Toshiaki Kawada vs. Cactus Jack, HUSTLE-3 (5/8/2004)

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This, despite being on HUSTLE, was for Kawada’s Triple Crown Title.

Mick Foley and Toshiaki Kawada are two of my favorite wrestlers of all time. For any number of reasons, I do not connect with too many professional wrestlers on an emotional level (not that there are like five or anything, but given the sheer amount of professional wrestlers, you know?), but I did with these two, and it was near immediate in both cases. Outside of Stone Cold, which as a child in 1998 was undeniable, Mick Foley was one of the first wrestlers I ever loved. I was the person that WCW documentaries describe who turned it to Raw is War on January 4th, 1999 when they said that thing. When I first got into Japanese wrestling, while the heroics of a Misawa or Kobashi were impressive, it was the struggle of Kawada that kept me looking back at things and discovering. You get me on the right day (these days, usually around when Bryan Danielson is too kind to a bad wrestler in a big AEW match), and I will say Kawada is the second best wrestler ever in my eyes, and up there was my very favorite of all time. Get me on the right day, perhaps even that same one, and I will say Mick Foley is in the top twenty, if not better than every other Pillar (I can waffle on he and Taue, nothing is ever set in stone).

I say that all to say that I love these guys, beyond just a base level on which I think they’re really great wrestlers.

Despite what many might say, I am a very positive person, and I believe that I see good in a lot of things many others do not (sometimes even wrestling matches), and I am particularly inclined to do this for wrestlers I love watching.

Such a thing was not possible here.

The best thing about this match is that, because HUSTLE booked it and because it happened, there are pictures widely available of Toshiaki Kawada and Mick Foley fighting each other.

When you watch the match — as I avoided doing for over twenty years because of such warnings — that all falls apart.

Both have been a part of some great stylistic clashes that prove the old adage about styles making fights, but I think this is simply too far of a divide to bridge. Foley is like two weeks removed from one of his best and most wild performances ever, if you want to cite that, and has admitted that he was here for the insane money HUSTLE was throwing out (Dusty Rhodes, Mark Coleman, and The Outsiders are also on this show). Kawada throws some of the softer shots of his career all throughout, and leans a lot on these elbows to the back of the neck that are more in line with a U.S. southern heel than Dangerous K, really only unloading with one kick at the very end.

Neither ever feels at all comfortable with each other, nor interested in becoming so. It’s all best summed up by the classic Foley barbed wire bat, which is brought in and teased, but never even all that close to being used in a meaningful way. It’s a match that feels as though it was forced to happen at gunpoint. Two of the best ever do exactly enough to say that, technically, they had a match, which ought to get someone somewhere to let Foley go free and to keep Kawada’s ramen shop free from extortion for the time being.

I didn’t enjoy it much at all, but I’m happy both made it through this ordeal that they were very clearly forced into.

Kawada wins with a Gamengiri followed up by a head kick to a seated Foley.

The greatest strength of this match is that, despite all Foley would go on to do in sporadic appearances over the last six and a half years of his career, it made me a little less sad that Samoa Joe vs. Mick Foley never happened the following year.

Some dreams are best left as dreams.

Ric Flair vs. Mick Foley, TNA Impact (10/7/2010)

This was a Last Man Standing.

Listen, yeah.

I get it.

The ideal thing is for them to have met in 1993-4, at the best possible intersection when both were among the best wrestlers in the world. You wish they could have lined up then, or maybe even a few years later, or gotten to have a match as a side attraction on the way to Cactus vs. Orton in 2004. You wish that their 2006 WWE feud — only four years before this, but with guys this near the ends of their respective ropes (in Mick’s case, it is literally his last singles match), four years also sure isn’t nothing as the differences between their matches then and here shows — allowed them to (a) have more than one non-angle match, (b) let them get this insane but on actual pay-per-view without a commercial break, & (c) that the good match in the feud had a better ending than one revolving around Foley having a crush on a heel manager who then turned on him the next night in a failed attempt to get heat and again embarrass Foley. You maybe wish it also happened on pay-per-view so a chunk of it wasn’t cleaved off by a commercial break for probably such Spike TV standouts as BLUE MOUNTAIN STATE, 1000 WAYS TO DIE, or idk, like fuckin’ MILFSHINERS: BILOXI VICE.

You wish for a lot of things. You maybe wish any combination of these things happened, to help remove the, at the very least, slightly gross feeling behind it.

AT THE SAME TIME.

At the same time, this rules so much.

There is zero caution or time wasted at all. Two of the best ever, comfortably a solid decade past the point where even one of them could claim he was in his prime, make every single piece of this match stand out in some way. Gross bleeding from both, a few real cool big spots like Foley taking an especially nasty throw off the stage through a table or Flair having a barbed wire board run into him in the corner, tons of nasty punches, and a real energy to it all that more regular hardcore matches throughout TNA history rarely ever came close to.

