Matt D

Glad that I found something you hadn't seen (I threw a hail mary there because you've seen a lot of stuff). It really is a hell of a sprint with a great crowd and a ton of traditional, classic babyface fire by Hennig. Very much looking forward to what you've put in front of me because it's far out of my wheelhouse. Will check it out in the next couple of days. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/21752-kenta-vs-suwa-noah-2nd-great-voyage-091805/ Thanks to jmare for this. It's something I wouldn't have come across on my own and I got a real kick out of it. Very interesting layout with a top notch heel performance and what might be an underrated ace babyface one.

I came into this blind. I think I've seen one KENTA match in the 00s (a heel performance with Shibata vs a Taue tag). I'm not convinced I've ever seen SUWA; actually I'm pretty sure I never have. You can count the NOAH matches I've seen, in general, on two hands. I really liked this though. It was a testament to consistency of character and the malleability and possibilities of pro wrestling, as well as the transcendent power of escalation and symbolic meaning. Yeah, it was all that, mainly through a dickish performance by one wrestler and the way another chose to respond. SUWA was great from the start, dipping under the ring to drop off his Money in the Bank case, threatening the ref, ripping up the scroll, making obscene gestures, and then, ultimately, after KENTA gets the best of the initial strike exchange, trying to take a powder. I kind of wish they had stalled just a little more there, but 1) it would have extended an already long and eventful match, 2) the fact that KENTA chased right after him helped to establish his credibility, and 3) it set up, in a wild fashion, the bell shot and the immediate briefcase shot that followed. KENTA got the DQ win, including a graphic on screen, SUWA clapped and laughed his way down the ramp. This needed blood. Two big shots to the head from foreign objects. It needed blood. That's ok though. I didn't get a sense of KENTA demanding they restart the match, but restart it they did, with KENTA recovered enough (maybe more believable because of the lack of blood?) to dash down the ramp and assault SUWA, kick him, suplex him on the ramp, and proceed to toss him back in. The next couple of minutes are a lot of fun, as KENTA doesn't get outright bloody vengeance (again, maybe blood would have prevented this?). Instead, he humiliated SUWA with offense, sliding in and out of the ring to mess with him, draping him over the top rope and kicking and slapping him but at his own leisure, hitting a flashy dropkick. It fit the characters and the match but wasn't at all conventional. Unfortunately, the big transition to SUWA taking back over came from KENTA locking in a chinlock for no reason, basically letting him up, and SUWA hitting a sloppy Regal Cutter. I have no idea why any of that happened. Part of pulling off a match like this is total commitment and that felt like a slip. Thankfully, SUWA more than made up for it when he was in control, starting by undoing his taped fists and choking KENTA with them, then going to the turnbuckle and trying to get it off, which never really does pay off in the match, but does allow him to arguing and threaten (and even try to kick) almost everyone in the arena including Higuchi. SUWA's body language here was just off the charts. When he tried to kick the guys fixing the turnbuckle the place came unglued. It felt so wild and natural and immersive. It's like this. If doing one dickish thing was good, doing three in a row was excellent. KENTA, to me, came off as absolutely credible and dangerous. I don't think people should overlook his performance here. He felt like he could come back at any moment, but still sold heavily and appropriately. When SUWA started on the back, KENTA would build in a bit of sell into his comebacks. SUWA kept going to cheapshots and eyerakes to cut him off (though KENTA doing a full back bump on one eyerake was pretty ridiculous). The best cutoff was SUWA shoving the ref into the ropes to break up a springboard. I had to rewind it twice to figure out what happened. Brilliant stuff, probably dangerous to execute, that you just don't see all that often. It was, to a degree the folly of each man in the match. SUWA wouldn't stay on the back, wanting to create distance to do big jerk attacks (which sometimes worked, like the corner dropkick, and ultimately didn't, which I'll get to in a moment). KENTA's instinct in fighting back was to create distance to hit something aerial when he should have just stuck to the strikes. It's pretty much the only reading that makes the transition into a comeback (so much as there was one) work, as it was pretty much just SUWA running into KENTA's feet in the corner a couple of times. It didn't really transition into a finishing stretch and the match got a little amorphous at that point, so I could have used something a little more definitive maybe. Just a small thing (one of a few that I've mentioned). The escalation was just right for the match in general. When SUWA hits a tope ~18 minutes in (hard to say with the pre-match stuff), the crowd goes big for it because it did feel like a big moment in the match up until then, which is telling considering that they had done a lot of STUFF up until then. It just was appropriate for the period they were doing it. The ultimate finishing stretch was enjoyable, with what I thought was equally appropriate selling even on a strike exchange. That's where the escalation really paid off. The big moment on the back end was SUWA going for repeated low blows and KENTA powering out of a double underhook into the Go 2 Sleep. It wasn't the finish, which also sort of felt right due to the fact SUWA controlled so much of the match up til that point (even if he had just eaten a Tiger Suplex) but it was such a definitive moment where SUWA's cheating ended up not mattering in the face of the sheer force of KENTA's will and moral superiority. At that point, barring some sort of escalation (like another box shot), there was nothing SUWA could do. Fate was against him and he was outmatched and there was ultimately a sense of surprisingly satisfying anti-climax was KENTA finished him off with the running strikes. There were a few things I was iffy on, but ultimately this was a unique match with a couple of great performances in front of a great crowd who was totally into it. I'm glad I watched it.

