Survival Tobita vs. Bauxite Medium, SPWC Flag Raising Battle Round Six (4/26/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Hootsoot. 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.

When I was a kid, even while really only understanding like half of the contents of them at best, I fell in love with kaiju movies.

Somewhere around that six or seven or eight range, I remember my dad taking me to Blockbuster (yes, I am old and ought to be forcibly put down) and renting GODZILLA (orignal, not GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS), KING KONG, and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (my formative experience thinking that the protagonist in the story was actually a loser bitch) before watching them all in a twenty four hour span. In addition to establishing my ability to watch at least three movies in one sitting, somewhere also, although not often coming back to it again for another twenty plus years, somewhere in me, something was set up to want to see colossal figures fight over gigantic stakes and occasionally destroy each other in the process.

This is perhaps why it was so easy to slide into professional wrestling, in which, at its best, features larger than life figures fighting over gigantic stakes.

Is this what I mean by at its best? Yes and no.

No, because wrestling can have so much more to offer. Mechanics and the beauty of smaller narratives and long term character arcs. One can look at a working class hero fighting his own hero, failing, and then succeeding, and they can also look at a near ten year odyssey of a troubled young man having to learn that the fix to so many problem has to come from within, and so many other variation on any of the many many many concepts that professional wrestling can play with.

On the other hand, yes, it is, and I know that because I have seen Survival Tobita.

Which brings me to this.

Survival Tobita, in addition to being (1) very die hard, & (2) just a Japanese rock and roller, is also the greatest human defender of the Earth (second place: Don Frye in GODZILLA: FINAL WARS) that we have seen in our lifetimes. He knocks out all enemies and attacks all monsters, and in this, his home promotion, Saitama Pro Wrestling Company, all monsters are welcome to give Survival Tobita their best shot, and this includes metal monster and anti-littering warrior Bauxite Medium.

This match is a fucking experience.

On one hand, one could note that it is all a bit, Bauxite doing character work for half of the fight before being brought to life by Tobita chugging a drink in an aluminium can before hurling in front of him.

On the other, enjoy something for once in your life, you freaks.

Survival Tobita, Earth’s greatest defender, gets beaten to shit by the steel soy sauce container hands of a horrible unfeeling alien, and like many of the other greats to survive such hostile elements, like Ellen Ripley before him, finds a way.

Through tearing off the ring mats and running at the monster with them, Survival Tobita not only knocks the vile and dangerous canisters loose from Bauxite Medium, but he is finally able to not only to stop him but to knock him back and eventually to knock him down. Tobita buries him eventually underneath all of these boards for long enough to count, and though I am wary to assign such lofty motives to people like professional wrestlers, it is a lot too hard to look away from the message clearly offered up to the world by a match like this.

Confronted with a horrifying and seemingly unkillable robot monster, luddite ass Survival Tobita eschews technology and manages to defeat him through pure human grit and ingenuity.

Secretly up there with Tanahashi/Suzuki and Cena/Lesnar among the all time great Inokiist texts, as one simple man, armed with nothing more than his own wits and his own human strength does all that he can in the face of a threat much larger than him, before digging deep and finding the strength and genius within himself to rise up in the face of a monumental challenge.

The first great kaiju film of the century.

star ratings are bullshit and this is perfect.

Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Super Crazy, ECW on TNN (1/21/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Hootsoot (riot). 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.

This was a Mexican Death Match.

Not that I wasn’t delighted to receive this commission, but I’ve always been a little bit afraid to watch this match again with a critical eye.

When I first watched, I did so without any real preparation for how much I might love it.

I came to ECW at, I think, the perfect time in a man’s life to watch ECW. Having seen some things on those 2000-1 DVD releases but mostly unfamiliar otherwise, I began it all on a challenge from a few people I’ve known online for a while (one of whom runs his own forum-style review blog you might enjoy) when my WWE reviews had caught up to the current timeline at the end of 2012, and I began in 1995 in the spring of 2013. As a college student, I had very little in the way of responsibilities and pretty much mainlined it over the next twelve months or so, mostly over the summer. I don’t mean to get philosophical with this, but ECW ought to be consumed both (a) in a row, without cherry picking, more than maybe any promotion EVER & (b) when you are old enough to have experienced some shit and also still young enough to not yet be a full human being, ideally like 85% of the way through that process. Anyways, at that time online, I was able to avoid a lot of opinion on what the Actual Great ECW stuff was and mostly come to my own opinions and beliefs.

Most of what I loved and felt lined up with some common beliefs. Shane Douglas actually kind of ruled from 96-98, Sabu and The Sandman are some of the best ever, the FBI is one of the best acts in wrestling history, Foley, Raven, all of that. Not everything lined up, I hate RVD/Sabu vs. Hayabusa/Shinzaki and the RVD/Sabu 1996 feud is not for me, but as one learns at some point growing up, a whole lot of consensus favorites — especially with a promotion like this — are that way for a reason.

An exception to that — although not the only one (feel free to drop in the Ko-fi with an ECW Dealer’s Choice offer) — is this match. While I had heard about Corino/Tajiri or even the rightfully acclaimed FBI vs. Tajiri/Whipwreck tags later in 2000, as this proof of how great Tajiri could be, along with this series and the three ways in general, talk of this exact match was something I never came across before I saw it.

I’m so happy for this, because it allowed this match to totally and completely blow me away.

Since I watched this, I have become something of an evangelist for it. If I ever considered you a friend on the internet, I have either asked if you’ve seen this, pressured you to see it, or in some cases, simply assumed that you had seen it before. I have extensively praised it in more public forums. I am not suggesting that I am the reason this seems to be held in higher esteem now, I am not (quite) that egotistical. I imagine many people have gone on comparable journeys to my own and had similar experiences to my own, there were perhaps others like me before I happened upon my road to Damascus that I did not encounter at the time, but truly, it is such a thrill to see this talked up more and more as one of the greats.

