ohtani's jacket

Yeah. The hair match is not talked about a lot, so I doubt that it's a classic, but the two trios I watched are awesome.

The 8mm film footage of Bockwinkel in the early 70s is amazing. .I was really impressed with the Ernie Ladd footage.

Anyone who doubts Casas needs to watch the Tarzan Boy feud. Hot damn.

This was a great match! It was only a two fall trios match, but it may have been the best two fall trios match I've ever seen. The tecnicos were on fire. Negro Casas vs. Tarzan Boy -- oh man, what a feud. Casas upped the ante in this bout after last week's blood, and it was INCREDIBLE. No-one can up the ante quite like Casas. Arena Mexico was rocking in this match. You had Atlantis and Wagner going at it again, Casas going full throttle against Tarzan Boy, and even Niebla refusing to hold back against Rey Bucanero. I've said it before, but you can't beat a trios match where the tecnicos are fired up and dishing it out to the rudos. Usually, you get that in the tecnico comebacks, but when the entire match is built around the tecnicos handing out an ass whipping then you know you're watching something special.

This was joined in progress, but it ended up being pretty decent. It was closer in quality to Virus' lightning matches than his classic title matches, but he worked in some cool shit, and Fuerza was able to hang. The finish wasn't what the crowd wanted to see, but Fuerza drew good heat and I thought he sold the finish well.

I haven't gone through Mike Tenay's entire collection yet, but Casas' 93 is built around the Ultimo Dragon title match and trios and the La Fiera hair match and trios. There is also the long Casas/Dandy vs. Jericho/Ultimo tag that personally I'm not a fan of. In '94 his major program is an apuesta feud with Mocho Cota that leads to an oddly structured hair match. In '95, his big feud is against Santo leading to their match at the Anniversary Show. I haven't seen much lucha from '95. IIRC, Segunda Caida have reviewed some of it. I don't know if there are any hidden gems outside of the Ultimo, Cota & Santo feuds. He may have some good performances here and there.

Yeah, that was a great podcast.

I need some clarification on this week-to-week thing. If you're talking about three trios and an apuesta/title match then there are few better. If you're talking about three random matches on TV from Arena Coliseo or Arena Mexico then not so. The thing is, I just watched a run of CMLL where Santo & Casas had a great match against Ultimo & Rey which moved into a Ultimo vs. Santo tease until CMLL and Santo had a falling out, or Santo fucked off for whatever reason, and Casas picked up the slack. It wasn't as good, but they plugged away and Shocker and Mascara Magica got involved, and Vampiro, and now they've set up Casas vs. Tarzan Boy, which is a great match-up. And the thing is, in between all that, Casas changed his wrestling style to a brawling style focused on punching and looked fantastic against GdI. Now if you expect Casas to look amazing in every match, it's not going to happen. Chad and I have mentioned the lulls lately. But what do we have week-to-week from Funk? Some All Japan tours? Funk benefits from random, isolated footage. Funk benefits from "we don't have much of him but what we do have is awesome." Funk benefits from "here's a new Terry Funk match that nobody's seen before that adds to his legacy." Casas was probably that way in the past, too. I am sure if we got random pre-92 Casas matches spring up that he would benefit in the same way that Funk does. There's never going to be a level playing field in these arguments, but I will say that the '93 trios matches I watched recently, which is for all intents and purposes a random watch, where I put Casas over as at the height of his powers, to me that is no different from how people judge Funk.

I'm not a huge Johnny Valentine guy, but man, that clip of Harley and Valentine in St. Louis in '72...

This was cool. It was built around Vampiro vs. Ultimo, and Ultimo being the best heel in CMLL naturally made it awesome. There was even a flashback to last week's low blow. Holy continuity, Batman. I am actually hyped to watch the Ultimo/Vampiro singles match after this. Vampiro was DQ'ed for throwing a back elbow at Babe Richard, who sold it like a fucking champ. I can get down with this reckless Vampiro with a hard on for Ultimo. The other story was Tarzan Boy vs. Casas, which is a great match-up. Tarzan Boy bust Casas open, which was barely noticeable at first, but when Casas put a rag around his head it soaked right through. He looked like Buck Shelford playing the French in '86. Look it up if you don't get it. I kept thinking how much I wanted to see them have a hair vs. hair match and then Casas got on the mic and said the magic words. There's a lot riding on that match. It could make or break Casas' year. The build up was ace.

Virus and the Guerreras are on the same side despite last week's brawl, but of course they're not cooperating. The tecnicos keep inviting Virus over to their side, which the Guerreras openly mock. I hate these drawn out turns in lucha, but at least Virus is in the spotlight and it's fun watching him sell the angle. Fuerza gets absolutely humiliated during the match when Niebla bumps and grinds all over him. Virus wants Juvie mano a mano, but first he has to go through Pops.

