Matches from AJPW 11/25/90: WALKING TALL DORY~! NO RESPECT DYNAMITE~! KIDNEY PUNISHING HANSEN/KAWADA~!

The Funks vs. Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith AJPW 11/25/90

ER:  A pretty amazing match that I had never seen, with four standout performances. It's so hard hitting, and these new All Japan Classics episodes showcase that in the best way. The sound on these episodes is incredible, and it puts you right in the middle of this high impact style. I can't imagine what it was like sitting front row for such a physical style as All Japan - let alone be a participant in it! -  but this video makes it feel like I was there 35 years ago. It's one of five Tag League matches smack in the middle of the show, and they kill each other and treat it like a match with actual stakes. It's an awesome Dory match and more evidence that Dynamite Kid's Winter 1990 is him at one of his highest levels. Dory comes off like the tougher, harder hitting Funk, an actual Cool Dory match. The match peaks with the Bulldogs working over Terry's Not As Damaged 46 year old legs in ways that contributed to Terry's Old Knees while Terry scrambles in half a dozen of the greatest attempts at making a hot tag, a face in peril to his big brother's ass kicking tough guy. 

Johnny Smith is at his absolute beefiest; Dynamite is at his most bitter and dangerous, a little guy starting the most violent fights at the bar. It's a great team. Dynamite looks angry the entire match, on the apron, in the ring, and treats Terry like an old man to be put to pasture. Terry works lighter to come off as vulnerable to loss as possible, and is at perhaps his most sexy. Sexy Terry working as Pretty Ricky. Ponytail Terry with his little mustache and the best body of his career. I love Hot Ponytail Terry in his Body Glove tights, and here's Dory in his blue trunks working stiffer than anyone in the match,  maybe anyone on the show (Eric's Note: Kawada and Hansen kick each other so hard in the kidneys later on the card that Dory Funk would have died so let's leave it to saying he worked stiffer than anyone in this match). It adds up to a middle of the card tag match that was worked as a small show main event. 

Listen to how hard they're all smacking each other! Dory's contact on his collar and elbow tie-ups with Johnny were the sound of bodies used to taking hits. When Dory is in against Dynamite, he hits him with uppercuts that are so hard that I don't think Kid had to sell his limbs all going numb. He looked shocked that Dory was hitting him so hard. He tees off hard on Smith and really looks like a mat expert going after Smith's knee and ankle. Everyone worked this super honestly, but Dory's work was the most honest and well executed of all. And here's Dynamite, the by far smallest man in the match and the guy who I'd least want to confront about anything. He goes after Terry with no respect. Maybe my favorite spot in the match, is when Terry is hitting Johnny with headbutt after headbutt before they both go down. Johnny goes down, Terry spirals down after, and the second Terry hits the mat Dynamite's eyes go wide and he scrambles up to the top rope to hit a headbutt to Terry's stomach. He pulls it off so hastily, making it look like a snap impulse, and his knees land full weight one inch from Terry's face. It looked so dangerous and was only one of the things that made this match play so tough. Dynamite is so geared up when he's in against Terry, that they even do a spot where Dynamite presses Terry off him on a kickout and Terry flies several feet from it, like Dynamite was Yokozuna. Dynamite kills Terry with clotheslines to the back of the head, throws him to the floor with a back body drop, and - most incredibly - drags him into a standing stretch muffler that blew me away. Dynamite's body had to be in constant agony and as he locked in the muffler and stood to his feet, clasping his hands while the much larger Terry was hanging upside down in a headstand, his pain was as palpable as any I've seen.  

The Bulldogs working over Terry's knee was some excellent third act cutting off the ring. Dynamite wanted that knee all match, and when he got it he was like a dog with a chew toy. He was slamming Terry's calf over his knee and it looked like one of the most violent pieces of work I've seen. Terry's selling was incredible, crawling and leaping towards Dory while Smith and Dynamite had to keep tackling and blocking. There were some nearfalls that got the big crowd to bite, like one of the most well-used and well-executed rolling inside cradles. Dory pulled the cradle and Smith rolled it over and the movement was so good that Yokohama bought in. Terry's win over Smith was so well done, as Dynamite had totally drained Terry and suddenly one of the biggest stars in wrestling history looked like he could be beaten by Johnny Smith. He has to resort to scrambling on top of Smith during a pinfall exchange and just weigh his body down. The Bulldogs looked like a tough vital team against two legends, and The Funks looked legitimately at the top of their abilities. 

Andre the Giant/Giant Baba vs. The Land of Giants AJPW 11/25/90

ER: Phil and I wrote about this match 7 years ago and I don't think I appreciated it enough then. It seems funny to say that I didn't appreciate an Old Andre match enough, as I think every single review of any Old Andre match I've ever written is me appreciating and analyzing every step he takes. I love the 1990 Tag League old broken but still proud Giants, and we should all be thankful that we got to see them against the worst Fake Road Warriors team ever assembled in a respected promotion. I cannot and will not say it is a great match, because it is not. The Land of Giants - Skywalker Nitron especially, specifically - are total cornballs. Nitron is the goofiest of all, almost surely the goofiest wrestler All Japan used in 1990. You're off the hook Richard Charland and David Sammartino. But part of what makes the match great, is that Andre and Baba know that these two are cornballs, and the gift that brings us is a very active Andre match. 

Andre is old but not nearly as old as he'd look in 1992. He was in the ring a lot against both cornballs and had a bunch of great ideas and ways to attack both of them. He looked really strong, even if Nitron sold some of his offense with the goofy acting only seen from people reading stories to small children in libraries. Andre looked like he had a lot of fun beating these two goofs up. He had two different cantaloupe fist punches, one while holding Nitron in a headlock and the other just thrown to the face and followed up with a NOAH worthy headbutt. He grabbed Masters in a knuckle lock and made it look like he was crushing his hand. The camera had a zoom in on Andre interlacing his fingers with Butch and his fingers were so big they looked like they were forcing Masters' fingers to break apart. It looks like something that would and did drop Masters to a knee. The best part is when he broke the knuckle lock by rearing back and punching Masters in the fingers. 

This match has Andre the fucking Giant holding Rob Zombie's Michael Myers in a bearhug. Freddy vs. Jason is my least favorite Nightmare on Elm Street movie and my least favorite Friday the 13th movie, but Andre the Giant vs. Michael Myers is a horror movie showdown we needed to see and I would have paid money to. There's no way I would have gone into that movie and gotten Andre keeping his bearhug locked in by pulling on The Shape's rattail. Moustapha Akkad wouldn't have had the guts. 

Stan Hansen/Danny Spivey vs. Toshiaki Kawada/Mitsuharu Misawa AJPW 11/25/90

ER: The Funks vs. New Bulldogs was a hard hitting match. Every open hand on chest and back landed with a loud crack and Dory Funk threw in a last hurrah before his 50s with a great Walking Tall badass role. It's great. But then two matches later Kawada and Hansen took such righteous anger out of each other's kidneys that it made me think *I* was going to piss blood. This is some of the toughest wrestling you'll ever see. Hansen is in full force of nature mode and he hits Kawada like a kid in training camp. Every chair, every shoulder, every godforsaken kick, was felt thoroughly. Hansen is such a force of nature, that you're not expecting Kawada to take such a force so head on. Kawada kicks Hansen back even harder and cracks baseball bat shots off the old cowboy's torso. Kawada makes such wicked contact that Hansen's pancreas selling looks like the man is learning how to sell a bruised pancreas in real time. Hansen is the best Train Running Off the Rails impacter in wrestling and it was amazing to see Kawada throw his whole body at a moving train. The finish is incredible and features one of the greatest low bridges I've ever seen. Misawa flies over the top rope with such speed that I jumped in the same way I do in the movies when a car gets unexpectedly T-boned. Spivey's team with Hansen took his timing to a really high level. Misawa is there one second and gone the next and as he's flying one direction, Hansen runs the other and knocks Kawada into the sky with a western lariat. Later, Doc and Gordy try to hit harder clotheslines on Taue in the main event and make fine cases. Later still, Jumbo and Taue outdo them all with their clotheslines to Gordy. It's show-long clothesline oneupmanship I can support. And then Jumbo gives Gordy another. 

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: AJPW CLASSICS~! ABBY~! WAJIMA~! MAGEE~! TAKAGI~! IDOL~! RICH~! KABUKI~! TIGER MASK~!

Abdullah the Butcher vs. Hiroshi Wajima AJPW 1/2/88

MD: Abby had bigger fish to fry. His eyes were on Jumbo and Baba. Wajima was just a guy he had to babysit here. I'm not going back to see if this did ratings or not but I bet it did even as Wajima was less of a TV draw than he'd been the year before. I'll be honest. I started my AJPW chronological watch with 89 in part to avoid the guy. I kind of regret that now though not necessarily because of anything he did here. More because I would have liked to track every Tenryu match after his turn. But I'd say in small doses, i.e. this match, Wajima was pretty interesting to watch.

Here we got to see him through the lens of an Abdullah the Butcher that wanted the country of Japan to remember that he was a singular and formidable monster. 

Wajima would try a bunch of things. Abby would no sell them in the most bored and stoic way possible, hilarious to both me (despite myself) and the crowd at the time, and cut him off with the throat shot. The fans would chant Butcher over and over again. Then Abby would do some stylized karate shots and pose. It was something. To Abby's credit, it built to Wajima finally got him over and even though the first time that happened, Abby looked more bemused and surprised than anything else, it did sort of matter because of the mountain Wajima climbed. It would have just mattered more if it was, let's say, Isao Takagi (since he'll come up later) or Shunji Takano doing it and not someone who had been around main events for a while. Abby quickly had enough of that, hit a shoulder block and started laying in the elbow drops. Wajima kept putting his feet on the ropes and Abby got incensed and started going after anyone that moved with Baba making the save. Definitely a match that one experiences, this one.

ER: Another lifetime ago, I was the sole person on the Pro Wrestling Only All Japan 80s Nominating Committee to want this match as one of the 150 matches on the final set. I understand the need to keep someone like me in check on a group project like the 80s sets. We were cultivating something important and historical for a large group of people to see and experience. Setting new talking points and updating tastes and standards. All 150 slots were important. I sincerely wanted this Abby/Wajima match on the Final 150. I love it. It deserved to be on. The main argument against it was that some thought it was the clear 150th place finisher, which might be true. Some would rank it low because it's only 6.5 minutes bell to bell. It isn't a title change, it doesn't build to a hot finish, and obviously not enough voters went to the wall for Abdullah the Butcher matches, because he had no matches on the set. Hiroshi Wajima had three. So maybe we put this match on the set as the fourth Wajima match and the only Abby match, and it finishes last? Is that bad? 

