Found Footage Friday: STEAMBOAT~! ORTON~! PIPER~! ORNDORFF~! HARTS~! BEES~!

Ricky Steamboat vs. Bob Orton Jr. WWF 3/6/86

MD: We've got a trio of matches from Richard Land's patreon that weren't in ready circulation here. It's worth checking out. There's a well known Steamboat vs Orton match from Landover in 85 and this is a good partner to that.

They go fairly long here (I thought it was headed to a draw actually, especially after Orton survived the flying body press), and it's relatively back and forth thought with fairly lengthy stretches of momentum. Orton's a bump machine here, flipping into the corner and flying all over the place for Steamboat's shots.

Likewise, Steamboat sells like you'd expect him to. After the first minute or so, you can tell that they were going long, but it really picks up in the back half. Steamboat gets a win out of nowhere but then Orton pile drives him after the bell and hits the ref, getting himself suspended immediately (got to put over the PA commission).

Roddy Piper vs. Paul Orndorff WWF 3/6/86

MD: Even Monsoon said this feud had been going on for a while at this point, but they get in and out and get the job done here. Great hot start. Piper's one of the best at throwing fists to start like this, making sure to lose and get knocked out of the ring, only to throw a drink right into Orndorff's face.

Orndorff spends most of the rest of the match selling the eye, and Piper uses to to full advantage anytime Orndorff starts to get over on him, including one great fall away (in the basketball sense, not the wrestling sense) eyepoke. Just when Orndorff finally has Piper on the ropes (or in a Crab as it is), Orton rushes in to cause the DQ. The feud was a little worn out at this point, maybe, but they covered a lot of ground with high energy in just a few minutes here.

Hart Foundation vs. Killer Bees WWF 3/17/86

MD: We come in slightly JIP here, but this was really good. Anvil takes the first chunk of it, getting clowned by the Bees. Brunzell has a great drop toehold, but more of a trip with his arms and there are some good rope running spots. Hart sneaks in on commentary to complain about the (legal) doubleteaming.

Harts take over on Blair and they keep it moving and interesting. Brunzell's hotheaded and draws the ref repeatedly giving this a real southern tag feel. Choking with the ring rope. Double teams (including a modified decapitation). Illegal switches. Some really good hope spots in there as well. Brunzell comes in hot after the (very earned) tag and hits the dropkick for a nearfall. The Bees pick up the surprising (to me at least) win after another bit of miscommunication. Honestly one of the best heel Hart Foundation matches I can think of.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Vs! Ripper!

40. 1979.07.31 - 03 Jackie Sato vs. Monster Ripper (WWWA Singles Title)

K: This is advertised as a death match. It’s no DQ or countouts, but the meaning of that is a bit different in this era to modern times, it’s really just guaranteeing the crowd that they will see a definitive finish rather than they’ll see someone get exploded or something.

Right from the start Jackie goes after Monster’s injured knee. She doesn’t wait for Monster to do something unsporting first before resorting to that. It might come across as heelish out of context, but after everything we’ve seen Monster do in the months leading to this, it more gets over that Jackie isn’t a sucker and is going to take the fight to her. She has a couple of cool moments where she’s knocked down but will then throw herself immediately at Monster’s leg or try to kick it. One of them reminded me of Antonio Inoki in the infamous Muhammad Ali fight where she’s on the ground just kicking out at Monster’s leg. It makes Jackie simultaneously come across as the underdog but also a super tenacious and determined one.

Another cool spot is the way Jackie deals with Monster’s Irish Whip > hip attack move. She just ducks and rolls under it like how you’re taught to do if your clothes are on fire, but she’s so slick about it she’s immediately back onto her feet and able to lay into Monster who’s still downed from missing her flying move.

It’s shortly after this display of coolness that the pretense of a fair fight gets thrown right out the window, and Jackie is on the outside getting beaten up by the heels. There’s a lot of chaos at ringside so we can’t clearly see what’s going on, but the important part is Jackie emerges with the crimson mask. It’ll be an iconic image of this era of Zenjo. You see the girls in the crowd getting very distressed as they see their hero in mortal danger. She keeps fighting the whole time though. We get a nice counter of a backdrop where Jackie uses her weight to force Monster down into a pinning predicament. Monster’s top rope senton that’s been built up as match-ender also gets dodged. The crowd keep believing Jackie can pull this off and she rewards them accordingly. The finish is a bit of a let down though as the referee just stops the match as bloodied Jackie is getting stomped on. This could have gone somewhere great but it wasn’t allowed to happen. We get a rematch instead.

***1/4

MD: I accidentally watched a later match on this one and I guess it’s a testament to the footage so far or my own instincts but it felt like a match that things should have escalated further to instead of the initial match. That ended up being the case. So here we are with this one, the right one, the one with more build than any other match we’ve seen yet and it was a great piece of pro wrestling.

Ripper came in with a bandaged knee, which gave Jackie a wedge against her (and a way to protect Ripper for the next match). This had more shots to the crowd than any match I remember so far. They referred to Sato as “Superstar Jackie” and she was given the reaction she was getting. She wrestled like one too, constantly leaping at Ripper no matter what was happening, always fighting back. She was only able to get an advantage when she went after the leg though, not just with kicks but also wild trips off the ropes. It all built to a bridging figure four but Cheryl Day got into the ring and while she was pushed away by the officials, it was enough for Ripper to get Jackie out of the ring.

From there things took a ghastly, theatrical turn. We mainly saw the shots of the crowd and the chaos of both groups of wrestlers swarming into each other with matching jackets, but when Jackie rolled back in, she was a bloody mess (which is not a sight we have seen much if at all in the footage). From there Ripper demolished her with multiple suplexes. Jackie was able to turn it around but only for a one count and after another sojourn to the floor, the ref called the match over blood stoppage and an elated Ripper was declared champion as they cut to multiple shots of crying young women in the stands. If I’m not mistaken, they, carny as can be, already announced that there was going to be another match at the end. As pro wrestling as pro wrestling can be.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death (and Friends) 11/18 - 11/24 (Part 2)

AEW Full Gear 11/23/24

MJF vs Roderick Strong

MD: I have a soft spot for AEW. No big surprise. I write about it every week, right? Part of why is that it really made me care about modern American wrestling again. And the thing about caring is that you get invested. And sometimes that investment takes you good places and sometimes it doesn't, but it's always better than not caring at all. 

I can't think of a moment in the last couple of years where I was more invested than the very start of the MJF vs Ospreay All In match. I had been watching MJF's American Title run, vs Oku, vs Templario. I wrote about them even. I had also seen Ospreay a bit and wrote about him. I wrote about the Danielson match and the crowd that seemed to be high on the fumes of the spots instead of fully engaged in the actual narrative of the match. I thought long and hard about how to get around that, how to tap into something old and primal, how to deny the crowd something they wanted for as long as possible until the pressure built up and the exhilaration could boil over. Between how MJF was wrestling and the code that I thought I had cracked (and I thought maybe he had too), I was incredibly invested on how MJF was going to wrestle the match. That's kind of unique when you think about it. We don't often consume art focused on the artistic choices in the moment. Maybe people who went to see Megapolis really were invested on whether Coppola would go this way or that, or people ready to listen to a new album of their favorite band would want it to lean towards one sound instead of another, but it feels kind of rare to me, very much a wrestling thing, and very much for the people like me who are very, very invested in it in a certain way.

So I sat there watching alongside so many other people around the world in real time and I saw the entrances and I waited for the moment the bell would ring. He just had to do one thing. Instead of rushing forward, he had to dart out, had to stall and stall and stall some more and deny the home country crowd everything they wanted (and felt entitled to get) from Ospreay. Then he could force a mistake and use every dirty trick in the book to deny it some more. Because he had already proven he could hang in the hour long match, there was real hope he'd have the freedom to do it. I was as invested in a performance as I had been in a very long time and boy did my heart ever sink when Max rushed forward instead of backwards. He went the wrong way! Both literally and figuratively. And they had a perfectly fine Ospreay "all the hits" sort of match, though one that couldn't live up to the hour long match they'd already have, and it set up Garcia's return and Ospreay's victory and it was fine. Perfectly fine. And I was pretty miserable about it all I have to admit. Max had the chance to get the most heat imaginable in front of the biggest crowd with the biggest stakes and they just went another way with it. I thought the subsequent Garcia match was pretty good. He shouldn't have worked it the way that I wanted him to work the Ospreay match and he didn't.

Which brings us to this. Look, I'm not saying I'm not at all invested in Max still. Yes, I was disappointed once, but I think his heart is in the right place and he's as well-positioned as anyone to champion so many lost elements of pro wrestling, the stuff that can really manipulate minds and move hearts that makes it such a special and unique art form. Sometimes maybe he can't get out of his own way in his own perceived need to protect himself as a drawing act, to compete with all of the other six star players on the card in the eyes of fans that he doesn't trust to take leaps of faith with him, and maybe, just maybe, he himself doesn't believe in the power of pro wrestling quite enough. Because when you see some of these crowds and how they react, how they've been conditioned to react over the last couple of decades, sometimes it's real hard to have faith and work towards something deeper and more meaningful when there's easy candy and empty sensation always within reach.

I've got my own thoughts about the Cole program and the eventual match to come, but the Strong match sort of worked within a vacuum from that. The dynamics were easier to work out. Strong is a cleaner babyface here, a guy who is trying to help out his friend against a scumbag heel. He's coming in hot, wanting to get his hands on Max, maybe even wanting to spare his friend from getting his hands dirty (because they are dirty enough - no, that's me reading in what I'd in the story; it's not what's been on screen). Strong's out to end the threat of Max once and for all, for the good of all. Max is doing everything he can to avoid such a fate and to wound Cole as much as he can in the process (and then to rub his finger in the wound if he can).

To be honest, I was more invested in Fletcher vs Ospreay because I thought maybe, just maybe, Fletcher would be the one to crack the code (I now believe the code is uncrackable because Will Ospreay, the human being, will not allow it to be cracked; I was disappointed in the match but less so in Fletcher who shows such promise for the year to come). So I came into MJF vs Strong with an open mind. And I have to say, Max absolutely outdid himself. It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (because why would I, right? Just one guy), but I came out of the match actually kind of proud of Max's performance. Which again, is just a sign of being invested in this stuff. I can't think of another match where I came out feeling proud of any wrestler like this though, so on some whimsical level, I guess it's worth noting.