I'm gonna go with Casas on this one. I'm not really a Terry Funk guy. I love listening to his promos, but he's not a guy who I get immediately excited about when it comes to a match. And he doesn't represent wrestling to me like he does to so many other people. In fact, I went down a YouTube foxhole recently and wound up watching his roast, and I was interested in the part where Funk started listing the guys who represented wrestling to him when he was coming up in the business. Terry's a legend in the business, no doubt, but I don't think he's everything. I am interested in watching more of his 70s work if I get the chance. I didn't realize that we had some agnostics on the forum when it comes to Casas. That's interesting.

I've been reading up on Dump to see if there's anything I can add to this thread, and man, between the way rookies were treated, the management practices, and the amount of money the Matsunagas blew, AJW ought to be a lot more notorious than it is. One thing I've discovered recently, and they did this with Aja and Bull and Dump and the Crush Girls, is that management would get in the workers' ears and feed them lies that their opponent was saying about them. Then they'd encourage them to take it on their opponent in the ring.

Hashimoto's body of work is deeper than people gave him credit for in the past. If you pimp any of those matches as a MOTYC then clearly they're going to be an unconventional choice for MOTY, as I don't think a Hashimoto match was ever given serious MOTY consideration in real time. The 1998 Hashimoto/Tenryu match may have gotten MOTYC buzz, I don't remember. I do think it's important to keep re-evaluating and adding to the canon. I despise the idea of a canon that is set in stone. And, yes, that sort of attitude creates a bias towards things that are new and shiny, and not old hat, but if people have a problem with that, I think they should find something new to say about a Jumbo or Flair. There's not a lot of discourse going on these threads just sides. I know no-one wants to have page after page of arguing, but what's going to happen in 5 years is that the folks who think Hashimoto is cooler than Jumbo will vote Hashimoto higher, and the folks who think Jumbo is untouchable will set him on a pedestal, and we won't have advanced the discourse because both sides will ignore each other.

This is a brilliant match. It was the closest thing you'll see to a 70s Inoki match in 2002 New Japan. Takayama could have destroyed Nishimura in a stand up contest, but I loved how he worked Nishimura's style while staying true to his own formidable stand-up game. Watching Nishimura try to figure this monster out was a ton of fun. I adore Nishimura's out of place style. God bless him for working that way in the modern era. Easily the best Japanese men's match of the year. Probably a MOTYC for 2002 overall.

This is tricky. Casas is in a lot of crappy matches, and there are periods where he's given nothing to do and languishes in random matches because of lucha's weak ass booking. The argument used to be that he was brilliant even in those matches, but I'm not so sure. Given him a program and he's an all-timer. That '92-93 period after he'd jumped from UWA to CMLL was the absolute peak of his genius. It was as though he was hellbent on making Arena Mexico his house. I also like the way he changed his style later on after working in Japan. I have a lot of respect for the way he was able to adapt and stay relevant as he got older. That's basically what I'm witnessing now as I watch his work with Ultimo Guerrero and Rey Bucanero. Tamura, on the other hand, basically worked one match a month and essentially spent the rest of the time training. It was kind of a sink or swim scenario as to whether the match was any good, but even in a match against a bad opponent, or a guy who wasn't great doing a work, he still gets to flash some technique and the selling point is that it's an actual fight, and Tamura looks great if he wins. So that's probably an advantage over being stuck in random trios matches. Casas' genius vs. Tamura's athleticism and technique... You could make a case for Casas being the best luchador of all-time and Tamura being the best Japanese wrestler of all-time. Lucha vs. shoot style. This is really tough. These are basically the two types of wrestlers I like -- the genius performer vs. the skilled wrestler. I will go with Casas because he probably had more all-round ability. Tamura may have been great at pro-style, but we'll never know because of his career path.

Bob Elandon & Albert Falaux vs. Rene Caballec & Gilbert Puydebat (aired 2/23/63) This was an old Bob ALPRA upload, but it's worth watching Bob's uploads in context. I'm assuming this was before Elandon started doing the N'Boa the Snakeman gimmick. He was a strange looking dude but a great heel. His partner, Falaux, grew on me throughout the bout as a nifty heel technician. I'm pretty sure Falaux appears later on in the footage. I know Caballec does. If you can concentrate on the bout, there are a lot of great exchanges. However, as with most catch tags, the rhythm is strange. The match goes two out of three falls to a finish, but that's all it does. If you don't care about that sort of thing then there a plenty of neat moments. I enjoyed it a lot after two months of not watching any Catch.

