SLL's All-Request Friday Night

Rikidozan vs. The Destroyer - Best 2/3 Falls Match (JWA, 12/2/1963)
Requested by Jingus

The description on the YouTube page linked above says this is their historic match that drew the largest TV audience of any match in wrestling history. Assuming the dates are correct, that's not actually true. That match happened on May 24th of the same year, and to the best of my knowledge is still buried in the NTV vaults if the footage still exists at all. And that's unfortunate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that - again assuming the dates are correct - this would be one of the last - possibly even the last - matches in Rikidozan's career. This match happened on December 2nd. Six days later, he'd be stabbed with a piss-soaked knife in a nightclub men's room. Five days after that, he'd be dead.

So let's send out Japan's greatest wrestling hero with a bang, as he takes on one of his greatest career rivals probably for the very last time. And I'm sure glad it's him, because while Rikidozan seems to have been mildly underrated as a worker, The Destroyer is one of the best, and at least half of this match's charm comes from him bitching at the referee. "Get 'im out of there! What's he gonna do, stay right there? Get 'im out of there! You don't see anyone in my corner, do ya?" There are kind of a limited number of Destroyer matches out there, but from what we have, he did seem to have a nice formula worked out that he executes here: attack, get countered, complain. This is something like 35-40 minutes, and he could build the bulk of a 35-40 minute match around stuff we usually think of as opening match bullshit. Rikidozan holds up his end of the bargain as the straight man in Destroyer's comedy routine well. He grabs a nice jumping headscissors takedown, and lord knows Destroyer is a guy who can work being in a headscissors. He tries to handstand out of it, but eats a mini-piledriver before eventually escaping. He clings to Rikidozan's leg and gets him backed into the corner, where he rams his shoulder into Rikidozan's gut while the ref was laying in the count before backing off ("I broke the hold, and I'll belt you, too!"). We get a lot of fun trading holds and complaining ("What's wrong with that? What's wrong?"..."I broke it! I broke it! I broke it!") before things start getting rough around the 20-minute mark. Rikidozan slams Destroyer and then busts out the double bootscrape on his face. Destroyer comes back with two big kneedrops. A third from the second rope misses, but he recovers and lays Rikidozan out with a pair of slams, getting the first fall with his feet on the ropes. There is hemming and hawing from the natives, but honestly, it was just his feet. He didn't actually lift his legs off of the ground to get added leverage. He just draped his ankles on the ropes. They should be hemming and hawing about how a wrestler as good as The Destroyer should be able to cheat better than that. Ah, well. It's a minor flub in an otherwise stellar match. Anyway, things get more aggressive in the second fall, including Destroyer shooting face-first into a kneelift, followed by Rikidozan's prototype Kawada short kicks. Destroyer comes back with one of his own, but he can't hold the advantage long before Rikidozan chops him in the throat to tie things up one fall apiece. Destroyer takes out his frustrations on the guy handing out bottled water between falls, and then really takes his frustrations out on Rikidozan when the third fall starts, immediately getting him in the corner and laying in big forearms and kicks. He grounds him and drops some more knees on him, including the nasty-as-fuck handstand double kneedrop to Rikidozan's face. Most of the rest of the match is The Destroyer trying to lock on the figure-four, which Rikidozan keeps countering by rolling with the stepover toehold onto his stomach, which was pretty clever,though I may argue that they dragged it out a touch too long. Eventually, though, Rikidozan kicks him off of an attempt and send him to the floor. He gives chase, and they have a nice little brawl until Rikidozan hits a backdrop on the concrete and makes it back in the ring just in time to beat the count and win the match. The crowd goes wild, blissfully unaware that their hero's most dangerous opponent of all was just about to strike.

Randy Savage vs. Bruno Sammartino - Lumberjack Match (WWF, 2/7/1987)
Requested by Televiper

Pretty great for a sub-five minute match. Savage wastes no time, using Elizabeth to keep Bruno at bay before pulling the QB sneak around Liz and the ref to blast Bruno with an axehandle. He lays into him, but Bruno makes a fast comeback. From what little I've seen of Bruno, I think he gets a bad rap as a worker. Even this late in the game, he's a pretty capable brawler, though obviously it helps to have Savage bumping around for you. Savage comes back with the help of an imaginary foreign object, and gets Van Terminator-level distance on a top-rope axehandle, but Bruno fights back and tosses Savage out of the ring to Ricky Steamboat, who dishes out some payback before sending him back to a Bruno bearhug. King Kong Bundy runs in to break it up, getting Savage DQ'd, and Savage bails as a big brawl with all the lumberjacks breaks out with Bruno and Steamboat standing tall at the end. Nice.

Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage - Lumberjack Match (WWF, 2/17/1986)
Requested by J.H.

This is the rematch of the bout I reviewed last week. In the month since, Savage has won the IC Title and Hogan has had his ribs injured by King Kong Bundy. Beyond that, this match really picks up right where the last one left off, with Hogan rushing the ring and clocking Savage behind in payback for the post-match cheapshot from last time. He also gives Savage a taste of his medicine by repeatedly bashing him in the head with the title belt just as Savage did the month before. Hogan is on fire offensively. His punches all look great, and he also shows off a nice backdrop and a great running back elbow into the corner. This all gets cut short when Bundy trips up Hogan while he's running the ropes, which doesn't immediately turn the match around, but does seem to throw off his game enough for Savage to go to the eyes and then hit a running kneelift to the taped ribs. Savage does a great job working over the ribs, including hitting four top-rope axehandles to them. There also a great spot where Hogan gets thrown to the outside in enemy territory, and Don Muraco holds him in place against the post so Bundy can deliver a nasty avalanche to Hogan. They roll him back in, and Savage winds up for a big right hand...and then just pushes him down and rolls him back out where Muraco and Bundy do it again. Hogan sells the beating really well for the bulk of the match, barely getting his shoulder up on every pinfall. But, of course, we do get our requisite Hulk-Up after the top rope elbow. Match ends pretty quick after that, as the criss cross off the ropes, and since turnabout is fair play, George Steele grabs Savage's leg, and Savage trips and lands in perfect position to be hit with the leg drop. After Hogan's great early offensive run, I kinda hoped his finishing stretch would be a little longer, but I still liked this a bunch.

Marty Jannetty vs. Skinner (WWF, 11/9/1992)
Requested by douchebag

Man, there is some weird-ass commentary between Gorilla Monsoon and Lord Alfred Hayes in this match. I'm trying to decide what the highlight was: Gorilla's off-hand comment about Sensational Sherri having been hit many times before "in numerous places", his implication that Hayes was into teen pussy, or him suddenly yelling that he'd belt Hayes if he disagreed with him over something and Hayes just laughing it off. When you're on a commentary team with Lord Alfred Hayes and you're out-weirding him, that's kinda impressive.

Anyway, match itself is pretty choice. This is one of Jannetty's first matches back after The Rockers' break-up, and he is all fun and athletic, and does a "block a monkey flip by stomping his face" variant where he does a fistdrop instead. That is one of my favorite stock spots in wrestling, and Marty has a good fistdrop, so cool to see him break it out. Cool spot where they fight to a stalemate, and the ref steps in between them, only for Skinner to reach around and smack Marty in the face. Not long after that, Marty takes a spill to the outside and tweaks his knee, and the second act of the match is built around Skinner: Master Technician working over the leg with various toeholds and kneebars. It's kinda brilliant at first, because you remember, "oh yeah, Skinner is Steve Keirn, he's a grizzled ring veteran who would know how to do this old-school stuff, and the fact that he's doing it under a silly early-90's WWF gimmick just makes it weirder and cooler". But then you remember "wait, I've actually seen a lot of pre-Skinner Steve Keirn, and I don't remember him ever doing any of this stuff...is he calling back to his 70's work or something? What am I looking at?". Marty makes his comeback, and does a great job selling the knee all the while before putting the Fabulous Alligator Man away with the top-rope fistdrop. Marty looked really good here, and Skinner did a fine job putting the youngster over.

Masato Yoshino vs. Don Fujii (Dragon Gate, 1/18/2011)
Requested by Brandon-E

Yes, I will even review Dragon Gate matches. Don't expect it to happen often. Especially if they're like this one.

