Emission Du Catch 5/17 or 7/15/1978

 Watch (And you want to watch)

Brigitte Borne vs. Lola Garcia

This was a sweet match. It was Borne, who was pretty much the top woman among the French lady wrestlers against Garcia who was the #1 in Spain. Rare you get a high profile match up like that. The wrestling was a real clinic too. It starts great right off the bat with Garcia really throwing Borne hard with her basic headlock takeovers and then basically trying to pop her head off with those side headlocks. The whole match was built around some really great throws and then head crunching headscissors and other tight holds. Not a ton of flash but Borne had some really sweet flashy arm takedowns at one point. The holds and escapes were worked insanely well and both of them fought like mad. Check out Bornes spinning headscissor counter when Garcia tried to go for her leg. Great stuff, the best womens match from the 70s?

 

Angelito & Kader Hassouni vs. Jean Menard & Jackie Richard

 This was another absolutely sick match. Just one breathtaking exchange after another, worked at a crazy pace. It rules that a bunch of balding dudes working in France in the 70s pretty much blow everyone in the world right now away both in terms of athleticism and sheer precision and timing. They just go hard and rip out one crazy exchange after another like it's the easiest thing in the world. Angelito and Hassouni were slick cats climbing around their opponents and hitting ranas and all kinds of surprising stuff. Richard was old and bald but he still bump really hard and really kick the shit out of his opponent. Menard was big and bad and grey and hold and holy lord anyone wrestler who can look half as good as Menard does here at any age can consider himself lucky. Usually rudos tend to cheat a lot in these matches but Menard wrestled like he had something to prove, often getting the better off his opponents by wrestling and it was really compelling. He may have had the cleanest armdrag from a wristlock I've ever seen. At one point he caught a flying Kader Hassouni and just spun him around and slammed him. Later he busted out all these cool throws, huge backbreakers and even a gutwrench bomb because why the hell not. His match up vs. Angelito was the money match up in this bout and they looked awesome together. Highlights include Angelito working some really neat painful looking halfcrabs, and a spot where Menard went for a backslide and then stood up and held him in a canadian backbreaker. At one point they worked a knuckle lock monkey flip exchange that may have been the best of it's kind I've ever seen, and think of the ground that covers! Angelito was absolute dynamite in this match, crazy how good the guy was both at the flashy highspots as well as the technical stuff. He even ended up taking some giant bumps in this match, the spill over the top rope may have been the craziest I've ever seen. It even ended up spelling his eventual doom as he was unable to tag back in and later he took another huge bump that made for one hell of a finish. Hassouni was pretty slick too and nailed all his stuff. Hell everyone here nailed every thing, so you have a 30 minute match full of compelling high difficulty exchanges with some huge bumps and a good plot and they nailed everything, insanely great shit really.

French Catch-Catch-Up

Petit Prince & Jean Corne & Alain Mitchell vs. Daniel Noced & Jacky Richard & Guy Renault, France 2/9/1974

Really cool French take on a lucha trios. Like those matches, you had a lengthy technico shine, a rudo beatdown building to a hot 3rd fall with plenty of comeuppance. And you had a real money match up to carry the whole thing, and that was Petit Prince vs. Daniel Noced. Holy fuck the Prince is an absolute trip to watch, just the fastest trickiest wrestler ever, and Noced looked great both bumping for his crazy arm drags as well as trying to kick the Princes chest in. Everyone else was good too and I especially enjoy Jacky Richards stooging who is Infernales level when it comes to eating technical offense. It wasn't a deep match and the fact that Cornes initial absence barely played a role was a bit weird but it was a rousing good time in total.

18/01/1973 Rene Ben Chemoul & Walter Bordes vs. Anton Tejero & Inca Viracocha

Another week of French TV, another 30 minutes of stupidly high end pro wrestling. It‘s quite fascinating how closely these matches mimic the layout of a lucha trios. You get about 10 minutes of fun one up manship exchanges, followed by 10 minutes of a rudo beatdown and then 10 minutes of high quality back and forth. Everything executed with ridiculous tighntess and perfection. There are so many little things here that make these exchanges great – the technicians cranking up the viciousness just a little bit more than your typical friendly babyface shine segment, the way these guys will sell a basic shoulder block just being thrown back only to get up immediately and into a rope running segment, the way these guys will not kid around with their european uppercuts and body punches etc. Some of the technical moves were just blindingly fast. Beatdown segment was good with the faces taking lots of bumps flying to the outside, and the ending section was fun and unpredictable. I‘ve learned that big finishing runs centered around heels stooging and trying to throw inside shots with the faces bowling the heels into eachother are way more entertaining than back and forth 2.99999s. Ref has some heel antics but never gets into derailing the match. The French crew is starting to rise in my estimation to be up there with the Michinoku Pro or BattlARTS guys where you could throw any permutation of them into a tag match and it would be MOTY if it happened now. And they did just that week in week out.

 

Georges Cohen vs. Chico de Oro (2/23/74)

1 fall match going about 25 minutes. Chico de Oro is announced as a Spanish champion. If Spain still had workers that good around in 1974, it’s pretty sad that Spanish wrestling died around that time. This was a technical match up with a fast pace. Both man engaged in some intricate wrestling and fast rope running. Chico de Oro played nice and sportsmanlike, but the French crowd was firmly on the side of their boy Cohen. It almost annoyed me a little how they kept siding with Cohen even when he kept kicking Chico de Oros ass. The Spanish champ ended up taking a few bumps to the outside and fought back valiantly, even throwing out some flying headbutts, but he had no chance winning that crowd over. There was also some weird controversy with the referee where he gave Cohen a public warning for breaking out of a pinfall. All that said, it was a very good match.