Mat Classics: BB V RR

In conversation the other day, it came up that Rusty had never seen a Bruiser Brody match.  By coincidence, it is the 25th anniversary of his untimely death.  I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on Brody, I've only seen about a dozen of his matches myself.  There is one match of his, however, that I've watched over and over.  It's an unusual match in that Brody's the babyface, I guess because the crowd wanted Rick Rude to get his ass kicked so bad.  Brody did have a long-time reputation for being stiff in the ring, but considering how much time he spent in the south and in Japan, that should come as no surprise.  Along with his notorious toughness and roughness, Brody may be best remembered as one of the great "monsters" of wrestling.  Of course, we're used to seeing 6'8", 300 pound dudes like it's no big deal, but what makes Bruiser Brody special is the aura around him.  He's got an incredible presence, which to me almost seems to bust out of the screen, making him one of my favorite wrestlers to watch.



This match was filmed May 4th, 1986, from the WCCW event Parade of Champions 3. Part of why I like the match so much is the way it looks and sounds, with the natural light, bright colors and washed-out colors, old-school sports announcing, and a freakin' awesome behemoth wild man puttin' the hurt onto the Ravenous One, who deserves his own post someday. The title he's defending in this match is the WCWA World Heavyweight Championship, which was basically the NWA's top belt for Texas, except that WCCW had cut ties with the NWA and rebranded the belt in their own image. In it's previous incarnation, it was known as the NWA American Heavyweight Championship (defended exclusively in Texas,) a title which Brody held 4 times between 1977 and 1979.

What's that you say?  No, I didn't use Wikipedia to write this!  I know this stuff COLD.  Well, I might have done a little fact checking...

By the way Poncho, I tagged all your major posts with "Poncho Madness" so that we can search through some of the content on the site more easily (see bottom of sidebar.)  If you want to use a different tag (it could be anything) I'd be happy to relabel the posts, no problem.  You guys have always been real nice about letting me do whatever with the content of the site, but feel free to let me know if you have other ideas or suggestions for improvements. 

Poncho Man Mat Classic

 Been off the map for a few days...I just started watching Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. From the very beginning. As in I'm working on every show they've ever done (about a 100 or so). I'm actually fast forwarding through a lot of it because it's not the greatest...but a good AJ Styles vs Frankie Kazarian match headlined the first show. So I'll have a review of the first year in a week or so probably.

In the mean time....I randomly found this on the internets. Now the CM Punk dvd tells us these guys have wrestled hundreds of times...and this probably isn't one of their best matches...but I really enjoyed it. I think mostly for the very straight commentary that puts them over very very well. And it's introduced by a big breasted blonde British babe. Bonjour Boys!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4UtOsujdMQ&feature=related

Mat Classics: Japan Number One Forever

First off, thank you for requesting a Terry Funk mat classic.  I had a fantastic time this afternoon rummaging through my files and watching old Funk Brothers matches.  There was one among them that I knew I had to share.  This is it.

Terry Funk and Dory Funk Jr. v. Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy

August 31, 1983

PS: Keep watching after the match is over!

Mat Classics: Innovation and Perfection

As if a 3 HOUR RAW wasn't enough for a Monday's pro wrestling quota, here's another two matches to sink your lousy yellow teeth into.  The first: the debut of Tiger Mask, locked in contest with the irascible Dynamite Kid.  Saturo Sayama, the first of five Tiger Masks, had spent years wrestling in both England and Mexico before he returned to Japan to adopt the persona of the already popular anime character Tiger Mask.  It was the bookers at New Japan that came up with the gimmick, and chose Sayama to fill the role.  Sayama would later say that the Tiger Mask character was "small and shameful", though his matches during this phase are his best remembered (at least by non-Japanese audiences).  Particularly famous are his bouts with Tommy "shotgun" Billington, whose real-life mean-guy exploits may now outshine his legacy as one of the most influential pro wrestlers of all time.  Bret Hart will swear up and down in interviews that D. Kid was absolutely the greatest wrestling mind he has ever known.
The special thing about the Dynamite Kid-Tiger Mask matches is that they're obviously so far ahead of their time.  They're each individually ahead of their time, and they work together in such a fantastic way that their chemistry in itself is also very much ahead of its time.  The following match, dated April 23, 1981, represents the "Innovation" half of this post.