In the Garcia match, it didn't make sense for Max not to engage. He wanted revenge for what happened at All In (even if that was revenge from Garcia for something else). Here, he didn't want to fight Strong, not really, certainly not on his terms, so when the bell rang, he rolled right out, stalled, and started to run him (and New Jersey) down on the mic. That would help to set up the finish but also worked to at least partially turn a crowd geographically inclined to root for Max against him. Roddy cut it off with a shot and Max, instead of engaging, retreated. He went up the ramp and was chased back down only for Roddy to miss a strike against the post, allowing him to start working Roddy's hand over it. 

What followed was a nice little early match heat, Max dismantling the hand, playing to the crowd in the most irritating ways possible, and keeping Roddy in a hold. Here, he did a beautiful Bockwinkelian rendition of telling Roddy that the crowd didn't care about him, which got them clapping Roddy up. It was appreciated, let me tell you. Yes, the crowd still traded chants, but I think they would have been far more for Max otherwise (part of that is the problem of the story where Cole prematurely betrayed him while the fans were still trusting him, but I'm not going to get into that). He did a masterful job at giving Roddy every chance to keep the crowd behind him. 

Roddy eventually came back with a backbreaker out of nowhere and he started tearing apart Max's spine. Max shifted his offense from the hand-focus to just whatever might work here, but he ultimately got swept under. Roddy hit the End of Heartache, but instead of kicking out, Max got his foot on the rope, protecting the move, infuriating the fans, making sure he didn't seem tough but instead sneaky and tricky and savvy. Everything right, again and again. It all built to Roddy hitting the Sick Kick. Instead of going for the pin, however, he (infuriated himself) needed to put Max away for good with another End of Heartache. That let Max reverse and hit his Brainbuster finisher. Roddy got his hand over him (again protecting Roddy) but Max turned it into the Salt of the Earth for the win. 

I'm going to reiterate, everything right. It was some beautiful pro wrestling. Roddy absolutely did his part, from the first shot when Max had the mic all the way to the momentary lapse where he didn't go for the pin after the Sick Kick, but this was Max embodying all of the outwardly selfish but truly (secretly) selfless qualities of a classic heel. I'm still kind of dreading the eventual Cole match because I have no idea how they can square the circle on the story so long as Cole's acting like a justified babyface and trying to "cool face" promo through it. But after this match, I'm willing to give Max a chance to at least try.

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2024 Ongoing MOTY List: Premier Athletes vs. Kings of the Black Throne

 

10. Tony Nese/Ariya Daivari vs. Brody King/Malakai Black AEW Rampage 7/12/24

ER: Kings of the Black Throne? House of Black was fine, but it wasn't enough so now I have to type out something truly stupid to refer to a monster finally wrestling like a monster and a jaundice-thighed Dutch kickboxer. What's happening with the AEW jaundice tan? We established orange as the ridiculous tan color for two decades and suddenly the Big Yellow 5 feels emboldened by a lax FDA to start branching out into other areas, away from sodas with a high school reputation for shrinking dicks. I don't know what's happening with Black's legs and midsection but something needs to stop and we need to contain this. This isn't normal. You would be called Piss Boy every year of high school if you showed up with yellow legs from some kind of chemical burn accident, so there's no way we should be letting 40 year old Dutch kickers and skinny fat bunny hopping piledrivers get away with it. 

Maybe Brody King worked big in this match due to the fatigued state of his friend, finally throwing aside the middling forearm exchanges and fake big man work for stiff clotheslines and aggressive size. His Throne Buddy's brain is slowly being eaten away as the yellow spreads outward through his tissue, but it's making King hit hard and miss with a toppling big man intensity. His work with Premier Athletes associations was a real plus for the match, taking a great out-of-control-big-man bump to the floor on a low bridge, and aiming a crossbody at Daivari through Mark Sterling. It was a good way for him to stay occupied and make this more of a match. 

Tony Nese is arguably the least cool AEW worker to champion but I like him. I didn't like him in Evolve but I grew to enjoy him in 205 Live when I was watching that a bunch for Drew Gulak, Jack Gallagher, and Oney Lorcan matches before those guys were retired or canceled or canceled into partial retirement. Nese isn't so different from 30-40 other good body speedy backflip guys in AEW but I think he's better than a lot of them. He's good at getting naturally into place for unnatural offense, falls in some ways you wouldn't expect, is good at pinballing between two guys, and is capable of fucking up in cool ways that feel like part of his character. He goes up for one of the highest backdrops in AEW history, has shockingly good worked arm strikes, and he repeatedly eats shit on his 450 splash no matter where Black sets up. People love holding the opinion that Great Sasuke slipping off the ropes only makes his Jushin Liger match more legendary, but nobody is quick to accept missed spots as part of a wrestler's charm, unless it's a JT Smith situation. Tony Nese does these missed spots that are almost surely unintentional but can read like expertly planned out Chris Hamrick or Juventud Guerrera misses, because they're never sold as something that connected and they often lead to his downfall. His meathead athlete Dave Portnoy energy makes the misses more charming, and his first overshoot barely got him a nearfall. His second was supposed to hit knees and instead his rotation is fucked up and he winds up connecting knees hard with Black and whipping his own head into the mat. Tony Nese has the tight physics on headscissors and backdrops like Billy Kidman with the same type of "I kind of want him to mess up this finisher though" charm. 

Nese and Daivari are both really good at getting in the way of Black's crescent kicks, and you know who has spent years gently flying under the radars of anyone offering a wrestling opinion? Ariya Daivari. Daivari is another guy I fell for during the glory days of 205 Live, but doesn't get talked about because his brand of professionalism can fade into the background. He has a consistently good floor, and a style that has always reminded me of Christian, but with less offense and less upside. He's great at using logic in matches the same as Christian, like the way he changed his pescado delivery here in an attempt to actually damage Brody King, getting a running leap that he doesn't otherwise do, just to throw more weight. He doesn't bump big like Christian but he has good selection in bumps. My favorite here was the way he fell off rigidly to the side after a running back elbow. The finish played great: Nese getting his face in the way of another kick while King hanged Daivari's motionless body off the apron in a sleeper in the camera foreground. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/18 - 11/24 (Part 1?)

ROH TV 11/21/24

Athena vs Leila Grey (Proving Ground)

MD: Athena makes a tricky finger of death because there are some diminishing returns in my writing about her. I'm not necessarily interested in structural issues (like where she places the magic forearm in her matches; I'm not sure this match even had it) or in narrative ones (like how in this match Grey, due to the hierarchy, was mainly able to get opportunities by using her athleticism to help enable banana peel slip moments of Athena missing shots). I'm interested in Athena's full immersion, the way she's always on, always reacting. 

I'm interested in taking a match and watching her facial expressions and body language the whole way through, taking for granted that the match will make sense and be narratively compelling and sound, that the execution of moves and her bumping will be very good, just focusing entirely on how she reacts to everything that happens. Buddy Rose was always on, but from what I understand, he wasn't able to explain it. It was instinct, natural; it just happened. With Terry Funk, I always get the impression that his brain just worked more quickly than everyone else's, that he saw opportunities in the moment and was able to choose which one would create the biggest ripple. Maybe I'm wrong. 

I wonder a little which it is with Athena. Grey here did a very god job of reacting. At times you could see exhaustion or desperation or hope in her face. There was often a momentary gap, just a blip, and it's nothing to hold against her. It's human. I'd argue that the majority of wrestlers have that gap of making a conscious choice of how to react, how to sell, how to be, and because most wrestlers do it, there's no reason to even notice it. Athena doesn't have it though. With her, it's seamless. In some ways, you watch her matches to see just what the reaction will be, but sometimes you watch them to see what's not there, to revel in the absence of that gap and the extra semblance of immersive reality that she can create that almost no one else in wrestling in 2024 can. I'm just not sure how interesting it is to people for me to keep writing about it.

AEW Dynamite 11/20/24

Darby Allin vs Claudio Castagnoli

MD: Sometimes when someone's not going to be on the PPV they get a feature match in the week around it. That seems to be what we have here. Even though he lost, this was maybe the first time that Darby really looked like "the guy" to me. There was something about how he carried himself, a certain confidence. It's not that he was ever lacking it (no one as fearless as he is could possibly be lacking it), but it's always been a sort of of outsider edge and now it felt more mainstream, more central. He didn't feel like a pillar. He felt like a main eventer and it felt like he knew it. I'm curious if he can carry that forward in the weeks and months to come.  

Some of that was Claudio putting him over. You may ask how he put him over; it was by treating him like a legitimate threat right from the get go. Yes, there was a size and strength advantage. Yes, it played into the match, but Claudio treated him as dangerous nonetheless. The first couple of times, when he retreated to the floor (and he retreated to the floor in the first place), he quickly got out of Darby's line of fire. Then, instead of trying to aggressively overpower Darby, he took over by luring him in and catching him. If you've ever read anything I wrote, you know that I feel like details can matter. All of this can matter. Claudio choosing to take over in the way that he did, especially given the strength differential, meant that Darby was someone worth being wary of. That matters.

Of course, Darby, being who he is and the size he is, enabled Claudio, who could do almost anything to anyone anyway, to do amazing things. The endless gutbusters, the walk up the stairs, the swing into the guardrail, the press slam that all but ended things. There's some question of whether Claudio doing such impressive, crowd-pleasing spots is counter productive in some way. Some of it comes down to execution. A lot of it is on his opponent. They care about Darby. Darby makes them care. That matters. It makes the difference. If you have an over babyface, it can work. If you don't, then Claudio will just get himself over. Here, it worked, and Darby made it work, constantly fighting from underneath, biting, scraping, and even almost picking Claudio up, something that made Darby look just as unreal in his own way, as all of Claudio's big power moves. Again it's because they made things like the differential matter. They kept it consistent, they leaned into it, they reacted and sold what was happening, not just the physical toil but the emotional weight behind it all. That turns Darby lifting Claudio in a fireman's carry out of a hold as a hope spot from just another spot, a checked box, to something with massive emotional resonance that will get the crowd chanting not for the match or for the company or for each other or for action for the sake of action, but for Darby Allin to overcome.