They spent a month trying to force the yes chants on to big show.

Will get Migs and dkooky in next week.

No one is acting like he is the Shockmaster. You can be bad without also falling through a hole in the wall. Hm. 92 Ottman is decent. That's tough.

There's a bunch of Georgia easily available online. I'd rather have Florida, I think.

My dad has been telling me about that episode all my life! It was the Tron of bladejobs.

Glad that I found something you hadn't seen (I threw a hail mary there because you've seen a lot of stuff). It really is a hell of a sprint with a great crowd and a ton of traditional, classic babyface fire by Hennig. Very much looking forward to what you've put in front of me because it's far out of my wheelhouse. Will check it out in the next couple of days.

Works for me if it works for you.

More people can join up, certainly. It's a bit tricky with an odd number, but we'll work that out. Oops. That's because I had to run the random things twice because I missed the two latecomers the first time. I won't fix it or else I'll kill your joke. ANYWAY, I think I know what I want jmare to watch. The #5 result in the DVDVR AWA 80s set. 05/31/86 AWA World Heavyweight Champion Stan Hansen vs Curt Hennig.

Week 2: I think everyone's come through and it went well. People seemed to enjoy it. I'm glad. If you haven't had a chance to hit your match yet, that's ok. You're just generating a backlog for yourself. In the meantime, come up with one for your new partner for the week so that they can keep rolling. I took a quick glance and it doesn't look like anyone's matched up with the same person again. CapitalTTruth PeteF3 SPS Rah topropepodcast WingedEagle SirEdgar Matt Franklin Matt D Jmare007 Grimmas AstroBoy C.S. Wahoo's Leg Laz soup23 dawho5 Jetlag Nintendo Logic Tim Evans Beast Richeyedwards I'll try to have a match for jmare later in the day. Thanks for participating. dawho5 Jetlag

I'm playing catch-up and cherry picking. The Sami Zayn episode was excellent. Sami put forward an idea that you learn so much more about how to wrestle when working under a limitation (be it a match or even an injury) and that very much resonated with me because I've always felt like you learn a lot about a worker from how they work with a limitation (including, yes, aging). I find Sami's concept of a good match having to be like Terminator 2 (Good story, Good characters, Good action) very interesting. It's a different but similar take on the workrate arguments we've had, though I think we pick things apart slightly differently. Some of the talk about the "This is Awesome" chants are interesting, but they never see them as bad, just something that they have to make sure is genuine. How he learned psychology was interesting (wrestling in a bubble in Quebec and then having Super Dragon put some pieces together for him). Little touches from Vince (he should smile, not scowl as a heel). How (according to Balor, and they sort of agree) great matches are ones that stand the test of time, which feels very anti-meltzerian.

Maybe one that was slightly more representative of the two years of discussion leading up to it. I look back on the whole thing extremely fondly though. No regrets.

From the outside in because i see myself sitting this one out due to other responsibilities, I guess what I'm going to be most interesting in seeing is how people shape their criteria. How much do you value checkhov's gun, or a proper balance between shine and comeback, or clever transitions, or downplaying obvious cooperation in setting up spots, or counters. What about "learned psychology" where a match plays on previous matches. Etc. People will have to come up with their own metrics to compare matches. Or not, I guess.

No, but Great Wrestler Theory does.

One week from the start of this will be Tuesday. I think I'll tally who's finished and see if I can reshuffle for week 2 based on that. If someone hasn't had a match suggested yet (especially if they suggested one of their own) I'll have to figure out what to do there. We'll see. So far, so good though.

"Build" is the wrong word. I'd use "Sputter" or maybe... http://www.celebrateboston.com/strange/cow-paths.htm

That sounds krone-meltzer interesting, therefore not really interesting to most of us if the year is no longer 2001 or so.

