TAKA! NAKAGAWA! GREAT SASUKE! DYNAMITE KID! wotta week!- and other stuff I saw and heard this week.
Howdy!
I had a bittersweet week of tape veiwing since a lot of it was from the
80's- and if ever there was a hit and miss decade, that was it.
-I watched a few zillion hours of Pro Wrestling This Week from 1988- up
to Bruiser Brodie's death. This was Joe Pedicino's great syndicated show
that was a sampler of basically all independent wrestling every week.
The show was so chock full of love for the sport that one can overlook
the usually subpar action that was offered up. The late 80's indie scene
was great for angles, pretty bad for wrestling- my favorite being the
Dirty White Boy and White Girl angle from CWF in Alabama where White
Girl, sporting a blackeye, pleads with a face Tom Pritchard to save her
from more beatings from White Boy. Pritchard is giving her a stern
lecture about straightening out her life when, of course, when the future
P L Hopper commences to beating the crap out of him with a chair. He
then proceeds to cut off his hair and string him up with a noose. All
the while, White Girl is laughing and kicking the future Bodydonna. Now
that was good old fashioned hardcore redneck violence. The crappiest
parts of the show are when they would show some horrendous WWF match. I
am sometimes down on today's WWF, but compared to the shit they used to
shovel out (I saw a Hercules vs Duggan match, and StrikeForce twice!)
today's WWF is All-Japan Carnival 365 days a year. It was definitely
cool seeing a formative Paul Heyman, learning how to be a heat machine in
front of a batch of Alabamans. And I never want to see Playboy Buddy
Rose's big fat hinder ever again (and I thought Flair's flabby ass on my
TV screen was bad enough.:)) The most touching show was the tribute to
Bruiser Brodie, about a week after he died and the honest rage of Jerry
Blackwell over the ordeal; it was very heartfelt and beautifully done.
I'm also guessing that Paul Heyman is the only man to be kissed by
Bruiser Brodie on national TV.
-I saw a Dynamite Kid vs George Takano as Cobra match from 1984 and
GEEEZ! I sometimes forget how awesome the Dynamite Kid was in his prime.
The added attraction was that he was totally bald (as was Davy Boy Smith
in his match on that tape- YIKES!). I think this match was better than
most TigerMask/Dynamite Kid matches I've seen. Much stiffer, with great
psychology on both sides, as opposed to Kid dictating the pace and trying
to keep a handle on Sayama. And Dynamite Kid goes to one knee to block a
piledriver like somebody else does now.:) Benoit still has a couple of
steps to go to reach Dynamite's level of arrogance, even if he has at
least matched his intensity. Also on that tape were three David Schultz
matches, who I had not really seen other than when he slapped the hell
out of that idiot reporter and got banned for life. God! These were
pretty choice, pretty technically sound for a redneck ass-stomper, and
his match tagging with Larry Coage against Inoki and Fujinami was
downright brutal.
-I watched NWA True Grit from 1988 and that brought back a lot of good
memories. I was in college and I would go get drunk at parties when all
music and talking stopped as everyone would stop and marvel at the Flair
interveiw on TV at one in the morning. NWA would come to the Richmond
Coliseum every month and we would get ten people together and go. We
would make a cretinously drunken roadtrip to Charlottesville to see the
Great Muta at U-Hall. It was a golden time. The main thing that struck
me about this PPV was that every match was good from top to bottom with
the cream of the crop being the Fantastics vs Steve Williams/Kevin
Sullivan and a truly great Barry Windham/BamBam Bigelow match. It is
easy to forget that for a short while in the late eighties, Barry Windham
was THE best wrestler in North America and if you need any proof, see
this match. Workrate, intensity, stiffness, psychology- he had it all
for a short while. Flair also dragged Luger's loser ass to a great
match.
-Bushy Tail also sent me a truly weird Sheik special on Big Time
Wrestling from 1976. It had matches from the sixties and early
seventies, with the Sheik executing some pretty nifty moves. After all
the Pogo I've seen, its kind of weird to believe how horrified I was as a
kid when he would use that flash paper to burn people's faces. It was
neat to see the pre- "I like to Hurt People" Sheik, especialy since it
spared us the movie's spectacularly horrible soundtrack. The ads for
Cobo arena "with girls, a six man midgets match and over 40 stars"
are priceless.
-I watched the 5/5/96 FMW show that St. Phil sent me and it was about as
hit and miss as any FMW tape with the highlights being the Kudo/Combat
Toyota Exploding Barb wire match, the Cactus Jack swansong and the truly
fantabulous TAKA Michinoku/Koji Nakagawa match which sported three
TAKAbombs and impressive wrestling all around. The Cactus match made me
happy that he is Mankind now and will be able to prolong his career for a
few years because I don't know how many more bumps he could take like
these. I'm convinced that Kanemura enjoys being bodyslammed into barbed
wire and spidernet, that can be the only explanation for anyone allowing
this much pain and agony to be inflicted upon one's body. The Pogo match
was irritating because Pogo once again carves up a wrestler who can work
circles around most people in the sport when he takes the sicle to
Tanaka. The Kudo/Combat match reminded me of a Tenryu/Onita EBW Cage
match I saw once that was cool because there was so much actual wrestling
in it that you forget its an exploding barbed wire match, so when they
hit the wire, the explosion is that much more impressive. This is
definitely the most brutal match I've ever seen involving two women
(including Hotta/Candori), maybe the most overall involving two people
who are actual, card carrying wrestlers. I have to disagree with Phil
when he said that the EBW was more horrifying than the two backdrop
drivers at the end. I think I would definitely want to go head first
into the barbed wire than get that next to last backdrop driver. That
looked career-ending. GAEA just rules at every level. The Chigusa/Shark
Ichyu... Ichuy... Ms. Pogo match was also pushing the limits of what I
can take in a woman's match. Chigusa is so cool, and is the perfect face,
and I hate to see her blade or juice hardway. I was still entranced by
the GAEA matches far more than the men's matches (except for the
TAKA/Nakagawa and the fabulous Hayato match ((who was that masked man who
beat the hell out of him? Between Hayato and Ooya I don't know who the
biggest pretty boy in FMW is.:))
-I started watching a gargantuan Japanese tape and saw the fabulous
TAKA/Great Sasuke match. If anyone ever thought that Sasuke couldn't
have a great match without the Sasuke Special look no further than this
match. All the bumps were within the non-life-threatening range and it
was as intense in the end as any other match I've seen these two in.
-This was a pretty crappy week for free TV wrestling with the best being
the Malenko/Regal match. I love the way Malenko can cover up for a
subpar middle of a match by kicking it into overdrive at the end (see his
match against Liger on Nitro.) I didn't see SummerSlam, being the
Bizarro World John Petrie :)(I must get every WCW PPV, but never get WWF
PPVs) but am looking forward to seeing the Mero Shooting Star Press.
All in all, it was a great week to be a tape trader!
NANIWA~!
Dean Rasmussen, Super Caloiac!
