El Canek vs. Dos Caras, UWA (2/2/1992)

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This was, as usual, a best two of three falls match, for Canek’s UWA World Heavyweight Title.

It’s a mixed bag in the ways that a match like this always will be.

First, the good, because there is a lot of it.

Canek and Dos Caras have one of those classical types of lucha title matches between, seemingly, two wrestlers on the same side of the law, and get a lot of the nuances right. It isn’t always my favorite type of lucha match, particularly when handled by wrestlers I don’t already love, but this match gets all the big movements correct. A flashier and lighter first fall before things get more serious. An escalation in both tone and pace, and in the final fall, all the big nearfalls off of more scientific pieces of offense. Miniature payoffs of thing that worked earlier but that no longer work, particularly when it comes to a move that had previously won a fall not working upon repetition in the third and deciding fall.

There’s then the other part, in which Caras spends virtually the entire second fall working over the knee of the champion, only for it to barely matter once it’s over, and that never isn’t going to bother me.

It’s not to say the work itself wasn’t all very good.

Caras not only has many great, tight, and unique holds to put on the point of attack, but does so while perfectly walking that tightrope between aggressive and antagonistic. In the moments, and some just after, Canek’s selling is also not entirely horrible. A stutter step here, more wobbly up top post-attack than before there, even a shake or two of the hurt limb.

It’s just that those shakes come after repeated spinning heel kicks, when almost anything else would have done, or that he specifically uses a gutbuster to win the second fall. It’s a fascinating sort of prototype of one of my least favorite things in all of wrestling, someone kind of pretending to sell, only to get their shit in anyways, proving that it doesn’t really matter anyways. I expect great limb selling way less from lucha, where I almost never get it, but when that is around a third of the match, that’s no excuse. Even as a — as many longtime readers and/or friends online may attest to — a former selling fascist who has calmed down about these things a whole lot, it is never going to be something I like, when so much of the match is a waste of time, and it’s a real shame that a match otherwise this good makes an error like that to hold it back.

Still, what’s good is good, and the first and last fall are exceptional.

They’re smooth and dramatic and very very well assembled and executed. The third fall is particularly impressive in the same way any match this hold that can get me to truly buy into nearfalls like this is, even when knowing the result ahead of time.

Dos Caras wins the title with a hurricanrana, trapping the legs on the way down.

Equally good and annoying, with the former only enhancing the latter.

Manami Toyota/Toshiyo Yamada vs. Mayumi Ozaki/Dynamite Kansai, AJW Dream Rush in Kawasaki (11/26/1992)

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This was for Toyota and Yamada’s WWWA Tag Team Titles, and as with all matches for those, was a best two of three falls match.

For those unaware, either newer viewers or someone reading a 90s joshi review for the first time, Toyotai-sm — and Manami Toyota herself — is not my favorite stuff in the world, and this is not a match without many of those problems.

Obviously, that is absolutely not to say she doesn’t have some major major hits and that she isn’t one of the, idk, 150 best wrestlers of all time, but that it is very specifically not for me. I love some fireworks, but very often, these matches (both with her and those, much worse off, that tried to mimic her) are too long for how they’re paced, a million things in a row, occasionally with segments that have no value and get immediately ignored in a real frustrating way, and that wear out their welcome long before they start. More or less, on top of the fact that I think years and then decades of people trying to wrestle like her or like this (not this is her fault exactly, you shouldn’t blame Kenta Kobashi for Mike Elgin, or even in a smaller/more recent sense, Will Ospreay for Blake Christian) has made wrestling worse, it’s also incredibly frustrating to see, largely because great seeming matches can turn bad very quickly, and every single one feels like a total crap shoot. It’s stunningly ambitious wrestling with an ultra high margin for error that I think winds up crashing into the sea far more than it approaches the sun.

To those points, yeah, this could use some editing. The twenty to twenty five minute version of this (or I might just say the 12/6/1993 version) is an all-time classic, while you can lob a solid ten off of this and lose nothing. If you want to criticize, you can absolutely make the claim that a lot of this is activity for the sake of activity.

Sometimes though, things just work.

It’s not the most inexplicable thing in the world, of course.

Look at the elements, and things fit. Mayumi Ozaki is one of the greatest villains of her generation, and gets to walk into an AJW ring with her bruiser partner and beat up on two dorks in front of an electric crowd. The formula, even as it warps around a Toyota-ism epic, works as well as always, with the invaders cheap shotting and shouting up a storm and cutting through these horrible little women before getting the receipts, all of that. Toyota and Yamada are also a million times more interesting when their stuff is turned into a specific direction against something, and if it isn’t someone bigger and meaner, invaders do just fine. They also have the benefit of a wonderful atmosphere on their side that has a way of, at least in a match that already work, making everything just a little bit better.

At the same time, it is forty minutes long, and given that I usually hate matches in this style even close to half an hour, I am not one to deny the presence of a miracle when it is laid before me.

While there are those flaws, the things that slightly hold this back, just about everything else that can go right does go right. The performances are fantastic, they get the escalation real correct so that the match feels like it ends at least somewhere close to its highest point, there’s not a whole lot of repetition, Kansai guarantees the nasty nasty nasty strikes and gets Yamada in on the act for some of her best ever, and it also turns out that Ozaki and Toyota are magic together in a way that Toyota does not really experience with anyone else outside of Aja Kong. There’s — again — just sort of something in the air that comes to life when they wrestle each other, especially in the end when they’re emptying out their prodigious arsenals and running through majorly dramatic nearfalls, their natural chemistry and the remarkable atmosphere elevating each other, resulting in some of the best work in the career of either.

The only real issue comes at the end, when the count gets a little messed up when Toyota beats Ozaki with one of her bullshit water name suplexes, except Ozaki sort of falls out of the bridge, only for the referee to hit three anyways. Even then, like how a lot of this match just kind of works out well, it allows a real hater to claim Toyota never actually won but merely benefited from some Tim Donaghy ass home cooking, setting up two more matches between these teams, one that was very much not for me and another that’s among the best of the decade.