Darby finally came back by combining his bite hope spot with Claudio's luring tactic earlier in the match, getting him out to the floor and biting a face instead of a finger. They went into the sort of finishing stretch you'd expect all building to the huge spot off the table. Darby valiantly crawled back into the ring to beat the count only for Claudio to wipe him out for a sort of surprise pin. All in all, Darby wasn't hurt by it and it was a win Claudio probably needed relative to his current role. I will say that the climb back in, even after such a huge spot, wasn't as impactful as it could have been. I think of early-mid 80s NJPW where they occasionally did huge countouts. While it was incredibly unsatisfying when one or both wrestlers went over the rail for the DQ, the countouts still had oomph. Some of that was the fighting spirit element of it, but a lot of it was because they actually happened. People loosely understand the symbolic idea of a countout now, the notion that someone who makes it back to the ring is heroic and deserving of praise, but the element of risk of Darby NOT beating the count wasn't actually there. It never happens. If it did, then people would care more when someone beats the count. The baseline isn't someone not making it. The baseline is someone making it, always, even if they just barely make it. You can't push against something that never actually happens and expect for it to hit as well as it might have. In this case, I actually wonder if Darby might have been more over for even getting up and crawling towards the ring and almost making it and NOT beating the count. That wouldn't have been about the spirit being unwilling but just the body holding him back. Just something to think about right?

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BONUS: On Hangman Page, my most improved wrestler of 2024 (with every bit of implication that statement carries).

This should be a pretty safe one right? A positive message. Adam Page is my most improved wrestler of the year. I think he's taken extremely well to the maligned heel act.

Except for one little thing. He's not my best wrestler of the year. He's my most improved wrestler of the year, and to be improved, well, you had to start from some sort of deficit.

And yeah, did he ever have a deficit in my mind. When I started watching AEW in fall 2021, I had never seen Adam Page before. On paper, there seemd a lot to like. Hard hitting cowboy. An undeniable expressiveness that went hand-in-hand with the whole depressed millenial sensitive guy deal. A fairly solid person behind the character with a good social media presence.

So I gave him a shot. Believe it or not, that's what I do. I saw him win the title, saw him on his first few defenses. And deeper into 2022. I come from a school of thought that tosses conventional wisdom out the window. Other people can help guide you places, but once you get there, you delve in yourself and make your own judgments. And judge I did, and I found him wanting.

When it comes to conventional workrate metrics, he was aces, right? Worked hard. Hit hard. Had big spots (big enough at least: the fall away slam, the death valley driver, the moonsault, the springboard clothesline).

It was just how he used them and how big spots seemed to be all that he had. He was lacking simple things: punches, kicks, a standard clothesline, a corner clothesline, a bodyslam, any of the stuff that you'd normally expect early into a match. And lacking that early and mid-level offense, he started dropping the bombs too early.

It worked well enough when someone huge (like a Lance Archer) controlled the match. Then he could hit a fall away slam or even a death valley driver as a hope spot or a big comeback spot. He was a dominant presence though, a lead babyface, and he went too big too quick, and then there was nowhere for his matches to go. He was consistently hitting something like a death valley driver in the first few minutes and it meant multiple finisher attempts and finishers later on when he should have been hitting some of those bombs that he might have theoretically saved instead of used earlier in the match.

The thing was, it worked for him. Maybe not with me, but it worked with the crowd. Some of that was buoyed by his personality and his connection with them, but a lot of it was because he was giving them gratification and plenty of it. A lot of sensation. A lot of reason to pop. That it ultimately wasn't as memorable as it could have been, that it wasn't sustainable over time, that it didn't always build to emotional beats, well, it was beside the point, because he was rewarded.

Page has an art nerd background. I get the sense he's a creative guy, that he often tried to pop himself and his friends, do the things that he thought would be cool in a match. And it meant he was rewarded repeatedly for things that didn't necessarily hold up narratively, things that might have worked over the span of months or if he was used as an attraction, or if he had an opponent who could bring the right sort of structure to the table but that faltered against certain opponents. My least favorite match of 2022 was the Takeshita match, because Takeshita is very similar. He was new to me too and I didn't know the criticism of him from DDT, but both of them rushed to as much cool stuff as possible without building it in a way that feels earned or paid off. 

So yes, it works, but it doesn't work nearly as well as it could potentially work. It leaves things on the table. However good you might feel he is, he could have been so much better. This year, he has been.

A heel turn alone isn't a magic fix. I'd argue that Takeshita still stumbles with a lot of the same pitfalls. Action without substance. Payoff without build. Athleticism without meaningful escalation.

Page, however, has leaned into it far more thoroughly. He's captured a mood. He moves with purpose. He's found that mid-level offense. He leans on opponents, takes the air out of them, out of the room, oppresses them, an imposing presence that now wrestles from the incensed, hateful, look in his eyes outwards. He's channels a methodological presence in the best of ways. Now when he hits one of his bombs, it resonates with narrative force. I've gone from dreading how he might structure his matches to looking forward to it.

People felt things in certain of his older matches. So much of that was due to the set up outside the match. Now he's the one creating the mood and tugging on hearts with his actual wrestling. And he deserves all the credit in the world for it.

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Found Footage Friday: GALLI~!

GALLI 1/11/09 Full Show 

Calypso vs. D-Ray

MD: The ref (animated, sunglasses, shorts) here came off as a bigger star than either of these guys unfortunately. I couldn't tell if he or D-Ray(?) was coming out to the NWO theme. Calypso had an ok act on the way out running around the ring and at times he'd grunt and scurry about, but most of the time he turned it off. D-Ray had that solid Pat Rose physique, was vocal throughout with the fans and ref and his opponent in a good way and controlled the match. At one point he had a pumphandle power slam (Wrath's meltdown) with a slightly different entry position that was kind of neat. Calypso won in less than five minutes with a small package driver (maybe wasn't supposed to be a driver?) out of nowhere. This makes me wonder just how many matches are going to be on this card.

Chilango vs. Emperador Azteca

MD: Chilango here had a tee-shirt and bandana. He did the most heelish thing possible on an indy show; he interrupted the calling out of the sponsers. After that he ran down the fans. The guy in the red mask came out stop him and they rang the bell and got a ref. Chilango was quite the stooge to start, running about. He took over with a foul and didn't really look back. Just a lot of decent jerk offense. Simple, straightforward stuff that was mean and got over who he was. Mask guy didn't even get a comeback before he won with a Sharpshooter. Not sure about the layouts here so far.

El Potro/Justiciero vs. Simbolo/Silver Dragon

MD: Perfectly fine mechanical work until the end, just with a big "but." They were moving fast and hitting things mostly clean with just a slightly tendency to land a little too close to the ropes on armdrags and what not. Things didn't feel overly cooperative. It was a good mix of advanced and basic. The de facto rudos became more than de facto after ending up on the losing end of one too many exchanges and took over with a handshake > kick. Weirdly, there was no actual comeback, just one of the tecnicos coming in on a hold, breaking it up, and cycling on to the finish which was the only thing in the match that looked way off. Some bizarre layout here. Like reality itself was clipped.

Venganza/Resistencia vs. Elektron/Silueta Dorada

MD: I had the sense we hit the part of the show with more of the GALLI regulars. This still didn't have quite the comeback I would have wanted as Elektron just stormed into the ring while Dorada was hung up and there was a bit too much stumbling all around, but in general, it fit into the pattern better and they were working both each other and the crowd in a more concerted way, while still hitting a lot of their exchanges cleanly and crisply. Dorada and Resistencia worked together best overall. They started it and it felt like a living, breathing match instead of guys trying to figure it all out and glue together their spots. So not perfect but on the right track at least.

Centella de Oro/Meteoro I vs. El Guerrillero/Pentagono del Infierno

MD: I feel like over the last few matches, it's been like the meme of the horse drawing where more and more of it is filled in and made complete. Pentagono had a second who was a kid in a mask and I wonder if he has 13 year of experience wrestling by now. There was just more connective tissue between each move, even more working the crowd, everything seeming more alive. The wrestlers tried to get tecnico/rudo chants going since the fans were likely not super familiar with them. The rudos took over after Centella teased a dive and his back was turned. The dives did come towards the finish. I will say again that the comeback was kind of missing even if everything was a bit more fleshed out but I think at this point it's probably just a victim of this being a 9 or 10 match show which is maybe not how lucha should operate?

Demencia/Payaso Blanco/Payaso Negro vs. Furia Roja/Kamikaze/Nemesis

MD: Another match where they didn't actually have a comeback but instead just went straight to the submission cycling. Very weird. The opening exchanges and action was good but needed way more Payaso comedy. That was the best part. We've already seen a bunch of things hit clean. That's what would have made this one stand out. They did have a lot of fun tandem moves when the heat started, including this nice double torture rack. This had a solid enough beatdown that you could have gotten a solid comeback out of it. Pressure was ramped up. My guess is that both the comebacks and the comedy are waiting for later matches? The fans were getting their money's worth spotswise but it's all a bit much by this point.

El Tigre/Samuray del Sol/Slayer vs. Amenaza del Siglo/Mason Conrad/Tony Scarpone

MD: This was a bit of a mess but not an unentertaining one. It never really settled down into any sort of meaningful structure. People hit a bunch of stuff and eventually it ended with Amenaza turning on Conrad and Scarpone since they wanted to use a chair to set up a roll up out of nowhere. In the meantime, Amenaza did a lot of work in trying to base for an out of control Tigre (A for effort, lower score for most other things), Conrad did admirably against Slayer all things considered, and Scarpone postured well against Samuray del Sol but maybe, just maybe, this wasn't the right card for him to be on? He seemed like he'd make a very solid 1987 Crusher opponent on one of those bar shows they ran in the mid-west. 

El Pantera/Incognito/Lince Dorado vs. Cassandro/Charley Manson Jr./Gringo Loco

MD: This was the reward for everyone sitting through the rest of the show and it was quite the reward. To start you had Gringo Loco singing and Cassandro coming out like a head of state, full the sort of methodological grace that only he could encompass, kissing babies, the whole nine yards. The pairings were good in all the falls, Cassandro and Incognito wrestling clean with just a little bit of an exotico bent, Gringo basing for Lince like only he could, Pantera and Manson going tricked out but competitive.

