All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2004: Kawada vs. Hashimoto VS. Necro vs. Klein

Shinya Hashimoto vs. Toshiaki Kawada AJPW 2/22/04 

ER: This is the definition of Dream Match wrestling with actual, real purpose and incredible execution. Beyond being one of the biggest one-off dream matches in wrestling history, the fact that both men worked the exact brutal match that everyone viewing it as a dream match would want to see just cements its legendary status. Hashimoto beat Great Muta for the Triple Crown Title almost exactly a year before this match, but badly injured his shoulder in a July 2003 tag match opposite Kawada, and wound up vacating the Triple Crown due to that ongoing shoulder issue. Kawada never actually beat Hashimoto for the Triple Crown - he beat Mike Awesome and Shinjiro Ohtani in a tournament - so this match was the showdown every single fan wanted to see happen the second Hash won the Triple Crown. Since vacating that title due to his shoulder, Hashimoto continued working through the injury until it got so bad that it inadvertently lead to his death, when the necessary surgery required him to stop taking his heart medication. But now, nearly 8 months after first injuring it and much worse for wear, that shoulder is wrapped up with a trainer's room worth of KT tape, and in classic puro tradition would be targeted in the most sadistic ways. 

Hashimoto takes a logically sound wrestling psychology approach to the match by targeting Kawada's knee, whereas Kawada opts for a straight ahead vicious approach by aiming to destroy Hashimoto's shoulder and set the snowball rolling fast down the hill towards his death. While it's entirely unfair to say that Toshiaki Kawada murdered Shinya Hashimoto, Toshiaki Kawada murdered Shinya Hashimoto. The selling from both is incredible from stoic beginning to white towel finish, starting with Hash selling Kawada's first kick with the same disinterest as a man scrolling his phone while eating a half sandwich in his work break room, and while he's wobbled down to a knee after walking into a Kawada crescent kick, it's not before he cups Kawada's ear with a slap so hard that Kawada's ear starts leaking blood. When someone's ear is bleeding a couple minutes in, you'd think that would be the most violent thing you were going to see, and they spend 15 minutes trying to top it. 

There is a hamstring-knotting kick exchange so hard that after a half dozen of them their plant legs and kicking legs are both stiffening up, and we get one of those unparalleled Kawada leg wobbles, which Hash stops short with a leg sweep that looked like it would explode any mortal man's achilles. Hashimoto's dissection of Kawada's knee is done with the confidence of a man who is not advertising to the world that his shoulder is currently constructed of milk-soaked graham crackers, as he stomps on it, sits on it, jumps on it, and kicks at his tendons. The best part about Hashimoto's stomps is that he's not stomping on Kawada's knee the way a pro wrestler would, he's stomping on that knee like it's the biggest cockroach he's ever seen on his kitchen floor. Except Hashimoto does not fear this cockroach, he loathes this cockroach, and wants nothing more than to splatter its viscera across his tile. Also, he is in somebody else's house acting like a total asshole, and you can only get away with that for so long. 

Hashimoto gets away with it until he tries for an o goshi hip throw, and realizes what he's done when Kawada plants and pulls. Hash is now fighting to not get backdropped onto his shoulder - the way a man with a debilitating shoulder injury who is desperately trying to avoid surgery would - before being deadlifted completely against his will, his shoulder taking the entire brunt of the fall. You know when you try so hard to avoid a pothole that you end up driving right through it? Brother, Hashimoto's shoulder hit that pothole dead on. Kawada is now the mechanic who recognizes how fucked Hashimoto's suspension is, and he's gonna price gouge him hard. Now it's his turn, and he yanks on that shoulder, leaps onto it with his knees, kicks at it like a heavy bag. His knee is still shaky but not perilously so, and he runs the length of the ring to jam a boot as hard as he can into that shoulder, then whips his boot across the back of Hash's head with an enziguiri so strong that it sends Hash into a staggering Sean Salmon plunge, a reference almost as old as this match. 

Kawada's Stretch Plum with Hashimoto's shoulder as the focal point of all the pressure looks like one of the most painful holds ever applied. The wounded, anguished face of Hash as Kawada kicks his shoulder around the ring, is gutting. He looks like a mastodon who knows he's dying but merely attempting to stay on his feet due to animal survival instinct. That flame in his eyes as he finally catches one of those legs and slashes downward on Kawada's knee, and how he takes immense aggrieved pleasure in sizing up a huge roundhouse left to Kawada's chest after, is a reminder that even dying mastodon's have those lethal tusks. His brainbuster has incredible lift and spike, and is capped off by Hashimoto screaming like a railroad spike got driven into his shoulder on landing. That scream is the scream of a mortally wounded man and you can see him hit the pedal from there, going hard with high lefts to Kawada's chest and high rights to the back of his head, Kawada doing a full wobble legged teetering sell, cross-footed across the ring, the vacant expression of a man whose upper torso just weathered the hardest kicks of a 22 year career. 

But when Kawada manages to pull the Stretch Plum again, you know it's over. Hashimoto knows it's over but pride won't allow him to actually say so, a man who stood until he couldn't, towel thrown in as Zero-1's literal meal ticket takes years off his career by refusing to submit. We know one man did irreparable damage to his body in this match, but the selling is so next level that it feels like a match neither man would ever recover from. To that point, this was the last elite performance of either man's career. We didn't know that Hashimoto had only 60 matches left and that his last singles matches would be against King Dabada and UPW owner Rick Bassman. Kawada became more of a 2000s Taue who would turn it up in one big match or two every year, but never endured anything else like he did here. 

PAS: These two spent the 90s on parallel paths, a pair of killers slicing their way through the rosters of their respective promotions with vicious kicks. I was an active fan of Japanese wrestling during the primes of both wrestlers. I started getting video tapes from a local Japanese video store and quickly dove into the world of tape trading. This was the dream match I most wanted to see in 1994, a pair of threshing machines aimed at each other to see who would get chopped up. By the time we finally saw it 10 years later, they had mostly been threshed. Hashimoto's shoulder is cooked, Kawada's knees are toast; they are much closer to the end of it all than the beginning, which is what made this match so compelling. 

These aren't the two baddest dogs in the yard anymore. Their bodies don't work, but in their hearts and minds they can still deliver at that level, and they are going to rip each other into tiny pieces to prove it. The selling in this match is incredible, although I am not sure how much of it is selling. Kawada sells as if his knee is being destroyed, but his knee actually is being destroyed; Hashimoto's stoic demeanor is broken as he howls in pain, but I think he might actually just be howling in pain. One of the things which made the Thrilla in Manila such an iconic fight is that Ali and Frazier weren't at the peak of their powers anymore. Frazier was a year away from retirement, Ali never really reached those heights again. This was wrestling's Thrilla in Manila: two all time greats hanging by a string and falling together into the abyss. 

Necro Butcher vs. Toby Klein

Verdict: 

ER: I think we both knew that Hashimoto/Kawada was going to be our 2004 champ when we started this project a decade ago, but Necro/Klein is so damn good that we got a kick out of seeing it represented among the other All Time Classics. That match deserved its long reign, but the King has returned from battle, taking his rightful place on the throne. 

Our Full All Time MOTY List

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All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2003: Ogawa vs. Kobashi VS. Lesnar vs. Mysterio

Kenta Kobashi vs. Yoshinari Ogawa NOAH 11/1/03

ER: In 2003. this match was embraced by the people who disliked Yoshinari Ogawa as a Great Ogawa Match. A lot of people actually disliked Ogawa in 2003. Half my lifetime ago, people actually got mad on the internet about Ogawa winning the GHC Heavyweight Title off Akiyama in under 5 minutes. Scott Keith called him Rat Boy and babies cried of cronyism. I was in college. I argued about it on DVDVR, using a Mitsuharu Misawa Emerald Green iMac in a campus computer lab. Sonoma State University's Information Center and Library opened in August 2000 on the very same day as the very first NOAH show, and that information center was filled to the brim with neon-colored iMacs that I employed to argue about pro wrestling for the next 2+ years. I believed in NOAH. I traded Galavision lucha libre for NOAH tapes on those emerald terminals. I watched that Ogawa Title win on a huge screen in a media lab in that same information center, in a room that I often reserved for the sole purpose of watching pro wrestling by myself on a large screen. Two different professors got mad at me for watching wrestling in a large media room they thought they had reserved for a class, but I had reserved it first so that I could watch new NOAH shows and 90s All Japan Comm tapes. 

I watched and argued about that Ogawa title win as a college student, and I watched this Ogawa title challenge as a college graduate delivering bottled water for Sierra Springs-Alhambra, in an apartment I shared with an Armenian girl. That was my year. The year before, I was there live when Ogawa wrestled his first ever match in the United States, and while he was wearing the GHC Title around his waist I watched him trip on the stairs walking to the bathroom. Is the man just a dweeb with a powerful friend? Or was he perfectly method in playing his dweeb character to the one other person nearby - me - who also happened to be walking to the bathroom? Obviously the latter. Since wearing the GHC Heavyweight Title and tripping while walking up stairs in a Fairfield gymnasium, the year after losing that title to Takayama was spent almost entirely in tag matches, getting a late 2002 GHC Title match against Misawa and only working a couple of singles matches in the entirety of 2003. A couple weeks before this title match, Ogawa - as captain - won a Captains Fall Elimination Match by eliminating Kobashi, meaning Yoshinari Ogawa was the first man in 14 months to pin Kenta Kobashi. Still, coming into this match, even as a former GHC Heavyweight Champion, Ogawa did not seem like - nor was he treated like - a man who could pin Kobashi in a singles match. 

Nobody, not even diehard NOAH lifer fans, were treating Ogawa as a serious title challenger. Nobody thought Ogawa had a chance at winning the title. Now I suppose that nobody expected Ogawa to win it from Akiyama in 2002, but nobody expected him to win it from Kobashi in 2003. This was never going to be a quick match, win or loss, as that just wasn't an option in a Kobashi title match. No, they needed to figure out a way for Ogawa to plausibly last 25 minutes in a Real Title Match against Kobashi, which is an interesting exercise. Ogawa felt like the first Kobashi challenger who might not make it past 10 minutes, and they figured out a very fun way to turn this into a 25 minute match. I also think that the strength and weakness of this match is that it's great that Ogawa essentially trolls Kobashi into working a full Kobashi title match with him, but by going so long it also felt too much like several people had sat down and mapped out exactly how they could plausibly have Ogawa last that long. 

