Jumbo Tsuruta/Terry Funk vs. Tiger Jeet Singh/Umanosuke Ueda, AJPW Grand Champion Carnival III Day 24 (8/4/1983)

Commissions continue, this one from frequent contributor AndoCommando. You can be like them and pay me to write about all 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 $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

Something that has always really interested me in watching tons and tons of professional wrestling over the course of my life is finding examples of something outside of the environment in which we usually associate it in.

People often talk about TV wrestling or Wrestling TV, myself included, in the contest of the English speaking world. The idea of matches seemingly designed more to push things along week-to-week rather than offer any immediate conclusion, matches that are more effective as angles or character pieces than as Great Matches, which is so often what it feels like English speaking fans turn elsewhere to see, at least initially. Obviously, Japanese wrestling is not some place where build-up tags don’t exist, many of the best wrestling matches of all time are build-up tags for bigger singles title matches, but removed from more celebrated Prestige Wrestling contexts, it can be easy to forget that these places, historically especially, are full of this kind of pro wrestling.

This match offers up some great bullshit wrestling TV.

On the road to his (first) retirement, Terry Funk gets a rare team up with the Ace inside a white hot Korakuen Hall to take on a pair of real shit heels. They cheat a ton, with chairs jabbed into the head and neck along with the classic Tiger Jeet Singh spike, and Our Heroes try to stop them, beat their asses, and save their partner.

Really, that’s it, and it is a BLAST.

Funk and Jumbo have had probably like a thousand better matches than this if you combine resumes, but seeing as this is very clearly less about great wrestling and way more about seeing two cool guys beat up two super unlikeable cheating ass villains, none of that matters to me. The Funk hot tags and storm-in spots and punch cut offs are great, his in-peril work is great, and while he isn’t as great as Funk is (nor does the match ask him to be, retirement tour and all), Jumbo also has some righteous ass whipping in him to dish out too.

The spike gets brought out in front of the referee, Terry and Jumbo both come in to begin wailing on them, Giant Baba gets in on the act, and as the evildoers flee, all of our heroes celebrate in the ring for some kind of nebulous disqualification victory.

Not a great match, but a lovely chunk of pro wrestling bullshit.

It never has to be complex, as long as it feels right, and yet again, even a minor Terry Funk match like this has a way of just feeling correct.

Terry Funk vs. Bob Orton Jr., SWCW (5/21/1983)

Commissions continue, this one from frequent contributor AndoCommando. You can be like them and pay me to write about all 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 $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This is from one of those early 2000s old-school footage DVDs a la WRESTLING GOLD that came out, with current commentary recorded over it. I always hated these, a total clash of energies between past and, theoretically, present. Not only in the sense that you know it is not commentary from 1983, but also in that there are references to things happening later, like the existence and stardom of Randy Orton, or Terry Funk’s later hardcore work.

However, it is also a true delight to hear Mark Nulty of ROH 2004-2005 fame call a Terry Funk match.

(No, he does not shoehorn in a Rocky Marciano reference or shout “THE PANTHER STRIKES”, unfortunately.)

Shockingly, this is pretty great.

Funk and Orton almost definitely have a better one in them, as this is a 20:00 time limit draw in a territory that I do not believe was the highest priority for either at this point in time (especially with Terry three months away from his first try at retirement). It is not especially focused, there is no real narrative direction that they are working towards or in the service of, and neither gets especially wild.

It is still Terry Funk and Bob Orton Jr. for twenty minutes.

While not ambitious, everything they do not only looks great here, but feels like it matters. The holds early on are all tight and aggressive and mean, establishing a clear tone of maybe not hatred but clear dislike, on top of the competition. Orton’s control work on the back in the first half may not matter much by the end, the same could be said for the work Terry Funk attempts on the legs of Orton Jr. in the second half, but each of them are sold well enough in the moment and in transition to not feel like the match has wasted my time. Likewise, every other inch here gets filled up with offense that looks really good. Simple slams or suplexes, the previously mentioned attacks, huge bump, or mostly, tons of really really great right hands and headbutts.

Funk and Orton even get into a fun little bit in the back half, where Orton drops Terry hog-first on the top rope to cut off what feels like a match-winning run of offense, only for Funk to do the same in the last minute or two, not through any questionable trick with the ropes, but simply by directing the referee elsewhere, before throwing a real mother fucker of a mule kick backwards into the groin.

20:00 runs up a little after Funk’s revenge low blow, as our guys begin wailing on each other with right hands in the middle of the ring.

