Loosely Formed Thoughts on WWF Over the Edge 5/31/98

The Propaganda-style intro to this PPV is fucking insane. It's all World War II footage of tanks and soldiers and fucking Stalin and Mussolini and actual Nazi footage and it's all interspersed with They Live CONFORM and OBEY block fonts but also video of Stone Cold doing shit like turkey tapping Vince from several angles. Best possible start. 

 

1. LOD 2000 vs. DOA

It actually feels impossible that LOD 2000 didn't become the biggest tag team of the rest of the decade with Sunny as their manager. I don't think I'm being overly horny here either. I don't think the fact that Sunny looked like this while I was 17 years old matters here, as I don't think this is a matter of bias. I think I'm being a very reasonable and appropriate level of horny in a way that the eyes of history agree with. 

This is Hawk and Animal vs. 8-Ball and Skull but Droz and Chainz are there. Up above I only wrote "LOD 2000 vs. DOA" and I didn't want anyone to get confused about what members of each group of friends was actively involved here. 

Skull throws a nice ugly big man swinging neck beaker and an actual good legdrop. It does not bring me great joy that 8-Ball and Skull's work from '98 is probably better than we assessed at the time. 

Animal is in strong style mode and does a dragon screw and I don't think I've seen that from him before or since. How much of his BattlArts work is available? 

8-Ball vs. Hawk is better than Skull vs. Animal. They did more punching and elbowdrops and an ugly piledriver that Hawk gets to ignore completely because that is Hawk's spot. 

Hawk has a way of looking off balance while also having this incredible balance and sturdiness on all of his clotheslines. He looks wobbly, but takes this incredible bump all the way across the ring off a missed top rope shoulderblock, flying out of the ring into an almost Halloween style sliding bump to the floor. Hard. I liked Drunk Hawk when I was a teenager but I don't think it was because I thought he was GOOD good. Accidentally, time has only proven me right. Further proof of how good he still was on fumes in '98: the 1-2 punch of his  neckbreaker -> fistdrop combo. 

The 8-Ball/Hawk punch exchange is good and should have gone three times as long. It's worth it for Chainz punching Hawk in the balls from the floor in a way that didn't even seem planned. Cameras weren't focused on it. You can see Chainz pop him in the nuts from the floor and Hawk reacts like a guy who just realized he got tapped hard enough in the balls to react. 

Nobody quite knew how to get to the finish, but Animal clotheslining his way through a hot tag and hitting a great powerslam for the finish plays well with any lead up. 

There is a Faarooq! Faarooq! Faarooq is on Fire!! sign and folks, that's a good one. 

2. Jeff Jarrett vs. Steve Blackman

Fuck I hope Steve Blackman tries a piledriver here but I have a parlay on Jarrett doing one. You see, in between matches backstage, Faarooq hit The Rock with the Piledriver To Beat tonight. We're 20 minutes into this show and we've had two piledrivers and we still have over 2.5 hours to go.  

Blackman is really fun to watch during this stretch. We don't get Reformed Musclehead Karate Guys Working Every Pro Wrestling Spot He's Ever Seen anymore. Blackman doing a baseball slide dropkick to start but then press slamming Jarrett back into the ring but also doing Ricky Steamboat double chops but also looking lost and kind of dangerous is just lightning in a bottle. I think he would get a lot less interesting the more he learned, but this is still in that magic window. 

Blackman hits a thrust kick on the floor that looks like the the most violent version of Chuck Norris kicking Jarrett down the aisle. 

Jarrett does a really good job icing this down the right amount while there's an Al Snow angle taking several minutes too long at ringside. Jarrett works Barry Darsow chatter like "He ain't going nowhere now!" and "Ring the bell he's done!" and is able to do essentially nothing for a few minutes, really well. 

They do a preposterously slow 9 count after Jarrett hits a back suplex. Jarrett had been working over Blackman in a chinlock for a minute so I have no idea why Jarrett was as knocked out as Blackman. I thought they would explode a bit more after the Al Snow angle, you know, to get everyone back involved in things, but they kind of do the opposite for no reason. They've turned the entire rest of the match into "every move keeps both of us down for too long" and it sucks.  

Steve Blackman is at his absolute beautiful best when he is doing moves with full commitment without looking as if he's ever even practiced doing the move before. It's only a detriment if a couple of miscues happen back to back, but has a remarkably high ceiling as a style. His elbowdrop is not thrown like any other wrestler has thrown an elbowdrop. It's like he was born with the knowledge but without memory of where the knowledge came from. He knows it's right, but it's informed by something beyond him. He is not inspired by anyone else who came before. 

