Mio Momono Enters the Thunderdome

Mio Momono vs Mayumi Ozaki Oz Academy 4/28/24

MD: Back when I was making my Greatest Wrestler Ever ballot in 2016, I decided that if I couldn't understand a wrestler and a style in as 360 a way as possible, I wasn't going to try to rank them. There was only so much that I could fit in timewise and I set the burden of knowledge pretty high for myself. Certain things like shootstyle ended up completely left out because I just didn't think I was good enough to rank them at my current level of knowledge. That said, I did do a podcast with the brilliant Stacy going over our lists called Parejas Increibles, and as part of that, I wanted to be at least somewhat familiar with some of the people I knew would be on her list so we could have something resembling an intelligent conversation. I watched a chunk of Ozaki's big 90s matches, came off really impressed, just connected with her instantly, and then decided to peek at the 00s matches and even what she was doing currently in the mid-2010s. Why not, right? I was enjoying Negro Casas in his older age on a week in and week out basis after all.

That, in the moment, ended up being a mistake. Anyone familiar will know why. It feels like it's been two decades of blatant interference and a level of one-sided violence that comes off as gratuitous at best (at best!) and drowns into noise at it runs not just from match to match but from year to year to year. Again, I'm no expert, but that was my take as a dabbler, as someone who took a look here and there driven by honest curiosity and regard for the JWP work that I had initially seen. So I moved on and didn't give it another thought.

That is until I saw people pushing this match in the last week and I realized due to scheduling issues, I was going to have a window to talk about something out from left field like this. Let's get some caveats out of the way. There's an existing story here with previous matches that were highly regarded that lead into this moment; I'm not tuned into it. I haven't seen them. I still had such a positive visceral reaction to this I wanted to write about it in a bubble, to just get down my feelings. I have a working knowledge of Ozaki in very general terms, but only that. She's worked over a hundred matches in the 2020s and I haven't seen any of them. When it comes to Momono, I have a very basic understanding of just the idea of her. I am a tourist here in Oz Academy. I came in unaware, unprepared, with some preconceived notions and carried in on the opinions of people I trust. You can read a few reviews of this from people who actually know what they're talking about. I'm probably going to offend and annoy a couple of them, and I do apologize for that.

But it's okay, because this was primal and iconic, and as a one time encounter, all of the beleaguered, gratuitous, borderline exploitative bullshit actually worked. What carries this and what makes this work, when I can imagine so much else that happens in this building does not work, is the fact that Momono is an outsider as well. This is Mio Momono defiantly entering the Thunderdome to face The Lizard Queen and the Ruler of Bartertown. I picked up on the idea that she had obtained a tainted, darkened championship as leverage to get her own title back (or something like that; close enough is good enough here). She was headed into enemy territory, where they chanted Ozaki's name, where they celebrated her ruthlessness, where they had been formed and forged in her image. You could see the determination on her face, the defiance, the knowledge of what was before her. She had the PowerPuff Girls banner, her fuzzy hood up, the corrupt, chain-strewn belt over one shoulder, the Marvelous flag over the other, as if she was marching up foreboding stairs of doom towards some temple of depravity, some illicit den of sin. This wasn't some normal sort of pro wrestling story. This was an 80s action movie. This was Streets of Fire or Big Trouble in Little China. This was Sting entering the bar where Cheatum the Midget was going to let him Spin the Wheel and Make a Deal. This was post-apocalyptic mayhem, a hero walking through the very gates of hell to fight for what mattered to her.

And then there's Ozaki. Much of what made this work for me was that she was no longer simply doing this sort of thing in her late 30s or mid 40s. This was a 55 year old, in her red feathered robe, soaking in the adulation and egging it on, invoking all of this senseless wrath and violence. There was such character in her expression as she took it all in. For as much as Toni Storm is aping What Ever Happened to Baby Jane right now, Ozaki is living it, with all the presence of a pro wrestling Joan Crawford (even if maybe not a Bette Davis). There's never been a villain quite like her, and here she is, in her place of power, where reality comports to her will, the evil queen upon the throne, with an upstart that dares challenge her to punish.

Momono charges right in, gets an early advantage slamming Ozaki's head repeatedly into the corner, but Ozaki just shrugs it off and returns the favor. They slap each other, tear at each other, lay in blows. Ozaki gets a fair advantage and hefts Momono up, but she flips over. Here's where the usual chaos would come into play. POLICE (he who is what he sounds to be, uniform and all) comes in with a chair. This is what pushed me away when I dabbled previously. It's not even two minutes in and here comes the bullshit. Here, though I stuck with it, rode the wave, and I am glad I did. He errantly hits Ozaki with a chairshot meant for Momono; one of her friends takes out POLICE and Momono follows up with her twisting 'rana into a pin for an early, exciting nearfall. But POLICE is still there, just outside, and he immediately thereafter snatches a leg. That allows Ozaki to grab the chair and smash Momono to the floor, allowing for darkness to seep in and become ascendant.

There are two elements that allows this to transcend the normal formless chaos and violence and interference of the other 21st century Ozaki matches I've seen. The first I already mentioned. Momono is an outsider. After getting smashed and opened up, they place the collar around her neck. That allows Ozaki to drag her around the arena, to toss her into stairs, to whallop her with a chain-wrapped punch. This is the ritual bloodletting, the pound of flesh that the congregation requires as it chants Ozaki's name. Momono, valiant and good, is the sacrifice, buried under chairs and chairshots, only to rise back up, baptized in her own blood, ready to throw missile dropkicks into Ozaki's skull and tear at her arm in her comeback.

The second is that somehow, amazingly, all of the interference is carefully layered and timed. There's a bit of slippage here and there, but at times this almost felt like watching a lucha trios match. I'm careful about overusing this phrase, and I wish I had something better but nothing explains it as well: in lucha trios matches the beatdowns and comebacks often hinge on the mandate of heaven. That is, something happens that allows the tide to roll in or out when wrestling physics itself prevents it before that. That's the case here. It's not until Ozaki can get a backhand to cut off Momono that her minions are able to stream in. It's not until she misses a dive off the top that Momono's friends can stream in. The tide had already turned. Each of these elements need to be set up and each gets paid off or eliminated in order. For Ozaki's minions, it's when they miss Momono with the (second) double whip attack and hit Ozaki instead. That leads to the two of them getting written off. For POLICE, it's not until Momono is able to hit him with a low blow that her ally can come in and eliminate him once and for all. The interference exists, but the key story beats, the bits that are consequential, are not the interference but instead Ozaki and Momono defining their own fates. 

Occasionally the chaos that lives in this sacrilegious place slips through, like when bodies crash upon Momono and Ozaki to break up a pin after Ozaki destroyed Momono with the chain and hit her with a bridging suplex, but for the most part, that's the exception and maybe even one that helps define the rule. These are two primal forces, good and evil, warring against one another in the darkest corner of the world, where despite all appearances, free will and autonomy still matter most. In the end, Ozaki truly takes such matters into her own hands, eliminating Momono's last friend with the red mist before finally dropping her for the win.

It was a valiant effort, one to be remembered, but Momono would not dethrone the queen in her place of power on this day. This shouldn't have worked, but the core story was so strong and the attention to detail so astoundingly rhythmic that it was undeniable. There was meaning and purpose in violence that should have felt senseless. There was a throughline of almost mythic coherence to be found in the chaos. The code balanced. All of the open parentheses were closed. Momono's defiance shined through. Ozaki's core qualities, some of the greatest of all time when tempered and channeled, presented themselves triumphantly even in the cacophony of self-indulgent, sadistic mayhem that she's spent decades so lovingly fostering. I'm in no rush to return to Oz Academy, but on this one night, the stars were in alignment to create the stuff of pro wrestling legend.

JR: Peter Pan was written to be monstrous. He is described sparingly in the book, but when he is, the imagery is ghostly: dressed in skeleton leaves and the juices of trees and held together by cobwebs. When he appears in Wendy’s room, he is gnashing his baby teeth. We think of Pan now as a vision of the irrepressible nature of youth. There are moments when he is crueler than that.

Momono is Pan-like here, is she not? She screams and runs and has energy that seems otherworldly. She is crying and bleeding but until the very end it’s unclear if anything will stop her. She can fly. She can fight. She is held together with neon athletic tape, fake fur and glitter.

Would Ozaki make for a good Captain Hook? Her endless parade of semi-effectual hench people, her hand wrapped in metal. Her hatred of Momono seems ingrained to the point where I’m not sure she could tell you why it began. It just is.

Momono feels mythic in this match. Like a superhero or a gunfighter, facing waves of attackers single handedly in order to get a mere opportunity to dispense justice. Ozaki is a wonderful foil. Villainous and laconic, but never lazy or cowardly. The heel main event structure with endless interference has been a staple for years now. Here it at least feels purposeful. Planned and necessary in the face of a young and angry and talented foe. The act feels earned for Ozaki in a way it often does not for others. She relishes in fighting on her terms. She looks at Momono throughout with something bordering on curiosity: You agreed to this? Okay. In some way, this Ozaki performance is like the platonic ideal of what Jericho has tried and failed to do for the past few years. They are former stars finally abandoned by their athleticism. They have now transformed into crowbars but in their most egotistical moments they can still be goaded into going toe to toe with someone younger and better. More than anything, they are defined by loss. The moments Ozaki feels the most vulnerable in this are the moments when she forgets who she is now.

Ultimately, this is a story of what Ozaki has lost and what Momono has yet to gain. For all her boundless violence, her ability to bounce back, Momono often lacks a sense of where she is. She walks into chair shots. She takes a backhand when a more seasoned performer would step back or roll away. If Ozaki’s weakest moments are based in hubris, Momono is a mirror. She believes she can run through anything until she cannot. Even as she wins, Ozaki is rattled. She sees herself. Momono is unafraid of violence. She is fueled by it. Even in defeat she is terrifying and monstrous, held together by fairy dust and gnashing her teeth. 

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DEAN~!!!