The primera ended with absolute chaos, just a great mass of bodies hitting the mat from every angle before the tecnicos took it. The segunda went into the rudo beatdown as Cassandro hit a cheapshot dropkick out of nowhere. Gringo and Charley had some great tandem stuff like the rolling monkey flip across the ring into a headbutt. Again, not a very clear cut comeback but you almost don't care because it went right into Cassandro and Incognito doing super cool stuff like a small package out of a cazadora and a top rope dragon rana and then right into the dive train. The rest of the show had its moments, but by the end of it, you were absolutely appreciating the competence and brilliance to be found here.

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El Deporte de las Mil Emociones: Checkpoint 89.5 & 90

Week 40: Checkpoint 89.5 & 90

EB: We have reached the end of 1990 and thus far have covered about a year and a half chronologically of wrestling in Puerto Rico. We have gone on a journey that has taken us from August of 1989 onwards, have seen two Aniversario shows, experienced a hurricane, gotten to know the members of El Ejercito de la Justicia, the villains typically aligned with El Club Deportivo and La Real Academia, and several of the feuds and matches that have graced the rings of Capitol Sports Promotions. I dare say it is likely the most complete chronological review undertaken so far with regards to this period of Puerto Rico wrestling, keeping in mind that there are still notable gaps in terms of results and footage. Honestly, I wasn’t sure we’d make it as far as we have, simply because I have never really done something like this before. When Matt first suggested the idea (which was a bit different than what it ultimately ended up being), I was a bit hesitant for a few reasons. Not being up to the task was one fear, but also the distance from having first watched a lot of this and the scarcity of results and footage from significant parts of the post 80s period gave me some pause. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea started to appeal to me and I decided to do it. Matt deserves a lot of the credit for keeping me motivated and on track whenever real life has hindered our pace, and it’s been a real fun ride so far. What started as a potential look at some of the notable matches from the 90s and beyond turned into me deciding to ease into it by highlighting a handful of 89 matches that would have made the 80s set if not for video sourcing issues. And then, since I would have to go looking through what’s out there on basically a chronological basis anyway in order to find the matches, why don't we just share this part of the process as well? Thus, El Deporte de las Mil Emociones morphed into this chronological journey that I hope the readers have enjoyed so far. So with us reaching the end of 1990, it seems appropriate to give some thoughts on the different things we’ve learned on our journey so far. 

MD: Having partaken in a number of projects so far, I had a little more faith in our success, but I didn’t realize quite how comprehensive this would all be. But it was necessary. I tell Esteban that we’re not creating something for the moment but instead something that is out there to last as a resource for years to come. I can easily find out (or be reminded of) what happened in 1993 WCW or 1985 Mid-South or 2005 Ring of Honor, but this period isn’t even on Cagematch. And it’s good! And no one in our circles knows about it in a meaningful way. Maybe someone had talked up an Aniversario 90 match but no one had a great sense of the build, or what had happened a few months before, or the week to week ebb and flow. It’s 20 years old now but I do have a Masters in History and one maddening aspect of modern academic history is that you can’t really map anything that’s unknown. It’s much more about looking at things through different lenses. Well, we’re mapping the unknown and undocumented here and that element has all been quite exciting.

What were our expectations going in?

EB: Once I had a clearer idea about how we were going to proceed with El Deporte de las Mil Emociones, my expectations were to hopefully have fun doing this revisit, learn or relearn some things I had not seen before or had forgotten about, see what held up or would be proven wrong from what is usually remembered or thought about Puerto Rico wrestling, and to see how the memories of what I do remember match up to what I think now when viewing it through a more mature and experienced fan lens. Most of what we have covered so far is from a period I had not yet really started watching, so while I was aware of some of the broader strokes of late 89 through fall of 90, I’ve learned quite a few things looking at things via a fuller chronological context. Also, I was (and still am) interested in reading Matt’s thoughts and perspective on the wrestling and wrestlers I had spent quite a while watching, since a lot of this is new to him.   

MD: Coming in, I wasn’t sure what to expect. For one thing, I never followed any Puerto Rican wrestling on a week to week basis. My experience was primarily the 80s set with a spattering of other matches here and there. You could get some sense of the overall booking from the action within a match or from looking at the entirety of a feud (like the Hansen vs Colon one) or from various things I had read or podcasts I had heard, but overall, it’s very different than when you’re following things week by week. I wasn’t sure that’s what we’d be doing even. My initial thought was to find those buried gems that might eventually make up a 90s set utilizing the logic that so many of the key players (Colon, Invader, a number of the stooging heels) would still be on the table at least off and on. In the end, I’m not a great match guy so much as I am a wrestler guy or a big picture guy though, so diving this deep and trying to really understand the territory like people in our circles understand 1989 WWF or WCW has been a very worthwhile endeavor. 

What has stood out for us as a general impression so far?

EB: What stands out to me is that this is not a dead territory. You’ve probably heard the usual refrain of how the Puerto Rico territory was basically dead since July of 1988, with the killing of Bruiser Brody cited as the catalyst. Look, I’ve always thought that specific talking point to be exaggerated based on my experience of watching the territory, and it is a point that gets mentioned a lot. If you have been following along, I think you will agree with me that this specific ‘accepted wisdom’ does not hold up. It may not be a territory that is hot every week, there are ups and downs depending on the time of year and whether they  are gearing up for a big house show,  but the crowds remain hot for the most part and you can see a good attendance at the big monthly house shows that CSP would build towards. We are at the end of 1990 and CSP is still having good and hot crowds so far.  And that’s just  looking at CSP in a vacuum.  Placing what is going on in Puerto Rico in the broader context of the time, I'd say the territory still is performing well compared to the other territories that had been in existence at the tail end of the 80s. 

To that I would also add the other accepted talking point of the mainland/foreign wrestlers stopping their visits to Puerto Rico. If you have followed along so far, you can decide if that bit of ‘accepted wisdom’ holds up. My thought is that it does not. Looking at the talent available at the time (i.e. anyone not tied to the WWF or WCW) , I think CSP was able to bring in a good mix of veteran and up and coming talent that they could use effectively. When the list of wrestlers appearing since July 1988 includes such names as Terry Funk, Harley Race, Rick Martel, Ron Garvin, The Iron Sheik, The Junkyard Dog, Ivan Koloff, Tatsumi Fujinami, Kerry von Erich, Kevin von Erich, Leo Burke, The Wild Samoans (including the different family members), Manny Fernandez, Bob Orton Jr, Chris Adams, Eric Embry, Jeff Jarrett, The Rougeaus, Kamala, Scott Hall, Masa Saito, Riki Choshu, The Barbarian and Greg Valentine (among others), it is hard to side with that specific talking point. We will just have to see when a potential dip happens.

MD: What stands out the most is just how good the booking is on a week to week basis. The foreign talent isn’t what it once was maybe, though it’s quite comparable to what we’d see everywhere but WWF and WCW (even AJPW and NJPW). They have to hit a lot of the same crowds over and over. They have many of the same players month after month, or, quite the opposite, when people either don’t make it or leave very quickly. They have to rely upon the locals to hold up the brunt of the babyface side. But they’re able to keep the feuds going and keep everything interesting in a very Memphis sort of way. This isn’t just the making of a match comp. This is a living, breathing, dynamic enjoyable wrestling promotion with good feuds up and down the card. It’s good professional wrestling.

Any specific highlights and/or surprises so far? 

EB: Seeing the assortment of wrestlers that have turned up at one point or another so far has been a fun surprise, and in some cases these runs left one wanting to see more of them in the CSP environment. I did not expect to see Masa Saito and Riki Choshu do a brief stop in April 1990 CSP for example. Being able to turn up footage that was not readily available and that has helped provide a better context for feuds and rivalries has also been a welcome highlight of this project so far. On the other hand, even though it is something we knew would happen going in (and happens with other territories as well), there is a bit of frustration when we are missing footage of something we have the set up for or we lack information to help bridge gaps. It has also been fun reliving the last months of 1990, a period which I’m more familiar with.

MD: The biggest surprise for me is probably just how vibrant the territory was. The crowds were big and hot. They bought into what they were seeing. They reacted. Hearts and minds were moved. Yes, you think of things like Aniversario 89 and the trash being thrown at Chicky or Aniversario 90 and the reaction the Rougeaus got, but it felt pretty constant even during the in between times. This didn’t feel like a 1990 downturn that we saw with Sting and Warrior on top. I agree that sometimes missing footage is frustrating, and missing knowledge even more so. We don’t know who won the Bronco Boricua in 1990. Since we started with it in 89, that particular bit stung, but we (mostly Esteban of course) have been able to piece so much together and you can draw a line between and across feuds and up and down cards and it’s card after card that I would want to see.

What are your thoughts on the wrestlers, matches and/or feuds you have seen so far?

EB: It’s interesting to cover what is sort of a ‘dark’ period for Puerto Rican wrestling (and by ‘dark’ I mean lack of available footage and information) and gain a better understanding of who was coming in and out of the territory. I’ve gained a bit of appreciation for certain wrestlers and we’ve been able to see how effective some of them were. The tecnico and rudo dynamics were just as I expected, the classic El Ejercito de la Justicia vs the rudo managers and their assortment of wrestlers dynamic that has been a linchpin of how Puerto Rican wrestling works. You have the locals (for the most part) as the homesteading tecnicos with some other wrestlers coming in for short stints in support of the tecnico side. For the rudos, you have your rudo manager (Chicky Starr and El Profe for most of our runthrough so far), who serve as the anchors for keeping continuity with feuds in case the rudo players change (so you still have the heat with the manager if needed). They also serve as an instant catalyst for getting any newcomers over (he’s aligned with Chicky so he definitely should be booed). Some things are constants, and this dynamic is one of them.