Of those two, the former makes all the sense in the world (sequel syndrome, too long without the same magic) and the latter makes even more sense (the shortest yet, removing a lot of the room for error), but this one doesn’t. And it never really needs to. As fun as it is to dive deep into something, beyond just obvious “[wrestler x] is good at [thing], and [wrestler y] is good at [other thing], wow!” surface level work, sometimes that just isn’t the case. Not everything great comes with a complex explanation, and even sometimes when there is a decent enough explanation, it doesn’t seem like it’s quite enough either. Not everything can be explained.

Sometimes, the magic just breaks loose into the world, and this is as clear of an example of that as there’s ever been in wrestling.

***1/2

Sting’s Squadron (Sting/Ricky Steamboat/Dustin Rhodes/Barry Windham/Nikita Koloff) vs. The Dangerous Alliance (Rick Rude/Arn Anderson/Steve Austin/Bobby Eaton/Larry Zbyszko), WCW Wrestle War 92 (5/17/1992)

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This was the War Games match.

1992 is often cited as WCW’s best year, if not the one with the highest ceiling, and while I get it, those peaks are very enticing to those who only look at peaks, I’ve also often disagreed even with that argument. The best Sting vs. Vader match was in 1993. The best World Title stuff, both in terms of feuds and matches, was in 1989. The best Tag Title/tag division work was, I think, in 1993 also, along with probably the best TV Title work too.

Where that becomes inarguable though is here, because as everyone who knows anything knows, 1992 is far and away the best War Games.

The superlatives don’t just stop there.

Not just the greatest War Games match ever or probably the best match of 1992, but it’s in the running for the best WCW match ever, or at least the sort of match someone could tell me was their pick for that, and that I would have no real argument against outside of preference (I would “only” call it top five, or top ten at worst). Likewise, you could tell me you think this is the best match of all time, and while I wouldn’t agree, my strongest opposition is really just that I think it’s only one of the best matches ever.

It’s both a masterpiece of genuine feeling violence and a booking marvel.

The latter, I think, is easy to put a finger on, as everything that happens has some clear purpose or point within the context of WCW at this point. There are the obvious things, like opening with Barry vs. Austin to continue their feud over the TV Title, or Rick Rude going after the nose of Ricky Steamboat that he broke, or in a larger sense, the payoff to the Sting and Nikita tension that goes back nearly a full year, along with how the match finishes and where things go from there.

Far more impressive in a larger sense is the way this works itself around the idea of War Games, in terms of why these things happen in a strategic sense, as more than any other WCW War Games save maybe the one the year prior, there’s a logic and strategy to the entrances that this match has always been capable of, but that was rarely explored otherwise.

Especially so, how it works with the idea often mentioned on commentary by ex-wrestlers that while Paul E. is a motivational genius and has an incredible brain for plots and schemes, his weakness is strategy, and in their biggest ever match, it’s that weakness that really costs them.

By sending Austin in first, it’s not only a boon for him — that traditionally being former TV Champion Arn Anderson’s spot and signaling some passing of the torch there — but also arguably the major mistake the Dangerous Alliance makes. In contrast, War Games veteran Barry has five minutes in a match he knows better. The DA sends their heaviest hitter in Rick Rude in next, which feels like another strategic error, as Steamboat is able to neutralize him for the majority of the match (complete with maybe the best psuedo hot tag run in War Games history), rather than backloading the match with the bigger guys like Our Heroes do with Sting and Nikita last. Arn and Larry, two more War Games veterans, come in and do effectively turn off the faucet, especially neutralizing the Dustin run when he comes in, but Eaton last lacks his usual firepower in a match like this, and when the powerhouses come in last, the Dangerous Alliance can’t do much against it, with Rude more worn out, and the others effectively tied up, giving Sting an easy path to victory when Larry and Eaton famously miscommunicate at the end and Larry injures Bobby’s arm with a missed shot with the disconnected steel ring cable.

The violence and the way it feels so much realer and nastier than in a lot of matches like this is something even cooler, and goes along with the performances in the match.

Everyone in this match is great. Not everyone is on the level of a Steamboat or Dustin or Barry or Austin or Arn, there are some guys who excel more in this environment than others, and this match also asks more of some people than others. But even guys in more minor roles here, like Rude and Nikita and Eaton, are great whenever they’re on. Every shot thrown in this match looks awesome, the cage bumps are all sick as hell, guys are constantly finding new things to do (save for a weird run where like three new entries in a row fire off a DDT) and although this isn’t maybe the total bloodbath you may expect given praise like “best War Games ever”, the guys who do bleed (Austin and Dustin primarily) bleed so much that it covers up for everything else.

Like a lot of great older matches in this vein, it is less so much the specifics of what happens as the feeling the match creates. In between things like Rude’s attack on the taped up nose of Ricky Steamboat and the blood of WCW’s theoretical young tentpoles of the 90s (fuck you, Hogan) and how it stains the ring and the bodies and gear of just about everyone who touches them, there’s a feeling of violence created that makes everything else come off even better and more dangerous. Effectively, while this match is always talked about in a certain way, this is the only time that from start to finish, it totally lived up to that reputation. 

Enhancing that, somewhat, was something that really stood out to me now on the fourth or fifth time seeing it, which was how this was filmed.

Not necessarily in terms of blocking shots or catching everything, but more so in how neutral the camera was, it made it feel realer. There’s almost constantly something cool looking going on in the background once five people are in the cage, and while it might have been sick to have even more camera shots of one of the young guys dripping blood or close ups on what looked like awesome punch exchanges or Rude getting his head shoved in between the rings, I kind of like it. It’s WCW, of course, so I am not going to suggest it was intentional and claim genius when the answer is much more likely just that they did what they could with what they had, but there was a sort of genius to it. In so much of that existing in the background, not only did it add a rewatchability as well as a sense of chaos to the match, but it also made it all feel much realer, because naturally, a camera wouldn’t know where to constantly be if this wasn’t choreographed. It’s one of the greatest examples of a neutral camera in wrestling history, and just one more thing this match gets totally correct.

The only real problem with this match is the finish.

Even then, with Sting putting on an Anderson style armbar on Eaton after Larry accidentally hits him with the steel rod, we’re still talking about something that’s good and that works (although that may have hit harder being done to Arn himself), and the problem is that it’s just not as great as the other twenty three or so minutes, and what holds this back from being maybe the actual best match of all time.  

