ohtani's jacket

Working an arm or leg is the pro-wrestling equivalent of plot. If the workers don't have a story to tell then there isn't one and that plot is simply work. It may be good work, smart work, effective work, great work, whatever, but at best it's just characterisation or more commonly the type of wrestling strategy/psychology that Gorilla Monsoon and Lord Alfred Hayes prattle on about. A wrestling match doesn't tell a story by default nor does it have to tell a story to be good. We all want to see something that is coherent and makes sense, but I guess Jerry is arguing that we shouldn't necessarily praise a match for delivering on those basic requirements whereas everyone else is arguing that they're such rare qualities in a match that those things alone are worthy of praise. To be honest, I don't think a wrestling match making sense is all that uncommon. Moreover, I don't think coherency prevents a match from being uninteresting. To me, the biggest problem with wrestling matches isn't structure or lack of a story but pacing. Most matches are boring because they lack rhythm and are poorly paced. But two people can watch the same match and have a different feel for the rhythm, and you can watch the same match a couple of nights apart and feel differently about it was well. Ultimately, it's the person watching the match who draws the meaning out of it. For some people a heel/face narrative structure is enough of a story element to satisfy them. For some people maybe a coherent match structure. Personally, I don't think you can really tell a story without a significant change taking place. That hardly ever happens because wrestling isn't a great storytelling medium, so I'm happy enough with great acting/performing and/or great work.

I can understand being impressed by a good bit of work and wanting to expatiate upon the bigger picture, but I think there's a limit to how much you can praise this sort of thing. I know you haven't said it's the case, but I don't think Demolition matches are good because they have captivating shine periods. I dunno, it just seems like mechanics to me. But anyway, we all watch wrestling in our own way and care about different things at different times. Tito's philosophy is probably true of most wrestlers. Wrestling really is the same schtick every time, but as people have pointed out in the past it was never really meant to be watched on televisions and computers years after it was worked for a paying audience. Well, except for the forays into the home video market. Those Coliseum videos were made to last a lifetime, I'm sure. I don't think anyone was meant to watch copious amounts of Tito Santana matches in a row, though.

The way I see it, that's just good wrestling. I've been watching these Tito/Orton matches were the work is mostly good, but you'd be hard pressed to say they have any sort of story unless you think Tito and Orton go to a draw is a story. I suppose my argument is that work is mostly just work and only sometimes gets elevated to storytelling.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #8 -- "Handsome" Harley Race, the King of the Ring The mind was willing but the body wasn't. Harley still did some cool things at this stage of his career, but he was so slow. I watched two bouts they had in '86, one from Boston and the other from MSG, and they were both pretty lifeless. Tito wasn't the kind of worker who pushes his opponent to do anything special. A lot of the time it seems like he's along for the ride w/ the heel dictating everything. This was the case here as Harley called these matches rather audibly. Unfortunately, he couldn't really bump anymore but was still using the same old match structure. Hence, the mind being willing but the body not. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #9 -- "Adorable" Adrian Adonis This might have been a good match before the "adorable" gimmick, but Adonis' matches were messy. He never really got how to wrestle well and stooge in the same match. It's very disjointed the way he moves from one to the other. Plus, this match starts off with some good exchanges then turns into a three minute hammerlock. I like some of Tito's hammerlock spots against Don Muraco and Bob Orton, but I'm not about to praise him filling in time in this match. All told a bit of a disappointment, but it would've been a major surprise if it hadn't been. Match was from the Spectrum, 6/28/86. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #10 -- "Cowboy" Bob Orton Orton was a nice opponent for Tito. They worked time limit draws against each other so the matches are a bit measured to say the least, but the work is mostly good. I saw an IC title defense from MSG (7/23/84) and a later match from Boston (8/9/86). Personally, I preferred the MSG match as it felt shorter and tighter, but they're both worth watching.

