Kiyoshi Tamura vs. Kazushi Sakuraba, UWFi vs. WAR (5/27/1996)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Eric T. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

Despite the name of the show, this is simply an opening match between two of the better ever in this style, as Sakuraba takes his third try at the burgeoning superstar following two three minute losses in March.

It’s very good, I am not going to lie.

Previously, I have gotten into the idea of just what an opening match means in different promotions, and for shoot-style it is a little bit different.

While a lot of wrestling in America by this point has moved on to what we might consider the modern Western view of an opener (Rey/Psicosis is like five or six weeks away from this, you guys can all fill in some blanks), Japanese wrestling openers still largely work under that old idea of teaching people the norms so that later on in the show when those are violated in one way or another, these things stand out and matter. With this particular sort of wrestling, there’s a real value in a great opening match, showing how things ought to go, the sorts of thing that are possible, how strategy matters, the way strikes can be caught and holds can be blocked or countered, all of those sorts of things.

Few pairings are better suited for that than these two.

Sakuraba and Tamura do not have the best match possible, but given what seems to be the on-paper (again, spend your money on jumping me up a few years if you exist, but I do not give up on projects) potential, it is still really really good.

While they keep it kind of surface level in terms of more basic holds, kicks, and slaps, yet again, it is the pure speed that I find just so impressive. Everything is unseasonably quick and furious, it feels like we are watching two super super equal (in terms of skillsets) fighters from the future attempting to figure each other out and catch something out of the aether and the mist, and likewise, when something breaks, it feels a little bit like either a miracle or the sort of accident that refined skill and practice often tends to make the most of.

A look at the future of the genre, as if a science fiction program leapt a decade forward in some world where PRIDE or other entities never exist to sidetrack either athlete involved with such a remarkable display, and at the end of what feels like it ought to be a hologram, Tamura catches a takedown into a flash cross armbreaker and that is that.

Not quite a great match, but a phenomenal example of a shoot-style opener, and a fascinating thing for Tamura to leave the UWFi on.

Dean Malenko vs. Rey Misterio Jr., WCW Monday Nitro (7/8/1996)

This was a commission, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Shaq. 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 thing or $10 for anything over an hour or something you only want me to see/write about because it sucks, 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 was for Malenko’s WCW Cruiserweight Title.

Immediately, there are two things to note.

First, the Disney/MGM location that WCW ran Monday Nitro from for every episode between Bash at the Beach 1996 (the night before this) and Hog Wild 1996 is one of the better stunt locations for wrestling ever. The clear sky behind them is gorgeous, the big steel WCW in the distance feels both unique and big, and the crowd is pretty hot. There’s just a certain energy to it. WCW was better than any promotion ever at finding these great locations — the Spring Break Nitro episodes from 97-01, the Mall of America, using Disney again for a run of outdoors Worldwide tapings in 1994, Center Stage obviously, the late 98 stadium tour — and this is one of the more memorable ones. It doesn’t automatically make all bad wrestling good, but in the event of great angles like the NWO invasion attacks or the all-time best Arn Anderson promo (“send one of theirs to the morgue”) or great matches, like this, it makes them that much better.

Secondly, this is one of my favorite Malenko/Misterio matches.

Common consensus seems to be with the GAB 1996 match, but I actually never loved it all that much (selling stuff, shocker, Malenko’s failure for asking ’96 Rey to sell arm work). The stuff I love tends to either be shorter — this, the 1999 TV match, the B-show matches — or, in their best match at Halloween Havoc 1996, simply the result of them feeling each other out enough to know what works and then having the time and green light to get the most out of it.

This one is real close though.

Malenko and Misterio Jr. have ten or eleven minutes and there is no waste to it.

Virtually everything that happens is vital, serving the basic element of Dean trying to catch and ground Rey but being tasked with pouring smoke through a keyhole in that regard, and save an Asai Moonsault miss — which itself is nasty enough to overcome being an error by being so memorable — it is also all so crisp. They thread the needle perfectly between constantly offering up interesting and spectacular work on a moment to moment basis, but also offering both a clear and a continuing narrative, as Malenko gets less and less able to contain Misterio every time he wrestles him. He has his moments, but when he loses him, he LOSES him, and he never loses him quite like he does in this match.

Rey moves with that beautiful sense of urgency again that is so often forgotten when talking about the virtues of young Rey Jr., and Malenko matches him in kind. It’s both a virtue, the match becoming more desperate and frantic, as well as a great little narrative device, Rey throwing Malenko off his game and ever so slightly forcing him to play another one, both to the match’s benefit.

A day after beginning a few more real important trends that would define the golden age of the company over the next two to three years, WCW again makes an important decision by — within this division at least — opting to play the hot hand.

Following Malenko giving up the easy pin after the top rope gutbuster to try and make a point in Rey’s third challenge at the title, an idea these two would play off of in their rematches over the coming months, he slips up just enough for Rey to get him. A tilt a whirl get leapt out of into the classic 1990s Rey snap rana out of thin air, and Rey gets his first title win in a division that he would go on to define.

Truly beautiful television wrestling.