This is purely riff work, two guys hurling stuff out back and forth at each other, but when you have this sort of mastery of the pure mechanics and the feel for great riffs that these two do, even that is pretty well worth your time.

***

The Funks vs. Stan Hansen/Terry Gordy, AJPW Super Power Series 1983 Day Eleven (8/31/1983)

Another piece of Terry Funk themed commission work, this one from Stuart You too can pay me to talk about all sorts of stuff, wrestling matches generally at the top of the pile. You can do this by going to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where the current going rate is $5 per match. If you have something more complex, which is to say that cannot be figured out simply by multiplying something by five, hit the DMs, and we can work it out. 

This was, at the time, Terry Funk’s retirement match.

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah. I know. We all do. Yes, Terry Funk would be back in time for the 1984 Real World Tag League. Wrestling retirements are almost always fake, and this is the most infamous example of that. Whatever. Nobody cares, stop trying to be smart and write lmao in response to the stipulation, Reader Who Exists In My Head. You fucking prick. You water brained cheese eating bitch. Shut up.

None of that matters, because this rules so much.

It is not just the good shit, it is the best shit.

Mike Tenay recently posted a tweet saying that Terry Funk was everything good about professional wrestling, and you can just about say the same for this match.

Bigger bully heavyweight wrestlers against smaller guts and heart fighters, bruisers against a technician in an ideological struggle, an attack on a limb that means something, bloodletting, and above all, two horrible people trying to take a nice moment and ruin it, while Our Hero tries to walk off with his head held high.

The clear highlight — not only of the match but real arguably of All Japan’s entire year, going to their singles matches as well — is the Terry Funk vs. Stan Hansen match up. To say they’re electric against each other feel like it does them a disservice. It immediately feels right and with zero preamble (in the match itself), feels like a titanic struggle. Everything is big and it’s airtight and when Stan and Terry begin wailing on each other, doubly so later on when Funk is bleeding again and wobbling on a hurt knee, it feels correct. That feels like the most concise way to put it, that Terry Funk vs. Stan Hansen feels like what pro wrestling is supposed to feel like.

If this match has a problem, or at least a drawback, it’s that there are moments in this match where Terry Funk isn’t wrestling.

Dory is fine here. I’m not a big fan at all, but this is a twelve minute tag and not a fifty minute singles, and his sections of this thing have their utility. His short comebacks are fine and Hansen and Gordy are both real great when showing off all the nasty things that they can do to him. It’s just that he’s not Terry, he doesn’t quite have the same energy as every other section of the match. They’re good sections of a pro wrestling match, but in a match with next level drama and energy and yet another incredible performance by one of the best ever, the sections that are simply mechanically solid feel out of place with every other part of it.

However, again, forget all of that, because Terry’s in probably like 60% of this thing.

Most importantly, he’s there when it really counts. In much of the first half, in the hot tag, and especially in for the finish.

With a bloodied face and a hurt knee, Funk feels like a sitting goose, and a young Terry Gordy tries to notch his gun while the big dog takes care of pesky older brother. Gordy gets him down and goes up, following a great little moment where Funk tries to stand up only for the knee to give out. Funk rolls out of the way of a splash off the top though, a young Gordy paying for his overzealousness while Funk himself never gives up the fight. Terry goes up top himself in a rarity at this point, leaping off into a sunset flip on the big one to turn back the young gun while he still can.

It’s pro wrestling, man.

Simultaneously a match about a whole world of things, themes, and fight ideology itself, but also something that, taken completely on its surface and only appreciated for the what of it all, a match that also happens to whip a ton of ass in the easiest way.

Really though, if you’re watching this match, you’re there for the famous post-match just as much as you are for the match. The Funks fight them off again, and a bloodied Terry Funk gets on the mic. He proclaim his love for Japan, before shouting one word over and over again. It’s one of the most famous parts of one of the most famous careers in wrestling history, it’s forty years old already, and you don’t need me to spell it all out for you.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with it.

Like the man himself, even when it’s gone and the time has passed, it’s not going anywhere. It’s gonna be here for a real long time. In my head, and in your head, and in the heads of everyone who’s seen it or heard about it. Somewhere in there, bouncing around the various corners and alcoves of the old mind palace, waiting to pop up again one day and remind you about how great pro wrestling can be when it’s done right, about just how great Terry Funk really was.

Forever.