Steve Blackman is Backyarder Doug Furnas and we didn't know what we had. We didn't know, and he didn't know how to continue giving that to us. 

3. Loser Leaves WWF: Sable vs. Marc Mero

I'll say it again: Mero and Sable were really great during the first half of '98. Neither ever did it better. Maybe when we get into Jacqueline Era Marc I'll determine that it has aged even better than his Sable Forced Separation arc but I'm not expecting it to be. Honestly Sable and Mero are fucking GREAT together. They really seem like they dislike each other, like their marriage was really already over instead of merely being on the start of a 5 year slide towards being over.  

Marc Mero is so good during this entire segment. "Sable what happened to us? This business ruins relationships... It ruined ours."  

Marc Mero pulling a small package after doing the honorable thing and lying down for Sable, then jumping around the ring in celebration is one of those things my sister will bring up unprovoked 25 years later. 

4. Bradshaw/Taka Michinoku vs. Kai En Tai

Bradshaw press slams Taka into everyone within the first 30 seconds. He's so massive, they look like Lilliputians wearing Miller's Outpost jean shorts. 

I remember this being a lot better, with a lot more heat. Crowd really isn't as into it as I remember. I'm not into it as much as I remember. The Kai En Tai stuff doesn't read as fluid or unique today. There are a lot more seams with 2024 eyes. Bradshaw is not actually reckless at all. Did we all have false implanted rose colored memories of Bradshaw recklessly fucking up everyone in the match or was that just me? This Wisconsin crowd doesn't understand a single fucking part of it. Arms are crossed in Milwaukee, politely not understanding any of Dick Togo's excellent senton variations. 

Jim Ross makes an extended Gulliver's Travels reference and then explains it and I feel like a stupid asshole who's only read three books in my life out here making the same similes as Jim Ross. JR and I each watched the Ted Danson Gulliver's Travels Two Night Television Event in 1996 and now we use it to describe pro wrestling when big man fights small men.   

Okay it gets good when Bradshaw finally tags in and that's when he starts throwing them around. It's still never unprofessional in the ways I remember it being. In fact, Bradshaw was actually a good sport believably taking Kai En Tai's offense, leaning into dropkicks and struggling really well while the Lilliputians tethered his legs with rope. He does polish Funaki with a clothesline and choose Teioh as his Only True Victim by throwing him - really throwing him - with a tiger suplex, but you could watch this match and have no actual idea that Bradshaw is a miserable prick.  

5. Faarooq vs. The Rock

I think Faarooq looked like a real badass (before the match started). This match was the best his Faarooq gear ever looked on him. Fuck how cool would Jacqueline have looked in Faarooq's exact gear? Faarooq looks like a lean cut Masa Saito, or the most bulked up Bernie Casey. He looks perfect, in other words. He looks like a guy really giving a beating to a guy he dislikes. A beating he's been waiting to hand out. His sparsely African-patterned gear looked great with the straps up, and even better when he takes the straps down. Someone who's good with computers, put Jacqueline in Faarooq's gear. 

I hate how guys like MJF or Austin Theory or Ricky Starks move like 1998 The Rock. It sucks. They all flop the same and walk around with their butts out the same and it's all theater kids goofing around doing People's Elbows. The Butt Out Walk must be the first thing they teach at Brahma School. 

I don't know why the crowd isn't more excited for Faarooq dishing out a beating. The Rock wore a big neck brace after Faarooq piledrove him earlier and takes a fun beating, and that combination of things deserved a reaction. His elbows on the apron looked good, Rock is acting like a real punk doofus, yet nobody cares. 

Real flat finish. This feud never had a chance. There was a weird 3 count that got a silent reaction and the camera shot it in a way where you couldn't see Rock's foot on the rope. This whole thing was only 5 minutes and felt really incomplete. Blackman/Jarrett got twice as much time without even being based around an actual feud, so this whole thing was just set up to fail.  

When DX runs in after the match to ambush The Nation they look like the 4 Horsemen of Rape.

6. Vader vs. Kane

Vader was getting real reactions in 1998. There was a powerful machine working against 1998 Vader. He does the Vader flex, he flashes the V's, a ton of fans have Vader signs. The People believed in Vader in 98 and the people in charge didn't want them to. Vader was done wrong. We all know it. The man was 43 years old, which is not an old age at all. I know this because it is my age and how could I possibly be old? I understand why they instinctively didn't want to get behind a 43 year old Vader, but you see things a couple decades removed from the original context and you realize just how mammoth a star Vader would have been in WWF had they just treated him the same way they treat Nakamura at the same age. 