See Windham, Barry. Also Rhodes, Dustin. BTW, I didn't just pull the Davey/Eddie example out of thin air when trying to give my definition of psych. I purposely used an example where leg work would be meaningful to the hypothetical match. For every match with meaningful leg work like that, there are probably 1000 where it's strictly filler and has no meaning or impact at all. It's not meaningful to the match unless there's something more going on than leg work. Leg work doesn't tell a story no matter how logical it may be. Bret Hart setting a guy up for the sharpshooter involves a logical progression of moves but it doesn't tell a story. Now if the guy he's doing it to kicked his leg out from under his leg and just happens to be his little brother, then you've got some sort of a story.

I took a quick look at the results and seems they did a mixture of time limit draw and the Boston 4/22 angle. HistoryoftheWWE says Tito won a couple of times without specifying how. They didn't wrestle as many times as I would have imagined so I guess it wasn't as big a deal as I thought.

The percentage of great to bad is the same in any medium. The difference between wrestling and other creative endeavours is that at every stage of the creative process be it scriptwriting or songwriting or even shooting a film there is the chance for revision. Basic competency in these endeavours doesn't come easily but you can achieve it by reworking what you've created. If I rewrite a screenplay a dozen times it's going to be a lot more competent than the first time I wrote it regardless of how good I am at structuring a story. In wrestling, you can only really improve your match by doing it again and even if you do the same match night after night on the houseshow circuit you still need to produce your improved performance live. It's a much different discipline. Wrestlers don't labour over a match for a year like writers do with a screenplay. It doesn't take two or three years to produce a match like it does a film. The closest analogy is probably a prolific songwriter, but they still craft their work far more than a wrestler does. But really, most wrestling sucks because it's not important. Aside from matches that disappoint, there's no reason for most wrestling to be any better than it is. Take the Tito/Bossman match I watched earlier tonight. Theoretically, Tito and the Bossman had a great match in them but there was no reason to have one. Thankfully, some wrestling environments are better than others when it comes to the motivation or incentive to have a great match, but 90% of the time it's missing.

Well, if you're into scripts or you're a writer, critic or even a big movie fan you'll probably notice the set-up, but it's like a muso liking a song because of a chord progression. We're all pretty big wrestling fans here so we notice details, but in my opinion wrestling matches require certain conditions to tell a story above and beyond the wrestlers' ability to work. To tell a story either the stakes must be high or there has to be an angle to pay off. It's exceedingly rare that wrestlers create a story out of nothing.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #6 -- "The Model" Rick Martel In theory, this feud should've been as heated as the Valentine and Savage feuds, but for some reason the WWF mishandled it. There's a match from 4/22/89 in Boston that's a nice teaser. Martel attacks Tito as he's coming to ringside and Tito is unable to wrestle so they postpone the match until later in the show, where Martel takes full advantage of Tito's knee injury. Then there's their Saturday Night Main Event match from 9/21/89 which turns into a sort of impromptu lumberjack match when both their Survivor Series teams come to ringside. This was a pretty good match, actually, with plenty of chemistry between the two. It's been a long time since I saw Martel work and I'd forgotten his great facial expressions when taking a beating. Since we've been speaking about psychology in the other thread, Roddy Piper made a great point on commentary in one of their later matches that Martel is the type of wrestler who hates to get hit and will always take evasive action in such situations. This is so true. Anyway, the finish to the SNME match should be pretty obvious considering there's a heel team and a face team at ringside, but it's a good match with plenty of great reactions on the outside from the seconds. There's this great moment where Vince is talking about Martel's team being vultures and the director gets an awesome medium close-up of Bossman snarling. Vince recoils in disgust and blurts out "and there's the king vulture" in classic Vince fashion. But where is the blowoff match, Vince? There's one later match they have from The Main Event dated 11/23/90 that's really good, but most of their stuff from 1990 lacks any sort of spark. They really needed to have the blowoff match at Survivor Series but back then it was strictly the team concept and no singles matches. Really disapponting that there's no definitive match because work wise it's one of Tito's better match-ups. The only bad match I saw (and I watched about a half dozen) was a match from '92. Jim Ross did commentary on it and sure enough the motherfucker couldn't help but talk about Tito's football career. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #7 -- The Big Bossman This was from a special pre-Survivor Series episode of Prime Time Wrestling that featured singles match-ups amongst Survivor Series pairings. I remember these days like it was yesterday. Staying up late on Friday nights to watch WWF, living from PPV to PPV... They say you can never go home again and it's pretty much true with late 80s WWF, but still this was what you might expect from Tito vs. The Bossman without them giving away too much before the PPV or having a better match than the PPV match might be. Can't really fault a match that wasn't designed to be anything special.

