Nine hundred! What a nonsense. Anyway I watched some of my favourite matches and wrote words about them. Read them or don't, I'm not here to tell you what to do.
Andre the Giant v Killer Khan (New Japan, 4/1/82)
Going through the DVDVR New Japan set, this was one of the matches that blew me away most. People had said, "wait until the Andre matches, you won't believe how good he was" and it was like, sure, I guess I'll keep an open mind. Of course the narrative around Andre back in 2009 was different to now. We had some good stuff, but not nearly as much as we have today and nobody had run through enough 80s New Japan TV to find things like this. Andre being amazing isn't an unusual talking point in 2021, but back then, seeing things like the Hansen match and then this...holy shit, Andre the Giant actually fucking ruled! This was doubly surprising for me personally because I'd already seen a WWF version of Andre v Khan and it wasn't very good. It was nothing like this. Andre was just incredible here. Killer Khan is not a small individual. At 6'5 he's not even a regular-sized individual, yet Andre made him look very regular. Khan tries to put the boots to Andre early, but Andre is too busy shouting at spectators to even notice. When he does decide to pay attention Khan swiftly wishes he hadn't because Andre just grabs his whole entire head and tries to squeeze it like a grape. I know Andre was billed as being bigger than he actually was, but his hands are truly gigantic and they smother Khan's head completely, so it's not hard to see why people bought Andre being 7'5 or whatever (the afro adds about six inches anyway). Khan tells the ref' he's being choked and Andre, between bouts of telling people to shut up, is affronted, releasing Khan so he can demonstrate to the referee what he was actually doing, which the referee sells like his throat was just crushed. Above all else it was Andre's selling that made this. Khan has two weapons - the Mongolian chops and whatever the hell he can hit Andre in the leg with, whether it's kicks, punches, wrapping the ankle around the ropes and pulling, anything that'll do the trick. With the chops Andre goes from being surprised, to visibly rocked, to hastily trying to shut Khan down before he can string a bunch together. My favourite instance of this is when he just catches Khan's arms almost in an underhook before chucking him with a suplex. With the leg selling it's sort of gradual over the course of the match. To begin with he can shake it off, but the longer it goes and the more Khan goes back to it you can see him struggling to even stay upright. He'll have Khan on the ground and attempt to squash him, but if Khan moves then Andre suffers doubly because of the impact on the leg. Which makes sense when you look at the guy. If you're him, think how difficult it would be getting up after hitting the mat on GOOD legs, never mind after clattering a bad one knee-first into the canvas. The fact Khan even pushed him to take those risks is probably a rub in and of itself. Finish is great. Khan reels off some of those chops so Andre covers up with his big paws, effectively forming a barrier that Khan can't get through. So he goes up top and tries one off the ropes, but Andre has it scouted and squashes him dead while the chance presents itself. Andre really was awesome.
Midnight Express v Southern Boys (WCW Great American Bash, 7/7/90)
Still great. I'm not really someone who re-watches matches very often, but I've maybe watched this more times than any other match. It's just...easy to watch. It has all the elements of an awesome southern style tag. It has a great crowd. It has that cool early 90s WCW aesthetic that I'm very nostalgic for even growing up as a WWF kid. It has great performances across the board. It has extremely high re-watchability, is what I'm saying. It's also one of the all-time great Bobby Eaton shows. He gets beaten from pillar to post during the babyface shine and manages about 45 seconds of respite on the apron. It's the sort of thing you'd see as the basis for a babyface turn when someone feels like their partner is feeding them to the wolves. Then during the Smothers heat segment he's lucky if Lane spends more than half a minute in the ring at a time, and if he does it's usually off the back of a double team that Eaton is involved in anyway. He worked his socks off, did Bobby. That said, the Lane parts were awesome. I'll always have a soft spot for Sweet Stan, especially his trailer park karate, and this had possibly the best trailer park karate in living memory. Smothers was just destroying Eaton with thrusts kicks, so when Lane gets the tag and comes in stretching his leg over the top rope there's a ripple of anticipation from the crowd. This is Baltimore, Maryland. This is NWA country, dammit! They're plenty hip to Stan Lane's karate so they know exactly what's coming. Lane and Smothers establish their stance, Smothers steps in and backhanders Lane in the mouth, everybody ate it up completely. They face off again, this time Lane shoots in first, but Smothers blocks it and drops him with another backhander. Everybody ate it up completely. Then they step up for a third time, and if there was any question whether this was a Midnight Express crowd it was answered when Lane unloaded a flurry of dodgy thrust kicks. And that was another cool thing about this. The crowd weren't exactly shitting on the Southern Boys, but the Midnights were the Midnights and they weren't likely to be booed just because Cornette was running distractions. By the end the support was at least split though, so it's a testament to how everyone involved played the situation. The string of nearfalls before the finish are just magic and for a second there I actually forgot who won, so I bit huge on at least one of them. Pure, unfiltered southern tag wrestling, you are Number 1 and the Best.
