Lazing on a Sunny All-Request Afternoon...In the Summertime...

Steve Williams & Terry Gordy vs. Barry Windham & Dustin Rhodes (WCW, 9/21/1992)
Requested by TimLivingston

This is your classic example of what Bill Watts was doing right in WCW. A 20+ minute free TV heavyweight tag match with four guys who could really go. We get about 10 minutes of both teams working very evenly, with the MVC in particular looking great. Williams is doing his cool amateur stuff that he liked to bust out in that period, and Gordy punches Dustin right in the face a bunch. Then Windham takes a spill to the outside, and we get something like seven or eight more minutes of him playing FIP while the MVC wails on him. There actually is a fair amount of downtime in the match - especially this part - considering my tendency to think of the MVC as a bomb-throwing, go-go-go kind of team, but everyone involved works their holds well. It's not just guys sitting around doing nothing. Windham hits an axe bomber-ish lariat coming out of the corner and manages to get the hot tag, and Dustin makes a great house afire before he ends up as the FIP for about five more minutes. Dustin eats a great beating, including some nasty chops and a legdrop to the side of his head from Doc, and a big elbowdrop from Gordy. I don't know that this match was reviewed as part of the Dustin of the Day project, but it's interesting to note that he looked to me to clearly be the better half of his team, and this was not a fallow period for Windham. They got to do all the same stuff and play all the same roles, and Dustin looked at least as good as Barry at dishing out offense, and better at eating it, better working FIP, better working hope spots, better on the apron, and better off of the hot tag. Not bad for the kid. Windham does get the hot tag, and fends off both heels for a while before hitting the Superplex on Gordy. Doc breaks up the pin, but as the referee shoos him out, Dustin recovers enough to drop Gordy again with the bulldog. Windham grabs the pin, and the crowd comes unglued to the point that I immediately suspect canned heat. I mean, the crowd is pretty clearly going wild, but the sudden change in decibel to a level we had not heard all much was pretty stunning, and it kinda sent up a red flag in the more conspiracy-minded part of my brain. This isn't the best match for either of these teams. It took little bit to get going, and Doc and Gordy generally looked better than Windham and Rhodes throughout. You'll see more action-packed and more dramatic matches from both of these teams, but this is still a winner in my book.

Juventud Guerrera vs. Billy Kidman (WCW, 6/13/1998)
Requested by Rocco

A while back, Eric was talking about the two sides of Kidman. "Kidman has some of the lightest possible offense, like 0.7 Lance. But then Kidman takes three different awesome insane bumps. A great bumper will rank higher with me than somebody with great offense. But I challenge you to find a wrestler with better bumps, and worse offense. I think Kidman represents the largest gap between those two skills." I tend to agree with that assessment. So yeah, I don't know who this guy is, but he's called "Kidman", he looks a lot like Kidman, but he looks really good on offense and is less reliant on his bumping than on eating Juvi's offense well, being a good base for him, and stooging for the crowd. Part of this is probably the fact that we're dealing with Flock-era Kidman here, and he's being called upon to do different things as a heel than he would as a face. On the other hand...Kidman opens the match throwing some nice forearms in Juvi's face. When did Kidman have nice forearms? He's all "how 'bout that, punk?", and Juvi fires back a few of his own. Kidman does take his requisite nice bump when he gets clotheslined over the top rope to the floor, but even then, I'm just as impressed immediately afterwords with how well he positions himself to catch Juvi's pescado. Kidman recovers and turns things around with a wheelbarrow german suplex. When did Kidman have any nice suplexes? Kidman keeps Juvi grounded and plays to the crowd, drawing a loud "Kidman sucks" chant at one point. When did heel Kidman ever know how to play to the crowd like that? Juvi grabs a sunset flip for two, but when he gets to his feet, Kidman blasts him with a Windham-style leaping clothesline. A great looking clothesline? From Kidman? What the hell? Kidman takes another nice bump when he misses a jumping axehandle into the corner and Juvi makes his comeback. There's a bit of back-and-forth leading to a kinda lame/kinda cool finish. Lame in that it has Juvi doing a Michaels-ish kip up no-sell to cut off Kidman on the top rope so he can go for the 450. Cool in that Kidman dodges the 450, but Juvi landed on his feet, which was nifty. He hits the Juvi Driver for the win, and this was definitely one of the better short-form matches I've watched for this. Pretty cool to see a different side of Kidman.