Flair wins when he, stunningly, connects off the top with a splash to Foley through a table and then beats the count.

I love this match, and I’m always drawn back to it.

Mick Foley, more or less, ends his career in one of the most fitting ways possible, once again dragging a more traditional (yeah, mid 2000s Flair got into his bloodbaths if you want to bellyache about it, but in the grander scheme, you know what I mean) wrestler down into the blood and dirt with him. Flair also winds up with his last great match and even gets the win, but in the process, does this by once again giving in to these sorts of things  and this sort of wrestling after all of his public stands against them and after his tearjerker (emphasis on jerk) prestige wrestling farewell match, giving Foley the larger win in the process. 

One more for the good guys, really.

Now, again, I get finding it a little gross or exploitative or whatever and maybe getting sad about it. But at the same time, it is impossible for me to watch this and consider where it lands near the end of the careers of both men, and not also think to myself, “hell yeah, dude”, because for all of that, and maybe also because of the mixture between that feeling and, in comparison to every other post-WWE Flair match, how well done it is, it also just really really fucking rocks.

Gross and violent and a little beautiful, equally good and bad feeling at the same time, remarkably satisfying, but leaving you hating yourself just a little bit for enjoying it as much as you did given everything you know and can clearly see.

The complete pro wrestling viewing experience in ten minutes.

***+

Steve Austin vs. Dude Love, WWF Over the Edge 1998 (5/31/1998)

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This was, eventually, a no disqualification, no count out, and Falls Count Anywhere match for Austin’s WWF Title.

It is, above all else, one of the greatest pieces of WWF/WWE Bullshit of all time.

For the uninitiated, there’s a lot to this. Vince McMahon is the special referee, and stooges Pat Patterson and Gerald Brisco serve as the guest ring announcer and guest timekeeper respectively, with The Undertaker also coming out to keep an eye on McMahon as a last minute addition to undercut the great little detail of Vince challenging anyone to come and oversee his refereeing, knowing 99% of the roster would avoid putting themselves in jeopardy like that. On top of the great bit of making Patterson do all the talking, the match also changes rules as it goes along, first becoming no count out, then no disqualification, and finally Falls Count Anywhere once they begin to fight up the aisle. Couple that with some great prop work, blood, and multiple referee bumps, and it’s a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

You might vaguely recognize this from a million other matches like it, but save a rare few — The Rock vs. Triple H from Backlash 2000 comes to mind immediately — they all stand in the shadow of this original.

Part of that is that it’s the first.

In general, so much of 1998 WWF works in the same way. As they began to try new things, before Russo-ism really totally took hold towards the end of the year and for most of the year following, there was always a kind of older school respectability behind all of the nonsense that kept it grounded, and therefore, made it so much more effective. Here in particular, what this has going for it that so few matches in its shadow do is that the bullshit is balanced exactly right. It’s almost all in the first half, and save the well placed referee bumping near the end, it never gets in the way of the match itself. It’s an enhancement rather than, as so often would become the case, the actual thing the company is interested in presenting, with the match being a secondary accompaniment. It’s bullshit, smoke and mirrors, a cavalcade of pure nonsense, but it never forgets that this is also professional wrestling.

The other thing that this has going for it above so many imitations, on top of being the first of its kind and done before anyone could figure out how to make this sort of thing deeply obnoxious, is that at the helm, you have two of the arguably twenty to twenty five greatest pro wrestlers of all time in Steve Austin and Mick Foley.

Stone Cold and Mick Foley — beyond just this match — have a certain rare quality that few other wrestlers ever have had, and it’s the key to the success of so many Attitude Era walk and brawls.

They don’t have a perfect chemistry together exactly, but through force of talent, virtually every Austin/Foley match has a similar quality to it. They’re able to create this feeling of enormous chaos and project this idea that things have broken entirely down and are out of control like rarely seen while not actually doing anything all that insane, outside of some of the real gross stuff they do with all the old junkyard condition cars littering a classic Attitude Era set. There’s something about the way they react to things, they way they sell every little thing, and move in general outside of the ring that creates this kind of a feeling. They also have that old wrestling quality to them where every single movement seems important and like it’s being put to use to try and win this fight. Not quite the WCW Main Event feeling here, but something close, the feeling of this gargantuan struggle that could easily go in any direction, bolstered by the importance that Austin and Foley are able to inject into their every motion.

It’s the reason so many Attitude Era TV main events work so much better than they might had you simply read a recap on paper, and it’s also the reason this works to the extent that it does.

Respectfully though also, at the end, the booking is again just about perfect.

