It's actually ridiculous how Miu Watanabe has no trouble at all scooping up two opponents, holding them and slamming them with the same impact as a single recipient. Gifcam couldn't even capture the full length of time that Watanabe held Mizuki and Uta in suspension.
I've been meaning for several weeks to mention how impressed I am with Mark Davis. He was put in a tough situation between the injuries and loss of multiple tag partners, and chose the risky strategy of changing his act in order to claim a new role for himself. It has worked out really well.
David Finlay became really good during his last two years in NJPW and brought a lot of top performances out of a variety of wrestlers. I don't know if this will necessarily translate to AEW but if it does, a lot of people stand to be surprised by him.
Knight put in a top performance to get himself over and look like a credible challenger for the world title (something AEW desperately needs more of), and you're gonna let this pantomime be the concluding visual? Come on.
I hate bad ref bumps and Bryce's was one of the worst I've seen in ages, made worse by the fact that he kept selling for it rest of the match. Brutal. A real shame to end Knight's biggest match with such hokey shit.
I think AEW laid an egg by signing the Iconics and the Rascalz, while letting LaBron Kozone sign with MLW. I would trade all five of them for Kozone.
Would you be surprised that I thought this was one of the greatest tag matches ever? Because I watch things chronologically, I never saw it until today. These guys were the best. We will never see selling like this anywhere ever again. Amazing. Five stars.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO1f...
I think there's another issue that arises after years of commentators saying "it's the meat slappin meat portion of the show", which is that you subtly reinforce that it's not the main event. You're pigeonholing people.
I'd really prefer it at this point for commentators to drop the hokey "big meaty beef slapping meat" stuff. Not only is it just a corny line but it's getting to be like when the cruiserweights were constantly referred to with diminutive names like "speedster". It just diminishes them.
Mutoh vs Kawada, 2003, #1 Contendership Match
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7yE...
I think every wrestling fan needs to see the Mutoh/Tenryu rivalry and the Mutoh/Kawada rivalry.
A recent consequence of watching old wrestling is that I realized I'm a fan of early bald, Shining Wizard era Keiji Mutoh. It's not a lie that he had a renaissance in the early 2000s, which he ironically achieved by cutting out some of his moves and taking less bumps.
Saito was fine.
They're calling it the Gonso Plex.
I don't know if I've listened to a Beatles album all the way through and I can hum most of those from the names alone.
One thing I remember from when the Janel Grant story first broke was the amount of content creators who immediately thought it was fair ground for fun and games. They read the details and their first instinct was to appropriate them for their particular brand of social media yucks.
He's the embodiment of generational cruelty, which is why in the second half of the book, the children of the characters from the first half attempt to break the cycle.
I thought Mox was absolutely cooked in 2024 and I thought Max was cooked in 2023, but they both reasserted themselves. Strickland floundered a bit last year and clearly needed a reset after the summer, and he's just had a motyc and angle of the year back-to-back.
AEW takes rightful criticism over the length of time they take to elevate people to main event level, but you can also see from the company's headline acts why these people are in the positions that they are. Staying power is a skill in and of itself.
That was an amazing Dynamite.
Mark Davis Vs John Moxley was absolutely savage. Nasty match with a killer finish.
It's such a grift that you can actually pinpoint the exact month when Eric realized there was money in presenting himself as an enemy of Dave Meltzer. The flattening of history thanks to WWE, social media, Conrad podcasts etc has obscured the fact that these two were co-operative until recently.
The outrage over WON awards (awards these people claim not to care about but are also very mad over) has me remembering that Bischoff and Meltzer used to be friendly. Eric guested on WOR and put Dave over on the first episode of his pod. His perfomative hatred of Melzter is a very recent invention.
I wonder how many people know that Catherine and Heathcliffe on the moors is only one aspect of the 1st half of the book? There's an entire redemptive arc with their children in the 2nd half that has basically never been adapted.
I dismissed the Wuthering Heights movie once I read that it was the millionth adaptation to ignore the 2nd half of the book. Leaving out the characters of Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw is now an automatic fail, for me. Somebody has to be brave one day and actually adapt the actual book.
Big ups to Fray Tormenta's adopted son. What a journey he's had: From the biggest ticket mover in wrestling, to the wilderness years when it looked like he was cooked, to massive star and biggest ticket mover again.
Crimson winning the award in 2011 is how you can tell the haters have their eye on the ball. They didn't let themselves be distracted by several other prominent hacks that year and recognized Bischoff and Hogan trying to pull the wool over our eyes with a cheap musclehead who wasn't any good.
The voters really nail this one each year. I think it's the most consistently accurate award out of the whole WON Awards.
It has been posited to me that this is a reaction to the methodological change in Nielsen ratings that basically hurt all of wrestling (which I have given up trying to understand at this point). So the lesson is: If you like this style of booking, don't watch the show.
