Jingus

Did you read his thread? I think so, but I honestly don't remember. I guess nothing written in there left much of an impression on me. After reading seven hundred of these damn threads, not all of it is gonna stay with you. (I assume someone had things to say about Mark Rocco or Kamala or Kyoko Inoue too, but I can't recall those discussions either.) I don't remember tangential discussion about Maeda creeping into any other threads, which tended to happen with most other guys who were popular enough to be ranked at this level. If it's a great punch, why would they need to throw a gazillion of them? It waters down the move's impact if you hit it a hundred times in a row and still never pin anyone with it anyway. I like to have at least a little bit of variety in my movez, doing the exact same offense over and over gets boring after a while, so I've never been terribly fond of most guys who just punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch all the live-long day. There's ways to do that well and make a compelling match out of it, Lawler vs Funk comes to mind, but with most compulsive punchers it usually comes off as laziness or an inability to think of anything else to fill time with. And while I like The Rock quite a bit, I do think his worst in-ring flaw is how tiresomely reliant he is on filling time by endlessly "punching" when none of said punches are ever sold for more than couple of seconds. Don't even get me started. I don't think any of the Von Erichs would make my Top 20 Workers From Texas list. Heck, only David and Kerry would have a shot at Top 50. 100% agree Ditto. Nash always looked like a completely average guy who just so happened to be stretched out to an extra foot of height. Sid and especially Andre looked like huge unique monsters, completely different from everyone else who'd ever walked the earth. And most of Nash's offense always felt so damn inconsequential and oversold; it was embarrassing to watch guys sit there for a minute straight to sell the devastating impact of two or three back elbows in the corner.

At least we can finally stop asking "what about Maeda?" now. His placement does seem oddly high to me, for the reason that I don't remember ever hearing anyone really go to bat for him as being a great worker or having any number of matches worth visiting.

How would you decide who gets the belt in a scenario like, say, a tag match where the champion's team loses by countout and there's no specific individual "winner" on the winning side? Or what if you run into a situation where whoever the current RWC is, happens to retire or die or otherwise never wrestle again? I gotta say, I do love any train of thought which leads to things like Spike Dudley: Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion.

Bigelow also helped keep a certain mystique about himself by rarely staying in any promotion for very long. He rarely stayed anywhere for longer than a year or two. It didn't give the fans much chance to really get sick of him through familiarity and overexposure. The same thing helped Sid and various other fed-hoppers keep themselves fresh over the years. I still like his ECW work a whole lot, he did fun stuff with a wide variety of different guys. But in terms of single performances, Wrestlemania 11 has gotta be mentioned. He took LT by the hand and carried him to easily the best non-gimmicked singles match in Guest Celebrity wrestling history. In comparison, Big Show had a bunch of weapons and an entourage of run-ins and a buncha other stuff to help him smoke-and-mirrors the Mayweather match. Taylor and Bigelow kept their whole match inside the ring without any gimmicks at all. That's REALLY hard to do with a non-wrestler, there's good reason why most celebrity matches tend to be tag bouts.

1. Fighting spirit 2. Sell by pulling up your tights after getting dropped on your head. 3. Punches are treated like low blows, low blows don't exist. 4. Fighting Spirit~! 5. An elbow strike is more likely to pin you than a Tiger Driver. 6. Only pussies and rookies submit. 7. LOL at the idea that titles should be defended every thirty days. 8. No, you can't just call in sick on the days you gotta work Hansen. 9. FIGHTING SPIRITO~! 10....................

That's a good point. One thing that matters is I think Shawn is great at milking those kickouts and timing them to a ridiculously perfect fraction-of-a-second level. Doing a bunch of kickouts is simply a tool; the skill in execution comes in deciding when, where, and how to kick out of things. Another thing is that Austin/Rock was simply wrestled with much more energy and intensity than Trips/Taker. Austin and Rock rarely had any downtime in their match; even the most heavily-sold moves only kept them down for like ten or fifteen seconds, tops, before they were up and going to the next spot. And those two guys in their prime were brilliant enough in their planning and pacing that it never felt like they were no-selling or prematurely blowing off the previous spot just because they had Stuff To Do, every action grew organically out of whatever had just happened before. In comparison, Trips/Taker was fucking slow. They'd stall, pose, circle, do a staredown, and then do one move and sell it for the next minute straight. That's a big part of the "self-conscious" style in my mind, when they take forever to oversell every spot as if it were the greatest thing that ever happened. Diamond Dallas Page used to be bad about that in his shittier matches, he'd do a couple of regular spots and then be crawling around and gasping for air as if he was in the final stretch of an hour broadway. It's hard to act like a tombstone-to-pedigree reversal is the most amazing spot of all time when it's sloppily done at half speed, as opposed to Shawn's much more fluidly-executed spots with Taker in their matches. Shawn's botches tend to look crisper than Hunter's cleanest-hit spots. I'll put a finger on it: it was the first time people were wrestling that style. Nobody had ever really done the house style of "hit a BUNCH of patented finishing maneuvers, and you never know which one will finally end the match" before. There had been isolated incidents of wrestlers occasionally doing that for a big match, but it had never been done so commonly that the audience had come to expect it as the regular way things were done. Misawa & Co. basically invented that entire genre of wrestling, where the crowd was hyper-educated about each different wrestler having half-a-dozen different moves which were proven capable of pinning the other guy. In comparison, the American matches of the 21st century feel like a wannabe ripoff because they are a wannabe ripoff. They're copying the style, and often missing a bunch of the important details about how and why the All Japan guys did what they did. "Big moves and kicking out at 2.999999" is cool and all, but you're missing the other hundred nuances that made King's Road into what it was.

