Tuesday is French Catch: Khan! Gasparini! Voinet! Kasbarian!Straub! Gugliementi!

Iska Khan vs. Jean Gasparini 7/11/65

MD: We haven't seen Gasparini since 57, when he was thoroughly trounced by Hayes. He's still the game guy, a complete Italian stereotype (the commentator was talking about the crowd throwing tomatoes at him that he'd use for sauce later post match). He reminds me of Jason Schwartzman from the most recent season of Fargo. That makes him a better foil for Khan than Hayes, probably, and this was fun for what it was. Khan's quasi Charlie Chan act, with lots of bowing and chopping and clever foot usage to get out of holds, was definitely over. He also always has a bit more of an edge than you'd expect. At one point, after Gasparini was working nerve holds in and out of the ropes (including recoiling Khan neck first off of them in that old French way that's no longer used now), Khan repositioned to send him sailing out and then charged after him with some brawling on the floor. Gasparini had to resort to cheapshots and stalling for the most part, but he was good at it. Khan's got mad at the end as Gasparini tried to keep him out of the ring and fired back with chops and a final sequence which apparently used secret ancient marital arts to completely paralyze his opponent. He had to undo it after the match. Entertaining stuff with just a bit of an edge.

SR: 1 fall match going about 15 minutes. Gasparini is a rugged looking heel with a mustache who likes to hit shots to the body. This started as a fun tour of Khans spots before Gasparini decided to crank up the violence, even brawling Khan on the floor and swinging the ring steps at him. In turn, Khan started busting out the chops. Felt a little short (Gasparini went down pretty fast) but I enjoyed it.

PAS: I really enjoy watching Khan, he has a bunch of fun chops and eye pokes. Gasparini is a fun pasta and red sauce stereotype Italian, I just wish he hit a little hard. He was throwing body shots and I wanted a little more marinara on them. It did end up getting pretty heated at the end with Khan and Gasparini throwing bigger shots before Khan dropped him for good. I dug this, love Khan, but it was pretty unremarkable overall

Gil Voinet vs. Georges Kasbarian 7/11/65

SR:1 fall match going about 15 minutes. These are two guys with excellent build. Match-wise there was nothing outstanding they grappled a little and Kasbarian started cheapshotting and Voinet fired back and then they took it home. It felt like a match between two body guys.

MD: Like what we often see, but bigger. Both of these guys were definitely heavyweights and they still worked things with holds and escapes. Everything just had more oomph behind it, more shoulder blocks, more slams. Kasparian was quick to go to shortcuts and quick to complain when legitimate escapes got cut off. When Voiney ultimately got mad, his fiery blows were massive and the crowd well knew it. The technical bits weren't as smooth (even when Voiney would do something really impressive like cartwheel out or when Kasparian would try a huge flying headscissors out of an armbar only to get jammed and shrugged off) but they still absolutely worked. Voiney won with an airplane spin but his fireman's carry gutbuster was probably the most impressive single thing in the match.

Vasilios Mantopolous vs. Daniel Noced 7/16/65

SR: About 3 minutes are shown. This was an episode were the pre match on paper looked more exciting than the main event, but it seems these guys weren‘t that familiar with each other to produce a match similiar to Noced/Prince. They hit some hard uppercuts and fast rope running and I enjoyed that.

MD: This is kind of a weird few minutes. It had a few good spots and an ok energy, and maybe it's just because we didn't get the majority of the match, but at times they seemed to match up oddly. There were some starts and stops and some of the acrobatics (like Noced trying to land on his feet out of a monkey flip) weren't at all hit clean. I imagine if we had the longer holds earlier in the match, this would have still been pretty good though.

Luc Straub vs. Giacomo Gugliemetti 7/16/65

SR: 1 fall match going 30 minutes. Matt was wary about this going in, but I thought it was decent catch. They worked simple holds, with enough resistance and intensity that I got into the match. I dug Guguliemetti here, liked how he worked a chinlock, liked how he sold Straubs first chop as if his eardrum was shattered, really liked how he clutched his own arm after hitting Straub to put over how hard he was hitting. Straub didn‘t do any goofy stuff, no judo either though. Bit long match and needed more escalation but I enjoyed myself.