The two last place matches, #149 and #150, wound up being two different Jumbo Tsuruta vs. Bruiser Brody matches. Their 1983 match was #149, their 1988 match was #150. That 1988 match was #150 on my own personal ballot, in full unanimous agreement with the mass voting bloc in finding Jumbo/Brody '88 to be the very worst match of the 150 best All Japan matches of the 80s. Did we need to have two different Jumbo/Brody matches on there if they were considered the two worst of the set? Every territory we did was going to have a match that finished dead last. There has to be a Worst Scorsese Movie. I always wanted to put a colorful match on the set as the one we thought would finish last. For the WWF set I wanted the best of the Bobby Heenan/Ultimate Warrior weasel suit matches (which didn't make the set). For the Memphis set Phil and I were the ones pushing for the Nightmare Freddy matches that finished dead last. 

Something has to finish last. Abdullah the Butcher should have been #150. Or #147. Time has proven me correct on this match. I love this match. It has incredible aura, incredible atmosphere, feels filled with danger and tension and unpredictability for its entire short runtime, and devolves into genuine spectacle in Korakuen. This match has intrigue. Abby had returned to Japan a few weeks earlier after a three year absence. He had primarily been a New Japan guy in the first half of the decade and now he was a New All Japan Guy. Abby looked like as big a superstar in 1988 as he had a decade earlier. I don't think we put enough respect on his 87-95 run. Watch this match and witness the power of his charisma. Add Wajima to the mix, who is one of my favorite kinds of wrestlers: Disgraced Former Sumo. He was a big name and had the greatest robe in wrestling. People respected him. 

Abdullah the Butcher clearly was not one of them. This whole match feels uncooperative and Abdullah lis a guy who just keeps fearlessly making an all time great sumo look like a chump. There is no fork stabbing. There is no blood. But there is a lot of Abdullah the Butcher no selling Wajima's strikes and looking at him with unblinking, unimpressed eyes. His head is the perfect shape and his expressions are incredible. He walks through or ignores every Wajima strike while throwing screaming taped finger thrusts into his throat, and after every one of those thrusts he does karate poses, a new one every strike. He steps repeatedly to a champion sumo and makes more poses and faces than you've ever seen him do. Wajima finally takes the hint and does a couple shoot throws, grabbing Abby by his sizable pants. Abby had finally been Gotten in a match where he disrespected Wajima over and over and over, and once he gets thrown he decides NOPE we're not doing that and runs into a legendary sumo with a full contact shoulderblock. He drops three running elbows onto Wajima's neck and chest. They're all rough.  

Abby is so disrespectful to Wajima - AND THEN SHOVES JOE HIGUCHI! HARD! - that it draws out Jumbo and Baba and every green-tracksuited undercarder. Abby spends 10 constantly enjoyable minutes avoiding physical interaction with Baba and Jumbo while throwing fingers at the throat of every tracksuit he sees. Jumbo is screaming at him while being held back. Baba takes his track jacket off and is walking around in track pants and no shirt, and I don't think I've ever seen him look more badass. Abby walks the rows of Korakuen flanked by TNT and Black Assassin, who isn't a guy anyone knows. It's the best. It's always intriguing, always entertaining. 

Here's the match that unanimously finished #150, which is extra appropriate because it was the main event of this very show, 3/27/88. We cover the Tom Magee and Tommy Rich/Austin Idol matches below. Watch this match, this 150th place finisher, and tell me it's better than the pure spectacle of Abby/Wajima. 

#150: 

Jumbo Tsuruta vs. Bruiser Brody AJPW 3/27/88

Also, I was the extreme high vote for one of the Wajima matches that made the final set. I had Wajima/Ishikawa vs. Tenryu/Hara 6/8/87 as my #4 match. #4! It finished #141. #141! I ranked a match #4 that finished in the bottom 6%! You can't get much farther apart than 4 and 141. I haven't watched that match since doing the set, 13 years ago. I'm going to watch it later. I'm justified 15 years later in my love for Abby/Wajima, let's see what shit I was working through in 2012 to be the extreme high Wajima voter: 

Hiroshi Wajima/Takashi Ishikawa vs. Genichiro Tenryu/Ashura Hara AJPW 6/8/87

[Watched it again, turns out I was completely right once again. This match rocks. It's four sumos all angry for different reasons, Tenryu and Wajima cannot stand each other, everyone takes unprofessional shots. Wajima sells Tenryu's enziguiris better than anyone, Hara clotheslines Wajima in the side of the face and Wajima pays him back with one that knocks Hara onto his head. Every second of it has aura and/or sumos hitting each other hard. Undeniable top All Japan match of the 80s.]

Tommy Rich/Austin Idol vs. Tiger Mask II/Great Kabuki AJPW 3/27/88

MD: You'll want to stick around for the post match where Idol gathers a crowd around him and starts to pose like crazy. That's the most interesting thing in this one but it's also legitimately interesting. The second most interesting thing is the chinlock he puts on Kabuki where he works it so hard that every vein in his neck looked like it'd pop. The sheets said that Idol and Rich didn't get over because the Japanese didn't know what to make of guys who mostly punched and I find that kind of absurd and dismissive. The third is that Rich/Idol come out to Roll with the Changes by REO Speedwagon. 

I didn't love the feeling out stuff here or the finishing stretch to be honest, but I did think the control on Kabuki where they went after his neck/throat with a bunch of headlock punches/throat shots and a great Rich neckbreaker, plus the aforementioned chinlock was all very good. Tiger Mask probably just wasn't the right guy to match up against these two?

ER: Rich and Idol come out to "Roll with the Changes" and I love it. Tommy Rich was still using REO Speedwagon in Japan when he worked WAR in 1993, when the song was 15 years old. The match rules because it's Idol and Rich working a Memphis tag with Kabuki going along with it, Idol and Rich cutting off the ring and throwing punches from real and comedic angles, Idol connecting with Japanese fans as an honest to god cult celebrity. Jerry Lawler got such an ice cold reaction in his limited Japanese work, but Idol grabs the attention of the All Japan crowd and them makes aloof faces like he doesn't understand why.  At one point Idol tags in and throws Great Pro Wrestling Punches while dropping to a knee, throws a snapmare that is actually a man flipping another man to his seat by the head, and then throws punches to a seated Kabuki and chokes him on the mat before running him face first into Tommy Rich's knee. It is everything I love about wrestling distilled into 15 seconds. When he throws headlock punches to Kabuki, Kabuki drops forward to his knees like his nose is broken. Tommy Rich hits a fistdrop off the middle buckle. Idol hooks his hands under Kabuki's chin and flexes his arms as he pulls his neck back over his knee, hair looking like a swag version of the Mark Davis cut, and all is right. Austin Idol had a connection with the Japanese crowds and even in loss, that cult status looms over the victorious Tiger Mask. Idol flexes his biceps in the crowd and the reaction makes it clear that the people want More. 

Tom Magee vs. Isao Takagi AJPW 3/27/88

MD:  Some of these have been out there more or less for a few years but we never covered them (it's hard to keep up with Classics) so they're really new enough. And this was quite the thing right here. Magee came out to Danger Zone like he was Masa Fuchi or something, stood on the top turnbuckle, dropped his cape, posed, and did a shooting star press into the ring right into a tumble. Hell of a thing. 

And you know, parts of this were competent. Sure he landed on Takagi with his first leapfrog and there was just a weirdness to some of what he did. He'd do a headscissors at an angle I've never quite seen it and grabbed the ropes not for heat so much as so he didn't fall over, while in a grounded headscissors. His strikes were stylized to say the least. He put his foot on Takagi's leg while holding an armbar, not to drive him down but to set up a drop toehold and I don't quite get that. Lots of little things like that, but the armdrags looked ok and he was spirited in his legdrops and kneedrops and hiptosses and what not. 

But really this was about the spin wheel kicks. His was basically a beesting, the chop of the spinwheelkick, where he got the edge of his foot into the midsection of Takagi. Takagi when he later reversed a whip and hit a charge and just careened at Magee, went foot first right into his face as he arced. And yes, right after that, Magee opened up in a big way, blood coming down his face. The match was over by that point though as he did a somersault to "dodge a charging Takagi", put in quotes for a reason and then did a belly to back position backbreaker which I've never seen before for a submission. Hell of an entrance though. 

ER: I don't really think Tom Magee is that much different than many guys who are pushed as a Fast Rising Star on the modern indy (or national television!) scene. He had great athleticism and actually had more offense than I realized, and he isn't as terrible as advertised when it comes to fitting that offense into an actual match. He feels like someone who could have been molded with more time, but wasn't given more time. That's nothing new. I liked some things he did, like his weird drop toehold, but the main thing he had going against him was the same thing he had going for him: He moved like an alien in the ring. If not like an alien, he moved like someone who had been given the implanted knowledge of pro wrestling, without actually having seen pro wrestling. There was no sense he had any understanding what pro wrestling was. 

Many of the things he does look "fine" but he does them as someone who doesn't know what he is doing, and the crowds can feel it. He is doing a kneedrop, he is doing a legdrop, he is doing a weird drop toehold, but he is doing them in a way that doesn't feel like pro wrestling, instead a memorized series of steps. Tom Magee memorized the sounds of the alphabet phonetically but cannot actually read or understand letters, and it is off-putting to the people there live, who love wrestling. If you gave an alien a recipe to make a pumpkin pie, but they had never tasted a pie or seen what a pie looked like, you would almost surely get some sort of creation that had similarities to pie while being grotesque in a way that aesthetically offended you. It's why Magee didn't seem to realize he was even bleeding from the nose and mouth after being hit by a spinning heel kick. He does not understand these humans, the ways they leak.

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: WAR GAMES~! MISAWA~! KOSHINAKA~! PIRATA~! COLOSETTI~! BENETTO~!

Shiro Koshinaka vs. Mitsuharu Misawa AJPW 10/14/83

MD: As best as we can tell, these next two haven't been in easy circulation. Thankfully gus came through and figured out how to get them off of a tricky disc and upload them. This one started out as one thing and morphed into something entirely different. People should go out of their way for it.

Where it started, and where I figured it would end, was as Young Misawa putting Young Koshinaka through his paces. He controlled for basically the first two thirds of this as an undercard young boy cruiserweight bully. They both had red trunks and Misawa really did a number on Koshinaka, grinding down on the arm. A lot of shots of the back of Misawa's head and emotive selling from Shiro. Shiro would try to escape and Misawa would get him back in. There was a nice floatover arm twist and some rolling with the short arm scissors, etc. Eventually, Shiro turned things into a cross toe-hold and took over with that and later a Romero Special.

