One bastard thousand! Who'd have thought it? Not bloody me, I'll tell ye. I watched a few matches, a couple I'd never seen before but had always been meaning to. The pro wrestling is good. Witness.
Jim Breaks v Adrian Street (Joint Promotions, 2/12/72)
What an Adrian Street performance. This is the first and only real peak Street I've seen, all of the other Adrian Street matches I've watched have been from much later in his career, and even if he's always fun in them they all felt pretty late-career greatest hits tour. But this was something else entirely and maybe the best exotico performance I've ever seen. The way he'd flip a switch from prancing around trying to rile up Breaks to ripping at his face like a vicious maniac was incredible. The early headlocks were airtight and then he'd escape holds and smash Breaks in the nose with a forearm, fish hook him into a cravat, bodily fling himself at Breaks to grab a bodyscissors, just relentless. By the end of the match his immaculate hair looked like a bird's nest and he was practically seething at even the sight of Breaks. Breaks had no issue acting the prick either so it made for an awesome heel v heel dynamic. Cheapshots all over the place, nasty limb wrenching, shit-talking between falls, everyone in attendance lapping it up. Really the way they escalated things from start to finish was done about as well as I've ever seen in a match. You could just tell from how they moved and circled each other that they'd literally be at each other's throat before long and by the time Breaks started working for that wrist lock you bought him wanting to snap the thing. I've never really seen that Marty Scurll fella who I know does the finger-breaking sound effects so Breaks doing it here didn't even come off as silly, and Street sold it all like his wrist was being mangled anyway. I haven't watched nearly enough 70s Euro footage in general but this is probably best WoS-style match I've seen. Give us all of the Adrian Street.
Bob Backlund v Ken Patera (Texas Death Match) (WWF, 5/19/80)
This'll always have a special place in my black and decrepit heart. President Bobby Backlund himself will probably always have a special place in my heart for that matter. Backlund was a revelation to me way back in the simple and innocent times of like 2006. The Smarkschoice best WWE match ever poll was the first big message board poll/project I really participated in, and through that process I watched a bunch of peak WWF Champion Bob Backlund. It sort of blew me away and behind Flair, it was probably Backlund who was my biggest gateway to all of the 80s territory wrestling I wound up hunting down, and am still hunting down a decade and a half later. My very first post on this here stupidity of a blog was a Bob Backlund match. A few years later I took part in another greatest WWE match ever poll (this time on another forum, as I am a glutton for punishment) and I had this as the 9th best match in the history of the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment. Many years have passed since then, many matches have been watched, many tastes have changed. Backlund isn't really someone I'd call a favourite anymore and I'm not so sure I'd think this is still a top 10 WWE match ever, but I am happy to report that it held up well and I thought it was great. In 2010 I might've thought Backlund was the driving force, but in 2022, nine hundred and ninety fucking nine blog posts later, I thought Ken Patera was the star of the show. As far as Texas Death Matches go it wasn't much of a wild brawl. It was more of a straight wrestling contest that took some dark turns, and Patera was great at being the one who steered things there, at first because why wouldn't he? but later because his desperation called for it. He was full of confidence in the beginning, one of the only men in New York who could claim to be stronger than Bobby Backlund. Bob would often control large parts of his matches and at times he felt even more indestructible than Hogan, but here he felt very destructible and Patera went about business like he knew it. Structurally it was much more about Patera in control, with Bob's comebacks being built around big paybacks. It worked great because basically every single one of those paybacks ruled. Backlund's piledriver looked like it compressed Patera's spine, his big atomic drop would've sent Patera into the fourth row if he hadn't grabbed the rope as he flew over it, the posting and barricade-ramming on the floor to draw some sweet plasma, every moment like that was awesome. By the end Patera had to resort to a low blow and even in a match where no holds are barred that still feels dirty. When he brought in the chair his head had gone completely, so I suppose it's only fitting that that was his undoing in the end. And say what you like about Bob being a goof with silly facial expressions and ropey selling, but that pop at the end is as loud and sustained as anything you'll hear for Bruno or Hogan or Austin. The guy was over as a bastard for a minute there.
Atsushi Onita & Tarzan Goto v Masa Kurisu & Dragon Master (Texas Street Fight) (FMW, 4/1/90)
I once saw this described as FMW meets Tupelo concession stand brawl, and if that doesn't sound like perfection to you then I'm not sure why you're even reading this. And as far as 10-minute prison riots go you can't really get much better. This is the second Kurisu street fight I've watched this month and it warms by heart that he's kitted out in the exact same flannel shirt and cowboy boots for both. Onita grabs him in a rear waistlock and Kurisu drops to his backside and I'm thinking he's actually going to try and counter it with an armbar. But no, he just yanked off his cowboy boot and smashed Onita in the face with it. Dragon Master was a fucking psychopath in this, winging chairs with abandon, smashing folk in the ankle, the back, the hip, the head, using the flat of the chair, the edge of it, everything with a real Murakami-ish recklessness. I assumed the part where Onita was trying to crawl into the crowd and Dragon Master was throwing chairs at him led to several lawsuits from audience members who went home with chipped teeth or busted shins. Goto was lying face down on the floor at one point and this lunatic with a head like a 5-year-old's egg painting was just obliterating him with chair shots. Truly the greatest Dragon Master performance of them all. Goto is dressed like someone on work experience at a construction site and it's just about impossible not to love that grizzly little demon. Onita is bandaged up everywhere like a patchwork quilt and his big putting his body on the line moment came when he used his body as a shield as - you guessed it - Dragon Master was trying to do a murder on Goto with a chair. Kurisu taking not one but two powerbombs on his neck like that is sort of harrowing and this was fourteen stars.