It might not've been bullshit at certain times. I've heard from lots of different guys that the central Mexican promotions in the early 90s ran an insane number of shows, frequently running Arena Mexico multiple times in the same day. Pull up Chris Jericho's Cagematch profile, and a quick glance shows that his first three CMLL matches were all in the same building on the same day. Looking at Vampiro's match list, sometimes he worked for multiple different promotions on the same day.

The "failed TV writers" still manage to book the most profitable wrestling company in the history of America. Russo has done nothing but lose money since 1999. Come on, this is a joke. It's not even close. Steph helps run the most successful wrestling company on the planet. Dixie's company is so poor that it just relocated its executive offices to the inside of its merchandise warehouse. Even in terms of their characters, it's not even a contest: Stephanie's a really good performer, and Dixie is a worse actress than your average porn star.

The pics for CIMA and Buzz Sawyer are broken for me.

To an extent, yeah. But it depends on how much I like the guy, it's not a fair bias. I tend to forgive Stan Hansen's insane stiffness because I enjoy all his stuff otherwise, while I'm more likely to complain about Low-Ki's stiffness because I often find him to be a useless selfish lump who is ALSO guilty of hitting people way too hard.

I think "really stiff" is probably vastly overstating it, I don't remember anyone except for frequently-full-of-shit Bad News Allen claiming that Bret was physically painful to work. I hear more complaints about Stone Cold's punches than I've ever heard about anything Hart ever did. But on the subject of freak injuries, even Bret himself has occasionally mentioned "well, there was this ONE time I hurt someone" about a few different occasions (I specifically recall him talking about injuring Randy Savage's foot in a SNME match), so the eternal talking point about Bret being the safest worker ever is pure bullshit.

If it was a year later, I doubt anyone would be mentioning Shane/Taker. It'll be forgotten in time. It's not even the worst Undertaker match at Wrestlemania involving a Cell, unless y'all have all forgotten the Bossman abortion at 15. THIS. I have never, ever seen a worse match than this on any PPV in my entire life. (And yes, I have seen Heroes Of Wrestling and Great American Bash '91.) Sharmell giving the worst in-ring effort of her career was bad enough, but Jenna Morasca truly gave the single worst "wrestling" performance that I have ever seen on any pay-per-view ever. Jenna was so bad that she couldn't run in a straight line, attempting to "run the ropes" in a swooping semicircular parabola as if she was sling-shotting around the ring's center of gravity. Her "strikes" (which I THINK were supposed to be slaps, kinda like E. Honda in slow motion, but it's hard to tell) were considerably worse than the phony no-contact kind that actors use when one character slaps another one in a live stage play. Her offense was so bad that it was contagious, infecting Awesome Kong at ringside, causing that woman to throw the only no-contact airball that I have ever seen her deliver. After approximately twenty-nine hours of stellar action, even the match ENDING couldn't be considered a positive, since the finish was quite literally Jenna doing a lap-dance on Sharmell's face and pinning her with cunnilingus. I have had better wrestling matches than this. No, that statement is too literally true, I must reinforce it: ALL of my dozen-or-so "wrestling matches" which I have performed on indy shows were all better than this. And I am a half-trained announcer/referee/manager without a single speck of athletic talent. I was legitimately born with a mild case of cerebral palsy. I am officially a fucking CRIPPLE, and yet I repeatedly and consistently provided a better simulation of athletic performance and full-contact combat than Jenna Morasca versus Queen Sharmell. Fuck this match. And most especially fuck the bookers, trainers, and promoters who were egotistical enough to actually insult their own fanbase so grievously by expecting them to PAY to watch this no-talent no-effort ego-wanking garbage.

Problem is, a massive number of wrestlers, bookers, and promoters in recent decades have come to disagree with you on that. You can say "the goal SHOULD BE to make money", but almost nobody besides the WWE is actually managing to do that with any significant consistency. And even half of the WWE's own performers obviously think that getting the highest snowflake rating for their matches is a more important goal than cornering the market or selling merch or whatever.

Not surprised to see Ricochet drop this early (his career is still on the upswing), but I am a little surprised to see Homicide this low. Is this a case of "out of sight, out of mind"? He has been AWOL from the larger feds more often than not over the past five years or so. He took almost all of 2015 off, and has only had five matches since returning.