Ogawa does not have offense that plays against Kobashi. His short jabs don't look like they could phase him, his body doesn't look like he could lift him or hold him down, and his chest is not a chest that can sustain more than a dozen chops, and they do a great job of building this match around those facts. Kobashi sells Ogawa's offense appropriately all match. Worked jabs, a standing double stomp, or a double leg cradled pin weren't going to cut the mustard, but attacking a dude's famously fucked up knees could. And after enduring two different corner choppings with his arms stiffened and his chest puffed out as much as possible, Ogawa goes after those fucked up knees. The first time Kobashi chops him down, he literally chops the man down to his back, with Ogawa taking the chops like a man trying to keep his footing as best as possible while having a firehose turned on him. The second time Kobashi gets him in a corner and starts chopping, Ogawa wisely just plays dead like Kobashi was a grizzly bear, and when enough time passed by he runs and dropkicks Kobashi in the back of the knee, and his window opens. You can basically divide this match up into two parts: Ogawa going after Kobashi's weakness that nobody is supposed to go after, and Kobashi paying Ogawa back for doing so. 

Ogawa's knee work is really tremendous, just relentless and varied and constantly advancing, never lingering on any one attack. After dropkicking the knee, he starts wrapping it around the ringpost, removing Kobashi's knee brace and pad, standing on it, jumping on it, pulling on his leg, jamming his own knee into Kobashi's knee, dropping an elbow onto it, digging his elbow into it, bangs it off the apron several times, dragon screws that leg, works a harsh single leg crab, locks a figure 4 around the ringpost. Every possible thing you can do to fuck up someone's leg in a wrestling ring, Ogawa does it all, in succession. Ogawa can't lift Kobashi's dead weight into a suplex so he shoves him Kobashi straight into the referee, kicks him in the back of the head, and finally hits the back suplex. While everyone is tending to the referee, Ogawa actually starts drawing heat by bashing Kobashi's leg with the ring bell multiple times, including once while the leg was against the ringpost. Ogawa didn't know that this was going to be the literal last time he would ever challenge for the GHC Heavyweight Title, but he knew the only way he was winning that title was by turning Kobashi's knees into bone broth and having the match stopped due to injury. It's a great plan. It could have worked, and it was working, but it only worked until Ogawa got his face bounced off the ringpost a few times. 

Kobashi was always going to catch him, and he does so invoking the power of Kings Road to let Ogawa run into a Baba neckbreaker drop. But yeah, then Ogawa gets his face bounced off the ringpost a couple times and Kobashi hits a spinning chop to the back of his neck to bounce him off it once more, and Ogawa gets busted wide open. 

When Ogawa gets busted open - a thing not common in NOAH 

Kobashi starts throwing punches - a thing Kobashi didn't do  

Karate chopping 

Right into Ogawa's cuts

Champion's Vengeance

You can even see

Him raising up his knuckle

As he's punching cuts

Kobashi holds Ogawa up, frozen in the coolest delayed sheer drop back suplex, an elevator stopping for too long before plummeting down several floors all at once. Ogawa is powerless to prevent the delayed floatover powerbomb, barely kicking out before Kobashi leans into him with a smothering sleeper. Ogawa has one last resort, and you figured he was going to go after the balls eventually, but it's kind of a surprise that he bothered to wait over 20 minutes to do so. Are The Balls Ogawa's personal moral line? We all have our own lines that we hold at certain distance, not thinking we'll be pushed over them. But are we supposed to think that The Balls That KENTA Washed are the line that Ogawa had to be convinced to cross 20 minutes in? He needed about three minutes to make the decision to go hard after the most famously crippled knees in the company for 10 minutes straight, but attacking The Balls are beyond the pale, and baby, you know Ogawa is pale. Kobashi has literally already established that he can miss several months after suffering very real knee injuries having his legs brutalized in one match, but Ogawa has no quandary trying to shelve the top draw for a year. 

And as I ponder this, I swear that Kobashi hammerfists his own nuts to...I dunno I guess get some ball feeling back? Once Michael Myers reveals that he has no balls, it's pretty much over. Those balls have been shot through with cortisone. You can break a cinder block over those balls, and it's not going to stop the superplex and Burning Lariats. 

Lesnar vs. Mysterio Review

Verdict: 

ER: This is a great match, but felt more like a clever exercise in what it would take to get Ogawa a 25 minute match with Kobashi, than it feels like a real title match. The knee work should have drawn way more heat, and Kobashi had to endure it even as the crowd viewed it as something that "just had to be done" to grow this match from 5 minutes to 25. Kobashi's vengeance should have been more violent, even though I like him using a lot of punches for the first time in god knows when. As much as I enjoy this match, at the end of it all I kept wondering was "If NOAH weren't such cowards about putting Kobashi in the ring with SUWA, imagine how incredible Kobashi/SUWA would have been?" Champ retains. 

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All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2003: Taue vs. Nagata VS. Lesnar vs. Mysterio

Akira Taue vs. Yuji Nagata NOAH 6/6/03

ER: This is a match for the Taue fans. This is a Taue match. It's a match you can show any undesirable Taue-doubter as evidence of his deserved rep as a Pillar. I also understand that anyone who is reading this wouldn't bother wasting their fleeting life's time trying to convert a Taue-doubter at this point, but within this hypothetical, this match is a Taue Mind Changer. Taue is an aging, respected veteran who is put in the position of being the first real opposition to an invading serious threat. It's one of those great aggressive Taue performances, where a guy who made his career on his stoicism and unflappability shows real passion and lumbering intensity to shut this outsider asshole down. We Taue Heads love his lumbering intensity; his clumsy athleticism and absence of grace. The way he lurches and stumbles into offense and away from offense adds a realism that few possess. This match is a Taue clinic on selling offense and fatigue: the way his delivery changes and how he's able to show the affect his bursts of intensity have had on his gas tank, the way he stumbles and staggers and buckles his knees upon being struck or fighting to his feet. The best Taue selling makes him look like a giraffe who's been hit with a tranq dart, but also a giraffe who could still kick you in the face.  

Yuji Nagata was just coming off a dominant and active year-plus run as IWGP Heavyweight Champ, defending constantly and defeating everyone, before finally being stopped by Yoshihiro Takayama, who is sitting on commentary for this match. After losing his title, he took a week off, dusted himself off, then dragged his dick into Toyama and swung it into NOAH's business.  Nagata blew into town and bloodied up Masao Inoue, ran through all of Akiyama's exploders to beat him in less than 8 minutes, and now he's coming for Baba's doppelgänger. Taue is famously surly, but here his surliness comes out in his defense of Kings Road and he looks pissed at Nagata for making him do so. He is 42 years old and tiring, which I can relate to as someone who is 42 years old and tiring. He is going to unload his greatest hits at Nagata until he tires out, and Nagata is just going to have to weather it. He swings his hand at Nagata's head like a fired up 1980 Baba, throws the sole of his boot like he wears size 18s and they weigh 30 lb. each, slaps Nagata down in the corner, and throws every single nodowa otoshi like a man trying to spike a a football into the earth.  

 

Akira Taue was the reason I knew the words "nodowa otoshi" as a teenager, and he murders Nagata with a high backdrop chokeslam and then a real one armed classic, tries to give him one off the apron but settles for merely a boot to the face, and pulls back the ring mats to give him one on the floor of Budokan instead. 

The crowd is hugely into Taue and turns on Nagata hard when he starts kicking away at Taue's arm and snaps on a quick armbar after Taue had already reached the ropes. Taue gets his shoulder run into the ringpost, and Nagata keeps going back to that arm as a diversion the more tired Taue gets. I dug how he hit an Exploder that rolled Taue to his feet, and when Taue came up swinging Nagata just pumped his boot into Taue's bicep, and Taue decides to start going for broke with as many chokeslams as he can before the sand runs out. Taue flipping Nagata ass over crown off the top rope by his neck is an all time Taue match, in a match that had at least four other contenders for that. The fans were believing when they saw their man in red throw Nagata off that rope like a Street Fighter II killshot, visualizing it in slow motion with Nagata making groaning Arrgghhhh noises. 

If the first half of the match is about Taue the aggressor, the latter half him showing why he's one of my favorite salesman in wrestling history, and one of my favorite guys to watch take offense. Taue doesn't fall like normal men, and that makes me want to see him fall constantly. He's so good at progressively staggering to his feet in new ways, using his body's makeup and unique base to roll quickly to his feet, and is so talented at showing damage and fatigue that his legs keep reacting in new ways as he keeps having to get to his feet. There's a moment where you can tell the crowd knows that Taue is not going to be making another comeback, but they're also not sure that he's going to stop kicking out of anything Nagata throws him with. Taue has this feel of a guy who can't be pinned, and no amount of back suplexes or Exploders could keep him down. The Nagata Lock III was a thing that looked like it would dislocate both of Taue's shoulders, like the only thing that could have possibly stopped him that night. 

Lesnar vs. Mysterio Review

Verdict: 

This is probably the greatest singles match of Taue's last decade. Through the rest of the decade he remained great at having 1-2 major performances a year, but I'm not sure any of them hit this height. Is the Marufuji carry job as miraculous as I remember? Is the Rikio match as cool as I remember? What about that tag opposite Tenryu? This match is an argument for Taue still being a Top 10 guy in the world in 2003...

But he'd probably still have to be behind Brock and Rey on that same 2003 Top 10. Champ retains.  

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Leduc! Mychel! Dumez! Cohen! Montoro! Tejero!

Gilbert Leduc vs. Bert Mychel 4/16/73

MD: This is a rematch to a very good match from a couple of years earlier. Mychel was a two time Olympian in Greco-Roman wrestling. We come in late, maybe ten minutes in, but by this point, everything is gritty as hell and it never, ever lets up, not even once, over the next twenty-five plus minutes. One of the first things we see is Leduc powering Mychel over with the tightest cravat you'll ever see, just torquing his head around. As the match escalates, they'd escalate to throwing forearms, just pounding each other, both in holds and on their feet, but it never felt unsportsmanlike. It never felt craven or underhanded. It felt like exactly what they needed to do to contest each other. That was the level of skill and grit and determination and power and precision. They rolled around the ring, and it was everything Leduc could do to keep Mychel in a hold. Even with the slightly deteriorated film stock, you'd see it in his face, the exhaustion and frustration. He would catch him with a fake out, would take a leg, would snatch an arm, would get him down but there was no rest, no respite, no real control. Mychel was always grabbing for a limb, locking arms around a waist, and as the match went on, kicking or smacking, doing anything he could to escape.