Representing the "Perfection" half of the post is this slice of technical mastership, courtesy Quack and Bryan and the good people of ROH.  Now, I've seen each of these guys in more emotionally jarring matches, but what seems special to me about this contest is that they're only just trying to put on a great scientific match, and to have fun doing it.  They've had the Tiger-Dynamite matches, the Guerrero-Malenko matches, the Bret-Owen matches to study and serve as precedent, so that in this modern era guys like them can just go out and put on a clinic just for the fun of it, and the crowd will have a rich history of context through which to appreciate it, and therein lies the perfection.  This match happened on March 20, 2009.

SCW Mat Classic from the Poncho Man

Honestly I heard Daniel Bryan talking about this in an interview. I was intrigued so I looked it up and I'm disappointed this isn't on any of Shawn Michael's DVD sets. Just a really fun 13 minutes of your life that you'll be glad you wasted. Stupid Marty Jannetty being a druggy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_pPpCab4M

Rusty Nickles presents SCW Mat Classics

Last weeks visit by Marshal really helped pull me out of my wrestling slump. I feel like i can watch it with new eyes. For about a month wrestling felt like homework. But after the 13 hour marathon i am BORN AGAIN!!!

And here is the proof. Inspired by the preachings of Marshal and the Poncho Man i decided to download every RAW from 1996 and start watchin'. And holy cow, I have loved it so far. You can just tell that it's a really interesting time in wrestling. The old wave is slowly creeping out while the new wave is crashing in. In one of the first episodes of the year we meet Steve Austin!!! It's just a great time for wrestling and I'm having a lot of fun plowing thru these episodes.

The following match was shown, abridged, on RAW. It's from the last In Your House PPV from 1995. I really like the way that Bret Hart is selling everything. He gets little spurts of energy and you think he is going to have a big comeback but right away the Bulldog gets the upper hand. You would never see that happen now. Super Cena would never sell like this.

So Enjoy this match and let me know what ya think.

Rusty

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti_xOaQHxoI

Mat Classics: Steamboat-Flair

This match is good clean fun from start to finish, and a much better example of the skills of its competitors than the match I posted yesterday. This is the first of the 1989 series, from a NWA-WCW PPV called Chi-Town Rumble. It features perfect commentary by Jim Ross and Magnum T.A., plus a cameo by Teddy Long.  I could watch it every day.

Ricky Steamboat v. Ric Flair, February 20 1989

A few minutes are edited out toward the beginning, while Flair walks around the ring, stalling to get heat.  My guess is that this version of the match is from a vhs release, which cut some corners here and there to fit the event into a single tape.  As far as I can tell, no action is missing.

Mat Classics: Flair-Steamboat

Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat first met in '78 or '79 working for Jim Crockett Promotions when they were in their late 20's.  Their feud, which spanned the 1980's (with the exclusion of '85-'88, when Steamboat was in the WWE) produced arguably the best set of matches between any two guys in the history of pro wrestling.  In 1989, three matches from their series of four with NWA-WCW earned a 5 star rating from Dave Meltzer.  The other match earned six stars, which remains a unique distinction from the Wrestling Observer.  I can't say I regard Meltzer's opinion as gospel, but he's still a good judge of match quality.  The six star match wasn't broadcast on television or pay-per-view, but there is this footage which is from a closed-circuit feed that aired in the skyboxes live during the event, at the Capital Centre in Maryland.
For the first and last time, I'm posting a match I haven't watched yet.  I hope you guys are excited as I am.

Ric Flair v. Ricky Steamboat, March 18 1989

More trivia- Match of the year in 1989 went to another of Flair and Steamboat's matches, the Clash of the Champions 2/3 falls match I referenced in the last MMS.  That match took place on April 2nd, a few weeks after this one, so maybe Meltzer decided the April 2nd match was better, but that the 5-star system should remain intact, and stuff.  The other piece of trivia I want to share is that Ricky Steamboat's real name is Dick Blood.  Go ahead and look it up.