***1/4

Terry Funk vs. Nick Bockwinkel, AJPW Grand Champion Carnival III Day Three (7/12/1983)

Another piece of Terry Funk themed commission work, this one being the first of three this week from friend of the blog @beenthrifty. You too can pay me to talk about all sorts of stuff, wrestling matches generally at the top of the pile. You can do this by going to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where the current going rate is $5 per match. If you have something more complex, which is to say that cannot be figured out simply by multiplying something by five, hit the DMs, and we can work it out. 

By virtue of being great at basically every aspect of professional wrestling, Terry Funk will get a lot of credit for a lot of things.

He was great in every role, not just on both sides of the aisle but in vastly different stages of his career, ranging from peak-of-his-powers gutsy babyface to invading or veteran heel to elder statesman babyface. He could do just about any kind of a match too from your main event title epics to weird little things later in his career to whatever else.. He’ll most regularly be praised for his great brawls, and all of the things that allowed him to be such a great brawler. The sense of pace, the feel for a big moment, the selling, and of course, the famous punches.

What I don’t think Terry gets nearly enough credit for is just how great he was as a scientific wrestler.

This match — All Japan throwing two all-time great at each other with about a month and a half before Terry’s initial retirement — isn’t entirely conducted on the mat, of course. They get into roughhousing and fighting up on their feet before the end, but primarily, this is conducted on the ground, and it’s one of my favorite more technical matches of the entire decade.

Yeah, a lot of that has to do with Nick Bockwinkel.

Being one of the great mat workers ever, the first 60-75% of this that’s almost entirely on the ground feels like classic Bockwinkel. The long headlocks, the eventual transition into attacking the leg, the struggle over what feels in retrospect like every single movement made in the match. It’s as much of a show of why he’s one of the greatest ever as it is Terry Funk, and Bock shows himself to be a remarkable Funk opponent. Had they had forty minutes instead of twenty like Funk and Race or Funk and whoever else in major title matches, it feels like a pairing that could have produced one of the greatest wrestling matches of all time.

Again though, for as great as an opponent is and as good to great as a match is because of their performance on one end, it’s Terry Funk who makes it even greater.

The obvious thing here is how great Funk’s selling of the leg is in the back half, and yes, absolutely. He not only always moves with a limp, you get your collapse sell when he can’t lift his man on one leg, but there are a bunch of great little moments where he only uses one leg in a moments where almost nobody else ever does and in a way few others ever could. Terry Funk stands up on one leg and hits an elbow drop on one leg, and if I wrote that about a match from at any point after like 2004, I’m pretty sure I would hate how it was done and call it phony nerd bait, but it feels completely genuine when Terry does it.

More than that though, it’s everything before that that gets me so much more.

Nick Bockwinkel begins with his standard headlock work, Punk/Joe before Punk/Joe was a glimmer in anybody’s eye, but Terry Funk also stakes his claim early, trying to get the leg for a takedown. It’s a simple concept, but in committing to it in totality, the match immediately becomes so interesting, both mechanically, but also as an overall concept. Terry is constantly trying to pull Nick down by the back of the left knee at the start, and because Terry is Terry, it quickly becomes an obsession once Bockwinkel blocks it a few times. Even when they move to holds with Funk more on his feet, he’s throwing knees to the quads of Bockwinkel, continuing to go for the leg, and eventually succeeding in it, even if it’s only for a moment before Bock then goes to Funk’s leg in a classic “alright, motherfucker” moment.

There’s also a tremendous narrative function to that first half as well, immediately establishing the ideas of the match and never letting go of them. Bockwinkel is better at this, and Terry Funk is both good enough and stubborn enough to keep up and maybe eventually succeed, except that in his dogged pursuit of something, Bockwinkel has the chance to really hurt him. In short, the old idea of hard work and talent, except illustrated by two of the greatest of all time.

As interesting as it all is, they also find a finish that — relative to the time period and the norms of that time period — works just about perfectly.

When his knee attack eventually doesn’t work following the Figure Four winding up in the ropes, and they wind up outside shortly after, Bockwinkel finally tries to take the easy way out and immediately pays for it.

Nick Bockwinkel tries to pull Terry off the apron by the hurt leg to win by count out, but Terry hangs on. Bock gets on the apron with him to again target the leg, but when he does, Funk kicks him off and into the ringpost, before pulling himself in at nine to win. The match could have kept going if Bockwinkel wanted to genuinely continue the competition, but immediately suffers the consequences for his moral failure.

It’s the rare non-finish that, as a result of how it’s done and what it means, not only feels as legitimate as a pin or submission, but that also feels genuinely satisfying.

Beautiful pro wrestling.