MD: I have to admit, I was sort of dreading this one, and that's before I knew it was going to be a draw. I did know it went around 30 minutes and I knew that Straub's been pretty tough to watch in tags lately. The judo thing only takes you so far, especially in tags where there's a lot of shtick and comedy. This was wrestled straight, though, and it was solid. I'm not sure I needed thirty minutes of it, but it was solid. They would build to blows (with Guguliemetti losing his cool) and then take it back down. It never really boiled over, though, as Straub would fire back but then want a handshake and reset into holds again. What worked was the struggle of the holds, the selling in the moment and immediately thereafter, and the variety that Straub, especially, brought to the table. They didn't really do long working in and out of holds, but instead used a wide variety: a rolling leg nelson, cobra clutch, a short arm scissors, the Mascaras headscissors (which we now know predates him), a body scissors, hammerlocks, Gugulimetti's arm-switch stranglehold, etc. With a couple of fun escapes and dropkicks by Straub here and there and the strike exchanges fun even if, like I said, it never boiled over. If we were beggars and not choosers with this footage, we'd probably rank this fairly high. As it is, it's a half hour of very competent wrestling that never quite feels great.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day:Khan! Gentilly! Amor! Rouanet! Horst! DiSanto!

Monsieur Montreal vs. Jack Rouxel 9/15/61

MD: We get the last 5 minutes of 20 here. It's our first look at Mr. (Marcel) Montreal. Pretty straightforward. The crowd was against Rouxel and he, after quickly escaping the full nelson we start with, just mauled Montreal. Forearms and simple throws and a few kicks for good measure. I half through the ref should call it at one point (he gave Rouxel a warning instead) but then Montreal ducked a running forearm and Rouxel went sailing over the top and the entire match turned. Montreal got plenty of revenge, to the point where both guys seemed fairly blown up from all the slams, before locking in a bearhug for the win. We have a Rouxel/Bernaert vs Sola/Montreal tag in a few weeks that sounds like a lot of fun.

Iska Khan/Serge Gentilly vs .Yves Amor/Pierre Rouanet 9/15/61

MD: Not a lot of brand new fooage this week. Just the JIPs, I think. But we're going through this stuff as we encounter it for the most part. This was a very fun tag with a lot of fun pairings. Amor and Khan are both such interesting wrestlers to watch, very talented, multifaceted despite their sort of singular gimmicks, both able to lay it in and go at it when they're not doing the highly affectated stuff. Both men were consumate performers with great connections with the crowd. Gentilly and Rouanet worked extremely well together, lots of quick exchanges and holds that were either repeatedly hung onto or escaped from, including an excellent hammerlock/flying mare exchange. Likewise, Amor vs Gentilly was a lot of fun with Amor's size and reach advantage up against Gentilly's slickness. What we saw of Khan vs Rouanet was a slugfest as much as not. When the heels decided to finally act like heels, they controlled the ring well and demolished Khan's back. As the guy who ate the fall has to start in the ring to begin the next one, it let Khan work from underneath a bit to get a quasi-hot tag and the comeback was fun. The last fall was back and forth, with a couple of flashy things like a cool triple strike combo by Gentilly and Khan's stepover spin kicks, including the one that knocked Amor out of the ring to end the match, and great straightforward ones like Amor's kneeshots in the ropes. Good mix of straight up work and fun character stuff here.

Remy Bayle vs. Al Gamain 10/5/61

SR: We get about 1 minute of this featuring lots of heated slugging and a cool spinning canadian backbreaker finish. Wouldn‘t have minded to see 2 or 3 minutes more.

MD: Just a minute of this, but they went hard for the finish. Good striking. Gamain had a great, abrupt headbutt to the gut, and won it with an over the shoulder backbreaker whirlybird which was nice to see.

Kuti Nador vs. Michel Allary 10/5/61

SR: 13 minute match going one fall. I am pretty sure Kuti Nador is Hungarian wrestler Micha Nador, since that guys real name is actually Kuti. Nador I think was mostly active in Germany and Austria. It‘s nice to have a full match if him in his prime. He also showed up in NJPW in the early 80s, somehow. He seemed like a cool worker and I would‘ve liked to see him in a 30 minute match like they gave every other worker. This was face vs. Face, with them going through the usual solid wrestling with Nador having some unique twists on the established holds and counters. Then, Nador decided to work over Allarys face with thai clinch knees and lock in a nasty sleeper. The he just dropped him with a gnarly piledriver. That was unexpected for sure. They get heated for a minute before a nasty bump occurs and the match is thrown out.