There’s just too much still to love.

War Games 1992 not only tells a perfect story — stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Paul E. fails as CEO because he cannot manage his assets correctly — but does it in such a striking and memorable way. The result is not only one of the coolest and best matches ever, but the creative high point of one of my favorite runs in wrestling history (early 1990s WCW), and a match that reveals more and more to me, both of itself and myself, every time I watch it.

A monument to violence like little else from its time and place.

****1/2

Eddie Gilbert vs. Terry Funk, WWA (11/14/1992)

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This was a Texas Death Match.

It’s so great.

Sometimes there are pieces that require some kind of preamble or explanation before getting to the match, and then there times like these, where I think something is simply just so apparent — like, oh yeah, of course a grainy handheld video of a twenty plus minute Funk vs. Gilbert brawl rules — that there isn’t much that has to be said.

It is what it is.

The stipulation hinders them just a little bit in the way it often can, moves getting pin falls that normally wouldn’t otherwise so as to show off the gimmick, and stopping things in the way they often can. It’s not all bad so much as it is different, Gilbert and Funk know how to work within this and around this to still have the sort of match they were always going to. But it would be dishonest to say that they’re not hamstrung just a little bit by the confines of the sort of match they’re booked to have.

Funk and Gilbert are both just too phenomenal for that to matter all that much though.

Gilbert’s heel bumping and stooging walks the line perfectly between comical & exaggerated but also also feeling like he’s really getting what’s coming to him. Funk yet again finds the exact right pitch for his own theatrical bit, the classic punch-drunk selling, removing a lot of the comedic elements that can often be there for both a match where he’s the antagonist and also something more violent and serious. Both men are throwing out some serious heaters when the match fills up much of its runtime with heavy punching, and doing even better work in response to those shots. Gilbert gets the assistance of blood, and combined with his genuinely terrific selling of the leg after repeated spinning toe holds (setting up a great bit where Funk curses him out for tapping out instantly every time, inadvertently causing Terry to repeat the bit and making it worse on Eddie each time until he stopped being a coward), he might even be the better seller of the two in this match. The match itself is fairly sparse, some play with a broken panel of wood off of the steps, fighting around the building, but it’s the work they put into it that makes it work like it does.

Mostly independent of the match itself, it also feels like one of the first versions of something I really love.

Terry and Eddie aren’t the first people to have a big crazy arena brawl, of course. You have your Concession Stand Brawls, some of Funk’s own work elsewhere, and the Cactus and Gilbert matches the year before in the same area. There are dozens of matches from both, maybe hundreds in Funk’s case a little like this, and people cite this 1991/1992 Tri-State area indie brawling as the proto-ECW for a reason, plain as day every time I see one of these matches. However, this feels a little different from those to me, in small but precise ways. The simplicity of the violence and the way the gimmick is worked in a sparse but interesting way, the cumulative effect with a hurt limb thrown into all the fighting, the way they really take in every inch of the gymnasium they’re in, the absolute bullshit, the fight after the bell when Funk barely beats the count off a double down to win leading to another brawl after the match, it all feels so familiar to me in such a warm and satisfying way.

Spiritually, it feels a lot like the first IWA Mid-South match.

From me, there is no higher praise.

A fascinating historical document, that just so happens to have a really great match lumped in there too.

***1/4

 

The Steiners vs. Tatsumi Fujinami/Tayayuki Iizuka, WCW Wrestle War ’92 (5/17/1992)

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Before any discussion of the match itself, I would love to bring up that Jesse Ventura has the time to chime in early on by claiming that, the Steiners being Michigan Men and all, this is also revenge for the Japanese beginning to edge in on the auto industry.

As for the match itself, it rules, of course.

They do that kind of classical old Steiners thing that I don’t always love, where it is a lot of back and forth control work, as if the Steiners are never totally sure of how to bridge their more fireworks forward style with the older-school mindset still present within WCW (although by 1992 they are so much better about this than usual, look at the 1990 work against the Andersons for an example of what I really mean), but with Japanese opponents, they seem to make it work a lot better than usual (save the Sting/Luger miracle tag a year prior). Guys like Fujinami and a young Iizuka are much better than older U.S. guys at getting the idea of mixing up the holds and what not with tempo shifts and huge moments of offense that aren’t all in the last third.

For example, the sickest thing in the match, by far, happens in the first half, with the gnarliest ever version of the classic Doomsday Device counter.

Between the first time I saw this maybe five or six years ago and now, I’ve watched the GIF at least a hundred times, and it is still so impressive. What gets me the most with spots like this is the moment of hesitation in the air, the sort of stuff that not everybody can just do. It’s an insane feat of strength by Rick Steiner and placement by Iizuka, but often under-discussed with this spot is how Fujinami keeps a hold of Steiner until the tight moment. A moment earlier or later, and you can imagine this spot going so much worse, in any number of ways. It’s a three man spot, and it takes all three to make it as memorable as it is.

It’s more than just the one thing though, of course.

This match just kind of moves well. It is not always perfect, you can argue against some of the pacing, or the call to have it to be totally even as if this is a New Japan Steiners match rather than them at home against guys who are (mostly) strangers to the crowd, but the shit never doesn’t rock. Fujinami lays in the basics, Iizuka is obviously game, and the Steiners do so many incredibly cool throws and assorted power moves. Every time it begins to feel a little strange, there is something really wild to shut that part of your brain up, and it ends before it can ever feel a little too much, unlike some other 1992 Steiners matches to follow.

Rick gets Iizuka with a sudden Belly to Belly off of the top to win.

It’s something of an abrupt end, but it fits the match and promotional style entirely. Not only that there is a clear attempt in these years to show that a lot of moves can end a match (many people who have a 2000s ROH phase likely also have an early 90s WCW phase for a reason), but in a match where shifts and turns come suddenly, it’s the sort of thing that just feels right. A lot like the match itself and a lot like it, there’s something sort of hard to fully put into words about why it works like it does. It just kind of has that special touch to it, maniacs at the peaks of their athletic powers brute forcing something across the finish line.

