It's now been 15 years and change since I started up this here stupidity of a blog. Fuckin 15 years! Who'd have thought I'd be 1300 posts deep by now? Not me, I'll tell ye that. As with every 100-post milestone I went BIG for the occasion, watching some matches I've been meaning to watch for ages. A time was had by all. Here are words to express such things.
Harley Race v Wahoo McDaniel (Houston, 2/10/78)
This may be the most Wahoo performance I've ever seen. You hear a lot of stories about Wahoo being one of the toughest men to ever wrestle and if you watch enough of him you can see why people tell those stories (usually the people who wrestled him). Sometimes that stuff can sound like carny nonsense, old-timers waxing nostalgic about an era of REAL men who knew how to WORK and get HEAT. Our time was a better time, by god! My old man and his friends would tell me about some of the people they grew up with, the real basket cases, spouting all sorts of outlandish shit about big Billy McGilverie who once drank a litre of Grouse, beat up three policemen and punched a mountain goat to death. They don't make them like Wahoo or Billy McGilverie anymore, they tell us. Well I never did meet Billy McGilverie and as far as I know there's no footage on this here internet of him beating up policemen or punching mountain goats, but if the NWA Classics on Demand service did anything it was give us a look at the Wahoo we all heard about. This was the Wahoo who'd chop down trees with his bare hands, those chops looking like everything Flair told us they did. He was scooping Race up with body slams like Race was not the size of man Harley Race was, hitting a gorgeous butterfly suplex and his cross body block must've felt like getting smashed by a car. It was an awesome Wahoo performance. And yet somehow I thought he was only the second best guy in the match. This might be the best representation of Harley Race, NWA Champion that I've ever seen, or at the very least it's my favourite. I guess I say that through the lens of what I've come to expect from touring NWA champ, which honestly is mostly driven by years of watching Flair. I don't really know if the chicken or the egg came first, whether Flair was the obvious choice to succeed Race in the long term because of how he worked to begin with, or Flair took parts of what he admired about Race (and Stevens and whoever else) and used them himself. I haven't watched enough non-Flair touring champ stuff in too long to say one way or the other about Dory's reign or Brisco's reign, never mind Thesz or O'Connor or even Rogers. Plenty of what Race did here brought Flair to mind though; maybe less frantic and exaggerated, less constant motion and momentum, but still very much a keep things moving approach. I wonder if Flair got the kneedrops from Harley because there were some absolute corkers here and any sane person would want to steal these. One landed right across the eyebrow, one to the forehead, one to the gut that I thought was about to make Wahoo puke. The first fall was basically the inverse of a heel control segment, with Wahoo using the headlock to grind Race down, letting him up for air before cutting him off and bringing him back down again. Race was taking these awesome bumps off of Wahoo's chops, almost hanging in the air before crashing down on his back, really playing to that back row of the Sam Houston Coliseum. I loved how Race would go to the headbutts in desperation, nailing Wahoo in the gut several times and a few might've been lower than that. Again it reminded me of Flair, where he'd cut people off with those nasty short knees to the midsection. More than the headbutts to the gut it was the headbutts to the face that were truly savage. These were legitimately some of the best headbutts I've ever seen, total Fujiwara shots to the jaw and cheekbone, just ramming cranium into face and every single one of them looked brutal. He backed Wahoo into the ropes at one point and hit about five in succession, then later he outright jumped at Wahoo's face with one like a human battering ram. I also liked how Race would be a little more overt with the cheating the longer it went, the more desperate he got. The headbutts were entirely unnecessary but choking a guy in a front facelock is a steeper sort of cowardly. By the third fall he was fully scrambling and they'd whipped the crowd into enough of a frenzy that someone in the second row was cuffed and carted out by three cops! I guess Nigel McGuinness borrowed Helmsley's Harley Race tapes because Race was a fucking lunatic eating these post shots. I thought they were going to do a blood stoppage the way he was hunched in the ropes spurting blood out his head, but then he sneaks it in the end by reversing a roll-up and grabbing the tights, an NWA champion through and through. This was fantastic stuff. Maybe if I tell myself often enough to go back and watch a bunch of touring champ Harley Race I'll eventually do it some day.
Rick Rude v Masa Chono (New Japan, 8/12/92)
I really wanted to love this. Rude is one of my 10 favourite North American wrestlers ever and I thought he was the best wrestler in the world in 1992, his absolute peak year. I don't know why it's taken me so long to get to this, something that's been heralded for years as a Rick Rude masterclass. Maybe my expectations were too high, maybe I still haven't recovered from Chono fatigue from years past, but it never really landed like I wanted it to. I did at least love Rude being unashamedly, 100% Ravishing Rick Rude. He never toned down anything about his act and it garnered some amazing heat for the occasion. Maybe someone else might've come in and thought to toe the line for the G1 Climax final, but not Rude. This was fully a Rick Rude match, something you could see him working in the States, like his match against Sasaki earlier in the tournament. That meant there were obvious pros and I'd rather see a Rick Rude match than a Masa Chono match anyway, but there were some cons as well. Early on he got bumped around for a string of clotheslines and even took an amusing sort of Flair Flop. I love Rude bumping around off clotheslines so I naturally loved this. When he swivelled the hips like we knew he would the crowd were on his case, then Chono mocked him with his own and the place erupted. Pro wrestling doesn't need to be hard, I guess. Once they brought it down it lost me for a while though, despite moments like Rude trying to break a headlock by yanking on Chono's goatee. Rude is someone who'd slow things to a crawl at times and really grind on a chinlock or whatever, and normally it would work for me and I find him compelling enough in control even when it's brought to a crawl, but this time I was left zoning out and I can't blame it all on Chono from underneath. Rude had used the top rope kneedrop throughout the tournament to get him to the final and it's presented as a big deal, so Chono working the leg makes sense. It neutralises a major offensive weapon and sets up his own STF. I just never found it all that engaging and they spent a chunk of time on it. The final third dragged me back in some, at least. They really put over everything from the top rope as being important and used it to tease or follow through on big momentum-changers. The superplexes swung the tide and any time Rude went up there it created real drama, because everyone knew the kneedrop could follow. Chono had to operate with some urgency to get him down and when he couldn't he at least needed to be upright, which made for a cool progression from Rude hitting the top rope axe handle to the missile dropkick to finally the kneedrop that he wanted all along. The pop for Chono kicking out of the latter was huge and of course Rude was off his chops that it didn't end things. Chono winning with his own top rope shoulderblock was cool too and maybe Rude really bought into Watts' philosophy about moves off the top being treated as death.