MD: We're in tournament mode here, I guess, as this only goes 10 minutes. It's a good ten minutes though. Nador is bigger and relies upon his strength. He's a little awkward but has just enough technique to be extra dangerous. Allary is super technical and generally the aggressor here which serves him well right to the end when he KOs himself through the ropes in a charge. Good stuff up til there, however, with them trading hammerlocks, a Nador full nelson, and some nice leg holds by Allary. He had one great rolling takedown into a short leg scissors of sorts (including using his knuckle to grind the knee). Nador was generally able to power out though. They escalated to bombs (a Nador bodyslam tombstone followed by an Allary neckbreaker and heated strikes), before Allary went sailing out. Good, quick sampler if you wanted to show someone a bit of the style.

Lino Di Santo vs. Horst Hoffmann 10/5/61

SR: 1 fall match going 20 minutes. It‘s Horst Hoffmann, baby. Hoffmann may be familiar to people from his work in AJPW in the 70s. He was a young Mitsuharu Misawas favourite and inspired him to wear the emerald green tights. This Hoffmann was in his 4th year as a pro wrestler, but he was quite the specimen. In Germany, Hoffmann was promoter Gustl Kaisers boy and basically The Man. Needless to say having this match alone is a blessing. And it‘s a very good bout. Hoffmann really wrestles like a bear. He would wrench the shit out of Di Santo and just throw him around. After so many cartoonishly evil fake Germans, it was nice to see a real stoic German being a straight up bulldozer. Hoffmann didn‘t do anything evil but you get the sense he was demolishing the Italian. At one point, Di Santo denied a wristlock escape and Horst just kneed him in the gut. Hoffmann also had this amazing overhead suplex that looks far beyond the scope of normal humans. I thought Di Santo wrestled a great match, too. He really put over the overwhelming force of his opponent and fired back with big impact moves of his own, including that sick looking neckbreaker of this. There was some cool grappling, too. By the end Hoffmann was just dropping the Italian hard over and over. When the time runs out, it feels like Di Santo survived a storm.

MD: I don't think we have much more, if any, of young Hoffman in the footage and it's a little strange as Di Santo was going way out of his way to showcase him here. There was a lot to showcase too. He was a beast that brought a lot to the table. Di Santo would keep holds on (like a hammerlock) to show how many ways Hoffman knew to try to escape it and he kept things equally interesting by going for frustrated shots first and having a bunch of stuff, a good backbreaker, a neckbreaker, etc. Hoffman had it all though. Size and power. Pretty solid strikes. Some interesting holds like a bow and arrow. And big, big throws including one of the first gutwrenches we've seen and his fall away slam. This stayed more even than you'd think, even though Hoffman had a clear advantage on points by the end. Just a good showcase with a solid journeyman highlighting a younger guy with huge talent.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Bollet! Khan! Lecoq! Said!

James McTiffin vs. Johnny Stein 10/2/59

SR: JIP. We get the last 7 minutes of this. Looked like a typical slow paced heatmongering Stein bout, although I liked McTiffin a lot here. He looked good working an indian deathlock and he had this really cool double lifting armlock. He also had a guy at ringside playing the bagpipes whenever he got in trouble, so that is stylish. Another thing that stood out is how he threw Stein with a bearhug for the KO. 

MD: We get a little over 8 minutes of this, JIP. Stein's the best guy in this footage that I'm really not interested in watching. He does everything right and isn't even that dry in his stalking, put off manner, but the matches tend to be very long and a little of him goes a long way. This had contrast at least and I bet all of the early comedy spots we didn't get were enjoyable. What we had here was a series of holds with the bagpipes rousing McTiffin to fight back. Both guys showed fire, McTiffin with revenge punishing and Stein hitting back to regain the advantage, and there was a clear sense that things were likely over when McTiffin rolled back with the flying inverted knucklelock but this was one I was glad we only had the tail end of.