The real shit.

***1/4

Ricky Steamboat vs. Rick Rude, WCW Beach Blast 1992 (6/20/1992)

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This was a thirty minute Iron Man Match.

With all due respect to the other great half-hour iron man matches, your Sasha Banks vs. Bayleys to Benoit/Angle to AJ/Daniels (x2) to AJ/Roode to even Dustin Rhodes vs. Rick Rude a year after this match, Steamboat vs. Rude stands out to me very clearly as being the best of the bunch.

The first reason for that high praise — and the one most often discussed when talking about this match — is that, mechanically speaking, on every level from the offensive execution to the selling to the construction of the match, it’s unbelievably tight.

For those unfamiliar with this match, the big thing here that always gets praised is that selling, and for good reason.

Steamboat begins the match with an attack to the ribs of Rick Rude, and it never ever stops mattering. Even when Rude later controls by attacking Steamer’s neck, he is always greatly inhibited by the damage to his ribs, and in particular, the left side. There’s so many thing he cannot do, even when having had control for minutes at a time. Steamer’s neck selling is no joke either. Ricky Steamboat is every bit as great here in less flashy ways, as great as having a rule of babyface selling (The Steamboat Rule, for those unaware, is the idea that a babyface should fight back after every three or four things, so that an audience knows they aren’t just lying down and taking the beating as if this is fake or something, the idea being that it’s far easier to support somebody genuinely fighting) named after him might suggest, but the big thing here is the near half hour long injury to Rick Rude, which results in his career performance.

In terms of offense, it is as great as you would expect. Rude hit his prime this year, and although it only lasted a year or two, it’s a delight to see someone pull everything together like he did. His offense is not exciting exactly, but it all feels correct in a way that’s so much more important to me. Not cool or flashy, often basic and simple, but it’s all mean, and crucially, it all feels like exactly what Rick Rude, the specific character/person would do, which wasn’t always the case for him. Offensively, Steamboat is the revelation here, wrestling far more aggressively and, in his own way, more violently than usual with his attack on the ribs. Even in the back half of the match, when Ricky works from underneath in his usually sympathetic babyface ass babyface comebacks, there’s a meanness and hostility to everything he does to Rude that stands out so much, not only in terms of his own career, but compared to almost every other wrestler ever in a similar spot.

These guys have a match that, broadly speaking, you would define as scientific or prestige wrestling or whatever, but there’s a hostility and urgency as well that means it’s never just that.

Rick(s) Rude and Steamboat also assemble the thing really brilliantly, on levels both micro and macro.

The long period of control at the start, with Steamer making a rare and clear choice to specifically target one side of the body rather than general back or stomach work, stands out so much, but the fact that it never leads to fall — at least, in that specific moment — stands out a lot too. Rude instead barely escapes with a roll up after dodging Ricky when he finally gets overzealous, before then using that pause to go to the neck. The broader idea of the middle of the match — Rude pouring it on, getting a cheap DQ in the favor of the babyface and using it to increase his lead further — is old hat and the established way these matches go at this point, but not only is it a trope largely invented for Iron Man Matches here, but one that probably isn’t ever executed better than it is here. Every other team it feels like a heel being devious and smart, and that’s rarely bad, but there’s a desperation to it here because of Rude’s injury and the performance around it that makes it so much more interesting than usual.

What really works about this match though, what really elevates it in my estimation, and what I don’t think is ever brought up enough (or sometimes, at all) by others when praising it, is all the other stuff.

It often feels to me as though this match is discussed as if it happened in a vacuum, this pre-ordained Great Match that they happened to have that succeeded largely on mechanical skill and physical brilliance and the greatness of the Rick Rude performance in particular, rather than what it was not only in the context of their long feud and their characters, but also a remarkable individual story in its own right.

This is so much more than just a combination of impressive performances, it’s a match that works because of the entire package, a stellar example of what big time pro wrestling in America can be.

Rick Rude’s selling is very good, but the difference between something like his prehistoric gif-bait back sell in mid swivel stuff that’s there throughout his career and this is that it never feels showy, and even more impressively, it never feels sympathetic. So many far lesser wrestlers (or promotions, or even announcers for that matter) would go a little far with a match like this, where the heel is the one with the match’s big injury, but Rick Rude is always just enough of a rotten mother fucker that it never matters. At his core, he is so unsympathetic that this all just feels like the exact thing he deserves. It’s such a hard balancing act here, someone getting their comeuppance in the way that this match gives Rude his, but they pull it off perfectly.

It’s also one of those matches with a clear point of view and something to say about pro wrestling strategy, and I love that.

Steamboat starts hot and has a single plan that he never gets away from, and yes, he is rewarded for that in the end. He’s also rewarded when Rude overreaches in the middle, getting his second fall with a counter of Rude’s Tombstone into one of his own, along with repeated success in his comebacks when Rude would try to overreach. However most of all, this match rewards Steamboat not for having a strategy, but for being active. In the last five minutes, in a tie game, Rude aims repeatedly for a Sleeper. With Ricky’s bad neck, it’s hard to outright accuse Rude of trying for the draw (with Rude’s U.S. Title not on the line, there’s nothing to be gained or lost either way) when that hold conceivably could win for him, but he’s clearly also fine taking the draw. He keeps going back to it, and in the end, it’s both the insistence on one thing as well as what that one thing represents that does him in.

In the last minute or so, Rude again tries his Sleeper, but Steamboat kicks off the buckles like another great match this year. The difference is that, true to the more physical nature of this match, Steamboat never tries to roll over into a pin, but lands totally on top of the hurt ribs of Rude, and stays there to go up four to three.

With some fear finally put into him, Rude scrambles and tries to grab onto anything, but it doesn’t matter. Time runs out, and Steamer wins in a much more interesting way than people tend to win matches like this.

Rude loses the match because he failed to use his time and got a little too casual and desperate, and a little bit complacent. Steamboat wins the match not only because he used his time well, but because he did so from start to finish.

You just don’t see wrestling like this all the time.

Not now, not even in 1992 (although it was more plentiful).