You obviously haven't been checking out the DVDVR Best of the 60s forum Regarding "working the leg," I think it depends on what's happening in the match. Most of the time they're doing it because they're in a wrestling match. Sometimes they do it because they're a heel or a fired up babyface, at which point it's a type of characterisation. But if they really hate each other and have some sort of vendetta, then you've at least got the makings of a story. I always hated it, though, because in real life a knee injury would sideline a worker for months and they're right back at it the next night.

There's nothing praiseworthy about a guy working over someone's knee because it was injured on the outside. The other day I watched a great movie called Mamma Roma by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It tells the story of an ex-prostitute trying to start a new life so that she can raise her teenage son properly. Early on, there's a scene where the son and another character talk about whether they're afraid of death and the son says he's not. From that piece of information I'm sure you can all figure out what happens to the son in the end. It's a nice piece of set-up, but that's all it is -- set-up. You don't praise a movie for its set-up and you shouldn't praise a wrestling match just because of a simple bit of action that took place. A guy working over another guy's knee doesn't tell a story anymore than the Mamma Roma set-up.

For lucha, make sure you include the El Dandy/Javier Llanes match as it's mat heavy and one of Dandy's best matches. The Ciclon Ramirez vs. Javier Cruz hair match is okay but not great. I always wanted to see the Stuka vs Jerry Estrada hair match. You should try to track that down. Mascarita Sagrada/Espectrito I and Panther/Mariachi should be locks. This match -- 7/15/94 AAA: El Hijo Del Santo/Octagon/Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Blue Panther/Fuerza Guerrera/Psicosis had a Santo performance that I raved about, but I don't think that's a good enough reason to include it. 1994 was a down year for CMLL and the footage we have is incomplete. This is a desert island match for me -- Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Shinya Hashimoto (NJPW 6/1/94) I marked out when I read "the view never changes" in Dylan's post. What a promo.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #4 -- "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff I never have a problem with anything Paul Orndorff does, except for fact that it's unremarkable. He's one of those guys who is mechanically good but just doesn't excite me. There's nothing about his look that grabs me and there's nothing special about the way he moves or applies holds. But I watched two matches he had against Tito -- MSG 5/21/84 and St. Louis 9/1/84 -- and they were both pretty solid. They were very much "this is how you work a match if you're Paul Orndorff wresting Tito Santana," but the MSG match in particular is worth checking out for a hot crowd and Tito doing a big injury angle. Orndorff was pretty over at the time, which helped sustain my interest, and the matches built reasonably well even if the structure was somewhat generic. They also had a match from the Wrestling Challenge in '85 where they were both faces. They do some nice chain wrestling before things get heated. On the whole it was a decent match-up that like a lot of Tito match-ups needed a hotter angle. TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #5 -- Jake "the Snake" Roberts Eh, it's a Jake match. You always think it's going to be good then you wind up disappointed. The Tito match is from 11/26/86 in Houston and doesn't deliver much.