Andre Bollet vs. Iska Khan 10/2/59

SR: 2/3 Falls match going about 35 minutes. This was all about the singular charisma of Andre Bollet. Both guys come in looking like megastars, Khan in his dress, Bollet in a robe that looks like a sports jacket. Bollet is every raunchy heel character you‘ve ever seen turned up to 11 here. He threatens to punch audience members, he slips when he attempts to make his grandiose entrance into the ring, people blow smoke at him through the ropes. When the match begins he is your drunk uncle causing a mess at your sisters marriage as everyone nervously waits for a fight to break out. He slips some more, he flips the announce table for no reason. It‘s an amazing show and the match may have peaked early there. Khan is quite great as a contained gentleman taking on this walking menace. It rules that they let a short asian guy with a Hitler stache be a superstar. The match was a bullshit tour de force, although there was some really fun wrestling, and plenty of Khan going to town on Bollet with those chops. There were a few great bumps, including Bollet getting launched into the audience, and taking a headfirst dive into the turnbuckle. There were also some nutshots which end up weirdly no-sold. For this kind of match it didn‘t build to the kind of epic crescendo it needed but it was certainly a masterclass in showmanship. 

MD: Bollet was a star. There's no other way to put it. We haven't seen him for two years (nor Khan) but he jaunts out to the ring, which had a large open area at ringside for some reason, and just does multiple laps around the ring, basking in it and getting heat. That's basically the whole match, from the moment he arrives to the moment he steals the flowers meant for Khan at the end (only to have Khan smash him with him as the footage cuts off). Between the second and third fall, he threatens Khan with the spit cup he'd been using, causing Khan to brandish a stool at him. Leading up to the end of the second fall, he had taken so much punishment that he just sat in the corner as the fans counted along with the ref, again and again and again until he suckered Khan in finally. It wasn't some grand plan, just sheer persistence. That was Bollet. He stuck to the bit past any reasonable point and the fans loved every second of it. Khan, here, was constantly on too. He was an amiable gent, but every time Bollet tried a tactic, he'd get almost immediate revenge. If Bollet snuck in a low blow knee in the corner (and it's worth noting that this isn't Puerto Rico; we haven't seen many fouls at all so far), he'd return the favor. If Bollet bit his hand, Khan would bite his ear, and so on. It made for a less than even match but certainly for an entertaining one. We have so much Bollet ahead of us, against Hayes and Hunter, against Drapp, against L'Ange Blanc, against Leduc and Gastel (and how does that team work?), against Carpentier so many times. He was a star and now we're stuck with him.

PAS: I could write an entire review about what Bollet does before the bell. He struts around the ring with his hands in the air, climbs over one fan to take a swing a a fan in the bleachers, does a pratfall into the ring, covers his ears with his hands,  leaves the ring because the fans keep booing him, wipes his sweaty head on the ref's shit and dickishly shadowboxes in the corner. He is on a thousand and keeps it rolling, he throws a big overhead belly to belly but flips his way to the ropes catches his foot and gets hit with a clothesline. There is another great spot where Bollet topes Khan in the corner, and goes for it again and takes a crazy bump through the corner. Khan was great in this too, he is all Mongolian chops and cool faces and is a pretty perfect foil for all of Bollet's stuff. The match ends with an orgy of cheating, nut shots from both, biting, and Bollet putting on a front facelock/fishook combo which was just an awesome bit of assholishness. What a blast this was, one of the most purely enjoyable matches in the entire project. 

Pierre Lecoq vs. Arabet Said 10/10/59

PAS: I thought this was tremendous. Lecoq is a new name and he is a tenacious technical heel. He spends most of the match gripping on to a hammer lock like a drowning man with a life preserver. Constantly going back to it, grinding it in, twisting the wrist and fingers. Said finds a lot of different ways to squirm out of it, and eventually it comes down to a great slugfest as these matches always do. Said really lays into Lecoq who seemed out of his depth standing and trading , and Said eventually lays him out with a series of nasty bodyslams into the ropes. Lecoq was landing weird every time, and it really looked like something that could rip ligaments. 