The journey so far has reaffirmed some of my previous ideas while also changing my mind on some other thoughts I previously held. Let’s start with 1989, where our runthrough reaffirmed my thoughts that Sadistic Steve Strong is the MVP for CSP in 1989 (with an assist by Chicky Starr of course). .Strong’s act got over big in Puerto Rico, where he really came across as this dark beast that could conceivably end  El Ejercito de la Justicia, playing up the devil worshiping overtones to a degree not seen before in the territory. As a heel Universal champion, Strong anchored the summer and fall of that year with notable feuds against Carlos Colon, Invader #1, TNT, Junkyard Dog and Abdulalh the Butcher. On the tecnico side, Carlos Colon being out of action allowed TNT to rise up into a more prominent top of the card position, one that would lead into a bigger role as 1990 started. Invader #1 remained strong  at the top of the card after making his return early in the year, and once Colon came back you had a really great trio that could headline on the tecnico side (even adding in some short stint players such as JYD into the mix). The rudos would reload in the la t part of 1990, with the influx of Leo Burke, Manny Fernandez, Los Mercenarios and Harley Race all providing great foils for the tecnicos.

Highlights from 1990 would be seeing TNT winning the Universal title (becoming only the second tecnico other than Carlos Colon to win the title), Scott Hall’s progression during his run in CSP, the next generation of the Medicos and Invaders stepping into the ring (although more successful for the Medicos I would say), the Aniversario 90 event as a whole (with Colon vs. TNT, the Rougeaus, Zeus, Robocop and the boxing match being memorable for different reasons), the Carlos Colon vs TNT feud as a whole, and the run The Texas Hangmen have had so far. I want to talk a moment about the Colon vs TNT feud, one that highlighted what I think is the undercurrent of Puerto Rico wrestling. You expect your tecnicos to act honorably, but when faced with those who insist on acting dishonorably, there really is no point in giving that courtesy to those who insist on acting that way. The expectation of acting honorably was upended when TNT decided to challenge for the Universal title, and looking at it from my current perspective, you can argue that both sides were right to act how they did at the start. TNT’s hot headedness eventually saw him take things too far and act dishonorably, which is when the tecnicos started responding in kind. That Colon vs TNT feud from 90 is one that gets debated a lot among local fans, with many thinking that the wrong man went over. After watching the buildup and follow through, my current thoughts are that I understand that argument, but I actually think how they went about it worked. Whether it is a decision that will prove correct in 1991 remains to be seen, but I don’t think TNT losing to Colon is the bad turning point some make it out to be.   

A few final quick thoughts. If I had to highlight one wrestler from each side that I’ve gained a renewed appreciation for, it would Super Medico #1 on the tecnico side and Leo Burke on the rudo side. Super Medico has been a delight to watch in the ring and you could argue he deserved more of a showcase at the top of the card. Leo Burke is a wrestler who would have aggravated young me but current me appreciates his bag of tricks and how he helped anchor the rudo side for a good nine months. I also always  want to mention my appreciation for Ron Starr, just a great solid professional wrestler who always makes my list of underrated talents. One thing I’m still waiting on is for Miguelito Perez and Huracan Castillo Jr to break out of the pattern they’ve been in since 1986, where they team up for a stretch, go back to singles, then team up again, and the cycle repeats. TNT has jumped them over on the tecnico totem pole even though he was the last of the three to arrive, so we’re still waiting for them to move up to the next level. Maybe 1991 will be their year? Giant Warrior has been a good addition so far, Atkie Mululmba played his role very well, and I’m definitely looking forward to more of the Texas Hangmen, their run so far has been amazing.

MD: I’d say overall, the tecnicos, the babyfaces, the heroes were primarily locals. Occasionally you’d get a midcarder like Gama Singh, useful for putting people over, or someone more of an attraction be it Hall or Giant Warrior (or one-offs for big shows like Koko B. Ware or Kevin von Erich). Because we, as a community, pick and choose what 80s matches we tend to see, the overall effect sometimes is lost, but watching it this way the hometeam was consistently strong and united as El Ejercito de la Justicia. The rudos were vile and ruthless and the unity of the heroes made for a great force against them right up until TNT shattered it. 

Before that, they could run TNT or Invader #1 on top to warm things up for Colon or bridge the gaps between his big matches. They had Castillo and Perez to heat up the heels on TV. Invader could team with Invader #3. Perez and Castillo could come together or have lowercard feuds. Medico could do the same either on his own or with his son. I’m not sure it would have been sustainable forever, for they were already running angles based around Colon’s age but for 89 and 90, it worked very well as an effective engine.

And of course you had the engine for the rudos with Chicky and Profe managing the promos, cycling through almost all foreigners, generally a mix of truly top talent like Harley, Abdullah, Manny, Koloff (even if some were a bit long in the tooth), then journeyman midcarders who might have main evented secondary territories like Embry, Burke, Assassin/Morrow/Starr, and then guys who were either mid-carders in those secondary territories or fairly green like Albright, Valentine/Idol, Duk, and Styles.
That period in early 90 where they had Race, Fernandez, Burke, all on top felt especially strong. If I had to think of three rudos to highlight (TNT’s 1990 run notwithstanding and Chicky and Profe not counting), it’d be Strong, Manny, and Burke. They got an amazing amount of mileage out of Strong, being a guy who never really amounted to much anywhere else. He dominated for months with TV matches against undercard faces, the long feud with Colon, and defenses against the other top babyfaces while Colon was milking his “injury” and failure. Both the Manny/Chicky and Burke/Chicky pairings were great. There was a real sense of camaraderie between thieves with them.Manny was a double threat in his ability to cut promos in either language and he was able to get under everyone’s skin and garner a ton of heat. Burke tended to book himself strong but that’s because he could deliver. He built to big losses time and time again against different opponents, in different roles, and with different gimmicks. He could switch from teaming with Chicky to losing a boxing match against Invader without missing a beat. And a brief shoutout for my favorite over the top and entertaining enhancement talent, El Exotico, who I am always glad to see. 

What are we looking forward to?

EB: We are now in the period of time where I was actively watching, so it’s going to be fun revisiting something that I have not really watched since that first time more than three decades ago. To see what holds up from what I remember and what I completely forgot about. To see if certain things hold up to the memories of that 10 year old fan. To see what may change in terms of perceptions and thoughts. And who knows, maybe we’ll turn up some more discoveries on our journey. I’m certain 1991 is going to be an interesting year to go through, since it’s usually seen as a turning point of sorts for the territory. We’ll see if that turns out to be true. We have a bit of good fortune in that 1991 has quite a bit of TV episodes available, so we’ll get a bit more of the context and hopefully follow the progression of the feuds a bit better. I’m also looking forward as usual to seein Matt’s thoughts as he watches a lot of this for the first time. After about a year and half of the chronological runthrough, we have a good feel for the homesteading locals and the dynamics at play.   

MD: Moving forward, for me, we’re really in the unknown. People had at least some sense of the Steve Strong feud and maybe TNT vs Colon, maybe, but I haven’t been looking ahead and this is uncharted territory for me. I have no idea who the big foreigners in 91 will be, what the big feuds might be, what Anivesario will be centered around. I’ve spoken before about the weekly Houston or WWE Hidden Gems drops and how they felt like opening a pack of trading cards as a kid, the idea you never know what you’re going to get. It’s a little like that. Eventually, as we get further into the 90s, we’ll have long runs of TV too, and that’ll be exciting again as well. The flip side is that promotions are going to schism and I have no idea what that will mean for talent; likewise when the older territory journeyman pipeline drains up even more. But some of the staples will remain, even if they grow a little older, so I hold out hope that the quality will remain as well. Age won’t blunt the specific attributes and skills that make Colon and Invader stand out as special. That’s part of why we started down this road in the first place.

EB: As we reach the end of our checkpoint look at our journey so far, we now turn our attention to a new year. As I mentioned above, 1991 is going to be an interesting year in terms of potential changes for CSP. So next time on El Deporte de las Mil Emociones, we head into January of 1991, where we pick up on some of the remaining threads from the Christmas Day 1990 show. As always the year kicks off with a big Three Kings Day card and we’ll catch you up on what the status quo is as we review the first three weeks of the year. Who won the vacant Universal title in the rematch between Carlos Colon and Greg Valentine? Did Invader #1 get his revenge on the Texas Hangmen? Has Scott Hall really gone with El Profe? We have some departures and arrivals as the new year begins, so who will show up?. All this plus Carlos Colon vs TNT (huh?) will hopefully be made clear as El Deporte de las Mil Emociones enters 1991.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Queen Angels! Black Pair!

39. 1979.07.31 - 02 Lucy Kayama & Tomi Aoyama vs. Mami Kumano & Yumi Ikeshita (WWWA Tag Team Titles) (2/3 Falls)

K: This to me is the first match in the canon of the Joshi Classics. It’d probably be the weakest of the collection strictly in terms of quality, there’s still a few stylistic creases that they’d yet to iron out, but it’s definitely great and it hits a specific tragic emotional resonance that would become AJW’s speciality in the years to come.

In the intros it’s made clear that Lucy Kayama is coming in with an injured knee, and with her opponents being the nastiest and more ruthless heels imaginable you know that’s a serious weakness. So it makes sense that Queen Angels would go on a frantic attack as soon as the bell starts to try and get the advantage as quickly as possible. Immediately there’s an energy and urgency to this that you rarely got in the regular TV matches. Black Pair’s titles being on the line and Lucy’s injury being a threat double up the stakes. It’s a little hard to follow sometimes with how fast they move, but it also definitely feels like you’re watching a rough and frantic fight between wrestlers desperate to win. Black Pair manage to take control when Mami storms across the ring to attack with her wrench, and once that happens you feel impending doom.

Black Pair just cheat, cheat and cheat. They have so many tricks up their sleeve you never know what they’re going to do next. We didn’t even see Mami Kumano’s trademark in this match because she was too busy pulling other stuff out. Like this is really simple one, but rather than accept a tag from Yumi Ikeshita who wasn’t quite close enough, she runs across the apron, gets in the ring at the middle point and then jumps Tomi from behind like she’s a Maccabi hooligan and drags her across the ring meanwhile Yumi jumps into her corner as if a legal tag just happened. The ref just gets forced to accept this a done deal. When Lucy’s in the ring though they’re even worse, it just turns into a sadistic torture session as they hang her off the side of the ring choking her and wrenching her injured leg. Lucy then gets her bandages torn off and stamped on as the crowd shrieks. They keep part of the bandage wrapped around her knee but use the bit they’ve pulled out to tie around her neck, so when they kick at her knee and it moves Lucy also gets choked by the bandage. Quite the imagination this evil pair.

