ER: What an amazing surprise for me this week, when Phil found a YouTube channel that's been uploading West coast indies from the early 2000s, an era that is hardly represented online and was often never even released, and an era where my friends and I went to a lot of live West coast indy wrestling shows. We very easily found three different matches from three shows I attended in Spring-Summer 2002, none of which I've been able to see since watching them live. 2002 was a really great year to be a wrestling fan. I'm lucky to get the excuse to relive some wrestling memories experienced by a 21 year old college senior, half my lifetime ago.
LA Park/Shocker vs Super Boy/Capitan de Oro FMLL 03/23/02
MD: This is about as 2002 DVDVR a match as you can get. Two fat guys that could go: base, bump, stooge, fly, and in Super Boy's case flip, against two of the very best and most stylized in the world in Park and Shocker. I've seen a bunch of Shocker from a few years earlier and plenty of old man Shocker but I've never quite found the rosetta stone match that shows me what drove him all the way to the top of the old 500s. This gives you a lot of little elements: a great strike, a great bump, the charisma and presence, the signature elbow drop, but the match as a whole is more fun than anything else. Park is at the height of his groin utilization, which is crowd-pleasing and opponent-infuriating and a fine enough sort of thing to do for this indy against these opponents in front of this crowd, but it's not quite the Park you'd hope for. That's not to say he doesn't hit a dive and doesn't take some stuff, and it's certainly not to say that it's not great when Super Boy is trying to match him step for step. It's fun when Super Boy and Capitan de Oro are working together. It's fun when they're basing for Shocker's stuff. It's fun when Park and Shocker hit some tandem stuff and the synchronous frog splashes at the end. There's never really any drama but there's not a moment where this isn't enjoyable nonetheless.
ER: I think Matt is really really underrating this match. This was the kind of big action match that played perfectly to the flea market audience, and watching it now I couldn't believe it was even better than I remembered. Honestly, it was way better than I remembered. This was at Franks & Sons indoor flea market, a flea market where I bought Homies figurines, Desert Storm trading cards, a new Vader WCW Toymakers action figure for $2, and several lucha tapes. We watched those tapes in my boy Jason's RV, which we drove down to LA to see a bunch of wrestling shows. We had a TV hooked up in the RV so we could play No Mercy and watch tapes, so the tapes I bought were: the La Parka vs. Hijo del Santo Super Libre show, the Nicho vs. Hijo del Santo mask vs. mask show, and the 2001 IWRG show with the Dr. Cerebro vs. Hijo del Santo mask vs. mask match. Man, Santo had a really great 2001 that we celebrated while parked at a Wal-Mart. While we were lingering around waiting for this show to start, my friend Devin pointed out "a dork in a La Parka mask" who had just walked in. Of course it was La Parka. He was wearing Sergio Valente jeans, a tucked in mint green polo, and his mask. He was the main draw that got us excited for this show. A king.
But yeah, this is the kind of match you'd talk about several times on a 7 hour drive back from LA. I didn't even know this match was taped, and my handsome visage shows up really early in this, because Super Boy hit a big fatass tope that crushed the plastic chairs in front of me and landed him directly on my leg. My bright yellow Kawada shirt looks incredible. I am holding a digital camera that used floppy disks. Super Boy leans into me and I pat him on the chest, as commentary says that Super Boy landed in the lap of a lucky fan. A 20 years later reminder that I was once a Lucky Fan. Super Boy was a real marvel here. He was a more of a tape trading legend than anything, a cult star, but he moves, has the build, and has the timing of young Super Porky, with some of the greatest punches in lucha history. He's so awesome in all of this: hitting a big standing splash/standing moonsault combo, missing a big middle buckle moonsault, hitting a crazy late rotation swanton, cutting off Park by punching him in the face every time Park disrespectfully pelvic thrusts he or Oro, the previously mentioned tope into my lap, and he draws great flea market heat with a shirt removal that draws "Put it on!" chants. He looks like a total badass punching and slapping Park around through the whole match, any time Park started treating things as a joke. It all builds to Super Boy slapping the hell out of Park in the corner, then a great Park skeleton glove removal before he chopped the hell out of SB.