Manabu Soya & Seiya Sanada vs. Daisuke Sekimoto & Yuji Okabayashi (AJPW 2/6/2011)
Requested by Brandon-E

This was actually a dual request. Brandon-E brought it up first, saying it was "one of the best matches of 2011". The request was then seconded by ダニエル (Daniel, for those who don't habla katakana), because he disagreed rather strongly with Brandon-E's assessment. And after watching the match as an impartial judge, I think I have to rule in favor of Daniel. Simply put, this match stunk, and - not to bag on beloved SC reader Brandon - I'm not quite sure what inspires one to think so highly of this match. Yeah, it had it's moments, mostly courtesy of Daisuke Sekimoto. Sekimoto is a guy who's been pimped a lot in certain corners of the internet for a long time now. I remember back when the DVD 500's were still happening, there were people campaigning for Sekimoto saying that he had established himself as the next Kawada. I swear I am not making that up. That level of hyperbole quickly disappeared, but he's always had his supporters, and I've always checked out his work every now and then to see if he had grown into his reputation, and was always met with disappointment. But last year, the big baby-headed lug finally won me over, enough for me to put him on the tail end of my 2010 WKO 100 ballot, just by virtue of his Little Engine That Could determination to become a capable worker finally paying off. And he continues to deliver on his promises here. I dug his lariats, and the dueling torture racks spot made me crack a smile. But despite Sekimoto's improvements, he's still got real limitations, not the least of which is that you can't expect him to work for four, and that's exactly what he's called on to do in this match. I think this is the first time I've seen Soya and Sanada. Neither looked particularly good, but Sanada didn't look awful, and Soya ate offense well when he wasn't no-selling so he could do generic puro heavyweight strike exchanges. Okabayashi I have seen before, but has never left a strong impact on me one way or the other. That was remedied here - he very much left the impression that he sucked. I mean, I reviewed a Kidman match this week. If you are throwing the worst forearms I've seen all week in a week where I watched a Kidman match, it's time to go back to the drawing board on the whole "being a wrestler" thing. To be fair, he hits a nice lariat late in the match, and he was part of the aforementioned dueling torture rack spot. But that was too little, too late for him.

Basically, I just don't get why anyone would single this match out for praise. I mean, if you want to save yourself 20 minutes, here's the match: imagine 90% of the heavyweight puro tag matches you've seen since 2006. Now imagine the same match, only marginally worse. You just imagined this match. It's not just that I disagree with the praise, it's that I don't see a whole lot about this match distinct enough to praise. Hell, I'm having a hard time finding things distinct enough to complain about. Let's take a stroll through Purotopia and see if I'm missing something

"HOLY JESUS. Sekimoto is just ridiculous right now. It's not fair. No man should be this good at anything. Him and Soya just go at it, right from the get go. Sanada and Oka play their parts well but they were very much suppporting players here. This was a war. Perhaps the biggest war in puro in a few months. Go out of your way to watch this. Oh and yeah it's their first of three matches in the series!!! Top 3 for the year so far for me."
-Alan4L

Alan4L freaking out over one of the blandest, most overused cliches in wrestling today. Of course.

"I wasn't blown away but it was pretty solid, I thought Sanada was a great FIP and should have had the match built around it more but Soya held up his own. Could have used more dickish offense instead of the slow and bland surfboards, camel clutches, etc, but there's still plenty of action and it's good they're saving stuff for the later matches. Lowed Soya's hangtime on his leaping lariats and the like. The fact that 10 minutes, a whole third of the match is clipped out will probably hurt this match towards the end of the year."
-A.M.B.

What's interesting is that Sekimoto going for the Romero special stood out to me way more than any of the other stuff that actually got praised in the above statement. It's really all just noise to me.

The rest of the praise was fairly generic and not really worth mentioning. Kinda like this match.

The Widowmaker vs. Terry Daniels (WWF, 7/19/1989)
Requested by Victator

Fun fact: I got into wrestling after Windham had left the WWF, but I saw his name in old magazines, and always misread it as "The Windowmaker". They had some damn strange gimmicks back then, that didn't seem too far-fetched. Anyway, this is a really fun competitive squash. Windham controls early, tossing Daniels around and then smugly offering his hand to help him back up. Daniels rejects it, which leads to Windham shoving him hard into the corner, and Daniels decides he's not going to take this shit and nails Windham with some right hands and drops him with a big bodyslam. Of course, this is all pretense for Windham to say "no more Mr. Passive-Aggressive Guy" and spend the rest of the match mauling Daniels, socking him hard in the face and dropping him with some nice throws, including a great inverted atomic drop. Daniels gets a brief comeback, but it amounts to nothing as Windham eventually plants him with the Superplex, rolling into pinning position on impact to score the win. People seem to be down on the Widowmaker gimmick. I'm not quite sure why other than the usual "WWF stole his name/won't acknowledge his past" thing, but he still got to be a badass, and their failure to capitalize on that seems a lot more damning than the gimmick.