When things picked up, though, they really picked up. Shiro's butt butt, sure, but also Misawa doing a front flip into a kick off the top, followed by a huge dive to the floor, and then Shiro hitting a double stop off the top. It felt like whoever was agenting the match went on a smoke break and they just decided to do whatever they wanted for the last two minutes before Shiro finally dragged Misawa down with a bulldog. Misawa looked more like the guy who would become Tiger Mask II than the guy who would become Misawa here, but he looked like the best possible version of that guy.

Shiro Koshinaka/Mitsuharu Misawa/Halcon Ortiz vs. Coloso Colosetti/Pirata Morgan/Tony Benetto 3/16/84

MD: This is likely one of Misawa's first matches in Mexico. He was matched up with Colosetti here in the initial primera pairings and it went mostly ok. There were one or two times where he seemed just a little lost, like when it was time to tag Shiro in after Coloso left the ring, but in general, he did fine. Colosetti had great for-the-last-row body language, really working big, both when matched with Misawa and during the comeback in the tercera as he was batted around the ringside area. Shiro was matched with Benetto; basically a lot of Kato/Bruce Lee back fists but he did get his double stomp off the top in too. Ortiz and Morgan worked well together, as you'd expect, the best pairing of the three even if maybe that's not why we're here.

Morgan did get to match up a little with the Japanese contingent, most spectacularly for a spot towards the end of the primera where they basically hit a veg-o-matic (bearhug, lean back, kneedrop) on him. Most memorable, though, is the ending image of him as Misawa and Koshinaka were getting the win on his partners; Ortiz decided to just bodyslam him over the top, not touching the rope, so he could hit a dive. The heat during the segunda was effective and efficient though there could have been more of it maybe; possibly a small clip at the start of the tercera to give that feeling. The comeback was fun with plenty of Koshinaka backfists. Misawa was just finding his way here but it's a good way to spend twenty minutes.

War Games: Hotstuff Hernandez/Jeremy V/Jimmy Rave/Onyx vs. Iceberg/Jason Cross/Justice/Rainman NWA Wildside 06/28/03 - EPIC

MD: Are there just an infinite number of these matches hidden away somewhere? Is there some sort of alternate reality that we can just endlessly pull these from? Or are we coming to the end sometime soon? We've covered so many over the years and they're all great and this is no exception. Wildside was just amazing for the sheer diversity in the ring, every size, shape, temperament. And it all came together and it all worked. It was like the entirety of possibilities of what pro wrestling could and should be were in the ring together. Just wild stuff. 

They started with Jeremy and Rainman, maybe not the pairing I would have chosen myself even though they'd been feuding but Rainman was a pro in these and kept things moving. Right when Jeremy (who got color early) was gaining control, Bailey's team won the coinflip and Cross came in, absolutely crushing Jeremy with a dragon suplex and brainbuster and setting the tenor for the rest of the match. Jeremy, Jimmy, and Jason had a high hill to climb here since not only were they in there with monsters of various shapes and forms, but the monsters almost all did crazy stuff. There was a Superplex on Iceberg (I think by Onyx). Iceberg used the cage to steady him to hit a top rope elbow drop, etc. And Justice (being Abyss) came in as the mystery man and towered over everyone. Hernandez was like a missile when he came in to even the odds. They managed well enough by flying around though, Cross hitting a ton of offense, Jeremy showing heart (and getting the win in the end with his camel clutch/cobra clutch combo), and Rave maybe getting the spot of the match with a sunset flip powerbomb on Justice off the top.

Look, during the same year, Cage of Death was going on in Philly. I get that Blood and Guts take more from that than from classic War Games, but these Wildside and Anarchy attempts really show how you can bridge the gap between the two.

PAS: This didn't have pools of gore that some of the other all timer Landmark Arena War Games had, but it felt kind of on the level of them. This was like a version of the 1989 War Games, with a lot of huge dudes throwing each other with big power moves. This might have been the most I have ever enjoyed Abyss, and it felt like the slugfest between him and Hernandez felt like a huge big man showdown. Iceberg not being a huge star in the 2000s was a big mistake by the wrestling world, he was a monstrous force of nature, who would still bump big, Iceberg taking a superplex felt like felling a Redwood tree. His top rope Sudanese Meat Cleaver was truly disgusting looking I expected Jeremy V's head to pop off like a Pez dispenser. Finishing submission looked great although that kid did take a whole hell of a lot of punishment to end up winning. Classic stuff, in the upper tier of these matches which is a hell of an upper tier. 

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: TSURUTA-GUN~! VS~! SUPER~! GENERATION~! ARMY~! BARR~! DANDY~! PANTHER~! CHARLES~! ESTRADA~! RAYO~! HERMANOS DINOMITA~!

Jumbo Tsuruta/Akira Taue/Masa Fuchi vs. Mitsuharu Misawa/Toshiaki Kawada/Kenta Kobashi NJPW 3/3/91 

MD: Oops, this one's on me guys, sorry. There was a big dump of handhelds that came into the community back in 2018 and it was a lot to parse through. Over the years, we've covered a lot here, and I'd had reached out to all the usual tape trading subjects from years past to see what was really new (albeit with little interest from them who have all moved on) but sometimes something I thought had already been out there actually wasn't. And this wasn't. So, as best as I can tell, it's going to be a brand new Jumbo/Taue/Fuchi vs. Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi match that almost none of you (if not absolutely none of you) have ever seen. And it holds up with some of the best stuff of this period, quite frankly.

The whole thing is good but it probably peaks in the first couple of minutes. The match starts with Kobashi and Fuchi on the mat for a minute, including Kobashi's rolling cradle. Kawada comes in. They'd heated up Kawada and Taue pretty fierce in January and it was still going strong here, so Taue wants in (and Jumbo wants him in), Kawada immediately tags back to Kobashi like a true heatseeker and Taue sneaks in a cheap shot onto Kawada on the apron the first chance he gets. The crowd has come to like Taue by this point but there are no good guys here, just pure animosity, as shown by Kawada rolling back in, ignoring the fact that Kobashi and starting a massive early-match brawl with Taue that everyone has to break up. It's a hell of a way to start a match.

After that it settles down into the beats you'd expect: more Taue vs. Kawada, Misawa eating a beatdown and coming back with the forearm, Kobashi with the superman house afire hot tag until Jumbo shuts him down, both sides getting and advantage and comebacks as the cycle through the pairings, until they finally isolate Kobashi and crush him on an outside table (or in this case, on a chair that they put on a table). The heat on Kobashi is great after they start on the leg, with a Jumbo elevated half cab, a Fuchi STF, and a Taue Scorpion Deathlock, the fans chanting "Kobashi" the whole time. When he's finally able to get a hot tag of his own, there's this cool bit of stuttering alternating structure where they start on Taue only to cycle back to Kobashi (after a rocket launcher off the top to the floor) only for Fuchi to clip his leg out illegally back in the ring, only to do another comeback and cycle back to Taue. This all leads to the sort of high octane, extended finishing stretch you'd expect, including, maybe, the first time they do the combo Jumbo/Taue belly to back/top rope driving clothesline. Put simply, if this is something you like, and this feud is as universally liked as anything I can think of, there's a hell of a lot to like here.

ER: I was saving this one for my Saturday morning. Waking up, making some coffee, settling down to watch an unseen All Japan trios classic, and baby it was everything. This was an untaped Korakuen main event smack dab in the middle of a tour and these guys go so hard that any reasonable person would think this was an end of tour big show main. Everybody goes hard in this and the dynamics are incredible. 1991 Jumbo was my favorite Jumbo, Kawada and Taue fucking hate each other and are at each other's throats the whole match, Misawa was incredibly fast and aggressive and already knew how to carry himself as a superstar, every single person still had a vendetta against Kobashi's knees, it's all incredible. There isn't a single lull in the action at any point, it's all go go go with quick tags and constant oneupmanship. 

The way Tsuruta-Gun went after Kobashi's knees it's a damn miracle the man made it nearly a decade before the knee surgeries started piling up. They're all real dickheads about it, but the best is when Fuchi runs in with a dropkick right to the knee pit...or was it when Jumbo buckled it with a mule kick to the ACL...or was it when Jumbo was holding Kobashi damn vertically in a single leg crab? A real Dickhead's Choice. Taue threw some of the hardest clotheslines of his career, really shutting down some bullshit, and I flipped my lid when he leveled Misawa with a tope suicida after Misawa had leapt off the apron with an elbow into Jumbo's jaw. I don't think I've ever seen Kobashi get thrown with a Rocket Launcher to the floor, just one other thing that's nuts to see on an untaped house show. It's cool that Misawa was a better kicker than Kawada in 1991. Kawada had the same kick routine here that he would continue to hone and improve as the decade went on, but the variety and impact of Misawa's kicks made this look like his peak attack level, setting everything up with kicks and then sealing the deal with elbows. Jumbo's kitchen sink knees looked organ-rearranging, and he threw Misawa with a bodyslam that looked and sounded so painful that all 2,100 people in Korakuen made the exact same pinched face "oooooooooof" reaction. Six legends bringing real emotion and high energy and hate-filled stiffness for 30 minutes in my favorite wrestling style of all time? It's all I wanted. 

Love Machine/El Dandy/Panterita del Ring vs. Blue Panther/Emilio Charles Jr./Jerry Estrada CMLL  5/3/92?

MD: Some great stuff in here even though it was a twenty minute video that went more like fifteen instead of the thirty that went twenty-two and gave us the pairings that I really wanted. Obviously it was a perfect rudo side. My experience with Panther and Love Machine is more the mask match and what followed elsewhere, so it surprised me that Barr was more over with the crowd. The announcers noted that the dynamic had been different in Mexico City for the mask match and tried to explain it.

This had an ambush/comeback/beatdown/comeback sort of structure which was fitting a lot into the time and it never quite settled down. We got glimpses of great things though, Panther running from a fiery Love Machine, Dandy's awesome, awesome cracking punch and the not equal but still great and very different thudding punches of Charles and Estrada. When Barr finally got his hands on Panther, he was really able to tear into him (and tear off the mask). Estrada hit the usual ridiculous dive into the crowd. The ref was the same one we've been seeing who was very hard on the tecnicos and missed the cheating. Charles and Panterita really only got to pair up after the dives and that looked fine, with Charles faking a foul (he'd previously done one of his own). Post match, when Panterita was beside himself at the unfair loss, Estrada walked right over and yanked his mask off hilariously. I wish it had a little more to it but you can't fault any of the action here.