ACTION presents DEAN~!!! 4/4/24

MD: A year ago today, we lost DEAN. Eleven months later Phil, Eric, and Matt Griffin (being Jacey North Matt, not me Matt) did something amazing. In true DVDVR fashion, Eric has a road report in the works. Were I to give you a report, it would be why I wasn't there and would involve in-law family wedding drama, conciliatory water parks with the kids, and a bunch of other excuses. I missed being there, being part of that atmosphere, meeting a bunch of people who I respect and admire (and Johnny Sorrow too; I would have liked to meet Johnny). That said, it means I can come in with a slightly different perspective here, and hey, there's also this: DEAN the human was so important to me in expanding how someone could think about wrestling and Phil and Eric are my "people" in everything we do creatively, but because I watched from home (in part in the DVDVR discord, yes, but a lot on my own), I got to watch it with Dylan Hales in my ear, and there was no one I conspired with more closely between 2010 and 2015 about wrestling than Dylan, so while I couldn't be there with you guys, you were all with me as I watched.    

Alex Kane vs Colby Corino

MD: When I say "my people", I do mean a lot of this crowd too and that made it the perfect crowd for this specific match, one that knew how to act, how to buy in, how to give in, how to be wry but not ironic, clever but still earnest, just like the match itself. The wrestlers committed. The crowd committed. The match committed. It's probably sacrilege on a card with the back half that this one has to even consider this as potentially my favorite match of the night, but maybe it was!

Colby came in exhausted (six matches in six days). He had a size disadvantage. The match was always one suplex away from being over. So he embraced the headlock. It was a way to control distance, to control leverage, to frustrate Kane, to make Kane exert himself because Colby couldn't. It was wry, like I said, but it also made sense within the context of the match. Even at the beginning, there were multiple differentials for Colby to overcome and the headlock was a means for him to chip away at them. That's important. The headlock was never an end unto itself. It was the means to even the odds.

As the match went on, it went from being a way to contain Kane to a way to open him up for escalating offense. It went from being a survival mechanism to the entry point for all of Colby's title hopes and dreams. It opened up the bulldog, or an air raid crash, or the front DDT that he was likely going for to maybe finish things off. The problem with such a close contact strategy, however, is that all it took was one mistake, one wrong breath, one chance for Kane to plant his feet, and it was up and over, metaphorically and literally. Colby did valiantly for a man at the end of his rope, but that rope was just long enough for him to hang himself. Honestly in contention for my favorite match of the night (It's up there with Slim J vs Adam Priest as the most "Matt D" match on the card), as wild as that sounds.

O’Shay Edwards/Amboss (Laurance Roman/Robert Dreissker) vs The Good Hand (Kevin Ryan/Suge D/Tyler Stevens)

MD: I think that in some ways this match had the most to work against on the card. For the traveling crowd, there was probably less familiarity with the wrestlers here. It had a sort of similar theme to the "flippy guys vs strong guys" six-man later on the card but couldn't lean too hard into that without taking away from the match higher on the card. What it did have going for it was the ability to lean into the set units here to play with all of the tools you'd get in a southern or mPro style tag.

The Good Hand played their part perfectly, just annoying, arrogant, scuzzy heels, but maybe not carrying with them the sort of madcap delusion that the Sucklings were about to bring to the ring in the next match. These were three guys who were more than the sum of their parts both in style and in substance. They controlled the ring, cut off Roman, threw out a bunch of quick offense and double and triple teams. And then, when it was time, they got their comeuppance, only to take back over with something slick or underhanded or opportunistic. Basically, they used all the tricks of the trade, both in how they presented themselves and in how a match like this could be structured, to overcome some of the disadvantages they were facing. And the babyfaces were the straight men, constantly trying to work their way back into the match and then, when it came time, raining down justice and punishment. Like I said on the night, if you embrace wrestling, it will embrace you, and that's exactly what they did here.

Violence is Forever (Kevin Ku/Dominic Garrini) vs The Ugly Sucklings (Rob Killjoy/White Mike)

MD: I loved how tight and compact this was. That allowed for the Sucklings to do their pre-match promo, which made a lot of sense actually It was driven not just by ego and mania (though there was that as well) but by the relatable idea that if they had a good showing against a top team, they'd get more bookings and put food on the table. Scuzzy but relatable, a fine line to walk. Then, they went right into heat. That worked because ViF even just coming out as the surprise team with the Road Warriors pop... that was the shine. There was a sense of glorious inevitability here in the best way. The Sucklings were organized and effective and persistent but doom was heading their way from the moment Zombie hit, maybe even from the moment they signed an open challenge.

So this went right to the ambush-dirven heat then into the comeback and the finishing stretch and it was all just a wonderful celebratory bonus from guys with big presence. For people not at all familiar with the indy scene, obviously guys like Priest and Connolly stood out but I heard from a few people who only had a working knowledge that they immediately wanted to track down more Sucklings footage, so the mission from the pre-match promo was accomplished. Overall, this match set up a sort of party atmosphere to prepare people's appetites for the chaos and violence to come.   

Gypsy Joe Rules Match: Coven of the Goat (Jaden Newman/Tank) vs 1 Called Manders/"Filthy" Tom Lawlor

MD: This was the match where, on live viewing, I realized I couldn't just turn a write-up out for the show and that I needed some time to process. I'm still struggling a bit with this one. One thing will stick with me, and I mean forever stick with me, like Owen kicking Bret's leg out of his leg or whatever other super iconic wrestling moment is seared into my brain. That's the sequence of Lawlor getting Newman onto a chair and running around the entire ringside area to attack him while Tank and Manders were simultaneously sharing a beer right by the DEAN chair. The contrast was just this serene moment of pro wrestling wonder. It devolved quickly into Tank spraying Manders and Lawlor smashing Tank and Manders getting the revenge spray and of course then revisited it a few minutes later with the headbutt war. What am I going to say critically about this? It was madness and chaos and action with some stuff that was smartly put together but that didn't feel put together at all, that just felt wild and spontaneous and that, along with, you know, punches (and this had a few good ones) is what I could use so much more of in wrestling today. You weren't going to see the strings here, just the flailing limbs and crazy abandon.

3 Flippy Guys (Bobby Flaco/Brayden Toon/Rico Gonzalez) vs 3 Strong Motherf*ckers (Danny Demanto/Hoodfoot/Isaiah Broner)

MD: Hey, the WAR six man. This was fun. You didn't really get to see Rico do too much. In fact, most of the match was everyone just beating on Flaco, which is kind of what you want in a match like this really, just flipping guys bumping big and getting crushed. Brayden didn't do a ton (really this was mainly Bob getting destroyed) but everything he did looked great. Finish worked ok because the Strong folk were obviously goofing around and taking their opponents lightly; sometimes you live by the door, sometimes you die by it. This was a nice mix of levity and roadkill to give everyone a breather given what was to come.

Dr. Cerebro vs Gringo Loco

MD: This could have absolutely just been a "traveling match" sort of exhibition and it wasn't at all. It was a weird and surreal inversion full of a sort of emotion that isn't neat or clean or crisp. This match wasn't a straight line. It felt a little like a therapy session unveiling in real time through the back drop of gritty, gripping, beautiful lucha libre. It just wasn't a redo of 2010. Gringo Loco has evolved and in some ways, in this match, Cerebro devolved. He sure as hell wasn't wearing his mask against the Gringos VIP. Moreover, even though Gringo worked rudo, he was a pretty clear babyface for a lot of this. That happens! Usually it happens with a guy like Casas or Satanico up against an unfortunately reviled tecnico or an even more deplorable rudo, but it happens. Here it was because Gringo had something of the homefield advantage and because both of them had a chip on their shoulder.

While I loved some of the early matwork (Cerebro scooting around into an amazing contorting bit of torture was likely the hold of the night), and of course the Cerebro dive that almost took out Marty's wife in the third row was electric, it was that underlying snag of emotion that really put this over the top. Gringo's paid his dues, has traveled the world, has been on TV in big arenas and has wrestled in the dingiest, dirtiest venues imaginable; he's grown into a true base god, and yet Cerebro, maybe empowered in all the wrong ways by the mask he was donning once again, refused to forgive the sins of the past. When Gringo wanted a shake, Cerebro made like a matador. When Gringo escalated things, Cerebro was all to happy to call and raise. He raised all the way to bringing in a chair and tearing apart Gringo's shoulder. Watching it, you can't help but wonder if it was because instead of finding a 25 year old that would likely bend under the pressure, he found a man pushing forty who had no give in him at all. Maybe it was because even though he had traveled north and presented himself in all of his glory, the crowd still leaned towards Gringo instead.

Regardless, he crossed a line that both men had crossed many times years before. It wasn't the end, however. The match restarted. Despite the damage to the shoulder, Gringo fought his way back. When the opportunity arose to cross that line himself, he took it. He couldn't transcend past it. Cerebro wouldn't be the bigger man but Gringo couldn't either, not after what had transpired. Cerebro ducked the chair, kicked it into Gringo's face, and honed in on the damaged shoulder for a submission. They wrestled a gripping match, one with a resolution in the record books, but you couldn't help feeling like nothing was truly resolved.

Krule vs “Warhorse” Jake Parnell

MD: On some level, on top of being a tribute to DEAN and on top of being something cooked up by the mad geniuses I write with here on Segunda Caida and powered by the ACTION engines, this whole show was a tribute to the Indies in general, to all eras and all regions. As such, this felt like it could have been the main event of a NWA New Jersey Coralluzzo show from the late 90s or an early 00s ECW successor promotion and I liked it along those lines. They worked hard. They hit hard. They flew hard. It had all the overworked bs you'd expect for the finish. As such, I almost think they did too much; maybe Parnell shouldn't have flipped out of a chokeslam attempt, maybe that dive shouldn't have been a flip, maybe some of the more complex Krule offense should have been straighter and to the point. They did a pretty good job keeping up with parts of the rest of the show but maybe they didn't need to. Maybe they should have leaned harder into the contrast instead. That's a lot to ask of them though, especially with the title on the line, and they did an admirable enough job all things considered.