La Fiera v. Jerry Estrada, chain match, Monterrey, early 90s This is the first time I can remember seeing a chain match in lucha. I've got to say it's one of the better borrowed gimmicks I've seen in Mexican wrestling. The thing I liked about this most was how random the match-up was. One of the great things about lucha is that when you think of a chain match in Monterrey, there's probably a hundred different match-ups it would suit, but you look at the billing -- Jerry Estrada and La Fiera in a chain match -- and you think, "yeah, that works." Totally random, totally great. I can't think of another style of wrestling where there's so many match-ups you have to watch in case the match is great. This is a case in point, as long time readers will know how I feel about Jerry Estrada, but there's no way a sane man can resist watching this. I'll give Estrada his props now -- he was badass in this. They both were, really. It was basically a mano a mano match with a prop, but they did a lot of cool things with that prop and there was all of the blood and violence and selling that you'd expect. Brutality aside, I don't know if I'd call it a truly great match as it lacked the type of big finish that kicks the nearfalls into overdrive, but I kind of liked the finish they came up with for the sheer goofiness of it. After the tope and big spill to the outside, the idea was basically that the match was too violent to have any sort of resolution so they threw down the chain and did a double clothesline spot. Estrada barely connected with his clothesline, but it was one of those "only in lucha" moments where throwing down the chain and doing a double clothesline seems like a good idea. Yeah, it would've been better if one of them had tortured the other into submission but the match ran out of gas as a whole. Still, these matches are about atmosphere more than anything else and this definitely had its share, from the torn canvas to the workers bringing extra objects to the fight (for no other reason than they were scheduled to fight that night.) Plenty to dig even if it's incomplete.

Tito was one of the better workers in the company from '88 to '90 and didn't appear as though he had lost anything in his El Matador run. I think the key period of interest is when Bret started working more singles matches in the late 80s and early 90s as there are a lot of easy comparison points such as both of them having a ton of matches against Hennig. Yes, Tito was older and more experienced, but they were in a similar position company wise as midcard faces.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #3 -- The Barbarian The Barbarian didn't bring as much offense to his WWF matches as he did during his WCW run but he was still a pretty fun power wrestler. I always thought it was a bit weird how The Powers of Pain were broken up and repackaged as nothing singles workers. I mean, there's nothing to Barbarian other than some new threads, some hair and the fact he's managed by Heenan. Astute Tito Santana vs. the World readers will remember that Tito and The Barbarian had some history as Tito and Martel brought them in as hired guns to gain revenge on Demolition. As a kid, I thought it was badass that there was a team who might stop Demolition, but even I cottoned on to the fact that they were incredibly boring in the ring. I'm sure someone who take objection to that and point out the great Powers of Pain matches, but I think by the double turn no-one gave a fuck. Anyway, there's no reference to Tito and the Barbarian's previous history in this match-up, no baggage and no learned psychology. Just bear hugs. I watched three matches -- Wrestlemania VI, MSG 9/21/90 and a 12/2/91 El Matador/Barbarian match. All decent matches, but the highlight was Barbarian's clothesline to win the Wrestlemania match. Man did Tito eat that. One cool thing about watching Tito matches is that someone usually jobs as wins and losses in later Tito matches are inconsequential.

TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #2 -- "Mr Perfect" Curt Hennig These guys wrestled each other a bunch of times. I watched matches they had from 5/1/89, 5/16/89 and 8/21/89, as well as the final of the IC title tournament in 1990 and their Saturday Night Main Event match from 7/16/90. This was a real workrate feud by WWF standards and I imagine wildpegasus was a fan of this series. The impression of Hennig I had from the last time I watched his 80s stuff was his over the top bumping, but this time he struck me as a workrate machine. Compared to guys like Rude or Dibiase, Hennig was relentless. It was a bit suffocating, to be honest, as it was almost like watching Kurt Angle if Kurt Angle had no offence. The 1990 matches are much more impressive than the '89 bouts in large part because Hennig wasn't sticking to his man so much. The SNME match is the one to watch if you're going to watch any of their matches as it's a hot bout with a great crowd and a ref storyline that works. The only downer is the finish, which is too clean (of all things.) Definitely one of the better Curt Hennig matches and one of my recommended Tito bouts as well. If it had happened on a PPV it would be a lot better known. Tito had this ability (habit?) of blending with whoever he faced, but he was a pretty good foil for Hennig, firstly in vying to be the guy who ended the perfect streak and then as a rival for the IC belt. I don't know if it's true or not, but in the youtube comments some guy said Tito told him the original plan was for Santana to win the IC title off Hennig, not Kerry Von Erich. Kind've makes sense except for the fact that there seems to be other "Tito was supposed to win the belt" rumours. One final thought while watching this matches was whether Tito was better than Bret Hart. They were very similar wrestlers and did a lot of the same moves and I think it's an interesting comparison at least for Bret's work prior to '94.

