Jingus

Seriously? Congratulations, fuckers, you just lost this listener forever.

Sabu doesn't get enough credit for some of the little things he does. He's got really good punches, for one thing; how many flippy spot-monkeys can make the same claim? And most importantly, he sells everything. Far too many younger guys who took the wrong lessons from innovators like Sabu think it's all about the visual impact of the moves; they'll hit some huge dive, and then pop up and celebrate as if they didn't just fly through the air and land with an almighty THUD in a painful manner. And of course, then they're sprinting to the next big spot, acting as if they didn't do anything that should be emphasized as "hey, that one guy hit a huge move which really hurt the other guy". Sabu doesn't do that shit, he takes a moment to let everything sink in. And he certainly never tries to come across as an invulnerable robot who feels no pain, he goes to great lengths to express just how painful and dangerous his own offense is to himself.

Tracy's even better on little indy house shows, where he can dance and stooge and generally play around. He's still fun when he's shoehorned into a four-minute TV match, but he's one of those guys who really needs some time and space to find his groove and get his momentum. He's incredibly giving and generous, too; he'll sell for absolutely anyone and anything, despite being one of the legit toughest guys in the industry. And frequently when he's told to go to some bullshit non-finish when doing a one-night-match with a local indy kid (mostly because small-time promoters are too shy to ask any slumming stars to do a pinfall job), Tracy will just go "eh, fuck that, I'm not coming back anyway..." and put the local indy kid over clean.

Is every wrestler on everyone's ballot required to have their own nomination thread?

I still don't see how a Cena/Taker match helps anyone. If Taker loses again, then his Wrestlemania matches mean nothing in the future. Brock winning that night was booked as a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and it definitely had a feeling of "that wasn't supposed to happen" about it. Even post-Streak, Taker at Mania means something: the question is no longer Will He Finally Lose, but instead it's now Can He Still Win? For that narrative to continue onward, he needs to keep winning every year. And a win over Cena is pointless. John's been pinned by practically everyone in the company, and his street cred really doesn't need let another loss in a high-profile environment. Meanwhile, it might be a big deal if Cena beat Taker... ten years ago. Now? Way too late. Cena's already the ace of the promotion, the measuring stick against whom all other top guys must be compared. He's not like Brock, a guy whose part-timer status meant that he still had something to prove. Cena winning would hurt Taker, and it wouldn't help John. Taker winning would hurt Cena (especially since he'll still be around for most of the year, while Taker will inevitably vanish after Mania) and not do anything for Taker's legacy other than keeping the status quo.

Aw man, Timmy and Reno, you didn't have ANYONE else to put with poor Hot Rod Biggs so he wouldn't be doing the commentary by himself? If I still lived in Nashville, there's a pretty good chance that I'd be doing the play-by-play announcing on these shows.

I do think the whole idea of ranking the best fake fighters is pretty goofy, yeah. But I'm aspergers-y enough to enjoy a good list-making exercise as well. It's a contradiction, but wrestling fans must learn to put up with so many contradictions that this one example doesn't stick out as anything particularly egregious. And yeah, I do think that breaking it down into quantified sub-categories does generally look dorkier (and I say that as one of the dorkiest persons on the planet, I don't mean it as a pejorative).

I don't have a system. Going on total feel and instinct. My basic rule of thumb for every spot is, "if I had to watch a random match featuring #57 right now, would I rather switch over and watch something featuring #56 instead"? And of course that's subjective as hell and very open to changing one's mind, but I think the idea of trying to quantify a wrestler's quality with rating numbers is kinda silly.

Lou Thesz's book is a must-mention. It's highly opinionated, but it serves as a pretty good primer for wrestling in the first half of the 20th century.

Not a fan of his Lucha Underground work?

Snuka spent way too much of his prime career as a heel, because he was really terrible at it. A guy with his charisma and moveset should be a Babyface 4 Life (and his best work I've seen came doing face-in-peril stuff in WWF tags) but he was a villain for a really surprising amount of his life. His stuff as a heel in early ECW is practically unwatchable, so much stalling that Larry Zbyszko would scream at him to get off his ass and do something.

I think of my lower half in general as "the Tajiri Bracket". I fucking love watching Tajiri wrestle. He's not the best of all time, I've never seen him have a five-star match, and some might argue he never even made it to the four-star level. But I still completely enjoy his work, even when it's beating up Rene Dupree in a three-minute match on some forgotten episode Heat that absolutely nobody will ever watch again. Yoshihiro Tajiri will definitely be on my list. Just because he's not in the top 20 doesn't mean he sucks.

Maybe it feels that way to you and a few others, but the vast majority of the fans in the arena seem to accept him with open arms. Everyone's been pretty complimentary of his comeback matches with Brock (Summerslam's dumb finish notwithstanding), and they did feel like special occasions. And it's not like Taker losing was a perfect fairy-tale ending anyway, it seemed flat and depressing and people wanted more from him. You want a really great ending which turned into a really lousy comeback? Look no further than the lackluster return of Trish Stratus, who somehow went from OMG TRISH IS BACK into being just-another-diva in the span of what felt like about ten seconds. I think that's a much better example of the Favre Fatigue that you're talking about.