ER: I love that this was the standard for a throwaway weekly trios match in 1992. This adds a new layer to the Blue Panther/Love Machine feud and I don't think I've ever heard a weekly crowd respond so positively to Love Machine before this. Blue Panther as a cheapshot artist who can also wrench you on the mat was probably my favorite era of Panther (even those I do love old man tecnico Panther) but it was eye opening seeing how big the tecnico reactions were any time Love Machine started to wail on Panther, culminating in a tremendous tope suicida that flattens a few people in the front row. Dandy and Estrada worked magic any time they crossed paths, but somehow Panther and Love Machine outpunched them here. I wish we could have seen more Panterita Del Ring. The man worked differently as Safari and then evolved into Ephesto, but as Panterita he could really cut loose and we only got a little taste of that here, as he was the clear 6th banana of the match, and Estrada's perfect unmasking of him after the match only made that status more concrete. This was the perfect kind of unearthed lucha match to just devour like junk food. 

Rayo de Jalisco Jr/Mascara Sagrada/Black Magic vs. Los Hermanos Dinamita (Cien Caras, Mascara Ano 2000, Universo 2000) CMLL 5/17/92

MD: A weird moment in time as a chunk of these guys were main eventing the AAA debut show right around (maybe even two days before) this match. This immediately followed a tribute to Rene Guajuardo, who, among all of his other accolades had trained and promoted in this area, and had just passed away. The match itself made me wish for the tecnicos from the last match.

When they got to the beatdown in the segunda and the tercera comeback that followed, it was pretty good. You can count on the Dinamitas to beat people around the ring and Cien Caras to be a charismatic ass about it. That played into the comeback as well where Rayo could play the other half of that song well enough. The primera exchanges and the crowd-pleasing spots in the end to led up to the foul on Rayo and the DQ, though? Not so great. Again, you can count on the rudos here to get some good shots in (like Cien Caras' hopping knee to the gut) and there was one fairly decent Mascara Ano 2000 and Mascara Sagrada exchange. Black Magic looked best on the tecnico side, charging into things and asserting himself. This late in the game and after all of the animosity of the beatdown and coemback, I wasn't really feeling the multiple headlocks/la estrella/flip-flop submissions like I might have otherwise. Maybe it really was time for the change that was coming. Maybe it was just that some of these guys were focused on the next thing.

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: AJPW HANDHELDS~! TIGER MASK II~! FURNAS~! SNUKA~! TAKANO~! TENTA~! SPIVEY~! ACE~! RICH~! SLATER~!

Tiger Mask II vs. Doug Furnas AJPW 10/28/88

MD: This was a sprint that went just a little over five minutes, but if I was Baba, I would have come out of this wondering if I hadn't found the Dynamite Kid for my Tiger Mask. They'd teamed against each other during the tour (with Furnas teaming with Kroffat and an Oates trainee "Greg/Craig Brown"), but this was their first singles match. I'm not saying that the same sort of chemistry was there because Misawa just didn't exactly have a ton with anyone while under the mask, and Furnas was more dropkicks and backflips than anything else, but he had that explosiveness when he landed on his feet that made me wonder if there might not have been some money in the pairing as they were at this point. In Furnas, Misawa had someone to bounce off of who could also keep up with him. After this (and partially due to Misawa's injury in 89) they wouldn't face off again until 90. By that point, fate had them moving in very different directions.

John Tenta/Shunji Takano vs. Tiger Mask II/Jimmy Snuka AJPW 12/16/88

MD: They told a little story here by having Tenta take out both TM and Snuka with dropkicks only to errantly hit Takano at the end, which led to a neat moment of Tenta catching Snuka off the top (no small feat!) and Misawa following it up with a missile dropkick to knock him over for the win. Takano looked sharp in there. I think he'd have a better sense on how to use his size against varying opponents a year later, but he was big and lanky and agile with a nice dropkick and superkick. He took the Snuka leapfrog/chop shot with a skidding bump across the ring too. Tenta was further along sooner than I remembered too, having a couple of surprising agility spots but generally just asserting himself like you'd want him to and he had the elbow drop already. The best bit by Misawa here was a stubborn assault on Takano, knocking him out of the ring with a baseball slide, doing another, and then not quite hitting a tope but just charging at him between the ropes headfirst never leaving the ring. Snuka didn't do much, but then he never does at this stage of his career, just his signature spot, grinding things down with a hold, and then whatever's necessary for the finish. He did get a run of throat shots on Tenta followed up by a bodyslam but it didn't have the build you'd want for such a momentous spot. This was more of a novelty than anything else, but it was a fun one.

ER: I liked everyone here and even though it was overall inconsequential, everyone had cool moments, and there was one incredible spot that I don't think I have ever seen before. Tiger Mask is my least favorite Misawa era, but it's cool seeing him as more of a big bump guy than a shutdown strike guy, and the way he leans into a takes Tenta and Takano's great dropkicks here is just a perfect take of a dropkick. I like how he sticks and moves, and the way he finally goes after Takano gave us the match's incredible moment: he hits a baseball slide to roll Takano to the floor, a harder baseball slide to knock him into the guardrail, and when Takano makes it back to the apron Misawa just hits him with a Pete Rose slide. I don't think I've ever seen someone do a baseball slide headbutt before. It wasn't a tope, it was clearly intentional, just diving into a head first into Takano's face. Snuka took two big bumps to the floor, including a really fast one over the top, and he absorbed several nasty swinging strikes from Tenta. Takano feels like a man out of place in All Japan, but in a cool way. He's a New Japan style worker crowbarred into All Japan and he feels like if Nobuhiko Takada if he got into pro style instead of shoot style. I don't know. I liked all of these guys in this. I'm glad some guy recorded it and immortalized the baseball slide headbutt. 

Dan Spivey/Johnny Ace vs. Tommy Rich/Dick Slater AJPW 12/16/88

MD: RWTL action. That's where you got some of the most hierarchy bending and most interesting match-ups, many of which only survive today due to handhelds. I'm getting flagged that Spivey and Ace came out to a song from Bubblegum Crisis which amuses me for some reason. I don't think it was anything associated with either of them in general. Ace was like a leaner, more fiery version of Spivey here, just a force of mullets between them. This morphs into a southern tag where they work over Ace's arm pretty well and cut off the ring through hope spots but it resets once Spivey gets in there. I'm not used to Spivey working as so pure a babyface in Japan so it's a bit off-putting. Spivey grinding down on de facto heel Rich's arm isn't as interesting and would have worked better as a shine instead of a mid-match reset. At least 88 Rich isn't afraid to headbutt Ace right in the face. Once Rich starts stretching for Slater, Dick wakes up from his tuned out slumber and decides that they'll be babyfaces too for a while, so I guess that was funny. That only lasts long enough for them to start punching Ace in the face again, but then who can blame them. It has a pretty solid finishing stretch though. Rich and Slater could still turn it on when they had to. Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the match was all over the place given how much time they had to kill. 

ER: This tag and the Tenta tag was on the same card as the legendary Hansen/Gordy vs. Tenryu/Kawada RWTL final, a match that is literally the greatest match of 1988. This was a throwaway RWTL match on the same card as the RWTL Finals, and that probably didn't help this match feel like much more than filler. The one story the match had going for it (other than Match With Four White Guys) was this was Tommy and Dick's last chance to win one Tag League match. Crusher Blackwell & Phil Hickerson also finished with 0 points in 1988, which is pretty fucking stupid, and no other year of the Tag League ended with two 0 point teams. So Dick & Tommy knew that a win would keep them out of the basement, which makes them the underdog babyfaces, but Spivey & Ace are the more popular team so that's how we kind of wound up with a time killing tag with constantly shifting roles. But I also happen to find time killing Kings Road matches to be calming comfort food. Not every one of these things needs to build to something. I wish we got to see Tommy Rich kill more time in Japan. Tommy Rich takes a backdrop bump and hits two different great middle buckle fistdrops: one late in the match after he and Dick did a tandem clothesline to Johnny Ace's neck that caused Ace to drop straight to his knees, and actually hot tagging into the match with one on Spivey. Rich gets one excellent nearfall down the home stretch, taking abuse from Spivey and nearly getting to 2 points with a tight backslide, and it was the loudest the crowd got all match. 

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: MISAWA~! KAWADA~! THE LAND OF GIANTS~! CHRISTIAN~! JOE~! DYING DAYS IWE~!

Rusher Kimura vs. Carl Fergie IWE 6/6/81

MD: It's always fun to see a journeyman overachieve in another country. You can think of Jim Dillon in the Maritimes (not that we have that footage) or the Rock 'n' Roll RPMs in Puerto Rico (that we do have and it's fun). Here, it's Carl Fergie - fresh off a midcard run putting guys over in Mid-South and on his way to do the same in Crockett - in a main event with Rusher Kimura. I was going to say that he was well prepared for this one by wrestling Lawler, but he doesn't wrestle Lawler until 1982, so it was somehow the other way around.

You need somewhat similar skill sets against both, mainly being able to snap your head back at the sight of a great worked punch and take a back body drop. With Rusher, however, you also had to deal with nasty chops in the corner and headbutts.  That gave the match a more visceral feel; when Fergie snuck in a kick out of the corner and tried to assert himself, he was probably forcing a break for the sake of his forehead and poor chest. Rusher was in a hybrid phase here: not the wrestler he'd been in the 70s, not the comedy statesman he'd be a few years later. It meant he'd try for things like a stretch out of a Russian Leg Sweep or the bearhug into a butterfly submission he won with, but no longer had the flexibility he once did. This set up other matches on the tour as much as anything else, with Gypsy Joe interfering to mercifully (as he was trying out that first submission) cause the first fall. I thought Fergie looked like he belonged, for the most part. Some of that was the state of IWE, but enough of it was Fergie himself.

ER: King Carl Fergie the Wicked, wearing a Nazi helmet for his dying days IWE main event. King Carl Fergie, conqueror of Goro Tsurumi and Atsushi Onita, partner of Gypsy Joe. Rusher Kimura's takedowns look so impossible to stop. Rusher had lost some speed but this man moved and manipulated the larger Fergie like a real shooter. When he pins Fergie's arm and grapevines the leg, you can see him using all of his weight to effortlessly drop Fergie to the mat. It's the way Fergie keeps trying to push Rusher off him from his back, but Rusher won't let go of that boot for anything. The shoulderblocks hit hard and Fergie gets tossed immaculately by a backdrop, then gets punched directly in the face, taking a tremendous floundering back bump with windmilling arms that almost catches the back of his neck on the ropes. Fergie took that punch like he was a heavy getting knocked out by Rick Simon. This is really fucking good. Fergie walks right up to Rusher Kimura because he's the man, and he punches Rusher in the face and shakes his fist out angrily after punching him, and every man in Korakuen knows that Fergie is the man. His elbow strikes to Kimura's collarbones only reinforces that feeling.  

I loved every headlock in this match. 

Carl Fergie takes an even higher backdrop than he did earlier and Rusher locks him into a killer butterfly mid-squat bearhug like he was a Negro Navarro T-1000 sent back to send Carl Fergie back to Memphis. Who was the human (?) who, over 40 years ago, knew how important it would be to document the time crimes that were happening in the final three months of the 4th most popular wrestling promotion in Japan. 