All right, let's fire this baby up. I dunno how often I'm gonna do one of these, but here we go: TITO SANTANA VS. THE WORLD #1 -- Don "the Rock" Muraco Tito Santana was the man who ended Don Muraco's reign as WWF Intercontinental Champion at the Boston Gardens. That match only exists as highlights, but there are two MSG matches from 1/23/84 and 2/20/84 that give you a fair look at their title feud. It was quite a disjointed feud as Muraco cut these awesome heel promos where he said a bunch of derogatory things about Santana and Mexican people in general, but Tito was in real challenger/title match mode so instead of the fired up Santana we love so much we got a bunch of leverage holds. There were good things about the MSG matches, particularly when they unleashed on each other, but nothing beat the intros from the first match with Tito's hair and jacket, Muraco's badass red hoodie and the MSG crowd. Those early 80s MSG crowds were a much different beast to later WWF crowds. I dunno if you'd call them a wrestling crowd or a New York crowd or what, but every time the camera pans the crowd there's an array of interesting looking characters. But as great as the crowds are, these matches are a little disappointing. I actually prefered the shorter, tighter matches they had in Philly in '85 and Boston in '87. They're nothing special, so don't trip over yourself to see them, but they have a more watchable structure than the messy MSG matches. They also had a match at the Wrestling Challenge in '85 which is skippable and some matches in ECW in '93 which I only skimmed through but looked lacklustre. The thing I took away from watching this match-up is that they could have had matches as good as the Santana/Valentine ones but instead were going for some kind of title match psychology that didn't pan out very well. Nothing here I'd really recommend watching, but that MSG crowd sure rocked.

Rude was definitely a lot more enjoyable in '89, but to have a great match you obviously have to rise above a certain level and during that whole period nobody ever really does. It doesn't matter who the workers are, there doesn't appear to be any incentive to have a great match or even a clever one. EDIT: By clever, I mean if Tito and Rude had done a shorter match where they hit all the high points from their brief stretch run to the time limit, it would've been a cool Tito vs. Rude match. But because of the road agent or the booker or whomever else, it was waffle. I dunno why anyone would give pre-IC title Rick Rude more than 10 minutes, though I must admit that he turned the bear hug into a pin attempt which was pretty cool.

Blue Panther vs. Negro Casas, CMLL 4/24/11 Neither of these guys rank among my favourite lucha libre vets but this was an excellent mano a mano bout. I think it's fair to say that mano a mano bouts don't have the grandest of traditions in lucha libre. Historically, they remind me of studio matches from the territories system where the purpose was to further an angle or tease an arena match. For the most part, they were an excuse for both guys to spill a little blood before a wager match while holding back their big moves and doing the sort of fluff you see in the first two falls of any hair or mask match. Things don't really work like that anymore, but to be honest the classic mano a mano probably works best in a dark, dingy arena with a promoter who's teasing a wager match that will never, ever happen in his territory. What made this Casas/Panther match so good was that it was more or less worked like a straight-up singles match between the two. They also kept it really tight. I still don't like maskless Panther and I hate the way he waddles around the ring, but his work was snug in this match and I felt like he was keeping everything close quarters like in an old school mano a mano bout. I've mentioned many times in this blog that I think Panther's brawling is suspect, while acknowledging the times when it's been very, very good, but he managed to pull off what I'd describe as "technically minded brawling" in this particular bout; something that Negro Navarro and the Villanos are very good at. He's nowhere near as vicious at it as those examples, but then he's not a prime candidate for a hair match either. Nevertheless, he was looking to exploit Casas' injuries through submission and the finish was a ridiculously good shoot move. As for Casas' performance, I'm a big Casas fan without being a huge Casas fan. I agree with people who claim that Casas is one of the greatest workers of all-time, but for my mind it's a very old-school Casas that's one of the greatest workers ever. Casas was a guy who could generate massive amounts of heat through his magnetism and flamboyance, his sheer ability to get under people's skins, and many other things that didn't involve ring work. As times changed and wrestling became more and more offense driven, Casas had to move with the times, but offense was never Casas' biggest strength. Others may praise him for adapting to a changing wrestling environment and staying at the top or thereabouts for so many years, but for me the appeal of Casas begins to wear thin from about 1998 onwards. This match had pared down offense and a very dogged focus, but there was a long submission struggle that didn't really work for me where I thought it was clear that Casas came off second best in terms of pure technique. Mind you, even in the work from his prime I think he's been overrated as a mat wrestler. Sluggish matwork was really the only fault in what was otherwise an enjoyable mano a mano bout, however. Considering how forgettable most mano a mano bouts are even when they have blood and mask ripping and pillar to post brawling, this was a really decent match.

