JANUARY 5
1990
The weekly EMLL Friday night show at Arena Coliseo was highlighted by Pierroth Jr., MS-1 & Ulises facing El Dandy, Mogul & Popetikus in a ***3/4 match. The layout was a great progression from matwork to full scale brawling and gave us some very interesting pairings.
1991
Kyoko Inoue and Mika Takahashi had a match on an AJW house show in Tokyo that received a glowing write-up in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, with live correspondents giving the match ****1/2. While the match never aired on television, thankfully, a fan in the audience filmed the match with his camcorder and the tape made its way into trading circles. While I do think the match was good (I would call it a *** match), I was not as high on it as those who saw it live. It was interesting to see Kyoko Inoue, one of the key wrestlers of the 1990s AJW golden age, work a 30-minute draw at this stage of her career, but the match is a mixture of good ideas, overreach and all-over-the-place structure.
Ted DiBiase and Virgil continued the build to their upcoming break-up and feud on WWF Superstars, as DiBiase, while donned in a cowboy hat, ordered an angry Virgil to wipe manure from his cowboy boots.
Rip Rogers, a legitimate territory star, reached his zenith as an opening match guy in WCW on this episode of World Championship Wrestling, which was taped on December 11 at Atlanta’s Center Stage Theatre. Rogers lost every match he had in the company, but he challenged Brian Pillman to a match where pinfalls would not count in the first five minutes, arguing that the reason for his quick defeats was that it took longer for him to warm up. The end result was an action-packed, ***1/2 TV match, with Pillman and Rogers lighting each other up with chops and Pillman even doing a dive from the top of the entrance way.
Also on the show, Lawrence Taylor made an often forgotten appearance on WCW television to hype an upcoming house show match at The Meadowlands in East Rutherford, NJ, where he would accompany Lex Luger to the ring for a football match against “Big Cat” Curtis Hughes. The idiocy that was uniquely WCW was on full display in using a national platform to hype a local house show, a trend that would continue until the Eric Bischoff regime when Bischoff greatly reduced the number of untelevised arena events. Meanwhile, Paul E. Dangerously and Missy Hyatt had a verbal altercation where Missy slapped Paul E. when he insulted her choice of attire.
1992
What appeared to be an incredible 45-minute match was edited to 18 minutes when it aired on UWA television. El Hijo del Santo squared off with his top rival Negro Casas. The match was one of the most mat-based matches the two had against each other, acting as a rough draft of their classic match in September 1997.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x714zb_01-11-1992-santo-vs-casas-uwa-pt-1_sport
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7153y_01-11-1992-santo-vs-casas-uwa-pt-2_sport
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7152x_01-11-1992-santo-vs-casas-uwa-pt-3_sport
1996
ECW ran House Party ’96 at the ECW Arena in Philadelphia. The most newsworthy part of the show was the return of Shane Douglas after a brief and disastrous run as Dean Douglas in the WWF. Among the highlights, Stevie Richards had a match with Sabu that was designed to spotlight Richards as a semi-serious wrestler while Rey Misterio Jr. teamed with 9-1-1 in quite the interesting big guy-small guy team to defeat The Eliminators in a fun match. Meanwhile, Public Enemy bid farewell to the ECW faithful, as they were on their way to WCW. Little did they know their careers had already peaked.
1997
Megumi Kudo’s retirement tour took her to LLPW, where she faced Shinobu Kandori in a street fight at Korakuen Hall. The match was a violent ****1/4 brawl, which peaked from a drama standpoint when Kandori draped Kudo from the building balcony to demand her surrender. Kudo was a different type of worker than most of the top AJW stars at the time; in fact, she was cut from the AJW training camp because she was considered not good enough. She went to FMW where she became a bonafide star, spearheading the women’s division and maintaining a long rivalry with Combat Toyoda, who faced Kudo in one of the greatest matches of all time — her own retirement match — the previous year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugEq-Czkq4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZpfGbS0TkM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTBiQJ9KaiI
1998
WCW Monday Nitro ran their first show at the Georgia Dome in front of 26,000 fans. Lex Luger defeated Randy Savage in the television main event, and Savage attacked Eric Bischoff during an argument after the match, planting the first seed of dissension in the NWO. Meanwhile, Chris Jericho continued building to the heel turn that made him a star, throwing a temper tantrum after losing to Diamond Dallas Page. Ric Flair and Bret Hart also confronted each other for the first time in WCW and had a restrained but great argument to begin the build for their match at Souled Out on January 24. The show drew a 4.3 rating.
WWF Monday Night RAW was taped on December 30 in New Haven, CT. Steve Austin wreaked havoc on everyone in sight to set himself up as the most marked man in the upcoming Royal Rumble match while the Undertaker finally got some measure of comeuppance on WWF World Champion Shawn Michaels, surprising him by popping out of a casket and pulling him in. Meanwhile, Don King hyped Mike Tyson’s storyline negotiations (he had already signed) with the WWF while Goldust demonstrated how out of touch wrestling companies can be when he wrestled Flash Funk while dressed in black face, wearing an afro wig and coming to the ring with a “Shaft” soundalike theme. The show drew a 3.35 rating.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmo8bk_wwf-raw-is-war-01-05-98-part-1_sport
1999
FMW started the new year in style with a great show at Korakuen Hall. Hayabusa faced Tetsuhiro Kuroda in a ***1/2 match while Mr. Gannosuke and Hisakatsu Oya had a show-stealing ****1/4 encounter. Both matches nicely displayed FMW’s stylistic shift to more traditional wresting as the decade grew to a close. Hayabusa-Kuroda included some extracurricular brawling at ringside involving chairs, but they still succeeded in striking a balance between FMW’s roots and the new preferred style of working.
In The “To Watch” Queue:
Mariko Yoshida & Takako Inoue vs Sakie Hasegawa & Debbie Malenko (AJW 01/05/92)
Genichiro Tenryu, Ashura Hara & Masao Orihara vs Shiro Koshinaka, Great Kabuki & Masaji Aoyagi (WAR 01/05/93)