Kane's punches were better in 1998 - better, not good - but his straight rights are not good. There is a reason he never threw them for most of the rest of his career. They have no weight behind them. His uppercuts don't look good either. He threw a bigger variety of punches then, not just uppercuts, and their form is good but the weight is absent. Kane's strikes look shittier the longer the match goes. He would go on to phase all of these punches out other than the uppercut.  

Vader's offense looks good against a big guy like Kane. His bear attack runs him over, but he smartly did one bear attack that stunned Kane, then a second bigger one that flattened him. Nobody was flattening Kane in 1998. Vader knew we build to that. "Vader using his mass now" fuck yeah he is JR. 

This match should be getting a bigger reaction. Vader is making this look like a big fight. He's swinging arms into all sides of Kane's head, even throwing them to the back of his head. Kane is in retreat! Vader sent Kane into retreat which is a thing that has never happened and nobody is reacting to it. Nobody is reacting to these beefy arms and it doesn't make sense. Nobody thinks it's cool that Kane scoop slammed Vader? Vader is a really big guy to take a scoop slam! He lands completely differently than you've seen because you just don't see 400 pound men getting slammed. 

This has not been a night of good matches, which often hurts a crowd, but I don't know why this crowd was not reacting to this match as if it was not Good or Big. It was both, but the crowd reacting so indifferently and Kane just not being that good limited how good it could get. 

I don't know why I haven't mentioned how ridiculous the mask stipulation is but it really didn't need to happen. It didn't make anyone care more about the match than they would have. Vader getting real red-faced revenge would have been cooler. A match built around "first to grab and use the large comical wrench" would have been cooler, probably.  

Kane's top rope clothesline is the softest contact Signature Clothesline of the modern era. It's a terrible clothesline and it never got better. It was only ever good if used in No Mercy. His running clothesline, which he stopped using, looked like a clothesline that would run Vader over and is the loudest contact of the match. 

Vader bumps to get Kane over but they react more to Vader on the attack than Vader bumping around. If Kane had the energy of Bradshaw it could have been a real fight, but Vader has to create his own energy off Kane's Lesser Jason Voorhees body acting. Vader knows how to build a reaction when going for the Vader Bomb, and he knows how to peak it by pausing briefly on the middle buckle before deciding to climb to the top, Milwaukee swelling as he leaves his feet and deflating when he crash lands. The Vader moonsault is a flat out insane and incredible spot for a man his age and size to be using. Vader understood PPV and They resented him for it. This man got up for a goddamn Tombstone and yep, it looks cool as hell when a guy the size of Vader is Tombstoned. 

I don't actually know how I feel about Vader calling himself a fat piece of shit. I think it's a raw promo, and his delivery is note perfect. I guess the problem is that I don't think they ever did anything other than kind of reflect on how sad it was that Vader called himself a fat piece of shit. I don't know if we needed to see vulnerable, sensitive Vader but I do think it was so memorable because of how real it was delivered. We've all been down on ourselves in our lives. A lot sometimes, for any little thing. Vader felt real, and maybe we didn't need Real Vader. Maybe, if it led to something of substance, a renewed energy and fight, it would have allowed people to reflect on themselves when they get too down on themselves. I don't think WWF was or is capable of writing that kind of character. Whatever. It felt like actual, real frustration, the kind we all go through. We don't get that kind of insight into athletes. They're insulated. Taught what not to say to the media. Me, personally? I do not think Vader is a fat piece of shit, but I believed in that moment that he did, and that's affecting. 

I forgot this was the PPV they did that weird Lawler/Crusher/Mad Dog Vachon angle. The Crusher, in his early 70s, kept looking cooler the more undressed he got during his segment with Lawler and Mad Dog Vachon. He looked cool the entire time and got a great big reaction from Milwaukee. He looked like such a badass grandpa in his brown Wrangler Wranchers throwing his bolo punches. This was such a weird thing for WWF to do. They had already used Mad Dog's wooden leg in a match and the idea of WWF honoring a local hero who had nothing to do with them is such a non-Vince move. 

7. HHH/New Age Outlaws vs. D-Lo Brown/Owen Hart/The Godfather 

If your friend had never watched WWF programming before, you could convince them pretty easily that Owen Hart was working some kind of hacker gimmick in his caution tape singlet and, well, hacker sunglasses. 

Owen tags in and runs straight into a Billy Gunn clothesline, Gunn punches and press slams him, Gunn goes up for a backdrop for him, really two of the only guys trying to make this work.

Helmsley's running jumping knee and his tilt a whirl backbreaker (!?) looked good. He always really looked like he enjoyed working Owen. 