Watching it again, over a decade later, I’m still pretty sure this is the best ECW match of all time.

I’m not as sure as I was ten years ago. I think the gap between this and Tajiri/Corino is slimmer than I used to. Matches like the Bigelow/RVD switch or Douglas/2 Cold are up there somewhere, for sure.

However, the feeling is still here.

Yoshihiro Tajiri and Super Crazy combine to create not only their best match together, but one of the more transcendent pieces of violence in the entire history of ECW.

This is one of those matches that, if I began to list every moment of it that I loved, I might spoil the entire thing for anyone who hasn’t seen it before (go watch it). There are three or four spots that, not having watched it in years, were exactly as I had remembered them, having stuck in my head all this time. The missed decapitation attempt chair slides on a table that careened into the crowd at full speed, god bless ECW. The two double stomps it takes to put Crazy through a table, where nobody has ever put more into double stomps than Tajiri in these moments. Tajiri mocking the bleeding only to suffer himself. Multiple super impressive and ultra high risk moonsaults. A million gross kicks, and most of all, one of the best finishes in all of wrestling history.

It’s more than just that though, what they do.

Yoshihiro Tajiri turns in the greatest villain performance of his entire career, and to match him, Super Crazy delivers what has to be his career performance period. His selling is phenomenal, managing to be both dramatic and genuine feeling. His comebacks, although never lacking for energy here at his peak, have an urgency to them that the blood loss only helps in a visual sense. Nothing he does, outside his offense, is spectacular, but in terms of small things that make a high flier that much more likeable in a match like this, Crazy in this match ought to be studied. For Tajiri, it is obvious and easier, but also even more impressive in terms of the small things. Displaying Super Crazy’s bloodied face to the camera, getting on hi knees and mocking a genuinely good wobbling sell, all of that. He’s also even better in more dominant moments, coming off as genuinely impossible to kill, and when he gets up, especially at the end, there’s this kind of “oh shit” feeling to it. Tajiri plays a dangerous maniac, Gogo Yubari style, better than almost anyone I have ever seen, managing to communicate both an unhinged nature as well as this sort of dignified larger than life stature towards the end, better than nearly everyone else ever.

The ending, as teased, is one of the best ever as well.

Not just in terms of a bad guy getting what he has coming — both in terms of punishment survived and given out as well as a complex plot costing him in the end — but also simply in terms of beautiful bullshit and construction.

Tajiri puts one table on the middle ropes in the corner while Crazy puts another regular style on the other side. Tajiri stands on his to spray mist in Crazy’s eyes but when he leaps off, their familiarity becomes as much of his enemy as his own schemes are. Super Crazy catches him in the air, spins, and in the same sudden motion, powerbombs him through the other table to win. 

Something about saying “this is a match you HAVE to see” has always felt wrong to me. Everyone is on their own journey through wrestling (and through all media/art) and I never want to say you have to see something or else you’re a bad fan or something. I believe that, for the most part, if you are invested in these things, you will find them when you are ready for them.

Everyone is involved in their own process, and unless there is a greater trust, one ought not to get in the way of that. All things in due time, and all of that.

Having said that, there are very few matches that better communicate what it is that I want out of professional wrestling than this. It is bloody and violent, it is a story about good and evil and the mistakes evil makes that allows good to triumph. It is also sick as hell, full of some of the coolest spots ever, while also tight and efficient and so intelligently assembled. It is a character piece with large narrative function just as much as it is a pure lizard-brained delight. It is not everything I want out of wrestling, but save for some of the real epics out there, it comes closer to a personal mission statement than 95% of the genre could ever imagine.

One of the great spectacles of violence not only in the year 2000, or out of ECW period, but of the entire twenty first century to date.

****1/3

Steve Corino vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri, ECW Hardcore Heaven (5/14/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from longtime friend of the program and frequent contributor Tim Livingston. 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.

It’s a very rare feeling — not just as a wrestling fan, but as a human being — to experience the greatest ever version of something, or at least, what feels to you like the greatest ever version of something, especially for the first time. Those are occasions you remember, if not so much in terms of where you were or the exact date upon which it happened, the act of experiencing them and the feeling it gave you.

There are not a lot of wrestling matches that leave me in awe after the fact.

Not to toot my own horn, but when you watch a lot of wrestling, it is a harder and harde effect to achieve. It very rarely happens now (although, writing this in 2024, the year of Demus vs. Mad Dog, it is not impossible), but even ten or so years ago, when I first binge watched ECW when I was in college, it was not an especially easy thing to do.

Steve Corino vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri left me in awe, and every time I have watched it since, it has continued to do so.

I believe that, throughout the entire history of professional wrestling, there has never been a greater version of a former lackey getting revenge upon his former boss than in this match.

Part of that comes from everything before it.

Yoshihiro Tajiri had previously done what nobody else in The Network could do by winning the ECW World Television Title, only for that apparatus to also turn on him to gift it to Rhino, in the ultimate kind of expression of the idea that for everyone else, the people Tajiri represents, some things will be taken away from you the moment you have them because they are meant for a handpicked favored few. Of course, far more important than the context of ECW history, The Network, or Corino and Tajiri together, it’s the pre-match microphone work from Corino that gives this so much of the flavor that it has, in which Corino not only calls Tajiri an old-timey World War II era light slur beginning with a J, but upon a rebuke to an offer to rejoin him as an underling, drops in a “slant-eyed bastard” as well, before being immediately kicked as hard as possible in the face.

That’s so much of what I love about this match, I think.

Not only that it is this moment of revenge for a put-upon great and that this has been building for nearly a year, but also that it is one of the great morality tales in the history of professional wrestling.