La Parka was an absolute rock star, the kind of hard working, constantly entertaining house show performance that I've been lucky to see various versions of several times. His dancing is used to hilarious effect, tea bagging Oro to dance his way out of a sunset flip, backing Super Boy into the corner with sexually threatening humps, even break dancing! But the guy takes some Psicosis level bumps on a show held in a curtained off corner of a large warehouse. He takes his nasty upside down turnbuckle bump and takes a gross bump after getting crotched up top. He hits a big top rope splash and a gorgeous tornillo to cap off a fantastic dive train, while also throwing stiff strikes with Super Boy the whole match. It's a killer Park performance. Shocker and Oro have several standout moments of their own. Shocker was still so fast in 2002 and I thought he looked great here. I love his rolling elbowdrops and high headscissors armdrags, his flipping clothesline bump is a favorite, and his running boot looked BattlArts level. There's this awesome sequence of he and Super Boy going at it fast, peaked by Park throwing SB off the top with a nearly straight down arm drag, hitting a missile dropkick, and then crashing both of them through several plastic chairs with a tope con giro. Oro was going to get outshined by three mega stars, but he also hit some of the most high impact corner clotheslines I've ever seen, and he'd be a guy who would have really stood out on most shows I've attended.
Trust me on this one, not the almost always reliable and usually trustworthy Matt. This match is a gem. Plus, how much of a treat is seeing a match again for the first time in 20 years, and it actually surpassing your memory?
MD: You come for Juvi but you stay for Michael Modest being a beast. He trained both Morgan and Drake and he was really laying things in on him at times. You did get an exchange between Morgan and Juvi and Juvi working the apron and having fun after the hot tag with Modest, but this was about Drake taking a beating. Modest had some pretty out there stuff, again because he probably needed it to stand out but he made it all look fairly grisly which is all the more impressive when you're doing headstand ranas in the corner or taking physics-defying head first bumps into the corner. For the most part, it was Morgan that had all of the over the top moves and while he hit them well and it was part of his deal in getting over, there wasn't that same urgency and aggression and chip on his shoulder that Modest had. Drake had a nice Russian Leg Sweep that he used a couple of times and some good scrapping when angry but some of the rest of his stuff looked a little loose. I don't think he had been wrestling for all that long at this point. The best part of this whole thing might have been early on where Drake wanted Morgan to charge off the ropes at him and Morgan just punched him in the face and cheesed a big smile. I don't think Juvi was super interested in taking most of this stuff but he was happy to come in now and again to hit some things.
ER: I don't know if I've ever seen any Pro Wrestling Iron online before. I liked these guys. I briefly hosted a wrestling interview show at my college radio station, KSUN, that served as a Pro Wrestling Iron showcase: It was called The Iron Hour, and I interviewed Modest for the first show. Modest and Donovan Morgan were NOAH regulars at this point, which had lead to their bad split with APW. Infamous Sleaze Roland Alexander thought he should have a cut of their NOAH earnings and they split, taking several members of the roster with them (many of whom had been trained by Modest and/or Morgan). That caused Roland to go hard after Bryan Danielson and make him the new APW head trainer (which was a short, very fun era that we cover down in the match down below). Modest told me in that interview that Misawa respected workers who had their own school/promotion, so the PWI school was started partially to gain respect of the legend. It was also awesome that Modest took Misawa's advice so literally that he blew up the promotion after being the highest touted homegrown star who split with a large chunk of the roster. This is a good time to remember that Roland Alexander sent a wrestling school bill to the parents of a dead trainee, so Modest and Morgan laughing and leaving is a great thing. They also each had a 4 year strong run in NOAH, when it was my favorite fed in the world, and that rules.