Mitsuharu Misawa/Toshiaki Kawada vs. The Land of Giants AJPW 11/20/90

MD: Eric already covered the hugely entertaining 11/21/90 Land of the Giants vs Dory/Terry match (amazing Terry performance) so I'm poking at the guts of this thing instead. And on paper, it's kind of interesting. Misawa and Kawada had spent most of the last many months against Jumbo, Taue, Inoue, Fuchi, Doc, Gordy, Hansen and even occasionally stablemate Kobashi and Ace. Those are all guys you can do a lot against. Here, they were up against the sort of challenge rare to AJPW, two absolute lugs with size, no mobility, terrible clubbering strikes, little presence. That's the sort of thing you expect out of post-WWF talent 80s NJPW maybe, where they'd just trot out Mad Maxx and Super Maxx managed by Wakamatsu to face Fujinami and Kimura, but it's a lot less of an AJPW thing.

And, yeah, it goes ok. The real testament to Misawa, Kawada, and the crowd, was that there was a legitimately hot tag to Misawa towards the end and the crowd went up for it; I don't think it was entirely warranted, but they went with it anyway. After that, there was a great American tag moment of Misawa and Kawada whipping the giants into each other too. Otherwise, the big appeal here would be the Super Generation Army throwing really high kicks at really tall guys. Nitron took them pretty well too. That's about the nicest thing I'm going to say about Land of the Giants here, unfortunately. The blows didn't look great, crummy knees in the ropes, weak sweeping clubbering forearms, a couple of slams that didn't have much mustard behind them. There was stuff that worked in theory but not execution, like Nitron catching Kawada with a cheapshot clothesline from his spot on the apron to cut off a flurry. Their finish at this point was an assisted legdrop (from an atomic drop position) and Masters pumping his arm before going up with it was sort of entertaining. The finish worked too, with Kawada getting Nitron out of the ring so Misawa could throw some magic forearms and duck a clothesline to hit a pretty beautiful bridging German on a giant of a man. But like I said, that they got the crowd back was the most impressive thing here.

ER: Yeah, this wasn't great. It merely existed, and was worked surprisingly straight forward for being a couple of Faux Warriors vs. the two hottest young studs in the company. Misawa and Kawada didn't go after them any differently than they would have gone after Dynamite Kid and Johnny Smith, so that was kind of disappointing. I either wanted to see two giants with bad offense hold down two elites, or two elites absolutely lace into two bad giants, and we got something much less risky and much less interesting. What *is* important to note, is that the team of SKYWALKER NITRON and Butch Masters is not "Land of the Giants", which I suppose makes more sense than their actual name. No, their name is THE Land of Giants. Their team name makes sure to place the focus on the Land rather than the Giants who inhabit this Land, much like hit the hit Sid & Marty Krofft series The Land of Lost. 

In This Land of Giants, the Giants do not hit very hard. Of all the future X-Men, I imagine Misawa or Kawada could have worked a more compelling match with Kelsey Grammer or Alan Cumming. SKYWALKER NITRON throws two of the piddliest clotheslines, even though Kawada mostly saved one of them by just running neck first into it. Running into an actual clothesline in the backyard would have provided far more resistance that NITRON's long noodle of an arm. I do like how Misawa came in and kicked at him, actually liked his kicks more than Kawada's here. Lighter on form, harder on impact. Butch Masters is really good at stepping over the top rope, which is not a thing that every tall wrestler can say. SKYWALKER NITRON can't say it. But Butch steps over it straight, an optical illusion that makes it look like he's just stepping up onto a curb while he's actually clearing three ropes. NITRON meanwhile looks like he's trying to get into a ski boat from the water. Each man who hails from The Land of Giants did their own bearhug, and Misawa broke up SKYWALKER's by walking in and just elbowing him straight in the kidneys. Kawada hits a cool pescado into NITRON, and I do like the finisher of the team who hails from The Land of Giants, a man-assisted legdrop. What other Giants come from this Land? Were they sending their biggest and best Giants to the Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium? Was this merely a work placement program, or a study abroad kind of situation? What is the Giant Exchange Program in The Land? Are these two as good as Tall Rick or Thomas Big Boots? 

Christian vs. Samoa Joe NEW 4/21/07

MD: I love Christian's WWECW work. He was an amazing week to week TV wrestler, someone who could work his own spots and his opponent's spots into a match in clever, believable, varied, and interesting ways to deal with the grind of televised match after match after match. A sort of neo-Bret Hart for a different era with different demands. I've never really had any indication that he worked it out much before that though. Some of that is on me in that I didn't chase down his TNA run. Unfortunately, I do think some of it might be on him too.

It's a little off-putting how much of this match is rote heel champion vs. local dominant attraction house show fare, actually. It's not that the stalling isn't fun and the antics with the ref aren't good and the cheating isn't effective. It just doesn't stand out as special like you'd expect a Christian vs. Samoa Joe match to be. In fact, even though he hits some of his big offensive moves, it's the least "Joe" match I've ever seen. He's so submerged in the formula that he comes off as just another guy lacking his usual aura. Because it's such an aberration, I'm leaning towards Christian not quite being there yet and my gut says that this would have been a lot better a couple of years later or even right now. Again, there was nothing bad or wrong about it and the stuff that was good was very good; it just was less than the sum of its parts should have been. That's all.

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: MISAWA~! FUCHI~! SLAUGHTER~! BUNDY~! GANG~! PG-13~! DOUGIE~! TN VOLS~!

Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Masa Fuchi AJPW 3/24/92

MD: For the first 4/5th of this, Fuchi really had Misawa's number. He started out by bullying on the mat, so Misawa stood up, but he pressed him into the ropes to lay in shots. Misawa started to fire back as he would, so he picked at a leg and never looked back from there, spending the next ten-plus minutes just dismantling a limb as only Fuchi could. Every time Misawa started to come back, Fuchi would cut him off with a quick kick to the knee. He kept it moving and interesting too, using a tree of woe followed by a dropkick, a shin-breaker onto a table on the outside, and an STF. The fans were behind Misawa and took serious umbrage every time Fuchi went too far. He couldn't quite put him away, but I like how Misawa couldn't use his first choice of moves to come back. He couldn't hit a suplex so he had to shift to a DDT, that sort of thing. A lot of the comeback and stretch was about him just grounding Fuchi and hurting him however he could. I wouldn't have minded Fuchi getting a nearfall towards the end, but this instead portrayed a much clearer and cleaner momentum shift and that was probably a story worth telling in and of itself.

ER: If the idea of Masa Fuchi savagely attacking Misawa's knee for 15 minutes sounds appealing to you, then you are going to love this match. I don't know who out there would be reading Segunda Caida and also not be into Masa Fuchi punching someone's knee as if were pizza dough, but I'm sure they're out there. I don't think there are that many wrestlers who can make 15 minutes of leg work as interesting as Fuchi, and I think a big part of that is the pure joy Fuchi derives from it. This is not a man mechanically working over a limb, this is a man who is doing his favorite thing in the world and is unable to hide that it is his favorite thing. All of the work before the leg work was really good, with Fuchi locking in a super tight side headlock and Misawa dishing out sharp elbows whenever he had some space. But before long Fuchi is kicking Misawa with some downright evil straight kicks to the inside knee, throwing low dropkicks that are clearly aimed at the patella and not the lower thigh, and you can see Misawa starting to flounder. 

There is an amazing spot where Misawa misses an enziguiri, and Fuchi hops in place with his arms extended, knowing he has a sitting duck, before connecting with one of his own. It's the closest I've seen to a native All Japan wrestler pointing to his head after out-thinking his opponent. Fuchi does some brilliant work around the turnbuckles and ringpost, placing Misawa in a tree of woe and DIGGING his elbow into that knee, then dropkicking it some more for good measure. When Fuchi drags him to the ringpost, I'm not sure I've seen a man slam a leg more gleefully into a ringpost. Fuchi even takes a running start to do it! Fuchi slams Misawa's leg into the post like he's trying to slam his front door as hard as possible after an argument with a neighbor. I like how the legwork affected Misawa's abilities to perform some of his offense, making him adjust his offense to use more leverage throws and just try to flatten Fuchi out to stop him. That knee does not stop Misawa from hitting a top rope elbow suicida and a big frog splash, but the man took all that damage and if he wants to hammer his kneecaps a little bit more on a house show, who am I to judge? 

King Kong Bundy vs. Sgt. Slaughter USA Pro Wrestling 8/22/97

MD: I have a lot of faith in Eric's ability to write this one up, but a few things did stand out. Slaughter was billed as the new WWF Commissioner and a 5-time World champion, which is pretty interesting math. Just having the WWF title one time is impressive enough and it's not like being a former US champion isn't, in 1997, more impressive than having the AWA America's Title or whatever they made for him. Bundy, in a back and forth in the ring, said that people were saying he got the commissioner's position in an unsavory way, which feels quite timely actually. They led off with a good battle over a top wristlock. I was kind of disappointed Bundy didn't end up pulling the hair because with guys of his vintage/era/style, I want that Studd-like dissonance of the huge guy resorting to cheating. Sarge got an advantage but hit his signature corner bump to the floor which looked particularly good onto the Newark ballroom carpets. From there, Bundy basically leaned on him with one hope spot until Sarge pulled him out, rolled back in for the countout, and rolled right back out to toss chairs at him until he retreat away. I'd call this a very competent Bundy performance. He'd interact with the crowd and mock Slaughter with a salute and even moved quickly once or twice when it meant something. The brawling on the floor was pretty good which was a little disappointing because they could have done more with that. Anyway, let's see what Eric has to say.

ER: It is true that I'm the one who pushed to include this match in NFF this week. Slaughter wasn't exactly working a ton of dates by 1997 and the idea of him working a Holiday Inn conference room in a year where his only other match was a long PPV match against HHH was far too compelling to pass up. I also loved Bundy's pre-match mic work, deftly tossing off two major insults in two sentences, one taking down the city of Newark and the other a sly takedown of Slaughter. Every heel is going to insult the local town, but some insults are better than others, and Bundy grabbing the mic to say, "I come from SOUTH Jersey, GOD'S country, not this god forsaken nuclear wasteland NORTH Jersey." That would have been a perfect win on its own, but following it up by implying Slaughter did morally ambiguous acts to earn his WWF Commissioner job was pleasantly unexpected. 