In a medium that so often rewards cruelty towards everyone else, whatever group that might come to mind when you read that, this is both arguably among the most direct and inarguably among the most brutal cases of revenge for that ever caught on film. Wrestling is not short upon matches revolving around punishments for transgressions, but they’re usually bigger and more dramatic in scope, and I think there’s such a thrill in someone simply being this exact type of an asshole and being given one of the most horrific beating ever captured on film for it.

Part of it is also that, just as a match, it is one of the sickest and coolest and tightest matches of all time.

Every single thing to happen in this match rocks.

Corino and Tajiri pack this thing to the brim and then some with things to love. Not only all of Tajiri’s hard strikes — and this is a match with very possibly a few of his hardest kicks ever and what I believe is the most violent Karate Rush ever caught on film — but every bit of Corino offense is fantastic, every Tajiri attack feels like attempt on the life of Steve Corino, it also gets constantly meaner with every moment. It is, sneakily, one of the more hostile matches ever as well, with Tajiri taking more and more offense to every moment Corino sticks around, and feeling as if he’s constantly punishing him even further for refusing to stay down after all of the shit he’s pulled.

The other thing I love about this match is that — much like another all-time classic to also happen on May 14th including two wrestlers who are SO Corino-coded in different ways — it is one of the best ever examples of elevating and legitimizing a bullshit heel in defeat while never once making it obvious that this is what’s happening.

Obviously, yes, Steve Corino bleeds a whole lot, genuinely one of the more gruesome and impressive crimson masks of the 21st century let alone the year, and survives a lot after that, but more important is what he does for himself. His manager Jack Victory (high spot) is barely involved, and for the first time, what Corino has, he gets by himself. The match is smart enough to present him as an opportunist, lucky enough to be in good situations like in front of a table Tajiri set up in a moment when Tajiri gets slightly overzealous, but also always smart enough to make the most of everything. It’s the genius of a match like this done right, one that never yells at you that this wrestler is Great or that this wrestler is tough, but one that lays the seeds of admiration in small ways so that they can be harvested later while still feeling organic (in one of the best ECW segments in its final years, in which Corino of all people, is the first to interrupt the Justin Credible catchphrase and call it the lamest thing in the world to a huge pop).

What Corino gets in this match is all fairly basic, but because of the genuinely grotesque combination of what Tajiri’s done to him in terms of offense as well as the deep red covering his face and all that bleached hair, it’s all impressive. More than that, it is never so impressive that it turns the focus away from what is rightfully happening him towards what he’s fighting, and it is never so much — in terms of what he does nor what he recovers from nor how — that it feels as though he doesn’t deserve this.

That’s the magic here.

For all he gains in this match by taking this stunning beating, it is also always one that feels earned, and that also feels great.

Be it Corino’s luck, Corino’s toughness, or Corino’s mind, it all runs into a wall at the end, and that wall is Yoshihiro Tajiri. Corino cannot overcome the staggering amount of blood loss nor just how badly Tajiri wants to beat his ass, and steps in it further and further. Leaning on the edge of the table, he is perfectly set up for the best Tajiri kick of all time across his face, perfectly lined up on this surface.

Tajiri follows up by double stomping him through said table — and not just breaking it in half, but with the long edges still in tact somewhat, meaning he has literally put him through it — and gains the greatest feeling victory of his career.

Genuinely, it is one of my favorite matches of all time.

Some of that is, to be fair, the fact that when I first watched it, it had less the reputation as an all-timer and more so just as a late ECW highlight. I know I was never the first one to talk about this match like THIS, but as the years have gone on and more people have come around to this as one of the best ever, there’s a certain pride I’ve gained in being there earlier. The other part, independent of that and way way way way stronger than that, is that it constantly fills me with so much joy, and has become one of those matches I watch over and over again. I don’t do that a whole lot, it’s really like this and the FEAR main event and few select others, and like those, this has never once lost its charm to me.

I think it is the best version of this idea ever, the greatest coward heel legitimization ever, one of the great bloodbaths ever, one of the best matches ever in the history of one of the coolest wrestling promotions of all time, and, above all, one of those matches that I can and have and would recommend to anyone, no matter to what extent you are a fan.

Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Steve Corino is professional wrestling to me, and few matches have ever felt better, both on the first time and on maybe, I don’t know, the twentieth.

The only reason I’m not 100% positive this is the best match in ECW history, is because four months earlier, it’s possible Tajiri had an even better one.

****1/4

Super Crazy vs. Yoshihiro Tajiri vs. Little Guido, ECW on TNN (4/14/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor RiRi. 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.

This was a Three Way Dance for Crazy’s ECW TV Title.

Across the last two years of ECW’s wonderful life, there were a number of three way dances involving these three, occasionally broken up with wrestlers like Jerry Lynn (this made them worse) or Spike Dudley (in one case in late 1999, this made them much better), so much so that one could understandably lose track and tie them all together. Mainlining ECW from 1995-2001 across a span of a little over twelve months like I did, originally, from 2013-2014, it is very easy to lose track of them even further.

However, among all of them, this has always stood out to me as the best.

Part of that is, admittedly, the occasion, and what it allows them in a booking sense.

While so many of those three way were wonderful undercard window dressing, this is a real ass TV main event with the bells and whistles that come with it. Blood and multiple table bumps and, in the best way, all of the bullshit that goes along with it too. Bullshit often gets a negative connotation tacked onto it, but with ECW, I almost always mean it in the best possible way, and the same is true here. ECW had an eye and perhaps an ear for bullshit — the exact right amount in any given moment — that very few other wrestling promotions have ever had (given its short shelf life, one can say that in an absolute sense, rather than, like, “WCW 1996-7 had the perfect feel for it” or “the WWF in 2000-2001 had a mastery over bullshit”). There is enough put in the way of our heroes — the pure babyface Crazy and the about-to-turn Tajiri — to make their final half impressive, before more bullshit gets in the way of that, and at the same time, the bullshit provided is also always deeply impressive and impactful.