Unfortunately AJW don’t seem to have figured out how a ‘hot tag’ is supposed to work until a few years later, because the drama is hurt a bit by Tomi then just being allowed to be tagged in rather than this being built more effectively. Not that Tomi’s comeback attempt isn’t really good though. She shows a lot of rage and fire, even that Yumi Ikeshita doesn’t seem very keen on fighting her, so she throws her into her tag corner, grabs Lucy and pulls Lucy back into the ring to fight her instead, hah. Tomi actually tries to grab Lucy to stop her from being brought back into the match but she’s too late. Yumi gives Lucy two 2nd rope flying headbutts to the injured knee and then pins her with a sick suplex bridge and, with exquisite timing, Mami Kumano runs across the ring to cut off Tomi from making the save just as the count is being made. Great fall.

In between falls, it’s clear that Lucy’s knee is too injured to continue so she is removed from the match. So Tomi needs to either forfeit, or continue trying to win the tag titles in a 1 vs. 2 situation. This is a booking trope that the Matsunagas seemed to like to throw out once a year or two, and although they weren’t good booker generally speaking I think this is one tool they had good judgement in knowing when you deploy for maximised effectiveness.

The 2nd fall starts, again, with Black Pair just jumping Tomi. She gets a shin across her throat on the mat as she’s getting her head stomped in. She just looks so helpless and sad as she puts up this futile fight. We get one last hope spot from her, she gets Irish Whipped and counters with her spectacular boomerang flying bodypress. She isn’t able to nail the leap properly though so she comes a bit short, which actually worked in the match narrative as she’d been taking a hell of a beating. She still just about hits it though. This leads into her going on a rampage with kicks, dropkicks and later some suplexes. This feels like the big comeback the match had been building to and the crowd are super hot now. It feels like such a punch to the gut when she presumably goes for her over-the-top-rope dive onto Yumi Ikeshita, only for Mami Kumano to intercept with a chairshot to the head. Even when they have a 2 vs. 1 advantage they still pull out weapons to put the babyface down. It’s so wrong. She gets nailed with the chair a couple more  times before Mami puts her away to get the 1, 2, 3 to win two straight falls.

This must have been upsetting for the live crowd. The bigger effect it had on me was how heroic Tomi Aoyama came across as. Both in the first fall when she was doing every possible to protect her partner from getting mauled and injured, and again in second fall when faced with impossible odds she pulled out a superhuman effort to try level the playing field. Maybe if she hit that last dive she could have pulled it off, but she wasn’t quite superhuman enough.

****1/4

MD: You can really feel the build on this one. It felt like a big deal. The Angels were challenging and in matching gear (Lucy in red and Tomi in blue). Kumano’s cut off leather jacket thing remains cool, just like her. Lucy was coming in with a taped up knee. The Angels started out hot; they were absolutely wrestling to win, with Tomi charging forth with dropkicks and Lucy hitting her short arm shots. They hit a double team inverted gutwrench facebuster too. It looked like they had a real shot at it but the Pair struck from behind and started doubleteaming. They were able to switch off and fight back a bit but it was for naught.

To cut the momentum off, they started on Lucy’s leg, undoing the tape and wrapping it around her throat. They absolutely demolished her, finishing it with a bridging backdrop driver for the first fall. She had to get stretchered out leaving things in a dire spot for Tomi. After a few minutes of eating a beating, she hit her leap-to-the-top-rope bounce back body press (albeit not cleanly) and started to fire back. It looked like she might have a shot but both of the Pair ended up on the floor and when she charged after them, she crashed right into a chair shot. From there it was downright tragic with them crushing her with a chair and draining the last bit of life from her with Mami’s dangling chokehold. This certainly ended on a down note but the Angels had Lucy’s knee as an out and Tomi certainly came off as valiant in fighting them both off. Really though, it was the Pair who looked like an unstoppable force in the end.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/11 - 11/17

ROH 11/14/24

Dustin Rhodes/Sammy Guevara vs Love Doug/TJ Crawford

MD: Dutch having Dusty's cowbell as one of his last students is a good compelling real life wrinkle to the feud. I think on some level, I don't want to think about Dutch having a life outside of being a member of the Righteous though. It's not like they're wildly fleshed out as characters. I don't know why Vincent became who he is. He's just here fully formed and snapping, so it's kind of weird to think of Dutch in development doing promo class with Dusty. It'd be interesting if they were able to link this to how he fell somehow. I guess it's a sort of "don't open the door, unless you are willing to fully walk through it" sort of deal. Unless they're putting the belts on the Righteous, they're kind of okay as two dimensional characters who serve as physical threats. If they're going to try to do anything more out of them, I think we need to get to the heart of what makes them tick more. This could be a good step along that road or it could be messy depending on how this places out.

Likewise, the idea of Dustin and Sammy having a tag match and the Righteous having one on the same show, with a Righteous beat down after the former, is a pretty good bit of work too. Just nice, straightforward booking keeping things moving. Here it let them introduce the cowbell too, carried by the commentary. And the Righteous' new finisher which is Vincent picking someone up in a fireman's carry and then Dutch hefting both of them over his shoulder. 

The match itself was fun fluff with Shot Through the Heart feeding and feeding and feeding, with no care for the rules. Normally, I'd cry foul but they basically just kept running into Dustin and Sammy's offense, save for a brief respite while they were waiting for Sammy to hit a dive. It fit the characters. It fit the moment. It put Dustin and Sammy over strong right before they were about to get wiped out and the emotional element was to be introduced. Just good episodic pro wrestling TV.

AEW Rampage 11/15/24

RUSH/The Beast Mortos vs Alec Price/Richard Holliday

AEW Collision 11/16/24

RUSH/The Beast Mortos vs The Acclaimed

MD: The squash on Rampage was effective. We've seen Mortos basing for smaller luchadores and working against other talent equal, but it was very nice to see him just crushing people. The Buzz Sawyer-esque power slam stood out as much as anything else. 

The Acclaimed match needs to be unpacked a little more. Let's talk about the Acclaimed first. Something has to give. I don't know what that is yet. Traditional pro wrestling booking would have it look like Caster was going to go with the Hurt Syndicate and Bowens be the one to do it first. That would be a mistake. For one, Caster can't be a babyface. He took the FIP here and it felt GOOD. It felt great to see Rush take the cord and flip him over his head to the floor. That was one of the most refreshing, rewarding, satisfying moments of the year in AEW. You want to see him get beat up. And it's wrestling, so he can use that, not as some sort of edgelord heel like he's been as a face, but instead as a stooging, heatseeking, scummy, scuzzy Eric Embry/Rip Rogers type. It's obvious by this point that Perry isn't going to really lean into that so there's still a window. 

That leaves us with Bowens. I think Bowens could be a successful aggressive, athletic heel, sure. But why? He's one of the two most likable guys in the company off screen. He's got a great story. People want to get behind him. He's short which would be a detriment as a heel but works fine as a babyface who can go and who can bring it. Look, I get it. Whatever the company wants to do right now, it's not Tsuruta-gun vs the Super Generation Army. Maybe we'll get there in a few months, maybe not. Daniel Garcia is Misawa in that case. He's 100% Miswa, unquestionably Misawa. Maybe Hook is Kawada, maybe not. There was a world where Yuta could have been Kobashi but he's Taue now, the turncoat. Bowens is one of the only guys in the company that can be Kobashi, that can push up against monsters bigger and stronger with him through heart and intensity and passion alone. Just let him be himself and let him face off against all the darkness in the world. The fans will get behind him. They got behind the Acclaimed an idea, a concept, a hand gesture, an attitude. They'll get behind Bowens as a person. I'm sure of it. He just needs to believe in himself and to have the company believe in him. The fans believing in him? That's the easy part. 

And then there are RUSH and Mortos. Given what's happening with the Acclaimed right now and just the general positioning of LFI I would have much preferred a roll up pin after Mortos wiped out in the corner as opposed to him eating the Arrival/Mic Drop combo. It might be counter intuitive but one protects him more than the other. You can forgive a banana peel roll up more. 

Here's another "Look". Look, I get that RUSH has a history of... you know, everything under the sun, right? Being uncooperative, having a few injuries, supporting Cuatrero, all sorts of stuff. But if you're going to have him on your roster and pay him well and use him steadily anyway, USE HIM. There are maybe four people on the roster (with two of them being Mox and Athena) who can bring the same level of seething, immersive intensity. Rush is a generational talent. When he was gone more often then not, it was fine to use him as a sort of gatekeeper/mercenary for bounty situations because he's instantly credible just by showing up in the ring. Now that he's a more of a weekly character, he can't just be a normal guy. 

I'm pretty sure that one of the biggest matches they can put on for the Texas All In, at least if you care about walkup, is finally getting LA Park to put his mask up against Rush's hair. Rush's hair was one of the biggest draws in Mexico for years in the 2010s. Granted, I don't know the lucha politics nor do I want to in this case. The point more is this. He draws the eye. He captures attention. He has that feel to him of "Well, it's not all real, but maybe it's a little real when this guy is in there." Someone said a few days ago that if Rush knew what Caster had been saying on his rap, the match might have gone very differently. Obviously on one level you don't want that, but it's a double-edged sword. Genius and madness go hand in hand in pro wrestling, and you have to tap into the talent you have as much as possible. Give him a brass knucks title and feud him with the wildest people on the roster. Build to he and Moxley completely dismantling the set in the world's craziest no contest. Make him the threat that Bowens has to overcome over time like Hansen to Kobashi. Something. Anything. He's lightning in a bottle. Use him to light up the world.

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2024 Ongoing MOTY List: Sabre vs. Shingo

 

1. Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Shingo Takagi NJPW 11/4/24

ER: "Wow," he thought. "A Shingo Takagi match, finally getting discussed on Segunda Caida." That's not true of course, because Matt is a psycho who covers so much wrestling that obviously he hit the AEW appearances of Shingo, but he's a big name whose acclaimed work has never quite connected with me. His career has been long and successful and I'm sure there are plenty of matches among his thousands that will connect with me, but this is the first I've seen that felt just right. I fell in love with Michinoku Pro and still love it as much as ever, and I was there for the Toryumon tape trading and fell in love with a new generation of guys, and then I was older and out of college and had a job and a live in girlfriend and didn't connect with Dragon Gate the same and had less time to watch wrestling and so now I'm writing about Shingo Takagi for the first time on Segunda Caida. 