The match played well to each of their strengths, with Slaughter backing up Bundy with nice right hands and doing his best to stick and move. A year ago I wrote up a transcendent WWF fundraiser show from 1992 that was among my favorite things I watched all of last year. This was a show that was unlisted in official WWF records, with a Berzerker/Sgt. Slaughter match the main selling point for me. I was shocked that Sgt. Slaughter did his signature bump on that show, a show that was only being recorded by some dad with a camcorder. Well, here we are 5 years later and Slaughter - nearly 50 years old - is taking that bump as fast and dangerously as ever, crashing and burning across the unpadded Newark Holiday Inn carpet. Slaughter's corner bump is often majestic, and the one he takes here is one of the greats, not even accounting for age and venue. It's a nice turning point in the match, with Bundy keeping Slaughter down for a bit (and Slaughter taking a nice brick wall bump for Bundy's back elbow), and I liked how Slaughter hit three shoulderblocks on his comeback, knocking Bundy down on the third but missing a big elbowdrop to give the control back. I also agree with Matt the the floor brawling was really good and they easily could have done a couple more minutes of that and sent the fans home with a truly memorable main event. Bundy took a nice ring posting and they threw a couple of those rigid hotel ballroom chairs at each other, ending with some nice chaos before a post-match highlight reel makes me want to see some 1997 Cousin Luke matches that I didn't know existed. 

Doug Gilbert/PG-13 vs. One Man Gang/TN Vols (Reno Riggins/Steven Dunn) MECW 1999

MD: If the last minute or two went a little different this would have been just about everything you could want from a 10 minute match. Gang felt like an attraction and got to knock around JC Ice early, with Jamie doing sort of an Akeem dance mock and then paying for it. Midway through the ring broke and they used it to beat Dunn to a pulp. They had a ref distraction to miss the hot tag to Gang, and Dutch Mantel was on commentary so that was fun. The hot tag was good but it went to Reno instead of Gang which was the cardinal mistake in the match. I thought they might do a little bit more heat and turn it around and then have Reno tag Gang but he just came in. There was also some interference around the finish that was probably unnecessary and Dunn made the pin as the illegal man, which was what it was. Plus, the match could have used just a little more Doug. All nitpicks though because what we did get really did work both for me and the crowd. The finishing sequence was brutal with the Vols doing a double slingshot belly to back set up into a facebuster and then Gang hitting the 747. Pretty much an all time way to put a guy away. It's kind of exciting to think what other matches like this will turn up as Bryan Turner keeps going through his tapes.

ER: A very fun match, pretty much exactly what anyone going out of their way to watch this match would expect, only with a truly confounding ending that goes completely against what the entire match was building towards. It started out a bit shaky, with Wolfie having to do all the work to cover up all of the work that Steven Dunn was not doing. PG-13 are two guys that could work a great armdrag bump against the Invisible Man, so it's no shock that Wolfie is able to cover for Dunn. I swear, Dunn does the loosest, ugliest sliding legdrop I have ever seen. The camera angle didn't help, but I don't think there was a single angle you could have shown that legdrop to make it work. The match everyone (me included) wanted to see was Dundee vs. Gang, and Dundee did his usual chop suey cartwheel routine that ends with him being laid out by Gang's nice clothesline. That was the pairing I was most excited to see, but the best pairing of the match was easily Reno Riggins and Dougie. The two had the best punch exchange of the match, and Doug sprinted like a crazy man into an armdrag, and then took two insanely high backdrops. I didn't realize Dougie had Todd Morton backdrop height in him, but doing it twice in one match shows that it sure ain't no fluke. I dug the PG-13 heat segment on Dunn, choking him with the snapped middle ring rope and repeatedly getting the ref to get Gang back on the apron (nice work by the referee getting actually physical with the mammoth Gang). Gang got sent back out to the apron three of four times, and it was clear the entire thing was building to Gang, unleashed, decimating PG-13, Dougie, and the man wearing ICP paint on the floor. Wolfie sets up the hot tag in wild fashion by vaulting up to the top rope (remember, no middle rope) and whiffing on a corkscrew moonsault. It is unfathomable that Gang wasn't the hot tag here, no matter how decently Riggins handles a hot tag. I wanted to see Gang flattening everyone, no matter how strong the crowd was chanting for the Vols. Ah, nevertheless. 

Read more!

Found Footage Friday: BABY MISAWA~! ONITA~! SATO~! INOUE~! TENTA~! KABUKI~! JIVE TONES~! CADETES~! MISIONEROS~!

Mitsuharu Misawa/Atsushi Onita vs. Mighty Inoue/Akio Sato AJPW 12/08/82

MD: This is, I think, the earliest Misawa match on record that was identified in a handheld cache from a couple of years back and that's now online due to our new friend in Japan. We have some Goto vs early Kawada matches that we'll hopefully take a look at in the next couple of weeks too. A lot of this was putting Misawa through his paces with the basic spots you'd expect from someone in the system at his age. There was one point where he seemed a little lost on a whip and there were some things he did, like a big backflip off the top that you couldn't quite attach to the wrestler he'd someday be. In general, it was a good showing for his experience level, generally competent. Onita had that electricity that made you think that 82 Randy Savage vs 82 Atushi Onita would be the most interesting match in the world. He drew the eye with everything he did because it stood out so much to everyone around him. And it's not like Sato and Inoue were slouches. These two had as good a finishing combo as you'd see in 82, with Inoue's fireman's carry gutbuster, two flipping sentons, and Sato's wind up hook kick. 

ER: This was mostly simple juniors stuff, a lot of armdrags, some grounded headlocks, and some movements that seem destined only to ruin knees. You see Onita leaping off the top rope to the floor and landing on his feet, just to back off Inoue, and you think about how his knees were pure bone dust less than two years later. Inoue and Sato work over Misawa's knee (Sato had a really nasty grapevine kneedrop that did not prevent Misawa from backflipping off the top rope late in the match) and has a cool backbreaker. Misawa gets to show some spunk with a hard back suplex that gets paid back shortly after. I loved how the match built to a wild Inoue/Onita exchange, with Inoue hitting his high cross block and then FLYINF over the top to the floor after missing the immediate follow up, giving Onita the opening to fly into him with a great tope. The Misawa/Inoue stuff was nice and spirited, with Misawa missing a cool leaping crossbody off the top and getting his insides rearranged with a gutbuster and two fat flipping sentons. Misawa was only 20 years old here, but you could really see how high his floor was just from his young boy work. 

The Jive Tones (Pez Whatley/Tiger Conway Jr.) vs. John Tenta/Great Kabuki AJPW 9/2/89

MD: Jive Tones were generally supporting Abdullah (who was building up to his big, heavily promoted singles match with Baba) on this tour. We get them in some six mans but it's nice to see a straight tag match with them doing their thing. Tenta was winding down on his way to the WWF, having not been utilized all that much in 89. Kabuki, of course, would jump between lower card matches like this and being a second or third guy in Jumbo vs. Tenryu main event trios matches. Maybe that's why it was so enjoyable to see him goof and stooge about with Conway and Whatley here. There was a beautiful exchange where Conway escaped a headlock by dancing this way and that and Kabuki answered by mocking his little dance. The crowd was definitely into the act, popping for each bit of oscillation or jiving that Conway or Whatley pulled out. You never quite got the sense that they were going to win, between the hierarchy of it all and Tenta's sheer size, but they definitely irritated their opponents along the way. That made the post match dancing and strutting around the ring of Tenta and Kabuki all the sweeter after their victory.

ER: Matt really has a strong grasp on the kind of matches that will lure me into writing late on a Friday night. I didn't know the Jive Tones worked an All Japan tour, let alone in a featured tag match, so I was going to be here for this. You see, it's the way Conway shimmies Whatley's white jacket down his arms and shoulders, really taking his time, wiggling his partner free. He will continue wiggling his way through the match, but building to some surprising stiffness and a cool story. I would have enjoyed this if they had kept the early match vibes, like Kabuki barreling out of control doing rope running with Conway, leading to him eating an armdrag and dropkick, or how Tenta swung super low on a clothesline and then caught Whatley's high crossbody, only to go down in a heap from Conway's Thesz press. 

I thought this would settle down pretty quickly into Tenta and Kabuki dominating, and the fun twist in the match comes when Conway gets manhandled into the wrong corner. This is clearly where he was about to take a long beating, and instead, wins a punch out with Kabuki that turns into a nice heat segment on Kabuki, even giving us a Conway butt butt off the ropes. One of Tenta's best traits as a wrestler is how good he is at looking Actually Mad in the ring. He has great body language and is good at selling, but he's so good here at looking genuinely pissed off at Whatley's antics, coming off like someone who was upset that the Jive Tones weren't treating Professional Wrestling with enough Respect. It's so cool seeing such a big dude get knocked around by Conway and Whatley, and my favorite part of the match was this excellent last second pinfall save by Conway, flying into frame with a stage dive that Charles Peterson should have captured in black and white. Kabuki barely gets the win with an inside cradle as Tenta is getting smashed into the ringpost on the floor. Negative points to the cameraman for not giving us more of Tenta and Kabuki's celebratory in-ring strutting. 

Solar/Súper Astro/Ultraman vs. Black Terry/El Signo/Negro Navarro Primer Festival De Lucha Libre Regia 3/21/10

PAS: Always cool to see a new match from Navarro and Terry when they were in their mid 50s and smack in their prime. Terry was the greatest brawler in the world in 2010, but this was more of a Navarro vs. Solar style llave exhibition, which was fun but not revelatory. Everyone kind of hit their beats here, pretty heavily matched up, so we didn't see much of Navarro or Solar doing their things with the other guys in the match. We did get a nice Super Astro tope and some flips from him, and I liked how they teased the traditional Solar vs. Navarro double pin finish, only to switch it up and have Solar win by submission. 

MD: This felt like these guys playing the classics, especially with the initial exchanges, but they're classics for a reason and even though we shouldn't have been surprised by it, because we have Solar vs Navarro even a number of years later, it's absolutely impressive on paper. It was a lot of fun seeing Super Astro use Signo's sheer size as an absolutely literal base to use to bound around the ring. Navarro and Solar had a lot of time and they used it to the fullest with one interesting tricked out hold after the next, holds that almost no one else in the world could make plausible but them. Things opened up a little on the second or third set of exchanges and that let Black Terry unleash some of the shots you'd expect out of him from this time and it gave things some variety, but they snapped back to old form shortly thereafter. Past the action itself, my favorite bit of this was the audio of someone explaining to their kid who each tecnico was based on the color of their gear. It was matter-of-fact and wholesome, spreading the love of these guys across generations.

Read more!

New Footage Friday: All Japan 11/19/90

Masa Fuchi/Yoshinari Ogawa vs. Ricky Santana/Doug Furnas

MD: In general, it's astounding that these AJPW Handhelds are as well-shot as they are. Occasionally you're bound to get a match like this where there's just nothing the poor guy shooting can do to capture the action. We got glimpses of Furnas powering people about, maybe the tiniest hints that Ogawa was starting to put a few things together, a buzz for Fuchi doing awesome Fuchi things, and some energetic stuff (stooging? flying? who knows!) from Santana, but mostly, we're looking at the back of people's heads. Ah well.