I don't like Dragon Gate. I don't think that's a secret. What might be a secret - if only because it just occurred to me while watching this match - is that Dragon Gate might be my least favorite wrestling promotion ever. And when I say that, that doesn't mean I think it's the worst promotion I've ever seen. Believe me, I've seen far, far worse than Dragon Gate. I mean, from it's inception to this very day, even with the intermittent bits of good they've done, TNA has to be considered a vastly worse promotion than Dragon Gate. But they do intermittent bits of good, and I can laugh at the large swaths of bad, and the embarrassing spin doctoring that goes on after the fact. I can look back at death bed WCW and laugh at their pathetic foibles while digging their final syndie matches and the last-minute resurgence of the cruiserweight division. AAA at their very worst always had something interesting going on somewhere, even if you had to dig for it. But Dragon Gate is a wrestling dead zone, producing nothing good enough for me to really enjoy, and nothing bad enough for me to really laugh at. Dragon Gate is a promotion whose matches I can review with a form letter. In fact, I've got one right here:

"After Scott Keith's "Netcop Busts", the first thing I ever bought when I got into tape trading was a Jack Epstein "Best of Sasuke Sekigun vs. Kaientai D*X" tape. It's been a while, but the last time I watched the "These Days" 10-man, it was '05/'06, and I remember writing on the late, lamented Happy Wrestling Land board how surprised I was at how few dives were in it. Seriously, for a match that often gets thought of as the pinnacle of spot-fu, I remember counting a whopping two or three dives in the whole match. Which isn't to say it wasn't still chock full of spectacular looking offense, I just tended to remember it as being a lot of in-ring action in the first half building up to the out-of-control dives in the second half, and there really weren't that many dives. Even when I first saw it as a largely puro-illiterate kid, I was able to pick up on the significance of that first half ("Oh, they're keeping the match in the ring and just teasing dives right now to build anticipation, so when they actually start diving, I will be extra psyched for it. Cool!"), but when I rewatched it that last time, it really struck me how important that was. It may have only been two or three dives, but I remembered it like it was 30. They knew how to build a match, how to create a sense of scale, how to make things seem important...stuff I don't get from the Dragon Gate guys. I try - with varying degrees of success - to stay on top of the current wrestling scene. To that end, I do check out Dragon Gate matches every now and then. At best, what I've seen has been clean, inoffensive, aesthetically pleasing, but also emotionally empty. At worst, it's...well it's pretty much the same as it is at it's best, it's just more structurally flawed. I can see why people like it, but when I watch it, I just don't feel anything. It's been an even longer time than since I last watched old M-Pro, but I do remember liking Toryumon in it's original form. That might not age so well if I watched it now, but I wonder if there's an issue with the later generations of wrestlers from the company. There was a sense of real wrestling fun and old-school competence in Toryumon that Dragon Gate just abandoned. The fun was replaced by metrosexual fanservice, and the classic wrestling structure by an endless series of mechanically fine and emotionally hollow spots done constantly until the match ends. This isn't what I look for in wrestling, to the point that I'm loathe to even call it "wrestling". This is a demo of wrestling moves meant to get Japanese teenyboppers to touch themselves, and that's it."

But that doesn't really fully describe this match, so I've got to add a specialized post-script to the above.

Yoshino vs. Fujii. Is it a great match? No. Is it a terrible match. No. How does it compare to the average Dragon Gate match? Marginally favorably, largely thanks to Don Fujii. Fujii is the last of the old-school Toryumon guys who hasn't sold out stylistically to Dragon Gate (I'm looking at you, CIMA), and consequently, he tends to be the guy most likely to make a Dragon Gate match watchable these days. Here's the thing: back in the day, Fujii was widely considered the least of the major Toryumon guys. While he was pretty much always good, he was never great, and he still isn't. The fact that the least guy from that era is now the best guy in this one is really damning him with feint praise, not to mention a really damning statement about the rest of the roster. Speaking about the rest of the DG roster, let's talk about them for a second. Here's the sum total of what I can tell you about them: Shingo Takagi is exceptionally bad to the point that fucking Danielson couldn't carry him, Masato Yoshino runs really fast, and Akira Tozawa is actually great when he's put in an actual wrestling environment. That's it. I can't even make any kind of specific comment about Masaaki Mochizuki in 2011, and I had been a fan of his for years. So what we have here is the best of what's left against one of the less interchangeable (but still not particularly good) younger members of the roster. And bless Fujii's heart, he tries to work the grizzled veteran going up against the athletic youngster match to the best of his ability. The nearfall off of the Gedo clutch actually had me going for a second there. And for a guy sold on his speed, Yoshino does deliver on that front. He does Marufuji's stupid, stupid "drape the guy over the ropes, slowly walk away, getting a running start, and dropkick them spot", only here, he goes the entire length of the aisleway, but he runs so fast that it actually doesn't come off as any less stupid than when Marufuji does it. Still comes off as stupid, though. In the end, this is structured a lot better than most DG matches, and I can see how it was supposed to pull me in, and I appreciate the thought put behind it, but these were just not the guys who were going to make it happen.