Matt Makowski vs Arez

MD: I was going to call this a sprint and explain how instead of just spots it was layered with all that and more, but that's not what it actually is. It's a lucha lightning match and it's one of the best I've ever seen. It's cheating a little because it has the patina of a "different styles" fight but it's close enough to a lightning match in my eyes. A lot of it also speaks for itself, with Arez bounding around, hitting from every angle, and Makowski keeping up while trying to ground and stop him. For them to go that fast it for everything, no matter how unlikely, to still come off as plausible in this strange shared reality where Manders and Tank can sit in chairs headbutting each other as hard as possible takes incredible talent and commitment. I loved the transition where Makowski was able to jam the Casita and snap the arm. Arez wasn't exactly selling down the stretch but Makowski was so single minded in getting the cross arm-breaker in that you knew he felt like he was on to something and if he felt that way, you, as the audience, felt that way as well, even if Arez wasn't exactly putting out signals. Then it was all about working three moves ahead while dealing with the world's most unpredictable wrestler, to plant him in the center with the chaos theory cross-armbreaker. Thrilling stuff and a testament to knowing that they'd pack so much coolness into every second that they could let this go relatively short for the sake of the overall card but still feel fulfilling. Trust was the name of the game here, trust in the wrestlers, trust in the fans, trust in the mission

Slim J vs Adam Priest

MD: Yeah, ok, sorry to the first match, which I did thoroughly enjoy, but this is definitely my favorite match on the card. It couldn't be more down my alley. Two guys so good at doing the small things well hitting the fundamentals of what makes pro wrestling work perfectly and then adding just that added bit of creativity to put it over the top. Slim J's been positioned as a heel on TV for the last year or two but he's one of the best babyfaces of the 21st century and it was so great to see him on this stage, in front of this crowd, against this opponent, in this role. Talk about trust. They let this simmer and build so that when they hit bombs down the stretch they meant as much as possible.

Priest came in early with the trash talk and the early posturing and it was all about who would get the first shot in, and even more than that, who would be able to position the referee best to their advantage. Priest got Slim J into the corner behind him but couldn't follow up. Slim J, maybe a babyface here but a guy who knew every trick in the book and invented a good few of them, managed to snatch the ref's hand and use it (with just enough plausible deniability, of course) to smack Priest. Priest stalled just enough to rile the crowd without losing momentum. When he took over it wasn't just catching Slim on the way in with a knee, but then turning it into a neckbreaker over the second rope. It was never the easiest path but always a direct one with the extra little bit generally something additive that didn't distract from the key message.

Slim was always scrappy, always trying to fight back and his hope spots started small and close, an armbar or a chop back, but Priest cut him off definitely and then really added insult to injury as he grinded Slim down. It all built to the escape from the abdominal stretch where it seemed that Slim had come back, but Priest cut him off with a killer pile driver. That, in and of itself, set up the actual comeback as Slim reversed the second attempt at it on the apron. Even then, because the fans had just been fooled on a hope spot attempt, and because Slim was so good at staggering about in the ring selling his neck, the clotheslines he hit to really get back into it and launch the finishing stretch felt all the more striking and miraculous. Just amazing babyface work here.

That finishing stretch was the first time that they really launched bombs. Because they showed the restraint through the match, the big headdrops, which would have meant something just by their innate nature, ended up meaning all the more. Discipline creates opportunity, allows for the ability to build potential energy that can be turned kinetic. Then they paid it off with a finish that people probably didn't expect but that made the crowd happy. Just two architects building a castle of pro wrestling here.

Wasted Youth (Austin Luke/Marcus Mathers) vs Sinner & Saint (Judas Icarus/Travis Williams)

MD: This was as sprinty a juniors tag as you could get. Not entirely my thing but it had a place on a card that celebrated both the indies and DEAN. The first thing that comes to mind is hanging out on the DVDVR board the day that someone posted Brian XL/Divine Storm vs Red/SATs, probably in real media format, tiny file size, tiny video, and how all of us, the big guy included, reacted, like a whole new world opening up. Twenty+ years later, that wave has swept over all of wrestling a couple of times over, and it's led to a match like this. Icarus and Williams carried a lot of the middle of this with their more experienced and superior teamwork. They had a lot of clever tandem spots and sequences. I probably liked the Gory Running Punches the best though I would have liked to see a little more consequence to them. Mathers' connection to the crowd stood out more than anything else on the other side. This was breathless stuff. At times, the camera barely knew which way to focus next because things were going to come so quickly and explosively. This was candy before the steak to come but it was the expensive stuff and not some cheap knock off brand.

Dog Collar Match: Mad Dog Connelly vs Demus

MD: What am I am even going to say about this? How do you write about this? I thought about taking the coward's way out and just writing a paragraph about how Mad Dog Connelly has maybe the most amazing eyes that I've ever seen in pro wrestling, how you can track the entire match just focusing on them and in doing so, it's something different than you've ever experienced, how I'd never even thought about watching a wrestler's eyes a way to track emotion in this way because either the video quality isn't good enough or the quick cuts are too prevalent or whatever you're watching just doesn't rise to that level. How Connelly breaks a mold that you never even had reason to give a thought to before. I could go on about that but while totally accurate, it'd be both pretty weird and also a dodge. But seriously, rewatch this and just watch the guy's eyes. If you even can, because...

So let's try this instead. This match was a roller coaster ride. I hear you groaning. How dare I reduce this thing to some bullshit out of the can nonsense phrase. Just stop, ok? Stop and think. It wasn't like a roller coaster because it had ups and downs and it went fast. Nothing like that. Imagine actually being in a roller coaster. Imagine the first time maybe, when you were a kid, when you strained your neck to just be tall enough to hit the height marker and be allowed on. Imagine that it was one of those old wooden coasters, big and rickety, creaking, without some of the whirls and turns and technology and gimmicks of the last twenty years, just a looming monstrosity that might collapse at any moment because of one loose eighty year old screw. It's not the falling that gets you when you're on a coaster like that. It's not the speed. It's not even the anticipation as you're slowly going up. It's the fact that you're strapped in, you're helpless. If the thing fell apart, there'd be nothing you can do, nothing anyone could do to save you. You can't stop midway. You can't get off. No power in the world can stop it once it gets going. You're trapped.

That's what it feels like to watch this match. The second you hit play, it's like you're watching one of those videos from a Japanese horror movie. You're trapped. You can't shut it off. You can't look away. You can't even breathe. You can't even stop to think. You just have to watch one act of brutality seamlessly flow into the next. It's a river made of blood and you're adrift on it. I can't talk about specific moments of this. I can't break apart some sort of structure or go on about transitions. I've seen this two, three times. I remember the chain whip by Connelly to start. I remember people going into chairs. I remember biting and the smearing of blood. I remember the attempt at a hangman's choke and Dylan proclaiming it was that selfsame blood making things too slippery to hold it. Maybe there was a flying body press of some sort? Connelly choked him out to win. That's what I remember. I literally just watched this. Five minutes ago! It's all a violent blur. It's not a match. It's an experience. It's a sensation. You stare at the screen and your heart tries to leave your chest as you're buffeted by the violent, visceral gale. And like a roller coaster, the second you get off, you just want to get back on and go again. Look, I got nothing. Just strap back in and watch the thing again, ok?

Daniel Makabe vs Timothy Thatcher

MD: Full disclosure. This is an important match to cover well and I think I know what I want to say, even if it opens me up to be a little vulnerable. It's sort of the absolute worst time to highlight personal inadequcies, but here we are. Be kind. Maybe in part because I've got that most recent viewing of Connelly/Demus rattling around in my head, I don't know exactly how to start it. Let's go with this. Late in the match, Dylan likens this to Battlarts, and of course part of the inspiration here was Ishikawa vs Ikeda; Makabe wore his heart on his sleeve there if you get what I mean. So while this had its hybrid elements, much like Battlarts did, I think you could fairly safely classify this as shoot style. Shoot style, to me, is impenetrable in a good way, because I don't entirely get how they do it (Here's the vulnerable part). I watch so much wrestling. I write about so much wrestling. I think so hard (too hard, I know) about structure and narratives and patterns and comparative mythology and symbolism and whatever else is at play. And shoot style done well takes me back to being ten years old in the Boston Garden watching Bret Hart wrestle the Barbarian and just trying to wrap my head around how they could possibly know what to do next. And I've never gone out of my way to change that. I get so much enjoyment out of wrestling in so many ways, but only with shoot style is there still that hint of magic and wonder.

As I understand it, shoot style is a game of opportunities and openings, of mastering technique so well that all the physical possibilities to counter and progress the match are open to you in any moment. A little bit of give leads to a lot of take and the process repeats itself. Whether you're watching Fujiwara and Super Tiger or Volk Han, a lot of the storytelling is entirely implicit, driven by physical advantages and chance and consequence in the moment and over time. The drive for realism leaves certain basic, contrived narrative possibilities out of reach, but when done as well as it can be done, it can pull you in as much as any other form of pro wrestling. That was absolutely at play here, with every touch representing struggle and every contortion, simple or outlandish, feeling earned instead of given. What took this to another level was the genius at play. Yes, the storytelling was by necessity implicit, but underpinning and giving it color it was the weight of all of their previous encounters, the impending Sword of Damocles that hangs over Makabe's head, the expectation of what this match could be and what we all knew it was not (that being Ishikawa vs Ikeda), the well of emotion of the night and what people had just witnessed. 

Genius really is the only word for the alchemy of all of these things coming together, in small ways and in big. That could be Thatcher refusing the initial handshake or his look of glee as he was bending Makabe's wrist. It could be Makabe making the first inroads on the taped-up knee and Thatcher escalating to strikes out of desperation in response and then Makabe working at the upper body in order to open up the lower body to stay on it. Or it could have just been both of them stomping out each other's arm in frustration at the European Uppercuts they were throwing at each other. History creates the personality. The personality defines the character. The character decides how opportunities are capitalized on, and somehow, out of all of it, you end up with the richest, most compelling wrestling match imaginable. When it came to wrestling (and music, and a few other things), DEAN was like a cool older cousin to me, half a generation older, having gotten there first but selflessly willing to share. To him, everything was about sensation in the moment. To me, it's about thought after the fact. A match like this lets me meet the memory of my friend midway, and I'm very grateful for that.

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Found Footage Friday: HANSEN~! GORDY~! PARK~! FAKE KONNAN~! KENDOS~! MOCHIZUKI AND FRIENDS~!

Terry Gordy vs. Stan Hansen AJPW 6/8/90

MD: We only had around seven minutes of this previously and those seven minutes are pretty much what you'd expect, a super hardnosed finishing stretch between two monsters with gold on the line. I went through every single match we have on tape for 1989 and 1990 All Japan over the last five years or so, and, of course, we keep getting more, both in this format and with handhelds, but it's always enjoyable to push at the conventional wisdom and see how it holds up. I may have mentioned this before, but one of the biggest surprises of 1990 AJPW was how Baba dealt with the loss of Tenryu. This show obviously has Misawa vs Jumbo, right? And yes, there is a push throughout the year to promote Super Generation Army vs Tsuruta-Gun, but that often wasn't the main title scene for the back half of 89. When it came to the Triple Crown and the tag titles, it was foreign hosses up and down, Hansen, Doc, Gordy, Spivey, and even a bit of Bigelow thrown in for good measure. Off to the side you had Land of Giants and Abby and Kimala II, and even Andre. Big dudes. They couldn't present the larger than life force that was Tenryu, so they compensated with more conventional giants on top, all the while giving time for Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi to develop and become more and more credible. It was a giant bandaid and the flip flopping of the Triple Crown is a great example of it.