LA Park v Dr Wagner Jr. (TXT, 5/11/13)
Is there anybody better at these insane plunder murderfests than Park? I've seen this referred to as the best ECW match ever and boy it might be, but you can take it a step further and say Park is the best ECW wrestler ever. Some FOOL, some uncultured SWINE, will take that as a slight, turning their nose up at such a notion, but I assure you I mean it as a compliment and there isn't a soul I'd rather see work this sort of thing more than our boy LA Park. This had the incredible pre-match image of Park draping a Wagner Jr. t-shirt over a chair in the middle of the ring, setting the thing on fire, then getting down on one knee and flipping Wagner the bird. The fire wasn't even extinguished by the time Park had taken the chair and walloped Wagner with it. The primera followed the tried and true path of a thorough rudo beatdown, only this rudo beatdown was loaded with the tecnico being annihilated with furniture. Some of these chair shots were ludicrous but he was also slamming Wagner on top of pieces of guardrail, throwing a step ladder at his kneecaps, powerbombing him onto a stack of upright chairs. He smashed Wagner's head against the ring post while the latter was sitting up on the turnbuckle, then he grabbed him by a torn piece of mask and smashed his head into the mat like he was trying to break open a piggy bank. To start the second caida we get an amazing grizzly image of Park licking Wagner's blood off his own fingers, the sort of thing that would've had those old ECW bingo halls in raptures. I was expecting the segunda to be a short tecnico comeback fall, but revenge is not a dish to be hastily prepared and I guess Wagner knew that too. The start of the comeback was amazing, Wagner spearing Park through a stack of chairs to counter some other madness Park was trying to cook up (something with the chairs, probably). After that he took his time and paid Park in kind for all of the shit he'd unleashed previously. Park basically takes a chair shot fully in the face and then Wagner bonks him with a glass bottle, smashes the bottle on the ramp and uses a piece of it to stab Park in the head. Park bled so much that at one point the doctor either tried to wrap tape around his head to stem the bleeding and keep part of his torn mask attached, or he was trying to keep his face attached to his face. You couldn't even SEE his face for the blood. It was wild stuff and some of the close-ups were ghoulish. All of those chair shots must've scrambled their brains because for a brief second they went about a rope running sequence. Thankfully Wagner cleared the cobwebs and stopped Park mid-run, put his hands up like "what are we even doing here?" and then went back to chopping him in the neck. You can even forgive the ref' shenanigans at the end with how they were booting each other in the balls before it. This was unbelievable and it's sort of crazy that Park has at least three matches like this that I'd easily call a match of the decade contender. What a mad bastard.
Darby Allin v Konosuke Takeshita (AEW Dynamite, 1/3/24)
Speaking of mad bastards! This was an awesome Darby performance. It had all of his qualities on show -- the bumping, the selling, his knack for making creative yet sensible comebacks (sensible within the context of who Darby Allin is), his timing on nearfalls, everything you'd expect from him. I don't have a whole lot of time to watch a whole lot of pro wrestling these days so in that respect I don't have a whole lot of time for Konosuke Takeshita, but we are all about fairness and impartiality here so credit where it's due, I thought he was great in this and it's easily the most I've ever enjoyed him. It's kind of easy to forget that he's a pretty big dude but he really played up that size advantage here and almost worked like a Coke Zero Takayama with the knees and suplexes. He slowed the pace down and seemed to enjoy being able to chuck the little fella around, and some of those moments where he tried throwing him gave Darby a beautiful canvas to work escapes or teased momentum shifts on. Darby backflipping out of the first big high-angle German was gorgeous and seamless and could not been remotely easy to do, even if it looked like Darby did it with a graceful ease. Darby flies out for a tope and Takeshita hits him with one of the best looking knees to counter it you'll see. Following that up with the triple rolling German on the ramp was lunacy and Darby taking that last one on his neck looked hideous. Takeshita ends up in most trouble when he gets cocky, taking too long soaking up his own bullshit and giving Darby a window for recovery, smashing into the barricade off a missed flying knee. Darby's code red was perfection, partly in his timing of it and the speed with which he hit it, but also with how Takeshita set it up, hunched over selling the leg without making it obvious he was getting into place to take a move that requires an obvious level of cooperation. Allin is certifiable so those moments where he tells someone to hit him don't come off as typical macho strike-trading nonsense and more like a pain junky trying to rev himself up. Only here he asked for Takeshita to hit him again and Takeshita fucking obliterated him with an elbow. The Everest German was complete madness and then the running knee finish was a picture. It's been a while since I've watched Darby and it only took me a couple minutes of this starting to remember how good he is. He is very, very good, brothers and sisters.
There we go then. 15 years, 1300 posts, all nonsense all the time. Here's to 1300 more.
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