Why was the Billy Gunn/Godfather pairing so good in this? They worked kind of fast against each other, and Godfather looked like he was throwing his kicks and missed clotheslines with different pep.

New Age Outlaws working over D-Lo is really good too, though not as good whenever HHH tags in. It's wild how much HHH really kills all the pacing and vibe of this match any time he's involved.

More Owen Sucks chants than I remember but his perfect piledriver to Road Dogg brings no reaction at all. Philistines. 

This match is going a lot longer than anyone could have reasonably expected. The fans get real restless whenever anyone considers doing any kind of hold. This thing is dying the longer they go, nobody is doing anything to bring it back to life even if a lot of the work looks good. It's crazy how bad HHH makes the DX act in-ring. He is actively hurting their vibe and wrestling image. 

8. Steve Austin vs. Dude Love 

Pat Patterson is so fucking funny introducing Gerald Brisco as the guest timekeeper. He has his readers on and a stack of at least a dozen 3x5 cards. He actually said that Gerald Brisco's heart "beats like the tom tom drum on the reservation, like the Heartbeat of America." I mean whoever wrote that line was onto something next level. "Some call him the reincarnation of Jim Thorpe. We call him...A Friend." This is incredible. I did not appreciate how amazing his intro was when I watched this as a teen. All my friends and I just wanted to see Austin beat everyone's ass. 

Vince looks like an impossibly hulked up Robert Carradine. A real geek, and a real freak in his flap pocket black chinos and sleeveless ref shirt. Incredible posture, but a freakish build sculpted onto that wealthy flawed Connecticut skeleton and Kennedy hair. He has a million facial reactions and it's incredible how good literally every one of them are. It's a real Gotta Hand it To. 

Foley sells a back elbow like Austin really spiked him in the nose, running himself into the ground like Terry Funk but more real. The longer the match goes, the more I know that each man was really taking these shots. I just didn't realize they were roughing each other up from go. 

Foley takes such a great bump on a clothesline to the floor. Austin really timed it well and collided with him well, but Foley went over so fast, in that way that Foley sometimes does where you don't know how controlled it actually is. Man would just throw his body to the floor with more speed than he used for anything else. Shouldn't really be a shock anymore that Foley took some crazy bumps, but his heavy lower half really whips him over the ropes. Nobody else has really been able to duplicate that. 

Austin throws Foley onto Brisco and then stomps on them both and punches Foley in the back of the head too many times before clotheslining him ass over elbow onto concrete over the guardrail. I probably haven't watched this match since the early 2000s (I bought the Over the Edge VHS from a video store in Healdsburg that was going out of business) and remember it being built around tons of bumps onto concrete, and that is exactly what it is, and they keep escalating. 

Austin taking a backdrop onto the hood of a fucked up old style Honda Civic, boot going through the windshield 20 years before Zona 23. Is Zona 23:16 anything? Austin gets thrown onto and over a tilted old Mercury and Foley sunset flips him off that Mercury's hood, it's awesome. Foley's body makes a wet splat as his weird torso and wide butt land perfectly flat. It's a sound you never hear and Foley has made it like three times in this match alone. 

Austin is bleeding and is always an incredible looking bleeder. The blood doesn't keep up but the initial color is strong. When he bleeds he always gets the best deep red color on his tanned bald head. For a match built around big bumps on concrete I forgot how many hard back bumps Austin takes onto concrete in this match. My man is out here taking backdrops and suplexes in parts of the entrance that at least 7,000 people can't even see. It's insane. This man broke his damn neck 10 months ago and he's bumping on concrete for himself. 

Also, Steve Austin is great because he manages to bounce a chair off the ropes and into his own face and makes it look like a complete accident. It's a spot that a lot of men have tried and few have made work well. I think there needs to be a level of alcoholism involved to make it work. Sandman was good at it too. 

Pat Patterson throws such a punch into Mike Chioda's lower orbital bone. There's no way any of these Patterson/Briscoe matches from 1999 are any good but damn they should have been using Patterson in more physical roles this whole time. He takes one of the best chokeslams of the year through a damn table. This is a man pushing 60 who retired four presidents ago and hasn't done physical stuff on screen since the mid 80s. How did he even prepare to take this? How did Vince psych himself up to get brained with a pre-Chris Nowinski research chairshot? No idea. 

I don't know how well this holds up as an All Time Great Brawl, but it's differently great for its big stunt show feel and old man bullshit that was at the center of a fight. It was messier than I remembered and was more about getting to specific areas and moments, but this is still a standout 1998 WWF match and surely the best WWF match of the year to this point.   