With the full footage, what we see here is a title match style fight between two absolute monsters. They work it like Jumbo would often work his title matches, on the mat and with holds, but with these two that meant wrenching of necks and grinding of faces, just brutal stuff, power against power, with technique only utilized to open the door for more rough and tumble hurting. It's twenty minutes of the two of them throwing every imaginable strike at one another, just laying it in and meeting each other half way. On some level, every time they dropped down to a hold felt like a momentary mercy, because at least they weren't absolutely smashing each other, but then you saw the hold and just how hard they were struggling against one another to put on the pressure or how to escape and you realize that there's no mercy in a world where there's a title between Hansen and Gordy. It all escalates towards moments of opportunity, Hansen hitting a lariat out of the corner as Gordy goes to the well one too many times, Gordy (who survived that lariat only by rolling out of the ring) ducking another wild flailing arm to sneak in his DDT. Ultimately, Gordy couldn't hit the powerbomb. It was never a case of a simple block though. It was Hansen going up and getting squashed in his attempt at self-preservation, bodies clashing and crashing in unique, visually striking ways. Gordy decided that the only way he could really get an edge on Hansen down the stretch was that corner clothesline, turning his body into a freight train thundering across the ring. Hansen hit that first lariat out of it, and then later on he got an amazing roll up nearfall, and in the end, stopped it just long enough to duck and create distance for a second lariat and the win. This was the sort of program that had to carry the company though, so post match Doc rushed into prevent the celebration and to destroy Hansen. Really an amazing title match now that we have all of it. People should go back for this.

PAS: Holy hell what a war, on first impression this felt on the level of the absolute best Gordy matches ever, and in the same tier as the Hansen All Japan bangers. It felt like these guys were both taking things personally almost from the beginning. There are some really grinding collar and elbow tie ups, and Hansen took Gordy into the corner and popped him hard right on his ear, and from that point on it felt like a series of escalating receipts by each guy, getting uglier and uglier. Every facelock, kneebar, stomp and punch felt like it was getting out of hand. The little stuff was awesome, and the big stuff was huge and incredible. Hansen takes an incredible bump and sell on Gordy's DDT and we get a couple of incredible Hansen lariats. Post match was awesome too as Hansen may be the only person on earth who can look momentarily credible brawling one on two against the Miracle Violence Connection.  This feels like as good as a discovery as we have ever had in this project, an all-time great match in a way which is just completely missing from pro-wrestling these days. Loved every second.

ER: It's wild to find out this late in the game that Misawa/Jumbo might not have been the best match at Budokan on 6/8/90. Getting the missing two-thirds of a Triple Crown Title change 35 years later makes me think that All Japan was suppressing the footage of the better match that night so as not to overshadow the then-biggest moment of Misawa's career, because now we know how special Gordy's transitional Triple Crown loss really was. Somehow, we are still finding matches that raise the stock of two different legends. This is one of the greatest Stan Hansen singles match performances of all time, and it might be the actual greatest singles match performance of Terry Gordy's career. The full footage gives us such a captivating fight between two killers, Gordy coming off as a man who has no plans on losing his new title, forcing Hansen into one of his finest ever vulnerable performances. Hansen sells more in this match than any match I've seen, and he is amazing at it; Gordy comes off so mean and so punishing that it gives us the gift of a Stan Hansen match where he's working from underneath for longer stretches than you've seen. What a gift. 

We never got to see all of the matwork in this special affair. That's always the first thing that goes. But Gordy and Hansen work the mat in a way we will never see again, and rarely saw then. This was not two men going for guard passes, this was two huge men shoving each other around on the mat, a constant struggle lock-up turning into fight from their bellies, both men laid out but applying full pressure to the other. Every quick headlock turns into more super heavyweight mat resistance, any attempt to pick up the other man turns into both men falling on top of each other and fighting more from a horizontal position. Te best part of the matwork? Each man punching the other's downed body from their knees, in a way that looked more like a alley mugging gone murder. More matwork should have Terry Gordy punching down from his knees like he's stabbing an intruder. 

Hansen flattens out on a Gordy attempt at a double leg, Gordy pancakes Hansen when Hansen's body goes out from under him blocking a powerbomb, a Gordy DDT spikes Hansen and drops his full weight on Gordy; Gordy can use Hansen's size and aggression against us, and it leads to Hansen more desperate than we ever get to see. How many times have you seen Hansen get slumped in a corner, resting on the bottom buckle to hold himself up. How many times have you seen Hansen absorb an impact and drop to his knees or stomach, fall on his face, fall over the bottom rope. Terry Gordy makes Stan Hansen fight like a desperate man and I can count on one hand the number of men who have effectively done that. Stan Hansen desperately pulls Gordy by the trunks from his knees just to bury his head in Gordy's stomach, behavior you never see Hansen need to ever entertain. Look at the way Stan Hansen scrambles for three different cradling leveraged pins, and how they're three of the best pins in any title match. Hansen was using his off balanced weight and trying to force and keep Gordy's shoulders to the mat in ways he never has to do with anyone else. Terry Gordy was one a higher plane and never flying higher, and we get to see a Stan Hansen who is actually coming up against something dangerous. 

But also? Stan Hansen rocks Terry Gordy's shit on multiple crowd gasping occasions. There might be nothing I love seeing more in pro wrestling than Stan Hansen kicking a downed man with his entire lower leg. Every Hansen kick to the length of any man's body gets the exact same celebratory reaction from me, a Guaranteed Oof. I revere Guaranteed Oofs. Their durability provides consistent comfort in ways we shouldn't take for granted. I would scream the ugliest scream of my life if Stan Hansen had kicked me in the chest or kneed me in the cheekbone the way he did Gordy, and I would be left with neck pain for life with either of his Out of Nowhere/Always There lariats. Any match that has a surprise Hansen western lariat that doesn't lead to the finish, is swung blindly, at eye level, making Budokan jump to its feet, it's a guaranteed great match. 

Stan Hansen doesn't work the lariat into any match for the hell of it. He has plans in store when the lariat works as a mid-match reset, a way to slow his beating and stop a hungry zombie. Terry Gordy loses his Triple Crown - he looked so fucking cool and convincing carrying those three belts, that a Japanese man was holding a large Confederate flag at ringside. How fucking weird is that? - three days after winning it, but he beat Stan Hansen so bad that Hansen had to use a Desperation Lariat. This was one of the greatest matches of the 90s, and of two guys who had eras of great matches. 

It will never be like this again.  

Kendo Star/Kendo/Monarca vs. Principe Island/Konnan/Hombre Bala CMLL 1990?

MD: Another week, another young Park match. These really do help the guy's already stellar case as he's fascinating to watch here. First of all, tho3 ugh, this Konnan el Barbaro, being not the Konnan but instead some tree trunk like big lug, was kind of just there. It was funny towards the start of the segunda where he was jumping up and down to feed all of Kendo and Kendo Star's flourishes but with no life to it. He did take a crazy bump that we barely saw upside down into the chairs during the comeback so good for him there. He also had a pretty swank furry jacket, so that was something. Hombre Bala matched up well with Kendo Star to start, and may have been a central pairing though it was hard to tell.

Really, we're watching this for Park though, and he was paired with Kendo and the two of them meshed perfectly. Kendo was a guy who knew how to be theatrical, knew how to play to the crowd, knew how to come off like a Star, and he knew how to get the most out of a petulant bastard like Park. They were able to rope run and feed for each other and everything else, but they had a great bit where they just got in each other's face, escalating from stares to slaps to pushes to a dropkick from Kendo with Principe Island charging back in only to slump in a fit of unreleased angst. The beatdown was fine, but Principe was outside for a good chunk of it. I did like the double stretch they took the fall with, like a rudo version of la estrella. The comeback came when they were really laying it in on Kendo with a triple team and saw some big bumps like the one from Konnan. Finish was clever, as the refs were tied up with the other four doing some spots in the corner and Principe slipped in a brutal foul on Kendo. It got overturned post match but everything stayed chippy and hot. The Kendo vs Principe Island rivalry was prime for a hair match. Again, he was just so emotive and seething with upstart energy in these matches. It's crazy to think that he had most of the rest of his career as a mask and didn't lose a bit of the charisma.

Masaaki Mochizuki/TARU/Takashi Okamura vs Masakazu Fukuda/Kamikaze/Hiroyoshi Kotsubo WYF 3/20/1997

SR: This was the first match between these 6 guys. All their matches are great, and this is in Korakuen Hall and feels especially wild because WYF fans hate the karate guys at this stage, so it feels ultra heated.  Match was pretty much the perfect mix of shootstyle and WAR-esque potatoes/scrappiness with that trademark WYF levels of unpolished, dirty fighting. Early goings were really good as WYF guys kept their opponents grounded in scrappy fashion. Even Kotsubo looked really good as he kept taking downs with explosive shooting takedowns, at one point even leading to both guys tumbling outside and brawling on the floor.  Kamikaze is impeccable in these matches, kicking people in the face, hammering a guy with punches and taunting the karatekas further. Fukuda also looked great - just hurling dudes with suplex that looked insanely forceful, and trying to crush peoples face with dropkicks and stomps. Buko Dojo guys started breaking out their kicks later and it's everything you can ask for. There's a pretty great dive sequence, Mochizuki flying at people with kicks, Buko guys breaking up pins and submissions with nasty kicks etc. Even the Kotsubo vs Taru matchup which is really shit on paper ends up being good. WYF was striking gold with  this feud in 1997, and I'm so happy we get the beginning of the feud, really heated and violent from the get go.