Stone Cold stops Dude’s use of weapons and the surroundings finally and creams him with a grotesque chair shot to the side of the head, only for Vince to totally abandon the pretense and refuse the count. Foley misses the set up and knocks Vince out with a chair. Patterson and Brisco both get chokeslammed through announce tables by The Undertaker for trying to be replacement referees to rob Austin, setting up another Stone Cold Stunner. The payoff then finally comes, as Stone Cold does the most Stone Cold shit ever, slapping an unconscious McMahon’s hand three times on the mat to count the pin, living up to the pre-match promise that the match would end by Vince’s hand alone.

Austin not only beats the system, and does it in the most satisfying way possible, complete with a match that not only whips a ton of ass, but thrills in a real guttural way as well.

Complete package, an unbelievable production, with incredible performances aided through creativity and craft, at the start of one of the company’s three or four greatest booking runs of all time, as all of the pieces of the machine not only work like they’re supposed to, but even more rarely, find a way to work in perfect synchronicity. In retrospect, it’s not only this great piece of booking and an incredible match, but also the start of one of my favorite angles ever, the HIGHWAY TO HELL.

Pro wrestling ass pro wrestling.

***3/4

Evolution vs. Chris Benoit/Shawn Michaels/Mick Foley/Shelton Benjamin, WWE Raw (4/12/2004)

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This is much more like it.

Something you should know is that, at least as it pertains to the upper section of the card, I love 2004-5 Raw.

Call it a guilty pleasure if you would like. You could also call it the tail end of childhood nostalgia, as 2004 was the last year I was really like a WWE Fan proper, before the combination of TNA on free television and starting to regularly download matches from ROH and other indies at the end of the year got rid of that pesky little habit. But all of the different combinations of Evolution tags and matches against a tremendously skilled upper to midcard babyface core (Benoit, Shelton, Jericho and Edge when they were capable of being in good matches, Tajiri) do a lot for me. They’re not always perfect, old man Flair is not the most physically gifted and not every babyface there is great on their own, Shawn Michaels and/or Triple H is often also involved, etc., but any combo of Orton, Batista, and Benoit in a tag in 2004 is a slam dunk, and the brand has an astonishing success rate when attacking the rim here, so to speak.

(does 2004 Raw follow the theme of the year and Go To Work? Some would say yes. There is a man called Big (first name), an undersized all-world talent running the point, part of the team is now a coach for one of the most loathsome outfits in the sport, someone constantly getting in foul trouble, etc. If a basketball cannot hold a grudge, it also probably does not lie.)

I would love to write a bunch of words about the better Evolution tags of 2004, and their many virtues. The way they feel like updated versions of old Horsemen TV tags, the old style structure wholly unique in a WWE environment, the emphasis on hard hitting and violence, the manic finishing runs, all of that. Outside of Bryan vs. The Shield, it’s the best continuous series of matches involving a singular faction in WWE history, and I have a whole lot of time for these matches, and for writing about these matches.

This, however, is not one of the better ones.

Part of that comes down to the line up, as the very best ones tended to have a Benoit/Edge/Jericho babyface core, or the one-off Benoit/Orton/Shelton combo that came after Orton’s turn at the end of the summer. Despite the all-star line up, this makes a few choices that separates it in a more negative way from the better Evolution tags and six-mans that mostly followed.

Specifically, because this is essentially the root of every choice made, there is too much focus here on wrestlers who either totally mail it in or are not very good, and sometimes the two overlap. Almost every other great Evolution tag does not involve Triple H, who is simply not an especially good wrestler on a week to week level. The best Evolution tag work sees Orton and Batista in there for long stretches against Benoit, as he basically spends the year molding them into great wrestlers in a way you may have seen a decade later in the Bryan/Shield series (these have basically the same idea, glue your golden boys to the best wrestler in the company for 6-12 months and force them to get great as quickly as possible). Likewise, there’s a lot too much here of Shawn Michaels and Mick Foley compared to the other two babyfaces, with one (Foley) who would have been out of his element in a match like this even as an active wrestler in his prime and who now is semi-retired and clearly saving himself for the weekend’s pay-per-view, and another (Michaels) who has none of those excuses, but simply turns in an uninspired house show ass performance.

The latter is the one that really hurts, as while Foley is minimized and Hunter only in for bursts, Shawn Michaels is the one who gets the majority of the match’s big moments like the dive into break, the hot tag, and the majority of the finishing run. It’s not surprising, of course it is all about Shawn even when he is like the sixth best wrestler out of eight in the match and the third best on his team, but it’s especially grating when he turns in a dull and passionless performance off the tag and two wildly energetic and/or psychotically intense wrestlers wilt on the apron.