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 10/28 - 11/3

AEW Rampage 11/1/24

RUSH/Dralistico/Mortos vs BEEF/JD Drake/Butcher

MD: Really enjoyed Rampage this week overall. Very "Fastest Hour of TV" vibes. They started in the ring for this one, cut to Stokely after, did the Vendetta squash, paid off the Stokely bit and did something out of normal format with Taya, then went straight into the three Top Flight matches, one after the other, all linked with the entrances, and with the undertone of Moxley-influenced aggression in the air more so than usual on AEW TV (that doesn't involve Moxley directly) right now. Very much a "Restore the Feeling" sort of show for me, but then my feeling and other people's feelings tend to be different. I'll miss it if and when it's gone just like I miss Dark and Elevation.

And obviously, this was a great way to start. Look, I like the Outrunners, but I do think there's a ceiling to them and that the act will only have legs for so long. I see a higher ceiling for BEEF. Yes, he's over the top, but he's over the top in a believable way. The Outrunners are characters. They're very fun characters who are enjoyable to watch, but BEEF comes off as more human. You might know a guy like BEEF. You might tell yourself and everyone else that you wished you didn't, but then so do JD Drake and Anthony Henry, right? Deep down, though, having someone so earnest and enthusiastic in your life just makes it better. Do I think he can be world champion? No, but I think he can be a challenger for the TNT or Continental Title that fans might really get behind on a chase.

The most interesting guy in this one was Drake though. Arn Anderson is on record that he thinks he (being Arn) was a terrible babyface, that he didn't have the "skills," which in this case more or less means deep armdrags and dropkicks. I'm not sure if he really believes that of if he's being self-effacing but in saying it, he shortchanges just how good a babyface he was and what makes a good babyface in the first place. It's not "skills", it's emotional connection. I imagine Drake might say the same thing Arn did, but he was really good here being shoehorned into that role. He engaged with everyone around him, hitting the tranquilo pose early, played face-in-peril sympathetically but with fire, downright seething when RUSH stopped the run across the ring to kick him in the face, and then fired back for the hot tag, standing toe to toe with RUSH before making that final, pained turn to tag BEEF in.

Butcher fit right in too. Obviously you want him slugging it out with RUSH. You want everyone slugging it out with RUSH. There was a bit early on too where Dralistico really played up that little dog/big dog dynamic with his brother which I find effective. This was good all around. Only thing I missed here was one of those Jake pre-tapes to set the stage. BEEF has this sort of transformative element to him that makes everyone into Giant Machine or Piper Machine like in 85. Someday we'll get BEEF/Mark Briscoe interaction and the skies will part and the angels will sing.

ROH TV 10/31/24

Athena vs Abadon

MD: Abadon's an interesting case. If you go back to the territories, they'd move around like Kamala or other monsters, never staying in one place for too long. Here, they're one of the only honest attractions (in as they're used like one) that AEW/ROH have. They're gone more than than they're here and they're instantly credible and dangerous when they arrive, generally able to challenge a champion only to come short. Then they're away again long enough to make you forget about the loss so that they have an impact when they come back. I know in the margins they're working indies and training but the lack of ringtime is probably not ideal. 19 matches in 2024 with a third of those being squashes on ROH TV coming in at less than 2:30. 2023 was much the same. It's a tricky balance.

Part of me wonders if we're reaching the end of Athena in ROH. It looks like Billie's story is cresting again and Final Battle is around the corner. Plenty of people who don't actually watch ROH have been clamoring for it. Everyone who does likely wants her to stay. I do understand that what ROH is might change in the future (and it might not) but it gives her the freedom to stretch. This went almost 20 minutes, more with the pre and the post-match. It had all the room in the world to breathe. I love AEW commercial breaks in some ways, but Athena doesn't need them like others do. She is fully formed, self-actualized, able to structure her matches in the ideal manner and make the most out of every second. This sort of match would have been very hard to pull off in this exact way getting this amount of time on Dynamite or Rampage. I think in historical terms and the comp we'll have some day of Athena's Proving Ground matches and big defenses will shine, just like she does as the biggest fish in AEW's smallest pond. If she does get moved up at some point, then she should be featured on the same level as Mercedes, getting her own segment each week. On paper, maybe that's a bold risk. In actuality, it's an investment that would pay off in time.

But there's a match here and like I said, it went almost twenty. It was wild, with a slew of big spots that went like they should have or that were all the more impressive for maybe not. Some of the latter was simple physics. A lot of it was Athena's reactions in the moment. There were plenty of moving parts here and it was very much on her to make this feel organic. Remember, Abadon's had something like 120 matches and a big chunk of those are squashes. They did a good job sticking to character and keeping things moving, being where they needed to be when they needed to be, and this was their career match, from what I've seen, but it's a little different than Athena's 17 year career.

