Jingus

Yo.

The very first name which springs to mind is Ashley Massaro. And you'd have to literally bribe me to review more than one match. Ashley was so terrible that she made the previous Diva Search/Tough Enough winners from Jackie Gayda to Christy Hemme look downright competent in comparison.

I just now realized that I must've clicked on the "stay anonymous" option, which I didn't mean to do. Is it too late or too much of a hassle to change it?

Yeah, the threads are here already, doesn't make sense to have to start all-new threads about every individual worker anytime we want to analyze them.

At least half a dozen joshis made my list, Aja being the highest. Dude, when the post immediately before yours is presenting a pretty strong argument that Hotta's unprofessionalism could've led directly to a fellow wrestler's premature death, you gotta make a stronger argument than a ">" if you're going to make a claim that contentious.

What positive contributions? Aside from having a goofy gimmick which got real over with the toddler demographic, Beefcake's very best work could be characterized as "eh, that didn't suck as hard as I feared it would". It's hard to be a darling when you've never done anything worth being darl'ed for. The problem is, Beefcake was a huge letdown compared to what WCW fans had come to expect. Even at its weakest points, WCW fans viewed their product as a much more workrate-heavy product than the WWF's cartoonish showmanship. But then Hogan came in, hogged the spotlight in an unprecedented manner with the most ridiculously overblown push of his career, and even dragged in a bunch of his older-every-day buddies to fill up the card as aging novelty acts. WCW went from their top heels being Vader and Flair to, well, Brutus fucking Beefcake in the span of less than a year. Hell yeah it was badly received, of course, why wouldn't it be?

In a medium like wrestling, where every show presents multiple matches (usually every week), there does need to be SOME variety, just to keep people on their toes. If you give them the 100%-exact-same-shit every single time, people will eventually get bored with the predictability. So it's good every rare once in a while to break the rules, just to remind people that the formula isn't always ironclad. A hot tag in pretty much every tag match ever means more if the same audience has occasionally seen a tag match end with the heels just beating their opponents without a hot tag ever being made.

I voted for Brody. Low, but he was there. I might compete with you on Liger and Slaughter too.

I'm probably the high vote on Andre and Backlund, and maybe on Steamboat and Foley.

I'll out-weird anyone. Beat this: if she'd been nominated, Sakura Hirota would have been in my top ten.

That's a new theory? I thought it had been neurological fact for years. Just look at how often our brains tend to see patterns even where patterns don't really exist. "The face of the Virgin Mary appeared in my bowl of mashed potatoes!"

The short answer is, no doctor on the planet has access to every kind of technique or equipment. And most doctors in general don't have access to the really nice stuff or the newest innovations. It's kinda like asking "why did nobody do the Shooting Star Press before Liger invented it, and then why didn't everyone do it after he invented it?"

...come to think of it, Nitro-era WCW did indeed push a LOT of guys who did a lot of karate kicks. Not so much on top, where the preference was mostly "steroid users over 40 years old and over six feet tall", but in the undercard you have everyone from Booker to Jerry Flynn to Ultimo Dragon to Ernest Miller to Glacier and a million other guys who all did a million kicks.

Just one reason among several. I think Shawn's lowest lows in the ring are overall nowhere near as bad as Flair's worst moments. In this case, ironically, Shawn's backstage selfishness works in his favor, while Flair's go-along-to-get-along attitude hurts him. Flair all too often let himself be placed in situations where he was inevitably going to look terrible, while Shawn's paranoia about protecting himself kept him from doing the same. If Vince Russo had ever pitched "...and then I'll feud with you, pin you, and shave your head!" to HBK, he would've told Vinnie to go fuck himself.

That's the thing, I don't think his wrestling looked like shit. At all. It's not "I know this looks shitty, but I don't mind". It's "I think this looks great". Of course he had a couple of things that didn't go well, like his look-ma-no-knees inverted atomic drop; but for the most part, I think his execution was flawless on most of his moves. I honestly don't see the problem, and every time I hear it explained I don't agree with the description of what's supposed to be so shitty. As for acting? He's far above average by wrestling standards, which is all I can realistically expect from anyone. Guys the level of the Rock who have genuine thespian ability are so rare that I don't mind that the vast majority of wrestlers are really terrible actors, when compared to professional performers.

Jimmy just described pretty much my exact views on post-comeback Shawn. I've never understood why some people are so down on that period of his career, no matter how many times I hear them try to explain it. I still think he's one of the very best in the world. As for "what about Flair"? Let's be honest, Flair's last decade in the ring was pretty sad, and Shawn was smart enough to retire before he got to that point. He doesn't have that embarrassing epilogue of AARP League Rasslin' which taints Flair's career.

When do we ever hear much about any Japanese injuries at all? Unless they're bad enough to immediately end the match (or someone's career), it seems like that kind of thing isn't even talked about publicly. They keep it much quieter than Westerners ever do about their vulnerabilities. I do care. You don't have any good friends who are broken-down ex-wrestlers, whose bodies have been destroyed by the business? Great! BUT I DO. Quite a few of 'em. You've never driven a badly injured wrestler to the hospital after a match went poorly? Great! But I have. Multiple times. Don't lecture to me about "it ain't ballet, you know". You've never had to deal with the real-world consequences of this shit. And it makes me much less cavalier about people who just say "it's so fucking cool when they endure an unhealthy level of physical damage". You can say the same thing about every shooter ever, and yet most of them didn't consider taking a clean bump to be something which was beneath them. Naoyo Ogawa is "easily above" Keiji freakin' Mutoh? Let alone all the others, but come the fuck on, that's simply not a true statement. Exactly when was that? Because just looking at his match profile, I see him doing at least eleven different jobs in singles matches alone. And the booking isn't even what I'm complaining about. What a terribly odd thing to say about someone who 1.is in better shape than his dad was, and 2.loses most of his matches. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, "even fucking Kawada worked his kicks more safely than Naoyo Ogawa does". Once again: having been there and done that, I've earned the right to be offended by whatever I want. And why are you getting offended at other people taking offense?