Mat Classics: Unbreakable Redemption

After railing on Impact on the last Marshall Matters Show, I read an interview with Scott Steiner who was bashing the higher-ups at TNA (being Bischoff, Hogan, and Prichard) and it bummed me out because I used to really like TNA.  It seems so utterly fucked right now that it's depressing.  I've watched this week's Impact, and I certainly won't have anything to say about it on the next MMS, but I didn't want this week to go by without some kind of tribute to the floundering promotion, so here is this: the best TNA match that I've seen.

 AJ Styles vs Christopher Daniels vs Samoa Joe, Unbreakable, 2005

Mat Classics: Riki Choshu and Killer Khan

When I was a toddler, I liked watching baseball.  I'd sit in front of the television and say "Peechu bachu, peechu bachu" over and over, meaning "pitcher batter, pitcher batter".  That appreciation for competition still lives strong today, although my favorite "sport" now is pro wrestling.  While wrestling isn't pure competition, I think of it as being an homage to competition.  Like a novel or film will take the drama of life's experience and lay it out in such a way as to make the most interesting or moving segments all the more poignant, good pro wrestling takes the aspects of sport which are most exciting to a fan, and aims to recreate those feelings of tension, disappointment, and ecstatic release in the viewers, as if they were watching a top notch ball game.  All elements of storytelling are distilled into straight combat, adding into the mix the primal theme of survival, heightening the emotion of the viewer's experience.
Now, I guess to try and fully illustrate that point I should be posting an hour-long epic, but instead I'm going to post this 20 minute battle between Riki Choshu and Killer Khan which I think fits the bill.  It's pretty classic good guy/bad guy action, comin' atcha from August 9, 1986 (AJPW). Riki's the one in the white boots, and Khan is the one in the Mentors hood.  I'd love to see Punk and Lesnar have a match like this if Brock chases the title after he takes John Cena apart next weekend.

Mat Classics: Ring Psychology (Punk-Lethal)

A lot of people online will tell you that ring psychology is a lost art. The funny thing is, many of these people are big CM Punk fans. Punk's skills as a promo master and solid technician are lauded all over the place, but I haven't seen many fans cite him as being the #1 best ring psychologist working today. Which he probably is.
I'm not going to smark out and say that Punk's heel personas have been more effective than his phases as a babyface, or that his matches in ROH were any better than his current matches in the WWE. I believe he's just as good or better on either front. That being said, here's an ROH match featuring a heel Punk against the great natural babyface Jay Lethal. I watched it last night, thought it was really smart, exciting and fun, and thought you'd enjoy seeing it also.

CM Punk vs. Jay Lethal, Death Before Dishonor (7/8/05), ROH

I haven't looked into what angles were going on at the time, so I'm afraid I can't explain the context of the match. They probably talk about all that in the commentary, which I haven't heard. (I was listening to music while watching.)

DBD and a kid i knew - 2003

Here is something i was surprised to find last night. It's from the relaunched Portland Wrestling back in 2003. I used to watch this show religiously on Friday nights while living in Gresham. I think i remember watching this episode when it aired. Dustin Snyder, the guy wrestling some loser named the American Dragon, is a kid i went to school with in Hood River. I remember watching the show and flipping out cuz i had no idea he wrestled and hadn't seen him for at least 5 years by this point. The American Dragon is a guy i vaguely remember from that show. He was on consistently but i didn't really care about him much. This show had so many big personalities that the real solid and talented wrestlers kinda got overlooked, by me anyway. It's funny to see how young DBD looks and how 90's his hair was. I was really impressed by this match then and i love it even more now. Super cool.

Mat Classics: Tatsumi Fujinami and Kerry Von Erich

Here's a terrifically bad-ass match comin atcha from 1986. In the corner to my right- Tatsumi Fujinami. The technical prowess of this guy was a top prize of NJPW for many years. In the corner to my other right- Kerry Von Erich. One of the best remembered wrestlers of his time, whose time came to an unsettling end, as with so many others of the Von Erich family. The athleticism and intensity of this match speaks to the legacy which the Von Erichs imparted onto the wrestling world, as well as to the remarkable quality of entertainment that was coming out of Japan at that time.

