LKAC Night 14/ New Footage Friday: Ki, Murat, Solar, Heavy Metal, Jumbo, Robinson

Billy Robinson vs. Jumbo Tsuruta AJPW 3/21/82

MD:I promise we'll get back to the weird stuff soon with the 1981-1982 footage. There's another Robley match that Eric's been sitting on, for instance. I just feel like we have a moral responsibility to take our medicine on these matches. If we have something that feels canonical that no one in our extended community's ever seen before, we have to get it out there.

On this one, it helps that Billy Robinson's amazing. Yes, we have a lot of footage of him between 75 and 85, even it it feels like we're missing all of the AWA main events that I wish we had, but watching him be a wizard in the ring is always special. You can't look away from him here. The way he brings a limb around to create a momentary point of leverage to escape a hold is pure magic. He does things that make so much sense, like bringing his hands together to force just enough space to pepper in elbow shot. Just the footwork in widening his base to force Jumbo off balance is stuff that no one else does. He does all this while continuing to succumb to Jumbo's persistence. It means that while he stays in a hold forever, it's never at all boring. When he takes over, he puts the same effort and creativity into his holds. You know this is heading towards a draw but it's still fun how it gets there, with meaningful hold trading down the stretch and Jumbo making everything feel big and important and the crowd coming along for the ride.

Maybe this was us taking our medicine, but I, for one, feel healthier for it.

PAS: I am a real low voter on 70s/early 80s Jumbo. He just doesn't have a ton of spark to me, still he is technically excellent and you put him in with an elite opponent and the match is going to be great. Billy Robinson definitely counts as an elite opponent, and this was a real treat to watch, despite being a 30 minute draw which is always tough. I dug how a huge part of the opening section of the match was contested grappling on their feet. You normally think of grappling as a mat based thing, but here both guys were doing some great Greco pummeling, as well as grabbing holds and counters while keeping their vertical base. Robinson is awesome at using leverage and level changes to bring drama to a match. He was also rocking a great early 80s mustache which made him look like Dan Severn's dad. We get to the big bomb section and both guys have great looking bombs. I love Robinson's delayed neckbreakers and Jumbo has a beautiful butterfly suplex. It really felt like a draw was coming from the first minute, and it could have used a spit shine at the end to make people believe the near falls. Still this was a great excavation a chance to see two all timers with plenty of time to do their thing.

Solar vs. Canelo Casas UWF 1/19/92

ER: Man, 21 year old Heavy Metal looked like 1992 Johnny Depp had sex with 1992 Tawny Kitaen and they birthed a fully formed adult luchador. And this was awesome, very fast paced and very feisty. Solar comes off super powerful and Casas comes off nice and slippery. There were so many fun mat scrambles, so many fun simple spots worked around an arm (at one point Solar picked Casas off the mat by his left arm and chucked him across the ring with what looked like a half judo half lucha toss). This was no Solar exhibition, it was Solar scrambling to lock in subs on Casas who kept slipping out in fun ways and frustrating him. This whole thing is go go go and while there is good Heavy Metal out there this footage really paints him as someone who should have been a lucha legend. We get a lot of great Solar show off moments but I love how Casas never just lied still during submissions, always struggled to get out of them even if it lead to him getting caught in something else right away. Solar takes a big fast bump to the floor and gets hit with a big Casas plancha and staggers all around ringside into tables. The ending is a little abrupt with a couple Solar backbreakers and a belly belly that Casas appears to kick out of, but this felt like a 15 minute sprint which was more breathless than I expected it to be. Nothing but fun here.

PAS: Solar is a stone cold mat legend, where most of the footage we have is when he is in his 50s and 60s. While I love watching Solar and Navarro rip it up in Maestros matches, it is super cool to see him work that style closer to his athletic prime. Casas never reached his potential (don't do heroin kids) but you could see the potential here, while a little jumpy he was right there with Solar hold for hold, using his speed to press the action and shake Solar a bit. I really liked that contrast of styles, with Casas more jackrabbity and Solar more deliberate, it was really cool to see that work itself out in the context of a match on the mat. The standup stuff was a little more pedestrian, I liked Casas's dive fine, but it was pretty basic, and the three count felt tossed off. They basically did an awesome first fall, and kind of jumped to a finish. Would have loved to see this in Mexico where the second and third falls would be their own thing.

MD: I'm glad this turned up. It's just pure, distilled lucha fun, like you often get in Japan in this era. Sort of an abridged "good parts" version of a title match. Now, I'd argue that you lose something without more of the build, but the good parts are still good parts. They stay on the mat for most of it, with some rope-running interspersed. I'd argue that it's probably a good match to show to someone to introduce them to the style or as a bridge to more traditional title matches. There's a chunk of this with Solar letting Heavy Metal put him into stuff, and I do think he shows his youth and that not everything is entirely smooth, but it's all believable and effective. Still, this is somehow the epitome of lucha matwork, where they leave realism at the door for the sake of aesthetics, creating a new, entirely immersive reality where tying up a limb or adding in an extra twist or just one more rotation creates a superior overall effect. It's a journey to a mirage and it's the most beautiful wrestling there can possibly be.

Low-Ki vs. Murat Bosporus 2007?

ER: Bosporus is a Turkish wrestler who showed up on a NOAH tour or two, and worked some names we like (Chris Hero, Trik Davis, I assume others) on American indies in the mid 2000s, and seemingly pops up at random in Japan and Europe. I seem to remember TomK being into him. He's the same height as Low-Ki but probably 80 lb. bigger, just a Turkish spark plug (if there's a brand of Turkish spark plugs and he never did advertising for them while wearing a spark plug cone hat, then I'm not sure this is a world I want to be a part of any longer). He's basically an even stockier Sugiura. The match is pretty clipped up so it's hard to get a feel for ebbs and flows, but it's clipped to 6 minutes of all action, so we can at least see that they did a lot of fun stuff. This is Ki taking a humble loss in Murat's home country, so we get a lot of Murat, big belly to belly suplex and German suplex, some real explosive standing elbows, a nice lariat, and really plants an awesome frog splash. Ki didn't work unprofessionally stiff, but he still hit a double stomp to the chest after blocking a sunset flip, and hit some flat out baseball bat to chest kicks, hard uppercuts, a nice low kick, but goes down pretty easy. Couldn't get too invested in this one, even if a lot of stuff looked good, as - likely due to the clipping - we never really got to create much drama.

PAS: I really dug this as an opportunity to watch Ki as a traveling heel. It isn't a role we see a ton of anymore, but Ki is pretty great as a guy putting over a local legend. I loved his dropkick, smirk, eat and opposing dropkick spot, and his offense works well as a pure heel. That double stomp and those wheel kicks are mean stuff when punishing a hometown hero. I remember liking Murat during his random US Indy and Japan appearances, and he was neat here, great crowd pleasing wind ups on his uppercuts, and his big suplexes really looked great, he had that big hip power you see from legit amateurs, Ki isn't leaping over on that belly to belly he is getting thrown. I would have liked to see this in full, but I imagine this is what exists, and it is a treat.

MD: The clipping is definitely in an issue here, especially early as you can't really get a handle on the initial back and forth. Once we get more defined control, it's a little better. Murat has a sort of abandon to his stuff. When he did take over, I liked the way he was throwing himself into everything with a Jim Duggan-esque enthusiasm. Ki adapted to the audience just as much as he had to, setting up a comeback spot with an extended over-the-top thumbs down for instance. The clipping means we miss the set up to the finish, which is always a little frustrating. Do we have more Murat in Turkey? I could go for a few more matches of him as local babyface against mid-00 indy foreign invaders.