Athena reacted to everything, from planned spots, to mishaps like the chain falling off her band, to the crowd chanting this is awesome. She reacted from Abadon absorbing the magic forearm at the start all the way to the relief of hitting the crazy O-Face into the chairs and escaping with the belt(s). You couldn't see the strings because she managed to be on so thoroughly throughout, whether it was following some sort of plan or a temporary deviation from it. I can't stress how important that is, how rare that is in 2024, and how it turns a match from a garbage spotfest into an immersive, horrific experience.

Athena went from fear to seething frustration to seething rage to seething agony. There was a lot of seething in this one. Abadon's reaction to the blood from the skewers was spot on as well, and even better was Abadon's frustration after being unable to finish Athena off on the floor. That was the moment that the match shifted inexorably in Athena's favor, the moment where her persistence and determination and madwoman drive broke Abadon's will. For the first time all match, maybe even since their debut, Abadon showed cracks, and Athena drove a wedge through them before shattering her with the O-Face. That this went so long, had certain things that didn't work as planned, and still turned out to be compelling and cohesive is a testament to one of the best wrestlers in the world and a very game opponent and one more reason that we should cherish this ROH while we can. 

BONUS: AEW Collision 11/2/24 - Kyle Fletcher

I had tossed this in a tweet (https://x.com/MattD_SC/status/1853065072689496430) I'm doing a lot of these short form things over there, so do follow and follow along) but wanted to put it here as well. 

It's no big secret what I wanted MJF to do at Wembley. Channel Larry Zybzsko and stall. The stalling wasn't the point though. It was the means. The heat that it would have gotten him wasn't even the point. That was the means too. At the end of the day, heat generally is. It's a means to fuel the potential energy behind a comeback. The comeback is the thing. When you have a face and a heel and a crowd that cares about the difference, it's everything.

The traditional goal of pro wrestling has always been to figure out what a crowd wants and deny them it and deny them it and deny them it so that when they get it, it's the greatest feeling imaginable. For decades, what they wanted was to see the babyface win and the heel get comeuppance. That's not nearly as true in 2024. Right now, much of the audience wants to be part of an experience, want to have bragging rights for being live for a great match, to chant "This is Awesome" or "Fight Forever." And no one enables them to do that more than Will Ospreay. He's the poster boy for it. He gives the fans what they want. So if MJF was going to be the greatest villain of his age, how could he really get under the crowd's skin? By denying them that as much as possible in the grandest venue possible. Then, in the last third of the match when Ospreay became unchained and hit spot after spot perfectly and brilliantly, it would have felt like the greatest relief (and release) in the world. 

Max went a different way with it. That's fine. People still liked the match. We're not here to talk about that. We move on. We look to the future. Let's talk about Kyle Fletcher. I love AEW's commercial breaks. You learn so much about wrestlers by seeing how they fill time during it. This is where AEW generally sticks the heat (of shine/heat/comeback since I'm using phrases haphazardly) in its matches. That's the most important part of the match! I'm not entirely sure it would even exist for most AEW matches without the breaks because the tendency to go 50/50, your move/my move and get all the cool stuff in might be too strong.

People have been hot and cold on Fletcher the last couple of years, but I've been watching him during those breaks and I have to admit, I like what I see. He's been precociously good at interacting with the crowd, his opponent, the ref, at letting things breathe, at showing himself as a fully fleshed out character with emotions and opinions and able to emote and present all of this to the crowd. He's not just hitting stuff. He's not just sleepwalking through it until it's time for the big back-from-break spot. He's alive. It's just for a lot of the rest of the match, you didn't see it nearly as much. Great (surprising!) instincts, just maybe a career of hanging with a certain sort of crowd who had learned to get over in a certain sort of way, right?

So now he's turned on Ospreay, has cut his hair to differentiate him, and as seen on Collision's Komander match, has done something even more striking. He's managed to start moving differently. That Fletcher who we'd seen peek out during the breaks is starting to show himself from bell to bell. He used his robe as a feint to cheapshot Komander to start and then moved slowly, methodologically, with purpose. He grinded him down, played to the crowd, menaced Abrahantes. When I tried to explain what made Mark Henry so special during his Hall of Pain run, the best I could come up with was the notion of "negative space", what you did between the moves and the spots. Giving life to those in-between moments turns a match from a series of things that happened to a consistent, engaging, immersive reality of its own. Fletcher was absolutely nailing that here.