MD: As familiar as Sebastian is with this stuff, it's a stretch for me. It's good to stretch though. If this is new to you, here's a cheat sheet. On one side, Taru has the shinier black vest. Okamura has the mullet. And Mochizuki has the white letters on his back. On the other, Kotsubo has the singlet, and Kamikaze has the frosted tips for his hair. That's about all you need along those lines. What I love about this is that it seems to encompass just about every style of pro wrestling except for hiding the object. It's presented, more than anything else, as shoot-style adjacent, with a lot of strikes and struggles for holds, but the fact it's a six-man (and I love tag wrestling in this setting) forces pro wrestling nonsense on it right from the get go; I'm talking controlling in corners and coming in to break up holds or even to join them. You'll have guys rolling around on the mat or throwing kicks and then immediately Mochizuki will be training slaps with Kotsubo or doing dropkick/spin wheel kick spots where they crash into each other. It takes itself seriously and treats everything with weight and respect while still building up to over the top stuff before dragging it back down to more fundamentally sound grappling or sparring. Fukada will toss people around. Things will spill out to the floor. The crowd pops for just about every piece of impact. And it all builds to dives, top rope moves, and bombs. They're able to layer it throughout the match and put weight behind the impacts, underpinning it all with animosity, so it never quite feels like excess no matter how much they squeeze into twenty minutes. 

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2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Kingston vs. Yuta

 

Eddie Kingston vs. Wheeler Yuta AEW Dynamite 8/30/23

ER: I started this out writing "I don't think I have ever Bought In on Wheeler Yuta before..." but I think I said almost the exact same thing about him in the great BCC vs. Dark Order trios from 3/15, so at this point maybe I should just say "I buy into Wheeler Yuta, especially when he is working with or against some of my all time favorite wrestlers". That is still being probably too unfair to Yuta, but it is also tough for me to determine just how good someone is when they are the opposing force to a classic Eddie Kingston Crumbling Body match. We get a lot of Bad Back Kingston and not as much Sharp Pain In My Elbow Kingston, and it is a treat. I buy into Eddie having a sore elbow, and I buy into Wheeler doing things to make it more sore, and I fully buy into Eddie doing things that would make his own sore elbow worse. 

Eddie Kingston has a relatable way of selling big or small injuries. We are all old and we all have aches and pains depending on the day. My personal day to day aches come from much less interesting things, but just the other week my right elbow was sore Just Because, and it bugged me all day. I couldn't move a computer mouse without this thing screaming out a tiny bit, and yet I had to keep using this elbow for every single thing that I did. I was not adapting to using my right handed mouse with my left hand, I was just resigned to spending the day flexing and stretching and shaking out my arm every time I got a little sting. Eddie Kingston is that relatable Dumb Man, someone who gets some dental work done and pokes and chews at his novocaine'd cheek while he can't feel anything and then deals with the consequences later once that novocaine relief is gone. King comes into the match with a big head bandage and his right elbow taped up, and after an engaging, combative lock up, Yuta wastes no time going after that arm. 

Yuta then works almost the entire match in control, in a way that clearly shows that he is always one move away from no longer being in control. Yuta does real, constant damage to Kingston, but everyone does that. That's not what made his match stand out. What made it stand out to me is a confidence that was never present in Yuta. He worked this match not like he could beat Eddie Kingston, but like he knew he was going to. I expected cool flash from him, like that sick tornado single arm DDT that looked like it popped Kingston's elbow, but I was more fascinated by little moments like the way he threw Eddie's arm bandage into the crowd after ripping it off. This was Yuta working like a man who wins fucking fights, and after the way he looked throwing that bandage I actually thought he had a real chance at winning this. Yuta was always someone who could "do the moves" but he always came off like a guy who just wanted to do those moves, not like a guy who embodied those moves. Here, I bought it. The way he would bait Kingston into using that bad arm for chops knowing that the chops would hurt, but more importantly knowing that he could absorb them to then do more damage back, driving knees into Eddie's arm and elbow and running him hard into the ringpost. 

Kingston's big comeback was great, and sudden, and clubbing One Hit that sent Yuta ass over elbow to the floor and then a tremendous emotional tope. It doesn't bring Kingston out of the woods, but he's a momentum guy, and I liked the small changes Yuta made when Kingston started being fueled by momentum. He was still going to be able to catch the arm and fire elbows into that and into Kingston's face, and he was able to pull out Classic Goofy Yuta Offense and scrape by...for awhile. I am vocal about my real hatred for rope rebound offense, but Yuta desperately dipping into his Indy Reserve Offense to swing outside of the ring by the bottom rope - very stupid - only to swing back in and juke Kingston into a German suplex, is a fine example of Yuta tricking King into thinking he's still an indy goof and using his reaction against him. King lunged forward and Yuta's rebound while Yuta was ducking that lunge into a go behind. 

I love when Kingston starts to Blunt Object an injured body part, like how he straightens out that hurt arm to blast Yuta with a corner clothesline, and how you know, Yuta knows, we all know how he's going to go for that backfist. Yuta's selling down the stretch was excellent and it totally made the finish something special. The momentum had shifted but Yuta never showed a hint of panic, and he looked like a guy who would win right up until his knees got wobbled. Kingston bounces him off his neck with a nasty suplex and rolls Yuta up directly into a backfist that bows Yuta's legs inward. Yuta knows it's over in the same exact way we've seen Kingston realize when something is over, and so Yuta stands up in Kingston's face showing him that he can take at least one, and there was still that slight chance that he was bating King one last time...but if he was baiting him, Kingston snatched that bait clean off the hook. Yuta sold the match ending backfist perfectly, dropping to his back and side with a thud, body rigid, arms tucked to his side and chin slumped to his chest, a man who has studied enough World Star street knockouts to understand how to bow to a King. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Yokota! Hanawa! Kumi! Fujinami!

11. 1979.01.XX1 - 01 Nancy Kumi & Victoria Fujimi vs. Rimi Yokota & Seiko Hanawa

K: The referee of this match appears to be Miyuki Yanagi, who goes as far back as any of the wrestlers we’re going to be seeing in these reviews. She debuted in 1955 in All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling Association (not the AJW we’re familiar with, a similarly-named precursor company when the Joshi scene was split between multiple promotions) and from what I can tell wrestled for the Matsunaga brothers through the pre-TV period, holding the WWWA Tag Team Titles with Mariko Akagi as late as 1974. That’s interesting because she would have been a champion in AJW at the age of 36; the whole “mandatory retirement at 25” rule fans in the West are aware of really wasn’t a thing for very long, nor was it ever consistently enforced. After retiring she became a trainer, and can be seen in various road skits on AJW TV in the 80s running training drills and the like.

To the match. The opening of this was characteristic relentless offense from both teams, with neither getting much of an advantage. Golden Pair (Nancy & Victoria) are higher up in the hierarchy though, so it opening like this really means they’re not going to get an easy fight. After a couple of minutes of this, everything just stops and we get Victoria & Seiko doing a tentative staredown before going for grappling. If you’d played this match from 2 minutes in, you’d probably think that was the start.

We get a sustained period of Young Pair dominating things, mainly just keeping Victoria cut off on their side of the ring and smother her with moves. When Golden Pair manage to turn things around, we get pretty much the same kind of thing from their end. There is a focus on attacking Hanawa’s arm though, whereas Young Pair didn’t seem interested in any kind of limbwork. This pattern gets broken up though when they go outside the ring and throw each other into chairs/the outside wall for a bit. It’s something which happens in these matches a lot. I wonder if it’s a tactic for when they’re not sure where to progress whatever they’re doing in the ring, or feel like the crowd isn’t into it and they need to shake things up. It serves as a reset though, as they take their time to all get back in the ring while the referee counts.

After this ‘reset’ the match does go in a different direction, as now Young Pair are being more blatantly heelish. Things open with Rimi clawing at both her opponents eyes, and then raking Victoria’s face across the top rope, ignoring referee Miyuki’s warnings. It’s noticeable a bit later on when Nancy manages to escape one of Rimi’s holds and starts a bit of a comeback, she gets a bit of a cheer and applause from the crowd. When Young Pair get back into it, things spill outside again and they run right to the other end of the venue where we can’t see what’s going on, and we get a double countout.

Pretty enjoyable match with a few interesting moments. Things improved after the 1st run and throw around on the outside, but it never really went into another gear with a new narrative hook even if the action itself didn’t let up.

**1/2

MD: To remind everyone, Kumi and Fujimi are the Golden Pair and Yokota and Hanawa are the Young Pair. My impression was that the winners would get to challenge for tag belts but I’m not 100% clear on this. It was played up as a big opportunity for the Young Pair and they certainly made the most of it. This was wild, non-stop action but it followed more or less of a narrative. The Young Pair ambushed right from the get go and they pressed at full speed. That was, according to the commentary, their big advantage. They were absolutely relentless. Early on Kumi and Fujimi got some shots in but they were dragged back under. Probably most memorable here was Yokota with some lifting flapjacks and Hanawa pressing back with a headscissors and rolling with it on Kumi. Just brutal looking stuff. The ref would break it and she’d come right back in with it.

The Golden Pair had a size advantage though and were able to power their way back. That led to a series of nasty gourdbuster style drops by Fujimi. That’s one of my big takeaways from this one actually. For a lot of this, what they were doing didn’t feel like conventional spots or move so much as just them finding a way to drop their opponents on their face as much as possible. That was true for both parties. Also, so many back body drops and some of them were so quick that the camera had to shake all over the place to try to capture it. The Young Pair took over in the most dynamic way possible; Hanawa grabbed Kumi and literally ran her all around the arena before tossing her into a wall. It’d go back and forth after that before crumbling apart to their equivalent of “walk and brawl” which was more like dashing and brawling in the stands. The Young Pair almost made it back into the ring to beat the count but were held on to and the match ended as a draw.

So much happens in these that it’s hard to cover all of it. I’m glad there’s two of us working on this. It’s exhausting and they very often decide not to sell in order to just keep the action moving and the violence going but that doesn’t usually impact the overall momentum shifts so it’s a little more forgivable, even if maybe weird and preventative when it comes to the crowd really getting into things (though everyone did, as always, get a kick out of Fujimi’s butt butts). There was a moment on the tape where they cut to calmly interviewing some guests while the four were screaming and killing each other in the ring and when it cut back you really had to wonder if you missed anything essential for the match or just more of the continuous punishment. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t wild and fun to watch though.

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AEW Five Fingers of Death 4/22 - 4/28 (But really just LA Park vs Rush)

LA Park vs. Rush Elite 4/21/24

MD: Rush is basically a Finger of Death and this promotion has elite in the title and AEW didn't give me any of the usual suspects to work with this week so this is game. I haven't seen a Rush vs Park match for a while and this felt like coming home. Let's break this down a bit. Park is 58. He's hanging on admirably, one of the most talented, most charismatic wrestlers ever with an amazing presence. So much of what made him great when he was younger wasn't based on athleticism but instead on being larger than life and being able to milk every moment. That's not to say he wasn't athletic when he needed to be, but it was the personality that you couldn't look away from. Rush is in his mid-thirties. He's no longer the brash upstart. He's fully formed, dangerous, deadly. You watch him and you get an uncomfortable sense of violence and unpredictability, of someone who is unhinged and could do anything at a moment's notice. In wrestling, that's gold.