This was another wrestling show we took the RV to. I'm not sure why we all hopped in the RV for this one, as the show was in Ukiah, a small town about 2 hours north of San Francisco. I grew up an hour north of SF, and Ukiah in 2022 is like my small town of Healdsburg was in 1992. It's the closest feeling to being in the midwest that you can get out here, but it's a charming place with some good diners and a great movie theater. Ukiah used to be an AWA town in the early 60s with Red Bastien as one of the top attractions, and I believe Shire promoted there in the 70s, but all small town stuff. Maybe we took the RV because we were bringing enough people that it made sense not to take two cars, but I'm not sure it made more sense to drive a huge gas guzzling RV. We probably just thought it would be fun to drive the RV up the gorgeous stretch of 101 (nothing but scenic views from Healdsburg to Ukiah) to the Ukiah fair. This show was held at the fair and I remember walking around the midway before and after the show. 2 Cold Scorpio was originally advertised for the main event but was replaced by Juvy. The posters all around the fairgrounds had him listed and pictured as Flash Funk, and I'd love to meet the hypothetical wrestling fan who would not have attended this show, but then saw they had the WWF space pimp from 5 years prior on the show and that forced their hand. The Vets Hall type building on a fairgrounds property is a classic wrestling venue, but one of my biggest memories of the show was how cold the building got as the night went on, and how loud the crickets got. If the temperature and some of the matches are leaving the crowd cold, and instead of silence you only have the loud sound of crickets? Tough optics.
I don't remember a lot about this match, other than thinking Juvy didn't seem motivated to actually get in the ring for more than a couple minutes, and that my buddy Devin called Drake "Tommy Mistake", which got no reaction and lead to all of us clowning him for probably way too many months. Drake was Modest and Morgan's top student, and was a really new wrestler at this point (I'm not sure he even had 10 matches). He eventually went on one of the coolest NOAH tours ever. Seriously, look Tommy Drake up on cagematch and check his NOAH tour. In a promotion that ran tons of tags and trios, for some reason Drake got to work 8 singles matches on his 16 NOAH shows, ALL against different opponents. Japanese crowds got to see Tommy Drake singles matches against Morishima, Rikio, Ikeda, Taue, Honda, Inoue, Saito, and they got to see him BEAT Aoyagi. My new handheld white whale is going to be Tommy Drake, 20 matches into his career, pulling out a win against one of the toughest SOBS in a promotion of tough SOBs.
The match lines up pretty much with my memory, even though I wouldn't have been able to tell you any details of the match before watching it again, if that makes sense. I remember the vibes. Modest and Morgan worked over Drake for most of the match, Juvy coming in twice and never doing too much more than very fast rope running. There were a lot of people in the crowd who wanted to see Juvy, but instead they saw a lot of Tommy Drake. And that's fine! Modest and Morgan were a good team and had a tight act by this point. Modest knew how to get a reaction from NOAH crowds and kept that shtick for his stateside gigs, looking like a cool jacked Jerry Tarkanian. There's no wrestler more responsible for getting me into local indy wrestling than Mike Modest, my favorite live wrestler of the era. He hit like a truck, and I loved that early spot where a couple shoulderblocks don't budge Drake, so he feints a third and then just throws an elbow smash. His rope flip rana (that later became far more famous as the Stratus-faction) is a move that shouldn't look good, but somehow Modest makes it look good. I liked how he used it successfully, then had it blocked to set up a Drake top rope clothesline, and then later used it to flip Donovan onto Drake. His torpedo bump into the turnbuckle was always one of the great signature bumps, one which he said he stole from Ray Stevens (even though we don't have any matches showing Stevens doing that bump). I loved his short elbowdrop and his kicks to Drake's back, and loved how Donovan worked him over with suplexes. Morgan's snap suplex -> fisherman's buster -> fisherman's neckbreaker is a cool combo and he snapped all of them off nicely. Juvy was exciting when he was in, but it was for maybe two total minutes of a 15 minute match, if we're being generous.