Negro Casas v Ultimo Dragon (CMLL, 3/26/93)
I'm not sure there's anything left to say about Casas at this point. I mean I'm about to rattle off many, many words about him right here anyway, but I don't know. It's hard to articulate just how good he was in this. How can you really do justice to his performance? As a match I thought this was amazing when I first watched it 10 years ago, and after seeing the lead-in trios a while back it feels even richer taken in context. In those trios Ultimo ran circles around him and Casas had no answer, but he did everything in his power not to let it show. He'll also never lack for confidence, so with a new day comes new opportunity and he was in high spirits to begin. Then he asked for a handshake and promptly got put on his backside. The first caida was an exceptional matwork fall and the most impressive thing was the struggle. I'm not arsed about arguing with anybody who thinks there's no struggle in lucha or that everything is rehearsed; if you like it you like it and if you don't you don't, but there was a clear sense of struggle in this and Casas was incredible during all of it. Ultimo certainly held up his end as well, and I think the way he leaned into some of the matwork you'd see more in New Japan than CMLL gave it an almost hybrid feel. It had elements of their feud up to this point, with Casas never being able to crack the code nor manage to avoid Ultimo's kicks (this time it was a spin kick that caught him flush in the face). In the segunda there's a clear shift in Casas' mentality. He's dropped falls to Ultimo in trios matches and now he's 1-0 down in a title match, so even if he doesn't lose any confidence - he's Casas and he never will - he absolutely does ramp up the surliness. He starts throwing strikes, looking Ultimo in the face before he does it, even rolling out one of his own roundhouse kicks that was just gorgeous. When he has Ultimo in a sharpshooter and Ultimo grabs the ropes, Casas shakes his head and looks at him like "will you just give up already?" He's at the end of his tether and he needs some sort of victory soon. The return to the sharpshooter made for a great build to Ultimo giving up and there was almost a sense of relief from Casas when he did. The low blow between the second and third falls was amazing and Casas' dismissiveness when questioned was perfect. He was petty and spiteful and it only fuelled his competitiveness. The tercera was truly befitting of a deciding fall in a title match and of course Casas was absolutely sensational. He turned up the nastiness even more (loved him biting Ultimo's mask while he had him in the camel clutch to pull his head back further), then bumped like a maniac for Ultimo's comeback. The dives weren't just great in isolation, they were great because they continued the theme of their feud. Casas could avoid the first attempt, but Ultimo had that scouted in turn and in the end Casas wound up in the second row...and then up the ramp...and there was nothing he could do in either instance. All of his insecurities manifesting themselves when he falls off the top rope is one of the all-time great Casas moments. You can see him contemplating it, sheepish at first before buying into his own bullshit. Then he faceplants spectacularly and there's never been anybody quite like him. A minor quibble might be the ease with which transitions were come by in the last minute or so, but it's hard to ding them too much. I don't think this a carry job by any stretch because Ultimo absolutely held up his end, but it is one of the best performances of Casas' career, in a year where he may have been at the very peak of his power, where he took a great match and elevated it to one of the best of the decade. The greatest to ever do it.