And then, in the back third (after the break and after he finally nailed Abrahantes), he let Komander off the chain and they hit bombs and fireworks on the way to the finish. The crowd responded, for the most part, as they ideally are supposed to, chanting Komander's name and getting behind him. Sometimes you find a spark of hope in the most unlikely places, right?  

That brings us to Full Gear and Ospreay. I don't want him to stall. That made sense for Max. It made sense for the cowardly heel champ full of bluster. Fletcher's wrestling like someone with something to prove and he has more to prove against Ospreay than anyone. What he has to prove, however, is that he's his own man. If he comes out and wrestles Ospreay's match to prove that he can hang, that he's just as good as him (exactly what Max did!), that doesn't prove to anyone that he's his own man. It just proves that maybe he's as good an Ospreay as Ospreay.

Fletcher seems to get this, right? He seemed to get it in the Komander match, way more than I would have expected him to. How does he prove it then? He goes low early and then grinds Ospreay down the whole match. He makes sure Ospreay doesn't hit his usual first-few-minutes dive. He evades and avoids hope spots so that Ospreay doesn't even get to hit them. He denies Ospreay his offense. He denies the fans the chance to see Ospreay do his thing. They get absolutely nothing for the first two thirds (but the joy of booing), not because Fletcher is a coward but because he's an absolute bastard. Then? That last third? They get everything. Maybe it scores a half star less on the following Friday morning, but if Fletcher can pull it off, it would be an experience the crowd would never forget. It would define who and what he could be moving forward. It would give AEW another piece they badly need. I guess we'll know soon enough.

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Found Footage Friday: HANSEN~! IDOL~! WAGNER SR~!? HANSEN~! IDOL~!

Dr. Wagner (Sr.) vs Manuel Soto 1979

MD: This was apparently the first round of a $100,000 tournament with the finals in Madison Square Garden but I'm not going to look it up and try to figure it out if that was actually something that happened. This is a rare look at Wagner, especially in a full match. It goes around ten minutes and was worked "gentlemanly" and primarily on the mat with a few escalations and those were usually armdrags and the sort. The wrestling was god though. Wagner wrestled interestingly in the first few minutes, very reactive, very defensive, a lot of counter-wrestling. Soto came off as a bit more fiery and won most of the escalations with Wagner basing for him. They never stayed in anything for long, keeping things moving even though it was mostly on the mat. I wouldn't say we learned a ton about Wagner here but you got the sense he could back it up with skill in a straight match like this. I have no reason, after seeing this, to question anyone who might say that he was great certainly. I just maybe don't have a ton of proof to verify a sort of greatness that would take him over the top either.

Austin Idol vs. Stan Hansen Memphis 9/12/83

MD: A wild almost nine minutes here. Stan ambushes Idol as he's coming over the guardrail and they never look back. He opens him up immediately and once they make it back into the ring and the bell rings,  targets the wound like only he could. There's a bit early into this where he puts his heel right on the bloody forehead and scrapes and it's the simplest thing in the world but given how he does it, it's downright grisly. Beautiful pro wrestling. Idol fires back after a couple of minutes of it and the crowd goes nuts. Hansen is extremely giving here, bouncing over the ring, flailing limbs, letting himself get slammed. It builds to Stan tied up in the ropes, Idol pushing the ref away, and then Stan kicking Idol into the ref in one of the better ref bumps you'll see, and Hansen taking advantage, hitting a lariat in the ropes and winning by DQ. Hart's a great little nuisance throughout as Hansen has absolutely no regard for him. 

ER: The face of the DVDVR 80s Memphis 100 has changed over the last couple weeks. We wrote about a tag a few weeks back that could have placed in the top 10, and now we have two more Stan Hansen Memphis matches. Stan Hansen worked one month in Memphis in 1983, in between All Japan tours. He showed up and kicked Austin Idol's ass over five matches, three of which were included in and underrated on the DVDVR set. Now we have the other two. All five of Stan Hansen's matches in Memphis, during that one month of 1983 directly after he won the PWF title from Baba, are now all viewable on YouTube and you could watch all four singles matches and the tag in under an hour. That's a thing we can all now do, any time. 

