Posted September 26, 200817 yr comment_5434864 Disc 21 September 07th & 21st 1984: Matches 1-3 and 6 also on Classics 172 and 173 1. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Abdullah the Butcher - This was short but a fun little contrast of styles match. Didn't really build into anything much. 2. Riki Choshu vs. Greg Valentine - Choshu and Valentine look a lot alike for people of completely different nationalities -- same body type, same hair, similar wrestling gear. Weird. They also hit harder than most of their peers and got into a pretty fun slugfest here. If they had to go to a DQ finish on the outside this was the way to do it, with Choshu lariating Valentine out of the ring and then over the rail. I'll give this one a low-end nomination to see what you guys think. 3. Antonio Inoki vs. Strong Machine _ They had just started building this goofy feud with the Machines and their manager baiting Inoki repeatedly. He was set up to deliver vengeance here, but Strong Machine stalled and cheap shotted his way through most of the match. Probably the right approach for the angle but it led to a boring 10 minutes of wrestling. 4. Kuroneko/Kantaro Hoshino vs. Strong Machines - Pretty shitty match. Lots of sloppiness, little structure. Yuck. 5. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Greg Valentine - Very different from the Choshu match as Fujinami portrayed the more technically adept fighter trying to evade the slugger. He pulled in the crowd, though I thought the wrestling lacked the intensity of Choshu-Valentine. Fujinami had fallen into a bad structural pattern of taking a lot of punishment only to win his matches with a quick move out of nowhere. That's fine on occasion, but when you do it all the time, the finishes start to lose drama. So this match didn't pull me in, even though I like both guys. 6. Antonio Inoki vs. Ano Atisonae - For reasons surpassing understanding, they worked this in 3-minute rounds and limited themselves mostly to strikes and grappling. So it was an early, unspeakably shitty stab at shoot style. For strikes, the Samoan used head butts and for grappling, he used the dreaded nerve hold. So I'm guessing he wouldn't exactly be a threat to Fedor. This might be an extra, just for the clusterfuck oddity of it all.