Meanwhile, Leduc, even deep into his 40s, was an absolute warrior, always back up on his feet to fight, always pushing forward, giving his all to escape each hold, but sometimes not how he'd prefer. He was able to get his trademark headstand spin out of an arm puller, but for the headscissors, he couldn't manage it; they were just too tight. He had to squirm his way out through splitting the legs, through doing anything else he could. Maybe that's why he did strike first once or twice, but you never held it against him. It was what he had to do; the stakes were that high, his opponent that deadly. It was just business. Towards the end, he was the first to pick up speed, to escalate things further, but a high cross body went awry and he tumbled over the top rope. He climbed back in but was felled by three consequtive fall away slams by Mychel, able to pull himself up after the first two, but not the third. You can jump into any moment of this match and watch the two of them push each other up against the limit. Even when they were striking one another back and forth, they seemed to cut the gap so that they were almost face to face. There wasn't an inch of give there and there wasn't an inch of give anywhere else in this one. An amazing thing, maybe more so considering we've been watching Leduc go at it for almost two decades now and that he was able to create an equally exceptional but very different, gaga filled match when he teamed with Corn against Henker. What a struggle.

ER: We've seen a lot of stiff, well-executed matches in the 20 years of Catch, but this might be the match with the best fight feel we've seen. I don't think we've covered a French match like this. This felt like bad blood, but bad blood between two real entertainers. It all ended in Leduc being helped to his feet, but the 25 minutes before that sportsmanship was filled with potential hamstring injuries or broken jaws. This was Gilbert Leduc working as smooth as Santo but more violent than Finlay. Leduc's headspin escape should at minimum put him some sort of respected-in-the-right-circles Breakdancing Progenitor role. There was a real missed opportunity to have a Street Stylin Jacques Tati short feature with a Frenchman in a well tailored suit breakdancing on the L Train. Leduc could have started in a Spike Jonze video in a slightly different life. 

But in this life, he's trying to break Bert Mychel's hands by snapping at them with his strong grip (see how vice grip Leduc applies a cravat and picture that grip pinching into your hamate bone. Leduc pounds Mychel's hand into the mat, knuckles going into the soft spot of the palm. Michael takes the hand breaking in stride and sees where Leduc wants to take this, and starts colliding with him on every strike. Once we built to strikes, I'm not sure there were any strikes that only made contact in one spot. They start throwing their whole body into uppercuts, throwing a shoulder into the clavicle while throwing a forearm across a length of jaw. As the striking got more intense, the matwork got more intense. Leduc had an escape where he grapevined Mychel's leg out of a hold and rolled through so hard that it made my hamstrings sore. And the more intense the matwork gets the harder the strikes keep landing. Mychel rings Leduc's bell with one of the loudest open hand slaps, and the crowd reacts in more of a DAMN! way than with pro wrestling heat. It all builds to Mychel fallaway slamming Leduc to death repeatedly, throwing him over the top rope to the apron, then throwing him more onto the ring until the ref stops the damn match. It's pretty incredible the different ways that French Catch has continued to outdo itself, and I don't think there's another Catch match like this one. 

PAS: This was great stuff, it felt like a Billy Robinson or Terry Rudge match more than any other Catch match we have seen. We have seen other matches with great mat wrestling, and other matches with big striking, but this kind of hard gritty mat wrestling was a new thing. Every bit of grappling felt incredibly painful, and the spots with Leduc pounding Mychel's hand was iconically sick shit, it looked like he was torturing an enemy agent. Loved the finish too, with the multiple big fallaway slams. This footage just keeps delivering. 

Maurice Dumez/Georges Cohen vs. Antonio Montoro/Anton Tejero 4/30/73

MD: I think we have four matches with Montoro in the collection. This is the last. He has a rep of being one of the best Spanish workers, up there with Aledo, and he's so good and so versatile in what we have of him, especially his 70s work, that you can really see it. If someone who had lived through this period and watched these matches told me that he was the best they'd seen, I'd believe it. We just don't have enough footage to make that claim ourselves. He's taller, lankier, but can keep up with everyone in rope running and quick exchanges. He's hugely imaginative, using the conjuro backbreaker, a ripcord into a spinning tombstone, complex and intricate rope-running spots. He works those spots into callbacks, winning the first fall with a leap back body press off the top and losing the second by having Cohen catch him while attempting the same move. He has just enough personality throughout it all, raising his hands to deny cheating, sneaking in shots, having his arms flail about as he's getting punched. He bases for all sorts of offense, including a really tricked out headlock takeover exchange by Dumez, and bumps all over the ring, including a mad leap backwards on a miscommunication spot where Tejero crashed into his gut to set up the finish.

Tejero, of course, given his girth, bumps like mad as well. Dumez and Cohen were more than up to the task to face them here. I wish some of the comebacks had a little more dramatic oomph to them, as the beatings were solid and the heat was good, but when they came, they came a little too easy and didn't have that perfect flash of lightning to make them possible. Still, you watch this and marvel that Dumez and Cohen could take and hit all of Tejero and Montoro's stuff and equally that Montoro and Tejero could take and feed for all of Cohen and Dumez' stuff. You can't fault a second of the action in this one.

ER: We did not have a 1973 match on our All Time MOTY List, and none of us have seen a better contender from 1973 than Leduc/Mychel, so that match is now our 1973 champion! Peep the rest of our All Time MOTY List at the link below: 

ONGOING ALL TIME MOTY LIST

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Catanzaro! Bernaert! Mantopolous! Montreal! Corn! Leduc! Henker!

Billy Catanzaro/Pierre Bernaert vs. Mr. Montreal/Vasilios Mantopolous 6/5/72

MD:  I'm amazed we didn't watch this one before. It could be that we saw it was a swimming pool match and decided against it because the few pool matches we've seen so far just haven't been great. This had a few things going for it though. First, it had Billy Catanzaro who is a singular, once in a century, stooging heel. It had Bernaert who is as professional a put upon bad guy as you'll find. It had Montreal who was one of the biggest positive surprises in all of the footage because even a muscle man, in France, was excellent. And of course, it had Mantopolous, who was imaginative, creative, deft, skilled, very over, whatever word you want to use, just a marvel. Even so, what made this work was that they treated the water like a big deal. The tag setting meant that Bernaert could get knocked out relatively early due to mishaps with his own partner, but they took twenty minutes teasing the reviled Catanzaro going out with any number of close calls. It ended up being a bit like an exploding ring match where they tease it and tease it and then finally pay it off, here with Mantopolous skinning the cat and taking Billy over, except for instead of pain and destruction it was a wet humiliation that Catanzaro was trying to avoid. The tag nature meant that Bernaert could suffer repeatedly and keep the fans happy and the gimmick fulfilled while the tension for Catanzaro finally crashing into the pool rose and rose. Once that happened they were already in the second fall and they could just keep building upon it.

There wasn't going to be much heat here. Some cheapshots, some tandem cheating, but it was almost always to set up immediate comeuppance for the bad guys. This was all about keeping the crowd happy and the interplay between Bernaert and Catanzaro was perfect for that. Catanzaro was a jerk's jerk, so much so that Bernaert, a jerk himself, was getting more and more furious at him. On the other side you had Montreal's strength spots and big hammering blows and Mantopolous flying around the ring, using tricked out takedowns, and lady in the lake turtling to make fools out of his opponents. This wasn't the most dramatic match we've seen but it was wildly entertaining the whole way through.

Gilbert Leduc/Jacky Corn vs. Der Henker 7/5/72

MD: This was actually a tremendous piece of business, maybe the most emotionally resonant match we've seen in the entire set. Corn and Leduc were true stars, wrestlers' wrestlers, absolutely tops on my list of babyfaces and stylists I've seen in this footage. They were heroes. Henker was another in the line of masked headsmen but he had an aura, hard shots, big power moves, believability. We'd seen him face off against Leduc and Corn in singles matches already and I wouldn't say anything in those made it inevitable that he could take on both in a handicap match, but they leaned harder into his power and presence here and laid out a match that caused a near riot and that left everyone looking better than they came in.

Early going here was Henker's power up against Corn or Leduc's skill. They would tag in and out and never double team or cheat. Leduc obviously made good use of his headstand and the Mascaras style headscissors. Corn would go quicker into the strike exchanges. Midway through the match, Henker was able to toss Corn out, to slam his head onto the post as he was trying to come back in, and then to drop him hard with a tombstone. The crowd banded together to carry Corn to the back leaving Leduc alone. Leduc did well at first, taking over and even going for the mask, but the ref held him back allowing for a Henker cheap shot and infuriating the crowd. From there, it was Henker slowly whittling Leduc down with big blows and power moves even as the crowd occasionally tried to storm the ring. Leduc would get pops every time he tried to get up, every time he threw a futile blow but Henker was just too much, or at least he was until, minutes down the line, Corn, head taped up, rushed back to the ring. He got the tag and the tide turned with Corn (one of the best late match sluggers ever) and eventually Leduc getting revenge on both Henker and the ref. From there, it was more about Henker surviving the onslaught and making it to the time limit draw, which, as I said, left everyone looking formidable and respectable by the end. The last shot is Corn and Leduc embracing to the crowd's delight. We've seen many matches that were technically better but maybe none that had more heart.

PAS: This was a blast. Henker is a big beastly dude, and I liked how the match built from more exchanges to big bursts of violence. You don't see much blood in French Catch and to see Corn just dripping after getting smashed by those nasty elbow/forearms and the posting was pretty memorable. Also the mass of people carrying him to the back like a martyred rebel leader was awesome. They had really established Henker as so formidable that LeDuc being one on one with him felt like he was at a big disadvantage. Corn coming from the back was iconic and his fired up comeback was some Lawler Mid-South Coliseum level great stuff. After all that I would have liked a more conclusive ending then a draw, but this was very cool stuff.  

ER: I wasn't sure what to expect from this as the handicap structure felt odd. Der Henker is a big man but not so much bigger than Leduc or Corn that a handicap match feels necessary, but these men had all been feuding for a year or more and this was two of the best babyfaces teaming up to rid France of this asshole Executioner. I'm used to German words sounding more ominous than their American counterparts, but I admittedly think that Executioner sounds much cooler than Der Henker. That said, tell every person in attendance that Der Henker doesn't sound ominous and they'd find you mad, as this man is loathed. I love when a French Catch match has these simmering social situations that just keep getting hotter until they boil over, leading women in their nice coats to charge the ring and yell in Der Henker's face.

