I asked Zellner who said people spoke highly of his pre-AAA work as well. I guess you could argue that he was great right out of the gate in AAA since there isn't any Baja footage (at least not that I know of.) There is a 1992 Psicosis match on YouTube I might check out if I have time. If we're allowing for unseen footage, Jaguar Yokota was pretty great at an early age and Dynamite Kid was by far the best teenage wrestler I've seen in British wrestling.

That sounds a whole lot like forcing yourself to eat your greens. I can't think of many things worse than watching something I hate so that I can form an objective opinion on it. Having said that, the more I watch a guy I don't like the more I tend to soften on him and in some cases come around on them. I just watched a decent batch of Danny Boy Collins, which amazed me. You do lose that possibility if you succumb to your frustration.

Psicosis made his debut in 1989 and was around for a good three or four years before anyone saw him so that's a pretty liberal example. Another one people used to mention a lot was Mika Akino.

In that analogy, Orton would simply be a bad artist, but he would still be an artist.

Can't an El Gigante fan say "I know he sucks but I like him anyway"?

I don't get that Prince example. It's possible to tell whether Prince can find a note if you have musical knowledge. If Primce can tecnically speaking find a note then the person is just talking shit because they don't like Prince's music, which is what people are doing half the time behind the veneer of subjectivity.

There are Indy workers who will work for nothing just for the opportunity to wrestle just as there are actors who will work for nothing for the chance to act. And when both actors and wrestlers are washed up they'll again work for cheap. They're comparable professions in many ways. I'm sure there have been instances of a wrestler taking a lower pay day to support a promoter in some stage of their career, but it's not an easy analogy to make as the cost of even the tightest Indy budget dwarves a wrestling show.

Rey was still putting in some good performances in 2010, but I thought the quality of his matches was down on 2009. The Michaels match was okay, but Shawn's selling kind of sucked. I also watched the Undertaker match from the Royal Rumble but it fairly mundane. I think that was a match-up issue more than anything else. Still, Rey vs. WWE legends is another thing I can cross off the list of things I'm interested in. Rey vs. Kidd was the kind of Rey match I like to watch, but Kidd's execution was sloppy and there were too many people at ringside. The Del Rio stuff was okay, but he's a mechanical worker without much soul. I liked the Punk feud, but it wasn't a patch on the stuff with Jericho the previous year. Punk wore his influences on his sleeve, but he did it with conviction and I could appreciate that. I didn't much care for his over acting on the hair match payoff, but that's a standard American interpretation of a hair loss I guess. Their Wrestlemania match was kind of drab, but the rest were solid enough, though the delay during the Over the Limit bout hurt it a bit. Swagger was an awkward match-up for Rey because of the size difference (had no idea Swagger was so long limbed), but their feud was pretty good. Unfortunately, the final image I had of it was a terrible falls count anywhere bout (hate that gimmick) with Kane showing up to chokeslam Rey into the river. Was it me or did he appear at the end of each of their fights?

Yeah, the Puerto Rican guys fit into CMLL better than just about any other foreigners. They were also good in early 90s UWA.

That sounds very much like something the world needs to see.

Artistic works are commodities. There's plenty of people in the music business who see it as a business, as well as in film, TV and any other medium you care to name. The fact of the matter is that wrestling is in the entertainment industry and therefore closely linked to other commodities which are often considered art. There is an "art" to what wrestlers do in terms of craft and the commodity they produce can easily be called a "work." It's not a stretch for it to be classified as a "work of art." The problem seems to be with intent. A wrestler sets out to entertain people, get a reaction from the crowd, maybe get paid more or whatever it is he desires, whereas many people's image of "art" is setting out to paint the Sistine Chapel. Just because it's not of a higher calling doesn't necessarily make it any less of an artform. You can call it pop art or whatever you like. I personally think it's a limited art form (if indeed it is one) that doesn't have the depth of a comic book or even an animated cartoon, but that's because of its storytelling limitations. But it can be visceral and powerful and full of human drama. If it were all about dollars and cents, I'm not sure they would go to those lengths to create such performances. Other forms of show business don't. So, if it's not art it at least borrows from other forms of art -- like narrative and storytelling -- and therefore we can at least say it uses artistic elements even if it's Bobby Heenan doing comedy. I can understand people being careful not to over praise it, but on the other hand I can understand people refusing to undervalue it. Maybe I'll settle on wrestling being pulp fiction.

The 6/14 Hashimoto/Ohara vs.Tenryu/Ishikawa match is another fun handheld. It was basically designed to ratchet up the heat between Hashimoto and Tenryu, which was this festering boil of animosity. Hashimoto lifted his intensity to the next level and I thought it was the best he's looked to date. The other two were punching bags and mostly ignored as Tenryu and Hashimoto kept having a go at each other even when they weren't in the ring together, but they played their roles effectively. Tenryu squaring Ohara up after the bout and punching him for no good reason was a dick move out of the top drawer. His mannerisms in this were great, as you'd expect from a Tenryu match that was all about heat.