Dustin Rhodes vs. The Barbarian, WCW Saturday Night 11/14/92 Here we go, I've been wanting to see this ever since Loss pimped it a few years ago, but it never surfaced during the Smarkschoice WCW poll. Every few months, I check to see whether someone has put it on youtube or dailymotion and finally I hit pay dirt. That's a long wait in proportion to how short the match is, but it was every bit as good as I'd hoped it would be. For a sub-10 minute match they pack a lot into it, but never in a way that rushes things. There's simply an urgency to it because Dustin is hurt. It's a great example of selling well and not breaking character even in a minor bout. The urgency really helps the finish as well, which is a nice bit of booking against the run of play. Satisfying match.

I really wanted to like those Jake/Rude matches because of how memorable the angle was, but that feud was torturous. They may have had a good match at some point, but I couldn't get through the several I tried to watch. Just out of curiosity, I watched a Rude/Tito match from '88, and while you'd be hard pressed to call it a bad match, all it entailed was a lengthy test of strength spot, a chinlock, a bearhug, some stalling, a bit of stooging with the Brain, a drawn out atomic drop spot, a frustrated Santana getting his offence in spurts and a neat hot period before the time limit draw. This is what I imagine a stock 1988 match looked like between a babyface and a heel who could both work. You'd be hard pressed to call it bad, but it wasn't very interesting either and therefore a waste of time.

Did anyone have a good match with Rick Rude in 1988? Did Tito have a good match in 1988? Steamboat had numerous matches which were poor but so did Arn and anyone else you care to name. Every guy who I can think of who was consistently good had poor matches. It's a question of how many good matches they had amid the poor ones and how consistent they were in their prime.

The "They Shoot Pictures Don't They?" list is about as boring as you can possibly imagine, but both Rules of the Game and 8 1/2 are great films. My favourite Renoir film is Boudu Saved from Drowning, however. Most wrestling doesn't tell a story for the simple reason that the stakes aren't high enough. 90% of matches are just matches. They may have a narrative of some sort, but they don't really tell a story. Wrestling follows the same principle as sports: the majority of sporting encounters are disappointing in terms of their quality, but every now and again you get a classic. Sometimes that classic occurs during a finals series or a championship game and the sports writers go into overdrive and a story is spun. I think people confuse "psychology, logic and storytelling" with basic performance tennets. Just because a wrestler played their character well in a particular match doesn't mean it told a story. When story occurs in wrestling it is praiseworthy for the fact that it's a performance art. The story for a book or movie or play is written and rewritten countless times until it's acceptable. With wrestling you have to do it on the fly. It's a completely different discipline. Shakespeare would not have been able to knock out Hamlet in 20 minutes and Joyce couldn't have finished a sentence in that length of time. Basically, people want wrestling to give them their jollies in a way that sport does.

I liked all of the Sting/Regal matches. It was always fun to see Sting bring his mat game to those bouts. There's basically two interesting periods with Sting. One is 1992-93 where the roster in general are busting out quality stuff and the other is '94-95 where Hogan's come in and the quality wrestling has thinned out a bit. Sting did some interesting stuff in the latter period. Check out his matches with Meng, for example.