ER: Matches like these remind me how often I take handhelds for granted. For all the amazing handheld footage we have of various territories and eras, we don't really have a ton where 75% of the match is blocked by someone's head. What we do see are some moments that make Doug Furnas come off like a monster heel, Fuchi like a VERY relevant 36 year old (that man was prematurely shunted to openers and old man trios), and Ogawa like a guy that big crowds are really getting behind. Furnas had this kickass muscular athlete spot where he hit a press slam and then did a back handspring into a running shoulderblock that sent Ogawa flying. Fuchi works super fast exchanges and comes in at the end to hit a sick kneedrop off the top rope. Fans went nuts thinking they were seeing Ogawa pin Furnas with a nice bridging German, but Furnas knows just how to egg them on and rubs their faces in a strong belly to belly. 


Mitsuo Momota/Tsuyoshi Kikuchi vs. Dynamite Kid/Johnny Smith

MD: This one we could see clearly and it was fairly good stuff. Johnny Smith didn't have Davey's likability and oafish charisma, but he was a physical force and very athletic. In some ways, his edge synced better with Dynamite's. Kikuchi already had a lot going for him in 1990: His stuff snapped, he could draw sympathy, and he had fire in his comebacks. Momota was fine here but he worked best as an underdog and Kikuchi was there to play that role. Good finish, getting him out of the way for the bodyslam tombstone and headbutt.

ER: I really like the Dynamite/Smith team. Smith is a sound wrestler but pretty colorless, and Dynamite is a broken down 32. But the team dynamic is stronger than the Bulldogs dynamic would have been at this point, as Dynamite doesn't have to provide nearly as much flash and instead can rely on his strengths as an asshole. Here he's mostly utilized as a guy stopping Kikuchi's momentum and saving Smith, and it works really well. Dynamite looks and acts like a real tough guy piece of shit, with his slicked back hair and sideburns, and I loved every instance of him breaking up a pin with a boot to the back of someone's head, stopping a Kikuchi Boston Crab with the hardest chop of the match, and coming in late to smack Kikuchi off the top rope. We missed the first couple minutes of this, and that's likely where most of the Dynamite/Momota exchanges happened. The little bit we got looked great, with Momota working some fast juniors exchanges and then stopping Kid short with a straight kneelift. Dynamite's finishing 1-2 was really nasty, deadlifting Kikuchi into a scoop tombstone (that had to be hell on his back) and hitting a crippled (but still crazy) version of his top rope headbutt that inadvertently adds a forearm across Kikuchi's throat. This was a different Dynamite Kid than his uninjured heyday, but this iteration of him sees him picking and choosing how to use his fading athleticism, while increasing the emotional heft of his selling (the way he sells a falling headbutt looks like he rung his own bell). It's a different way of doing things, but I always get engaged seeing a wrestler operating at his base muscle memory. 


Haruka Eigen/Motoshi Okuma vs. The Land of Giants (Skywalker Nitron/Butch Masters)

MD: Eigen and Okuma get a solid B- for effort in trying to fend off Masters and Nitron, including chaining some strikes together to finally get one of them down, but the finish was inevitable from the start. Land of the Giants had presence due to their size and worked best when hammering down on their opponents or lifting them up. Their other strikes, including the kicks in the corner? Less so. This was still effective enough in presenting an attraction and making fans wonder how a more accomplished team might fare against them.

ER: Man, the fans in Niigata LOVED The Land of Giants. At least during their entrance. When the two giants stormed out and ambushed the natives you'd think the crowd was watching the Road Warriors. Land of the Giants might be the actual worst of the big league Road Warriors knockoffs, but I'll always think a pair of teaming giants has a high floor, no matter how glaring their weaknesses might be. And there are weaknesses. Nitron is very tentative with all of his stuff, almost always double pumping or stuttering a bit before making a move. Masters has a lot more confidence and has better timing, but neither of them have good strikes. It shouldn't be difficult for two legitimately huge guys to just swing their arms and voila, Good Looking Strikes, but pro wrestling doesn't really work that way. The best stuff here came from Okuma and Eigen making inroads and the fans getting excited about the distant prospect of an upset. Okuma especially got them fired up, taking advantage of a (really nice looking) missed Masters avalanche and helping Eigen knock him to the mat. I laughed at Eigen grabbing a single leg and Okuma kicking Master's plant leg out from under him, and Okuma misses his diving headbutt by whipping his forehead down into the mat. I also really loved Okuma's delayed reaction sell of the double big boot, looking up at them as if to say "TWO boots??" before falling to his back. The assisted legdrop is a cool finisher for Land of the Giants, but of course Nitron hesitates twice before finally lifting Masters. 

Rusher Kimura/Mighty Inoue vs. Stan Hansen/Dan Spivey

MD: Mighty Inoue really wrestled like a million bucks, but here he also got exposed as being really tiny. What was striking, however, was that Hansen and Spivey actually made him LOOK like a million bucks here, letting Inoue outmaneuver them. That lasted right til the end where he somehow rode Hansen's attempt to interfere into his somersault senton and took Hansen out (and literally out of the ring) before the distraction had him walk right into the Spivey Spike DDT. Kimura was only in for a little, but but he got to give Hansen a taste of his own medicine with the world's longest eyerake. If Inoue was two or three inches taller, he could have been one of the biggest stars of the 80s. Sometimes you get these bizarre house show performances where Hansen will give a ton to someone, like we saw some months back with Blackwell. Here, though, Inoue made it all seem earned. 

ER: This is a great house show curiosity, a match that looks like a surefire on-paper steamrolling and instead is worked as if the teams were equals. Hansen and Spivey paid a lot of reverence to the two old men (Rusher Kimura here is 8 years older than I presently am), with Spivey selling Rusher's headbutt like a real momentum shifter multiple times. Hansen runs over several audience members on the way to the ring, but he generously sells for Inoue, and the two big men getting knocked around by two smaller/older guys is incredibly entertaining. Spivey was smart about what to sell, not going down for every move but every other move, consistently selling the headbutts as a big move but merely getting knocked on his heels by shoulderblocks and lariats. Rusher has a fun hot tag where he punches Spivey right in the neck, Inoue hits a big bulldog on Spivey and has a great run of flying shoulder tackles (including one that Hansen bumps to the floor), but he misses his beautiful somersault senton right after disposing of Hansen and Spivey pounces with his spike DDT. I always get excited for new All Japan handhelds, because there are always weirdo gems like these where we get glimpses of guys working outside of the established All Japan hierarchy.


Dr. Death/Terry Gordy vs. Kenta Kobashi/Johnny Ace

MD: We get a few really good minutes of footage if you skip past the handheld issues that start this video out. There's a 50% chance that's all you'd get anyway with a match like this if it was filmed for the TV, so I can't complain too much. The clarity comes in right when Williams had Kobashi in a bear hug and the fans were going nuts for him to escape. Instead he ate a belly to belly. From what we could see, everyone looked great. Ace is an underrated apron cheerleader, not that this crowd needed much leading. Kobashi had been in the spotlight for about a year and a half at this point and he definitely already had It here, working from underneath and unleashing his fire when it was his time to get revenge. Unfortunately, the few minutes of clarity we got just made you want to see more since this looked like a great one overall.

ER: This was just the final 5 minute stretch of a 17 minute match, and I'm sure we at least got the best and hottest 5 minute stretch of the match. Sure it would be nice to have full matches on handhelds, and a lot of people would be excited for new Kobashi footage, but I like that we got complete versions of the other matches and just the finish of this one. The crowd is over the moon for Kobashi here, but on this same show I've been way more into babyface performances from Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, Motoshi Okuma, Rusher Kimura, and Mighty Inoue. I don't even think Kobashi was the best babyface in his own match, as this felt way more like a great Johnny Ace show. Kobashi had goofy slaps during his big hot tag, and meanwhile Ace is taking big bumps off the top and breaking up pins with his whole body, really knowing when to let Kobashi shine and when to step up. Gordy and Doc looked exactly how you'd expect them to look, and the hot crowd made the match-finishing Gordy powerbombs feel even bigger. 


Andre the Giant/Giant Baba vs. Kimala II/Abdullah the Butcher - GREAT

MD: This was fun for what it was and you knew what it would be coming in. Andre vs. Abby is a rare match-up if not a completely unique one, and both Abby and Kimala II were respectful and willing to put over the grandeur of their opponents. It was interesting to see a 1990 Giant Baba match where he did the brunt of the work. The highlight was the corner battering ram spot but Abby's timing was as good as ever. It was a crowd-pleaser though it was funny that Abby and Kimala got some chants from obvious dissidents before the match started.

PAS: I thought this was awesome. I am an end of the road Andre super fan, and watching him throw hands with 1990 Abby is really thrilling. We don't get a ton of it but it ruled. There is a 2/3 falls Abby vs. Andre match from 1977 in Houston, and it's probably in Billy Corgan's garage. DAMN YOU CORGAN!!. I enjoyed Kimala bringing the athleticism. He just flew into all of Baba's stuff, hit a dropkick, dove off the top, really wrestled around Baba and made his stuff look good. I would have loved to see the crowd brawling between Andre and Abby, but what we got was a blast.


Mitsuhara Misawa/Toshiaki Kawada vs. Terry Funk/Dory Funk Jr.

MD: This went all the way and from what we could see, which admittedly wasn't everything was really good. The crowd was up for it and made it feel like a big deal, a sort of parallel to Tsuruta-gun vs the Super Generation Army, but the latter facing legends in the Funks instead. It had just about everything you'd want: Dory throwing forearms instead of sitting in holds, Terry getting a ton of sympathy as he took all of Misawa and Kawada's stuff, a big comeback with an amazing exchange ending in him ducking a Kawada kick and flooring him, and an incredibly exciting and increasingly wild last ten minutes as they built up to the draw. Dory and Terry rose to the occasion, including tossing out a standing double hip toss which seemed pretty unique from them. I loved the bit where Misawa and Kawada both tried a Scorpion Deathlock since that's a death move in AJPW. And it ended with Kawada surviving the spinning toehold as the clock ran out and a show of respect from the four.

PAS: Terry vs. Misawa is a match up that only happened here (Terry worked with Tiger Mask II in the 80s) and they really had great charisma with each other, Misawa's stoicism blended nicely with Terry's wild shit. We get some fun feeling out stuff with Dory early and it built to a pretty exciting finish run, with Terry hitting his piledriver on Kawada and Misawa and Kawada trying to finish the Funks with scorpion death locks. I liked how the finishing run felt frantic, sometimes draws just finished, but here both teams felt like they were working against each other and the clock. 