Shinya Hashimoto v Toshiaki Kawada (All Japan, 2/22/04)
Maybe the last truly spectacular Hashimoto performance. What a way to go out on your shield, though. On the surface I guess this is basically a dual limb-work match, but not to sound all corny and dumb it came off a lot deeper than that. Very few wrestlers in history have a feel for the dramatic quite like Hashimoto and he milked every strike, every submission, ever ropey landing, every stretch of sinew on that shoulder. I've seen criticisms of Kawada's leg selling in this, and while I wouldn't necessarily say it was perfect I thought it was at least really good. Maybe he drops it a bit in the long term, but I'm not too bothered. Hashimoto volleys the crap out of it, obviously. Nobody throws a leg sweep like Hashimoto and this one looked like at about halved Kawada's leg at the knee. Hashimoto's shoulder is taped up so you expect Kawada to go after it at some point, and he does and he volleys the crap out of it. The shoulder coming into play was a great moment as well, with Hashimoto refusing to be suplexed and Kawada almost tripping him instead, which led to Hash landing all awkward on his collarbone. Watch these strike exchanges and tell me folk today can still do strike exchanges. And then down the stretch there's about a dozen moments of Hashimoto trying to grimace and fight his way through injury, and not a single person in wrestling has ever done that as convincingly as Hashimoto. The brainbuster DDT, the gamengiris, the molten heat for a minimal number of nearfalls, Kawada modifying the stretch plum to target the shoulder, Hash refusing to quit. This was good pro wrestling, boys.
John Cena v Brock Lesnar (WWE Extreme Rules, 4/29/12)
Even almost ten years and a bunch of Lesnar spectacles later this still feels huge and totally unique. I'm sure I saw it described once as WWE's version of Hashimoto/Ogawa, and even if Cena isn't Hashimoto I thought he did a great job being what he needed to be on the night -- the pro wrestling hero fighting the odds against an invading terror, defiant and courageous right until the bitter end. Lesnar was an amazing Ogawa. The shoot elbows early were ridiculous and you know Cena was crazy enough to let him do it, but at the time we hadn't seen anything like that and it was a pretty clear sign that this would not be your standard WWE main event. I guess I can see people thinking the ref' stoppages early on hurt the flow, but I thought they drilled home the scope of what Cena was facing and if nothing else it let us see Lesnar pacing and bouncing around like an animal. Even though he never lost that aura, not even at his most Suplex Cityish, this was a wholly different sort of shit getting real to anything that had come before. Everything he did looked like it was meant to break bones. The elbows, the brutal knees to the ribs, the way he threw Cena shoulder-first into the post and barricade, the way he wrenched those kimuras. At one point he literally picks Charles Robinson up by the belt, with one hand, and throws him in the ring like he was an overnight bag. I thought Cena was really compelling trying to fight back while selling all of this torture, how he'd hang that arm down by his side, how he'd grimace and drag himself to his feet like a man who'd been hit by a bus, and for a partisan Chicago crowd I think he'd managed to bring a decent amount of them to his side by the end. It was pretty impressive. The deadlift out of the kimura was some amazing last gasp superhero shit. He's brilliant at those moments anyway, but he milked that one to death and I loved Lesnar's face as he realised what was happening. Lesnar clearing the ropes off that flying clothesline and about snapping his ACL was insane, but his reaction to it couldn't have been any better. It was almost shocked recognition that even that couldn't hurt him, laughing in the middle of the ring, arms aloft, indestructible beyond his own imagination. In that sense I don't think they could've come up with a much better way of giving Cena the win. It was like the hardest-earned banana peel finish ever and Cena sure wellied Lesnar with that chain-wrapped fist. They kept showing us that chain throughout the match, once with Cena trying to use it as a weapon, once with Lesnar suggesting he might do the same only to drop it because he doesn't need to, then it was used later to hang Cena by his ankles from the ring post like he was a deer carcass (blood pouring from an open wound just to really sell the visual). You always had the sense it would play a part and the part it did play couldn't have come off any better. I could see someone calling this a top 10 match in WWE history and I wouldn't spend a ton of time arguing with them.
So there we have it. Here's to nine hundred more. Prolly.
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