It’s not only physically impressive, but masterfully handled despite all that could have gone wrong, and possesses a phenomenal narrative quality on top of everything else. The very first moment of the match not only impacts how the rest of the match goes, making it one of the most efficient thirty minute matches (let alone thirty minute iron man matches) ever, but leads directly to the finish. You would have a hard time coming up with too many other matches you could say just that about that have one fall, let alone ones like this that have seven, let along everything else this match gets right.

Bill Watts formally took over around three weeks before this show, and while I’m nowhere near as high on that run as a lot of other people (Kip Frye era WCW is probably what you actually love, “Guy Who Loves To Say He Loves Watts’ WCW”), this feels like the most complete realization of that vision. Classic pro wrestling storytelling, athletically impressive action and something more physically intense fused together with a simple and yet quietly ambitious narrative, all caught up with big 90s television production to make it all better. These things rarely all lined up the way they do here, and while it’s something much more associated with a WWE where they simply refuse to turn the machine on rather than rarely understanding how it works, for WCW at this time, this is what it looks like when everything works the way it’s supposed to.

Everything pro wrestling can, should, and ought to aspire to be.

****

El Dandy vs. El Satanico, CMLL 59 Aniversario (9/18/1992)

Here we have another commissioned review from friend of the blog/frequent contributor @beenthrifty. 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 hair vs. hair match, completing the apuestas trilogy between the two.

In their first hair match in December of 1990, El Dandy won through a revenge fake low blow disqualification, following a series of matches where Satanico employed his patented technique. In their rematch the following December, Satanico got his revenge and to really spit in Dandy’s eye, did it almost entirely cleanly. It’s hardly the most traditional pro wrestling trilogy storytelling and has its own problems, but it stands out a whole lot, especially because it still leaves Dandy with something to work for in the third meeting between the two.

Like all the previous matches, this is real great.

I could write for the fourth or fifth time about the beautiful mechanics and the chemistry on display between these two or how perfect they are in their respective roles. Dandy’s punches, Satanico’s celebrations and shit eating grins, all the energy Dandy has on the comebacks, how smooth everything is, how they can get so much out of building up relatively simple pieces of offense, all of that. It’s been done to death talking about these two before, so I’m not super interested in doing it again. Two of the best wrestlers ever have yet another great match for the reasons they always do, but more interestingly, for other reasons too.

The construction of the thing is also really spectacular.

More than any other three fall lucha match I’ve watched recently, this uses its time so well. The three falls all have enough time to really breathe, and maybe most impressively, the first fall is long enough and intense enough that for a moment, I wondered if this was actually a three fall match at all. Each of the falls not only has time to be its own individual piece of wrestling (while fitting together perfectly), but each of them has a real point to it too.

Dandy and Satanico start angry, but there’s still some science there in addition to the low blows (a quick note on the side: Satanico immediatly going to a low blow once he has the chance or it here is especially great after spending all of the second match disguising his low blows and also trying to lie about them) and face punching. Satanico gets nasty and violent in response in the second, winning out because of it, before Dandy beats his ass and delivers a million receipts in the third fall. It sounds simple, and I suppose it is, but few other matches come to mind that get it as right as this does. Not just in the execution of these ideas or how great the individual performances are, but how well paced and laid out it all is. Your standard three fall match is theoretically supposed to be a three-act narrative, but it rarely works out as well as it does here, with three distinctly different and even acts that just so happen to also come together into one complete thing as well.

It’s also a match that makes the most of every bit of material it has, never once feeling like a match with even a second more than it needs, and always moving forward at seemingly the exact right speed and in the exact right way. It is not astonishingly surefooted, in the sense that I am not astonished, but every single thing this match opts to do feels correct.

First and foremost, this is a match that succeeds on feeling.

The best quality this match possesses — and there are many great qualities this match possesses, as we will discuss — is that it feels genuinely climactic.

It’s not an easy thing to put into words, but there’s a powerful feeling present here at all times. Every punch feels like it’s being swung with not only the intention to end the match, but with so much force and hatred behind it too. I hate the word passion in a review because it feels both super vague and overused, but everything really comes pouring out of the screen here.

There’s also just a whole lot of stuff that whips ass.

Satanico vs. Dandy is a series full of great individual moments, and this has another of my favorites.

When Dandy finally does come back and draws blood on his enemy in the third fall, Satanico tries to retreat up the aisle with Pirata and calls for a time out, but Dandy sprints towards him and punches him in the face while he’s still motioning for a time out. It’s a fairly ordinary thing, but because of everything about this — how perfect both men are in their roles, the match up to that point, the series up to that point — it stands out as this really beautiful pocket chunk of professional wrestling. All of it is there in this thirty to sixty second package, Our Hero making the comeback, a shithead trying to evade justice in a deeply unrespectable way, and gets his shit rocked in the most satisfying possible way.

It’s the story of the match condensed into thirty seconds and it’s fantastic.

As the above might suggest, another strength of this match is that it sees them return to what made the December 1990 hair match so so great in the first place.

Tons and tons of blood.

the Satanico vs. El Dandy hair match from 1992, unsurprisingly, whips ass pic.twitter.com/4YeKnA09D1

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) November 21, 2021

Dandy bleeds first (an absolute gusher, as you can see above), but Satanico joins him before too long in the third fall. The work on the two open wounds is outstanding. You’d think that once again, the magnetism and pure evil of Satanico stands out the most, but El Dandy is just as great if not better. When he takes Satanico to task outside, there’s this little patch of time when he posts Satanico and the bad man just drops down by the post, and Dandy begins swinging the side of his head into the side of the post with these short little hammers, like he’s trying to break the ringpost apart from the ring itself, using El Satanico’s head as a blunt object.

Beyond the blood and the construction and the individual performances, what really elevates this in my eyes is what they chose to do with all of that, the ends that they applied all of these all-world raw materials towards.

True to that feeling, it is the conclusion, and what a conclusion it is.

With both all covered in blood and stumbling around and reaching frantically for any way to end the match, Satanico reverts back to who he is and always will be. Confronted with real adversity and not lucking out like he did last time, Satanico does what comes most natural, and cheats his ass off. He grabs the ropes on a bridging pin to steal it, only for cornerman Atlantis, Dandy, and the crowd to plead with the referee until an official comes out for the restart.

