March 29, 2004 
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Final Cut, this week I am back, healthy and fighting fit after my incurable bout with the dreaded influenza. And yes I know this column is going out a couple of days late and for that I apologise, my search for a new computer is still continuing.
Last week was the official launch of The Wrestling Channel on Sky Digital channel 432 for the majority of the lucky people living in Great Britain. Many scoffed that it would never happen, well, it has happened and well done to the people who made it happen.
Most professional wrestling fans that I meet only watch and enjoy World Wrestling Entertainment programmes and according to these people “anything else is crap!”
So since The Wrestling Channel has begun airing a wide variety of programmes from promotions all over the world, some of which have long since become defunct, I decided it was now time for me to open my eyes to the world outside the gates of World Wrestling Entertainment land.
NWA:TNA – Whilst watching NWA:TNA I get the distinct feeling that this show was a mixture of World Championship Wrestling meets Extreme Championship Wrestling for some weird reason. The show has all the razzmatazz of World Championship Wrestling but was produced in the style of Extreme Championship Wrestling.
Most of the former World Wrestling Entertainment stars that we remember can be found lurking in this promotion, from Jeff Jarrett and Road Dogg, right up to K-Kwik. Oh and Roddy Piper.
I am not too sure if this company can become a legitimate challenger to World Wrestling Entertainment in its current format, the promotion’s programme is not even available in parts of its own country and we only get a measly show, which is just like Afterburn, in the United Kingdom.
But despite the drawback of having people like Piper and Russo in main event story-lines and the fact that most people have to rely on tape traders to watch the show; the company has safely placed itself as the second most productive company in the wrestling business.
Not a bad display of wrestling from the likes of AJ Styles and their X-Division just blew anything the Cruiserweight division of World Wrestling Entertainment has ever done clear out of the water!
Pro Wrestling NOAH – Japanese wrestling is not to my liking. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I like to know who is in the ring and what the commentators have to say and it is near impossible when the letters are in Japanese and the announcer and the commentators speak in the same language.
But I decided to give it a go and settled down to watch my first ever Pro Wrestling NOAH show. Even though I had no idea who was wrestling or what the commentators had to say I did enjoy the matches.
On World Wrestling Entertainment programming most of the matches look so alike, with each wrestler hitting the same moves. Not in Pro Wrestling NOAH. Each match was different.
Whilst watching matches that are part of an American or a United Kingdom promotion you always keep that little eye out for the run-in, not in Japan, in fact whilst watching Pro Wrestling NOAH and even New Japan Pro Wrestling I saw no run-ins at all!
Definitely something I will be going back to more often if this is the calibre of the matches on offer.
New Japan Pro Wrestling – After immensely enjoying my first viewing of Pro Wrestling NOAH I decided to settle down and watch to see what one of their rivals, New Japan Pro Wrestling, could offer me. I expected it to be exactly the same as Pro Wrestling NOAH; boy was I in for a big shock!
Although the guys on the show performed some of the same moves nothing else was the same at all. The way I understand it Japanese promotions hate the idea of their guys working for other promotions and try and make their matches as different from the matches of other Japanese promotions as they can.
If the American and the United Kingdom promotions could follow this example then we may get some very interesting results.
Classic Memphis – I was actually looking forward to this, I was expecting to see some real old fashioned good American rasslin’ but what I saw was basically nothing more than a poorly thought out talk show with some wrestling personalities as guests.
Yes we did see a couple of clips of wrestling but hardly half of the show was devoted to wrestling matches, the rest was just two people I had never heard of before talking and joking on a settee with Jerry Lawler and Jimmy Hart.
This is sadly one programme I will not be making an effort to watch again in a hurry.
Frontier Wrestling Alliance – The company that is often called the number one wrestling promotion in the United Kingdom. Their production certainly looks more amateurish than their cousins in America. Your top wrestler walking to the ring accompanied by a song that was sung by Boyzone, Five or some other lame boyband is not going to impress anyone any time soon.
But all that aside it is the actual wrestling content that we are interested in today. The first Frontier Wrestling Alliance programme that The Wrestling Channel aired was entitled ‘Season’s Beatings’ and the main attraction was a tournament featuring Johnny Storm vs. Jody Fiesch vs. Doug Williams vs. AJ Styles.
After video-taping the programme and watching it twice I have been mightily impressed with what I have seen. Obviously this was not my first viewing of a Frontier Wrestling Alliance event, I have seen them at York Hall twice before and have even ventured out to Broxbourne once or twice.
But then I had my head half buried in a notepad struggling to come up with a review to befit the event in question. This time I had no notepad, just my two eyes trained on the action through out.
Johnny Storm is a fantastic talent no matter what other writers may think of him. His cocky style is a nice change from the norm that we may see on an All Star show in some backwater town.
Jody Fiesch has retired and it is a bloody shame because he had all the right parts to make it right to the top in Europe, Japan and America.
As for Doug Williams, well we all know the success that this young man has had and has brought a lot of exposure to the British wrestling scene.
Look out for the excellent Frontiers of Honour show to make its way onto the channel sometime in the very near future.
Major League Wrestling – Major League Wrestling is no longer with us, one of the many promotions that was seemingly run into the ground by incompetent people who laughingly call themselves promoters.
