Saturday Night's Alright for SLL's All-Request

Domingo Robles vs. Jay Youngblood (WWC, early 80's)
Requested by Tim Evans

This was a fun four-minute aside. Domingo Robles' gimmick is that he's what every clueless dope who read the WKO 100 without actually knowing what they were talking about thinks Black Terry is. He's this aged, broken down, clumsy, ambiguously drunken rudo who feebly attempts to brawl with Youngblood, but inevitably ends up getting knocked on his ass and begging off. And it rules. Robles' shtick is great. He has a million different ways to comically oversell Jay's offense. I think my favorite was when Youngblood hit him so hard that he got "stuck". This is compounded by Rip Rogers' solo commentary, as he is in awe at Robles' ludicrousness, and is actively cracking up at several points. "If at first you don't succeed...give up, Domingo."

Chris Jericho vs. Mike Enos (WCW, 9/23/1996)
Requested by DylanWaco

Enos' theme music epicness-to-push ratio is one of the mostly weirdly disproportionate I've ever seen. Dylan said this was his favorite Nitro match ever, and it's not hard to see the appeal. They do a really fun big man vs. little man match, and communicate the idea really well considering the size difference isn't that big and Enos has a lot of athletic offense for a biggish guy. Enos also comes across as a real challenge for Jericho despite the fact that I don't remember him getting one meaningful win in this entire run with the company and I'm watching from an age where Jericho is a multiple-time world champion (though he had only actually been in WCW a month at this point). Again, not hard to see why. Having not watched his stuff for a while, I had forgotten what a brute Enos could be. He opens this match by slapping Jericho hard across the mouth - seemingly because Jericho had an insufficiently firm handshake - and then cracks him with a headbutt. Jericho fires back with a nice spinwheel kick, but Enos hangs tight and catches Jericho with a slingshot shoulderblock and pins him down with the topes de Jalisco of all things. He spends the next little while beating Jericho up and powering him around. There's a particularly cool run outside the ring where Enos hits an apron dive clothesline and then turns the ringsteps on their side and suplexes Jericho onto them. After that, he turns his focus to Jericho's back. At one point, he breaks out a Boston crab that Larry Zbyszko completely shits on on commentary. Admittedly, it's not a very good Boston crab, but that's not the kind of thing you draw attention to in the booth. God, I hated Larry's commentary. Jericho escapes an Argentine backbreaker and hits a Michaels-style superkick followed by an Adams-style superkick to make a comeback, but it gets cut short in spectacular fashion when Enos turns a top-rope hurricanrana into a superbomb for a nearfall. When that doesn't work, he makes one last run at putting Jericho away, but Jericho over-rotates him on a powerslam attempt and lands on top for the pin. Offhand, I don't know what my favorite Nitro match ever is (Eddy/Malenko from the Saturday Nitro? I haven't watched it in a while. Hmmmm....). It's probably not this, but this was definitely one of the good ones, and a fine example of what used to make that show fun.

Kengo Mashimo & Madoka vs. Daisuke Sekimoto & Yoshihito Sasaki (Z-1, 3/2/2008)
Requested by Brandon-E

BJW guys vs. K-Dojo guys in Zero-One? OK. It's not like Zero-One has an identity of it's own anymore. These are three guys who I currently like, plus Madoka, who I don't really have anything against, back in a time when I either didn't like them or didn't care about them. Actually, weren't those fun MEN's Club multi-mans happening around this time? I probably liked Madoka the most when this happened. Either way, a lot has changed since then, but I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same, because these guys' performances in this match ranks roughly the same as how much I like them currently: Mashimo gives the best showing, then Sasaki, then Sekimoto, then Madoka. And that's not good, because Sekimoto vs. Madoka seems to be the main focus of much of the match, and Mashimo doesn't really even show up until the half-way point. The result is that we have the tale of two matches. The first half, dominated by Sekimoto/Madoka exchanges, is really listless and sloppy. At one point, in rapid succession, Sekimoto backdrops Madoka over the top rope onto the apron (which is blown completely), Madoka Rocker Drops him when he tries a shoulderblock through the ropes (which Sekimoto didn't even seem to be trying to connect), and then takes him out on the outside with an Asai moonsault (which takes too long to set up and leaves Sekimoto standing there like a dope waiting to catch it). It's not good, but at least it was bad in an active way. Most of the rest of their stuff was dull and generic in the way you kind of expect a match like this to be dull and generic. Please, bring on the suck. At least that's interesting. But all of a sudden, Mashimo finally gets in the match, and he gets paired up with Sasaki, and it's like night and day. Structurally, they're not mixing it up too much, but there's just so much more life behind their exchanges. Mashimo looks especially dynamic, having a lot of really crisp offense, and shows some hints of things to come. FUTEN was definitely good for this guy, but honestly, he looked like he was already most of the way there in this match. Their enthusiasm seems to rub off on the others, too, and overall, the second half of the match is a lot more fun than the first, including Sekimoto pulling Madoka off the apron and over the top rope for one of the best German suplexes of his very German suplex-heavy career. The finish is also really great, with Mashimo grabbing a crucifix on Sasaki and rolling it over into the Rings of Saturn, cranking Sasaki's arm over his shoulder to make him tap. The bad first really drags down the good second half of this, but it did make me want to see a Mashimo/Sasaki singles match, so that probably counts for something.