Dandy sprints at Satanico this time, and succinctly beats his ass with real finality now.

Following a series of the world’s most frantic punches and clotheslines, Dandy goes into the Dandina, and beats Satanico to take his hair for a second time. It is, perhaps, the ultimate testament to this series and the two wrestlers in it that they manage to make a simple La Magistral feel like not only a move with genuine impact, but also a perfect ending to a long-running blood feud.

El Satanico is the worst man alive, and finally, El Dandy not only defeats him in one of these apuestas matches, but really and genuinely beats his ass before pinning him un undeniable fashion, leaving him no legitimate gripe. It’s a perfect ending to a sensational story, with enough beautiful mechanics and delightful violence to satisfy just about everybody. One of those matches I would point someone towards to explain what this is all supposed to be and what it can be.

Spiritually correct professional wrestling.

***2/3

Perro Aguayo vs Sangre Chicana, Monterrey (1992?)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Benny aka @benbenbigelow on Twitter. 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.

Again with a frustratingly vague date on a very interesting lucha match, as was seemingly the theme of Benny’s commissions this year. More of you should try themed commissions. Anyways, repeated searches have not narrowed this down, either on cagematch, Google, other wrestling forms, or even luchadb. I’ve found other matches they had together, other matches in this building (Plaza de Toros Monumental), but nothing in a cage and nothing even close to an official date.

Sadly, yet again, it will simply have to exist in my mind, your mind, and on any sort of official measure you or I may undertake as simply maybe happening in 1992.

However, outside of that frustration, this has everything else I could ever want.

The cage is maybe the shoddiest thing I’ve ever seen, bending to real dangerous looking angles when either man so much as leans into it or grabs a hold of the bars when beginning their climb. Both men bleed here, but primarily, it is Sangre Chicana who yet again gets an absolute motherfucker of a gusher going in the early stages and, as this is joined in progress (we still get 15:00+, it is not a real problem). Eighty percent of this match is punches, and it is fucking GREAT. They throw so many great punches, with so many great bumps and sells for them, and each single shot contains so many bad feelings. Not only a hatred, but a kind of futility to it all, throwing hands for the sake of throwing hands, insisting on staying mad and continuing to fight, because if you are going to be angry, your anger may as well have a direction. There’s a point here — a point I cannot properly define — at which each punch thrown feels like it has an outdated slur or an insult attached to it, the Al Swearengen/Mr. Wu Summit of steel cage matches, but with all sorts of different ones mixed in there too.

If this sounds like your cup of tea — a cage match with so unsafe a cage that it is barely climbed at all, and instead used as an attempt at containment for one of the great slugfest pairings ever — then, just like me, you are going to have a hell of a time with this thing.

Beyond what happens between the two men in the ring, there are, of course, the other elements. By this, I primarily mean that the match is always cut into by shots of the crowd. It is immediately one of my favorite crowds in lucha history, seemingly comprised primarily of people over the age of sixty five, who are either disinterestedly watching one of the most compelling bloodbath slugfests of all time OR standing up and hollering with full throats at either Chicana or Perro, if not both. Everybody in Monterrey to see this match is either totally disinterested in the entire thing, seemingly having just wandered in off of the street to have a place to smoke or have a few drinks without a care in the world for the fact that this cage could fall over at any moment and kill them, or they are absolutely living and dying with every shot thrown.

Speaking of the shots thrown, to back to that, this match is full of incredible shots and sequences. Every single moment of this thing has something awesome going on. Not every punch is totally different, but they string together so many awesome sequences and exchanges, different versions of punch trading spots, guys being hurled into the horribly unsafe cage, and low blows thrown with more hate and pettiness than you’d usually ever see.

Here, look at some stuff from this match, and an explanation of some things that happened, which in a match like this, is less so intended as some kind of a recap (boring), and more an attempt to tell you what I loved about it (everything).

What also rocks about this match is that in addition to the violence, it is also genuinely entertaining and god damned hilarious in a few small parts, none of which undercuts the spirit of the other eighty to ninety percent of the match.

For one, the genital violence in this match is maybe not as severe nor as prevalent as the punching, but it is just as entertaining.

During this match, there are probably no less than ten different direct shots to the old tube, and it goes both ways. Primarily, it is a Perro cut off spot, but like any great match like this, Sangre more than gets his receipts in. Chicana is especially great at selling the repeated attacks on the hog, having trouble standing up after the last one, but Perro’s pretty great in that moment too. It’s a really beautiful display of the aftermath of a fight like this, both men doubled over in pain, but with this body language and these looks in their eyes that feels less like regret or even anger, and more like the appreciation for a good bit.

This is not even the best bit in the match.

At one point, the referee attempts to assert some kind of control in a match that nobody seems interested in winning anymore, and after already getting punched away earlier on by Perro for this sort of behavior, both men have had enough, and something even cooler and funnier breaks out, as both men simply begin repeatedly not only attacking the referee, but tearing off his dress shirt and pants, before attacking him again.

The referee’s clothes are put to good use, in yet another display of efficiency out of this match.

First as things to wrap their hands in before punching each other again, obviously a little sore after ten to twenty minutes of punching each other in the face as hard as possible, and secondly (when that doesn’t work), as strangling devices.

In the middle of all that, at some point after they’re used as a strangulation device, Perro Aguayo puts the referee’s stolen pants back around his neck, and wears them for the next several minutes as a trophy.

The best bit of the entire match follows that, when Perro Aguayo has the referee’s pants finally knocked off of him, the referee briefly tries to put them back on, before he is brought a pair of replacement pants. It could be from someone in the back and it could also just be from a fan who felt bad for him. It is hard to ever know, but I would prefer the latter. In the background of maybe the match’s dirtiest and most desperate punch exchange, you can see the poor guy putting his replacement pants on.

No other few seconds of footage sums this match up better than this.

An incredible punch exchange, guttural and violent and genuine feeling, with a referee stripped of his clothes and putting on a second pair of pants in the background, before briefly cutting away to an older woman who has absolutely no idea how to react to any of this.

It’s perfect.