Has Mid-Atlantic gone up yet?

You guys are doing great by the way. Thanks for everyone who's giving this a shot.

Who am I to doubt El Boricua? Secret Santo sounds good to me. Thanks for the match. I'm only back on Disc 3 of the PR set and at the rate I'm going, I'd not get to that match for another year. It was a blast. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/35590-los-invaders-i-ii-vs-chicky-starr-ron-starr-52588/ I'm glad you liked Arn vs Barry. It's amazing how much good wrestling was littered on WCW C shows in the early 90s.

To me, this was all about balance. Not every tag team match has to be worked exactly the same. That said, I do think the end result has to be balanced. The heat has to work relative to the shine. The comeback has to properly pay off the heat. If you have something in the pre-match (like, let's say stalling, or in this case a promo) or a post-match beatdown, it all plays into this. I wouldn't say that this was the perfect tag match, but I would say that it was perfectly balanced. Hopefully I can make that make sense. All that said, the shine was perfect. Yes, Invader 2's pokey punches were the best. Chicky's physical reactions were amazing. He could be in there bumping like Curt Hennig and it'd be all wrong. Instead, he had the physical grace of a guy stepping on a rake and getting whacked in the head and it worked so well. I'm not going to say it took as much skill as what Hennig did, but it did take skill and control and even more than that a willingness to look ridiculous and it worked. Again, though, there's balance. The transition was Invader 1 putting his head down and Chicky getting his foot up. Sure, the tide really doesn't turn 100% until Invader 1 reversed a whip into the corner and Ron got his knee up to catch him, but they made Chicky look canny and dangerous like a cornered rat, even in the midst of it all. That's important. Then, just to drive the point home, all the points home really, the brunt of the heat was Invader 1 getting mauled with his masked turned. It worked, but in the moment I wished that it could have been longer. It felt like they spent as long turning the mask as beating him down. Ultimately, it was the right call though for a few reasons. The first is that while it was a smart temporary ploy, it was ultimately flawed. The whole time I'm watching this, I'm thinking to myself that I want to love it, but it kind of makes no sense. This isn't Atlantis or Hijo de Santo. We know what Invader 1 looks like. The mask is something he puts on as part of a tag team solidarity thing. As cool as a notion as it was, I was sort of doubting the whole thing. So after about two minutes, when he gets the first real chance to do so, what does he do? He pulls the mask all the way off and starts to fire back. It's like an explosion, the impact of the comeback. Even so, in a normal situation, you'd want longer heat somehow. Here, it was fine and balanced because what would come. The comeback wasn't long but it was definitive, with Chicky and Ron both bleeding. Ron carried around such an air of competence to him and him pulling down the rope on Invader I and grabbing the chair that ended the match felt like the most natural thing in the world. Again, they got stooged at the beginning, only controlled the match by turning Invader 1's mask, and lost control the second he pulled it off, but they maintained their heat brilliantly here with the post match, utilizing a chair, yes, but using it and the numbers advantage to take out three men when they were only two (and not just any three). Invader 1 ended up in a pool of blood on the outside; Invader 3 was just decimated by repeated shots to the throat, brutal; Colon was so smart as an Ace, making sure it took three chair shots for him to stop fighting back, but ultimately, he was left a bloody mess too. The understanding of how pro wrestling works and should work here was just brilliant. Because of the way the match was worked, the Starrs came out of this looking like they could and would get destroyed the next time the babyfaces got their hands on them in any sort of fair fight, but they were the ones who were left standing, making the crowd want to see (and pay to see) that destruction with every iota of their being. Great pro wrestling.

Done. You're paired with Jetlag. I'm sure he'll come up with something good for you.

Absolutely. We've got an even 20 right now, so if someone else either pops up (or drops out), we can slot you in. Otherwise, once someone's finishes, if they want to do another for this week, they can pair off with you (and if no one manages it, I'll do double duty with you).

Ok. Here's my pick for dawho: I took a quick look and saw that he's going through the 1991 yearbook right now. He's not QUITE to this point, but this is probably my favorite WCW match of 1991 that DIDN'T make the yearbook. Barry Windham vs Arn Anderson from the November 2, 1991 episode of WCW Pro. It's a pretty deep cut so I don't think it's on youtube, but the episode is on dailymotion with watchable VQ. Match starts at the 24:00 minute mark. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2ivgm2 Here's what I wrote about it three years ago: http://placetobenation.com/the-column-beyond-the-great-hunt/