But this is a Zack Sabre Jr. review. Carry job is an insulting term that I don't really like using and this was not that, but Sabre's constant interruptions of Shingo's well orchestrated timing based wrestling made this dynamite. Dragon Gate at its best had exceptional speed with exceptional timing. The best of their multimans are undeniable. The timing and flow was real important to the style and Zack Sabre is amazing at working with the same timing to purposely monkeywrench the steps. He hits very hard and seems to enjoy being hit very hard. Sabre, over the last decade, has transitioned from a guy formerly accused of being a beanpole who needs people to hold still, to a deceptively sturdy guy who works as stiff as any of the BattlArts legends. He's a disruptor, he disrupts with surprising pop, and he seems to have this insistence on being hit just as hard and just as much. Unlike guys who make that their entire personality, whether they're actually stiff workers or just mimes doing bad stand and trade, he does not make it his personality. The stiffness and abuse are all part of the methodology to get to his submissions, which are also applied stiffly and forcefully. There's never any overwrought Hit Me Harder faces in sequences that stop a match dead, it's all stiffness that's intent on finishing. 

Sabre never seems to look for one answer. He has a shocking amount of depth and knows how to go several directions from established positions, making his method of attack always feel like his own while always surprising me. His willingness to lean into punishment to lean timing allows Shingo to work at his stiff best, getting to land full force clotheslines that occasionally get caught and twisted or beaten. But it never becomes an arm match, or a neck match, or a leg match, even though Sabre runs through sections of working on all of those things with the intent to finish, to wound, to slow. He can crank Shingo's neck with his legs, dropping his weight to drag him into the ring, without going back to a neck attack until the attack presents itself. When Shingo takes a second too long attempting a Gory Special, Sabre is there with a side headlock clutch that moves quickly into a disgusting octopus hold. If the neck presents itself, it becomes a neck match. As a disruptor, he allows Shingo to work his timing and takes every torso extension that presents itself. Sabre understands the weight of his offense and how to make submission applications and submission set ups look and feel as real as possible. The way he can straight an arm - quickly, slowly with pressure, working against resistance - and make it look like straightening an arm away from a man's body is requiring full strength from both, keeping that weight and gravity always present. For me, it adds meaning. Shingo looks like he's struggling to keep his head up at spots and it gave his responses frantic importance. 

Sabre is adept at catching Shingo's Actually Fast stuff, like the way he catches a few of his lariats and twists them into something dangerous, catching one and throwing uppercuts at it once he traps the arm, kicking at it another time. It's an all out attack and he commits just as hard to each attack, knowing one of them will lead to an ultimate opening. The weight made this into a match that could have ended satisfactorily at 15, 20 or 30 minutes. The survival felt earned but the attempts to finish felt real. Sabre's match long wear down was made even better with Shingo working 30 full minutes of body degradation. The final straw came down to Sabre throwing several short mule kicks at the inside of Shingo's knee before Shingo pulls off the Shingo Driver, causing enough of a delay in the pin attempt, and the way those kicks and the other knee and body attacks culminated in Shingo's slightly slower step down the stretch, his inability to get his legs underneath him on more than one occasion, and the way it was all done with no overacting, captured the best of this style. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST

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Found Footage Friday: OKI IN KOREA~! DUK~! HEEL TITO~! TOR~! IDOL~! PATERA~! BRET~! HAKUSHI~!

Kintaro Oki/Kim Duk vs. Dick Blood (Tito Santana)/Tor Kamata Korea 1978

MD: What an amazing find. Oki and Duk as native heroes. Plus we had that one Andre match where Tito and Chavo are his little buddies from 79 but this is some of the only heel Tito footage ever. It goes 40 with all sorts of pomp before and after the match (check out the robe on Oki) and is a fully fleshed out 2/3 falls match.

Tito isn't fully developed yet, but he's a stooging (lots of early headscissors foolery), big bumping (he must go over the top rope hard five times), dropkicking (the big finishing bit is Oki avoiding one of his dropkicks), heatseeking heel, as fiery as we'd expect. There are a couple of fun strike exchanges or flurries, especially in the third fall when he's kicking at Duk's wound leading to a huge comeback moment.

Duk's actually the standout here. Oki's fun on the mat once or twice and when he unleashes the headbutt (first in the corner as Santana was taking liberties, then against Kamata, driving him back on the outside, and finally to take out Tito to build to the finish) the crowd erupts but this is really much more the Duk show. He's super charismatic here, calling Tor into the ring, gesturing to him when he has control of Tito. After Tito won the first fall with a sunset flip in, Tor spends a chunk of the second, keeping him on the floor by knocking him off the apron again and again to the crowd's delight. You don't usually see a babyface king of the mountain bit but it worked here. He even had a football charge from a three point stance.

In the third fall, Tor pulls the pad back and opens him up with it, working over the wound like you'd want him to. When Oki finally gets in after Duk's big comeback shot on Tito, Tor tries to get Oki's head with the post, but he no sells it and takes out Tor which sets up the finish while Duk and Tor are brawling on the outside. This match was full of a lot of the conventions of the time but the roles were reversed and it made for just an amazing bit of lost footage.

Austin Idol vs. Ken Patera Memphis 9/5/83 

MD: This was on the Savoldi network and it's about as far from those Idol vs. Hansen matches as humanly possible. It's still really good but it's conventional as can be. You can shut your eyes and see this match play out for the most part, but the crowd was up the whole time and the performances were good and sometimes pro wrestling just works the way it's supposed to. 

Idol got the fans riled early which upset Patera. It was a contest between him waving them on and Patera posing. For a chunk of it Idol controlled the arm and teased punches to the fans' delight as Patera tried to cheat to get out by pulling the hair, that sort of thing. Patera got over on him and worked the back with a great bearhug. Idol was perfect in it, lilting sideways and appealing to the crowd to support him, appealing to God to look down and bless him, appealing to you, the viewer, decades later. Just a transcendent over the top selling of it.

He fought out but Patera cut him off with a reverse of a whip and a clothesline out of the corner and got on the full nelson. Idol climbed the turnbuckles for a double pin but apparently he got his shoulder up at the last second. Post match, he took out Hart, dodged Patera's jumping knee into the corner and put his leglock on him. Again, delighted crowd. As straightforward as could be and I wouldn't change a thing.

ER: Patera in '83 was such a feast for the eyes. He's constructed like a freak Rob Leifeld drawing; cut, but with incredible mass. You catch him at certain angles and it doesn't seem possible to be that rock solid and have so much space between your belly button and spine. It's incredible. Perhaps more incredible, is that Patera has that body but Idol is the one posing, and the posing is the best. It all happens when Idol holds the ropes on a whip and breaks out all these excellent little kneeling poses and flexes. And I just kept waiting for Patera to wreck him for it. It's a crime that Patera has that body and that power and mostly wrestles like a guy in a mid tier Russian gimmick, all clubbing and axe handling. I need more bearhugs, more presses, more whips with crazy pull strength. I wanted a Patera/Idol match and this felt more like a match that Idol could have had with Don Bass. I dug the way Idol sold Patera's grounded bearhug - I actually wish we got more bearhugging in this - and was excited to see how Idol would sell the full nelson. We didn't get him selling the full nelson, instead we got him doing one of the messiest, loose ropes versions of the Austin/Bret finish (yeah I know this was well before Austin/Bret but it sounds better than describing what happened). His missed knee into the corner, after the match, looked really cool with his size, wild that he used it in a post-match deal. I don't know enough about Patera to know if he's a guy who usually limits his bumping in a match and saves it for after.  

Cage Match: Bret Hart vs. Hakushi WWF 7/25/95

MD: Dark match from a taping. Honestly, I won't lie, I would have rather had Brad vs. Flair which lost the poll to this one. The best part of this was probably Hakushi's entrance in the cage which was moody and will stick with you. The biggest issue overall is that they went to too much selling too soon, before it was earned. Whenever Bret hit the ropes or the corner, there was a big clunking sound from the cage but he wasn't really selling cage shots from it. I'm not sure if he ever went into the cage. Instead, he got the early advantage but both of them crashed into each other in the first minute or two with a double clothesline and they went right into the labored slow attempts to escape for the next ten minutes. They probably should have led with an extra five minutes of action before that double clothesline spot instead?

There were bits I did like down the stretch. There were certain parallels, like Bret missing his second rope elbow drop and then Hakushi instead of leaving the cage, choosing to hit the diving headbutt and wiping out. Bret snuck in the five moves in interesting ways and yeah, sure, there was always the sense that they were trying to win, even if like I noted, the drama didn't quite feel earned. The finish was a superplex where Bret was able to recover first and scoot out and the fans responded to a lot of the big moments but this all felt just a little underwater to me due to that narrative choice early.

ER: I thought this was both really good, and felt unnecessarily long due to the narrative choice Matt pointed out. It's really strange, how much weight they each decided to give a double clothesline. The entire match can be divided into two, uneven parts, by that double clothesline. The single minute before the clotheslines was absolute fire, both men throwing worked strikes so great that the entire match could have been sustained by them. Hakushi throws a throat thrust (one of many, but one in particular) that sounds insanely loud, the crowd reacts to it like death, and Bret crumples from it like a hardened hand of stone had just smashed his trachea. This was a battle. 

Then there was a double clothesline that carried the weight of a thousand bad decisions. And that double clothesline seemed to double as the missing 6-7 minutes of work that led to both men being tired slow climbers the rest of the match. Here's what's important: I thought all of the slow climbing and tired selling was really good. That ring looked like unmoving concrete, and every bump Hakushi took off the ropes onto it was completely unforgiving. There are three different landings - before the insane match ending superplex - that had no give, no bounce, nothing but a man's skeleton absorbing his landing with no bounce. The speed they worked had actual drama, the crowd bit at the cage escapes, and the final 10 minutes of escalation felt right. It also made a 12 minute match feel like 20, instead of a 20 minute match that was missing an important 8 minutes. It's so weird. All of the elements we have are good, nothing is missing, it just feels incomplete and also too long as is. Bret's bumps into the buckles looked damaging as ever, and the superplex is something that I literally don't understand. I don't see how it's possible to be doing bumps like that when they "don't count". You watch that ring. It does not budge. Hakushi came off the literal top of the cage, suplexed onto a sidewalk, for a match that was never supposed to air, and is still wrestling 30 years later instead of in a chair. And I guess it's bizarre to me that, in a match that went on to have several high end skeleton-eroding bumps that should have naturally led to slow down, they paid so much more lip service to a double clothesline. 

