Matt D

Life is super busy but I did catch these on tuesday and enjoyed them a lot. This was one main event away from being a sort of ideal drop. Solid undercard match with a rare wrestler. Total oddity trainwreck. Midget match. Serrano's heat was so enjoyable. He made more out of a choke than almost anyone I can remember. Just the guy's look and how brazen he was and how he worked the ref and the crowd was a lot of fun. It's strange Pritchard didn't become a bigger deal in Houston. They could have built him more. He definitely had the talent and the crowd behind him. The Slater match was insane. It was like.. bad accidental shoot style. I've never seen a guy blow spots like that and still have his opponent try to work with him. It was obvious he didn't know how to do a single thing. He couldn't hit moves. He couldn't take bumps. He couldn't do spots. Just insane. I kept expecting Slater to start killing him (though maybe the guy was legit good enough that he didn't dare). Weirdest match on the whole service maybe. The midget match was solid but a lot more of what you'd normally expect than the usual fare in Houston. Little Tokyo was awesome in his precision shots, laying in the kicks in the chops and Boesch was as entertaining as ever on commentary but it lacked some of the novelty we've seen elsewhere.

I've gotten good with the 15 second jump button.

Heard most of the first part and I'm with Jerome here. Past hanging out with Flair, Conrad comes from a pretty similar place to the rest of us when it comes to knowledge and remembrance. As such he actually ends up asking Tony a bunch of the stuff that we probably would or mentioning certain things that we'd mention. If nothing else, he's got the incredibly detailed notes of someone who recently watched that really long "Best of the Four Horsemen comp" that starts in 85 with everyone disparate and runs through that year's TV. So it ends up as a much deeper dive than you'd expect. You could have forgiven him for starting with the Flair turn, for instance, but they hit a lot of other things instead. You have Tony basically corroborating each thing along the way. Ultimately, if you didn't learn anything new from this, it's because there was nothing new to learn but you did get a lot confirmed by a deeply inside source and Tony's memory for this stuff is very vivid and the emotion he's able to bring back to it is enjoyable. Unless you wanted to get deep into match quality or squashes or run through every available promo or something, so far it's everything you could possibly want from something like this and, to me, a lot more enjoyable than Tony going through a generally disconnected Nitro era PPV. I get that the format's working for them, but they'd do better with themed shows focusing on specific feuds or talents or whatever.

Notice from a local paper from 1970 on Boesch giving a seminar to a women's club: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth566901/m1/1/?q=%22Paul%20boesch%22 A sum up of the same topic (at more length) from a talk he gave at Rice University in 65: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth244949/m1/8/?q=%22Paul%20boesch%22 Here's one from 52 about Boesch's dogs performing for kids (no lie), also a Laff of the Week for Johnny: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth577320/m1/2/?q=%22Paul%20boesch%22 Looking through those local papers it's crazy how often Boesch shows up, either talking to kids at the American Legion or donating half the money for local wrestling mats at a high school or dedicating a new school gym or being the MC at some ceremony or competing against a bunch of housewives in a trivia contest. It's also hugely apparent how thoroughly he was able to promote the womenly art of self defense thing.

Looks like he's in St. Louis that night: 11/02 St. Louis, MO Dick the Bruiser & Kerry Von Erich(sub for David Von Erich) beat King Kong Brody & Gama Singh(sub for Ox Baker)

Sorry to disappoint. but the midget match is from the Nov 2 1979 card. Same card as these 2 matches. - Tor Kamata & Little Tokyo vs Tiger Conway Jr & Coconut Willie - Ernie Holmes vs Killer Brooks If you look on youtube and search 'Houston Wrestling circa 1979' there is a Mark Lewin/The Spoiler vs. Jose Lothario/El Halcon match. That is from the 6/1/79 card. Do we have any idea what the main event of that card was? It looks like it was sandwiched between a Harley vs Brody feud, with the big "Mexican" six man the week before.

There are a bunch of cool match ups from the first two nights. I've never seen a full card for the third. I'm not convinced he filmed on night 3, to be honest. Part of the pull was that this, unlike most things in Houston, wouldn't be on TV. On the other hand, could he really not have filmed so important a night for his career as a promoter just for his own sake?

To be fair, I, more than anyone in the world, will gladly accept Gold Cup matches (even squashes) as a peace offering.

I understand that Dibiase vs Duggan is a really important match and it SHOULD be up (again), but now that uploads seem to be only on weekends, it was a bit frustrating to go all week and then just to get something that was already up on the service months ago. It's ok and good for a match like this which got shifted off in the change or whatever, to be put back up, but as part of a random Wednesday upload in the midst of a week of them or something, not as the first one we've gotten since last Sunday. I get that these things take time to upload, but it's not the customer's fault that the matches got taken off in the first place, right? Some of this would be ok if there was better communication. As it is now, we hit reload and just hope for something new.

