Tuesday is French Catch Day: Rene Ben! Bordes! Shadow! El Arz! Kayser! Mercier!

Rene Ben Chemoul/Walter Bordes vs Black Shadow/Josef El Arz 7/25/70

MD: Ok, we've now seen enough to say that Ben Chemoul and Bordes are probably up there with the best stylist tag teams in the archives (in the 60s, the competition would be Ben Chemoul and Cesca or some combination of Wiecz/de Zarzecki/Montreal) if not the very best. We'll have a few more matches with them but they've already come quite a ways. Or at least it's safe to say that Bordes did. He'd expanded his act and bound it even further with Ben Chemoul. The match was more of a celebratory stylist showcase, full of tandem bits of offense, dancing taunts that drew some of the biggest chants and singing we've heard from the crowd and some really imaginative stuff from Bordes. Josef and Shadow hit hard and were persistent but they were mainly there to feed and feed and feed and they did an excellent job keeping up and going up for everything. Bordes did have a number of new moves, suplexes into slams, fireman's carry gutbusters, and some of the most amazing cartwheel spots you'll ever see to go along with his double knee and dropkicks and technical moves. Unless the matches are duplicates, we'll see them against Shadow and Josef again and hopefully the heels get a bit more in those matches to add some drama, but as a showcase, this was really great stuff.

Peter Kayser vs Guy Mercier 8/22/70

MD: This was the finals of what I think was a one night tournament. At the least, they did the semi-finals that night too. What it meant was that the crowd was very much familiar and very much behind Mercier and against Kaiser. They were up for everything, to the point of someone grabbing at Kaiser's leg from the crowd during the first lock up. The first lock up! There was a sense of fatigue from the get go with Mercier looking exhausted even when controlling things, but that didn't stop them from really laying it in. Mercier has a great spinning fake out leg pick, which at one point, led to him dropping down on the leg and and a hold. While in the hold, he probably threw the meanest, hardest chops we've seen in all the footage. Why? Just because he could. Kaiser would come back with nerve holds and just blatant chokes. Mercier would fire back with huge shots. Kaiser would return suit. Due to its nature and the other times they worked that night, this was shorter than a lot of the matches we've seen, and maybe it was lacking a little bit of the complex technical prowess, but everything, down to Kaiser's chokes and Mercier's chinlock, looked as nasty as could be.

PAS: This is my type of shit, two mean guys hammering the shit out each other. It almost felt like a heel versus heel match do to how nasty Mercier got, even ripping out Kayser's under arm hair. The forearms and chops were really nice and I liked how Mercier worked the Indian Deathlock as a wear down hold, and all the ways Kayser tried to get out of it, the finish was a bit of anti-climax, but the work in the match was hard and violent.