These are primal, forever opponents, but not necessarily peers or rivals. Park's middle age, even the beginnings of his old age, have in part been defined by his wars with Rush. Meanwhile, Rush himself truly became a man warring with Shocker and Casas, sure, but most especially with Park. Neither made each other, for both have had rich careers outside of one another, but neither would be who they are now without the other. Perhaps more than anything else, they allow each other to be their truest, darkest, brashest, most demented, most over-the-top selves. And that's saying a lot. They understand the power of a moment, the resonant mood that can be created by taking it slow, by building to impact, by hitting as hard as possible, by letting the blood drip and flow and stain.

Here, they attack each other right from the start, then they pull back to meet face to face in the ring, to build that anticipation back up so that they can just charge forth once again. It's equal between them to start, familiarity and animosity mixing with punches and kicks, simply throwing their bodies at one another. Rush dodges a shot in the corner and takes Park's head off, gaining control. They spill to the outside and the lucha beatdown begins. This encounter will mimic a three fall lucha match in its own way, despite being one fall: a bit of feeling out, a rudo beatdown (mimicking the end of the primera), a big comeback (as if in the segunda), and then exciting back and forth action to the finish (which would be the tercera). Rush uses Park's belt, beats him around ringside, tears at his mask. I have been watching decades old Principe Island matches lately and you can see the face of young Park in the torn up mess that is current Park's bloody visage, like watching Darth Vader remove his mask.

At one point as Rush is doing damage on the outside, the fans start to chant for Park. Wrestling sits on a spectrum; well, it sits on many, but for the sake of this post, there's one that counts. On one side are two wrestlers just calling it, just laying the bricks of violence and mayhem and emotion in response to each other and the crowd, leading the crowd, following it, reacting and resonating. On the other is the sort of choreography we saw this last week from O'Reilly and Ospreay, lifted to greater athletic heights due to the planning and practicing involved, intended to inspire a certain emotion and reaction in the crowd, but left with no room to negotiate, no room to deviate. It's not necessarily a value judgment (for you probably want it to fall somewhere in the middle, like most things in life) but the older I get the more  one seems more engaging and worthwhile than the other, the more that one seems to be the true writhing, beating, living spirit of pro wrestling and the other a sort of artificial exhibition. At the very least, the ability to make it seem organic and unplanned creates the sort of immersion and suspension of disbelief which leaves even the most inspired Rube Goldberg machine of counters and headdrops feeling cold and distant. So when the crowd started to chant for Park, Rush paused, looked to them, expressed his fury and disbelief, hearkening back to the time when he was a beleaguered young tecnico that the crowd had turned upon nightly, his own origin story. He rushed towards the crowd, snatched a small round table, lifted it to the ringside area and began to batter Park with it. Was it something he had scouted out before the match? Was it an opportunistic moment fueled by Rush channeling a wellspring of relatable inner rage? Who knows? But it was the most compelling thing I saw all week in wrestling, I can tell you that much.

The comeback was perfect as well. Rush set up Park for the corner dropkick, only to stop, kick, roll back, and hit the Tranquilo pose. Usually Rush playing with his food like this would just lead to a brief break in the action, a bit of grousing from the crowd, and a continued beating. Park was more than familiar with it, however, and sitting watching it, his mask torn, his faced blooded, it inspired a bubbling rage within him. He forced his way to a feet, reared back... and was stopped by the ref. Ah, the usual BS of 2000s Park heel ref antics, right? Here though, a wonderful thing happened. Rush, after cheapshotting Park, reached into his tights, pulled something out and handed it to the ref, who immediately pocketed it! He paid him off in the moment. What a great (and rare) tiny touch to underpin the worst thing in lucha with just a little bit of logic. I would have even been ok with another two or three minutes of rudo ref nonsense beatdown to follow this. Instead, Park came back quickly, bloodied Rush up viscerally, and they rolled into an exciting final third. Park hit a spin wheel kick. He took both the German off of the ropes and a belly-to-belly from Rush (even though he really didn't have to). Maybe even more importantly, they blistered each other with headbutts. Eventually, the ref got back involved, slow counting and then taking both errant and fully intended shots from each wrestlers, allowing them to foul one another for mirrored nearfalls. It led to a ref ending up coughing up blood, the combatants headbutting each other into mutual oblivion slumped into a near embrace, and the commissioner throwing out the match.

Post-match they made the usual grandiose challenges, but there was something greater underpinning it, something more genuine, more gripping, something that spoke to deeper themes of aging and rivalry, of bitter respect, even of love. Rush wouldn't outright say he loved Park, but he did call him the sort of bastard that he would, could, even did love. When he claimed to want Park's mask, it wasn't to humiliate him but so that the old bastard could finally retire, so that he could rest. Meanwhile, Park seemed to almost welcome it, knowing he couldn't stop until the raging fire that burned between them finally went out, an obsessed Gerard ever hunting Dr. Richard Kimmel (or Javert and Valjean but with the ages reversed). Wrestling can be this: sprawling brutality, flared egos, an oppressive, sensational mood where every punch makes it feel like you're watching deities battle one another, that deals with themes of respect and love, of aging, of hubris and being trapped by one's own masculinity and the need to look one's self in the mirror and to be able to take pride in what one sees, even if what one is seeing is a skeleton mask ripped to shreds. This can be wrestling at its most transcendent, but only if you let it be, only if you can find it, if you can embrace it, if you can leave empty sugar-sweet thrills behind and delve into the waters of this darkest, murkiest substance instead.

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I'm Far Away From Nowhere, On My Own Like Tarzan Goto

Tarzan Goto vs. Chainsaw Charlie Indy World 5/21/98 - EPIC

SR:What a matchup, and it ends up delivering exactly as it promises. Incredibly gory, violent and chaotic brawl. I am not super well versed in Terry Funks 90s output but from what I’ve seen this is easily among his greatest matches of the decade. The Chainsaw Charlie character is so fun, and Goto holds nothing back just tearing him up. I want nothing more from a brawl than two crazy characters throwing punches and sometimes guardrails at each other and taking crazy out of nowhere bumps, and this delivered that in spades. Terry throwing chairs across the arena and then getting a barbedwire board in his face was pretty damn crazy, same for the further barbedwire spots. Goto mockingly putting a spinning toe hold on Terry only to end up eating the barbedwire himself was also a really fun character spot. Then, after getting buried underneath a bunch of plunder, Goto suddenly emerged with a broken battle to carve up Terry further. I mean, the broken bottle is pretty much a regular spot in Goto matches, but it really felt like an escalating barfight move in this. 

Just as Tarzan decided to reprise the 1977 Funks/Arabs match and stab the shit out of Terrys arm and I was thinking the match was moving into MOTY territory, all hell broke loose with a bunch of Kai En Tai dudes running in to attack Goto on behalf of WWF. Still we gut more props thrown around, Victor Quinones getting walloped and Wally Yamaguchi taking a nasty powerbomb from Goto. Even with the non finish, this was everything you hope for and more. I’m kinda shocked this match is not legendary as it’s just incredibly bloody and also a well worked match. If it happened on a WCW PPV people would be talking about it to this day.

PAS: I wrote this up for the Ringer. Matches that Look Like Horror Movies. 

Horror movie comparison: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Chainsaw Charlie was a gimmick that the iconic Terry Funk used for a bit in the WWF, for some reason. It was always obviously just Terry Funk with a chain saw in his hand and pantyhose on his head, and they never bothered to pretend otherwise. He went ahead and brought that gimmick to Japan to face off with puroresu ghoulie Tarzan Goto in a huge Korakuen Hall brawl.

The match started with Goto meeting Charlie in the aisle and them sword-fighting with a chair and a chain saw. They brawled into the crowd and soon Charlie had blood staining his ridiculous-looking pantyhose mask—real gross-looking stuff. Funk looked like a guy who would jump out at you on a haunted hayride. Terry got thrown into barbed-wire boards and jabbed with broken pieces of wood, screaming and squirming the way only Terry Funk can. He was finally able to take over when he countered a Goto spinning toe hold (a signature Funk move Goto was applying just to be a dick) by kicking him face-first into a barbed-wire board. We then got broken bottles, more chair shots, and more shots with barbed-wire boards until, finally, Kai En Tai DX ran to support their WWF compatriot Charlie and started brawling with random Goto trainees. The whole thing ended in chaos, which is pretty much where it began and stayed throughout.

ER: Sebastian expressed shock at how this match isn't legendary. I love 1998 Terry Funk. I think Funk is one of the guys you can make an argument for as best WWF in ring guy of that year. I am a huge fan of Terry Funk, I have watched hundreds of Terry Funk matches, I am a huge fan of 1998 Terry Funk, and I did not know about this match. Somehow, not only is it not legendary, weird guys like me have not even necessarily even heard of it before today. That is outing myself as someone who either did not read Phil's Ringer piece, or that my brain is such now that I instantly forgot about it. Terry Funk, in his mid 50s, worked a Korakuen Hall Death Match in between a couple of Raw tapings. Terry Funk worked a Death Match in Japan, for some reason, as Chainsaw Charlie. He hadn't been Chainsaw Charlie in WWF for two months, and had only been Chainsaw Charlie for two months before that. Why did he work this match as Chainsaw Charlie? Why did he ever work any match as Chainsaw Charlie? 

But one man is holding up a sign that says Korakuen Chainsaw Massacre so wrestling as Chainsaw Charlie is 100% the correct choice. 

Was Terry Funk lying about where he was going and what he was doing? How many people were made aware that Terry Funk was taking his odd fitting grandpa jeans to Tokyo so he could roll around in barbed wire before wrestling Mark Henry in a King of the Ring Qualifying Match at the Rosemont Horizon. Whatever. Terry is bleeding through his pantyhose like a fucking Home Alone burglar two minutes in because he is a legend in ways none of us could have understood even then. Did WWF knew even 30% of what he was doing over there? Did they have any idea that a broken glass bottle came a couple inches from his eyeball? Did they know how violent Terry Funk was wrestling in between Raw tapings? 