I'm halfway through now. Alan is someone who is probably on a wildly different part of the wrestling spectrum than I am but he always comes off as hugely likable as a human being. (Rob is also as far from me as you can get but for the little bit of the lucha section I've heard so far he's great at instantly having answers to any question they might toss at him about some obscure undercard luchador from 20 years ago; never question the guy's factual knowledge). Also, as a head's up, I bought a t-shirt for my dad (who teaches Criminal Justice at the community college level) on a lark for late Father's Day that'll probably end up on the Amazon game next week and will pop Bix.

At the very least, that's a more interesting direction to go in than just calling everything equally stupid.

I'd think it's a means to a different end that's far more interesting. That's what you're undercutting in dismissing it. We can't even have that other conversation with you outright dismissing this one basically.

Maria's Brother Love gimmick? Can't have two Shanes.

The Gilbert/Sting vs Young/Gaylord match was a nice surprise. The worst part of it was Gaylord doing basically anything, especially but not just limited to his punches. Everything else was really quite good though. Gilbert was an absolute star, just a perfect stooging villain who knew to cheat and cry and complain at every turn, just a perfect heat magnet, and I think between that, the fact that Young was local, and the simple fact, seen so clearly in all of this footage, that the Southern Tag is the perfect form of wrestling, the crowd really got behind the babyfaces by the end. I loved how Gilbert continuously used the over the top rope throw (with distraction since it's illegal) to either take over or cut off comebacks, and how Young reversed that to set up the hot tag. The most important thing in wrestling are the big moments, the transitions, the comebacks and the cutoffs, and these are downright genius in their simplicity, making use of something that the crowd understood and that had meaning in order to make everything matter. Gilbert is a guy who snuck on my GWE list and I'm sure glad he did.

I'll agree that it matters more in how we interact with one another and in creating discussions that we have than in any sort of universal truth or anything like that.

Always happy to disagree with you utterly and completely, Jerome. But hey, at least we can be civil about it, for the most part.

Fuller coming out to All Hell's Breaking Loose is maybe the most amazing wrestler/actual song pairing in the history of wrestling, especially because it feels like it never actually makes it to the chorus. The Nightmares/Riches feud has been great and they've switched it up so well, but I kind of feel like the Nightmares didn't REALLY come into their own as promos/presence until they lost the masks. They're on a different level into 1986.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUw2n6fMB_A "Saga of the Family" is such a great thing. It's been offline for a couple of years now. Check it out.

1.) I was kidding to make the bad Evolution joke. 2.) I personally see both punches and 450 splashes as generally value-neutral tools and it's about how they're used, so this brand of elitism wouldn't be mine in the first place (were I to admit to such a thing), even if I do probably find effective minimalism more impressive than equally effective excessiveness. 3.) That said, the idea that one form or element of a medium is superior than another is a basic tenet of art criticism and you'd see it as commonplace on a board that thoughtfully covers music or movies or literature. Just because we cover a form of it which is socially considered low (and a lot of us seem to be happily self-deprecating about it) and we do want everyone to be able to enjoy it in their own way independent of our efforts at criticism doesn't mean we can't think and espouse such opinions so long as we're consistent and back up our arguments and aren't assholes about it. We get out what we put in to it. So many people here make honest attempts at analysis and their efforts help to elevate an art form that others (even some here) would be far happier looking at as disposable and inane. We get out what we put in.

I can't keep track with these things. Anyway, I feel like Pete is a good barometer for star ratings, actually. If you have to sync yourself up for some reason, Pete's a good person to do so with.

No you're not. This was a lot of fun. Kelly discovering star ratings was probably the highlight. I await the Debbie Harry episode.

I think, in general, there are times to get heat and to ramp up the heat, and then there are times to give the babyface a win, and figuring out when to do one and when to do the other is pretty much the most important aspect of wrestling booking and something that WWE gets right about once every ten years.

Evolution is finding increasing amounts of appreciation of less extreme things. We solved the mystery.

I think Lady (Mad) Maxine, not any Armstrong might be the most over person in the history of Alabama. That crowd came unglued when she finally showed up (which really has more to say about Street/Linda than anything else). Also fun in that episode was, in the transition from the Bullet/Flame feud to Bullet/Mr. Olympia, Bob messing up and going "My other son.. uh, Bob Armstrong's other son." when commentating over the footage.

Is it watchable? I've never actually seen that, I don't think.