Toshiaki Kawada vs. Minoru Suzuki (NJPW, 8/11/2005)
Requested by Curt McGirt

I have mixed feelings about this. Overall, if I had to call it one way or the other, I'd say this was a good match. Both guys brought enough fire to the proceedings to keep my interest throughout, and that's pretty much the minimum of what I could ask for from a match. They hit each other hard and Suzuki made his funny faces and it was generally structured well. That said, I wanted to like this way more than I did, and while I did like it, I'm not really that enthusiastic about it. Kawada was all over the map here. He was pretty deep into his HUSTLE "not giving a shit" phase, and while there were glimmers of his past greatness (he will still chop and kick the shit out of you, if nothing else), he honestly looked bored a lot of the time. At one point, Suzuki locks him in the sleeper, and I could've sworn I saw Kawada roll his eyes. I mean, we are talking Samoa Joe in TNA "great wrestler just not caring at all anymore" levels of boredom here. OK, maybe that's excessive, but there are some low moments here. Meanwhile, we've got Suzuki. He's kind of a divisive figure in wrestling fandom: either you think he's a really fun superdick heel, or you think he's an irritating Villain Sue. I understand both views, but personally, I've always leaned towards the former. I think the main tipping point is that his no-selling tendencies have always struck me as a bit like Kevin Von Erich's no-selling tendencies. When a guy wails on them, I don't believe either guy isn't in pain (usually), I just get the sense that they respond to pain differently than most wrestlers. He's not the Ultimate Warrior is what I'm saying. But I'm not dumb. I do recognize he's a guy with limitations. He works better in tags than in singles, he works better against lower-ranked opponents than equal or higher-ranked ones, and he works better in short sprints than longer, slower-paced matches. This is a singles match where he's wrestling a higher-ranked opponent, and it goes 17 minutes, which isn't an epic or anything, but is about 7 minutes longer than a Suzuki singles match should go. It's not a sprint, which really hurts the matches main appeal: watching two tough bomb-throwing bastards lay waste to each other. I mean, I guess you can do that for 17 minutes, but they really don't. When they're throwing bombs, it's great, and they throw enough of them to keep the match fun overall, but the match as a whole is still worked at a surprisingly and frustratingly deliberate pace. I don't know. Maybe I just set the bar too high for this one.

The Road Warriors & Paul Ellering vs. The Varsity Club (NWA, 2/11/1989)
Requested by Victator

By contrast, I didn't know what to expect from this. The Varsity Club has been revisited a bit lately, and people with opinions I take seriously are saying that they were a really fun act around this time. Watching this match definitely bore that out. This is worked as a brawlers vs. technicians style clash, and the Varsity Club hold up their end of the bargain, with really aggressive looking amateur takedowns early on, and some great work over Animal's arm later. But the real surprise was the Roadies. I never thought much of them in the ring, but they hold nothing back in this match, clobbering the hell out of the Varisty Club every chance they get. Hawk looks extra vicious, laying in his shots really hard, but Animal really proves his worth as the face in peril. Yes, this is a match where the Warriors are actually fighting from underneath, and they look really comfortable doing it. I mean, I think I vaguely remember Animal and Heidenreich being shockingly good working that style, but couldn't think of the Roadies at the peak of their popularity ever doing it. Well, here they are, and it's fantastic. Hell, even Ellering looks good the brief time he's in, hitting a nice dropkick, and Sullivan doesn't hold this back at all. The finish does, unfortunately. After completely dominating the body of the match, Hawk gets chucked over the top rope after only the slightest of comebacks for the DQ. He takes a nice bump there, but I was hoping for an actual third act to this, so I'm let down. Still, what's there was great fun while it lasted.