Generally speaking, the match simply lacks the energy of the best Evolution tag work, especially down the stretch, where a lot of things do not go right, and the usually more intricately put together Benoit-led finishing run is instead taken over by a half-speed and quarter-assed Michaels style one instead.

It is not without its virtues though!

The first half in particular is especially good. This is mostly Flair playing the hits against Shawn and then trading leather and some heavy hands (again, Flair never quite gets credit for those great corner punches) with ex-Horseman Benoit. Shelton gets in on the act and the big fella Big Dave has a few really impressive moments. Up until the commercial break, it is a genuinely super fun match. The control work on Benoit and then Shelton is also very good, largely led by Batista and Orton against both guys. The weak spots are there sprinkled in, but most of this is really really good. It’s just that it falls apart in the key moments, and for all of these foundational strengths and great flourishes throughout, it lacks the quality moments in the most memorable parts of the match, and suffers for it in ways other Evolution tags simply do not.

Shawn pins Orton with the kick, whatever.

Real far from the best version of this thing, but a fun enough house show version that just so happened to make it onto television.

three boy

Cactus Jack/Headhunter A/Headhunter B vs Terry Funk/Leatherface/Shoji Nakamaki, WPW Bridge of Dreams ~ DOME SPRING FULL BLOOM (4/2/1995)

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This was a Barbed Wire Board & Barbed Wire Baseball Bat Bunkhouse Deathmatch.

 

It’s the IWA Japan offer match on the famous Weekly Pro Wrestling BRIDGE OF DREAMS show. The famous pro wrestling magazine organized a gigantic Dome show with all the notable promotions of the era throwing a match in. Most were great, but I imagine if you’re reading this, you know that the NJPW guys didn’t quite produce their greatest outing and also that it’s never been released in any sort of official format.

Luckily, you’re reading this in the 2020s and unofficial video of it has been widely available for quite some time now.

It’s pretty great.

There are like ten or twenty different things here worth capturing in GIFs, but I think you should just watch the match for yourself instead.

Really, the match is just packed nearly full of real cool stuff. Terry Funk bleeding up a storm, the classic Foley vs. Funk stuff, Headhunters diving off the top onto Nakamaki lying on the Big Ramp, all sorts of stuff off the top or the apron to the floor near the end, Headhunter dives, a few real sick barbed wire board spots, all sorts of other assorted lunacy. Cactus Jack and The Headhunters getting to team up in a match based around sheer lunacy in the mid 1990s feels a little bit unfair, like Gary Busey and John C. McGinley sharing the screen as different types of psychopaths in SURVIVING THE GAME (1994) and constantly outdoing each other. It’s a wonderful type of thing to see, different sorts of freaks at the peaks of their powers going insane in front of the world.

You can criticize some things, it’s disorganized as hell, there are definitely a few real down portions of this that do hinder them somewhat when they start to build a lot of momentum, but I like that. I don’t want a match like this to really have a flow or to follow a formula. With people like this, stumbling upon any real sense of normalcy would feel deeply wrong. While it holds the match back somewhat, and while it could maybe be tighter, it’s otherwise just about perfect as is.

If you’re going to run a big sort of chaotic mess, this is how you do it. If you’re going to have a match that is simply a compilation of cool shit, it helps to do shit this cool. Not exactly some secret artifact, a road map to a land forgotten by time, but the sort of wild, violent, and reckless mess that I miss seeing performed with the sort of skill and charm that was on display here.

Big, dumb, and wonderful.

***

Cactus Jack vs. Eddie Gilbert, TWA (9/11/1990)

This series was ground breaking at the time, but it’s been almost thirty years. Fair to say they’ll get crazier as the long feud carries on, but this is a fairly normal brawl adjacent kind of match. This isn’t to say that it’s bad at all, but in a world influenced so much by this series of matches, the actual stuff they’re doing is real ordinary from 2019 eyes.

It still works though, and what makes this work so well is all the little things. Eddie begins by having his leg worked on when he hurts it being a real asshole, so he’s walking with a limp for the rest of the match. Eventually takes over with a combination of experience and skullduggery, but he’s constantly getting himself in trouble. Foley isn’t quite FOLEY yet, but he’s very good. Years later, he’s better than anyone ever at creating a sense that everything is about to go wrong and that things are already badly out of control. He doesn’t have that tentirely here, but you can see the signs.

It’s the first match in what becomes a famous program, so it’s not a long one. Much more like a TV match, the kind where you see that guys have something there, so they start a program. As it is here, they’re just setting the table and getting the basics points across. Who they are, and who they are against each other. Jack is a maniac, but still young and still learning, and still trying to actually wrestle. Eddie is an asshole who seems to always eat shit when he bites off more than he can chew, but he’s just crafty enough to survive here. He baits Cactus into running around a lot on his comeback, and can catch him with the Hot Shot for the win.

**3/4