Mantopoulos! Catanzaro!

Vassilios Mantopoulos v Billy Catanzaro (French Catch, 1/29/67)

Man get the fuck out of here. Every day I watch someone new from this stuff and I'm left gobsmacked at how ridiculously good they are. This was my first look at Vassilios Mantopoulos and wouldn't you believe it but here's another guy who looks like one of the best to ever fucking do it. Catanzaro I'd seen before. Like for most people, it was the Catanzaro/Cesca match that was my intro to all of this after it just showed up on the internet one day and everybody was like "this is one of the best matches there's ever been." I don't remember a lot about that specific match now, but it was awesome and I'll go out on a limb and say Catanzaro was good in it. But Mantopoulos is new and I already want to watch every match he's ever been in. Much of this was built around him working Catanzaro's arm, going back to it time and again in a hundred different ways, working some of the smoothest and quickest holds and float-overs you'll ever see, a pocket rocket of a showman. Catanzaro was a wonderful base for all of it, the perfect stooge into the bargain. For whatever reason he reminded me a little of Bockwinkel, maybe from the way he'd move, maybe from his reactions to things, maybe just from how he'd grab an armbar and punt Mantopoulos in the spine. If one thing held this back from being a real upper tier match it was a lack of Catanzaro properly putting a beating on Mantopoulos, even if they flirted with it briefly. Initially Cartanzaro takes over with a couple amazing tilt-a-whirl backbreakers and stomps to Mantopoulos' back. It looks like he's about to go on a run, but then on his third backbreaker attempt Mantopoulos reverses it (it looked sensational, obviously) and is quickly back on offence. I don't mind Mantopoulos working from above for the majority, he's so good that I wouldn't have minded another 15 minutes on top of the 30 minutes we got, just of Mantopoulos running circles around Catanzaro, but it still would've been cool to see our man Billy let loose a bit. Towards the end Catanzaro takes one amazing comedy bump onto the announcer's table (after the announcer sticks a microphone in his face as Catanzaro is sprawled on the apron), then takes a head dive through the ropes on the other side and we soon make peace with the fact we get half an hour of Billy Catanzaro acting the fool.