Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Ri Ri. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
People talking about pro wrestling on the internet in the 1990s got a lot wrong.
No more than people in the 2000s or 2010s, really, but as the birth of this horrible mental terrain that we all share, a whole lot leads back there.
Canonizing and lionizing a lot of stuff that doesn’t hold up, further codifying a lot of real dumb and rigid beliefs about what “good” wrestling is along with things like “workrate” where the actual intended meaning is both flawed and also mostly unknown by the sorts of people who refer to them a lot, and a whole whole whole lot of terrible writing. These are not things solely confined there, the disk horse has never been good, but it always felt to me like a firm foundation for a whole lot of dumb and annoying things.
There are some things they got right though, like the promotion and the preservation of the memory of certain WCW B or C show matches, to the point that even people who haven’t watched literally every minute of WCW programming that exists like I have know about them, like Jushin Liger showing out against Barry Houston or Fit Finlay vs. Lorenzo, one of the best squashes of all time.
Also this match, which has been a favorite of mine since the first time I saw it probably like twenty years ago.
Raven and Kaz Hayashi have something like three minutes, four at the most, together and make as much of it as these two together seemingly could, at least for a match on WCW’s least in-canon and least important show. Which is to say that it is not all insane — although Hayashi’s missed flip dive to the floor that creates a remarkable thud is individually — nor is there any presence of the things that get matches of this length praised usually like awesome selling or what have you.
The match is just pretty cool and very fun.
It’s one of those matches where, if I were to begin listing the things I liked that happened in the match, I would just wind up recapping the entire thing, and nobody wants to read that.
Hayashi is a lunatic, Raven is Raven, and when hurled together by the beautifully negligent pencil of WCW in 1999, some low level magic breaks loose between them.
Beautiful wrestling TV.
HANDWERK 