***1/4

 

Combat Toyoda vs. Megumi Kudo, FMW Fighting Creation ‘96 Day Eleven (5/5/1996)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor SSJW Gogeta. 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 thing or $10 for anything over an hour, 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 was a barbed wire current blast death match for Toyoda’s FMW Independent & WWA Womens Title, and also Toyoda’s retirement match.

As I write this in late January of 2024, it is not some great secret, having mentioned it in passing a few times on this site and more elsewhere or whenever asked about such a thing, but while I’ve seen some, for the most part, FMW (and while the company is more than just this, really 90s deathmatch wrestling in general) is one of my great blind spots along with Portland and AWA, when it comes to specific things. The sort of thing that, like I did/am slowly doing with older lucha, I hoped to one day make a project out of, and may yet one day, even if that just means that 100 Best FMW Matches compilation.

So, again, this is a great use of a commission, something I either haven’t seen yet and/or have been putting off for a while, and in this case, a little of both.

It’s really really great.

Before anything else, the thing that I don’t need so many hours logged to appreciate on some level or proper context to enjoy is that on a nuts and bolts level, on a mechanical level, simply looking at the what and how of this match, it is a phenomenal match.

The thing they’re supposed to do, the tease of the gimmick before it gets used, they do very well. It isn’t exactly unique to this match alone, the teases of the wire before hitting it, that bit itself home to a fascinating phenomenon where people who “don’t like deathmatches” always praise that either here or in other prestige adjacent deathmatches despite that basically every great NRBW match does well, along with the way the escalate its use, but in more micro detail, this does it better than most. After minutes of avoiding more conscious efforts to go into it, Kudo is sent in first less by design and more through a sudden shift away by Combat, and the other major wire/explosion spots follow that pattern. The result is that you get a real sense of how hard it is to send someone in, making not only the moments where it works more impressive, but also making them feel so much bigger.

Outside the major stuff, and more in terms of actual wrestling moves, they have the same great sense for proper escalation. Real sick stuff, with the offense gradually getting bigger and nastier, phenomenal spacing and selling of each thing, and hitting that point I love in these huge spectacles, particularly NRBW matches where nobody can hang onto any advantage because each major moment takes so much out of both of them. The result of all of that is that every time both make it to their feet, it feels like a restart in the best way, having something akin to a boxing kind of rhythm by the end.

Without knowing anything, air dropped in, it is already a great match.

Part of me worries a little — given, spoiler, this match’s place on a lot of lists as an all-timer and at least according to compilation listing, as the best FMW match ever — that it’s sort of a bad place to first dive in. Context, history, a million other things. It’s not that, just dropping in here for the ending, that this is lacking in any real way, in terms of being able to pretty immediately grab onto what’s going on. Really, it’s more that with a little more knowledge — seen more so than heard or read about — of their matches together, how things went, and all of that outside a few here and there or interpromotional tags, there’s a chance that, the next time I watch it, it might become even better. Another part, the louder one, says that “huge deathmatch with longtime enemies in one’ retirement match” is probably more than enough (and also to stop being a baby and just feel it).

Both are probably correct, although the latter so much more so than the former.

Watching this, even with basic knowledge, it still whips so much ass, and is very very easy to latch onto.

There is an obvious big and small element to this, Toyoda also with the look of a classical joshi villain and Kudo being one of the great babyfaces and all of that, but there is clearly more. Between simply how the match is assembled, with more back and forth and less obvious control even in the sort of match that is not always about classic formula, and also the obvious situation and how Toyoda carries herself, along with the post-match outpouring of emotion, it’s a much more even match in a way that adds a lot to it. For as easy as the visually obvious approach is, “old villain does her best against her most storied rival in a dangerous match” has far far more to offer.

It’s seen all over the match, but best illustrated in the final third or so. Unable to match the speed and not recovering quite as fast as Megumi Kudo, Toyoda takes a gigantic swing when she catches Kudo by the wire, and in a split second call, drops back into the exploding wire with a German Suplex to take Megumi Kudo down with her.

Beautiful thing that it is, as the go down, you’ll notice Combat Toyoda hitting first.

She doesn’t take ALL the punishment, of course — Megumi Kudo is still suplexed back into barb wire and some of the explosion — but it’s enough to essentially nullify it, if not leave her outright worse off than a moment earlier. She never really has a chance again, super admirably taking a gigantic swing and not quite making it, before a MOTHERFUCKER of a powerbomb followed by the Kudo Valentine for the win.

It is exactly how someone like (or at least, in limited viewing, someone who feels like) Combat Toyoda ought to go out. Respectable and tough and in one of the coolest matches ever, eating shit in a way that is both more than a little petty, admirable as hell, and that also sees her the victim of her own plan.

The match itself is maybe not the most perfect there ever was, but gets so much right that it never matters. Not quite a pure morality play so much as an emotional epic, but not one without something to say either. Home to two incredible performances, a study in construction for a match like this, great on levels large and small, with both minor and major moments that are pretty hard to forget. Given what it is, it does every single thing you could want out of it and more.

A genuine spectacle, and one of the great chunks of pure Pro Wrestling that there is.