Stan Hansen blew into Memphis one day and beat Tom Prichard's ass for the TV title and then hung around for a month before blowing out. Imagine how large Hansen must have looked inside the WLMT studio. If you were a fan of Tom Prichard in 1983, it must have felt terrible seeing this large man with no mustache show up and just beat your boy's ass the way he did and then make fun of the trophy that Memphis was using for their TV title. Hansen looked completely unstoppable in every way for 5 minutes and then came back a couple months later to beat the blood out of Austin Idol for one of the couple dozen titles Memphis had. This was full unstoppable Hansen but I like that it was very clear Idol was jumped. The official match time is about the same as the one-sided mauling of Prichard, under 5 minutes. But this 5 minute match is preceded by the out of ring beating that leads to Idol's incredible blade job. Hansen jumps Idol in the aisle and it's a beating that stands out as good in Memphis. He does this thing during the beating that's so perfect. It's a thing Hansen can do that any other big guy could do but doesn't have the intuition or charm to do. While bleeding Idol out on the floor, he rolls into the ring - there was no count, the bell hadn't sounded - and just runs the ropes a few times at full speed before going back out to bleed him some more. I don't think any wrestler understands the value in this, to look this aggressive and unflappable at the same time, knowing your opponent won't be getting up and leaving while you run the ropes. 

Idol's blade job on this video quality makes him look like Hogan, the entire top of his scalp dyed red giving him the same blond horseshoe haircut. Hansen goes after that cut in some disgusting ways too, digging his heel into it and punching down at the cut multiple times, even doing his perfect kneedrops into the cut. He forces Idol into one of the most natural and effective ref bumps I've seen, shoving Idol with his boot so hard that it looked like Idol couldn't help but careen into the ref. Hansen's lariat in the ropes was as nasty as any he's hit in the middle of the ring. Idol did not go flying backwards to the floor, he absorbed it. There is a full arm smack as Idol is momentarily flattened between the ropes and Hansen and the crowd audibly reacts to the sound. Imagine seeing this monster destroy Austin Idol in his first night at the Mid-South Coliseum. Hansen could just show up in any room and any building and look like this, at any time.  

Austin Idol vs. Stan Hansen Memphis 9/19/83

MD: This time, Idol attacks before the house lights come up. Great fire as he takes it to Hansen and Hansen gives and gives. He eventually gets an inside shot in as he is want to do when pressed and takes over. The transition is him missing a second rope knee drop and Idol soften him up for his leglock. I imagine Hansen couldn't keep doing a big miss bump like that as the decade went on, not with any regularity but it would have provided a bit of welcome variety to his usual open door to vulnerability in AJPW (the missed lariat into the post). Before the leglock can happen, Hart gets up on the apron and everything devolves into chaos. Post-match, Hansen says he's going to show him a thing or two about the leglock, brandishes a chair to injury him, Lawler makes the save and Ventura comes up to set up the next tag because Memphis booking is a never ending churn of great stuff. I know I didn't say much about either match, but they were simple, straightforward, primal, territory wrestling perfection really.

ER: This is the weakest of the four Hansen/Idol matches, if only because it feels the least complete, but has a completely different charm than those other matches. It was also weakened by having a completely spaced out Randy Hales on most of the call instead of Lance Russell, and when Lance joined in he kept throwing too often to Randy. Randy sounded like he had never spoken about wrestling to anyone before this match. This one is more of an Austin Idol match. Idol got blindsided and brutalized a week ago, now he's back and not going to make the same mistakes. Hansen in Memphis is amazing, but also might be one of the places that Stan Hansen wouldn't have really "worked". I love Austin Idol and I love his offense. I love Lawler, Dundee, all these guys. The Memphis set was my favorite of the 80s sets. But watching Austin Idol work strikes with Hansen, I'm not certain all of these Worked Strike Masters play as well off Hansen as they do off men who don't seem so large and indestructible. 

I think Stan Hansen is a gifted seller. The way he drops to knees and gets staggered and backed up and the way he eventually falls is genuine talent, a real theatrical gift. His body control seems impossible for a man his size, but he does several degrees of staggering and lost steps that show he always knows the exact level of punishment he's supposed to be selling. Sometimes, however, it looks like he is selling almost too much. Idol was laying it in, but not laying it in for the level that is necessary to look like Hansen is actually taking damage. I don't know, maybe I'm up my own ass on this one. Hansen is just such an armored tank that the best worked punches in the world are only going to look as good as Stan Hansen can make them look. The missed knee off the top rope is a nutso spot for Hansen to use, like the John Nord kneedrop plancha a decade later. A man that size should not be able to jump off the top rope and land like that without blowing out his entire lower half. Hansen missing offense always seems to make more sense as a transition to his opponent, because again it just rarely feels realistic that someone is able to fight their way back into control. I wonder how often Hansen did a miss this spectacular. You have to have a finite amount of them. That's not a spot I'd seen him do - not like that - and I imagine the total number is low. Now we have one of them. Maybe it's the only one. 

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