Henker did a good job of fending off the fighting babyfaces, but things went up to the next level when he tossed Corn to the floor and posted him, then dropped him with a tombstone. Up to that point it had mostly been Henker defending and clubbing in response (with these weird but also cool elbow strikes that landed the entire inside of his arm and elbow across Corn and Leduc's heads), but this was an actual outright offense! The crowd actually carried the injured Corn to the back and I thought for sure that there was going to be a riot, as Der Henker had the stones to actually get out of the ring and face the crowd, more of them pushing closer to the ring every second. A kid, 12 years old tops, even starts to climb up the ring steps to get in before an adult grabs him! 

The match had given us a lot of holds to work out of and now was the time for the uppercuts to start landing. Henker kept winning exchanges, taking a lot of damage, but not staggering or falling to his knees, into the ropes the way Leduc was. Leduc's best attack was his cool slingshot into the ropes, Der Henker falling back hard - twice! - into the points of Leduc's knees. But Der Henker's excellent press slam gutbuster (a move that might have made me flip out even more than the French acrobatics, had I been alive and in attendance) and tombstone on made it seem like that bad guy was taking this, leading to the bloody and wild Corn returning to save his partner. The finishing stretch to the (admittedly disappointing but understandable) time limit draw was pure joy. Corn threw his closed fists to the side of Henker's head and really let loose with uppercuts. Der Henker got stuck in the ropes, the referee got monkey flipped into Der Henker, total madness leading to our draw. I loved how this kept building and leapt into something huge. 

 

ALL TIME MOTY LIST

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All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2005: Necro vs. Joe VS. Ikeda vs. Ishikawa

First, if folks haven't listened yet, Phil did a podcast with the aforementioned Necro Butcher on this match here:

WAY OF THE BLADE POD

Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher IWA-MS 6/11/05

ER: This is arguably the most legendarily violent match of the last 20 years, the kind of match that embodies everything about that era of super indy wrestling, while taking it to such extreme lengths that everyone reading this likely remembers the first time they ever saw it. It runs just under 10 minutes and has as many memorable moments in those 10 minutes as any match you've seen. This is a fight that never really threatens to turn into a match. The strikes get more unprofessional the longer we go, and it's not surprising that after a few jaw rattling elbows they spill to the floor (where much of the match is spent). Joe levels Necro with a huge elbow suicida, they brawl into the crowd, and Necro gets immediately opened up once they start trading headbutts (unclear if it's one of the couple Joe threw, or one of the many Necro threw, but things get very bloody very quick). Necro and Joe really had it out for Necro's face in this match, and we get the first unholy meeting of Necro's face with concrete when Joe powerslams Necro forehead first on the floor. The match plays better than almost any other crowd brawl, as we aren't walking while hair holding at any point, it's always just these two throwing punches, chops, and elbows. Necro drags a guardrail into the ring and used it on Joe, hitting a senton with Joe underneath, and Joe follows Necro's lead in using metal painfully by hitting a German suplex through a set up chair. They fight to the apron and Necro punches Joe straight across the face...before Joe hits the most famous exploder suplex within our circle of wrestling fandom, chucking Necro onto his head/neck/face.

This is the line for many people. You know for certain that you side with the sickos if you stick around after that suplex, as Necro leaves a visible blood puddle on the ground from where his face made first contact, and then his head starts spraying plasma. And it wasn't a deep red color, it was that red paint plasma that you see in movies like The Harder They Come, leaving at first drops and then puddles on the floor of the New Alhambra. I loved Necro's comeback, this bloody limp corpse suddenly firing punches to Joe's face and body, actually backing him up and making Necro come off like some sick freak Terminator. And of course that's when Joe decides he needs to start throwing his most brutal strikes of the match, especially his knee strikes which just bounce right off the side of Necro's head. The KO finish was the way this should have ended, Necro choosing death rather than ever getting pinned by conventional weapons. It's pretty amazing that he even stayed standing as long as he did, as I can't imagine the average man getting up from a fraction of the punishment Necro took. But, Necro was never merely an average man.

PAS: One of the great big fight auras in wrestling history. The entire crowd was rabid, the announce team was rabid and both wrestlers were foaming. The match opens with possible the last good forearm exchange in wrestling, there was no tough guy faces and your turn my turn forearming, just two lunatics in the pocket throwing as hard as they can. Joe sends Necro to the floor and wastes him with an elbow suicida. Necro unsurprisingly starts spraying blood after a Samoa Joe headbutt (he had wrestled in Japan the night before and cut himself especially deep to make a point to the Big Japan management, wrestling is fucking strange). The match is pretty one sided from this point, but in an awesomely one sided way. Necro takes some monstrously violent head trauma, including taking a powerslam with his forehead landing on concrete and a sheer drop exploder suplex off the ring apron onto the floor onto the crown of his skull. Necro timed his moments of offense perfectly, just when he seemed overwhelmed he would stun Joe with a couple of body shots or a straight right hand. Joe eventually snaps when he can’t put Necro away and obliterates him with knee lifts, with the blood flying off Necro’s head like activator juice in a Rick James video. Wild fight which felt like a combination of Marvin Hagler vs. Tommy Hearns and that viral video where that one teen girl hits the other teen girl in the head with a shovel. 

Verdict: Really a battle of two of the most violent matches in wrestling history. I think the crowd heat pushes this over the top. There is nothing like a wild insane crowd to add to the mania. It's close, but we got a new champ.

ALL TIME MOTY MASTER LIST

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Boucard! Cohen! Kamikaze 1! Rene Ben! Bordes! Kamikaze 2!

Daniel Boucard vs. Georges Cohen 12/26/68

MD: Tremendous match. It had that sort of chippy 50s feel of amazing wrestling with everything eventually breaking down but with that flashier 60s sheen. The first ten-fifteen minutes was just brilliant stuff, with them starting very even in their chain wrestling and on the mat and then giving way to Boucard with the advantage with a headscissors, wristlock, and full nelson and Boucard doing everything in his power to escape, only for Boucard to hang on. There was just an extra level of athleticism in the escape attempts. Cohen's bridge was extra sharp. The way he'd whip up to his feet to try to get a beal, only for Boucard to hang on, had extra zeal. The kip up getting shut down again and again just worked. Then, despite holding the advantage, Boucard went chippy first with a brutal beat down, uppercuts and forearms and headbutts and some interesting things like a neckbreaker and head whip. 

Cohen fighting back with a headbutt to the gut out of the corner had the crowd up big for the comeback and he got plenty of revenge (though Boucard always kept swiping back when he could), before Boucard went to the leg and we got a few minutes of really strong selling and legwork that only ended with Cohen managing to kick Boucard out of the ring in desperation. Following that was more revenge and the eventual rush to the finish. They were working towards the draw but it never felt like something inevitable given the speed and intensity and the attempts at actually winning, despite both wrestlers selling massive exhaustion as they flung themselves with hammering shots at one another. We've seen enough matches end in the last minute that you just didn't know. Top notch stuff here.

SR: 1 Fall match going 30 minutes. This was the best French singles we've seen in awhile. They start with a bunch of silky smooth technical wrestling. It was like one guy would go for something spectacular, and then the other guy would do something even more spectacular to counter, and then they would cool it down for a bit with holds before repeating. It's a good way to work such a match and these two were flawless athletes. Eventually Boucard decided to batter Cohen with European uppercuts. He wasn't being a heel, but he jawed with the crowd a bit and twisted up Cohens leg. Cohen sold like a champ and they engaged in some breathtaking strike exchanges, up there with the best in the project. They also do a bunch of bonkers nearfalls and unpredictable rope running building to some huge Cohen ranas. These guys did toe to toe strike exchanges about as well as anyone in wrestling history, real edge of your seat stuff, and the nearfalls and spots were executed fast and beautifully. It would've been a good match if they had continued in the vein of the early technical wrestling but the dramatic second half completely elevates this.

PAS: Killer match which hits all of the great points of French Catch. Really fast athletic exchanges early, cool matwork and counters. I loved all the early headscissors and full nelson work, just endless cool counter wrestling. Then when it got nasty it got really nasty with both guys throwing heat. Sometimes these matches just end in draws, but here it felt like the pace got cranked up to eleven and both guys were throwing everything they had at each other to try to steal a win. Right up there with the best stuff we have watched so far, and a match which should join the pantheon of all time great wrestling.  

ER: A 30 minute draw is one of the more unsatisfying things in pro wrestling, and yet there is not one thing unsatisfying about this 30 minute draw. This was paced really well for a time limit draw, with some nice technical wrestling that kept threatening to sprawl into something more violent, then would settle back down before things got too violent to return to simple matwork. Boucard worked like a more stiff Nick Bockwinkel, able to cleanly work the mat but never waiting long before throwing his whole arm into uppercuts. Once we got into the painful snapmares and uppercuts the match kept moving to another level, with Boucard laying a vicious beating on Cohen in the corner. Boucard's uppercuts were nothing but hard contact, hooking Cohen's neck and chin with his inner arm while slamming his shoulder into Cohen's face. The uppercuts are so nasty that, in my favorite part of the match, the large referee grabs Boucard by the traps looking like Andre the Giant locking in a nerve hold, dragging Boucard out of the corner just to get him to stop all the damn uppercutting. Boucard sells the pain of the nerve hold, the ref lets go, and Boucard casually walks back to the corner and rocks Cohen with his hardest uppercut yet. 

Cohen's comeback is really fantastic, firing his best strikes of the match, punching back with his own nasty uppercuts, hard clubbing strikes to the back, and monkey flips that land Boucard as hard as suplexes. I love how often they would wind up in the ropes on every side of the ring. They weren't getting tied up in them and separated, they were getting flipped into them and falling awkwardly into them, getting thrown across the ring and seeing their limbs whip off the ropes. Things get more desperate and both men start throwing from disadvantageous positions, leaping from their knees to land headbutts to the stomach or grazing punches, and the entire run to the time limit was some of the best off balance striking ever seen in pro wrestling. We see a lot of stand and trade now, or even kneel and trade, and seeing exchanges like these really highlights how awful a lot of modern strike exchanges are. 

