2018 Ongoing MOTY List: MAMMOTH!

30. Mammoth Sasaki/Toru Sugiura vs. Mr. Gannosuke/Yuko Miyamoto FREEDOMS 3/22

ER: Ah Mammoth Sasaki, guy I would possibly be 5th or 8th most excited about on an early 2000s FMW card. Why are you so good in this match that I will now have to go watch a bunch of 2018 FREEDOMS!? I have a different wrestling watching life than I did in 2001. I had a LOT more free time then, and a lot less responsibility. Now that wrestling is the most accessible it's ever been, and I am the busiest I've ever been, it's very easy for me to lose track of any given Japanese indie worker for 15+ years. I don't remember the last Tatsuhito Takaiwa match I watched, but you know he's still out there doing his thing. And then a match like this floats along and suddenly Mammoth is filling all of those Tenryu/Morishima gaps and it gives me this weird nostalgia feeling of a time when Japanese wrestling was my favorite wrestling. Mammoth is MAMMOTH in this, throwing painful as hell shoulderblocks with Gannosuke, throwing big chops with a perfect surprise jab to Miyamoto, nice snap powerslam, and then going on this kickass finishing stretch with big lariats, a gorgeous brainbuster, huge deadlift gutwrench powerbomb, and a finish worthy Falcon Arrow. The guy looked awesome, and the nice pacing and great use of partner saves made up for some dodgy Miyamoto/Sugiura stuff. Miyamoto wears pants like an early 2000s east coast indie worker, but doesn't seem as good as Dewey Cheatum.  Sugiura is a Mammoth trainee and looks decent-ish at times, his elbow drops are okay (and I like that he's at least attempting classic elbow drops) and his back bump missile dropkick hits hard, but really this match doesn't bump up until Mammoth starts using Sugiura's corpse as a weapon. Mammoth gets a hot tag and throws Sugiura's tagged out tired body into a nasty corner lariat, then gives his partner a huge front suplex into a pinfall attempt. The saves down the stretch are all awesome. Gannosuke cares not about what happened to garbage fed stars like Misawa and Kobashi, he is 50 and will still take a huge suplex on his neck. Gannosuke gets a great nearfall of his wonderful leg trip backlside that somebody needs to steal, and I loved Mammoth reversing it into a powerbomb when Gann tries it again. Mammoth strung together finishing stretch killshots like a classic Kings Road main eventer, just smartly laid out shots and great finish teases. Mammoth!

PAS: I remember Mammoth having a moment as the next hotness around the turn of the century. There was a Tenryu singles match I remember loving in 2003, and then I don't think I heard hide nor hair of him for 15 years, and here he is rocking it out. For tubby sons of Tenryu, I like him way better then Ishii. I agree that the Sugiura vs. Miyamoto stuff wasn't great, but I liked Sugiura vs. Gannosuke a fair amount, I thought his one two elbow smash combos looked cool, and he had a nice bodypress. Gannoseke vs. Mammoth was the main event though and that was great. Big thick clothesline, and big backdrops it felt like a real throwback Puro heavyweight battle. I loved that Gannoseke backslide, what a cool move, and the doctor bomb counter was nifty. It really takes some mining to find cool Puro these days, but this was a little nugget of gold.


2018 MOTY MASTER LIST

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Dick Togo Started Out Trappin, Tryna to Get Those New Bo's, Then He Realized What it Did to Those Hoes

Dick Togo vs. Yuko Miyamoto GUTS World 5/5/17 - FUN

This was a match with a lot of good ideas, which Miyamoto wasn't really skilled enough to pull off. The story of the match was Miyamoto working over Togo's knee, which would limit what he could do. Togo did a great job selling the bad wheel, including limiting his ability to climb the top rope after the pedigree (which did mean we didn't get a Senton which is always a bummer).  Miyamoto had some fun submission attempts, including a prawn hold rolled into a kneebar, he just seemed a bit slow and a bit sloppy in the execution. It feels like Togo should have saved this match layout for a guy who could pull it off a little better.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE DICK TOGO

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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]

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