The other is what it allows them, in terms of the match itself, and what that brings out on an individual level.

So often in matches like these, there are limits or ceilings bumped into, but this is one in which all three get to bleed a lot and go through tables and have every single thing possible going for them. All three go completely insane, but underneath that, also hit everything perfectly, wrestle and conduct themselves in a way that feels big and makes the entire match feel big, and every single inch and centimeter of the match, on top of all it does right in a larger sense, is a delight.

It is also, absolutely, the Yoshihiro Tajiri show..

Near the middle of a career year that, with the exception of a rare collection (2000 [REDACTED + OTHERS], ’01 Austin, ’89 Flair, mid 1990s Kawada, 2005 Joe, 2006 Necro, 2013 Bryan, 2015 Roddy), few can come close to, Tajiri puts on another violent masterclass. It doesn’t hit the highs of either the January Super Crazy match that it obviously walks in the footsteps of, itself arguably the best ECW match ever, or of the Steve Corino PPV match this begins to set up a month later, itself among the greatest “punishment for a crime” matches in wrestling history, but it is a wonderful medium. Tajiri is involved at all points, while Crazy is out for a while in the first half, and once Guido is eliminated, and something like eighty five percent of this match runs through him. The sharp offense, the blood, the inventive weapon spots, all of it. It isn’t quite what I would call a masterclass, but there are few others in wrestling history who have ever felt like they had either a fuller command of a multi man than this, and even fewer to turn that command into a match as great as this.

What results is a beautiful and wonderful piece of blood, violence, bullshit, and nonsense, one of the great examples ever — and in terms of the TNN show, perhaps the greatest ever — of just what ECW could be when every single thing was working right.

Following Rhino’s interference with a Piledriver off the apron to Crazy, Tajiri wins the title, setting up something else entirely.

Not only one of the better matches in the history of television wrestling, especially through this point in time, but really really arguably also one of the best three way matches ever as well.

***2/3

 

Kaiju King Mandora/Kaiju Zeta Mandora vs. Ultra Ace/Ultra Monkey, Osaka Pro Legend Story (1/4/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Henry HeadCheese. 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.

I don’t fucking know, man.

Ultra Ace and Ultra Monkey are your classic wrestling characters based on some anime shit (I cannot tell you a single thing about Ultraman besides that SHIN ULTRAMAN was directed by the director of SHIN GODZILLA (not the same SHIN G director who directed SHIN KAMEN RIDER, which I have seen and loved) too, although I have not seen the former), and they go after some monster guys with several eyes and claw hands.

The match itself is beautiful nonsense.

Many things go wrong, the monkey walks into the ringpost on accident, and many also also go right, like all the arm drags and various ranas and headscissor combinations. While the split is a clean one in which no one takes a thing away from the other, the match is cleanly split between schtick and basic lucharesu routine, and so, the match itself is sort of stuck in between the two.

Settling for a little bit of both, to be fair, still results in a super fun eight minutes (of what’s aired) that’s more fun than a whole lot of other wrestling.

Our Heroes win, obviously.

There are likely millions of worse things someone can pay me to watch and write about than an eight minute bullshit comedy match about an anime I will never watch or understand though.

I encourage all of you to find them.

Edge & Christian vs. The Hardy Boyz vs. The Dudley Boyz, WWF SummerSlam (8/27/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from friend of the program @beenthrifty. 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.

This was the first ever TLC match for Edge and Christian’s WWF Tag Team Titles.

It’s a mother fucker of a thing.

Certainly, yes, I recognize bias. You have to. Anyone does, trying to talk about anything like this in a fair way. I cannot imagine someone who began watching wrestling in like 2014 holding this in the same esteem as someone, in my case, who began watching wrestling in 1998. Not only in the sense that it is probably nearly impossible to look upon this with even a shadow of awe in a time not only past this, but past things that have followed this like Shelton in MITB matches in the 2000s or Briscoes vs. Steen & Generico, or in their own way, Ultimate X matches, but also in the sense that there is no nostalgia attached either to these matches or these people. I cannot make someone have their first memories of the Hardys being as psychotic underdogs and all-world babyfaces, in the same way that I also cannot make a younger person’s first Dudleys thought be the deeply deeply deeply deeply canceled and, frankly, embarrassingly entertaining Heatwave ’99 promo. My feelings on this match are — if not locked into place by — at least heavily influenced by even just faint shadows of the feeling it gave me the first time I saw it.

Having said all of that, I think it also just objectively rocks.

So often with matches like this now, it feels as if there is a pretense to it on the front end, that [x] amount of time and/or things have to happen before they get into the heavy stuff, but this match is up there with the most confidence per minute metric in the history of matches like this. They get right into it, never pause, and never ever look back. On top of the confidence of it, it also all feel correct. Beyond how little filler there is, almost every single thing seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger, resulting in a near constant state of hearts in throats in the last half. On top of that, it’s also assembled in a way in which the really huge off the ladder out through table stuff is spaced out, so that each instance feels big.

On top of the efficiency and how it’s a genuine marvel of construction, it’s also pure lunacy for eighteen minutes.

With the exception of bump coward protected ass golden boy Edge, there’s nobody here who doesn’t take at least one genuinely psychotic bump or shot. Gross hits with ladders, huge moves off of them, big falls through tables, it’s a match with so many thrills to it. The ultimate compliment is that if one were to make a highlight reel of what happened in the match, they would have to include just about everything, but that’s just as much about the near total lack of cowardice on display as it is about the planning and construction.

That’s not to say the latter doesn’t also rule.