Even at his spot-fu MovezMovezMovez worst, I'll still take Kobashi over 99.9% of all other wrestlers. And I think his all-chops-all-night-long era is actually more fun than his most ridiculously headdroppy period from about 98-03 or thereabouts, even though being older and broken down meant that he couldn't deliver as many top singles performances in his latter days.

I'm just surprised at the number of people who've said "I've only had two people drop so far". I have at least ten or twenty people from my ballot who've already made the Honorable Mentions list. I don't remember parts of mine very well either. I don't think I saved a final copy of it, and the link doesn't let you see the list anymore. Now THERE'S a guy I'm familiar with, I've known Lil' Tony since he was thirteen years old. And, good video, by the way. I could swear that I attended a NAWA show once, around maybe 2004 or 2005-ish, hanging out with Dan Wilson one time... that was the one in Rome, right? Was Iceberg ever the booker or promoter for that one? I might be getting my greater-ATL-area indies all mixed up, it's been a while.

Well that's mean. Fat jokes about Margaret Cho? Come on, dude. No one called anyone fat. Margaret Cho looks like Gail Kim compared to the pallid doughy androgynous marshmallow-bodied horror that is Morishima. Hey, I don't think I know you, but I do know your name: Chris Coey once threatened to have you beat me up. (Which of course says way more about Coey than it does about either of us.) What parts of GA/TN did you work in, and under what name? Just wondering if we ever might've crossed paths. I don't think so. It's just not the same as being in the ring. The VAST majority of the burden of performance stays on the wrestlers, not whoever's accompanying them. It's much easier for a good wrestler to get a lackluster manager over than it is the other way around. Which I guess could technically kinda improve the case for someone like Heenan that he actually was able to get almost any random jabroni over just by managing them, but he's the rare exception. More typically, the crowd is like "oh, this is the guy that Jimmy Hart is managing this week? Fine, we'll boo him until Lawler wins, and then quickly forget this loser ever existed." When I was a manager, I certainly never felt like I was on the same level of performance as any of my wrestlers, even on those rare occasions where I was saddled with some non-working stiff who was probably a worse rassler than me. It's just such a different world being on the outside as opposed to being in the match, with such lower expectations and so much less pressure on so many different things.

I'm somewhat biased since he was a friend of mine around this time: but Brian Lee wasn't that bad, dammit. You just had to know how to book him and what opponents to give him. In the atmosphere of all-chaotic-brawls, all-the-time which came with the New Church stable, Brian fit in just fine. Sure, it had a purpose: for the WWE to hilariously steal TNA's new find away from them almost instantly (although not before hilariously signing the wrong one-legged wrestler first). I was there for Gowen's debut in a dark match the previous week, and it showed what a mark Russo was. Gowen got real over real fast with the crowd, so of course Russo sends his wrestlers out of their separate locker room afterwards to go give him a S.E.X. t-shirt and induct the hot debuting talent into the booker's own stable. Of course by next week when Gowen actually wrestled on the PPV, cooler heads had prevailed and everyone just pretended that didn't happen, with Zack being a free agent once again.

Even during his "peak" years, I never saw his greatness. He never carved out his own niche in NOAH, he always looked like a kid who was cosplaying the acts of his elders. In ROH he seemed dull, with offense that was apparently stiffer than it looked; it seemed like he was a one-man injury factory for a while. Terrible selling, too; I remember a match with Danielson where the finish was AmDrag snapping and stomping Morishima in the balls over and over again, literally at least a couple dozen times in a row. Takeshi's response to getting his balls stomped dozens of times in a row was... wait til Bryan is out of the ring, calmly stand up, and walk to the back with no expression on his face while selling nothing whatsoever. Fuck a BUNCH of that.

Oh. Whoopsie. Sorry. Sometimes that kinda thing tends to fly right over my head.

Yep. Athena had no idea the stripping was coming, that was basically Russo or Jarrett or someone amusing themselves by giving two different sets of instructions to her and Desire and then having a big LOL at the resulting trainwreck.

If you want me to incessantly complain about it forever, sure. I've never agreed with boards forcing their members to change their names, titles, avatar pics, or whatever. If people want to participate with a fad, fine, but you shouldn't ever force them.

Why the hell did we allow someone to vote a tie on their ballot? Isn't it hard enough to count all these totals already? Heenan certainly counts as a for-real worker. Cagematch has him listed at 729 documented matches, and that's despite missing almost the entire first decade of his career. Heck, he even worked two full tours for All Japan in the early 80s. Once Baba not only books you but asks you back again, surely then you can call yourself a capital-W wrestler.

I've had the same avatar for the entire lifespan of this board. And I'll be damned if I'll abandon Mr. Pogo now for the likes of Chase fucking Stevens, even if he did once make me tap out four times in a row in unlicensed shoot-grappling matches held on the floor of a pizza parlor in front of a crowd of drunken wrestlers.