ohtani's jacket

Manami Toyota/Toshiyo Yamada vs. Madusa Miceli/Mitsuko Nishiwaki (10/8/89) Not the most memorable or dramatic TLTB Final, but AJW was going through a real transition phase in late '89 with the retirements of both Crush Girls. Why they chose to push Nishiwaki so hard is something that's probably worth researching/considering when it comes time for an '89 Yearbook, as she also won the 1989 JGP (defeating Madusa in the process.) She wasn't a bad worker, but it's not as though she was a stand out. Madusa wasn't as bad as I thought she might be and actually had a fairly decent stand up exchange with Yamada, whose kicks were again a little soft. The rest was your usual FIP stuff where they don't make an effort to go the whole hog with FIP. Bull Nakano vs. Yumi Ogura/Noriyo Tateno vs. Itsuki Yamazaki (5/6/89) Two matches going on at the same time in two different rings. This sounded like a bad idea on paper and was even worse in practice. The director tried his best and there were a couple of neat cuts between matches, but mostly it was a mess. Most Joshi matches in this era (or in general really) open with the action spilling to the outside and one of the wrestlers struggling to make the count while the other poses in the ring. You can imagine how bad that looks on a wide angle shot with the action taking place outside both rings. Bull/Ogura had a lot more action, so the director tended to stay on them a lot. Often when they cut to the JBA, they were laying around in holds, and the two matches just didn't seem to gel in a way that made it easy to cut between them. At one point, the JBA even seemed to look at Bull and Ogura and figured they ought to do something more interesting. There was also some bullshit with the ref in the Bull/Ogura match that wasn't worked very well, and the whole thing seemed like a failed experiment to me.

Dan Aubriot vs. Pierre Bernaert (9/11/62) I'm not sure where Phil got the date from on this one, but I'll roll with it. This was similar to the British style bouts that would disintegrate into forearm smash contests, which the crowd loved but Walton would lambaste. Aubroit seemed the more skilled of the two, or at least was getting the most purchase in the early exchanges, and Bernaert was known for his short temper, so they stirred this one until it was simmering then uncorked the forearm smashes. I like that style of working, so I thought this was a good watch, but it wasn't quite as memorable as some of the other French catch. There were plenty of novel spots, though. The spinning toehold that sparked Bernaert's frustration was a thing of beauty and the strikes were great, though not really Tibor Szakacs great it's fair to say.

I like Futen and late period BattlARTS, but the 2005 Ishikawa/Ikeda match was disturbing. Their late 90s work is a lot better.

Giant Haystacks vs. Johnny & Peter Wilson (4/23/85) This was supposed to be a handicap match for Haystacks, but having Peter Wilson in there made it more of a handicap for Johnny than Stax. The Wilson brothers went after Haystacks with the fiercest body blows they could muster, but were no chance against a ballooning Stax. Big Daddy/Drew McDonald vs. Giant Haystacks/Fit Finlay (5/2/84) So here we go, Daddy vs. Haystacks. I've been putting off watching these matches for years. On one hand, this was a shitty main event for a Cup Final Day. On the other hand, it wasn't the worst professional wrestling I've seen. Finlay, who was growing his hair out here and had a bit of an odd look, was the pinball for Daddy and was pretty decent. The thing you always hear about these matches is that Daddy stayed on the apron while his smaller, more talented partner did all the work, but I think that's a bit of a fallacy. Finlay vs. McDonald made up the bulk of the match, but Daddy tagged in more than he's given credit for during the HOF voting season. Most of the time, Haystacks avoiding facing Daddy, which was the way they built heat for their singles match(es), but on this occasion they squared off, and it's hard not to get a kick out of two extremely fat men colliding with one another. The problem with the bouts is the shitty finishes. The DQ was their out every single time. The payoff was meant to be that Daddy would get Haystacks one-on-one in a fight to the finish, but you had to be there I suppose. Big Daddy/Alan Kilby vs. Giant Haystacks/Wild Angus (4/29/81) We got to see the entire Big Daddy entrance here -- kissing babies, pushing a kid in a wheelchair, showing respect to the elderly. The whole bit. Shit was faker than the in-ring action and best avoided, unless you want to go around whistling "We Shall Not Be Moved" for the rest of the day. This was Cup Final Day once more, and they took advantage of the larger than usual TV audience to promote the Wembley Arena showdown between Haystacks and Daddy by basically having the heels re-injure poor Al Kilby (who had cartilage damage) and leave Daddy fuming. Match was a non-event, but a decent promotional tool.