***3/4

 

Yuki Ishikawa/Shoichi Funaki vs. Katsumi Usuda/Daisuke Ikeda, BattlARTS Grand Opening (1/13/1996)

Commissions continue, this time from frequent contributor, Kai. You too can be like them and pay me to write about anything you’d like. Most people tend to pay for reviews of wrestling matches, but I am happy to talk about real fights, movie fight scenes, movies in general, make a list, or whatever. You can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that, just make sure I haven’t already written about it first. The going rate is $5/match, or with regards to other media, $5 for every started thirty minute chunk. If you have a more elaborate thing in mind, hit the DMs, and we can talk about that too. 

BattlARTS ends its debut show with a certified face melter, opening the way it would spend the majority of its lifespan, by hurling Yuki Ishikawa and Daisuke Ikeda at each other, and letting the world enjoy one of the meanest, coolest, and all around best match ups in the history of wrestling. Much as it would for the next fifteen years, and beyond the promotion that spawned it, it absolutely fucking rocks.

Of course, it is not quite BattlARTS. Or rather, it is not quite what BattlARTS would eventually turn into.

The most obvious thing that stands out here is Shoichi Funaki.

While he has the background and experience that might fit with BattlARTS, the truth is that he has spent his time in Michinoku Pro, and does not really wrestle in this style. He feels at a loss sometimes with the more advanced techniques that his opponents are utilizing, and when he has to go on offense, the match shifts suddenly and strangely to accommodate what he does. The things he does and the ways he gets his offense in — running off the ropes, diving off the top rope, diving to the outside — are very un-BattlARTS. More importantly, they do not mix especially well with every other part of the match, which is very much a display of every wonderful thing this company will become.

On that note, holy shit man.

Ishikawa, Usuda, and Ikeda arrive with their sections of this match (along with Ikeda and Usuda’s work in control of Funaki) feeling like BattlARTS has already been fully formed for years. It is all here. Not just the tone and style and specific rhythms you expect from all shoot-style after a decade plus of the style existing, but specifically things that BattlARTS specialized in. Punctuating moments with incredibly insulting feeling punches, slaps, or punts to a downed opponent after a rope break or a down, but also the very specific struggles and little touches on the mat that BattlARTS did better than maybe any other promotion. Ishikawa, the key to that statement probably, specifically excels in that aspect of the match, constantly adding in small little touches when struggling to maintain or to escape holds. My personal favorite came when Ikeda was trying to pry his arms out of a hold, but Ishikawa balled his fist up and dug it into the mat to try and fight with one arm against the force of Ikeda’s hands locked together. It’s maybe five seconds of the match, but stands out both because it is so minute and irrelevant and yet received the same effort as anything else, but also because as an individual concept, it was just so unique and interesting.

To me, that is BattlARTS.

You will get all your violence here as well. Ikeda and Usuda have all of the hard kicks to the legs, body, and head that you can handle. Ishikawa has the reliable punches to the face as well, even encouraging Ikeda to get in on some of that action in the second half. This is not quite on the level of some later efforts, I think there is some kind of showcase element to this or simply not quit having that experience or idea of all this can be that every Ikeda/Ishikawa singles match to follow would have, but the core elements of violence and pettiness that make every future match work are already there.

They also find themselves a real nice feeling grand closing to this grand opening.

Following Funaki’s dive outside to Ikeda, Usuda goes after Ishikawa with the same leg kicks he had succeeded with all match, only for the payoff to finally come. As will be a repeated theme throughout the history of this promotion, a perfect formula that both always makes sense and that feels incredible, Yuki Ishikawa simply figures out a way. Usuda feels himself just a little too much at the exact wrong time, and tries to add in a spinning wheel kick to put an exclamation point on it, only for Ishikawa to catch him perfectly into a heel hook for the win.

It might work elsewhere, but this is BattlARTS, and that shit will not fly in this house.

As good of an opening ideological statement as there’s ever been, not producing exactly one of the most memorable or greatest matches in company history, but providing as great and nearly as clear of a baseline as you could ask for.

***+

Triple H vs. Marc Mero, WWF In Your House: Beware of Dog (5/26/1996)

Commissions continue, this time from Shock. You too can be like them and pay me to write about anything you’d like. Most people tend to pay for reviews of wrestling matches, but I am happy to talk about real fights, movie fight scenes, movies in general, make a list, or whatever. You can head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon to do that, just make sure I haven’t already written about it first. The going rate is $5/match, or with regards to other media, $5 for every started thirty minute chunk. If you have a more elaborate thing in mind, hit the DMs, and we can talk about that too. 

I try my best not to be dismissive or whatever with these, so long as someone is not obviously torturing me (this is not a good match, but it is a little obscure and too mediocre to be torture). You pay the money, you get some words. A lot of times, a match will be highly acclaimed and I don’t like it as much as everyone else, or flat out just do not like it, but I understand the impulse.

This one I don’t get. People have love for random midcard or undercard PPV matches from their childhood (mine is Val Venis vs. D’Lo Brown from SummerSlam 1998), so I am not going to be mean, but there was absolutely nothing here for me.

Marc Mero vs. Hunter Hearst Helmsley was very much a wrestling match.