Tatsumi Fujinami v. Kerry Von Erich, NJPW, 05/16/86

Mat Classics: Danielson vs. McGuinness, ROH Driven '07

First you saw him compete in the first season of NXT. Then you saw him defeat the Miz for the US Championship. You've seen him compete in many of the best WWE matches of the past year and a half. Now you see him with the World Heavyweight Championship every week on Smackdown and Raw, and hear him heralded on my podcast over and over. But have you ever seen a Bryan Danielson ROH match?
Between 2006 and 2009, Danielson had a series of (I believe) nine high profile pay-per-view matches against Nigel McGuinness. I've seen four of them so far, and the one I've chosen to share here is possibly my #1 favorite DBD match ever. On your mark-outs, get set, go!

Mat Classics: Bockwinkel-Hennig

I first heard of Nick Bockwinkel as being one of the greatest talkers of all time. I started watching AWA mostly to see his interviews, which were great, but what I kept going back for was the matches. AWA was run by Verne Gagne, whose reputation as a "wrestling purist" remains intact more than 20 years after AWA folded up. I had heard of him referred to as such for a long time before I started to understand what "wrestling purist" would even mean in the world of pro wrestling. For a while, I figured it just meant that the characters would be unassuming, and the action in the ring would be- as a rule- boring. It didn't take much AWA to prove that preconception false. Some of the most colorful characters in the biz cut their teeth in Gagne's territory, and some of the matches proved to be all-time classics, such as the one I've chosen to share today.
This is an hour-long bout between the AWA champion Nick Bockwinkel and his young challenger, Curt Hennig, from November 15, 1986. It's one of the finest matches I've ever seen. It's also a shining example of what a "wrestling purist" might consider a near-perfect hour of wrestling. I don't consider myself a purist, but I don't think it takes one to appreciate a match like this. Make yourself a bowl of popcorn, get a few cans of soda ready, and spend some quality time with your computer screen. Hope you enjoy.













If you watch these in a single sitting, does it count towards your 112 in 2012?

Well look at this! A new idea. We both watch a lot of extracurricular wrestling in our spare time. And often times we come across totally awesome stuff that it worth sharing. So i figured we could start posting them here under the new SCW MAT CLASSICS banner. This will also give us a reason to seek out the best matches we can find, other than just watch wrestling cuz it's fun.

The funny thing is, i have the idea but can't decide on the match to post. So i guess ill start with one that i loved when i first saw it. It's CM Punk vs Jeff Hardy in 2009. I know, it's no Savage - Steamboat or nuthin but i really like this match. This was about 2 months after i got back into wrestling and i loved these guys. Smackdown was really good then and this fueud was super hot. These guys kill each other and JR is great as always.

Ill have a more classic match for you soon. Till then enjoy a less inked CM Punk and a half sober Jeff Hardy beating each other like a government mule.
part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg-5qbg66fI
part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FCz5JLz8M&feature=related

How Regal Rules

I was looking across some list of in-ring shoots today, and one stood out in particular. "Lord Steven Regal turns squash match with Goldberg into wrestling match." I probably watched this live on TV- it was the era of WCW that I was really into. Goldberg was riding a wave of popularity, he was racking up the numbers of his undefeated streak, but hadn't entered the main event picture yet. He'd come out every Nitro to great fanfare and squash one of the mid-carders. The match would typically take up less time than his entrance. He was over with my brother and a billion other people like magic. I wasn't a fan of his, I always just liked the wrestling and the promos, neither of which he did very often. Apparently Regal wasn't a fan any more than I was, wasn't going to go down like a chump, and forced Goldberg to have a wrestling match with him, which Goldberg complied to with surprising capability. I'm tempted to do a play by play of this match, because there are so many great little moments, but I don't want to lessen your enjoyment of simply watching it.



Suffice to say, he left WCW shortly thereafter and debuted on Raw using this gimmick:



His manly time with WWF was short, as he was having some personal issues. He checked himself into rehab, and his next TV appearance was back with WCW. That lasted less than a year, and he went right back to WWF. This time it wasn't long before he had his rightful place on the show with regards to how much screen time he got. I couldn't find a video from this era as awesome as the Goldberg match, but in an effort to have a well rounded mini-bio, here's a good one.



I'll be looking forward to someday finding a youtube video of highlights from Regal's commentary, which is the phase of his career which he's only recently begun. One highlight that I can think of off the top of my head is when he said that JTG stands for "Jimmy The Gimmick".