Narratively speaking, the match is imperfect (more later) but also hits a certain sweet spot. Everything in the match comes down to either the Dudleys being too insane and aggressive, the Hardys — especially Jeff — going way too far with any minor opening of a window to go insane, or the champions hitting a perfect antagonistic blend somewhere in between cowardice, opportunism, and pure luck.

Jeff Hardy and D-Von Dudley get stuck up there with no ladder beneath them at the end, and Edge and Christian take advantage. D-Von drops on his own and the champions throw a ladder into Jeff to knock him down before climbing up to get the win.

Despite the reputation, it is not all it can be.

Partially, that just means in terms of how wild it can get. This match feels like — although having an urgency and efficiency that the WrestleMania 2000 version of this did not quite have almost six months prior — it is still just beginning to scratch a little under the surface, and not just because it is almost a quarter century old. Every inch of it is used well, but there’s something about it (and almost definitely this is the result of a direct rematch that goes even crazier but also branches off with each combo also doing the same) that leaves this feeling like the middle part of something too, even if it is an absolute mother fucker of a middle part.

As a result of the booking as well, it denies itself the greatest possible triumph in acting as a narrative stopgap before a far greater emotional payoff the next month.

The WWF being the WWF, these big attention grabbing showcase matches were all won by the team with the clear project guy on them (do not lie to yourself, Edge was as much of a protected ass golden boy as anyone save for a Cena/Orton/Batista/Reigns figure), and so in a match devoted to these gut reaction high spots and pure visceral thrills, it also handicaps itself at least a little by denying the Hardys the feel good hometown win in classic WWF fashion and having the coward champions luck out intead, stringing it along until Unforgiven a month later in one of the great forgotten matches of this golden era. It doesn’t necessarily make this specific match worse or anything, it is a special thing on its own merits, but given the raw material, one cannot help but imagine something even better.

Still, given all that comes — both in the next month and also in the next year — it is hard to be all that annoyed at a match that opts to simply be one of the great displays of raw artillery and creativity of the time. It isn’t perfect, it isn’t allowed to be, but even in the midst of probably the best year in company history, it’s still so impressive when something this great, especially like this, break loose.

One of the all-time stunt show fireworks ass pieces of bullshit, whose only true flaw in that department is that it is probably not even be the best one these teams had against each other in the same twelve month span.

***3/4

Triple H vs. The Rock, WWF Backlash 2000 (4/30/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Dan Vacura. 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 for Triple H’s WWF Title, with Shane McMahon as the special guest referee.

On top of that, Vince McMahon, Stephanie McMahon, and every lever of power is on Triple H’s side and in his corner as well, even down to replacement referees Pat Patterson and Gerald Brisco. Steve Austin was supposed to be the special enforcer to even the odds, making his first appearance since Survivor Series 1999, but he has run into very suspicious “travel difficulties” and has not been able to make it to Washington D.C., leaving The Rock on his own.

There are, I think, two aspects to this.

Firstly, it very obviously is a big budget more WWF brained remake of the Steve Austin vs. Dude Love epic two years prior. Not that it is the first Attitude Era main event with special referee nonsense, one naturally thinks of the Austin/Rock Backlash 99 main event that also had Shane as the referee, but between Vince outside, the stooges at the end, and Austin as the third party, there’s more wheels in the air spinning than any match like this since the big famous one. They take the stuff that — I imagine — they think made that work, the McMahon nonsense and the referee bullshit and the help coming in at the very end, and keep that, while cutting out the stuff that actually made that special, in the brawling and the specific touch provided by two of the best brawlers and wrestlers ever and the careful escalation of the bullshit (along with that it was really the first like it, and had the benefit of having nothing to live up to). It obviously is nowhere near as good, and when you kind of see it, it’s very easy to wave this off not only as a lesser retread, but to see the future of the company here, sanitizing one of the best things it ever did and running it back with the two golden children to try and give them some of that same success.

While holding that opinion though, I think there’s also still room for the second part, which is that it completely succeeds.

Yes, you’re right, it is bullshit.

Completely.

Rocky and Hunter have a better one in them, as they would show the next month in what’s up there in the career match rankings for each of them. This is a lot of punching, some signature stuff, but mostly using the bells and whistles and the smoke and mirrors to fill in the gaps in between those moments.

It still works.

For one, because Rock and Triple H are at the peaks of their powers, and each has a relative (the most important word in that sentence) Midas touch. Rocky has become a full on borderline great, as he will be until he leaves, having found a real bounce and comfort that wasn’t really there before the last few months. Triple H is right in the middle of the one period of time (Jan 2000 – May 2001) where his athletic prime lined up with him finding himself in the ring. The latter, as with his other best periods (2005-6, 2014), are when he abandons the prestige shit and gets down to the root of what he is at his best as a character, which reflects in the ring, being a smart wrestler, but nowhere near as skilled as he thinks, and leaning more on power and brawling, and keeping it simple. Together, they maybe don’t create this super high level magic, but there is something that works between them. Hunter never had better punch fights than he did against The Rock, his bulkier bumping rarely felt more natural than when done for a guy around his same exact size and frame, and The Rock’s simple approach also had a way of reining Hunter in, whether he ever intended to or not. They have a chemistry that this match seems to lean on, that allows the bullshit to work a lot better, because the wrestling is good underneath it all. `

The second part is that, for as annoying as it is that the WWF mimics itself and forgets why one of the best things it ever did was THAT great, what they have here is still that classic kind of bullshit WWF machine fireworks show that cannot help but work out well.

While lacking the care and escalation of Austin/Dude, every part of it still lands.

Shane McMahon as a bullshit ref, the increase in how much he and Vince interfere, Shane being taken out, the replacement referees, the one or two major nearfalls, Lind returning with Earl Hebner, Linda shoving Stephanie down in revenge for a slap months earlier, then Austin coming out. Austin, Rock, Hunter, and the entire apparatus around them, is over enough that it would take real genuine incompetency for this to not deliver, and the WWF in 2000 is one of the most well run and highest functioning machines in U.S. wrestling history.