Do you know if the 16mm prints of Rocco/Jones and Masambula vs. Leon Arras ever converted to DVD?

How many millionaire British wrestling fans do we know?

I would say it mattered less to me before I came online. As a kid I would watch the entire card with some notion of who my favourite performers were, but I was mostly into the storylines. Match quality never really crossed my mind. When I got back into it as a teenager I started judging matches and workers and looking at it from a performance aspect, but when you come online and there are so many voices saying this guy is great and this guy sucks, it's bound to have an influence of some sort even if it's merely reaffirming or strengthening your existing position. I imagine a lot of people, myself included, felt they should be a much bigger Benoit fan after spending a couple of months online.

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so. Find me the evidence. There is quite a lot of evidence of fans not being smart -- riots, death threats, and so on. 20,000 people at MSG who'd throw a fit if Pedro lost, etc. etc. You find me the evidence to suggest that a significent proportion of them were "smart". The onus is not on me. I'm peddling the line of what is known. The onus is on those people claiming that there were smart fans discussing wrestling like the IWC in 1998 back in the 60s or even the fucking 1930s. They are the one making the claim, it is up to them to prove it. If you think that they're a myth then the onus goes right back on you. You've had the argument put to you that the media has always tried to expose pro-wrestling as fake (as far back as the 1870s or before) and that there was very little difference between how people viewed pro-wrestling then and now, i.e. the media thought it was fake, the public thought it was fake, and the fans didn't care. Of those fans, you don't think there were people capable of viewing it as a performance? In the 1960s? Does it really matter if they didn't use the same terminology or that there was no internet? I get your general point that people were unlikely to have been talking about wrestling the same way that we do in the 1930s, but what does it matter if they appreciated it the same way? There is huge world of difference between stories exposing the business and reporting it like it's some major scoop and "smart fans". As I said, everyone knows it's a trick, but how is the trick done? The burden of proof does not lie with me. The terminology matters less than the entire way they think about and engage with the product. And to be clear, I'm talking about fans in the 1960s or the 30s or whenever talking about booking decisions as fans now talk about booking decisions. "I think Wrestler X should have won and it was a mistake for that promoter to make Wrestler Y win". That sort of thing, doesn't matter what words they were using. How many shoot interviews have we all seen and heard from guys who got into the business in the 50s, 60s and 70s? How many times do you hear guys talk about being "smartened up"? And this is people into wrestling enough to, y'know, actually become a wrestler. How many times do you hear those same types of guys talk about being part of "smart communities" of fans? The answer is zero is so far. Zero. We're not talking about the distant past here, this isn't the stone age before men and women could write things down, it's not the even the medieval age, it's the 20th century. Evidence shouldn't be hard to come by. Fuck, let's go to Kayfabe Memories and get some of those 70-year olds to explain what their fandom was like in the 1950s. of I literally have no idea why so many people here are not willing to admit something as painfully obvious as the seismic shift in fandom that happened post-internet. In my experience, the first thing people discover about pro-wrestling is that the outcomes are predetermined. From there, they come to the realisation that the wrestlers are co-operating with one another and that the moves are assisted. Most of us here came to that realisation on our own before newsletters and before the internet. I remember reading in the tabloids that the guy I thought was the announcer was in fact the owner of the company and that the whole thing was rigged. I didn't know how they rigged it and frankly I didn't care. Did I learn a lot when I logged onto the internet? Sure. Did it change the way I thought about wrestling? Not really. I was already thinking about booking and pushes as a teenager. Was I the first person to do so? Unlikely. The internet collected a lot of information in the same place and allowed for communication across the country (and indeed the world) where previously the only form of communication had been through fan clubs or at live shows, but honestly if we were talking about movies or comic books or music or any of our other hobbies we wouldn't be talking about seismic shifts (and there is insider knowledge in all those fields.) Why should I trust what workers are saying in shoots? Are you really going to have a shoot where a wrestler says they guessed it was fake before they began training? It's not going to happen. Believing what wrestlers say in shoots leads to a pretty romanticised view of pro-wrestling. Steve Yohe watched wrestling in the 60s. He seems pretty smart.