I can tell you with one hundred percent confidence that this lasted for sixteen minutes and twenty three seconds, that both wrestlers did some moves to each other, and that it had a beginning and a middle and an ending. Hunter tried to do some real boy technical wrestler arm work, which was mostly real clunky, and that Mero was at no point all that great at selling. I am positive that I watched it. As for the rest, who could possibly say?

The nicest thing to say about this match is that at least it attempted to imitate what a  good wrestling match might look like, and had better wrestlers been involved in this match, this may have been more than a total mediocrity, as seen from ten million other matches to do a match like this in a far more interesting, soulful, and well executed manner. Want doesn’t get and hypotheticals do not matter, but you know, hearts in the right places or something.

Anyways, en lieu of anything interesting to say about a match that did not offer anything interesting to think about, I always think there’s some charm in a review of a match matching how it made me feel, or the emotions it stirred in me.

So on that note,

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Marc Mero won.

As more time passes and I find more words, my memory of this match grows fainter and fainter. By the time you read this, I may as well have never seen it. You are more than welcome to pay me to watch and, theoretically, to also write about any number of deathly boring 1990s WWF midcard pay-per-view matches you like, but I am positive there are at least fifty more interesting ones than this.

Dick Murdoch vs. Yoshiaki Fujiwara, PWFG Fujiwara Gumi 5th Anniversary Fan Appreciation Event (5/23/1996)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor AndoCommando. 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. 

First things first, it is just a very cool match to see.

Not in the sense that it’s Murdoch going down on the ground or in a Fujiwara style match, because despite the rep, that’s never all that there’s been to Dickie, if you go back and look at some longer Mid-South work or the Inoki matches. Moreso in that, to me, Dick Murdoch is this total avatar for The Way Things Used To Be, a wrestler very much synonymous with old territories and old ways of wrestling, simple and direct, this personification of doing a lot with a little. It is very strange to see him in 1996, and it is just as gratifying to see him in a match that rocks this much.

For those familiar with Yoshiaki Fujiwara, this is yet another Fujiwara match with some very unique rhythms to it, a lot of peaks and valleys throughout the first two-thirds of the match, and Dick Murdoch fits in so well to that. Fujiwara has a wonderful other half in Dick Murdoch here, another older wrestler who always makes fascinating choices and gets so much out of small motions, similar to Fujiwara in all the ways that matter and different in all the ways that make a match better too.

The highest complement I can pay this match is that every single thing that happens in it is interesting.

Virtually every bit that Murdoch and Fujiwara get up to is a real joy. Some of those are actual bits, like some tremendous comedy with each man holding the ropes for the other, and notorious scoundrels that they are, neither man trusts the other and they constantly tease cheap shots that don’t come, embarrassing the other. Other times, and more frequently than the comedy, are the great little wrestling bits. Nasty cranks on holds, small counters that have a way of seeming desperate and violent through the force of selling and execution, great punches, tremendous little sells and looks thrown out there, it is all supremely interesting and at every possible moment, incredibly watchable.

Fujiwara opens Murdoch up for his namesake hold with a headbutt to win, but details like that almost don’t matter at all. This was an expert riff session between two old masters, with the only thing decided seeming to be that finish.

The joy of a match like this is everything before and around that one detail.

Dick Murdoch would, at least according to cagematch, have one more match in his life after this (vs. Rod Price on a spot show in Amarillo on June 6th, which probably also rocked, to be fair). He would be dead within a month of this match, on June 15th, 1996.  Murdoch hadn’t done too much of great note for a few years before this (there is a WWC run that is probably fun, some SMW shots, but otherwise not a lot since the super great and brief 1991 Hardliners run in WCW), and so it is a really beautiful thing that he got to have a match like this just before the end. A match this wonderful and this weird feels not only like the kind of near-final match everyone would want an all-time great like Dickie to have, but in fact, like the kind of match that stands as a summary of everything that he was and stood for as a professional wrestler. 

A professional last will and testament over the course of twenty five minutes from old Dickie. As such, it’s no great world beater, but an ultra charming little thing that I’m real happy exists in the world.

***

Bret Hart vs Steve Austin, WWF Survivor Series (11/17/1996)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Kai. 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. 

Despite this not being their most famous match, it is a real famous series, featuring a few different kinds of matches. More often than not, you’ll find me opting for the bloodbath, as they had in their more famous submission match at WrestleMania 13 four months later, but in a rarity, this is the Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin match that I have always preferred.

The thing is that, while the WrestleMania match may be slightly better, this is simply the sort of a match and a story that I’ve always preferred. Rather than a nasty fight once things have already broken down, this match is the story of things breaking down. I’ve almost always preferred the matches that show that transformation, things breaking down, entropy through simulated violence, and things like that. I’ve also always preferred this match because it’s one of a few rare statement matches from the Hitman. Bret Hart has a few matches in the last few years of his career that feel like his kind of a statement on what wrestling can and should be, and alongside the Owen Hart tribute match, I think this is one of them. They’re these unbelievably confident slower paced old style kind of 70s sorts of matches, but done with a lot of modern (for the time) moves and even greater cohesion, and they’ve always appealed to me ideologically as much as they do spiritually. Therefore, as a match that is both of these things that I love a whole lot, this is not only my favorite match between Bret Hart and Steve Austin, but one of my favorites of the decade period.