I don’t know if this is a hidden gem or some kind of a secret, because of the finish or because nothing was at stake or because a far more famous Funk match awaited at the end of the summer, but it’s one of my favorites, and if you only think of Funk the one way, you ought to give it a watch.

***1/2

Don Kernodle/Sgt. Slaughter vs. Ricky Steamboat/Jay Youngblood, NWA/JCP The Final Conflict (3/12/1983)

This was a commissioned review from Corwo, ex-WWW Slack member and writer of the Spinning Wheel Kick blog. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

This was a steel cage match for Kernodle and Slaughter’s NWA World Tag Team Titles, with the stipulation that if the challengers did not win, they would never team again.

It’s quite the famous match, and at least relatively, that is for good reason.

These four guys have what, for 1983 in the United States at least, probably passed for a genuine epic. Thirty two minutes (although certainly ten more than was ever really necessary), blood (although not picked up nearly enough by the cameras filming this at the time), and a whole lot of drama both as a result of the way in which this is worked, and the stipulations of the thing.

Does this need to be thirty two minutes?

Obviously not.

For all that Steamboat and Youngblood get out of the first third of the match, largely comprised of headlocks and arm drags, delivering these outstanding babyface control periods that are nearly as good feeling as their spirited comebacks in the back third of the match, I am not sure you couldn’t have accomplished effectively the same thing in half the time, if that. The same goes for the Slaughter and Kernodle’s time in control. It’s great. They are incredibly mean and eminently unlikeable, it is the ideal kind of veteran basic heel tag team control work in this environment, but you can probably also cut it in half and lose nothing.

The finish is also not the best, as Sarge drops Jay Youngblood with a clothesline using a loaded elbow, only for Steamboat to roll Jay on top of Don Kernodle for the win. It stands out as especially weak, and certainly not the sort of vibrant and impactful finish that a match and a classical kind of story like this deserves.

Still, there is so much here to like.

Ricky Steamboat, in particular, is outstanding here. His runs against Sarge himself, the other all-time level great in this match, are especially great. There is a perfect kind of good guy against bad guy chemistry here, valiant fight against size and strength. The match may be too long, and rely too much on the others, and be like five to ten years too early and/or in the ring place to make the ABSOLUTE most of this, but it is hard to deny the performance and the effort of all of the wrestlers in the thing.

This is maybe not perfect formula that these four find in the here and the now, but a kind of near ideal formula is initially approached here for everyone else to make use of.

On top of that, there’s a great approach to the cage here, really building it up before using it. Maybe not getting everything possible out of it, but using it to create the sorts of visuals that help the match, and in the process, creating a greater feeling of importance and violence around it. The greatest thing this match does, moreso than the quality of the match itself, lies in the influence of the thing and tag team cage matches in general. It is hard to look at this and not see the Hardy Boyz cage matches from 1999-2001 in the WWF, or the ones in this area over the remainder of the decade. If not a passage made full use of, it is a sterling display of a door being opened that was not opened before. A pathway made clear, if not made the complete and total perfect usage of.

As it is, a nice match, and a harbinger of things to come.

***

 

 

El Satanico/MS1/Espectro Jr. vs. Sangre Chicana/Mocho Cota/La Fiera, EMLL (10/7/1983)

I’ve avoided a lot of tags in this project so far, either because they haven’t popped up much or they haven’t been interesting enough to supercede the big singles matches I’ve been looking at so far, but seeing this on a Youtube sidebar felt undeniable. This is an all star game, but it starts out more like Ten Cent Beer Night, and doesn’t once get under any semblence of control.

This is less of a match than it is a gang fight. It’s disorganized and wild and messy in the way an actual fight is, but kept that feeling and atmosphere alive for fifteen minutes. On top of that, it has the kind of flow and storytelling you’d want out of a wrestling match, without ever sacrificing the things that made this so captivating. The rudo team led by Satanico, famously named Los Infernales, doesn’t even let our heroes in the ring to start. This is only two weeks after that famous MS1 vs. Sangre Chicana hair match, and while Satanico is the bigger personality, this match is driven by the rage and embarrassment of a now-bald MS1. Los Infernales begin with an absolutely unholy beating on Chicana, the type of mauling that breaks through whatever mental problems I have and makes me genuinely feel bad for someone in a match from thirty seven years ago. The first fall is stopped when they won’t stop beating the shit out of poor Chicana, and L.I. go up 1-0. 

