Man what a hard nosed nasty little battle this was. This was babyface Regal before they brought in Dundee and starting doing the Lord Steven gimmick, and Windham was the NWA champ. This was after Bill Watts was fired, but it had a very Watts feel to it, starting with gritty mat wrestling and then moving into big bomb throwing. Windham works over Regals arms, with some simple but really nasty looking holds. Regal is a great fired up babyface here, there is a moment where they are exchanging and he motions Windham to bring it on, and Barry just wipes him out with a flying right hand. Finish is pretty awesome, Regal gets a bunch of roll ups and it really looks like he might pull a huge upset, when they do the same bodypress to the floor spot Regal used with Taylor, this time Regal catches his knee in the rope in a great Chris Hamrickish accident on purpose spot, Regal fights his way back into the ring, but he is too damaged and gets smashed with a jumping DDT. This was Windhams last great run as a worker, and it is fun to see him as a bruiser, it is also great to check Regal out as a US babyface, really would have been interested to see him get a longer babyface run in WCW, as he was just awesome at it.
New Japan Pro Wrestling on AXS TV Episode 4 Workrate Report
1. Prince Devitt vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi (6/22/13)
This is a 15 minute match clipped down to 2 minutes of highlights, so that seems pretty pointless. I liked some of Tanahashi's stuff in this, like his somersault senton and he actually snapped off the Slingblade. Devitt's stuff was all mostly complicated and looked good because Tanahashi flew into it. He's selling a knee intermittently throughout, yet still goes for a huge double stomp off the top. He misses and starts grabbing his knee, but I guess I'm failing to see how it wouldn't still hurt real bad if he had landed flush. Even in these brief highlights we got a fair amount of Bullet Club interference, and at one point Fale/Devitt wait around in hilariously bad fashion for a Tanahashi HFF off the top to the floor. Devitt gets bumped to the floor and then he and Fale immediately get into position to take the crossbody, even before Tanahashi had even made a motion to do the move. So there they are waiting to take a move that at his quickest would have likely taken Tanahashi 5+ seconds to get into position to perform. Horrible ref Red Shoes Unno also is distracted for a preposterous amount of time by Anderson, just a poorly conceived spot to end a match. So, we get two minutes shown, and there are a couple of horrible moments in those two minutes. Oof.
2. Togi Makabe vs. Kazuchika Okada (6/22/13)
I really liked Makabe in this one, really did not like Okada in this one. Makabe threw a bunch of really great clotheslines and a couple real nice bridging suplexes, but none of it mattered as Okada would just do offense whenever he pleased, sometimes just beating Makabe to his feet after being the one who just took a big move. There were a couple different moments where Okada would get dumped by a suplex, then with both men selling on the mat Okada would be the first one up and just do a move of his own. And a lot of Okada's stuff did not look good. He has a real bad top rope elbow, and the match ended with the Rainmaker, which in this match just means that it ended with a clothesline that looked weaker than all of Makabe's clotheslines. Mauro went full scream mode pretty early in this match, too, although the crowd did get real hot at one point off a Makabe German suplex near fall. But man I'm not getting very excited for more big Okada main events. Dude will just get all his shit in, no matter if it makes sense the way the match is building or not. Still, I liked Makabe a lot more than I remembered, so this wasn't a total waste.
MLJ: Hechicero Spotlight 4: Rey Hechicero vs Canek, Jr.
2010-08-08 @ Arena Coliseo Monterrey
Rey Hechicero vs Canek, Jr.
2:36 in
Another stop in 2010 for Hechicero. Here we're in Arena Coliseo Monterrey and apparently the matches at the arena have their own show? I see: Federación Internacional de Lucha Libre, which is apparently a local promotion in Monterrey. It has a cagematch listing. This aired on ACM (which presumably aired matches from A.C.M.), which makes me think I could maybe find some more Hechicero from this time if I dug, but I'm going to stick with what I have. Point is that I have no idea of context here (again), including what stakes, if any the match had.
Canek, Jr. was in short, Canek's kid. He's the rudo. He's in Hechicero's reds and Hechicero was in yellow. There's not a ton about him online, to be honest, which feels surprising given his lineage and the fact he's been around for a while. The idea of Hechicero as a tecnico is sort of off-putting to me, in the same way Satanico or Averno playing tecnico would be. On this more local stage, it sort of works though, because he seems to be wrestling for people who want to see him wrestle and he's definitely showy.
This was another stop on the road to him becoming the wrestler he is now. There's much more of the matwork you'd expect here, with him especially being good at moving Canek around in the primera. He almost moved him around too much because while it was believable, it didn't feel super competitive and some of Canek's stretches seemed almost too "gimme." Hechicero was still a little prone to goofiness too, like a standing flipping splash which didn't look great and took me out of things. Watching him like this, there were some elements of his game that almost worked better as a tecnico. He could fly around a bit more, including a nice tope (non-suicida) from the inside of the second rope back into the ring. I wouldn't call the primera particularly smooth but it did have a nice bit of escalation with Canek starting to work on the mask and both men escaping each other's holds until Hechicero locked in his grounded, rolling abdominal stretch, cinched up so that there was no escape.
Hechicero continued to show off his tecnico skills int he segunda, working the crowd, hitting some high level, showy offense that wasn't quite as "move" oriented, culminating with a big inside out springboard dive that barely hit. That was intentional for the most part, I think because Canek immediately took over on the leg with some really simple but effective offense and solid selling. He finished the fall with a figure four.
Third fall was good on paper, certainly, with a lot of that rare, rare creature in lucha matches, limb selling, some of which I'm absolutely giving the benefit of the doubt on. For a big chunk of it, Hechicero was fighting from the ground, or using the rope to get back to his feet and it kind of makes me sad that he's not a tecnico now because I want to see more of this. I will say that the inverted fisherman's suplex is easily the most ridiculous move I've seen in ages. It feels like something some kid came up with his action figures. Here, he barely gets Canek over and I'm not going to credit the knee selling on that at least.
Anyway, this sort of cuts off after a roll up and we don't have the next part of the TV but I'm going to say that was the finish because we know Hechicero won. Lots of good stuff here even if Canek didn't show me a whole lot in hanging. We're ever closer to getting the Hechicero of today.