From what I saw the promotion saw the void left in the market by Extreme Championship Wrestling and attempted to pull in the fans of Extreme Championship Wrestling. Sadly they failed to take note that although they were a nice promotion Extreme Championship Wrestling did go bankrupt.
The company tried to mimic Extreme Championship Wrestling so much that they have also gone down the same road that Paul Heyman’s ‘family’ took on their way to bankruptcy.
I have no idea how many shows The Wrestling Channel have of Major League Wrestling but from what I saw they did once have a good thing going. So sit back and enjoy what they did put out before they closed up shop.
CMLL – Mexican wrestling has fallen foul of the same problems as Japanese wrestling as far as most wrestling fans are concerned, I am not alone with my feelings that I have aired earlier in this column.
But this is all about broadening my mind so I sat and watched what I believe to be one of the most bizarre promotions I have ever seen and I have seen many promotions over the years!
Extravagantly-dressed wrestlers, all in masks, dressed in costumes in a foray of different colours prancing about in the ring doing moves I had never seen before in my life.
The main problem I see with this promotion is that each and every match is very similar and there does not seem to be a lot of variation for the wrestling fans who attend and watch it at home.
I am not talking about using the same moves in each match, although they do this, I am talking about the fact that every wrestler wrestles the same way. In World Wrestling Entertainment you have brawlers, technical wrestlers, amateur wrestlers, fighters, Cruiserweights, etc.
In Mexico most of their wrestlers have the same style. I know most people who like Lucha Libre style matches will think I am mad for questioning a promotion that pushes so much of that style, but if every match is a Lucha Libre style match then it will get boring.
Ring of Honour – There is a lot of hype about this promotion, every writer has written about how wrestling fans should go along and see these guys live or besiege the tape traders and buy tapes of their shows.
I fail to see what all the hype is all about, I just see another company trying to cram itself into a market of Extreme Championship Wrestling clones. I have seen some glimmers of good matches such as Raven/CM Punk matches and Homicide/Low Ki matches.
But I have yet to see anything else that even impresses me enough to buy a tape. Their programmes are currently available on The Wrestling Channel so I will happily watch their programming but they will have to up their game if they want to survive.
We may be witnessing another Major League Wrestling situation here. Especially after the recent Under-age sex accusations against their owner/former owner.
Combat Zone Wrestling – There is a line in wrestling, I have no idea who it was who first quoted it but it went along the lines of “professional wrestling is like a circus, there is always something to grab your attention, be it the clowns, the elephants or the acrobats.”
I am not a huge fan of garbage wrestling. Sure I enjoy the odd hardcore match now and again along with the odd brutal stipulation match thrown in for good measure, but I prefer the good old fashioned wrestling match format.
So you can understand that I was not looking forward to sitting through a whole hour of what I was informed would be a promotion dishing up nothing but one ultra-violent garbage wrestling match after another. Oh how wrong I was!
With wrestlers such as Homicide 187, Danny Maff, Justin Credible, Johnny Kashmere and the like on the show it was clear to me that I had been grossly misinformed.
I was about to leave the comfort of my seat to head into the kitchen to make myself a sandwich when two ladies squared off in the ring. My experiences with female wrestling matches have not been good in recent years.
More often than not they are just two women attempting to rip the clothing from each other whilst slapping and pulling hair.
Mercedes Martinez and Sumie Sakai were the two women who made me jump back into my seat pretty quickly as they bounced around the ring and actually did something that hardly anyone in the World Wrestling Entertainment female division does any more – WRESTLED!
These two ladies should be signed up by World Wrestling Entertainment pretty quickly; they will help restore a hell of a lot of respect and credibility to the dire female division.
The rest of the show was very enjoyable with hardly any hardcore matches at all! Even Justin Credible had a decent outing in a six man tag match. This promotion may be just what the people who missed Extreme Championship Wrestling need, along with 3PW.
3PW – If anyone has ever wondered who took over from Extreme Championship Wrestling when the ‘original extreme’ promotion went bust then look no further than the mighty 3PW.
Standing for Pro-Pain-Pro Wrestling, 3PW is the brain child of The Blue Meanie and they have basically taken over from where Extreme Championship Wrestling left off, they have even invaded their old patch in Philadelphia!
The matches are different kinds of hardcore type matches with brutal stipulations thrown in just for good measure. For those of us who miss having Extreme Championship Wrestling around and have been looking over at Combat Zone Wrestling for comfort, I say take a look at 3PW as well.
World of Sport – Ah this takes me back a few years. Sitting on the floor right in front of the television on a Saturday afternoon watching the likes of Big Daddy, Marty Jones and the like beating the snot out of each other.
No chair shots, no poetic twists and turns, just plain rasslin’ pure and simple.
One thing I noticed was that back in the good old days of British wrestling we used to have rounds just like boxing. How many wrestling promotions still carry this on I wonder?
Not only did it bring back the memories but it was a great programme Owen Hart taking on Marty Jones and Bret Hart taking on Tiger Dunbar Singh both on the same programme!
This show may not interest the younger fans but for those of us old enough to remember it will bring back great afternoons of youth!
The above statements are not those of the web sites I write for, nor are they meant to persuade anyone, they are simply my thoughts on the promotions.
Until next time.