Everybody knows the story, and if you don’t, the brief backstage promos before the match do as perfect of a job summing it up in thirty seconds or less a piece as I’ve ever seen in wrestling history.

From Stone Cold’s “a cliche is a cliche, and an ass whooping is an ass whooping” to Bret’s iconic “I’m not greedy for money, I’m greedy for respect” (Bret’s is maybe the best promo of his career, also including the line about MSG being holy ground and about using the match to find out where he stood), both lay out the stakes of the match for both men real clearly. Bret Hart, still arguably the Ace of the company returning after a long time off after a real real iffy title loss in March, trying to challenge who he thought was the best wrestler in the WWF in his absence to see where he still stood, only for that gesture to be totally scorned in the process by someone who had already publicly called him out, and met by someone who just wanted to kick his ass and notch his gun.

Each man, wildly and totally different from each other, wants effectively the same thing out of this match, a statement win of real value at a point in their careers in which both men need it, only they want to achieve it in very different ways and, being at near opposite points in their career, for very different reasons.

This is pro wrestling and it is perfect.

From the opening, there is something real beautiful and special and different about the match.

It is a fight, a real contest and competition, in a way no WWF match has felt like in at least a few years. There’s a real grit to this, a layer of filth and dirt over the entire thing that I’m not even sure the WrestleMania match has. It’s a Bret Hart match, it is mostly very dignified, but they gradually get more desperate and nastier, and the match breaks down in all of these fantastic mechanical ways. Everything is so hard fought, and there are these pauses in between the major moves in the back half that feel very un-WWF/WWE like. Bret and Austin add a certain weight to everything that makes smaller things feel really important, and that has the effect of making the real big moments feel monumental. At all times, especially in the last third or so of the thing, there is always this kind of mad scramble to get into something that could be the end of the match. The result is a match that, in the best possible way, does not feel like a WWF match at all.

This match is great not just in terms of how they do everything right and the tone they strike, but also in terms of how every little piece of this thing matters. Even opening lock up exchanges wind up not only having a point to them, but displaying the contrast between the two. When Austin tries to humiliate Bret after backing him into the corner, he talks his shit. When Bret does the same, it’s him baiting Austin into a wild swing, only to easily duck and making Austin look foolish. Aggression and violence and raw naked ambition set up against science and experience, spelled out completely within one minute. 

Even outside of the raw efficiency of the thing, the match is full of these great little touches, some of them I didn’t even get until this watch, like both men repeatedly using the same holds as each other early on. Knowing these two, it’s hard to see it as anything but deliberate, and again, it always feels like there’s a point to it. Either Austin using the same holds as Bret after they work on him, trying to prove a point in a more frantic and desperate kind of a way, or Bret reversing something of Austin’s into his own, and making the same point in return. It’s a “you’re not special, old man” from Stone Cold, compared to a “no, this is how you do it, you little shit” from Hart, the contrast between the two making it so much more interesting than usual with this kind of common ground. Even late in the match, Austin makes a point of stealing Bret’s top rope superplex. This idea reaches its zenith late in the match, when Bret Hart finally strikes back at Stone Cold on his terms, and uses the Stun Gun to begin his comeback. It’s the perfect kind of a Bret Hart receipt too, not loud and not obnoxious, but deliberate and impactful, coming at the perfect moment to work both as this big insult, and having maximum function within the match as well.

For the most part though, this is, as previously stated near the start of this piece, a story about transformation and progression and regression and adaptation, and all these other versions of change.

The easiest display of this is in the way that the interactions between the two change. While there is never respect going in both directions, the match does begin in a stately and dignified sort of a way, only to gradually disappear into frenetic brawling and these very personal feeling punch exchanges. It is a match in which that kind of dignity begins to disappear, that takes a professional issue and that very slowly makes it more than that, if not one hundred percent deeply personal just yet.

Austin cannot do what he wants to do to Bret on the ground, and is forced to get away from him and brawl. The way he does that — repeatedly sending Bret off the ropes for distance, using his speed advantage as well — speaks again to the more thoughtful and deliberate nature of this match, but it also speaks to a larger theme of the thing, if not more than one of them. In addition to it being this clear sign of Austin shaking off being in a Bret Hart match and trying to make this a Steve Austin match, there’s a little more to it as well. Stone Cold has to go back to what he was before the WWF, breaking the Stun Gun out, and then finally taking control. His work on the neck is, again, very deliberate, and most impressively of all, always very cruel in a way that differentiates him from Hart. This is a match that also ran the risk of being a little samey as a result of all of their similarities, but because of the small ways in which they handle things and carry themselves — Austin always with this chip on his shoulder, playing everything with as mean of a spirit as he can muster up, while Bret is always sympathetic and fighting and breathing heavy while moving forward — it never reaches that level.

Likewise, Bret Hart can never return the match to what it was, and is forced to brawl with Steve. He doesn’t do all that well at it, and while the match has these great triumphant moments where he tackles Austin through a guardrail or wins a punch exchange or two, he never really succeeds at it in the way Austin does. He can never get the match back to the way he really wants it to be, getting shut down about midway through when he tries to break out his classical comeback sequence, and taken outside.