Bret Hart v Stone Cold Steve Austin (WWF Wrestlemania 13, 3/23/97)
I'm not really sure if there's anything left to say about this. 25 years is a long time and there haven't been many wrestling matches with more words written about them since they happened than this one, so I won't go on forever. The work itself was great. The heat, the way they built to the big moments, the paybacks and everything else. Even the early crowd brawling was decent. It's easy to say now when we know what Austin would become, but this really does feel like the moment where goes from "this guy has something special about him" to "holy shit this guy could go nuclear." That said, he wasn't quite there yet. He felt like next man up, but Bret still felt like The Man. Whether you think he WAS The Man, or if it was Michaels or whoever the hell, it doesn't really matter - what matters is that Bret worked this like there was no question that it was him, the LeBron to Austin's Giannis (or KD or whoever the hell you think). In some ways it was maybe the last true underdog babyface performance Austin had, even if he never technically started the match as a fully-fledged babyface. After he went supernova it never really felt like he was a true underdog. Didn't matter if he was in there with Undertaker and Kane, or Foley with McMahon and Patterson and Briscoe doing everything they could to screw him over, he was Stone Cold and had godlike momentum that couldn't be be halted. Bret was still above him in the pecking order at this point and he carried himself like someone who wasn't about to relinquish his spot. You could get all poetic and pretentious about symbolism and the story and the way they told it, and to be honest it's one of those matches that warrants it. Bret is sick to death of Austin and needs to be rid of him. Austin is a madman obsessed with making Bret's life a misery. You could say it was a matter of respect but I'm not sure it was, at least not for Austin. I don't think Austin respected anything and I don't think he cared about being respected, not by Bret, not by anyone. He wanted to win because Bret said he couldn't. Even bleeding buckets, locked in a hold nobody escaped from, that obdurance kept him going until he physically couldn't. In the end maybe never earned Bret's respect, but he earned the people's whether he wanted it or not. Maybe he went on and had himself a career after that.
El Hijo del Santo v Blue Panther (Monterrey, 4/9/00)
In a year that had the iconic Villano III v Atlantis feud, this to me is still the best wrestling to come out of Mexico in the year 2000. There are a few types of wrestling match about which I'll often say "this might be my favourite kind of wrestling." There's your real top-drawer shoot style, a bit of RINGS, UWF, PWFG, or the more hybrid-style Battlarts. There's your nuclear interpromotional wrestling, the WAR v New Japans and New Japan v UWFs of the world. Sort of along the same lines there's your big multi-man tags, often with that interpromotional twist as nowhere does a big multi-man match better than they do it in Japan. There's your timeless southern style tags, the sort of thing I can throw on after not having watched any wrestling in months and instantly remember why I'm still obsessed with this nonsense. There's your high-end lucha brawling, often in the form of an apuestas match that ends with someone bald or maskless. And then there's this type of lucha, the lucha title match loaded with that lucha matwork that you'll either think is too cooperative and showy or something that makes you go, "you know what, this might be my favourite kind of wrestling!" I don't know which of those styles is my absolute favourite, but I love them all like my own children and Santo v Panther is about as good as you'll get with lucha matwork. The first two falls here are roughly eight minutes in total, yet they don't feel rushed or stunted even with the traditionally short second fall lasting all of about 90 seconds. Everything is slick but never at the expense of the struggle. The reversals are fought over, the little details making everything pop, like when Panther shifts his body on the mat to reverse a key lock into a hammerlock. Panther also worked this like he had something to prove, every time he wrenched on a hold, every whip on a takeover, like he was using every pound of his slight weight advantage to its fullest. The tercera caida propels this into the stratosphere, which is really what you want in a deciding fall after two falls of Santo/Panther-level grappling. Panther picking up where he left off after the segunda by wrenching at Santo's arm built some real drama, and there were a couple points where people absolutely bit on Santo submitting because of it. The fight over the Gory Special, the setup to Santo's tope, the tope itself, all of it ruled. Even the finish was about as clean as you'll get for Monterrey. It came off great too, with the ref' getting physical with Santo to break the camel clutch only for Panther to use the ropes to seal the deal. A bit of a double slap in the face for the son of El Santo. An outstanding match and one of the best of the decade.
So there we go. A thousand posts. What have I done with my life, you ask? Well I'll leave that up to you.
Here's to a thousand more.
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