From what we've heard in bits and pieces from various backstage reports, the Brock/Taker match was planned months in advance. Taker said, sure, I'll be there; the plan was to have Brock lose and Taker continue carrying the streak onward. It wasn't until after the match was officially announced and hyped that Taker realized (or admitted) that he felt like shit and wasn't sure if he could keep doing this stuff anymore. Being under the gun and fearing that this might be Taker's last match ever, Vince made the impulse call to put Brock over. After a year of rest and recuperation, Taker finally managed to shake off whatever was bothering him at 30 and come back looking much more like his usual self. Going into Mania 30, the timing couldn't have been more perfect anyway; Lesnar and Calloway are friends, Brock is one of the few guys that the fans might actually buy as credibly slaying the Streak, it's the big 30th-anniversary show in front of a gargantuan crowd, and they're sending everyone home happy with D-Bry's impossible title win, so there's room on the card for a huge heel upset in one of the other matches. And looking at the next year of booking: it was the right call. Brock used this unprecedented bit of street cred to go on such a glorious rampage that he became a true star attraction in a way that he never had been before. And it didn't even really seem to hurt Taker in the long term, he's continued doing business-as-usual just fine.

I don't understand why anyone would think that Taker should be forced to retire forever just because the Streak is broken. So what? He's still tremendously over, as the past year has shown. As long as he's physically capable of continuing in the ring, and as long as the crowd is still giving him such great reactions, what's the problem with occasionally bringing him back for some part-time programs? I don't think Cena would be a good opponent for him at Wrestlemania, though. I don't think it would help either guy to win that match, and it would probably hurt either one of them to lose. Cena is too much of a long-established veteran now for him getting a post-Streak victory to mean much (it would've been different five or ten years ago, but it's too late now) and I think Taker needs to keep winning every Mania match for the indefinite future. Losing again would make him look too washed-up; in some ways having lost once could actually improve future Mania matches, since the fans know he CAN lose here and each nearfall is a more credible maybe-finish. The weird part is how suddenly his once-per-year deal started. In 2010, according to Cagematch, Taker wrestled 49 matches. Suddenly, in 2011 and 2012, he's only working Mania and nowhere else.

I don't see the financial point in belonging to the NWA nowadays. You've got to pay for membership dues, and I seriously doubt that having those letters in your company's title does anything to draw even one more fan to buy a ticket. And I don't think that any of the recent world champions are draws either (on the rare occasions they show up at the outlying "territories"), guys like Rob Conway are still seen as being jobbers and jokes by the common casual fanbase.

AND his self-indulgent matches with Hogan two years later, which were booked so much like the Mania 6 main event.

I don't think it was just being sick of Trish, as I don't recall many other cities turning on her around the same time. Mickie was doing the "crazy hot lesbian" gimmick so of course she was guaranteed to receive a certain amount of cheers, but the crowd that night in Chicago took it to a whole different level. That was the same night that both of the lead babyfaces were heavily booed in the men's world title matches; when you've got the crowd going completely against the grain in at least three different segments, that's more on the crowd than it is on the company or the product.

From what I can tell, he didn't take any time off at all. IMDB claims the shooting schedule was from May to September in 2000, and Cagematch lists match-by-match how Rock worked a full-time schedule throughout that whole period. He must've flown in on some of his days off to film his scenes (which, admittedly, weren't very much in that movie). He supposedly spent so little time on set that he never even met Brendan Fraser during production. Compare this to his time spent shooting The Scorpion King, where he took off most of the time between Wrestlemania and Summerslam in 2001. Nah, even at that time there was still plenty of HHHate to go around. He was a lot more respected after pulling off those brutal matches with Mick Foley, but we could still tell that this guy was receiving an inexplicably strong push like no other heel in the WWF had ever received before. He was the first heel to win in the main event match of Wrestlemania, after all, and he had 75% of the McMahons on his side at that point, plus a whole horde of various wrestler henchmen.

In the early 90s, Hansen had the most destructive and overwhelming offense in the company. Kobashi was the biggest overseller in the company, trying to make everything look like it's almost murdering him. Pair him with Hansen, and his overselling doesn't look uncalled-for; it looks absolutely appropriate. While guys like Misawa and Kawada try to be all stoic and shit, Kobashi is doing everything but screaming out a Ric Flair "OH GAWD!" and I think that style works better with Stan than trying to do a relatively dry "serious sports" kind of match. Plus, Kobashi is the AJPW master of the Ridiculously-Fiery Super-Saiyan Comeback, and once again that's something which looks perfectly appropriate when dealing with Hansen. If you're gonna try to actually beat that guy, you SHOULD be shrieking at the top of your voice with your eyes bugging out and every cord in your neck sticking out like steel cables.

At the time, I remember the response being almost universally positive. Most smarks loved it, and most mainstream media outlets had a "whoa, that's surprising, that FAKE RASSLER is actually a pretty good comedian" sort of attitude towards the whole deal. And it was a huge deal for the WWF in terms of business and exposure, since it was the first time that any wrestler had hosted SNL since Hogan did it in the 80s.

Londos was the only one that stood out to me. Does he even any entire match complete on tape? The few Youtube videos featuring him all seem to be short clip-jobs. Everyone else are guys I've seen on lots of people's Top #Whatever lists. Yes, even Edge and Graham.

Depends. Considering the wide range of places wrestlers used to routinely travel, they saw a lot more of the world than the average person, or even probably the average model wrestler. There's nothing to get you to understand the plight of third-world citizens than seeing them in person (probably while having Power Uti clumsily thump you over the head). But the older wrestlers tended to be meathead jocks who coincidentally fell into a secondary profession, while today's wrestlers are more likely to be internet nerds who are relatively well-read; so, it's a push.

Never, according to Cagematch's database. All it lists are a few battle royals, and then a brief run of a half-dozen house shows during a '94 European tour which had Bret going over every night.

What's going on with all the downtime recently? The board was out of commission for almost the whole day yesterday, and it's been doing that with worrisome frequency.