Ultimo Dragon greeted the crowd before the match and mentioned he was here to see his friend Vampiro. The rudos jumped him and gave him a working over until the tecnicos arrived. WTF is up with Shocker's entrance attire during this period. He was wearing a rastafarian hat with dreadlocks. The match had the usual exchanges between Ultimo and Shocker, Shocker and Tarzan Boy, and Casas and Bucanero. It was short compared to their other main events and ended up a crappy low blow finish instead of a payoff to the Ultimo Dragon beatdown, but the Shocker & Casas vs. GdI dynamic is the best thing going in CMLL.

About halfway through this, I thought it lacked spark aside from the usual excitement around the tecnico comeback. Then La Familia de Tijuana turned on Satanico and it made sense. More beef. A lot of angles on this show.

This match was an excuse for Virus to start beefing with the Guerreras, but that's a good thing since it means we'll see more of Virus on TV. I've complained about Juvie a lot, but he was perfect in this. Just an absolute shit. The match wasn't much, but the post-match brawling was cool and the crowd cheered loudly for Virus to wipe the shit-eating grin off Juvie's face.

If you're interested in Lou Thesz, go ahead and watch a Lou Thesz match. They're not hard to find. I'm not interested in championing Thesz so that people will vote for him. I'm too old, tired, and swamped at work, and it's not going to happen anyway because it's not an era of wrestling that people are interested in. If people want to talk about Thesz that's cool, but watch a couple of matches first. I don't know why people wouldn't like the Thesz vs. Schmidt matches and not be interested in seeing more Thesz, but I can't wrap my head around a lot of things.

It's not about liking or disliking Toyota. I get why people have a problem with Toyota. It's about actively hating on Toyota while claiming that every other Joshi wrestler is great. I don't get how someone can watch that period of Joshi and not coming away with the understanding that she was an integral part of the era and a worker who embodied what it means to be a Joshi pro-wrestler. I don't know anything about current Joshi, so I'll stick with the older era. Aja, Dynamite and Bull were not indicative of Joshi pro-wrestling or Joshi pro-wrestlers. They were given the gimmicks they had because of their body type and the way they looked, and also because it had worked in the past. That style was antiquated, the audience changed, and finally they were able to show traits that were closer to what Joshi was truly about. Aja got to show more of herself. Bull got to show more of herself. The best part of Bull's career, IMO, is when she's the respected elder stateswoman speaking on behalf of all the wrestlers. She had been moved sideways, career-wise, but she seems happy to be in that role. I don't know that for sure, that's simply my impression. I know from listening to her speak that she had a hard time at the beginning of his career and a difficult time during that early 90s period people have been talking about a lot recently. Anyway, back to Toyota. Toyota was representative of practically every girl who broke into Joshi or tried to break into Joshi. The outliers might be bigger girls, smaller girls, or sporty types, but the point is that pretty much every girl who tried out for AJW wanted to be the babyface idol. Aja wanted it. Bull wanted it. They all wanted to be like Chigusa. Toyota didn't have the charisma to be an idol like The Beauty Pair or Crush Girls, but she did have the drive and determination to be a fierce competitor. People praise Hokuto the hilt, but to me there is no difference between Hokuto and Toyota when it comes to their mindset, their attitude, the raw feeling they tapped into. I do not see a difference between Toyota and Jaguar when it comes to determination, either. There were a lot of girls on the AJW roster who were good workers, or fun workers, inoffensive, but not on Toyota's level. I'm not gonna say Akira Nogami was a better worker than Shinya Hashimoto and I'm not gonna say Takako Inoue was a better worker than Manami Toyota. The most frustrating thing about Manami Toyota is that you can never have a proper conversation about her. You can't talk about what she was like in '89-90 or how terrible her GAEA work is because all anybody ever talks about is selling the leg. Anyway, this was an antagonistic thread in the first place, and I gave an honest answer even if it made no sense.

Well, he's a better wrestler than just about everyone else, so yeah.

I would take the '92 Dandy, '93 Dragon and '93 La Fiera matches over any Santo vs. Casas match. I actually think Santo vs. Casas is probably Casas' most overrated match-up.

First of all, Bull keeps saying that the Matsunagas were in Bull and Aja's ears trying to get them to hate each other and that a lot of the emotion in the ring was real. I don't know how much of that you can believe, but from what Bull says it wasn't a case of Bull dragging Aja to her level, but Bull fighting to retain her position. I think Bull was a good worker from her rookie days through to her retirement, but I don't think she had great matches with the younger girls when she was the company ace. Some good matches, for sure, but nothing amazing. And by the time the interpromotional era rolled round, she was downplayed by All Japan Women and didn't have a lot of singles match opportunities.