 

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Sato! Iwae!

38. 1979.07.31 - 01 Chino Sato vs. Kazuko Iwae (Kazuko Iwae debut)

K: There’s not much to say about the actual wrestling in this match so I’m going to talk about debuts. A much bigger deal of them is made in Joshi compared to other wrestling scenes. Part of this is that after its first boom in popularity with Beauty Pair, AJW set up a unique system of accepting new wrestlers with a two-stage process.

First, hopefuls would have to pass an audition, then they are accepted as trainees (and thus, are already considered ‘employed’ by the company), usually live at the dojo and train full-time until they’re ready to pass the second stage called the ‘pro-test’. The pro-test is like a live exam, and consists of a mixture of general athletic feats (e.g. squats, bridges) and specifically pro-wrestling skills like rope-running and grappling. If you want to see a modern example of a pro-test, Marvelous broadcasted one on their YouTube channel last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IIHmgkbzxk

If they pass the pro-test, they’re then given a debut date. AJW (and its descendents) made a much bigger deal out of debuts than other companies, they’d usually be on relatively big show and would be televised. In later years AJW would also sometimes broadcast footage of their trainees getting ready to debut or their pro-tests to hype this up, so it means that the fans would often be able to follow a wrestler’s career right from the beginning.

As for the match, it’s more evenly-matched than debuts typically would be later on (this is probably just because the formula hasn’t developed yet). Iwae does a good job of showing her stuff. She has some pretty cool headscissors moves on a standing opponent that I don’t remember seeing much of, but the crowd certainly sounded like they bought them as offense. Her lowly status is more established with her lack of hit points, as all it takes to beat her is for Chino to dodge a flying crossbody then splat her with a powerbomb and that’s her out for the 3 count. Chino looks like she’s barely been hurt from the whole thing though.

*

MD: This is Iwae’s debut and she looks ok out of the gate, starting with a couple of armdrags before Sato took her out with a jumping fist and jumping knee. Iwae turned a bodyscissors around by grabbing the hair and pulling her up and then controlled for a while with a series of headscissors. She missed a cross body and Sato hit a couple of power bombs to end her. Not a lot to say here but she looked ready to debut at least.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 11/4 - 11/10

AEW Dynamite 11/6/24

Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy vs Claudio Castagnoli/PAC

MD: This was an extremely well put together tag match. I'd like to say more about Cassidy in general in a bit and then I'll follow it up with something I wrote about AEW storytelling in general, but let me start with layout of the tag itself.

Just to recap quickly, it started with Cassidy luring the Deathriders into Darby's dive off the set. From there, Darby fought Claudio on the floor and Cassidy fought PAC in the ring. Cassidy side stepped and Claudio hit an uppercut almost simultaneously. Yuta distracted Cassidy however, but he was able to push a resurgent PAC off the ropes and hit a jumping DDT. Claudio had been laying in wait and rushed in to break up the pin and hit three big power moves in a row to turn the tide and start the actual heat.

There's so much going on in there, so many wrinkles, so many little bits of character, so much specific highlighting of what makes each of these wrestlers unique. It was a great way to start a match. The shine wasn't long and it was fairly back and forth (as you have to keep your relatively new heel unit strong while making the defenders of the company stand out) but it was punctuated with big moments in Darby's dive and Cassidy's jumping DDT, then Claudio went way overboard in smashing him. Just a very effective opening.

That brings us to heat #1, on Cassidy, through the commercial break. It's so frustrating to see people who should know what they're talking about completely miss the boat on him. He'd already done multiple things extremely well in the match (the character-driven sidestep, getting distracted by Yuta) but he did exactly what he should have done as a face-in-peril. He was constantly fighting, constantly reaching, constantly showing the world just how tough it all was, constantly giving the fans something to latch on to. He has all of the substance of being a traditional babyface in traditional wrestling, and it's just the style and the trappings that work differently. The important stuff all hits. How can people who know so much about wrestling be blind about this? 

And the Deathriders, to their credit, kept it interesting. They had a multiple distraction spot just so Claudio (the illegal man) could hit a double stomp on the floor. Claudio is the bar, a wall, the perfect guy to cut people off and he had a great cutoff with the gutwrench over the shoulder backbreaker as Cassidy was starting to fire back after the commercial break. Then Cassidy capitalized on a banana peel slip as Claudio hit the corner and got the tag.

Darby came in hot, and things were elementary from there. He took everyone out, got caught by Claudio, gracefully avoided the catch once but not twice, got beat on a bit, and then slipped through the legs in the bumpiest, most Darby way possible for a second hot tag and to roll into the finishing stretch. Then as they were pinballing into the Deathriders and as Cassidy was hitting Orange Punch after Orange Punch, Shafir and Mox asserted themselves and we got a rare DQ. A perfectly fine DQ by the way given how good the match was and how it gave Darby and Cassidy something of a moral victory right up until Darby got lawn darted into the post (won the battle, lost the war; clearly were dominant, but the heels more than got their heat back). Matches without clean finishes happen so rarely that this gave everything a chaotic mood that kept things chugging along on the road to Full Gear. Not an every day occurrence but something they shouldn't be afraid to use when needed.

Which brings me to something I posted on Twitter yesterday (https://x.com/MattD_SC/status/1855593937882247204)

The State of AEW Storytelling

The people who say there is no story in AEW are completely and blatantly wrong. Almost every match has some driving force and purpose. Every match on TV is either set up or is setting up something. There are criticisms to be made but that's not one of them. Instead, people should look at the style, the execution, the sometimes mechanical nature, the pacing, the lack of tangible change over time. While AEW succeeds sometimes in some of these things, they're apt to fail just as often.

There is a hierarchy to how AEW matches work. Wrestlers are built up on Rampage to build someone up on Collision so that they may be built up for someone on Dynamite. AR Fox will get a win vs Josh Woods on ROH TV (this well could have been Rampage) so that he can lose to Nick Wayne on Collision, very likely for Wayne to lose sometime in the near future to HOOK on Dynamite to set up a match with Christian on the PPV. Often all of those intermediary matches are further underpinned by story. Wayne wants to get back at AR Fox for Fox attacking him in his dad's school with Swerve last year. So things are both set up with lead-in matches and underpinned with story.

It's mechanically sound. It works on paper. Maybe the fact that Woods never gets a win (maybe in an enhancement match on ROH sometimes? His last was in August.) hurts things a little but hierarchy is hierarchy.

So what's the problem? Well, there are a few. For one, it's too mechanical. It's too obvious maybe. It'd work if you were scoring on a machine, if you were checking boxes on a video game. In real life, it's a logical engine but not necessarily a compelling one.  It's organized but it doesn't feel organic, doesn't feel alive. It's not vibrant. Everything feels like a means to an end.
Things are supposed to be means to ends, yes, but it's not always supposed to feel that way in the moment. Maybe some of that has to do with the fact that none of the results are ever in question. The lower-positioned wrestler is always going to lose to heat up the higher one. What would it mean to the story for the opposite to be true? It wouldn't make sense.

Maybe it shouldn't be so neat all the time? AEW is known for clean finishes but maybe there are other ways to get to Point C (that Dynamite match) where Point A and Point B (ROH/Rampage/Collision) can be a bit more in question. A few more DQs. A few more countouts. A few more double DQs or countouts. These are tools that were in the toolbox for all bookers for decades. They were used to cheat crowds out of finishes at times and that should be avoided but that doesn't mean they can't be used on the path to the match that actually matters in a way that still gets everything where it's going.

Then there's lack of follow up on midcarders after they've served their purpose. To continue with the current advantage, Woods isn't going to grow or change from his loss to Fox. Fox is going to come out of a potentially emotional substory with Wayne probably no different the next time we see him.

Things start and stop and are not always clearly communicated. Look at Top Flight. Andretti had been getting more impulsive and aggressive for weeks but it was more or less dropped so they could weave them in as early Deathriders opponents, spiking again when he needed to be bullheaded enough to fill a segment and get destroyed by PAC. They never clearly defined if Top Flight lost their new look due to the Deathriders pressing them or if it was just haphazard. There was nothing to connect Andretti's aggression in September with what was happening in late October. Likewise, there's nothing connecting Lio Rush getting pushed by the Deathriders to him potentially working with the Hurt Syndicate. Someone who watches all (and I mean ALL) of the TV can read between the lines, but the average viewer isn't at all led and it leaves the company open to criticism.

AEW's gotten better about recaps and trying to let things sink in as of late, but that's primarily served the A stories, not the B and C ones that lead to the A stories, and it's those B and C ones that fill TV time and where the criticisms tend to sit.

I know what people might say here, or what they should say. When has any company really managed what I'm talking about above? Consistently and over time especially? Maybe never. Maybe it's all an unfair expectation that I'm setting on Khan and AEW.

Here's the thing though. AEW is match-based promotion. There aren't long promos that carry the story. There aren't extended interview segments. I don't want that. Khan doesn't want that. The hardcores don't want that. The only people who seem to want those things are the bad faith grifters and the people who have only known wrestling in their lives to be one sort of thing.

So then how do you get around that? You use every tool in your disposal. You flesh out your characters as much as possible. You find ways to introduce stakes in the matches themselves, propelling the winners but also developing the losers along the way so that they either someday can be winners or that the idea of beating them time and time again becomes more important. You ensure that things, like Andretti's character development, 1) exist in the first place 2) are clear and flowing and not start and stop and haphazard, and 3) allow for meaningful change and aren't just jettisoned when no longer immediately useful. It's all a big ask but it's a big, frequent criticism and if it's to be countered, it should be in a way that furthers the company and rewards viewers not just those acting in bad faith.

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