The second fall is more of the same. Nobody can break through them, and in one of my favorite things in wrestling, we get Mocho Cota as some kind of barely-reformed scumbag trying to fight new bad guys. He gets his ass kicked even more than Chicana did in the first fall, because he gets busted open just a little bit. The game of king of the hill finally comes up short when Chicana is able to catch one of Satanico’s kicks through the ropes. He holds him there so that La Fiera can make a difference, and they finally are able to swarm the ring. They catch low man Espectro all alone and beat his ass, leaving only Satanico alone, leading to one of the gnarliest revenge spots I’ve ever ever seen, as these violent babyfaces hold him down so Chicana can just kick him over and over in the goddamned tube. 

Cota puts a sleeper on after that, and they get revenge to win the second fall. The fighting never stops. There is no break or time for replays, because they will not stop fighting. They continue to absolutely maul Los Infernales in revenge for all of the the crimes I can imagine they’ve perpetrated upon our heroes. Poor Espectro Jr. gets caught alone, and because everyone is so god damned angry, the heroes decide winning this fight matters more than winning this match. In one of the wildest acts of ownage I’ve ever witnessed in this short little journey, they all crowd Espectro Jr. on the mat, beat the shit out of him, and instead of unlacing his mask and pulling it off in a cowardly kind of classic rudo fashion, they just rip and tear it apart and then clean off of his face. Los Infernales win by disqualification for this, but as they scurry away, it feels way more like a loss. This was never a match, it was always a fight, and they got mauled and beaten down into the Earth’s core by the end of it. The babyfaces lose because they got mad as hell, but chose winning the fight over winning the match, and made the fight feel more important than the match.

One of the most memorable fights I’ve seen in recent memory, for the fact that it never once settled down, but still told such an effective story in a very interesting way. You don’t see a lot of near forty year old matches that still pack a punch like this, let alone ones that are this inventive and mean. A blowaway great little scrap. 

***1/2

Sangre Chicana vs. MS1, EMLL 50th Aniversario (9/23/1983)

This was a hair vs. hair match.

This is one of the more famous lucha matches ever, as you well know. It’s famous enough to enter that “even if you don’t like lucha!” sort of category along with other lucha de apuesta stuff, and well regarded enough that I could go into our oft-mentioned Slack chat after watching it a year or more ago and intentionally rile people up by calling it “only ***1/2″ as an easy shorthand for “I really liked this, but I don’t totally get it”. Being that I’ve sort of turned this lucha doc of mine into a project, I thought I might give it another shot because they have a rematch in 1984, and because watching with the intent to write produces different feelings than watching to fill 20-30 minutes on a stationary bike.

This is great, of course. I always sort of knew that I’d love this more on rewatch, especially if I was to write and think about it with full attention, but holy shit. Firstly, as a true monster, I can never insult a match with this much blood. A lot of these matches are bloodbaths, but few of them get it going this immediately. As a result of MS1 jumping Our Hero in the aisle before the match, this match begins with Sangre Chicana already being an absolute goddamned mess. In between bouts of strutting and preening around the ring and celebrating his success, MS1 pounds on him and throws him around. He quickly goes 1-0 with a splash off the top, which feels again like him showing off because he could have pinned him from the opening bell. Chicana’s selling is especially wonderful, with a minor detail I caught onto on a second viewing of him punching himself lightly a few times, like he’s trying to stay awake while this shithead is killing him, or pounding his head on the apron in the final fall to psyche himself up and to keep himself awake, real classic babyface stuff. There’s also a lot of little accidental things that help the atmosphere so much, like an old lady wiping Chicana down with a handkerchief (while smoking), or MS1’s back getting covered in blood from Chicana leaning on him. Chicana has one of the most simplistic and best comebacks ever near the end of the second fall.

A wild Tope Suicida, barely caught by the camera, follows that, and Chicana barely beats the count back inside to even it up to 1-1. Like MS1 beginning the match already in control of a bloodied Chicana, it’s one of these great formula changes, depriving Chicana of any win before the final fall so that he still hasn’t actually BEATEN this absolute piece of shit. MS1 gets his face broken open when Chicana has his revenge outside, and it’s one of the greatest bladejobs in history. This is pushed up beyond simply beyond a classic formula fight when, under pressure for the first time, MS1 takes chances of his own. It’s hard to do this well, but something I absolutely love is when a heel saves his biggest and most dramatic efforts for moments like that, loathing to ever remind anyone that they’re actually incredibly skilled but sometimes not having a choice. MS1 always adds in little touches to the actual offense to maintain that perfect Tullyesque balance, like grabbing Chicana’s tights to help with a suplex, stuff like that. He’s talented and gutsy as hell, but first and foremost, he will always do the easiest and cheapest thing, because he is a coward and a bad man.

