Falls Count Anywhere

04-23-08

Livin' at Boone's Farm...

Last week was the 100th anniversary of the Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt match that most point to as the start of modern professional wrestling. They’re wrong, but it was the biggest match, certainly the longest remembered from that period. It was like Andre vs. Hogan, or more accurately, like Frank Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz.

Gotch was the fighter, the brawler (nearly) who was skilled and sneaky. Hackenschmidt was an incredibly talented wrestler, a submissions master and possessed one of the greatest natural muscular physiques in history. The two had a match that went about two hours. Gotch worked hard and largely worked dirty, and he won. That was the way of the match, and the way of the world at the time.

The two had the famous rematch in 1911 that drew another huge crowd. Those two matches were the most famous in the world for years. It wasn’t until the age of television that a match gained as far-reaching a reputation. In the modern era, with the possible exception of Andre-Hogan and Hogan-Warrior, there are no single matches that are anywhere near as famous. It’s strange.

I started to think about MMA and what it will point to as its Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt. You’d think it’d be one of the early PPVs that UFC did, though I don’t think any of them are much talked about these days. I remember seeing Shamrock vs. Severn and thinking it was going to be a classic, but it was not. Royce vs. Severn? I don’t think so. I usually point to Frank Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz as starting the modern MMA era, but others disagree.

I think it’s likely that if MMA lasts 100 years, people will have at least some idea of the importance of Liddell vs. Couture. I’m guessing that’s going to be the defining match of this era, even though there have been better fights and more important fights when it came to titles and so on.

Sadly, in the regular wrestling world, there’s nothing that can come close to fulfilling the role of Hackenschmidt vs. Gotch. Austin vs. Cena? The Rock vs. Cena? The only one I can see coming close would be Samoa Joe vs. The Rock, and that’s only if TNA got big enough and they built it right. That’s never a good bet, by the way. There aren’t any huge matches that haven’t taken place that feature characters who are big enough to make that kind of impression.

A little piece of news
Ric Flair has been everywhere recently. Throwing out first pitches, taking radio call-in show interviews, doing TV in the Carolinas and promoting WWE shows around the country. If he makes it into his 80s or 90s, he’ll be one of those guys who can tell you about the way the industry changed and how he was the best. The funny thing is, he’ll probably be the first guy to play that role who can without question say that it was true that he WAS the best. OK, Lou Thesz might have an argument, and maybe Blassie, but that’s it!

Samoa Joe’s the new TNA World Champion
In a match that I thought was brilliantly built and might give us a slight change in traditional US wrestling style, Kurt Angle lost to Samoa Joe clean with the Muscle Buster. The match was very interesting as they played with strong-style stuff for the first half. There were a lot of submissions and strikes and everything was stiff. This wasn’t like Undertaker vs. Angle (though I’m sure that UT would have loved to have worked a match like this) as it was more like Shamrock vs. Steve Blackman from 1998. They worked a credible match and the crowd reacted to it big. When they went in on regular wrestling moves as we Americans are used to seeing, they got even bigger reactions.

In the mid-1990s, when Kawada, Kobashi, Taue and Misawa were breaking each other in half with their big Budokan Main Events for All Japan, they used a very similar method to get stuff over. The UWF was still fresh in people’s minds. UWF was shoot-looking wrestling. There was little flash and DQs and such weren’t done. They wanted it to be realistic, but not real. That was still a few years away, though there were a couple of shoots in UWF matches, which is a problem that’s hard to fight off. I can think of a Kawada vs. Misawa match where the first twenty minutes were both guys kicking the hell out of each other and then it became a wrestling match. The crowd was hot for little things like hip tosses after Kawada peppered Misawa with all his kicking. It was an amazing match and one of the best that year in Japan.

I’d like to see them do more of that with Joe and Angle, and to a lesser extent with guys like Alex Shelley and even Robert Roode. They can work that style and make it believable. With the Real Thing (MMA) lurking around, it would be hard to pull it off as a full promotion, but as Bryan Danielson has proven in Ring of Honor, you can add a dash of the legit and make things far more heated. Heck, even Undertaker finished off Edge with the Gogoplata submission at WrestleMania, so many we are on the road to that!

That’s all for this week!

Chris Garcia