This was not two men voluntarily standing in one place and taking turns, this wasn't two guys pulling up chairs to have a seated punch out, this was two men getting knocked around and then throwing from wherever they wound up. Cohen knocked Boucard down to one knee with a punch, then held his jaw firmly in place while he landed another, also from his own knees. They staggered into knew spots, threw kicks to create distance, fell, leapt to their feet with offtime strikes that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, and they made it look like all rules of proper decorum had been thrown out. The time limit draw worked because Cohen and Boucard looked like they had completely forgotten about finishing a match within the stated limits of time, they only wanted to knock each other's block off. The crowd would buzz and roar louder with each mention of time, but these men were lost in a swarm of elbows and uppercuts, and we are better for it. 

Rene Ben Chemoul/Walter Bordes vs. Kamikaze 1 and 2 12/26/68

MD: Really good tag here, with a better balance then we usually get. The smaller Kamikize was most likely Modesto Aledo, though they were masked and leaning hard into the over the top Japanese gimmick, stalking and crouching, with plenty of shots to the throat. When the Kamikazes were really going and targeting that head and throat, they looked great, going so far as to win the first fall with a spinning hangman's neckbreaker hold after what looked like a Katahajime. The match was full of things I've seen before in the footage from all parties, including Bordes using a half crab into a bow and arrow or almost a stretch muffler, and Ben Chemoul using a reverse knee crusher to the back of the head. One of the Kamikazes rolled in from the top rope to hit a chop at one point adding insult to injury, and I think we saw one of our first cross-armbreakers too. 

Very imaginative spots all around, with the best one maybe being Bordes eating a whip into a back body drop over the top rope and bumping huge. Everything clicked, with the stylists both selling and hitting their big stuff well, to big response. I'm excited to see Bordes continue to develop as he was great at grinding down holds but also launching big high spots, like just throwing out a press slam into a gutbuster when it was time to pop the crowd. Ben Chemoul hit his somersault senton and corner torpedo and worked the apron really well when his pupil was in trouble. The last ten minutes were maybe a little too celebratory for the good guys since it covered two falls, but the heat leading up to that had warranted it and no one left unhappy.

PAS: Tons of fun shit in this match. Kamikazes were clearly super skilled, and I could see Aledo under one of those masks. I loved how slickly they moved around the ring, and the fun bumping on all of the faces big moves. Bordes taking that huge bump was a real moment as well, insane stuff which feels like something that should be made into a gif. I agree that the finish was a bit wonky. Kamikaze's were really formidable until they weren't Chemoul and Bordes take 90% of the last five minutes, it was all cool offense, but it sucked all of the drama out of the match. Still enough individual coolness for me to heartily recommend.  

ER: We've decided to make Daniel Boucard/Georges Cohen our All Time MOTY for 1968, replacing an excellent young Andre (Jean Ferrer) French match. Boucard/Cohen is 30 minutes of excellence and deserves its place on our list. 

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Tuesday is French Catch Day:Les Copains! Blousons Noir! Said! Kader! Bernaert! Double Dip of Manneveau!

MD: As promised, let's talk quickly about 1963 and 1964, and really, why we have so little from 61 on. Over at PWO, Phil Lions stopped by and told us the following:

"How come there were so few shows in 1961, you may ask? Well, in April of 1961 Maurice Herzog (the French Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports at the time) put pressure on the network not to air catch anymore, because he considered it a "degrading spectacle" and wanted them to focus on other "more noble" sports such as athletics, boxing, skiing, volleyball, and basketball. Despite catch being one of its most viewed sports broadcasts, the network could no longer air it regularly so they'd only do a handful of broadcasts per year. So that explains why there's so little footage from 1961 and onward."

So we're suffering here, 60 years later, from a cultural backlash. Phil also looked through French newspapers in 1964 and found about ten TV listings for Catch, including a couple of Rikki Starr matches (including one vs Gastel), but we don't seem to have those from the archives. Hope springs eternal that they might one day show up.

If you haven't already seen Phil's article on L'Ange Blanc, go check it out. It's phenomenal: http://wrestlingclassics.com/cgi-bin/.ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=10&t=005393

Le Grand Vladimir vs. Bernard Vignal 5/16/64

MD: We'll take whatever we can get in 64, obviously, but this might not have been my first choice. It's 9 minutes JIP and fine. Vladimir is a guy who we have British footage of decades later but seeing him young is new. He hits hard (including slaps/chops at the neck), had the sort of chokes and nerve holds you'd expect, some nice throat-based offense using the ropes, and an interesting entry into a cobra clutch off the ropes I haven't seen before. Vignal is someone we've seen before, an older scrapper with the fans behind him, but this never really escalates into the slugfest you'd want it to, and it ends on a pretty lame low kick DQ. Certainly ok stuff, and we're beggers and not choosers for this year but nothing high end.

Les Copains (Dan Aubriot/Bob Plantin) vs. Blousons Noirs (Manuel Manneveau/Claude Gessat) 5/16/64

MD: If we're only going to have one full match from 64, this isn't a bad one to have. Manneveau and Gessat are such a great unit and I'm glad we get at least a few more matches with them upcoming. They are such a well-oiled machine, constantly drawing heat, constantly cheating, constantly looking for an advantage or a double team, and when it's time, feeding and stooging. We know how good Aubriot was and he lived up to that here, with flashy offense, sympathetic selling during the long FIP stretches, and fiery comebacks when he had the chance (though always cut off in the back half due to the backwork; even after he snuck the fall on a bridge, he couldn't get out of the bridge without Plantin's help). Plantin showed a lot of fire here, especially being great on the apron. After the super fast, tricked out opening exchanges and some great hold exchanges, the rest of the match was heat and more heat, with some southern tag tricks, that heavy back focus on Aubriot, and some hot tags. Finish could use just a little more weight to it, but at that point, you got the sense that the Copains were just worn down from the constant assault.

SR:2/3 falls match going about 35 minutes. The French love their tag matches. This started out as a fantastically athletic match, with guys busting out sick looking kip ups and working holds with fantastic resistance. Then it turned into a total asskicking. That was due to Manneveau and Gessat, who cut off the ring and beat their opponents like they owed them money. Aubriot and Plantin fired back like any French babyface would, with massive european uppercuts and throwing their opponents around the ring with blindingly fast headscissors. The Blousons ruled the show though, with those nasty short kicks, stomps, kneedrops to the face, and throwing hands. While Aubriot and Plantin were supposed to bring the spectacular, the Blousons had some big moves of their own, including probably the highlight of the match, a crazy headscissor counter into a huge backbreaker. The 3rd fall was just a house of fire with Aubriot and Plantin having enough and just stomping their opponents on their face. It‘s not hard to see from performances like this that the Blousons Noirs act is up there with the Anderson Bros, Misioneros de la Muerte, Ikeda and Ono etc. as an incredible heel unit.

PAS: This was killer stuff, a fine 1964 MOTY representative, even if we only have one match. Noirs have shown signs of it in the other stuff we have, but man was this a master class of showing out for the babyfaces and when given a turn just unleashing a bruising. The opening section was really fast and elaborate, reminding me of a great opening Caida in a lucha match. When it got down and dirty in got down and dirty with the babyface landing big shots and being matched with even bigger stuff Manneveau almost leaps into his uppercuts spinning the babyfaces around with them when they land. He also hit almost a springboard jumping roll up for the for the second fall. The third fall was furious stuff ending with an assault with Manneveau stomping and punching Plantin right on the throat,  he landed a disgusting knee which looked like it crushed his windpipe. The final big bodyslam almost felt like a respite. 

Arabet Said/Abdel Kader vs. Pierre Bernaert/Marcel Manneveau 1/10/65

MD: This was extremely heel-in-peril, with very few periods of extended heat, despite Bernaert and Manneveau sure trying their best and taking every opportunity. In some ways, that's a shame, because you could tell from the get go, this was a really game crowd and they would have near-rioted if there was any actual heat. At one point, some lady swipes Manneveau's leg from the outside and he barely even deserved it at that point. That's a lie. He always deserves it. What a pest. He's almost like a combination of Delaporte's mustache and smugness and willingness to show ass with Bollet's manic energy. He threw himself into everything, including bumping out of the ring repeatedly and hitting a crazy fast spinning and twisting sunset flip to win the first fall. Bernaert was more than happy to play along. He's always a great slugger and so good at being smarmy with the ref and his opponent. Said looked great here, with one extended short arm scissors bit where he kept getting each guy into it and a lot of legitimately funny stuff worked around his hard head. Kader could garner sympathy and had solid striking but he was in there to lose the advantage so Said could get it back. They built to some fun and elaborate heel miscommunication spots late. Bernaert's come a long way and Manneveau is just one of the most entertaining guys in all of the footage.

SR:2/3 falls match going about 38 minutes. This was another good match although slightly overshadowed by the above tag. Bernaert and Manneveau, the heel team, didn‘t fully let loose like the Blousons did above. There was still plenty of asskicking going on, with Arabet Said doing some fun hard head work, and we got treated to some quality wrestling from the faces including some great short arm scissors work. There was a genius moment where Mannevau from the apron tripped somebody up, who fell perfectly into a Bernaert front headlock and set him up for Manneveau to come in with several flying stomps. That is high end heel work just thrown out casually in a match that is basically a fun house show main event by the standards of this stuff.

PAS: Fun match and a look at a slightly different shade of Mannevau. He was much more of a goof here, getting caught in the ropes, spun around by armdrags, stooging for Said hard head. We never got to see him unleash the brutality he showed in the previous match, but he was great in a more overtly comedic role, as was Bernaert who just got angrier and angrier the more he got flummoxed. Love a hard skull gimmick and Said did it well, including Baernert basically breaking his arm trying to forearm him. Great week with two different but hyper enjoyable tag matches. 

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All Time MOTY List Head to Head 2003: Lesnar vs. Mysterio VS. Honda vs. Kobashi

Brock Lesnar vs. Rey Mysterio WWE Smackdown 12/11/03

ER: Talk about perfect match atmosphere, perfect location, perfect opponents; every element that makes a match a classic was right out in the open, and we get the pure glee of watching two of the most charismatic performers of all time do their thing. Mysterio has the hometown crowd on his side, his entire family in the front row, and Lesnar has the unreal nuclear heel charisma that makes this whole thing feel like Little Mac taking on Mike Tyson. 2003 Brock is a top contender for my favorite wrestler of all time, and I challenge anyone to watch his performance in this match and not feel the same. This was the perfect heel for Mysterio to be going up against, and Lesnar knew it. I'm a high voter on modern Lesnar, and still think he's the most unique performer in wrestling, but you watch him in 2003 and notice so many details, so many little touches that he doesn't really bother with anymore. 2003 Lesnar is the complete package, the ultimate T-800, only this Terminator also knows how to stooge wonderfully for a 160 lb. man while being a big bumping lucha base.