When he tries to repeat his successes with a second Tope or a dive off the top, he eats shit in the most brutal ways possible too, and I absolutely loved that idea. That winds up costing him, as after he misses a flipping senton off the top, it gives Chicana enough space to go into a real nasty Stretch Muffler with a hold on the wrist added in. MS1 is all tied up, and after he can’t escape the one time he tried it, he gives up. MS1 revealed himself to be tough and wild when he needed to be, but ultimately, he is a coward, and gave up when it was too hard to keep fighting.

What can I say? I’ll never admit I was wrong because I’ve never been wrong online, but I’ll reiterate a lesson here that I already learned previously, which is that video footage watched on a cell phone on an exercise bike is maybe not the best environment to watch matches for the first time (or at all). That might be it. It might also be the effect that watching something to write about it has when compared to just watching something more casually, or hey, maybe it just hit different this time. I still don’t love this as much as a lot of the people I love talking to most about wrestling, I don’t think it’s one of the like ten best matches ever or something, but I get it a lot more now. Certain lucha rhythms are always going to throw me off in ways I can’t entirely explain or understand, but on a second watch, it’s the best lucha match I’ve ever watched.

In terms of some kind of timeline of wrestling, I wouldn’t fight anyone who said there’d never been a better heel performance or a babyface performance in history up to this point. MS1 didn’t invent heeling or the idea of being a tough coward, but he’s sort of the ur-80s heel here, hitting on a lot of the same ideas I love in people to follow him. Sangre Chicana absolutely turns in the best tough guy babyface performance I’ve ever seen up to this point, and it still might be one of the best ones ever. I’d disagree about it being the best match to ever happen to this point, but I wouldn’t argue too hard. It’s up there with the best stuff of the decade and among the best stuff anywhere ever until Magnum TA vs. Tully Blanchard becomes the best match of all time, to that point, when it happens in 1985. I’m not all the way there on some of the more outlandish praise, but this is the platonic idea of a lucha brawl. The only bad thing about this is that it robs me of one of my favorite bits, if not that it might ruin all of these going forward by providing an unreasonable comparison, but it’s worth it to finally get something this widely revered. 

Since the start of the year, I’ve been rewatching THE SHIELD. It’s one of my favorite shows of all time, but I hadn’t seen it in a while. I first watched it in 2014 and 2015, but this time, it hit a little different. It really might be my favorite television show ever. This time around, what I loved about that show is how clear it is, both in story and in tone. The start of the show leads directly to the end of it, and unlike other prestige dramas of its era, at no point does the show allow you to believe that Vic Mackey is a good man. He commits serious acts of ownage and does some cool shit, but he is evil and the show never allows you to forget that. While it’s an excruciating journey towards that judgment, it does happen. In the end, he and the people who helped him are almost all punished for the initial crime and all the ones to follow, and while he escapes any sort of ultimate justice, he ends the show declawed, alone, and humiliated, with everyone knowing exactly what kind of a man he is. I spent the last ten minutes looking at a word document, only thinking about this comparison. The reason I loved this match so much now isn’t just because the blood hit me better or any of that, it’s the complete clarity of it, both in the incredibly pared down nature of what they do to each other and the morally direct way it has about it. There is no scientific wrestling to start before things degrade into a bloodbath. The entire match is a bloodbath. MS1 doesn’t degrade, he begins the match bad and becomes worse, before he’s punished and exposed at the end. His flaw at the beginning — cowardice and the hubris to just go for it before the bell — is the flaw that dooms him in the end, when he makes one mistake too many, and isn’t willing to keep fighting once he’s finally trapped. This is hardly the first or last match to tell a story like this, but very few instances get it this correct.

People praise this, I think, for its simplicity, but the complete confidence to it was what impressed me the most. One of the clearest and most direct matches I’ve ever seen go for what this goes for and therefore, one of the best.

****1/4

Buzz Sawyer vs. Abdullah the Butcher, GCW (11/6/1983)

This was five minutes long, both guys bled, there was the right amount of face stabbing (some!), and then it ended when they refused to stop trying to murder each other. Pretty much everything I want out of a Hidden Gem release from a 1983 Omni show. Wrestling can absolutely be more than that and it can be a million things that aren’t this, but this absolutely fucking ruled and it doesn’t need to be any more complex than two different types of maniacs trying to kill each other.

***