Once firmly secured in a second pair of pants, the referee again goes about trying for order, this time simply trying to declare a winner. Rather than calling it off entirely, the match again makes a choice that is a thousand times funnier while still retaining its believability as a real fight. He tries to raise Sangre Chicana’s hand, only for Chicana to reject it. Instead, hilariously, the referee then goes and tries to raise Perro’s hand, as if to insist that one of them is winning this, before he also refuses.

They resume fighting, the ref gets hit again, before Perro THEN reverts back to being a chickenshit heel and trying to run out of the cage. It’s the perfect antagonistic response to this situation, this moment of bravado before insisting that the fight continues, only to then immediately run away again once he got popped in the mouth the next time.

Chicana chases him out of the cage, they fight again, and finally, when they get into a sea of people, there’s finally a pause in the action that becomes permanent. Nobody officially wins, as the referee and, I think, fans in the crowd get in between the two once it spills outside. Some hold up Chicana’s arm and some hold up Perro’s. As the referee has been stripped of his official uniform and is dressed just like anyone else, conceivably, it is hard to tell what side he’s on, if he is even there at all, and I kind of prefer that.

The match breaks down into a screaming match between like forty different old men, and that is that. At the end of a generationally beautiful monument to all of the many ways in which violence is cool, the winner is both nobody and everybody.

Pro wrestling, baby.

This is one of the most fun matches of all time, and as opposed to other lucha classics, for which I think you may need a little context, I think this is enough of a beautiful mess, violent and bloody and cool and genuinely hilarious, the sort of thing that ought to be enjoyable to any fan of real pro wrestling, that there is no such distinction to be made here, and I need you to watch it immediately.

One of the most spectacular pieces of violence and nonsense, along with being one of the great intersections of the two, I’ve seen recently. If I had had a single drop of alcohol to drink tonight, I would assume this was a match I would have to rewatch with a totally clear mind, but that wasn’t the case at all, on account of this hellacious blizzard (12/23/2022). I actually just liked it this much on the first watch, and I say that specifically, because I have a feeling that this is a match I am going to watch at least fifteen more times in my life.

The Jay Briscoe vs. Mark Briscoe of early 1990s lucha spot shows.

***3/4? ****? more? doesn’t matter, really. if you need a star rating at the end of this, you are missing the point. 

Genichiro Tenryu/Koki Kitahara vs. Shiro Koshinaka/Kengo Kimura, WAR (10/23/1992)

Commission work once again, this time from friend of the blog Tim Livingston. You can be like him, both in logging off Twitter forever to the betterment of your mental well being, and also in that you can pay me to watch and write about all sorts of things, mostly pro wrestling matches. You can do that first by making sure I haven’t written about something already and then by heading to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The market price is currently $5 per match, and if you have some ambition that is more complex than simply multiplying a number by five, feel free to hop in the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi, and I’m positive we can work something out. 

Throughout my wrestling fandom, or at least from the point at which one starts to have opinions on who the Greatest Wrestler Ever is, my feelings have only waivered a few times. There are less than ten wrestlers ever who I’ve ever thought were the best wrestlers ever, and fewer still to really strike me and change my mind on that. Getting to that age around the early 2000s, when the WWE started to push the idea that Ric Flair was the canon pick, being a Bret Hart and then a Chris Benoit kid before that, those were the first ones, those easy picks before one starts to branch out. When I started to watch more older Japanese footage, it became Toshiaki Kawada. I started to wonder at points in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as he succeeded in the WWE, if it might actually be Bryan Danielson.

Anyways, for a period in 2013 and early 2014 — that is before WrestleMania XXX grabbed me and installed it as this hard belief in me that it was Bryan Danielson, and it was on everyone else to prove it wasn’t, a task nobody has yet succeeded at — I first started watching the WAR vs. New Japan feud.

For a few months here, however long it was between when I started this and when that spot was cemented for the time being, I firmly believed that Genichiro Tenryu was the greatest professional wrestler that I had ever seen.

Granted, it’s not all because of WAR vs. New Japan. Like any good boy raised on forums and on a certain archive, I had seen the hits. The All Japan vs. Choshu tags, Jumbo vs. Tenryu 6/5/89, even a few sojourns into NOAH in the 2000s. There’s a level wrestlers can often get to when you haven’t seen a whole lot of them, that I always kind of connect with Nick Bockwinkel, who holds that position with basically everyone as a result of the rarity of full career footage. It’s this point where you know someone is great, occasionally where you know based on a handful of things, that someone is one of the best to ever do it. But without more, you simply are not confident enough to put a hard number on it unless pressed. That’s where Tenryu was for me for a long time, obviously at a certain level, but I couldn’t quite say more than that, or put it in any definite terms. The elevation, however, came as a result of the performances that came out of this interpromotional feud. It does not include all of the best work of Tenryu’s career, but it is a run with so much to offer on every level, peaks, performances, diversity, versatility, all of it.

Such a thing, the performances that took Tenryu from among a vague class of all-time greats to being someone I thought of and still think of as one of the single digit greatest ever, begins here. Koshinaka and Kimura of New Japan Pro Wrestling step into WAR (not actually for the first time, as that came two days prior, although the first time on film), and wrestling is forever improved for it.

This match does not leap off of the page on paper.

It is not the strongest line up in the world. There is only one truly GREAT wrestler in this, and you ought to be able to tell based on the start of this piece which of the four that is. Koshinaka and Kimura’s best days, while not horribly far behind them, are in the rear view mirror. Kitahara is not especially great in this match, to the point that I imagine he could be subbed out for any number of basically competent warm bodies in the WAR locker room, and this match would wind up retaining much of its quality. The goal of the match is not to be Great, but it is one that comes by that quality honestly by succeeding so thoroughly in its purpose, which is to take this from a reliably tense interpromotional tag and escalating it into a full on War.

To that purpose, this is a match defined by a few different moments and sequences.

Firstly, the start and the way Koshinaka and Kimura conduct themselves in the first third of the match. After rushing the locals at the start, Tenryu isn’t allowed to get in for five to ten minutes, and the kid gets pulverized. In this larger subsection of the match, there is one moment that sets the stage for everything. Koshinaka grabs Kitahara from the apron while he’s in the corner, and the crowd loses it. In a split-second decision, Koshinaka seems to define the entire feud going forward, both in its hostility and its willingness to completely go along with how a crowd is feeling on a given night, and goes completely in. Choking, hair pulling, these nasty twelve-to-six elbows to the face, and Kimura follows suit all match with these short punches to the forehead that manage to feel as nasty as they do cheap.