The kind of swagger Lesnar brings to the beginning parts of this match was exactly the kind of swagger the crowd wanted to play off. Lesnar works crowds the way a top 80s territory heel would work crowds, and that's something he kind of skips past now. He mocks Rey's size, jaws with fans like it was a 500 attendance house show, makes Rey eat dirt on a couple of lock ups by merely stepping aside, a real jerk. But he's a jerk who is so good at showing ass, and you can see that once Rey initiates a cat/mouse game and tricks Brock into chasing him all around the ring and through. By the time Lesnar realizes that Rey is just trying to gas him out (it was a long and very well done chase), he gets this impotent anger across his face, rips the ring steps from their base with the body language of a frustrated teen (or adult, ahem, couldn't be me) throwing a video game controller. And Rey gets exactly what he wants, takes Lesnar out of his zone, and flies through the ropes with a dropkick that sends Lesnar and the stairs crashing into the aisle. Lesnar is so great at doing atypical bumps, no standard flat back bumps, he falls in a way that is theatrical while realistic, not comically over the top athletic bumps, but large unique bumps that only magnify offense. Not long after his sprawl into the aisle he takes a gloriously arcing bump over the top to the floor, and it's time we just acknowledge that somehow this massive pile of lunchmeat is better than anyone else in wrestling history at bumping to the floor. Oh, and this pile of meat will also kick you in the balls from behind and then laugh about it.

I loved the vulnerability Lesnar shows for Rey's offense, and the creativity he uses in setting it up. It's weird to think Rey's best foil might be a man twice his size and not Eddie or Psicosis, but looking at how Lesnar sets up all of Rey's offense and twists it in little ways at least has to put him in the discussion for best opponent. We get the added danger knowing that anything Rey snaps off could be reversed at any part of the process, so for every time Lesnar is taking a 619 or eating a rana as fine as any lucha base you've seen, there's equal (or better) chance of Lesnar catching one of those ranas and powerbombing Rey into the ringpost, or attempting to powerbomb Rey directly through the ring in the ugliest flattest splat of a bump. 

My favorite little moment of the match was the way Lesnar got into position for the 619. I always appreciate creativity around setting up someone's trademark offense, the way Finlay would be off balance and drop to a knee before regaining his balance just in time to get plastered with Booker T's axe kick, instead of just bending at the waist waiting to take it. It's hard to come up with new ways to drape yourself over the middle rope to take the 619, and Lesnar shows just how smart his wrestling brain is here, setting it up in a way nobody else did and maybe nobody else could have: He's fighting with Rey on the apron, and Rey catches him with a kick as Brock is leaning down, and Brock - one of the most inventive bumpers in wrestling history - falls backwards, through the ropes diagonally into the ring, and in the struggle to gain his balance finds himself draped over the ropes, allowing Rey to pull off his tremendous 619 around the ringpost. It was a brilliant sequence. My only real complaint about the match was the finish could have used one tiny little hope spot from Rey, one little flash, and instead Lesnar flattened him with that powerbomb and bent Rey's body in horrible ways with a stretch muffler. But the complaint is minor, because Rey was getting so horrifically bent that it *should* have been the finish, I just wanted one tiny sliver of hope before the curtains fell.

PAS: Finding hidden gems is pretty much our raison d'etre here at Segunda Caida. You expect to dig up something off of a Japanese hand held or obscure lucha YouTube link, so it's weird to find a hidden gem on WWE Smackdown with two of the most praised wrestlers of the last 20 years, but here we are. This match has a pretty small online footprint, a PWO thread with two comments, no nomination over at the GWE board, it seems to have been forgotten to time. My goodness was this incredible, and honestly a career level match for two guys with incredible careers.

Hometown hero taking a shot at a dominant champ is a classic wrestling trope, and Lesnar is amazing as traveling Ric Flair here. He is great as a taunting jock bully early, the way he says "You're just a little guy Rey" chefs kiss, what a marvelous asshole. I love how Rey just sends him on a wild goose chase in and around the ring, until he gasses and infuriates Brock, and the pissed off rage when he can't get his hands on this little shrimp. He is such a master at portraying terrifying menace and surprising vulnerability. Brock's basing and bumping in this was incredible. It is like someone used a supervillain ray to supersize 1996 Juventud Guerrera. I am not sure anyone ever took a Rey Mysterio headscissors as well as Brock Lesnar, which is fucking bonkers considering how enormous he is. He is so good at eating offense in a way which doesn't make it look cooperative,  he always seems completely flummoxed and out of control when he is getting spun around the ring, but also seconds away from wiping someone out. 

Rey is of course a master, we get some of his incredible timing and athleticism, he gets thrown to the top rope and lands as cleanly as anyone ever has, and rips off a bunch of big spots, and he is also amazing at timing things perfectly to bring the crowd along. I actually had no problems with the finish, Rey gets a bunch of really plausible near falls on Brock with ranas and headscissors and Brock is finally able to to smash him and bend him into a horrible pretzel. I don't think Rey needed another hope spot, because he was less then a minute removed from getting the win. It wasn't one of those drawn out Brock beatings which sometimes drag down his post UFC stuff, it was a lightning strike.


Honda vs. Kobashi Review

Verdict: 

PAS: I am pretty surprised that I am going along with Eric on this one. I was expecting a fun TV match that he was overrating due to his nostalgia for 2003 Brock, but this was a perfect match, with two incredible performances from two all timers. It was actually a similarly structured match to Kobashi vs. Honda, and while Honda might have slightly inched Rey in his performance in that match (no diss here, Honda's performance in that match is my favorite title challenger performance ever), Lesnar's dominant champ performance smokes Kobashi, and I really liked Kobashi in that match. The upstart takes this.

ER: The abrupt finish was my only complaint about this match, but the rest of it was classic pro wrestling with an unbeatable atmosphere and two larger than life performers. Honda/Kobashi had its own great atmosphere, but I thought Lesnar created and thrived within this atmosphere even better. The creativity, execution, and rabid crowd puts this one ahead for me. NEW CHAMP!

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Corn! Bibi! Aledo! Dula! Monsieur Montreal!

Jimmy Dula/Jean Martin vs. Monsieur Montreal/Leon Minisini 11/16/62

MD: Long tag that we miss the start of, and it's good. The last time I saw Dula, I wasn't 100% sure what to make of him. He hit hard but seemed to appeal, ironically, to the crowd after each shot. Here, he held that to between falls and it was pretty funny when he did it and made poor Martin do it with him, plus some fanning antics with the two of them as well, but otherwise, he remained fairly focused and helped to make a 40+ minute tag almost constantly entertaining. He just had this odd way of coming at you, weird angles, a lot of charisma, but hit super hard with his clubbering and headbutts and whatever else, while still being able to work holds. I think he'd improved since last time we saw him. Martin was a persnickety bully, no question, feeling like a guy trapped in a world he didn't make, just being swept along for the ride with Dula and taking it out on his opponents. Big stooging power when he was taking offense too. We won't see more of him, which is a shame. Montreal continues to show me a bit more than I was expecting out of a muscle guy. He works well in this environment, is more than willing to take his opponents' offense, but has some big set pieces to come back with, whether it's a belly to belly toss over the top or big catapults out of the ring. This is it for Minisini too and he was fine and fiery, with big shots when warranted, but a little bit interchangeable with all the others we've seen. Anyway, they kept this moving, kept it entertaining, with Dula almost constantly finding ways to keep himself involved and active. It felt unique in a sea of great, long, hard-hitting tags.

PAS: I thought this was totally excellent. Martin and Dula are cool looking guys, they look like a pair of Sam Cooke bodyguards, and made a really fun team. With Dula as the big bruiser and Martin as more of a frenetic ass kicker. I loved Martin's low angle in ring topes, and he took some fun bumps where he missed them and flew into the crowd. These long tags are very long, but the Martin and Dula team had a bunch of different ways to work exchanges so the time flew by. The finish got super exciting, including an all time great slugfest exchange between Martin and Montreal, it was Lawler vs. Dundee level stuff, with the combos and feints and variety of shots, blew me away. 

Jean Rabut vs. Modesto Aledo 12/14/62

MD: You look back at this footage and it's Modesto Aledo and Tony Charles we really, really wish we had more of. This is it for Aledo though. 3 glorious minutes of he and Rabut really going at it, with clever call back spots (turning the second knee crusher into a shin breaker, turning the second headbutt to the gut off the ropes into a knee lift) and something we've definitely never seen before as he jammed a 'rana, turned it into a power bomb, jammed the press up 'rana attempt, and turned it into a powerbombing backbreaker. This ended with one of the best sunset flips I've ever seen. And that's it for Aledo. Ah well. At least we got a glimpse.

Jacky Corn vs. Cheri Bibi 12/14/62

MD: Totally iconic match that tells you everything you need to know about two of the greatest characters in French Catch. Corn might be the best, most sympathetic seller we've seen, though what holds it all together is how he can turn it on when it's time to fire back. He's excellent technically, though maybe not in the top, top class, but as a total picture wrestler, he's as good as anyone in the footage. He's in those stylist vs stylist matches less because he'd almost be wasted there. You want to see him dominate on the mat early, take a beating in the middle, and them come back with thunderous, battling shots in the stretch. Bibi's come a long way as a tag worker over the years we have footage of and I think that held true in this singles match as well. He's still got that monstrous, almost ever-present look of enjoyment, a bulky way of constantly cheating and leaning on his opponent, but the timing and the purpose of what he does seems tighter and better than what we saw out o f 57 or 58 Bibi. It gave Corn one of the best possible foils to battle against here and they gave us a twenty minute or so match that was focused and pointed, that took the crowd up and brought them down again, and ended clear and clean and definitively in the center of the ring.