As much as anything, these parts of the match also express a larger idea not just about the match, but about Bret Hart and the WWF and wrestling as a whole now. Bret took eight months off, but March 1996 to November 1996 contains at least one of those weeks in which decades happen, and he is coming back to an entirely new thing, and struggling to adjust. There are these really great moments sprinkled in throughout to show this, Bret spending a little too long outside when he is able to get a shot in on Austin and being hurled onto the announce table, which never happened to him before. There’s also this one great little bit near the end, which is maybe my favorite part of the entire match. After Austin’s work has moved more to the back, and a little to the legs after a Texas Cloverleaf, Bret collapses when whipped into the corner, only to collapse and slide under the bottom turnbuckle, back first into the ringpost. It’s a spot that many have used in the quarter century plus since, but that (with exceptions for when the other man purposely slides them that way) rarely feels as realistic and genuine and heartbreaking as it does here. It’s maybe the ultimate shorthand for Bret’s struggle in the last three quarters of this match, something just going unfortunately wrong as his body begins to give him problems, resulting in even just accidentally taking the sort of beating he had never quite taken before.

The beauty of the match though is that late in the match, Bret Hart adapts better than Stone Cold ever could.

Abandoning trying to out-brawl Austin, Bret instead makes small adjustments where he can that mean so much. There’s a small show of it in the middle of the match when Bret does his elbow drop off the top rope instead of the middle, but especially once he makes his comeback, it feels like a Bret Hart who understands and adjusts for Steve Austin so much more, rather than Stone Cold trying to force Bret into his match. It’s not only the Stun Gun that was previously mentioned, it’s Bret breaking out a rare Piledriver, and kind of slowly shifting Austin back into his kind of a match. If not on the ground, then slowly removing Austin’s advantages, matching his level of physicality in ways Bret can control.

When the Stunner fails and Austin goes for the old Million Dollar Dream, Bret kicks back off the buckles to roll on top, and just barely does it.

Austin’s scouted everything about Bret, but wasn’t expecting the thing he did one time nearly half a decade previously. It’s a beautiful finish, Austin panicking and regressing, only for Bret to have one last trick left. It’s also a finish that speaks perfectly to who both are as characters. Bret willing to adjust and taking the win where it is, but Austin being too aggressive and insistent, not letting go in time, and losing for it. In the end, the statement of the thing, the how, matters a whole lot less than the ultimate result. Bret Hart may now be a stranger in this WWF after eight months of letting monsters, perverts, and lunatics run the place, but on holy ground, the old Ace finds a way to force the man-in-waiting into his kind of a match again just long enough for it to matter.

Bret Hart proves what he needed to, and despite the loss, so does Stone Cold. It’s a beautiful match and an even better story, working in every possible way. As one match, a perfect story about youth and experience, ambition and patience, brawling and technique, all of that. As part one of a larger story, it’s even better, a near perfect foundation and jumping off point that allows both men to be correct, nothing to truly be settled, and a smaller or at least more purely professional issue to break out into what feels like the biggest thing in the world.

In the end, nobody got what they wanted. Steve Austin never notched his gun in a way he would be happy with. Bret Hart proved he still had it, but began to see the shift in wrestling as a whole that would eventually drive him insane. On top of that, he failed to get the only thing that, at the outset before even coming to the ring, he said he was greedy for in the first place.

The seeds of frustration, if that is even the God damned word for it.

Something close to an ideal version of this thing, and I don’t mean Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin specifically, so much as I mean professional wrestling as a whole.

****1/4

Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind, WWF IYH: War Games (9/22/1996)

Back to that Black Friday Sale commission work. This one comes from Darren. You too can buy a review of any match you’d like over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon at $5 per match. If you’d like more (or less? I can review parts of a match if you are short on cash?), we can negotiate in the DMs. 

This was for Michaels’ WWF Title.

To get it out of the way, yeah, there’s a bullshit finish. I don’t especially care. I think this is a great enough match to where the lack of a real finish simply means this can’t be even greater than it already is. Given that we get twenty five plus minutes of what this looks like before than and given that it comes right about at what would logically be the end of the match, it doesn’t feel like I was robbed in any way. To me, nothing fundamentally changes about the way I view this match because it ended with a disqualification instead of a pinfall. It’s the right fight to have a lot of times, especially with regards to matches in this company, but it doesn’t feel like much of a real issue here.

As for the match, it’s one of the all time conundrums.

Here, we have a match in which work on the hand plays a major role in how the match unfolds later on, hitting on not only a WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG? level but also hitting on one of those other little tropes I love a lot, a match suddenly changing at an unexpected moment as a consequence of something that happened.

On the other hand, it’s a Shawn Michaels match.

However, this is one of the best Shawn Michaels matches ever.

It’s not exactly a secret that I don’t like Shawn Michaels.