Sayama also wrote a book exposing the business. The same thing happened in England when Tony Walsh had an expose in the Sun. That was around the time Jackie Pallo blew the lid on the business in his autobiography. All pre-internet and non-WON influenced. The real vs. fake tabloid coverage was a big deal in the British papers long before '85. Walton used to rail against the Fleet Street press every so often.

Manami Toyota/Toshiyo Yamada vs. Akira Hokuto/Etsuko Mita, 10/8/89 Another "before they were stars" match. It must have been from a commercial tape since there was no commentary and the camera angles weren't television set-ups. Man, were the schoolgirls loud. They were really into Hokuto & Mita and shrieked whenever there was a nearfall. The match was non-stop spots, and we can safely say that Manami Toyota was Manami Toyota in 1989. The highlight for me was the bump she took off the top rope to the floor followed by a pretty nasty catch she took against the guard rail. Of course, Manami being Manami she was no selling it in no time whatsoever. Yamada has looked good in these tags. She's noticeably less stiffer than her 90s work, but she honestly looks like the heir apparent to Chigusa at this point. It's amazing the young talent AJW had at this point. One of the better future generations you'll see in any promotion.

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so. Find me the evidence. There is quite a lot of evidence of fans not being smart -- riots, death threats, and so on. 20,000 people at MSG who'd throw a fit if Pedro lost, etc. etc. You find me the evidence to suggest that a significent proportion of them were "smart". The onus is not on me. I'm peddling the line of what is known. The onus is on those people claiming that there were smart fans discussing wrestling like the IWC in 1998 back in the 60s or even the fucking 1930s. They are the one making the claim, it is up to them to prove it. If you think that they're a myth then the onus goes right back on you. You've had the argument put to you that the media has always tried to expose pro-wrestling as fake (as far back as the 1870s or before) and that there was very little difference between how people viewed pro-wrestling then and now, i.e. the media thought it was fake, the public thought it was fake, and the fans didn't care. Of those fans, you don't think there were people capable of viewing it as a performance? In the 1960s? Does it really matter if they didn't use the same terminology or that there was no internet? I get your general point that people were unlikely to have been talking about wrestling the same way that we do in the 1930s, but what does it matter if they appreciated it the same way?

You lost me at the mythical 1968 smart fan part. How do you know there weren't smart fans in 1968? Just because you imagine there weren't doesn't mean it's true. I could just as easily convince myself that there were smart fans in 1968 simply by stating so.

