Matt D

Eh. He just lucked into an environment which was impossibly advantageous? That he couldn't get more during the last round of negotiations was embarrassing. This is a massive success but he didn't create the situation. He just kept a steady ship that could benefit from it.

Week 20. We finally slipped one. Ok, having Ippon dropkick and oldbirds go again since they didn't last week. Giving Joe another shot in the random roll. Tim is out for now. SmartMark15 SirEdger JoeG HeadCheese Grimmas Matt D jetlag DR Ackerman Nintendo Logic fxnj Victator dawho5 IpponDropkick oldbirds Steven, dataintcash posted this 3 weeks ago. It has the best transition ever. I think you'll like it.

This is certainly good news.

Why bother doing Friday house shows anymore?

It can become a procedural with no meanungful week to week connectivity.

Well, things are never boring.

From the outside (and I mean FAR outside) looking in, I think it comes down to Sofia, right? That's the only thing that's changed between now and a few years ago. There have been these weird little hints of things shifting one way or another over the last two years, but in the end, CMLL remains CMLL. So we'll see. Either Park does something to get himself kicked out in a few weeks or he does something and DOESN'T get kicked out. That's how we'll know.

He should have bought the Houston footage then.

I feel like even deep into the 00s, there were allusions for women going on certain WWE tours "for the boys'" morale. I wonder if some of this is just an issue of semantics, whereas Moolah, who up until the late 80s with Vince, was getting the lump sum for her women and part of the money she was getting (or, to put it differently, why she might have gotten more than if she was providing the midgets, for example) was for assumed additional services rendered. That's less dramatic than the business-who-takes-passport story, but bad in other ways for the matter-of-factness of it all.

I have a 7 month old, two other kids, and a 90 minute commute. Yeah, I consume a lot of caffeine. I wouldn't say I was necessarily addicted to one specific drink though. Diet Dr. Pepper is my soda of choice. While I have a small frame and am not wildly overweight or anything, I do eat more than I'd like (and stress eat). Some of it is that my body starved itself for years without me realizing. I was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2012 after an endoscopy after some ulcers. They caught it early due to the ulcers so damage hadn't been done yet but it turned out my body had been starving itself for a few years. I never quite regulated so it takes a lot for me to feel full. Generally I can exercise (I watched a lot of wrestling while on an exercise bike) but the new baby makes that nigh-impossible.

I'm on board with the Bischoff stuff right now, would only listen to a Tony episode if there was real novelty to the topic, and wouldn't listen to a Bruce episode unless you guys specifically told me to.

People were doing this in 98 though. Some of it is easier now but we were all staring at quarter hours in the late 90s.

You're right as in they brought him in at the very end of November with a promo talking about how the Sheepherders hurt him 9 months before in New Zealand and then he had a couple of multi man tags against them in the weeks that followed, but this was still within his first couple of months. I went through pretty much all this stuff back in 2013: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15074-buddy-rose/page-8 with aggravating train-of-thought reviews as I was watching but the board getting upgraded destroyed the formatting. I'm sure I'll pop in and out when I can revisit something or want to talk about Stan Stasiak. Maybe I'll even jump in with 82 which I don't know as well. In the meantime, Portland's amazing and you guys are going to have a blast.

We know the least about the 60s and 70s, so that's what I hear the most about, working in the Gulas/Welch office as an assistant in the 60s for instance.

The real key to understanding this match was that it was Martel's introduction to the territory. He was going to be their big babyface going into 1980 and he came with a few detriments. He was relatively unknown. He couldn't speak well (in English at least), even though he had the right look and was technically sound. This was part of a campaign to get him over and establish him. It was a big deal for anyone in a territory to face the NWA champ. I can't think of any other situation where the promoter used it to put over a brand new talent instead of heat up a preexisting one to make his own promotion look important. Martel not just faced him but more than held his own, completing controlling in the first fall. That meant something. One thing you guys will find with Portland is that while we have a lot of the Saturday matches, a wealth of them, a trove of them, and thanks to the sponsors (in part), they're pretty much the best thing we have from 1980 and maybe the best TV in the country, the big blowoff matches were all on the Tuesday Night shows and we have so many of those. They'd do other things to get Martel over, by the way, like announcing special kids' tickets promotions were because he went to Don Owen and demanded them. This match worked. The promotion worked. Martel worked. Hell, in this one situation, Harley worked too (even his usual detriments were a strength for what they were trying to accomplish).

I'm an hour in to the Bret one. Does he ever explain why Nitro vs Thunder never happened?

I am discombobulated by the flurry of people who are apparently starting the Portland set all at once. Is this your doing?

Sounds good. I'm happy to give everyone the weekend.

http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/21780-jun-akiyama-vs-masao-inoue-noah-spring-navigation-042306/ - Akiyama vs Inoue feels like the sort of match everyone on the board should watch and have an opinion on, one way or the other. Just to tally: it looks like, oddly enough, IpponDropkick and oldbirds didn't give each other matches and DR Ackerman and dawho5 didn't give each other matches. JoeG hasn't given NintendoLogic one. Everyone else came through, but some just recently though, so I'm giving things til Monday for people to watch those. It means we slip a week, but I think that's ok.

I do see the parallels to Ogawa vs Kobashi. This seemed like a slightly more unfocused version. I didn't get the same desperation to win out of Inoue. Instead, it felt a little more like a cry for attention. That's not a value judgment, necessarily, just a point of comparison. He certainly got Akiyama's attention, and the fans' as well. Where I feel Ogawa really makes the Kobashi match, here it was Akiyama's reactions which will stick with me here. I loved his frustration after the fans wouldn't condone him stooping to Inoue's level with the revenge eyerake, for instance. The back half still works for me, even with the slight excess. If you want to elevate someone in 2006 NOAH, this is as good a way as any: plucky sympathy early on, dogged survival in the stretch. The excess is acceptable because you get the idea that Akiyama could have put him away earlier. There was no harm Inoue getting up again and again to show his spirit when the narrative responsibility was on Akiyama simply choosing not to finish him. I will say that the figure four stuff felt a little out of place and threatened to make the match feel more like a series of thought experiments ("How far can we get with just eyerakes?") than a cohesive whole. The match probably would have been better without it. In general, though, the match is an excellent little piece of story and reaction.

I kind of want it to lead to Cena/Carmella vs Bryan/Nikki though.

Cena has a lot more to lose from this sort of thing than Nikka has to gain.

I'll happily concede that the biggest problem with GWE, if we were trying to make some sort of authoritative list, was the lack of agreed-upon criteria, though peak vs longevity wasnt nearly as big an issue as the people who wanted to judge on out of ring elements. The second biggest was the name which was simple but could be misconstrued. What was not a problem at all was the fact what we'd never been in the ring with someone. If it was an issue it was due to the name. I agree with OJ that individual lists are worth more than the aggregate. I disagree with fxnj that if you watch 1000 matches of wrestler x and 1000 of wrestler y, you can't have a very educated opinion on which wrestler was better on maybe a dozen different valuable and interesting qualitative metrics.

How many characters survive the jump from NXT unscathed? Alexa did. Maybe Asuka. But every other female from Paige on lost 2/3rds of what made them work in NXT.

Going to reroll on Friday. If you haven't given someone a match yet, get to that.