"lol japenese rassling is STIFF" is your hand-wave to explain Ogawa's unprofessional horseshit? Okay, now I can tell that 1.you've never been in the ring, 2.you've never done much in the way of training or sparring for MMA, and 3.that you don't even pay much attention to the physics and biology of what you're watching. There are DEGREES of stiffness, and what Ogawa was doing here is akin to Maeda's infamous kick to Choshu's face. I'd rather let Kawada kick me in the head for twenty minutes straight than take even one kick in the style Ogawa was doing here. He was kicking in the wrong place, period. There's NO excuse for that. No amount of "it's his gimmick" or "well, they're Japanese, of course they're gonna kick ya" can explain away the legitimate physical danger in what he was doing. YOU NEVER EVER KICK A GUY RIGHT IN THE POINT OF THE CHIN. There's no "safe" way to do that. Notice how Kawada, for all his infamous stiffness, never actually kicks a guy in the chin? He always puts his boot across the guy's forehead, or along the long side of his cheek or jaw. Never in the point of the chin. That's how you win a kickboxing match, but it sure as hell ain't acceptable in a worked match. Hitting the point of the chin is likely to shatter teeth or break the jawbone, and it is the single best spot on the entire face to hit someone for an instant knockout. As for the rest: once again, you must have been watching a different match. "Picture perfect" is pretty much the exact opposite of that suplex spot, where Ogawa turned into a sandbagging piece of shit and seemed afraid to even leave his feet. And you must have a different definition of "selling" than I do, considering that Ogawa never once projected the idea that he was in pain from anything Daichi ever did. A couple of brief "oh wow, he actually hit me, I'm momentarily stunned" moments are the best he can do? That's the kind of "selling" Andre would do for a jobber. And talking about "someone on Ogawa's level" is horseshit. Daichi's first matches involved Chono and Mutoh bumping and selling their asses off for him, before finally defeating him; and not in a three-minute squash, but in ten or fifteen minutes. Same thing in Daichi's matches with Choshu, Yuji Nagata, Masato Tanaka, Otani, Shiozaki, Marafuji, Tenzan, and Takayama. What makes Ogawa so special that he doesn't need to bother being as generous as all those guys were?

I seriously have to add the disclaimer "unless it's an act of felonious sexual assault"? Come on. That's obviously not even the same category of thing that we're talking about. Criminal activity is newsworthy; private events between consenting adults who have every right and assumption of privacy are not newsworthy. And never in the history of the fucking planet has the leak of any celebrity sex tape ever been "valuable speech".

Were we watching a different match? That was terrible. Ogawa's performance was godawful, sloppy and dangerous, to the point where I felt professionally offended by it. He literally looked incompetent in that match, like a guy who'd never been trained or had zero experience in the ring. Didn't know how to take bumps (the German suplex was pathetic), didn't sell a single damn thing, and couldn't even feed. That thing he keeps doing where he's trying to block or dodge EVERY single bit of offense that Daichi throws? That's a no-no. You don't do that in professional wrestling. And don't even get me started on those legitimately threatening kicks, it's a wonder he didn't shoot K.O. his opponent with a couple of those. He was soccer-kicking poor Daichi right on the fucking CHIN; and you don't do that in a worked match, period, you can easily break the guy's fucking jaw by doing that horseshit. If that's all Ogawa has to offer these days, then motherfuck him and everything he stands for. "Selfish", "amateurish", and "unsafe" is pretty much the worst combination in the world.

Admittedly most of those weren't dedicated sports arenas, they were random smaller venues like VFW halls or disused back rooms which weren't designed to host wrestling (it's practically impossible for most small indy shows to afford any kind of real sporting arena in the 21st century). But yeah, definitely at late as 2004 at the very least.

I worked shows as late as the mid-2000s where they still allowed smoking in the arena.

The thing is, some guys work fine without those things. I don't think Abdullah or the Hardys looked any more ridiculous because they were wearing nontraditional gear (or for more current examples, the Shield and the Wyatts). That stuff worked for them. I don't think Owens's bought-it-at-the-mall gear works for him. That's the kind of guy who needs either a plain ol' singlet or some kind of gimmicky costume.

It's been done. Low-Ki and the other northeastern Puerto Rican spot-fu artists used to steal a bunch of spots from martial arts movies. Look at the first Ki/Red match from ROH for some good examples. They're not the only ones, Jack Evans was the first guy to introduce me to Tony Jaa movies, long before he had any name recognition in this country. As for the mixing of styles: we do live in an awfully weird time, when even the WWE is blatantly influenced by so many regional styles. On any given episode of Raw you'll see standard Titan Sports main event brawling, indy-style spot monkeyshines, faux MMA, probably a little bit of third-generation strong style, probably some lucha libre, maybe a little bit of Southern work-the-crowd tomfoolery, maybe even some European catch. It really is nowadays a rather astonishing melting pot of wrestling from different times and places, all haphazardly thrown together and then given the standard WWE Style new coat of paint.

I freaking love that sequence. Even aside from the punches (which seriously feel like some Lawler/Funk level fisticuffs), that part where Austin just KEEPS throwing Angle into the post over and over again was one of the better spots I've ever seen in that environment to make it clear that we're reaching a new level of viciousness within a match. It makes it clear that Stone Cold is willing to do anything in order to beat Kurt, even if it winds up putting the Olympian in a goddamn wheelchair.