This works like it does not because of some great intelligence, but because they are just dumb enough to not even know how to start screwing it up.

Even the bullshit works in a larger sense.

A year after Rock turned babyface following heel referee Shane McMahon messing up, and after Shane McMahon’s referee heel turn at Survivor Series 1998 helped first get him the title, The Rock has to go through the thing he used to benefit from to get to a guy who’s been throwing roadblocks at him for just as long. Steve Austin now serves the role The Undertaker did two years ago, the veteran giving the okay to the newer main event babyface, except to much much greater effect, because he’s Stone Cold Steve Austin, and anything he approves of has to be good too. It’s light, it’s a little stupid, but it’s there, and it ties itself up real neatly on a year over year basis.

The Rock gets his moment, Stone Cold celebrates with him, and it’s a great payoff.

Pro wrestling, baby.

With the field level, Rock finally has the clean chance, and wastes no time with it. Spine on pine, People’s Elbow, and after a year and change, The Rock finally regains the WWF Title.

It is bullshit. It is complete and total bullshit. I blame nobody for not caring for this at all, especially if you have zero fond memories of it from the time it happened. It is some big budget nonsense, through and through. Style over substance, sizzle over steak, all of that. Complete bullshit. And at every point in our lives, we are all incredibly susceptible to some well executed bullshit.

***1/5

Steve Blackman vs. Albert, WWF Smackdown (8/10/2000)

Commissions return again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Jack the Jobber. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Blackman’s WWF Hardcore Title.

Hell yeah man.

Among all my wrestling guilty pleasures, or at least things I know I like way more than most people, the Steve Blackman hardcore title run is real real high up on that list.

Not only was it, in the context of 2000 WWF, a breath of fresh air with the division returning to action after the better part of a year plus as a comedy sideshow, but it was also just objectively cool as hell. None of these matches lasted ll that long, for sure almost never over ten minutes, and they were always full of the hardcore spots nobody else was doing. Not just in the WWF, but like anywhere in the country. Blackman would use kendo sticks, a chair, and a trash can and opt to try stuff from martial arts movies instead. To say he was doing John Woo fight scenes in the ring would be dishonest, but that sort of thing was clearly his inspiration, and it made him so much different than everyone else doing these matches, as well as the best one to do them since Mick Foley left the belt behind in late 98.

This is unfortunately not the greatest show of that.

Blackman works best against smaller guys who he can do a little more with, creatively speaking. The Blackman work against guys like X-Pac or Al Snow Raven or Road Dogg tends to allow him more room to get creative. This is also a little on the shorter side at three minutes, and in no other era do you tend to feel the difference between three minutes to five minutes like this one. The greats can still achieve a lot in five minutes, but three feels far more stifling.

Still, this is not without its qualities.

Albert’s offense is all really good. You can see the future Giant Bernard — or even just A-Train — in there behind the Bicycle Kick or the basic clubs, or even just how he moves. There’s a great DDT on an open chair he hits too. Additionally, while a little bigger than works best with the Blackman routine, Albert is still there for Steve to do a few cool tricks with the sticks and the trash can, as even in a shorter one, Blackman finds a way to stand out.

Blackman wins with a mere kendo stick shot to the head off of the apron.

Hopefully, someone a little newer might see this and find out about one of my favorite weird little bullshit runs out there. It’s not what I would necessarily throw out there as a Steve Blackman introductory course, but if you come across this and like it, there are many greater delights in your future.

And as always, thank you to pervert Youtube accounts for, as a side effect, preserving such wonderful wrestling history.

 

Atlantis vs. Villano III, CMLL Homenaje A Dos Leyendas 2000 – Juicio Final (3/17/2000)

This was a commissioned review from Corwo. 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 mask vs. mask match, and as far as those go, is one of the more famous and celebrated ones of the last, I don’t know, half century maybe.

It is great.

Really really really really great. Transcendently so. In a lesser year, it would be the runaway no-other-candidates answer for Match of the Year, and even in a year as stacked as 2000, it’s not an answer I would have any real argument against, and may even choose for myself one day. You could call it the best match of the decade, and again, sure, fine. It’s remarkably great, to the point that when it was over, I felt the need to watch it again.

You watch it once for the experience, and another time to try and reckon with it, in some attempt to put words to a thing like this.

I do not imagine many of you are reading this — both on account of the readership of this blog, and of the numbers even famous lucha matches do, sort of a self selecting thing — who have not seen this and love it already, or at the very least, have not heard about this in some form. Be that as something other people have praised in video, audio, or text form, or something that even lucha fledglings or the lucha ignorant know about for awards it’s won or for the status it has as this huge box office hit (biggest Arena Mexico number of the twenty first century, no big deal). It’s a match with a reputation, to put it lightly.

Still.

Still.

What a match.

There are a few different elements of this that I really loved.

Independent of anything that Atlantis or Villano III does in this match, the way that this is presented is unbelievable.

Part of that has to do with one of the great atmospheres in wrestling history.

Arena Mexico is more than full here, twenty thousand people hooting and hollering and loudly pouring their guts out just the same as Atlantis and Villano III. Every single thing in this match gets a huge reaction, every possible hold and pinning combination is reacted to it like it could be it, and along with the way the two wrestlers in the match perform and react to these moves (more on that later), it makes everything feel a thousand times bigger and more important than it might had things been different.

