brockobama

Wow someone hasn't seen the era-defining Lesnar feud

Gruesome in the most gripping way. Plenty of perfectly reasonable people find bloodbaths too offputting to be worth investing in but I don't know how you couldn't be invested in Jay Briscoe's fight for survival. It doesn't have the same lasting impact as the Mania match by any means but with Samoa Joe nominally the face at the start of this match and Jay far more sympathetic by the end, I think we should be talking about this alongside Bret/Austin as one of the great double turns. Watching this back for the twentieth anniversary I was struck both by how well it escalates and how modest a match it really is. The former comes easy enough—the mounting dread of watching Jay bleed more and more, seemingly faster all the while—but the latter is a thing of beauty. It's less than 15 minutes long, each guy hits a single finisher, I'm not even sure there's three pinfall attempts in this whole thing. It feels so unlike the mental image you have of a big ROH match but neither does it feel out of place on this show, not nearly so much as some other cage matches in the promotion's history. The emphasis on the blood and on a few dramatic moments (as well as the action itself living up to that bloodletting; this has gotta be Joe's best and most brutal avalanche Muscle Buster) gets them so far. Probably a top 100 match ever for me. Some of that's nostalgia but god man, I can feel it in my gut whenever I watch it again. Incredible stuff.

Would Fuego fit in with this Dancer group or am I thinking too literally about that name? Certainly doesn't seem as over as the rest of those guys.

Real frustrating misfire of an apuestas match, even if there's still plenty of good wrestling here. I don't mind Cerebro trying to prove early on that he can beat Santo straight up (and does so perfectly well with the finish to that first fall) but trying to beat the man at his own highflying game doesn't come across nearly so well, both because Cerebro's not nearly so good at it and because it's a real step back from their bloody brawl in February. I'm never sitting there thinking "oh boy I hope the blowoff to this bitter rivalry is less emotionally intense than the matches that came before," you know? Wouldn't say Santito brings the heat here either and is probably to blame for the format this thing takes but it doesn't reflect well on Cerebro when he's as subdued as he is to lose his own mask.

Now this is the good stuff. Don't agree with OJ's assertion that the first fall is sloppy unless he means the cerebrina II finish specifically, in which case it didn't factor much for me. The primera, as with the rest of the match, is gritty and uncooperative in the way I want a grudge match to be and if some tottering around as one guy tries to apply a submission is the price to pay, so be it. Likewise I think Santo's comeback is better than standard (helped by an excellent closeup of Cerebro's bloody mask in the replay of the camel clutch) but I do agree the tercera is where this really rockets off into the stratosphere. Santito really sells the anger of having been cheated by Cerebro last time and brings a level of spite and pettiness that serves this super libre match so well. There's no particular move that's so spectacular that it makes the match special (aside from Cerebro's post shot which is maybe the best of those I've ever seen) but it's approached with an intensity that is undeniably fun. Can't wait to watch this mask match.

Very uneven match but with some real highlights. The matwork in that first fall is certainly quite good, worth the price of admission alone, and while Cerebro's nervousness does allow him to be smothered by Santito more than I'd like to see, he contributes more than his fair share to a memorable primera. The second and third falls, until Santito's comeback, are far more underwhelming. Some of that's on Cerebro not bringing the sort of intensity you need to really threaten a legend in the prime of his career and some of that's on Santo not picking up the slack. Business picks up again once both men begin hitting some beautiful dives, with Cerebro's dive setting up a dramatic countout tease the likes of which I don't recall seeing too often in lucha libre. Finish feels cheap even by indie lucha standards but thankfully this is only the first match between these two over the next few months.

Is there any hard delineation between the Brazo de Plata and Super Porky names? Does he go from using Plata to using Porky at a specific time or does he just use them both interchangeably?

Ah is this why Takeshi Kitano was involved in late '87 with the Sumo Hall riot and everything? Always seemed like a weird celebrity angle even considering his popularity.

Had a question about something in an old Observer and couldn't find anywhere better to ask it so here goes. From the January 7th, 2002 Wrestling Observer Newsletter: Can anyone speak to this claim Dave makes about shooty matwork being to blame for NJPW "losing casuals" and getting its TV timeslot moved? Never heard anything like that before. Seems more likely to me that it was due to any number of other issues NJPW had in the 80s. Not sure if the timeline even matches up here, when exactly did that show get pushed to Saturday afternoons?

The two AEW crowds you saw are not all wrestling fans man, come on

Oh I don't know about that, there are plenty of dumb deathmatch scolds out there. I mean look at the reaction whenever there's a bloody AEW match. I would say there's no small amount of people who think "well I don't agree with him that the (((liberal cabal))) is eating baby brains in pizza shop basements but light tubes are where I draw the line."

There are definitely some telltale signs that they're doing so, at least with a few of their latest shirts

Know so many people who first got into punk/hardcore/etc. because of CM Punk's rise to prominence in the 2000s (and honestly the only reason I didn't was that I got into wrestling later in life)

Damn. He bamboozled us, gang.

Can imagine he's (been) having regrets about the egregious stuff they did in that period after Eddie's death and now feels bad at any mention of his uncle's name on television.