Terry Funk throws chairs at Tarzan Goto's face and falls multiple times into barbed wire. I thought he was working as Chainsaw Charlie so he could hide layer after layer of insulation to protect from the barbed wire, but within minutes he is stripped to old man jeans and suspenders and the bloodiest fucking face and it's among the best he's ever looked visually in his entire faultless career. Goto clotheslines him at full strength without hesitation and made him rip his own hair out to remove barbed wire. Goto sliced an old man up with a bottle he broke on the ringpost after trying to break it over Terry's head. Goto grinned like an asshole playing his greatest hits after throwing a barbed wire board as hard as possible at the referee, a man who I believe Funk hit as hard as he could in the back before throwing him into the crowd earlier. Chaos is right. And Terry Funk took a week off from his gig as the oldest active wrestler in the biggest wrestling company in the world to go fight and bleed buckets and create new scars. Who's better? 

Tarzan Goto/Ichiro Yaguchi/Sheinryu vs. Arashi/Osamu Tachihikari/Ni Hao SPWF 3/11/99 - FUN

PAS:This has an awesome on-paper stimulation, it's an elimination match with the eliminated wrestlers being crucified on a barbed wire cross. Unfortunately it doesn't really live up to that cool idea,  folks don't seem that upset when put on the cross, and it is pretty meandering. These matches are the best when they are frantic, and this lacked that urgency. If we had a better set of ex-WAR Sumos I imagine it would have been great. Goto does carve up Tachihikari with a bottle, and Yaguchi looks cool, so it keeps it from being Skippable, but it is on the border. Barbed Wire cross elimination match is a killer gimmick and my guys in the Coven of the Goat should steal it for sure, just make it 12 minutes instead of 25. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE TARZAN GOTO

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Found Footage Friday: EIGEN SIX MAN~! PARK~! BANDA~! ESTRADA~! REYNA~! MIGHTY ATOM~!

Harry Monte/Farmer Spatts vs. Billy Curtis/Cowboy Clatt NWA Hollywood 5/23/53

MD: This was a midget's match that goes about 25 minute. It was announced at the start as "the miniature mastodons of the mat, the mighty midgets." These guys all had gimmicks upon gimmicks. On one side was Farmer Georgie Spots from Hogwash, Arkansas, and "The Mighty Atom" Mr. Harry Monte. The other side had Cowboy "Pee Wee" Paul Clatt and Hollywood Billy Curtis. And of course, the Kansas Whirlwind, Olympic Champion (1932) Pete Mehringer was the ref. This was a little bit a tale of two matches. When Clatt and Spatts were in there, there was more comedy. Spatts was barefoot, for instance, and that came into play with stomps. There were bits where they ended up on top of the ref or accidentally on his back giving him a chinlock. While not exclusive, when Monte was in there, it did feel a little different. He was the champion apparently and seemed pretty skilled. Look, I'm never going to say no to an old midgets match. 

A lot of the time the comedy hits and they show a ton of commitment. I've seen a lot. This looked different than most. I'd almost explain it like with this analogy: when Monte was in there, more so than any US midget match I've ever seen, it felt like a minis match relative to the lucha of the day. That is to say, it was faster, sprintier, sprawlier. When it was Monte and Curtis in there, it had a wild energy of them going for holds and advantages. It lacked the precise technique of shootstyle, maybe, but had the same feel of jockeying for openings. There were moments of levity but in practice they were presented with more dignity than you'd expect, especially given the slew of gimmick names that started the match. Even the post-match interviews were more like what you'd expect from any of the other names of the time, talking about issues with the ref and recovering from injury and vying for the title. I like comedy spots as much as the next guy but much like some of the women's matches from this era show us a potentially different path, this did as well. There's some alternate reality out there where guys like these paved the way for a division even snappier and more exciting than junior heavyweights. 

Kenta Kobashi/Mitsuo Momota/Rusher Kimura vs. Haruka Eigen/Isamu Teranishi/Motoshi Okuma AJPW 10/20/89

MD: All of the Eigen/Okuma stuff is fun but it's especially fun when Rusher's in there. You end up seeing this dynamic so many times that you cherish the familiar and appreciate the variation. This had both being a six man with Teranishi hanging out with the shitheels. I've seen Teranishi on the other side as someone who would put Eigen in his place, but it was nice to see him as part of the problem, not part of the solution. And of course, you have Kobashi, one who's ever closer to finding himself, on the other side. That said, there was plenty of familiar here. It started with Eigen shaking Teranishi and Kobashi's hand but refusing to shake Rusher's. Then when Rusher took offense, he pushed him. They locked up, immediately got in the ropes, and Eigen slapped him before taking him back to his corner and getting out of there. Being an AJPW six-man, there was the usual cycling. You'd rarely see a guy get tagged in before everyone else on his side had their turn. 

The pairings were more situational than hierarchical. Rusher eventually tagged out but Okuma could take back over at a moment's notice with a headbutt. There was plenty of headbutt fun in general, whether it be Eigen running someone in to Okuma's head or all the bad guys recoiling in fear as Rusher's indomitable head overcame them. My favorite bit was when they kept laying them on until Okuma finally got him from behind and knocked him down and did a little dance in victory. Eigen's crew were very good at pulling things back into their corner and they even pulled out the triple clubber at times. When Kobashi got in there, he came in hot and got to do a bunch of things before Teranishi got to smack him down enjoyably. Teranishi is a guy who just hits a little harder despite his relative spot on the card. Eigen got to hit the spit spot shots on Kobashi and never got comeuppance along those lines, though Kobashi did toss him off the top and then set the stage for Rusher to come in and mow him down for the win. This is just some of the most watchable wrestling imaginable, guys who were credible and dangerous and could go but that were just having fun out there with themselves, each other, the crowd, us thirty-five years later.

ER: I knew how much I really truly loved wrestling when I consciously noticed how much I love old man All Japan matches. I love them. I've always loved them. I loved the first old man match I ever saw, a concept I had never heard of before but understood and fell in love with instantly. I was a teenager buying All Japan tapes in the mail within my first two months On The Internet because Mitsuharu Misawa was #3 on the PWI 500 that year behind Steve Austin and Goldberg, and I owned Steve Austin and Goldberg shirts that I purchased from Millers Outpost, but had never heard of Mitsuharu Misawa. Or Kenta Kobashi, who was just a couple spots behind Misawa. I clearly needed to see All Japan Pro Wrestling, without actually knowing how to see it or what specific matches to seek. But I found someone selling AJPW Comm Tapes - whatever those were - and sent them an honest to damn god money order for them. I went to the post office to get a money order to buy Acclaimed Japanese Wrestling over the internet. The first All Japan tape had clips of old men spitting at the crowd while people covered themselves with newspapers, and then all of those old men headbutting each other. This was not the wrestling that I expected, but I was so surprised by All Japan old men that I loved all of them, and there has not been a time since that my love for them stopped growing. 

I call them old men, but they seemed a lot older when I was a teenager. Now I am the same age as Haruka Eigen in this match, and only a few years younger than Rusher Kimura and Motoshi Okuma. These are much younger versions of the old men that I saw, but the Old Man All Japan match is a style as much as it is a literal description of a match. This was men, peers of mine now, working a match in the style of Old Tough Men and it just always looks like a 4 star match to me. The pace goes quick, there's never any kind of slow down in the action, the pairings cycle through constantly (outside of an extended beatdown of Kimura, when you think the entire match might be building around cutting him off from his team, as many of these matches went), and you have the cool element of a 22 year old Kenta Kobashi who was nowhere near who he would be in just a few years. 

As these things tend to, it all just broke down into old men headbutting each other harder than you or I could handle. Okuma has been a real revelation for me over the last couple years, here at the end of his career and never cooler. He brings the headbutt thunder to Rusher and doesn't let up, headbutting him from the apron and then running back to his corner to tag in so that he can continue headbutting Legally. Everybody headbutts in this match. Eigen comes in to sneak attack guys with headbutts and keep momentum on his team's side, Okuma headbutts any time he gets the chance, Teranishi and Momota throw headbutts of their own to keep with the spirit, and eventually everyone gets silent when Okuma headbutts Kobashi right in the nose and mouth. Momota as a fired up babyface is beautiful, tagging in and going nuts on the heels with open hand chops. "You want to headbutt my fucking friends? You want to hit people? I'll fucking hit people. I'll hit all of you!" Eigen bends Kobashi back over the ropes and hammers away at his chest, setting up his own spit spot before the spit spot existed. Men headbutt each other in the back of the head, Okuma runs harder into clotheslines than he runs his own head into other skulls, and Haruka Eigen might be the greatest shit stirrer in wrestling. Another low card old man classic. 

Remo Banda/Rudy Reyna/Mano Negra vs Principe Island/Meztizo/Jerry Estrada CMLL 1989/1990

MD: The opening interview mentions Christmas just happening and there's some mention of 1990 so I wonder if this was just in January maybe? Again, there are some great guys in here. This is Park pre-Park teaming with Jerry Estrada in all of his glory against Super Parka/Volador pre-those things, exotico-turned-tecnico Reyna (who remains awesome in all of this footage) and they get a ton of time to have a very complete match. My biggest complaint is that it was just a little unfocused, but it was a lot of great things that maybe never came together; there was still plenty to like. For instance, the opening pairing (and posturing beforehand) was Remo Banda vs Estrada, which made a lot of sense given they had similar teased out hair and style. They worked well together. The other pairings were good, though I would have rather seen Reyna and Principe matched up. Mano Negra was just sort of there and I don't have a good sense of Meztizo even after watching this. 

The second round of pairings gave us Principe vs. Remo Banda which is a rematch from Panama and just like there, they came off like sparring partners who trained so hard against each other they could to an extra gear with wilder stuff. Even just for a minute or two it was great to see them do their thing against each other again. Likewise, the bit we got of Estrada vs Reyna was very good and full of motion and shtick. The segunda started with some really wonderful, imaginative work where Remo Banda fought off all the rudos, full of a bunch of clever spots you don't see all that often. The beatdown, once we got there, was gnarly stuff, with Principe dragging Remo Banda around the ring or stepping on his hair and pulling his arms up, and Estrada just beating Reyna around ringside with great punches. That made it all the better when Reyna started to come back with the best punches that you'll see this week. It devolved into chaos, leading to Estrada exiting the ring with one of his insane signature bumps and the tecnicos finishing off the remaining rudos. This didn't become a bloody war but as fairly conventional matches go, it had a lot of what I usually look for.