SR: 1 Fall match going a bit over 20 minutes. Another two names you‘ve never heard of deliver an awesome match of the day. Lecoq was balding in the corners and wearing a singlet, and had the look of a real tough as nails dude. He had a real singular focus on grounding his opponent and then either bending the fuck out of his fingers or delivering a straight up beating. Said was this wiery guy who had some fast wrestling movements that he pulled off in a very uncooperative way. You can find 2 guys like these in any amateur wrestling team in the country, back then they had the choice of either living a normal life after their amateur career or going pro and becoming awesome wrestlers working these spectacles, today there‘s no money to be made in local circuit wrestling so these guys all live normal lives now and we don‘t get scrappy violent fights like this anymore. I think Lecoq didn‘t even do a single move in this match besides the hammerlock but I loved him. He was also pretty great at stiffening up and flopping around when Said unleashed his violent retaliations. There‘s another fun crowd brawling segment where audience members were looking to have a go at Lecoq, and the finish was really fun as Lecoq takes a series of brutal slams. He is able to get out of the pin but has to quit the match as it seems his ribs got crushed, something I‘ve also seen in amateur wrestling matches.

MD: I've been waiting for a match like this for a while. We've seen little glimpses or moments of it before, but here it was, a match that was almost entirely built upon body part targeting. Look, it's reductive to point at body part targeting/selling as a true sign of psychology/storytelling as we define it in wrestling but it's an easy trope and something that can be used to great effect and we just haven't seen it almost at all in the footage. If we did see it, like in the Bollet vs Khan match after Bollet tossed Khan and hurt his arm, it was usually just for a minute or two and then they'd move on to some other focus. This entire match was built upon Lecoq grounding Said by working on his arm and Said breaking free, getting distance, and firing back. At times, especially early, he had to wrestle defensively, avoiding Lecoq's grasps with one arm behind his back and darting through his legs or dancing around away from him and ending with a drop toehold onto the ropes as if he was going to hit a 619. Most of his hold attempts were headscissors, out of necessity, and when he lost it, he'd dash right up to Lecoq to try to get him back in. All of this made sense, especially given the speed and intensity of the opening exchanges. Said was dangerous. Unfortunately for Lecoq, his uppercuts and jabs and headbutts still made him dangerous even with a hurt arm. Lecoq did his own fair share of selling, spinning out after getting hit and staggering around the ring, until he was able to land a blow onto Said's arm again or ground him with a hammerlock and toss kicks and knees in there. So this was a novel format relative to what we've seen so far, and guess what? It worked. The crowd was super into Said's comebacks, his striking and his head-twisters. They wanted blood whenever Lecoq went to the floor. That played into the finish actually. Lecoq went to argue with the fans and Said was able to hit a big running powerslam and then a couple of slams in the ropes, with Lecoq unable to meet the count (which makes that the second time we've seen a 10 count finish in a couple of weeks after not seeing it much at all so far). As for the limb focus, once you see something once in this footage, it's fair game to show up again, and with this match, it's almost like a missing puzzle piece snapped in.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Louis! Bordeaux! Perero! Dos Santos! Oliver! Iska Khan!

Iska Khan vs. Jim Oliver 2/1/57

SR: JIP 1 fall match with about 20 minutes shown. Iska Khan was the child of Mongolian parents and born in former Yugoslavia in 1924. He was also an actor and even has a French Wikipedia page. He is introduced as the Tibetan champion here, while Jimmy Oliver is introduced as the champion of Spain. French wrestling was quite diverse. This was in the same style as the previous match between Inca Peruano and Joachim La Barba, a mix of wrestling and two guys beating the shit out of each other. There is an art to beating on each other for 20 minutes and making it good, and they had it down. Jimmy Oliver, a former boxer, had the vibe of a hard as nails guy who will really hurt you, and he had some big bumping and awesome selling. Considering that is something you can say about most of these 1950s heels working France, it really says something about how amazing the talent at the time was. Khan was working barefoot and hitting chops and nerve holds, which was a fun breath of fresh air, and he was really chopping the shit out of Oliver's neck here, he also had some amusing ways to torture his opponent. Iska works this match as the babyface and the crowd is really into him. There was some fun wrestling, although nothing super athletic or graceful. Oliver was pretty awesome to watch, he makes basic holds look really violent, and he had some really nasty knees, at one point he throws a punch combo to the body that had the referee jumping on him. The strike exchanges here were really awesome and stand out to someone watching this in 2020. These days it seems most wrestlers idea of strike exchanges seems to take turns hitting each other and making angry faces, these guys tearing into each other is on a completely different level. Khan was just chopping his opponent silly which lead to some awesome wobbly selling from Oliver, and Oliver come across as a total prick. The finish is a big move that you would expect a 1980s powerhouse to do, it comes a bit out of nowhere and I would‘ve liked to see these two guys kill each other for a little longer because it was awesome to watch. This is probably the most "standard“ of all the French matches we‘ve seen so far, it was simple but they totally nailed it.