Secondly, at two or three points in this match, it completely disintegrates into these increasingly frantic, unorganized, and ultra-genuine feeling scraps. “Brawls” doesn’t even feel like the right word to me. I say “brawls” and I think of whips into chairs or walls, throwing stuff, punching, I think of a direction, of something even just slightly organized. These are scraps. The four involved, their seconds, all just furiously grabbing at each other, swinging wildly and often not connecting, hurling each other not even into anything, but just back and forward and to the side. They’re not the best fights in wrestling history, but there is a pure spirit to them that is virtually unmatched in any other match of its kind, a feeling that things have broken loose. Because there are so many seconds that do get involved and because it is in Korakuen Hall, everyone so close together, there’s also this WONDERFUL idea there that, hey just maybe some of these ultra rabid WAR fans are getting involved too.

Lastly, Genichiro Tenryu.

In general, in a broad sort of totality from beginning to end.

New Japan vs. WAR is a feud I’ve spoken about before as being home to many of what I would consider the greatest antagonistic performances ever by Tenryu, but the beauty of the feud is in the versatility it allows its participants to show, the sides switching depending on whose show a match is on. Here in front of a white hot WAR crowd, it’s something wildly different from what might be considered more famous matches in the feud. In front of this crowd, on this night, Tenryu is God. This is a feud that will be known partially for the remarkable performances on the other end of guys like Hashimoto, Hase, Choshu, you name it, in opposition to the WAR side, but in this match, Tenryu delivers a great a pure babyface performance as any of them, and probably and even better one. On the scale of babyface performances in interpromotional tags like this, the only competition that really comes to mind is Samoa Joe in the ROH 100th Show tag, largely for all the same reasons, and that’s the sort of performance that seems to draw so much upon matches like this and the Tenryu/Hashimoto performances at large in this feud specifically.

Early on, Tenryu delivers these wonderful annoyed glares when he can’t tag in, as great a visual shorthand in pro wrestling for the promise of future violence as I can recall. Tenryu’s hot tag here is among the hottest to ever transpire, flying out over the top from the force of a clothesline he delivers, these ultra wide swings on chops, and such such nasty offense. Tenryu’s second hot tag, once he’s been busted open outside, leads to an even more hateful look than in the first half, not this promise of finally getting loose and unleashing a beating, but that someone has really really horribly fucked up now. Combined with the blood, artfully flowing down past the right eye and down the mouth, it’s one of the great images in wrestling history.

My favorite singular moment of the match comes during Tenryu’s second hot tag, in which a more focused and violent ass beating has led to him being on the doorstep of finishing Koshinaka off, only for Kimura to try and stand in his way. Tenryu refuses to sell an inch of what Kengo Kimura is dishing out, glaring at him from the center of the ring, and just watching as young Kitahara runs across and floors Kimura with a right hand.

In a match full of violent and hostile acts, a deep contempt that reveals itself more and more with every frantic swing and throw, it’s this moment that manages to feel the most hateful.

Tenryu beats Koshinaka with a second Powerbomb, and the WAR Faithful (the WARriors) completely erupt. Grown men are leaping up and down with joy in the bleachers and in the seats at Korakuen Hall. The ringside attendants and seconds join in, raising the flag and waving it around with force and gusto, as if Genichiro Tenryu has just liberated Paris.

It is beautiful, and it is everything pro wrestling and interpromotional matches, feuds, and stories ought to be.

My dream is that someone or several people will do the research, find every New Japan vs. WAR match on film, and pay me to watch and write about them.

Make my dreams come true.

***1/4

Masahito Kakihara vs Tatsuo Nakano, UWFi World Heavyweight Title Match (9/21/1992)

More Black Friday Sale commissions, this time from Parm. You too can pay me to watch and write wrestling matches or anything else over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5 per match. DMs for discussions on anything else. 

For once, Parm did this right. Don’t tell him. Here’s hoping he doesn’t ruin the positive esteem he earned after paying for this match and not something bad.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: he did, within 24 hours)

It’s a five minute sprint, meaning less work for me on the front end of this process (watching) and somewhat under a words restriction on the back end (even when trying to live up to the idea that someone paid for something, there is really only so much to say about a four minute match), and a match that also whips a lot of ass.

The ideal commission.

Nakano finds himself in a familiar setting once again, facing a young super athlete who absolutely swarms him.

Within thirty seconds, Nakano’s nose has erupted into the Mt. Vesuvius of blood. Kakihara lights up him up with the fastest slap, punch, and kick combinations you’ve ever seen and makes it worse and worse. While Nakano can grab him and take him down, the blood never stops coming. At one point, he’s given a towel after a break and instructed to clean himself off. The towel winds up looking like the Shroud of Turin after pressed to the area where his nose is supposed to be for a few seconds at most. Nothing changes, except that he’s briefly cleaned the canvas for new blood to stain his face, chest, and legs as it cascades downwards. He covers Kakihara’s body every time he’s against his body for even a second, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Nakano delivers one of the great bloodlettings of all time in this match, made so much better by it not being planned in the slightest.

Kakihara continues to whip his ass and strike at will, up until one beautiful moment that ties the whole match together.

Being a younger and more impulsive man, Kakihara cannot help himself. The victory is within sight, as it’s been since Nakano’s nose went flying off his face and into the sea. Kakihara wants a victory as emphatic as the visual he’s created and it’s only there that he finally messes up. He tries a wild spin kick and with enough distance, our man Nakano is just barely able to dodge it and catch his leg as he lands on the ground.

Nakano turns him, with a stomp that might be the most violent single strike in the entire match added in as his sole receipt, before sinking back into a half crab for the immediate submission.

One of the great little pocket bangers of all time, as not only is it one of those classic Thomas Hobbes style matches, but every frame of this is a painting as well. One for the entire family, assuming you’re raising them right.

***