Falls Count Anywhere

12-18-06

That's right, ladies... belly up to the Garcia bar...

UFC Fight Night
Wednesday was the UFC’s special and I didn’t remember it was on, so I only saw Koscheck vs. Joslin and Diego Sanchez vs. Riggs. The Koscheck fight was actually kinda boring. I mean, yeah, it was Koschack, who I always enjoy, smothering Joslin and keeping him from making any advantage was not great TV, but it was the smart way to make the fight happen. Really, Joslin just couldn’t defend against Koscheck’s takedowns, and if he could have, the fight would have been much different. Koscheck didn’t really do much once he had him on the ground, which was really sad.

The Sanchez vs. Riggs match-up was one of the best going into the fight. Riggs is a stand-up fighter who has some impressive wins and could handle pretty much anyone standing up. Sanchez is tough as nails and has had Fight of the Year-level bouts recently that have gone the distance. This was not one of those fights. Sanchez got a couple of solid punches in, a big knee and that was that, less than a minute. I’ve been saying the Diego Sanchez is the next big thing, that there’s no one nearly in his league when you look at the total package in his weight class, so we’ll have to see if they’re going to give him the big Main Event push he deserves.

TNA Impact!
I caught the Main Event angle which was Cage and Tomko, who are a really good old school team-up, saying that they were going to spill Abyss’ secret to the world. Anyone who has seen the Kane-Undertaker feud from 1997-1998 will know where this goes.

Abyss came out and beat on the guys until Tomko managed to get a clothesline in and Cage started booting him. They had all the refs and folks run in to split them up, but Abyss started giving them Black Hole Slams and Shock Treatments. That was awesome! The lights went out and Sting showed up. Abyss was scared and Sting picked up his belt and walked off with it. Not the best angle, but it worked.

A Sliver of SmackDown!
In what is a theme of this edition, I actually saw a few minutes of SmackDown! in a bar in Downtown San Jose on Friday night. Honestly, it was the worst part too: Sylvan vs. Vito. Vito did a Thesz Press using the dress to heighten the impact. It was weak. JBL was really over-powering on commentary, constantly talking about a segment on WWE.com where Vito kissed him. True, JBL was funny, but not enough to justify the harping.

I’m told that the rest of the show was OK, with a decent match between Mercury and Jeff Hardy and the Cena vs. Finlay match was OK.

The Spoiler
When I was a kid, Dan Jardine was a big star in Texas. He worked under a hood using the name The Spoiler. Unlike most wrestlers of the 1980-1984 time frame, he used the ropes, including walking them like the Undertaker does now. He’d grab the robes and jump up and deliver a knee, or twist around and hit a legdrop. He was older by the time I saw him, but in the 1960s, he was a real flier. Sadly, he lost his battle with cancer this week. He was 66. The Spoiler worked mostly Texas and was a big star at times.

The funny thing is that he was involved in the first match at the Modern Madison Square Garden with a masked wrestler. Vince Sr. brought in Mil Mascaras and had him wrestle the Spoiler, but since the commission would never let a masked wrestler work in the Garden, the Spoiler had always previously worked The Garden (including matches against Bruno Sanmartino) bare-faced, so he worked the match against Mil without his mask!

The Ladder Match
I only managed to find one Armageddon match on the Intarwebs, but it was the right one. There was an unannounced Ladder Match between The Hardys, Paul London and Brian Spanky Kendrick, Dave Taylor and Steve Regal and MNM. Wow. That’s the best place to start.

If you never saw the legendary Ladder Matches between the Hardys, The Dudleys and Christian and Edge, this was nearly as innovative and it was such an incredible spotfest that it apparently killed the crowd for the rest of the show. It starts fast and doesn’t let up. London and Kendrick vs. The Hardys is a match up for 1999’s State of the Art wrestling vs. 2005’s State of the Art Wrestling and it’s so damn good. This was a brawl mixed with a Lucha match and while the selling was questionable at times, they told a good story (especially the part where Regal and Taylor were afraid to climb the ladder). Jeff goes for Poetry in Motion, but flat out lands on his freakin’ face! Kendrick does the Double Stomp off the ladder! Nice!

In the spot that will be talked about for ages, MNM set up the ladders like a seesaw and then were about to Superplex Jeff onto it. Matt makes the save and Jeff leaps over them all and makes the ladder go up, nailing Mercury squaw in the face. It was brutal looking, just bashed him. Mercury was busted in the middle of his face with a broken nose and deep cuts on his cheeks. They took him to the hospital even before the match was done.

The finish was amazing and actually made sense with Regal’s story of being afraid of heights. Regal’s right at the top and Spanky runs up and gives Regal Sliced Bread #2 off the Ladder! No kidding! Brian also landed on his head a bit, which is bad. London and Matt Hardy fought on the top of the ladder until London managed to get the belt to win. Great freakin’ match. Easily better than the Ladder Match at Mania. The injuries to Mercury were pretty bad, but he shouldn’t be out longer than a month.

The New WWE Magazine
A lot has been made of the transition to the new WWE magazine from the old RAW/SmackDown! versions. It’s more Maxim-like and its sales are now higher than the combined sales of the two old mags. I picked up this month’s issue and it was interesting. It’s very first fifty pages of Maxim-like, with brief articles and lots of eye-candy photos, but there’s not much to it.

With Maxim, you get a lot of longer interviews and articles mixed in after those picture-based sections and in the new WWE magazine, you don’t get that nearly as much. Still, the section of all the PPV results is going to prove very useful for me and the centerfold with still of every major finisher is awesome too. There’s a lot to like about the way the magazine is put together, but it would be nice to get some more substance.

DVDs: Superstar Billy Graham and Jake The Snake Roberts.
I watched these two DVDs over the weekend and they’re both solid, though the Superstar Graham one suffers a very simple problem: too much repetition. The same photos are used over and over because there must not be that many good photos from Billy from the 1960s and 70s, which seems odd. The AWA period is glossed over, and they don’t even mention that, without a major program, he and Butch Reed managed to sell-out Madison Square Garden in 1987, well beyond the point where it should have drawn. Of course, the period dealing with his drug and steroid issues was the strongest, and the interviews with his wife were great. The return to the WWE locker room in 2004 was tear-worthy.

Jake The Snake: Pick Your Poison was a much harder-hitting piece. Jake’s an important figure in the history of wrestling and he’s probably the best example of a guy who could have been huge if not for his self-imposed limitations. His early life before wrestling was brutal, and they talk about it a lot. Whereas the Ultimate Warrior’s DVD made him look like a born monster, this treated Jake like a monster who was created by his circumstances.

Sadly, the weakest parts were his early years in wrestling. I’m not sure if they had bought the Watts (Mid-South) or Stampede video libraries yet when they produced the DVD, but they almost completely ignored the Stampede years (where he feuded with Junkyard Dog among others) and the Mid-South years had few video clips. They didn’t even show anything from his first WrestleMania match! Even worse was the fact they didn’t talk about his time in Mexico when he was easily the hottest heel in the world working with Konnan. He caused riots, and they acted like he was retired at the time.

Still, when he got talking about his drug matters, that got good, and they covered every aspect of his several WWE tenures. Well-worth buying, I’d say.

Hopefully, I’ll get the AWA DVD for Christmas.

That’s all for today. More on Thursday, but then I gotta take a week off.

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Chris Garcia