Much of that specifically has to do with his second run, which I find overrated to the point of feeling gaslit sometimes. It’s not to say he’s never had good matches, but it’s a career of stuff that I rarely loved, while seeing these stunning reactions. That and everything he did personally, including the obviously fake back injury and cloaking himself in a cross upon return. While the first run evoked the same hyperbolic praise that one is accustomed to with most periods of Shawn’s career, the two years or so prior to his back “injury” in 1998 saw the best versions of Shawn that could have ever existed, and are the only two years of his career that I have very little issue with. The 1997-98 bad guy run in particular is the best work of Shawn’s career, as it felt like the only Shawn run ever when he was actually being true to himself (that is, a appallingly loud and obnoxious piece of shit), but 1996 saw most of the best babyface work of Shawn’s career as well, despite unbelievably offputting things like ending pay-per-views by stripping and having Vince McMahon on commentary with off-the-charts levels of lust in his eyes and voice for everything Shawn did.

In a near career year, this is the best of all of those matches, and the best match Shawn Michaels ever had as a theoretical good guy.

The trick, shockingly, is that this doesn’t look much like a Shawn Michaels match at all.

For once when tasked with someone different or who doesn’t fit perfectly into some Shawn Michaels bullshit epic, Shawn’s response isn’t to try and shove them into his match anyways regardless of what the opponent does well. Mick Foley isn’t going to fit into a normal Shawn Michaels match, and so this is something different. For once (outside of working with friends, in which case he’ll move heaven and Earth to accommodate them and shine them up), it’s Shawn Michaels crafting a match around what someone else can do and the gifts that they have. So here we have a more grounded, more of a sprawling sort of a match, and definitely one with more thought put into it than usual.

After a hot start, Shawn begins using Mankind’s manic nature against him and wrestling a smarter match than usual. He suplexes Mankind on the floor once and his leg hits the steps. Much later in the match, he barely avoids the Mandible Claw two or three times, and then attacks the right hand. Beyond the desperation present in these attacks that makes this match feel different and like a real challenge that puzzles Michaels, it’s also something that succeeds because of the way it’s done. Shawn Michaels is not so smart that he necessarily plans to trip Mankind up, outmaneuver him, and take a leg away and then go to the hand to disable the Mandible Claw, but smart enough that when things happen, he takes advantage of them. It’s a great choice, because while the former wouldn’t feel quite right and is much more of a Bret Hart style attack, Shawn Michaels succeeding because he’s a lucky opportunist is exactly on the nose enough to play as genuine.

What also plays as especially smart is that while Shawn is capable of exploiting situations in front of him, he’s not an actual technician and has no follow through. Mankind is hurt, but the whole deal is that he has a higher pain threshold than anyone else in wrestling. When he can do things like get Shawn off the leg, Shawn never goes back to it. He’s so rattled by Mankind doing things like using a ringside casket as a weapon or being willing to do things out in the aisle that he never goes back to the leg. The same thing comes with the hand, as Mankind does every other move he can think of and even, stunningly, a try at a fancy cradle. It’s both an incredibly neat way to tell the story but also a perfect explanation for why a scatter-brained mostly-flash wrestler like Shawn Michaels would go back to the work he knows.

As one may be able to tell, this all succeeds to the level it does because of Mankind.

He’s incredible here, a virtuoso performance in terms of this sort of a thing. When the matches takes different directions, such as focusing on his knee or later on his hand, he spends the rest of the match still focused on these things and never allowing them to fade out of mind. They’re pieces here that could easily become elements that feel like a waste of time in the hands of someone far lesser, but Foley is always hobbled because of the knee from that moment on. With regards to the hand, he doesn’t go out of his way or make a show like with the constant hobbling, but he holds his hand in a certain way that feels real and natural as someone who’s hurt a hand and still had to work with it. A clear effort to keep it as still and tight to the body as possible, whenever possible. More than that, the choices he makes on offense to sell the Mandible Claw being taken away are the exact sorts of interesting approaches that I wish more people would take. It’s more than just communicating that this is physically disabling, it’s the thought about how this changes the match.

It’s not just one great approach to selling that Mankind takes in this match, it’s two of them, and he does them both perfectly.

That isn’t to say that Shawn is worthless here or that this is some kind of masterful one man performance from Foley in which he weaves something beautiful around Shawn Michaels which renders Shawn as little more than a piece of the set. That’s not fair. Shawn’s good here. He’s not asked to do too much more than his usual pieces of offense and simple work in terms of the new directions the match takes, but he turns in one of his better performances anyways. He’s able to nail all the character beats well and the moments where they’re not on the same page and just trade these great punches and scuffle about are the rare time when Shawn being a real shithead actually benefits the match.

For once, everything works.

It’s another example of what happens when the machine runs like it’s supposed to. An interesting match and an interesting story, not only with people who have the abilities needed to pull it off, but shape the story to those abilities. Mankind turns in perhaps his best antagonistic performance ever, and I’ve never seen a Shawn Michaels match with him cast as the hero in which he delivered a performance as good as the one here. It’s a match clearly designed to establish toughness in him as he’s able to use Mankind’s game against him in the end with the table spot and superkicking a chair into Mick’s face right before the non-finish, but honestly, it works. At least in this moment, it does. He’s not Bret Hart, he’s not John Cena, he’s no Punk or Bryan, but for once, he captures that sort of a classic champion feeling. Catering the match to an opponent, coming off as an actual blue collar wrestling champion instead of the fortunate Golden Boy he often comes across as, and wrestling a match with thought to it. For once, he feels like the sort of babyface I could actually like. It’s the highest compliment I could ever give him.