Joel Deaton/Dick Slater vs. Jumbo Tsuruta/Akira Taue

MD: This had a sense of inevitability from the start, but it was still pretty good for what it was. Deaton and Slater were able to maintain control when they leaned into their teamwork. Taue wasn't quite there yet but he was closer than he was and could better use his size and presence, though in this match he was there to set up the big tag to Jumbo. Inevitability is the best part about Jumbo, that last minute where his opponent survives but where everyone in the crowd knew the hand would be raised and the backdrop was coming. Slater, despite being past his prime still came off as fairly credible in this setting.

Read more!

New Footage Friday: FUJIWARA! SUPER TIGER! MASCARA CONTRA MASCARA! JUMBO! TAUE! FUCHI! MISAWA! KAWADA KIKUCHI!

Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Super Tiger UWF 1/16/85 - EPIC

PAS: Tiger vs. Fujiwara is in the discussion with Lawler vs. Dundee, Santo vs. Casas, Misawa vs. Kawada of all time greatest matchups. Our pal Charles from PWO DM's me and says "I think I found a HH Tiger vs. Fujiwara that wasn't out there before" 2021 is already turning the corner.  

I am not sure where this stands in the pantheon of their matchups, but it was a hand to god wrestling treasure. The story in this is familiar, Fujiwara works for various submissions, while Sayama unloads a Dresden level firebombing on his body.  Can Fujiwara find a tendon to snap before Tiger beats him to death? Sayama just mauls Fujiwara's thigh with gross kneedrops and kicks. It is so relentless and violent looking that it seems like Fujiwara might never walk without a cane.  Fujiwara does land some nasty body shots, but he is mostly overwhelmed on his feet. There are very few wrestlers in history who are as brutal strikers as UWF era Sayama and some of the kicks and punches seemed to violate the unspoken agreement of professional wrestling. Despite that onslaught, Fujiwara is who he is, he can be getting blown out and beaten up, but if you stick out your arm or leg even a little bit, it is getting snatched. Fujiwara looks absolutely done, he is lying on his stomach while Tiger whip kicks him in the head and drops knees on his thigh. The ref pulls Tiger off to give Fujiwara a count, Fujiwara stumbles into the corner glassy eyed, but as Tiger approaches to put him down, Fujiwara catches the spin kick, grabs a fast waistlock and pulls him down. He then tries several attacks on the arm, until he maneuvers it into a key lock and snaps it like a breadstick. Wonderful mix of violence and skill. I am a Fujiwara guy, and finding a unseen prime classic like this, what a treat. 

MD: Absolutely elemental battle. Sayama is the wind, absolutely relentless, constantly driving forward, battering Fujiwara with piercing kicks, tearing apart the knee again and again and again, squeezing out of holds to restart the assault at the earliest opportunity. Fujiwara is the sea, repeatedly dissipated by Sayama's barrage but ever reassembling, patiently enduring the storm, calm and consistent, the wave of his arm able to reach around at any moment to pry off one of Sayama's limbs and recover the advantage. For all of the effusive, medium-criticism-defining praise of decades for Sayama's grace and execution, I connect with him most when he's tearing away at Fujiwara in the corner with his kicks. Later on, Fujiwara fluidly seeps out around Sayama's attempt to contain him and returns the favor with brutal punches in the corner; there's none of his occasional playfulness here given the stakes and the ferocity of Sayama's offense. Sayama wins on points by never stopping, by absolutely decimating Fujiwara's leg, but he's never able to fully take advantage of it, and all it takes is one opening, one mistake, one possibility for the sea to sweep forth and swallow the wind whole.

ER: This is listed as a Death Match, and while I'm not sure what that means within 1985 UWF, it's awesome that Fujiwara worked something billed as that sandwiched between days where he fought Terry Rudge. Can you imagine that schedule? How insanely tough is this man, who was taking on perhaps his greatest rival in a Death Match on a Wednesday, while no doubt getting pummeled on Tuesday and Thursday by Rudge. Handhelds are a pretty amazing glimpse at how our favorites worked when the cameras weren't on, and they almost always show us that a lot of them never held back no matter who was watching. Fujiwara is a punisher, but the most iconic images of him are of him taking a punishing beating. I loved the shots we got of him lying on his side, covering his body with one arm while keeping a hand in front of his face, only surviving because Tiger decided to catch his breath lest he get too tired kicking Fujiwara's ass. Fujiwara is the man this crowd wanted to see, hearing them chant his name while Ride of the Valkyries hit was like hearing AJ crowds go crazy for Misawa. And they kept willing him back into things even when Tiger looked like he was trying to cripple him. Tiger was a real monster here, and it occurred to me that there are probably a ton of people who know Tiger from the Dynamite Kid matches, that have never seen him in full UWF asskicker mode. His kicks to a grounded Fujiwara's head were disgusting, but his leg attacks were what really set this apart. His knee drops were incredibly cruel, dropping down as hard as possible on Fujiwara's hamstrings, including off the middle buckle. You knew at a certain point that Fujiwara was only going to target a keylock, and I loved seeing him weather this awful storm to get there. 

Aguila Solitario vs. Al Rojo Vivo CMLL 12/15/85

PAS: An unseen 80s mask match is pretty exciting, it gives you hope that more is still out there to be unearthed. This was pretty formulaic, but it is a great formula to watch. Rojo takes the first fall entirely rips the mask and bloodies Solitario a bit. Solitario is able to fight back and take the second fall leading a near fall heavy third. I liked the Solitario superfly splash he used to take the segunda, and how he came up short trying it again in the tercera. I could have used one more big moment, a huge bump, a crazy dive, a ton of blood. It was just missing the hook which would push this to another level. Still it was really cool to see, and a big moment in two wrestler's lives we got see play out.

MD: This was exactly what I wanted it to be and hugely refreshing to watch. Rojo Vivo launched the ambush right at the start and controlled the primera with a very solid beatdown. Very little pomp or bs. Aguila's comeback spot in the segunda was actually worked for more than you'd usually see in these. It wasn't a bolt of lightning but instead an errant, desperate backhand followed up by more desperate swipes and revenge-driven offense that really embraced selling the damage already done. At the same time, Aguila threw himself into it, making even armdrags feel like punishing revenge spots. The tercera was exciting, full of nearfalls that had me for a moment. Rojo Vivo turned the tide with a low blow on the outside and Aguila used that to express vulnerability and peril off and on in the stretch. He didn't have the world's best execution but it really didn't matter here because everything was believable and he kept the crowd connected.

Akira Taue/Jumbo Tsuruta/Masanobu Fuchi vs. Mitsuhara Misawa/Toshiaki Kawada/Tsuyoshi Kikuchi AJPW 3/29/92

MD: Great lost six man here. You look for the big things and the little ones with these. For big ones, you get the relative novelty of Kawada and Misawa working together, Kawada going at it with Taue, the huge feel of of Jumbo vs Misawa, and after spending a good chunk of the match avoding everyone and getting little shots in, the sheer inevitability of Jumbo crushing Kikuchi starting a really enjoyable peril segment for him where Fuchi demolishes him (including an amazing neckbreaker hold over the top rope) and Taue lawn darts him into the turnbuckle. The little stuff would be the specifics, like Misawa doing his headstand flip and going for a tag early on, only to realize he'd lost his ring positioning and was in the wrong corner, or Fuchi playing his usual bulldog self from the apron and rushing in to go straight for Kawada's eye to break a hold, that sort of thing. I thought the finishing stretch went on a bit too long, maybe, but that's a me thing. Otherwise, this was really good stuff with a pretty legendary four minute beatdown on Kikuchi that everyone should see.

PAS: Pissed off at the kids Jumbo is my all time favorite Jumbo. He seems to take such glee in brutalizing Kikuchi and man does he kill him here. Kikuchi taking these beatings multiple times a week really shortened his career, but he was one of the best ever at spunkily taking a pasting. Fuchi was a real fucker in this match too, he comes in and tries to rip Kawada's eye out, and enziguiris him right in the kidneys. Kawada was a great supporting player in this match, he was a level below then his opponents at this point, and it was fun to see the ultimate asskicker coming off the back foot instead of firing forward.  This was a Kikuchi show, bravely dying on his shield, and the barbarians who slaughtered him. 

ER: I love these six mans, and it's so incredible to see them working their charismatic, easy to follow formula at every house show. A special thing about this nearly 30 minute handheld, is that we have a genuine wrestling handheld maestro behind the camera. Our footage  shakes wildly for the first 30 seconds, and by the time the match starts the guy is doing perfect framing zooms, keeping all the action perfectly squared up the entire LONG match. When the match would break down and everyone would pair off, he'd manage to jump between all three pairs without missing action. This guy did some shots that made it seem like he knew exactly what moves were going to be happening, just an awesome familiarity with these guys. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a handheld match keep the action this well. I have to imagine he was part of some kind of community, the way Grateful Dead fans know the names of certain prominent tapers who got the best sound mix. I want to see his other work. 

The match was an awesome heel performance from grumpy Jumbo and his goons, Masa Fuchi and Akira Taue. This is the era of Jumbo I love, such a magnetic superstar in that ring. The handheld really gets you in with the crowd, and every time Jumbo showed off just why he still had reasonable claim to being the top dog, the crowd OOOOOOHHH'd along with him every time he pumped his fist. The whole match really picks up when Jumbo's team gets Kikuchi away from the pack and really lay in the kind of beating that Kikuchi took in 1992. Kikuchi is one of the toughest lunatics in wrestling history, and most prisoners don't see the kind of abuse this guy took in the early 90s. Taue lawn darts him face first into the turnbuckles, Fuchi hung him out to dry on the ropes, and Jumbo confidently injured him with a stiff Boston crab while keeping him away from his corner. We get the great fakeouts where Kikuchi is held back from making the tag, and all of it works really well. 

You really get to see how far Misawa came when you see him here versus him as the absolute top guy. Jumbo still comes off like the main hoss in All Japan here, and Misawa doesn't have quite the impact for me he would just a couple years later. Jumbo was practically out of wrestling just a few months after this match. Misawa is such a boss within two years, but here he still looked like a guy who wasn't quite able to move Jumbo around the way he wanted. Fuchi is so good as the second in command ass kicker, behind Jumbo. He never uses Jumbo to hide behind, but you can sense he feels emboldened having Jumbo there. He really rips at Kawada, and you always get a sense of glee when you know he's standing across from Kikuchi, like Kikuchi is his violence muse. But really this left me feeling like the perfect kind of match to soak in the 1992 brilliance of nearly/suddenly retired Jumbo and what might have been in the 90s, with more from a great year of underdog babyface work from Kikuchi. A great find, and a more complete look at one of the most fruitful rosters in wrestling history. 

Read more!