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2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Darby & Orange vs. Swerve & Keith (Lee)

 

11. Darby Allin/Orange Cassidy vs. Keith Lee/Swerve Strickland AEW Dynamite 7/5

ER: I didn't consciously set out to write about every Darby Allin match I haphazardly cherry-picked my way through, but it's certainly become that. It would be great if I could just watch a Darby match that I didn't feel the need to say something about. Alas, he does too many things I like, finds too many ways to do new twists on old crash landings, and manages to do something every match that is astonishing enough that it makes me exclaim aloud. When compared to any of the other wrestlers who make me do the same on such a consistent basis during nearly every match of theirs I watch - Stan Hansen, Fit Finlay, Necro Butcher were the first that came to mind - it puts Allin in the immediate company of my favorite wrestlers of all time. It is still probably too soon to say that Darby Allin is one of my favorite all time wrestlers, but he's certainly put up some numbers through his 20s and I've been persistently surprised by his sustainability. There are only so many times I can say that before his run is cemented as legendary, regardless of when it ends. 

I've written up plenty of matches that I thought were Darby elevating one or even three opponents to something grander, but I think one of his great strengths is how selflessly he interjects his stunts and feats. Darby Allin manages to take Shane McMahon stunt bumps in a way that is in service to his opponent, never to himself as a Show Stopper. At this point there is a lengthy list of people who have had some of their greatest performances and matches while in the role of Darby Allin Opponent, and that is not a coincidence. Darby is a canvas that allows wrestlers of all sizes and styles to rise to something greater, in the same way Rey Mysterio or even Amazing Red did. 

Keith Lee is one of our great Should Be So Much Better wrestlers. He is a study of a man shaped like a root beer barrel who mostly works the least interesting style for his size and shape, a Mo Vaughn who bunts and works walks with men in scoring position. Swerve has a CVS receipt length list of matches where his focus was on doing a cool one armed handstand before hitting a move rather than just hitting a move, a John Morrison with more thigh slaps and less backspins. This match, surely not coincidentally against Star Maker Allin, was Lee and Swerve working to their full potential. This was a typically great show opening Darby Allin performance, with a constantly pushed pace getting one-upped all the way to the finish, laying things out to the strengths of every person involved. Keith Lee was Donkey Kong instead of a man the size of Trent Williams doing rope running reversals. His Only On Darby biel to start the match set a tone that every Lee match should have. Darby and Orange played off Lee perfectly, using him as a rock climbing gym who could throw them, and I love how their team works as one man split into two attacking beings, attacking in 1-2 flurries, one sacrificing his body so the other might have an opening to land a shot. 

Lee focuses too often on agility, Orange and Darby made him focus on power. He looks more powerful than ever with Allin getting ragdolled over ringposts and bouncing violently on throws. He brings interesting dogged struggle to stopping OC's constant attempts at diving DDTs or Slumdogs, and his lack of neck makes him impervious to backpack sleepers. Swerve forgets about matching athleticism with Darby, instead focusing on hitting him hard and torturing him. Swerve wedging Darby under the ring steps so that Lee (carrying Cassidy on his back) can walk up the steps while Darby screams like he's slowly being crushed in an industrial press? That's four men coming together to creatively inflict pain on a masochist babyface icon. 

I loved OC climbing all over Lee, attempting to drag him down by the neck while kicking his legs against Lee's resistance, before finally holding Lee stooped over with two consecutive Slumdogs, setting up an actual plausible way for a man Lee's size to bump for a Darby code red. Lee hadn't taken a bump all match and they found a complicated set up that could have looked bad at every step, and instead built to the most logical use of a Keith Lee Agile Bump. The finish is Darby and Orange as Santo and Casas: OC diving off the top with a leaping DDT that spikes Swerve onto his head while sending himself running and diving straight through the ropes into a the exact same DDT on Lee, while Darby ensnares the spiked Swerve in a Last Supper. It's a great twist on Santo's rolling senton/tope, taking out the man on the floor while Casas majistrals the man left in his wake. I don't seek to keep comparing Darby Allin with the greatest names in wrestling history, but he sure does make it easy. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Enter Monster Ripper! Kumano! Beauty Pair!

10. 1979.01.04 - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Mami Kumano & Monster Ripper

K: This is the last match Beauty Pair ever had a tag team. It is also the debut of Monster Ripper, aka Rhonda Sing or Bertha Faye in her unfortunate WWF gimmick. Rhonda grew up in Calgary and was a big fan of Stampede Wrestling growing up. She had contacted Stampede about being trained but was turned down (the Harts didn’t train women at the time). A trip to Hawaii in 1978 re-ignited her ambitions when she saw AJW for the first time, as she recalls in an interview in SLAM Magazine in 2001:

“I was actually in Hawaii on vacation and zapping through the channels, I stumbled on Japanese women’s wrestling. They were hitting each other with chairs and everything! It was an all-girl company, and I thought it was the coolest thing. It sparked my interest. This was definitely what I wanted to do” https://slamwrestling.net/index.php/2001/01/09/slam-wrestling-canadian-hall-of-fame-rhonda-sing-monster-ripper/

 A friend later gave her a wrestling magazine which contained contact details for Mildred Burke’s training facility in California. AJW’s scouts soon noticed her and asked to bring her over to Japan to be their new foreign monster heel.

The match starts with Mami Kumano squaring off with Jackie Sato, a pairing the Korakuen faithful would have seen very times by this point. The immediately establish Monster as the Immovable Object when Mami throws Jackie into her, and Jackie just bounces off her like she hit a brick wall. So the crowd is especially fearful when Monster tags in, I like how she does the Irish Whip here, it just looks really rough and forceful. They actually get the crowded even more heated (and they were hot from the start) just by how violent those Irish Whips look and how Jackie is selling them like she’s being launched out of control. Monster brings an extra dynamic to things because while Mami is getting heat with her cheating, Monster is like a big raging beast on a rampage creating a sense of terror in the fans of Beauty Pair that their favourites might get seriously injured in this. Mami doesn’t have the physical credibility to pull that off.

The 1st fall is fantastic stuff. The 2nd fall struggles a bit to keep the momentum going. Monster’s lack of offense gets a bit more apparent here as she’s in the ring longer, and just doing her big body blocks gets a bit repetitive. Mami shows how she’s contributing to things the most in this moment where she gets in and builds the heat right back up again dragging Jackie out of the ring from the outside, and later when Maki is in for the save I noticed how Mami fed on the apron so Maki could knock her off for a nice pop. The crowd are really into Beauty Pair when they start working together to fight off the heels, so by the end of the 2nd fall the heat has really been built back up again for Jackie to unload some cool throws and big backdrops to pull things back.

They don’t give things a chance to die down in the 3rd fall like they did in the 2nd. Jackie grabs Mami right from the start and hits her with a couple of proto-slingblades. Monster unfortunately looks a bit lost in this part for a moment, just kinda wandering around the ring before she clocks what she’s supposed to do and goes to save her partner. Mami helps though, coming into the ring with a trashcan, hitting everyone including the referee to keep the carnage hot. There’s another moment here where Monster looks like she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do and you can very clearly see Mami pat her on the back, point and say something before Monster picks up her opponent and puts her in a bearhug. While outside of kayfabe that may literally have been what was happening, this time it didn’t detract from the match so much as it still works to see Mami as the brains of this team and Monster is, well she’s just a monster. Plus this set up allows Mami to go and deploy her signature hanging off the apron move, which kicks us into the super-hot finishing stretch where Beauty Pair’s teamwork just dissipates (in part due to Jackie getting attacked on the outside by what appeared to be a member of Silver Pair) and they are overwhelmed by the repeated double-teaming and lose to a horrified crowd.

This was brilliant stuff. Hot crowd, well-structured, tragic story, the only downside really is someone in literally her first match ever looking a big green.

****

MD: We’re no longer in Hawaii. This was if not the debut for Rhonda Sing as Monster Ripper here, it’s very close to the debut and she’s debuted as a force. She was billed as Chinese-Canadian, 17 years old, 120 kg and trained by that old World Champion Mildred Burke. From what we’ve seen of Mami so far, she was definitely a force to be reckoned with, but the crowd buzzes way more the first few times they see Ripper in there. She’s treated as this amazing obstacle that the Beauty Pair somehow have to surmount. Kumano is definitely directing traffic, and quite good at it. She tossed Sato into Ripper to start and when she’d see Ripper throwing some odd looking stomps (like a bear just flailing), she’d quickly come in to control the violence. In later years, I always attributed the heels getting to do whatever they wanted to the refs being afraid of them and their superior numbers but here there’s more of a tecnico/rudo feel where the ref might halfheartedly try to stop the heel double team but he’ll drop everything to ensure that the other Beauty Pair member doesn’t get in the ring. At this point, it felt like they were playing by a different set of norms.

The answer to the question of how they could deal with Ripper was that they couldn’t. They could get an advantage on Kumano though. They just couldn’t keep it because Rhonda would come in and slowly walk over to stop whatever they were doing, to the point of just sitting on Sato a few times to win the first fall. And when Sato even got close to getting an edge on her in the ropes, Kumano would walk over to whack her in the head with a wrench. Because of course she would. However, the Beauty Pair were tag team specialists (maybe in the first generation of them with the High Flyers and…. Well, probably not the Jet Set) and they eventually cracked the code: double teams. All it took was a ducked clothesline to take Kumano out long enough to isolate Ripper. Once she was out of the way they could fight a fair fight against Kumano. That meant Sato’s insane belly to back suplexs where she flipped Kumano right onto her face over and over again. They really got to shine at the start of the third fall, with Sato’s slingblades and Ueda’s big splash but Kumano came in with a bucket and took out the ref and everyone else. That let Kumano do her signature dangling hangman’s choke and really things devolved into chaos from there. It went back and forth with a huge double suplex and Sato fireman’s carry drop on Ripper and Kumano hitting her Calf Branding-esque meteora for a near-fall. They finally ended it with Jackie being pulled off the apron and attacked by interlopers while the Black Pair (as this was the current incarnation of that multifaceted group) hit a brutal finisher, Kumano hanging up Ueda in the tree of woe and pulling her up while Ripper leapfrogged over her to squash Ueda in the corner. Hell of a thing. Anyway, I’m not sure Sing entirely knew what she was doing in there but she was used smartly and the big comeback spots were built to matter and pop the crowd big. Overall, it was one of the most effective debuts for a monster I’ve seen in a while.

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