The way this is filmed and presented is even better though, and genuinely may be my actual favorite part of the match. Certainly, it’s what leapt off the page on the first viewing of the match, not only capturing all of the action perfectly, but doing it in all of these really interesting ways too, not only with these cool perspective shots, always finding fun new angles to show the blood soaking Atlantis’ mask, making the dives feel as big and exciting as possible, but also in the way they approach small things before the match really gets moving,

over the moon about this reverse Bret Hart zoom from ramp to ring during the famous Atlantis/V3 apuestas pic.twitter.com/ElWvz63YGD

— killer spelled backwards (@ElHijoDelSimon) December 23, 2022

CMLL’s presentation of the atmosphere on top of the action is a significant help too. There may be no greater example in wrestling history of a show of fans throughout the match than this one. They cut away to just about every demographic you can think of from old men to children to young couples to middle aged women to, you know, you fucking name it, they’re all here, twenty thousand of ’em. They’re making all of these different faces and reactions too, from wild exhuberant cheering for their guy to pure horror, to my favorite, an old man looking on with the greatest look of concern I’ve maybe ever seen a fan have. The camera slowly zooms back out to see him surrounded by more excited younger people, and it is not at all hard to imagine this man as a long time Villano III fan, maybe a Ray Mendoza fan before that, living and dying with this stuff, and that adds so so so so much to the experience.

As a full package, it is a masterclass in wrestling presentation and production — showing the scope of the event, as well as displaying the action in interesting and novel ways, creating a greater sense of importance and feeling — and one that I think really ought to be studied. That’s the sort of thing people say about great old matches or great old mechanical performances, people always ought to study Arn or Manny Fernandez or whoever, but with a total and complete package like this, it goes just as much for the other side of the camera too.

When combined with the way in which the action is shot, the effect is that this is transformed into more than just a high stakes wrestling match. The old bit was always that it’s a sport outside of America (which always felt a little woe-is-me to me, whatever, stop crying and watch), but has rarely felt quite so true as it does here. It is less a wrestling match on film than it is a genuine event, a happening that the world poured out en masse to bare witness to.

The kicker is, on top of all of that, the match — this monumental event that they’ve all come to see — is also incredible.

It’s on a level not just beyond most other apuestas matches of the twenty first century to date, but beyond most other apuestas matches ever, with only one other coming to mind as a potential rival, and I’m not really sure off the top of my head which one I would go with in the end. This isn’t the raw and violent kind of fistfight I often prefer my lucha bloodbaths to be, but they manage to have this kind of a pure back and forth apuestas style match with the same kind of guttural feeling, which is maybe the most impressive thing of all. It is one of the more dramatic contests in wrestling history, but that feeling is largely achieved with two dives and a lot of holds and simpler maneuvers.

Largely, this is achieved because Atlantis and Villano III put on one of the greatest displays of the idea of Wrestling Big that I’ve ever seen. Every single thing in this match feels like it matters to both wrestlers in it, and once the big Villano III tope suicida happens and they crack heads, opening each other up, every single movement in this match feels like life or death. The dive itself is a perfect kind of lucha morality tale in and of itself, even though this is not a match with a super clear hero and villain story, with the overzealousness of the older star costing him, not only in the moment, but arguably in a longer-term sense, the contest itself. The match can be praised for the way everything flows perfectly into the next thing and a jaw-dropping economy of movement, in which everything is treated as important by everyone involved, but there is such a struggle that happens with every single thing in it that helps it further that feeling. Every hold comes with an attempt to fight out as quickly as possible, but also this sense of panic. Every moment once they’re both cut open has a sense of desperation to it, and maybe more impressively than just that, a desperation that flows back and forth as the match goes on, from moment to moment.

Genuinely, it feels less like a wrestling match sometimes and more like something greater, game seven in a championship series, but with a tangible punishment for the loser as well. It’s the sort of feeling that only professional wrestling can really ever recreate, and that it so often fails to even try for, let alone achieve.

Villano III pulls off what feels nearly impossible, and escapes from La Atlantida. In the attempt though, his back is too hurt for him to do much, and this time, Atlantis follows through with a little more force and a lot more intensity.

On the second attempt, Atlantis’ La Atlantida, now complete with drop down to avoid the escape, succeeds and Villano III surrenders his mask.

Following the match, one of the more emotional mask removal ceremonies ever takes place. Villano III is maybe not a wrestler I loved as much as I did Blue Panther or that I do some others (Atlantis now among them, as a result of seeing his early 90s and 2010s work around this match), but when his father Ray Mendoza gets in there with him for the embrace, along with his brothers, and an infant in his arms, it’s real hard not to feel at least  a little something. Villano III hands his mask over to Atlantis, and while it’s a little late in both directions to be some kind of real passing of the torch, it sure doesn’t feel like nothing either.

Maybe the best lucha match I’ve ever seen (if not the best, then certainly top two or three), and in case that is a little too restrictive for you, one of the best matches of all time period.

Having said that, just in case newer eyes are reading this one, I don’t think just anybody can jump in here.

I don’t want this to be anybody’s first lucha match.

These big mask matches should never be. The first lucha match, save things like the When World Collides tag that was on a WWE DVD and some recommended 90s stuff, was the famous Blue Panther vs. Villano V mask match in 2008. A great match, even to a stylistic novice, but it was something I saw without the connection needed to get the most out of it (a great match, but one I rejected the MOTY praise for at the time, going with the other two of 2008’s Big Three — the BattlARTS six man and Fire Ant vs. Vin Gerard respectfully — instead), and simultaneously, it raised the bar just a little too high for everything else, accomplishing little more than forever making me go ”oh, yeah, I love Blue Panther”. When nothing else was as good, I fell back out of trying to regularly watch lucha for another decade or so, before really committing to it during the pandemic. I imagine this could perform much the same way for many of the same reasons, if not moreso.

Watch a lot of Villano III. Watch even more Atlantis, past and future. Maybe even do what I didn’t quite get to do here, and that I would have done if this wasn’t bought and paid for, and watch through the entire build up to this match, which isn’t too hard to find online these days. When you’re ready, this is going to be there waiting for you with its arms wide open and fists curled up and cocked back. I cannot imagine it disappointing a single person on Earth who was ready to see it, given how far it stands above just about everything else.

