RIP Badboy Hido

One of the ultimate marrying up guys in professional wrestling, a scuzzy Juggalo garbage wrestler who somehow ended up wedded to Megumi Kudo. While not at the level of his wife, he had a cool career of his own, scraping the bottom of the Japanese indy world along with having some cool turn of the century US Indy matches. 

Badboy Hido vs. Bull Pain IWA-MS 6/1/01

PAS: This was one of the best US death matches of the 2000s, a barbed wire baseball bat match in first round of the 2001 IWA KOTDM , Pain is a masterful brawler, so good at making the little things look great, punches, spinning headbutt to the nuts, nasty stomps to the head. He also maybe the best baseball bat worker in wrestling history, he really makes it look like he is smashing someone with a baseball bat without breaking bones. Hido was right there with the brawling and bleeding, and they broke out some very cool spots using chairs and the barbedwire baseball bat. I loved Hido wrapping a chair around Bull's head and braining him with a chair shot, and the tope rope splash onto the barbedwire bat was nasty. Finish was really cool as Hido throws a chair in the air and drives it right into Bull's face with a lariat. Great creative plunder fight and a fun fist fight between two tough fuckers. 

Badboy Hido vs. Necro Butcher IWA-MS 7/7/01

PAS: Hido comes to the ring with Madman Pondo and a midget as a Juggalo heel faction. The start of this match was unexpected to say the least, as they work the first 5 minutes or so like a Jack Brisco match around a shoulder block exchanges and a knuckle lock. It of course eventually spills to the floor and gets grody, with some sick looking Necro flip bumps into chairs (including wiping out a fan). Hido is in beatdown mode for a while, and no one takes a bigger beating then Necro Butcher. The wildness keeps ramping up and Necro gets a bunch of lighttubes stuck in his shirt and smashed with a chair, and ends the match by lighting his leg on fire and landing a top rope legdrop. Hido looked great going toe to toe with big shots with Necro and is willing to be completely nuts, great little mini IWA run, I need to find his Cash Flo singles. 

Badboy Hido vs. Shadow WX BJW 4/28/02

PAS: Totally wild match which reads a bit like a shoot angle. Hido is really unprofessionally smashing refs with unpulled kendo stick shots, mauling a woman at ringside with a broken lighttube, getting into what looked like a fist fight with WX. More of a weird angle then a match, but it really delivered the rampaging on the edge violence. Felt like a Japanese version of the IWA-MS Tracey Smothers riot, which is about as a high a compliment as I can give a thing

Read more!

Rifling Through the Trash: The Unfinished Segunda Caida

We here at Segunda Caida all watch a lot of wrestling. We also start a lot of projects. More projects than we can ever ever possibly finish. We start watching something, write about it, don't finish writing about it, and there it sits. We have about 80 unfinished drafts dating back 4 years. Some of them may get finished some day (IWA-MS show reviews, WAR show reviews), others are kind of pointless to ever finish (old CMLL TV write-ups, reviews of WWE Superstars episodes). Still these write ups all took at least SOME time out of our schedules, and it's only fair that we get SOME use out of them. I literally forgot Go Shiozaki was a person.



~Started (and not finished) by SLL on 6/1/08:

Takashi Sasaki, Abdullah Kobayashi, Shadow WX, & MASADA vs. MEN'S Teioh, Jun Kasai, Jaki Numazawa, & Yuko Miyamoto
BJPW - 1/2/2007 - Tokyo, Japan
Fluorescent Light Tubes Death Match

Oh God, this was painful. And not in the good "hot damn, Onita's dragging his back along barbed wire" kind of painful you want from death matches. This was more of the "hot damn, Zandig doesn't even know what a wrestling match is, does he?" kind of painful. Well, maybe not that bad, but still. I'd say something like "you know you're in trouble when MASADA is clearly the worker of the match" but....

1. I haven't seen a MASADA match since before he was in The Carnage Crew.
2. He was actually legit good here. In the midst of guys standing around to set up needlessly complex spots, odd patches of no-selling, and Abdullah Kobayashi throwing the shittiest strikes imaginable, MASADA actually comes off as a guy you want to see more of. Comes off as the guy you would actually need to be afraid of in a death match. He gets a lot of neat spots, including grabbing Miyamoto by the legs and dragging as back around on all the broken glass, and punching the seat out of a chair before using it as a weapon. I've written elsewhere about how the Finlay/JBL match from Mania was conceptually cool because they took the late-90's/early-00's "cookie sheets and garbage can lids" style of benign, mainstream hardcore wrestling, and made it look really hard and dangerous. Getting hit with just the seat of a crappy folding chair is about the same as getting hit with a garbage can lid (and the way Miyamoto no-sells it hammers that home) but the way MASADA sets it up by just punching the seat out of the chair makes it look like he's doing some seriously bad stuff. So there's MASADA's name next to the names of Finlay and JBL, for whatever that's worth.

Anyway, the rest of the match is pretty much ass. The post match with Miyamoto getting all up in Sasaki's mug and Sasaki beating the shit out of him, but Miyamoto refusing to back off, was kinda neat. Got me interested in their match later in the set. I didn't need to sit through Abdullah Kobayashi throwing punches that would make Rob Van Dam shake his head in disgust to get there, though.


~Snippets from TomK reviewing ROH "Take No Prisoners" (left unfinished by Phil on 6/23/08):


Tyler Black v. Delirious v Claudio Castagnoli v Go Shiozaki

TKG: This is a four way for a title shot at the end of the show. Not normally a fan of this type of spotfest four way and so came in with some trepidation. Shocked by how effective this was. Delirious who gets shit on a lot lately really looked like the best guy in this match and everything he did looked solid, but that was beside the point. Whole thing was aimed at getting Black over and no-one was trying to upstage him. Black had two big spectacular spots. The dropkick attempt landing on his feet was especially cool. Unlike most of the time with this match format, there wasn’t any excessive kickouts and match ended in a real satisfying way right when it felt like it should.

Notes for Phil: If you can’t come up with anything else leaving you to talk shit about the everyone stares into the mic and cuts a promo shit, or Nigel on commentary.

Kevin Steen v Roderick Strong

Notes for Phil: Them stealing your idea for how to ue Kevin Steen from DVDVR 166:

I haven't had much to say about the IWS guys before, and I have actively hated Steen, but he seems to have ditched most of his crap and just become a fat asskicker. With his bad skin and flabby body he does look like every single guy in the audiance though, I am guessing ROH books him for the same reason you book Pedro Morales in NYC, he is the regional babyface for fat wrestling dorks. With that I think this match was hurt a little by him working heel, you don't book Putski as a heel in Pittsburgh.


~Snippets from Eric reviewing random matches from 2009 (left unfinished 1/15/10): 


1. Roderick Strong vs. Necro Butcher (IWA-EC, 2/4/09)

I don't really know what the internet opinion is of Roderick Strong. I don't know if he gets talked about as "good" or "bad", or if I would actually trust the opinions of the people that would be calling him good or bad. I know he's blandish, but he's a guy I really don't mind. I can picture him walking down the street wearing khakis and a letterman jacket and some white sneakers, and not everybody can pull off something so clean cut All-American like that. Of course depending on what state you might be in, Necro is also a pretty accurate representation of American society. This isn't about all that, though, this is just two dudes hitting each other pretty darn hard for a good 20 minutes and I really can get behind that.

Roderick takes Necro's corner "punch/chop" combo in the corner better than anybody I've seen. Instead of just flexing up his chest like he's taking Kobashi chops, he acts more like Ali on the ropes [match review just sorta...ends there]

Read more!