Giant Haystacks vs. Pat Roach (2/3/82) You'd think if anybody could stand up to Haystacks outside of Big Daddy it would be Pat Roach, but this was bullshit. Both men scored a pinfall over each other and then they were both disqualified for fighting between rounds, but really it looked like they had no chemistry together whatsoever. Giant Haystacks vs. Tiger Dalibar Singh (1/8/87) Singh was the British Heavyweight champion here, so how would he fare against Haystacks? The answer was not very well. He got the DQ win, but was left writhing in pain from the elbow drop to the knee. You'd think Haystacks could do the odd job now and again, especially to put over the British Heavyweight champ. He did it for St. Clair at one point, but Singh could have done with the rub as he wasn't exactly Mr. Charismatic. After the bout, Brian Crabtree went off at Haystacks about finding a bigger, nastier opponent for him to face and Haystacks threw him across the ring. Now there's a match I want to see -- Giant Haystacks vs. Battlin' Brian Crabtree. (All three of the Crabtree brothers were wrestlers incidentally, even promoter Max Crabtree, who was apparently a decent light heavyweight in his day.) Giant Haystacks vs. Rasputin (4/20/88) This was set up by an angle a few weeks earlier where a Super Eight-Man Battle Royal came down to Haystacks and Rasputin, who were tag team partners at the time. Rasputin didn't want to fight his partner, but Haystacks had no qualms about eliminating the Irishman. So this was a short, hot bout with Rasputin looking for revenge. He wasn't a particularly good worker, but some of you may be familiar with him from the Fit Finlay documentary. Match was the usual DQ bullshit, but Haystacks was miffed at the decision and took a swing at referee Jeff Kaye. Kaye dropped like a sack of potatoes and Haystacks followed up with the big elbow. You don't see that much in WoS and it got a chuckle out of me. Wild Angus vs. Pat Roach (11/18/81) Well, after all that it was nice to see two big men who could actually work. Wild Angus was a Scotsman who looked a bit like Alan Moore. Not a great technical worker, obviously, but his work fit his character and he knew his way around the ring well enough. He was pretty well traveled and there's a chance you would have seen his work in Japan or the US. This went a bit long, but it was a decent antidote to the short changing on the Stax matches. Wild Angus vs. Caswell Martin (3/31/81) All right, I've decided. If Gravesend was the best venue for wrestling in the country then Hemel Hempstead was the worst. Every time they taped there, there would be these young guys who would not stop heckling the wrestlers. Wild Angus was Scottish so in this match they wouldn't stop harassing him with English football chants. It was distracting for the wrestlers, distracting for Walton on commentary and distracting for the viewer. A shame really, because Caswell Martin is almost always excellent and Angus could work, but they definitely seemed to be affected by it. Giant Haystacks/Big Daddy vs. Steve Veidor/Tibor Szakacs (4/21/76) This was a fun match. During the intros, I had no idea what to expect. On one side you had two of the all-time great professional wrestlers and on the other side you had Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, and there was this moment where Tibor was standing there in his yellow jacket looking cool as shit and I had no idea how he was gonna play it. But to Veidor and Szakacs' credit, they hammed it right up. Both guys had awesome strikes and Daddy and Haystacks bumped like fools for them, so it was a pretty good spectacle. Daddy sucked, but we know that. What surprised me was what good buddies he was with Haystacks in their leaner days. They were thick as thieves those two. It almost makes their later rivalry Shakespearean. Wild Angus vs. Honey Boy Zimba (4/7/81) If Hemel Hempstead is the worst crowd ever, then I need to give some props to this Guildford crowd for being an excellent wrestling crowd. They were right behind Honey Boy Zimba, who wasn't exactly a top drawer star, and kept on screaming to the ref about Angus breaking the rules even when he wasn't. In fact, it would've nice if they could have given the partisan crowd a Honey Boy win, but they'd spent a couple of weeks building Angus up as Giant Haystacks' new tag partner and promoting their first match against Daddy and Al Kilby. But Zimba got a lot of heat so this was enjoyable.