MD: One of my favorite matches we've watched so far. Some of that is due to a sort of familiarity/standardness, sure, but I think a lot of it was the contrast. Khan was full of affectation, the honorable easterner character, down to the robe and the bowing shtick with Oliver and everyone else at the end. That said, he was still that character plucked and placed into 50s France, where everything was technically sound and they had a penchant of beating the everloving crap out of each other. He went back to the nerve hold but he did so in a looming, competent manner that the fans kept popping for (he literally went "over the top" with it, coming in over Oliver's guard). Some of that is that we never see it as a babyface hold that heels have to work in and out of. I sort of love how we're seeing example after example of mean, surly "heels," most of which I'm sympathetic to because we share hairlines. Oliver was no exception. He would occasionally get clowned or outgunned (chopped in this case) by Khan and would sell it with the height of sharp indignity, but when he came back it was brutal, stretching him, hitting a killer backbreaker/knee drop combo onto the back, and the explosive finishing stampede that maybe could have used just a bit more set up. We've got Khan vs. Bollet from a year or two later down the road and I'm really looking forward to that.

PAS: This was my favorite match we have gotten from this new batch. This is basically a WAR heavyweight match, the 1950s French version of Takashi Ishikawa vs. a more agile Ashura Hara. Khan has the best and nastiest judo chop's I have ever seen and I love judo chops. It is really fun to see a nerve hold as a babyface spot, and he really digs into the traps. Oliver takes a couple of great looking bumps into the crowd and has some really nasty looking knees to the head and body, and great punches, there are a couple of punch/chop exchanges which felt like Johnny Valentine stuff. We get a little more Khan in this stuff, but no more Oliver, one of the coolest things about this stuff is seeing guys show up you have never seen or heard of before, and instantly have new favorites.

ER: Who among us could have predicted French wrestling from 60+ years ago would look like this? I watched The Red Balloon in school, that was from the exact same period, and this surely felt like a France not seen. This really did feel like a WAR singles match, with a smaller babyface Killer Khan vs. one of Tenryu's stable of killers. The stiffness kept ramping up as the match went on, with Oliver's shots to Khan's jaw so mean that I kept expecting Khan to wilt, and instead he would fire back with full open handed chops to Oliver's head, face, and neck. These were Baba chops that would have put Baba (clearly a teen in attendance) in the hospital. Oliver is really fantastic at taking big reckless bumps into the ropes, really placing all trust in them not breaking as he plunges into and through them into the crowd. He went into the crowd twice and that's always such a strong visual for me, and here the crowds are so close to the ring that he is essentially crowd surfing on men in suits. It's perfect. There's a fantastic spot that I have never seen before, that somebody really needs to steal: on a sunset flip, Oliver traps Khan's legs, holding Khan's legs so that Khan's calves are touching the back of his own thighs, and it looked absolutely impossible to get out of. So far I am undefeated in finding something in these French matches that I have never seen anywhere else.