A genuine monolith.

****1/3

Kensuke Sasaki vs Toshiaki Kawada, NJPW DO JUDGE!! (10/9/2000)

Another commission here, again from Ko-fi contributor Kai, as we go in snake order. You can be like them and pay me to watch and review any sorts of matches or whatever else you’d like. Head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon if you think you’d be interested in that, and make sure I haven’t already written about it ahead of time. The current market price is $5 per review and if you have a more complex notion than simply multiplying a number by five, feel free to hop into the DMs and we can work something out. 

You know what this is.

As a moment, it is a hell of a thing.

Main event of the Tokyo Dome, New Japan against All Japan for the first time in a billion years, all of that. Quite the famous match. As part of defending the honor of All Japan as one of the last ones left, Kawada marches into enemy territory to face dominating IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kensuke Sasaki, near the end of a nearly perfect 2000 in between winning the title to start the year at the Tokyo Dome and winning the G1 Climax as champion, a feat not matched since. A wunderkind in the midst of a perfect year against another promotion’s older and hardened superstar who is having an especially troublesome year between the All Japan to NOAH exodus, trying to stand up for AJPW when nobody else has all year. The former of the two either revered as a lizard-brain wrestling icon or despised as a booker’s pet golden boy and the latter of the two the absolute favorite of that last group. Nobody hates Kawada, but big Kawada fans are dying for (a) something to go right for him and AJPW & (b) for someone to finally stop a guy like Kensuke Sasaki. Translated into real sports, it’s the 2011 NBA finals (not just youth on one side, but raw power and objective numbers, and a history of failure on the other), something that comes together too perfectly to ever feel planned, a match up that feels like some kind of moral judgment from on high as much as it does any kind of athletic competition.

As a match, it is something real special too.

I had this down in my memory as a kind of gigantic dick measuring contest, one of the biggest in wrestling history. It absolutely is. Kensuke Sasaki wrestles one way and Kawada is more than willing to meet him on that familiar terrain. They hit each other exceptionally hard, build up to a few spectacular exchange, and the match comes down not to any of their larger pieces of offense — Kawada’s powerbomb or Sasaki’s Northern Lights Bombs or the throws — but to those impossible hard shots.

There’s also a lot more than that here.

Kawada never just has matches like that.

Sasaki manages the early shows of power and force. The big knockdowns, the first closed fist of the match, the big showy gestures. He’s the stronger of the two in early strike exchanges. In classic Kawada fashion though, the same as we’ve seen against every larger opponent, it’s a Kawada match that is about surviving, enduring until he finds an opening, and then hurling himself through it in the most admirable and stubborn way possible. Kawada returns fire with the closed fist in an absolute screamer of a revenge spot, and slowly but surely begins getting more and more and more of those strike exchanges. Kawada isn’t the most strategic wrestler in the world, it’s part of his charm, but there’s something that feels coordinated about the way he keeps drawing Sasaki into these big strike exchanges, and the way in which they take more out of Kensuke than they do Kawada.

The IWGP Champion isn’t a stranger to slugfests by any means, he’s unseated Hashimoto and Tenryu for his title reigns, but they’ve rarely held up a sustained pace at this style in the way that Kawada forces him to in this match. Kawada never smiles, he never lets on that it’s this plot, but the way things work out more and more and more for him the longer the match goes, it all feels like one of wresting’s greatest ever displays of the old rope a dope.

To that end, another great thing this match does is the way it kind of fuses the two main event styles together. It’s under twenty minutes and effectively runs the length of a traditional New Japan main event rather than the half-hour range of All Japan main events for the last ten years plus. It’s also a match that has that kind of New Japan spirit, that Hashimoto feeling, in the sense that everything matters and that they’re always working towards the end. However, it’s all done at this blistering All Japan pace. It’s not just a fusion, it’s the greatest possible fusion. No bullshit, no obviously wasted time, but with this massive sense of importance and this super genuine feeling behind it too.

Brilliantly, this match is also constructed to work perfectly for fans on both sides. Sasaki is bigger and stronger, and as the match goes on, he proves his toughness. A New Japan fan could claim he got caught with a lucky one at the end, and that it was a one in a million fluke. And they might be right. An All Japan or simply a Kawada fan would say — as I am — that this wasn’t just some all-time display of force and strength, but a story about power against guts and about brute strength against heart and technique. Sasaki has every advantage at the start, but gradually loses more and more, not just because of stamina and being drawn out of his comfort zone, but also because he lacks the most important qualities, the ones that Kawada has an abundance of. Guts and will and heart.

Sasaki blocks Kawada’s Gamenguri once with a Lariat to the foot, but when he tries a final Lariat of his own, Kawada lands the Gamenguri in spite of that foot, and just barely gets on top to win. Sasaki’s arguably healthier after the match, Kawada can’t get up on his own and has to take the boot off of the hurt foot and ankle. Sasaki will get him in the rematch, but here in the one that counts the most, the result goes not just to the man who was smart enough to know how to get the win, but the man who was willing to suffer enough and to give up enough to be in that position.

The ultimate Toshiaki Kawada match. There are larger wins, title victories in the same venue, but I’m not sure any of them sums up Kawada as completely as this does. Not simply a major victory on a gigantic show, but one against a near complete ideological and career opposite whose career singles match Kawada has in the process, one garnered through the most Kawada-esque means possible, and one in defense of something that probably wasn’t worth quite what he went through to get it.

All Japan’s crowning moment of the century, very arguably Toshiaki Kawada’s signature singles victory, and one of the most ideologically, spiritually, and morally correct wrestling matches in history.

****