Fittingly, the one time Shawn Michaels conducts himself like a top babyface worth cheering for, it results in one of the best matches of his life.

****1/4

Hulk Hogan vs. Arn Anderson, WCW Monday Nitro (2/12/1996)

It’s another Black Friday Sale commission from Big E. Vil. He gets two in a row because he bought six reviews in the sale for $20. You too can pay me for reviews over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. However the sale is over now, and we’re back to $5 a match. If you want a full show or if you want me to watch and write about like season one of Grounded For Life or something, DM me and we can negotiate that too. 

There’s not really a lot to this.

I’m not totally sure why this match was selected. It’s not a great match outside of the very end. I think perhaps it’s just a match that Biggie wanted some of my less well read or newer-to-wrestling viewers to know about, because it is a very fun little curiosity. One of the great “hey, remember [x]” bits.

It’s a formula Hulk Hogan match, with Double A plugged in as the heel of the episode. That’s not to say it’s totally devoid of value or anything, because Arn rarely has matches that I would call worthless. The bulk of the quality emanates from Arn and even if this isn’t a proper Arn Anderson Match (and even if the last great Arn match happened in 1995), it’s not a match that’s hard to watch at all. They go through the motions, Woman cheats, Arn goes to Hogan’s bandaged eye every now and then, and Hogan makes his comeback. It is what it is. Hogan fare on a TV, whatever. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

EXCEPT

Except that this time, a hand intervenes from up high. Ric Flair and Miss Elizabeth come to get involved and after powder to the eyes from Woman and a shot to the bad eye with Miss Elizabeth’s high heel shoe, Arn Anderson pins Hulk Hogan.

Hogan gets his revenge, both immediately and for weeks to come. Even if Arn never gives the win back (the rematch is a DQ), it’s not as if this makes Arn or gives him some big career moment. It is, however, a very cool thing that got to happen in front of the world. Since Hogan came to WCW in 1994, there hasn’t been a lot of hope, at least not in terms of stories or outcomes. A great deal of effort in 1994 and 1995 seemed to go into purposely trying to drive out old WCW fans. The sole real beam of light in that time was the Ric Flair vs. Arn Anderson feud in 1995 and the recent Flair/Savage feud (that semi-secretly was actually a big draw), but otherwise, it’s a lot of bad Hogan stuff and bad stuff involving Hogan’s people. This doesn’t change any of that, but it is the exact sort of small token that feels incredibly good and that hurts nobody.

A small meaningless thing that makes a lot of people very happy for the first time in some time.

It doesn’t matter what comes after this, be it immediately or on the next pay-per-view.

Arn Anderson beat Hulk Hogan.

God exists, and sometimes we get reminders like this that He loves us.

Doug Furnas vs Rob Van Dam, ECW Natural Born Killaz (8/24/1996)

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Somehow, this novice and worst poster of all time candidate chose one of my favorite little ECW matches ever.

One of my favorite ECW matches ever and one of the best ECW matches ever is the Van Dam vs. Bam Bam Bigelow match from April 1998 in which Van Dam begins his famous World Television Title reign. It’s a match that works for the same reasons that this does, and that much of the best Van Dam matches work. RVD trading spots with a Sabu or Lynn is fun once or twice, but loses its charm the more it happens. The same with any match that’s entirely just about offense. Give Van Dam something to fight though, and the acrobatics turn into something done out of desperation when he’s not big or strong enough to fight against something normally. It’s the sort of change that transforms the entire routine and makes for the best work of his career.

Furnas isn’t as big in either direction as Bigelow. Few were.

He is, however, a complete god damned maniac and a perfect fit for ECW here at the peak of what it was.

A physical freak capable of all types of violence. Hurling Van Dam on his head on a chair on the mat feels as correct as a walk and brawl through the crowd, with enough unprotected chair shots to the top or back of the head to always keep it interesting. He spends the match teetering between stuff I love and stuff I hate, but it’s both short enough and feels pure enough that I can’t ever totally commit to the latter. There’s an earnest stupidity to this compared to later RVD matches that I just really appreciate, a brawling stunt show but without a lot of artifice to it beyond that.

Furnas brains Van Dam with a chair a few times in revenge, after all of Van Dam’s goofy and showier acrobatics have either fallen short or wound up getting RVD even more severely beaten. Furnas can’t help but stand and celebrate with the chair in a way that, again, feels completely natural. Van Dam’s flash Van Daminator at the end for a sudden victory feels both less obviously set up than usual and also like the only possible way that Van Dam could ever beat a guy like Furnas after a performance like this.

Not one I’d put in a top ten or maybe even a top twenty five, but just a ton of big stupid fun. Real dudes rock style pro wrestling in a different sense than just pure slugging and meatheaded wrestling, as they mix in a few acrobatic moments from Van Dam and five to ten of the grossest possible chair shots into the usual Furnas formula. It’s a wonderfully rewatchable sort of a thing that holds up nearly as well now as it did some eight years ago when I saw it for the first time, and as it did five or six years ago when I watched it again on a whim.

A true god damned hoot.

***1/4