Last year, I interviewed Ricky Steamboat for a couple stories for Fighting Spirit Magazine, including their "Training Ground" featured that features all kinds of advice for wrestlers. He gave some amazingly in-depth responses and I boiled down the best stuff for the article. Amazing nuggets about how to get across that you're trying to win, the right amount of selling, how to make big moves mean something (he specifically says that he has no problem with doing as many big moves as you want as long as you contextualize them properly), and more.

 

In light of the Will Ospreay vs. Ricochet BOSJ match discussion, I nagged FSM editor Brian Elliott to post it on the FSM website, and he did.

 

Even setting how it may make you look at"The Match" aside, this stuff is amazing. Loss called it "Maybe the most insightful interview on ring work that a wrestler has ever done" ad who are you to disagree with him?

Damn fine interview. I especially love the details on stuff like the number of chops you wanna throw during a comeback, that's the sort of deep-cuts psychology that most veterans seem unwilling or unable to talk about in public.

With the seemingly endless discussion around the best wrestlers and matches, I'm surprised there aren't more critiques of particular aspects of matches, e.g. timing of comebacks, strike exchanges, hope spots, cutoffs, timing of kickouts, setups for dives, etc. In this respect, critical analysis lags behind analysis of other forms of human expression. We're still in the afterglow of a sharp increase in the availability of footage, so it makes sense that people are focusing so much on breadth to discover new wrestling, but it would be nice to see discussion of wrestling change direction a bit and gain more depth.

On the subject, has anyone watched this?

 

http://wrestlingepicenter.com/cart/product_info.php?products_id=2090

If it's the same one that was making the rounds fifteen years ago, yeah I have. It's much more of the same stuff, and well worth the six bucks. Steamboat goes into a lot of detail like he did in Bix's piece, including an extended discussion of the difference between "registering" (that is, selling a move's pain as soon as it happens) and "selling" (selling the pain long-term through the rest of the match).

Someone linked this article on Twitter the other day. Really great stuff.

Great interview. Thanks for sharing.

Really interesting read and insight.