Lucero's timing is off at times and as I've mentioned before I think his tope is weak, but against Silver Star he was working the classic lucha title match style -- which was never the tightest matwork to begin with, not that I thought the matwork was that poorly applied -- so, it's an appreciation of the form and the style. Lucero can work fast paced lucha exchanges with young guys (better than Hechicero has shown he can in CMLL), it's just that Silver Star is slower than he used to be and can't bump like the young guys do. I like Hechicero as a worker. He was great in Monterrey. But I don't know when he's shown those qualities you're talking about in CMLL. Every match he had in the En Busca de un Idolo tournament was flawed in some way and he was off the pace in that trios that everyone loves. I thought Cavernario was considerably better in the tournament and in the trios. In fact, aside from heeling, I would say Cavernario fits the description you gave for Hechicero. That match against Cachorro was a good example. Really basic layout, but it kept the work focused and allowed Cachorro to shine. Hechicero gave technicos like Dragon Lee way too much offence and the matches became messy spot fests. Just because he tossed a guy around by the hair or something isn't enough to persuade me that he's really controlling things from the top. He'd do things like that in the opening few exchanges then try to work a three caida match in seven minutes instead of a simple one fall bout like a lightning match should be. He hasn't had a proper three fall singles match yet (to my knowledge) and it's hard to be a gold standard rudo in modern CMLL, so I'm not trying to hold him to impossible standards, I just think he could do a better job of laying out his matches, working at a rudo pace, having better rudo cut-off spots and carrying himself in the ring better w/ rudo mannerisms and a rudo attitude. Being a masked rudo isn't as easy as an unmasked one, but I'm not sure he's as good as rudo Panther, and Blue Panther wasn't exactly a great rudo. I can't understand why they didn't bring him in as a technico. His biggest strength is his killer offence, which you don't want a rudo to have too much of.

I must be the only one who thinks Hechicero hasn't looked that sharp in CMLL. His work right now reminds me of when the Radicals first jumper to the WWF and struggled to adapt. I don't know why they've got him playing rudo when he was a technico for so many years. It's like he's learning on the fly how to lay out a match as a rudo.

I think you should add the AJW and JWP dojos, the UWF dojo and the various British and Mexican gyms.

Stu was old in the period we're talking about. He had people like Hito, Sakurada and his son Bruce doing a lot of the hands on training, but stretching guys presumably taught them a lot about holds and was a workout at any rate.

BTW, you should add Choshu as a trainer for New Japan and Hashimoto as a Calgary trainee.

Hase and the other Japanese workers had additional training in Calgary under Mr. Hito and Kazuo Sakurada. It wasn't their initial training, so it's up to you whether you include it.

Davey Boy Smith was trained in Ted Betley's gym.

Where is Virus? Why is Casas so high? How come Cavernario isn't on the list instead of Hechicero? I like the Lucero pick. He's the second best guy in Mexico behind Virus right now.

Sting's '93 was just as good as his '92 with the Vader strap match being the high point of his work during those two years. From '94-96 he was a good worker, but didn't have a marque feud like the Vader series (aside from the times he faced Vader again that is.) His feud with Meng was fun and produced at least one good PPV match. I also love all of his stuff with Regal where he's outside his comfort zone on the mat and just goes for it.

Looks like the guy uploading this stuff had his account taken down. Loss mentioned being interested in stuff from '89, so I thought I'd have a poke around. Grizzly Iwamoto & Bison Kimura vs. Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada, AJW TV 8/89 This was pretty good for a match featuring young workers. Of course, they worked at a thousand miles an hour and never slowed things down, but that was the style and not really a fault of the workers. Grizzly and Bison more or less worked like Bull and Condor from a few years prior, while it wouldn't surprise me if the company were hoping Toyota and Yamada would blossom into the next Crush Girls. Some nice double teaming from the heels and some high end moves from the faces were the highlights of this.

Buddy Rose/Curt Hennig vs. Dynamite Kid/Assassin, 9/3/83 I've been looking forward to seeing some Dynamite Kid in Portland. The best DK match I've seen was his '83 bout against Marty Jones, and while he wasn't as good here as he was in that match, it looks as though '83 might have been his best year. Rose as a face was weird. The crowd were into it, but I found it strange. It's too bad they couldn't find DK a better partner than the Assassin. You'd have to like your Portland to enjoy that cat. Match dragged a bit with the double FIP falls and there really wasn't that much to like about the work. Nothing the heels did was really that compelling and Buddy's hot tag wasn't all that convincing despite the crowd being hot for it. Hennig was a bit quiet and the ending left me feeling short changed, so all in all, a bit flat.

Kotetsu Yamamoto trained many of those New Japan wrestlers.