Francis Louis/Jean Claude Bordeaux vs. Antonio Perero/Mota Dos Santos 4/24/72

SR: Weirdest damn thing I‘ve ever seen. They‘ve got springs at ringside and using them to catapult the wrestlers into the ring at incredible heights. I can‘t find words to do it quite justice. Before the match, both teams come out dressed as corny sci fi movie astronauts while early electronic music blares. Amazing. Tags are signaled by raising a fist and the tag in, the other wrestler catapults into the ring. To make things even weirder, the match has rounds, which I‘ve never seen in a tag match. Perero & Dos Santos were announced as „Portuguese“ but that may not be true at all. Aside from the insane gimmick, the wrestling wasn‘t blow away, although there were a few beautiful armdrags and headscissors. All these guys moved slick as cats. Seems they couldn‘t focus much due to having to do all these jumps while trying not to blow their knees out. They actually didn‘t use the catapults for many moves, though there is the crazy spot where one guy catches the other flying and hits a body slam, not something I would‘ve believed possible before seeing this. Also, guys kept bumping on their back while flying into the ring and they just got up and kept moving. How am I supposed to buy a body slam as a finisher after seeing that? Anyways, this felt like a true crossover of wrestling and acrobatics. I‘m sure a couple AAA guys could do way more with the insane gimmick, but that would be riddled with thigh slapping moves, Canadian Destroyers and backcrackers. What we got here was classier, basically Catch in Space, and it was fairly nice.

PAS: I remember seeing clips of either this match, or another match like it before, but it is nutso that we actually got to see it in full. The Portuguese team doesn't seem to show up again, and I am now wondering if every match in Portugal is a springs match, and this was the 70s French equivalent of one of those ROH Dragon Gate six man tags. All the actual in ring wrestling was pretty cool, working that fast headscissors and armdrags style, including a great short arm scissors exchange, although it was hard for the match to have any structure with guys being flung into the ring. The catapult was really high, they just flew 20 feet into the air before landing in the ring, several times guys would take flat back bumps off of the catapult and jump up, and it hurt the wrestling physics in my brain, it was basically a superplex off a cage with the guy bounding up.  This isn't going to be the best thing we find in this footage, but it is the damndest thing for sure.

MD: Your poor disbelief watching this and all of the back bumps (and their poor backs!). In some ways, I'm glad this wasn't the first bit of footage that was uncovered. If we had gotten this before Cesca or Catanzaro popped up, I think we'd be blind to the failings. Instead, even with the novelty, we can see the cracks. I've been thinking what might have been changed to make this work and here's what I came up with: flip it. They started out with a feeling out process, moved on to a bit more control and build to place the middle falls, and then finished with a fireworks grand finale of guys flying in one after the other towards the draw. It's not that there wasn't some sense of escalation or struggle. For instance, the second round told a story of French control which ended with the round break and was followed by the quick Portuguese pin off of the impressive flying catch, so it was possible. So flip it. If they had started hot and then slowly showed the cost of it all with increasingly less frequent tags and the act of getting into the ring shown as making one vulnerable (which they do sort of play to at the end here), they could have made this resonate much more. Ah well. As for individual performances, it was hard at times to keep track. Dos Santos was impressively agile and seemed to do the best flips into the ring, if that is a new metric for us now; and the stuff at 18:40 might be the single most beautiful exchange we've seen since starting this project. Everyone should go out and gif it and promulgate it on the internet now. Past that, watch a few minutes of the last round and then go and watch the Khan match instead.

ER: I thought this was brilliant. Imagine if you saw this live when you were a kid. How magical must this have seemed? I was taken to events when I was a kid. I went to baseball games, and Sesame Street Live, and the Harlem Clowns (I think a feeder system for the Globetrotters) play local cops and firefighters, and the circus, and the Beach Boys playing Reno with John Stamos actually sitting in on drums. So I saw some shit, pal. Brother I've stood right next to one of those big metal globes that have two guys daredevil riding their motorcycles around really fast just inches from each other. But imagine seeing this? Your whole world would have changed. What else have you, presumably an adult, ever seen like this? But imagine watching this with a child's eyes. Look at how high up in the air these men are crashing from, over and over with no break. Phil said it looked like 20 feet! Imagine what Phil's 20 feet looked like to an 8 year old! This feels more like a 30 minute feature you would find on a new Criterion Collection blu ray, an unearthed documentary of the acrobat wrestlers of Portugal. Where are these men? What happened to their bodies? How long did they have to practice to get the confidence to repeatedly dive into an empty pool for half and hour? I have so many questions and none of us are ever going to have answers to any single one of them. We may be able to piece together loose trends or guesses, but we won't ever really know any of the hows or whats of this. And how beautiful is that? This is a treasure that we have unearthed from a forgotten time capsule, no way of contacting any human being who would have witnessed this spectacle live. This felt beamed from another galaxy. Incomparable.

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