SR: 1 Fall match going about 24 minutes. The way I saw this described, I thought this would be like a miracle performance from Bibi in a technical clinic. It wasn‘t that, but it was still pretty great. It was pretty much a mix of tight, simple wrestling and some of the sickest slugging it out in this whole project. Jacky Corn reminds me a bit of a Shinichi Nakano type guy, not the most charismatic and doesn‘t do much fancy, but he will execute his technical moves a little tighter, crank his holds a little harder than everyone else, and engage in some disgustingly violent back and forth strike exchanges. And Cheri Bibi was just a tank here. He didn‘t do anything that made me think he was a genius worker, but he was quite impeccable here as a massive, barrel chested evil dude. The 2nd half of the match is mostly them slugging it out and it was spectacular, with some shots being thrown that would look crazy in a FUTEN match, and both guys lacing each other up with those nasty short kicks. Corn has a lot of things to dish out, at one point he was kicking the shit out of Bibi's shoulder, later he chops him in the throat. And Bibi took and gave as good as he got.

PAS: Pitched fist fight which started at 10 and kept cranking it higher and higher. Bibi looks like Bob Hoskins and has shocking Hoskins in Roger Rabbit level agility when he is taking moves. He is mostly a banger though, hard forearms to the throat, jaw and kidneys, powerful ring shaking slams, he feels like a guy it would absolutely suck to have to wrestle, you are just coming out of it bruised and sore. Corn matches him shot for shot, and even starts exceeding him in violence including some razor chops right to the throat, before finally dumping him with a fast violent tombstone for the duke. This actually felt like a Johnny Valentine match to me, which is about as big a compliment as I can give. This snatches that 1962 slot from Aubriot vs. Bernaert.

ER: You know a match is stiff when the referee works as stiff as the participants. My favorite part of the match - and the most exquisitely filmed shot of the entire match - was the referee throwing some disgusting stomps at Cheri Bibi's wrist and fingers as Bibi's hand gripped the bottom rope. It really made me notice how fearless the ref was the rest of the match, whenever he had to step in between these two to break up a skirmish in the ropes. This guy had uppercuts being thrown inches from his face and he had no problems getting his body in there. Now obviously the referee wasn't the star here, but it certainly added to the presentation for me. Bibi is our favorite Buzz Sawyer/Bob Hoskins hybrid (Buzz Hoskins?) who throws punishing uppercuts, hard combos (love his right punch to the body/left clubbing shot to the back, great rhythm), and full arm shots to the body. His body shots are basically standing clotheslines, a straight arm thrown from different angles about a broad section of Corn's body, and I suspect we'd see some mighty bruising if we had color footage available. 

French Catch tecnicos are always impress me with the amount of punishment they can take, always building to a big comeback, but Corn's selling really put over Bibi's beating. I love how both men sell in the ropes, and how they sell each strike appropriately. The bumping is never over the top, and they don't overuse the bigger bumps to put over bigger strikes. I love the butt drop sell after a particularly nasty uppercut, and each man used it once, really a great way to separate and get across the severity of a particular strike, which wouldn't be as special if they had done it throughout. The tombstone piledriver that Corn finishes Bibi with was on the shortlist of most violent things we've seen in this entire series. The drop happened below the camera line, but you can see where Bibi's head was in relation to Corn's knees, and the way he dropped down fast you can tell Bibi really got crunched. Somebody might have beaten Corn to the drop though, as Bibi's big round head is already square on top of his big round shoulders. This match takes over the crown as our 1962 All Time MOTY, in our list linked below. New champs are always a cause for celebration, and these two earned it. 

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: BILLY CATANZARO! Duranton! Chaisne! Le Magorou! Mantopoulos! Louis!

 Michel Saulnier vs. Jetty Coster 06/03/60

SR: JIP match where get the last 8 minutes of a time limit draw. Jetty Coster, what a name. Saulnier was young and lean at 24 years old. Coster was bigger, but Saulnier was relentless and seemed to be tiring him out. Some quite amazing fast moving sequences here, including Saulnier backflipping and then popping up with a headbutt, and some neat pin attempts. This about served the point of being a fun scientific wrestling exhibition while folks sat there waiting to throw cigarettes at Robert Duranton.

MD: We get around 8 minutes of this. They'd already gone 22 or so. It's good action with a clever callback or two even in what we have. There's were a couple of great bursts of speed and complex spots, including Saulnier hitting a leap up to a victor roll though he had to grab the rope to do so. My favorite bit was a little later when Coster dodged another Victory roll but sort of shifting himself between the raindrops so Saulnier had nothing to hang on to. I've never quite seen that before. Otherwise, this could have used a little bit more focus. As it went towards the time-limit draw, there was a little bit of escalation with forearms but it was mostly Saulnier containing Coster by hanging onto an arm. This was our first look at Coster and he definitely hung with and based for Saulnier. We won't see him again so that's going to be my only impression of him.

Robert Duranton vs. Michel Chaisne 06/03/60

SR: 1 fall match going about 25 minutes. Last time we saw Duranton he was flamboyant. Now, he has returned with a bleach blonde head, a robe and an equally arrogant male valent. I would say it feels novel compared to his earlier appearance if we hadn‘t seen a murderers row of whacky characters ranging from masked hangmen to literal Quasimodo and motherfucking Spartacus on TV in the last few months. This was another heated match with Chaisne bringing the wrestling and Duranton bringing the cheapshots and swaggering. There were some interesting moments around his valet who had a few audience members going at him and even got into the ring to get thrown around by Chaisne one time. There was also one well executed ref spots that stood out because I am used to ref spots coming across as really fakey. Really liked the backbreakers Duranton would hit followed by those nasty short kicks. Chaisne doesn‘t sell on the level to make this an epic match but we get Duranton finishing him off in a quite brutal way. France sure wasn‘t afraid of having nasty bomb throwing for a finish.

MD: We've seen this exact match up back in 58 and at that point, it was entertaining but Duranton hadn't quite worked it all out. Here, his act was complete. He now had a valet in a tuxedo that he worked into his match as a prop. He was haughty before, but it was turned up a notch or two. And maybe most important of all, the wrestling was smoother and he didn't do anything outside of his physical limits. Chaisne is just an excellent stylist: right place, right time, right moves. He also had a familiarity with Duranton and played into his opponents gimmick: escaping holds by mussing his hair, going tit for tat with revenge spots mimicking Duranton's cheapshots or backbreakers, coming back from Duranton's peppering kicks with a big face twister. This was over 25 minutes over the two falls and through a mix of familiar spots and new ones, through working in the valet and the ref, through Duranton's reactions and general meanness and Chaisne's superior prowess and perseverance, it's entertaining the whole way through. You almost can't imagine it not being so. When the valet is finally most fully involved, as Chaisne whips him into a tied-in-the-ropes Duranton, you can see the delight on the faces of the fans. Duranton gets a lucky reversal towards the end of the first fall, dumping Chaisne over the top on a third monkey flip attempt, and that's basically the match, but it was fun while it lasted.

PAS: Chaisne is a bit Vanilla but a really skilled wrestler who can deliver some pop, which really makes him the perfect opponent for over the top characters like Kaiser or Duranton. Duranton was so great in this match, he was like Adrian Street's daddy, a flamboyant prancer who could turn into a vicious killer at the drop of a bow. There was some great stooge spots, Duranton walking away from a dropkick attempt to pose, only to get dropkicked in the mush, and some really nasty stuff like Duranton sitting on Chaisne's face and smashing him with body shots. I thought the finish felt a bit flat, we have seen some vicious beatdown finishes, and while the exchanges were great the actually moves which put Chaisne down weren't at the level I expect for French Catch KO blows. Still this had a ton to love, and I am all in on Duranton. 

Billy Catanzaro/Gilbert Le Magorou vs. Vasilios Mantopoulos/Francis Louis 8/19/66

SR: 2/3 falls match going about 35 minutes. Billy Catanzaro, baby. Regrettably we only got about 4 more matches of the man who started the craze in the French archive, but Billy Catanzaro is really making every single one count so far. This was right on the awesome match train. It was basically the worlds greatest IWE juniors tag with a bunch of elegant arm lock throws and takeovers interspersed with guys kicking the shit out of each other. Catanzaro was already a grimacing veteran heel here and while you’d love to see him work more straight matches like the Cesca bout, he is fantastic in the Finlay role. He does about a 100 awesome things in this match. The nasty face stomps, the stiff short kicks, the unexpected bitchslaps, a super fast spinning armlock that looked like it would pop your shoulder, some nasty face grinding, the way he got his foot stuck in the ropes when he tried breaking up a pinfall... at one point he just went and punched Louis in the face to break up a pinfall, which is a sure mark of an all time great. I also loved his missed european uppercuts. Gilbert Le Magorou felt a bit like he was Catanzaros trainee, as he looked a bit younger and did similar things to Catanzaro but a bit less extravagant. That said he was extremely solid and never a let up, but this was the Catanzarro show through and through. He looked just great at both the actual wrestling as well as the stooging and bumping for his opponents. 

Mantopoulos and Louis on the other were a great pair of tecnicos. Mantopoulos is of course someone with a million tricks, but I also really liked his elegant wristlock reversals early on. That kind of opening wristlock work is is hard to make compelling when you’ve seen geeks like Zack Sabre Jr. doing it to death but it looked classy here. Mantopoulos also has some of the more esoteric moves you’ll see in this project including that awesome swinging backbreaker that Julien Morice did in a World of Sport match once and  the GIF of it became semi-famous on certain image boards. Francis Louis was the more straight forward side of the technico team and while not as flashy as his partner I really appreciated his dedication to just wrestle and throw brutal European uppercuts when it was needed. The match had a few heat sections that were extremely well done, particularly all the interference spots from Catanzaro/Le Magouru, and a great moment where Catanzaro took a fall with a tombstone piledriver, immediately going for the same move in the next fall with his opponent barely escaping. The match built to some brilliant quick rope running exchanges, and most importantly there was a ton of asskicking going on. I have no idea how these guys just clubbed each other with thudding European uppercuts straight to the jaw and nasty short kicks for +30 minutes and never slowed down but I loved every second. For a fast workrate-like match it got pretty nasty towards the end with Gilbert looking like he was about to get KO’d by Louis. I would’ve liked Louis to finish the match as he was looking like the toughest skinny lightweight on earth as he kept smashing dudes with those uppercuts. But instead he tagged in Mantopoulos and the match ended in a pretty esoteric way. That said the journey is the destination when it comes to European wrestling and this match was a 35 minute monolith of brilliant wrestling. Which begs the question, excluding BattlArts and Futen is France the greatest place for junior tag wrestling of all?