MD: All of Danielson's stuff looked really good here. That's my biggest takeaway. This didn't go much longer than ten minutes, but everything looks great: the forearms, the step through/up and over out of the Greco-Roman knucklelock, the all time great missile dropkick, the front chancery suplex, the belly to back off the top. It's all smooth and impactful. Daniels gets credit too because he portrayed a chip on his shoulder in this one. It's hard to fault 2002 Daniels for all the STO/Downward Spiral/Complete Shot/inverted bulldog/etc. stuff. I don't think any of it works quite as well as the time he just grabs Danielson's head and tosses him down, but it was part of the appeal and part of what made him stand out at the time. I was on the wrong coast for this one, but I know 19-20 year old me watching NECW and Chaotic Wrestling and whatever other indy I had access to would have been all for everything he did. It was a little much at times, but less so in a ten minute match than it would have been in a twenty minute match. And hey, some of it, like the Blue Thunder Bomb was super impactful and really worked. The issue is that when everything a guy does is out of the norm and a little over the top, nothing ends up standing out too much. You end up with an overall impression of the guy with all the cool moves but it take you out of a match as much as it potentially adds to it.
ER: This show was at the Napa fairgrounds as part of the Napa county fair. I took a nice sunny afternoon drive out to Napa and stopped for an It's-It at a gas station on my way in, walked around the fair, then met up with friends for the show. All of the seating was in the grandstands, like we were about to watch a demolition derby, with the wrestlers all playing to our grandstand side and the dirt arena behind them. Justin Roberts did ring announcing and showed off his comedy chops to the crowd, getting booed for his novice and outdated Beavis & Butthead and Andy Kaufman impressions. His "Thank you very much" was tantamount to everyone thinking they can say "Here's Johnny" and have a Nicholson impression. The show was really fun, and unnecessarily stacked. The main event was a midgets match which was the only real draw on the show. This was a free admission show at the fair. You pay to get into the fair, but the wrestling was a free attraction. I remember noted deceased bag of shit Roland Alexander bragging repeatedly about drawing "several thousand people" to this APW show and bitch, most of those people just wanted to get a funnel cake and throw up on the fucking Gravitron. Like he thought a Super Dragon vs. Jardi Frantz hair vs. mask match was going to draw anything but some dork like me eating an ice cream. During that match I remember a lady getting up to leave, and a friend yelling out "You're going to miss the midgets!" and her replying "I'm obviously coming back for the midgets!" I don't think she was talking about making it back for the Tony Kozina match.
This was pretty much the exact kind of pro wrestling I wanted to see in 2002. This was the new style that Danielson was helping to pioneer and I was here for it, literally. Some of it hasn't aged well, but most of the things that haven't aged well are Christopher Daniels "I fall down with you" offense that became the basis for most of the worst Edge offense. It's a style we evolved from but damn if I don't still love a lot of this. Check out Danielson's amazing step over to Fujiwara, a sequence I don't think I've seen someone do so well, or at all. I thought he was swinging his leg over Daniels' head to set up a victory roll, and instead he just swings it straight over and drops down hard into that Fujiwara. Watching Danielson matches from 20 years ago gives the same gift as watching AJ Styles matches from Wildside, as you can see a lot of the physical movement is still similar (maybe a bit slower, but just slightly different) but a lot of the offense is completely different. At one point Danielson threw three right hand punches like I never remember seeing him throw punches before, then turns into an STO. Later, he hits this amazing missile dropkick where he ran up the turnbuckles and spun around in midair to hit the kick. I don't think any of the slick rope artists like Fenix, Freelance, or Gran Metalik could hit it any better. The crowd gets into this as they packed a lot of action and bumps into a tight runtime, and they got really loud when Danielson hit a big top rope headbutt, then got up and ran full steam into a huge spinning Blue Thunder Bomb. The top rope jumping back suplex was a great finish, and the match had a shocking amount of risk and hard bumps for something that was going to be absolutely blown out of the water reaction-wise 10 minutes later by two mildly trained midget wrestlers.
Labels: APW, Bryan Danielson, Capitan de Oro, Christopher Daniels, Donovan Morgan, Juventud Guerrera, LA Park, Mike Modest, Shocker, Super Boy, Tommy Drake
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