John Cena vs. Kevin Owens (5/31/15) I ended up watching this three times, and I've got to say it was much better without commentary. I can't stand the way the WWE commentators step on each other's toes all the time and Layfield peeved me off by claiming that Magic and Bird were already in the NBA while Dr J was playing for the ABA. Also that NBA Countdown style panel the Network has where the wrestler's mimic the same intonation as those ESPN crews is hokey as shit. This was the first time for me to see Owens wrestler so I had absolutely no basis of comparison. At first I thought he was weak on the mic, but his understated delivery grew on me and I dig his accent. The early beat down stuff was pretty generic. It wasn't bad, but there was no hook and it didn't relate to the rest of the match. As soon as Cena mounted his comeback it turned into a back and forward finishers battle with not much in the way of a middle (more of a bridge from the early wear down stuff to the kick outs and near falls.) Owens didn't really brawl as such, but the commentators kept putting over his fighting gimmick so I thought he could have been a bit more aggressive. Cena has some of the worst transitions of any major wrestler I can think of. I don't get how a guy who works such a choreographed style can have such terrible transitions. He also has poor punches, awful moves (like the springboard stunner and that shoulder tackle thing), can't sell very well and has poor pacing and sense of building from one section of a match to another, but it's those transitions that get me. The shuffle step he took after the missed moonsault was the most glaring, but there were two or three other transitions where he "wrote him a letter" as Kent Walton would say. And that's on top of the audible spot calling. I did like the finishing stretch and I thought Cena's first lariat was the best part of the match (especially on the replay), but the finish was weak. I get that they wanted it to be flukey, but I'm a firm believer in escalating near falls and ending a match on the right beat and that wasn't the right beat. In fact, the counter of the superplex probably would have been a better finish even though it didn't involve what I suppose is meant to be Owens' signature move. Or they could have just gone a few more beats instead of having it come after a string of hotter moves. Some of Owens' hybrid Dick Togo/Vader moveset is cool, and I guess his performance was better than Cena's as I don't think Cena was all that good in this bout. Overall, the bout was okay as the first match in a three match mini-program, though at the risk of upsetting people even more, it seems to me that people add a lot more to the narrative than the wrestlers or commentators provide as this really felt like a fair simply May to July mini feud and not overly important in the career of John Cena. But maybe it takes a further turn with Cena's reaction to the loss. I'd go about ** 3/4 stars on this.

I don't know how they rate as Match of the Year contenders, but here are the World of Sport matches I liked: Kung Fu vs. Mick McManus (4/21/76) Zoltan Boscik vs. Steve Grey (aired 5/8/76) Steve Veidor vs. Gwyn Davies (5/26/76) Mark Rocco vs. Marty Jones (6/30/76) Terry Rudge vs. Marty Jones (11/30/76) Zoltan Boscik vs. Alan Sarjeant (12/29/76)

It's fair to say that I like lucha matwork. My only problem with lucha matwork is that there isn't more of it. Lucha matwork is a style of matwork much like European style matwork, shoot style, submission wrestling, amateur wrestling, NWA heavyweight mat wrestling, good old regular pro-wrestling matwork, and so on. It's possible to like one style more than another, or like one style of mat wrestling and not another. I know you're finicky about what you like in your matwork (or should I say particular) and firm in your convictions, but when you're dealing with a particular strand of matwork, you have to appreciate that there are inbuilt expectations that may differ from you'd personally like to see. When I watch lucha matwork, I want to see different things from different workers. I want to see some guys work tough gritty mat contests and some guys work surrealist masterpieces that don't look like anything else in pro-wrestling. The very best guys can do both. Matwork that may look lame to you meets my expectations. Dandy vs. Azteca met a lot of people's expectations. Most people have praised it for its execution and enjoyed whatever tropes it contains; but really the point isn't whether you like the trope or not, it's whether the trope was well executed in the first place. If you time code the limbwork you're talking about on YouTube, I will check it and decide whether I think it's poor or not; but I don't think you can say just because you've watched a lot of pro-wrestling that everything about the match is obvious or apparent. The only way you can learn about a style is by watching as much of that style as possible, making assumptions and getting things wrong and learning through those mistakes. Writing things off on the basis that it didn't look like something familiar to you is unfortunate. Writing things off because they don't stack up to other examples is unfortunate. Like the Dandy/Satanico, Tully/Magnum thing... why should Dandy hate Satanico as much as Magnum hated Tully? There is no basis for such a comparison. Anyway, no-one is going to as you to invest anymore time in lucha than you would jazz at this stage, but telling a lucha fan that Dandy/Azteca is crap is like telling a jazz fan that a great jazz lp is crap. Do you have the grounds to really say so? Generally, people ignore what they're not interested in. Writing off an entire genre in a more verbose way -- while a natural thing for many of us to do -- is an annoying thing for its fans if it doesn't seem like you really made an effort to understand it. Especially, a genre that has always suffered from stereotypes and lazy criticisms. Maybe I'm being overly protective of my beloved lucha, but matwork that doesn't look like it hurts etc is a craw in any true lucha fan's side. But please time code it because it may not actually look good.

Only one person said anything about your views on Dandy/Azteca and that was me. Subjectivity isn't an excuse for unfounded criticisms.

That may have been the case pre-network, but I cannot see how MITB 2015 was one of the biggest shows of the year.

It's a glorified In Your House. Not in the present day where every PPV/special event is pushed as important. Two weeks after the last special event? Cena sure learns new moves quickly. Maybe that was the narrative behind the botch. He hasn't had time to master the all-important Code Red yet.

It's a glorified In Your House.