PAS: Damn did this rule. It is such a bummer we have so little of Catanzaro, with almost a decade in between appearances. He is a very different wrestler here, much more of a trick veteran than an athletic marvel, but he is tremendous in every variation we have seen him. Mantopoulos is a fancy dude, his spinning wrist lock reversals, actually looked fast and violent, and that back breaker variation Sebastian mentioned was totally dope looking. Both rudo were great at feeding for the fancy tecnico offense, and would unload when they got a chance.  I loved the different ways the heels would get tied up in the ropes,  great bit of stooging stuff and a great way to for the faces to get their revenge. We get our traditional violent uppercut exchanges, with Le Magouru especially really getting great torque with his hips before throwing them, it was like a Joe Frazier left hook. Finish was a bit silly for a match with such violence with both heels getting tied up in balls and counted out, but this was still an all timer. 

MD: Thirty-five minutes of brilliant pro wrestling. At times, this had some of the fastest, most consistent, most elaborate chained spots we've seen as the heels keep feeding for Mantopoulos and Louis' takedowns and holds. It was often so quick and creative that the camera didn't know what to follow. That sums up the match as well as anything else. The heels weren't in charge much but they made the most of it when they were. Catanzaro was such an amazing jerk, one of the greatest characters in wrestling history, dancing and prancing around with excitement, making elated faces, as he laid in forearms, kicks, and stomps (immediately to beg off if he lost the advantage). He could go from sheer brutality to getting his foot caught in the rope on a dime. Le Magorou had a slightly out of shape junior goon look to him and he made for a great whipping boy for Catanzaro whenever they get foiled or clowned. They hit enough of their cheating and double-teaming to make it all credible and to make it matter all the more when it didn't work out for them. Louis always looks good, but Mantopoulos just goes above and beyond. He possessed great physical awareness in how he ducked a forearm or spun out before a takedown. It's as if the world moved half a step slower than him, which worked not just for wild spots but for seizing a normal advantage. Honestly though, they all went so fast when it was warranted that most exchanges started with a believable little fake out attempt. They went little with the fake-outs or Catanzaro's mean mugging, but they went big too, whether it was Catanzaro hitting two full nelson spins into backbreakers only for Mantopoulos to tag in and reverse the third with a Robinson backbreaker and then hit conjuro style spinning trapping backbreakers on both guys or when they trap both heels in the ropes and hit multiple alley oop body splashes on them. The back half of the match contained more of those elaborate set pieces and the crowd loved all of it, building finally to one of the more unique finishes you'll ever see.

ER: I loved this, and how could you not!? This is just the pinnacle of athleticism and personality through pro wrestling. I genuinely don't think there is any acrobatic wrestling better than this, nothing today compares to this. There are great athletes today, but none of them can work with the unpredictability and creativity of the men here. The unpredictability is the key, as you just never have any real idea of where some of these guys are going with their material, and yet nobody ever seems lost, nobody ever seems to be waiting too long in position, nobody does anything with their face or body to indicate they know what is happening next. Their misdirection skills are incredible, nothing in sight is telegraphed. It's incredible. 

This was such a thrill, with an excellent rudo team and two incredibly fun and capable tecnicos. Catanzaro is a legend of ours at this point, and it's great we now have two matches of his, a decade apart, with such different aspects of his abilities on display. This was like a hyperdrive William Regal house show performance from him, stooging around while throwing uppercuts so hard they looked like Louis and Mantopoulos weren't leaping to sell them, instead being lifted by force. He and Gilbert Le Magorou are such an excellent team of single strap stooges, and it feels like Catanzaro is so magnetic that he kept outshining the also excellent Magorou. Magorou looked and wrestled like the best possible Oliver Platt in Ready to Rumble. He had a belly and great floppy hair and Catanzaro knew a ton of different ways to fall into the ropes. Each seemed like they had cool ways to fall on the bottom, middle, and top rope, and knew a few ways to get tangled in the ropes (two heels both tangled by their ankles in the ropes is the kind of thing I picture a John Tatum/Buddy Rose team doing). Mantopoulos is a tecnico who is impossible to take your eyes off of, with some of the most beautiful step up headscissors, hardest dropkicks, has a few of these incredible pendulum backbreakers (like Norman Smiley's pendulum bodyslam, but ending on a backbreaker), and a killer spot where he vaults off Mantopoulos's knee, kicks over his head, and lands in front of him on his back just to hit a wicked upkick. We haven't really had a disappointing batch of French Catch yet, but getting brilliance like this match is rare. 

Unsurprisingly, we are adding this tag match as the 1966 representative on our All Time MOTY List. 

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1996 Match of the Year

Mitsuhara Misawa/Jun Akyima vs. Akira Taue/Toshiaki Kawada AJPW 12/6/96

ER: This was a legendary tag match among tape traders, often billed as "the greatest tag match of all time" by people who may have been prone to hyperbole. It's a big part of the Misawa/Kawada feud, as this was the finals of the Real World Tag League, which had been won by Misawa and Kobashi for the prior three years. In two of those years they beat Kawada and Taue, but in 1995 Kawada finally got a pinfall win over Misawa and now was his chance to do it again, and finally win a Tag League with Taue. You knew going in that the strategy was going to be to separate the less experienced Akiyama from Misawa, and get revenge on the younger wrestler for pinning Kawada for the tag belts. But for me, Taue is the star of this match. Taue is the guy paving the way for Kawada to get his big win, he's the guy separating Akiyama and Misawa, he's the guy blocking off Misawa from saving Akiyama from Kawada's abuse. Akiyama has his own great performance down the stretch, sacrificing his body multiple times in an attempt to buy Misawa more recovery time. 

It's tough to write about a match that is one of the most written about Japanese matches of the 90s, so I'll just cover some of what I love about it. And a big thing I love, is Taue. Taue just stands out as a beast the entire match, I love how his "clumsiness" adds to his offense, the way he doesn't have athletic grace but doesn't let that get in the way of inflicting pain. He adds such a big extra SHOVE to all of his impact, the way he keeps sending Misawa and Akiyama flying with dropkicks to the chest, those big running boots where his foot follows the head all the way to the mat. He breaks out that rare Taue tope where all style points just go out the window and he's just a body balled up and flying through the ropes, and I'm not sure I've ever seen better chokeslams in a match. Taue doesn't get the height that Giants get on their slams, but he throws them down like he's spiking a football. He hits several nodowa otoshi in this match, and each one looks like he's sending Akiyama or Misawa onto a bed of concrete. It's the late release point that makes it look so painful, and when he finally chokeslams Akiyama off the apron to the floor, we buy that it's something that will keep Akiyama out of action long enough for the Army to suitably weaken Misawa. 

Akiyama was a great crash test dummy, younger than anyone in the match and looking for his own big RWTL moment. His prior teams with Takao Omori didn't make the top half of Tag League standings, and now he's in the finals teaming with the guy who had been on the winning side of this tournament the past 4 years. This story was not going to be about him, the crowd was really here to pull for Kawada vs. Misawa, but I love the way Akiyama did anything in his power to give Misawa a 5th straight Tag League title. After he gets strangled off the apron by Taue, he mostly becomes a guy intentionally stumbling his way into the match knowing that he won't be able to do much but distract the Army long enough for Misawa to get his wind. It's one of those great babyface performances like you'd see a few years prior from Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, and the Army continues dispatching of him in uglier and uglier ways. Akiyama probably did at least a few years of damage to his neck in this one match, eating suplexes on the top of his head and one disgusting German that couldn't have landed him more on his neck if it were the only aim, and finally a back suplex/nodowa otoshi that turns him into a non-factor in the match (and he's probably lucky it didn't turn him into a vegetable). 

Misawa vs. Kawada was the big story the fans wanted to see, and their exchanges were certainly Misawa vs. Kawada exchanges. Kawada's kicks looked fine as ever this match, and he punished both with hard kicks to the chest and back, short kicks right to the forehead and face, hard stomps to the back of the head, running kicks where his boot plants under the chin and stays there. He splats to his back after Misawa elbows and comes up gunning, and I thought it was so cool how calm and in control Kawada seemed right from his ring entrance. Kawada and Taue came out for this match looking like it was in the bag, and they showed they had the perfect strategy to win. Kawada was a real master at close nearfall selling his move selling throughout was excellent. There's a great moment where he takes two straight German suplexes and stands to his feet, only to do a dead man's walk directly through the ropes to the floor. For a good 2 minutes of the match Kawada is selling being dead on his feet, his body only firing on muscle memory, and it lead to one of the great nearfalls of 90s All Japan. Misawa works his own magical nearfalls down the home stretch, barely getting out of Kawada's series of folding powerbombs, rolling his body just enough to shift the leverage and escape, until he finally cannot.  

Is this the greatest tag match of all time, as it was billed to us tape traders who were new to Japanese wrestling? No, it's not. Is it the best tag of 1996? For now, we're going to say that it is. But there will be challengers. 

PAS: The mid 90s All Japan main event crew had the highest floor of any group of wrestlers ever, even random six-man matches and tags were of really high quality. This match was right at the ceiling and their absolute peak doesn't capture me the way absolute peaks of other all timers do. Still this was excellent, excellent stuff and had a really layered nifty story. Kawada at this point was an all time legendary athlete who had never been able to reach the pinnacle of his sport. Misawa had been standing in his way, especially in the RWTL and he was determined to finally capture that brass ring. 

However his triumph had a shadow over it: Kawada still wasn't able to truly best Misawa, he would often lose exchanges and ends up getting dumped on his head and knocked silly by a German suplex. This was John Elway going 12 for 22, 153 with a pick and no TDs in Superbowl 32, he finally got his ring, but he needed Terrell Davis to get 157 and 3 TDs to do it.  Luckily Kawada had his Davis.

Taue needed to come in and dominate and he really did, just a career performance wrecking Akyama with the chokeslam to the floor, hurling his body like a club at his opponents and weakening the gazelle so the head of the pride could get the kill. Misawa is the greatest wounded animal in wrestling history, no one has ever died on his shield better, and I loved Akiyama as the phenom who just isn't fully ready for the hottest spotlight. I did think that the match really should have ended on the first powerbomb, the second just felt like repeating the spot again, and didn't have the same dramatic finality as that first one, small nitpick on an otherwise near perfect match.

ALL TIME MOTY MASTER LIST

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