Jingus

This sounds like a tremendous compliment to me. "He's like a wrestler who was very popular and over at the time, who perfectly held the toughest audience in the country in the palm of his hand, except without the worst flaws that guy had." Really, the only knock I have against Brock at this point is "okay, you don't need to do THAT MANY German suplexes in EVERY match, you're watering down the individual impact of each one". But otherwise, he's freaking amazing. He's the best squasher of the modern era, bar none, in a time when seemingly everyone else has forgotten how to just squash the shit out of someone else and make yourself look like a monster. He comes off as believable and legit in a way that hardly anyone else does. The same way people used to talk about the original Sheik in terms of "that guy was just scary, nobody would even think about trying to fuck with him, you know he'd hurt you really really bad", I think Brock has that same sort of aura of credibility and danger which is sorely lacking in today's prefab IKEA-assembled cookie-cutter product.

This was pretty true for me as well. If I'd made such a list back in 2006, I don't think most workers' placement would be all that different from the one I've got today. Of course there's some changes (ten years ago, I'd never heard of Yuki Ishikawa and had never seen much Destroyer, just for two examples) but largely my tastes have stayed pretty consistent. Aside from that, I guess "variety is the spice of life" is the main theme of my list, because there's simply no underlying theme to any of the placement. Lou Thesz might be right next to Great Sasuke, who might be right next to Necro Butcher, who might be right next to Sergeant Slaughter. There is no real rhyme or reason, I pretty much put the whole thing together on pure impulsive "do I like This Guy better than That Guy?" instinct.

Ditto. I've got literally hundreds of books sitting around waiting to be read, and a To-Watch List of movies and TV shows which is well over a thousand titles long. There's plenty of non-wrestling stuff in the world which deserves attention.

Oh my god, you just made me think of the idea of a wrestling-themed version of Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch. "We had to show up at the building at one o'clock in the morning, drink a glass of boiling steroids, wrestle eleven days per week and pay the promotion to get booked on the card, and when we got back to the locker room the promoter would strangle us to death with a weight belt while whispering in our ear that we young kids didn't know how to work!"

Although it's appropriate for this particular podcast, since the hosts can rarely go five minutes without making a cock joke.

Even back around 1999-ish, I think Rey was already regarded by many people as being the best highspot artist in the world, with only Liger as any real competition, and maybe Eddy/Benoit if you counted them. Even among WCW's overstuffed cruiserweight division full of really good workers, Mysterio stood out as being a step above pretty much everyone else. But I do think it's true that his WWE run really cemented his legacy, since it gave him a MUCH wider variety of different stuff to do and different opponents to work with and he consistently succeeded with pretty much everything they ever let him try. (For the record, his abysmally-booked championship run doesn't count as genuinely letting him try anything.) The only time WCW ever let Rey out of the cruiserweight ghetto was in his feud with Nash, and we all know how that went.

I think the closest you'd get to consensus is "that Halloween Havoc '97 match kicked all the ass in the universe" and that a non-great worker is probably incapable of producing that level of performance.

There isn't a consensus. Some say his WCW work was his athletic and artistic peak, others say his WWE tenure was more mature and rewarding, and you've got a few outliers who will claim his lucha days were the best. Personally I'd argue for his best WWE matches being his finest work, although his best WCW work was awfully close. (The difference being, his worst WCW matches during the unmasked period were easily shittier than his lowest lows during his WWE years.)

I've seen comments from quite a few people who wrestled Brody where they talked about their experiences and were perfectly happy with the results. (Aside from Luger, obviously.) Of course there's dissenters, but Brody still has a lot of fans among his contemporary coworkers. Meanwhile, I think literally every single comment I've ever heard from anyone who ever worked with Mascaras was extremely critical and negative towards Mil. I've literally never seen anyone praising him in any manner, he seems universally despised by practically everyone. And in terms of simple quality of match aesthetics, I'd rather watch literally every other wrestler mentioned in this thread than Mascaras. I've never understood the hype with that guy, he always bored me to death while rarely doing anything worth watching.

Everywhere he ever went after ECW, they booked that guy as if they actively hated him. And poor Awesome never really figured out how to have good matches with most guys, he had a very particular formula that was unfortunately something that the majority of workers were either unable to keep up with or unwilling to subject themselves to. Can you imagine someone like Stone Cold letting Mike recklessly powerbomb them over and over again? Not everyone has Masato Tanaka's balls and/or total lack of common sense.

Bryan's versatility makes him a slightly better candidate in my view. Rey specializes in being the flashy underdog and does it tremendously well... but that's pretty much the only role he ever plays. (And as shown by his pretty lousy heel run with the Filthy Animals in Russo's WCW tenure, it's probably best that he doesn't try to be a villain.) AmDrag has a lot more different tricks in his repertoire, and at his best he can be just as great a plucky little-man babyface as Mysterio as well. .

Done both. Ugh. Just typing them in took me two hours.

And the literal next guy to win that particular belt? HHH's good friend Batista. This shit writes itself.

I don't remember anyone named Woddy from back then. Wait a minute... (google google google) ...WOODY FUCKING STRODE WRESTLED?! This guy? (Pictured moments before putting a bullet in Charles Bronson at the beginning of Sergio Leone's finest spaghetti-Western masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West.) How the HELL have I never heard this before? Glancing at the match now, I'm surprised to see that it's 1.an interracial match, 2.probably in the early 50s, and the black guy 3.is the babyface and 4.goes over clean, while 5.the presumably mostly-white audience rabidly cheers him the whole time. Yeah, this was in Los Angeles so it's not like this was in Alabama, but still it's not something I'd expect to see from that time.

As an old indy-worker friend of mine once put it: "At Wrestlemania 19, it took three Rock Bottoms for the Rock to pin Stone Cold. It took three F-5s for Brock to pin Angle. It took three big legdrops for Hogan to pin Vince. But bah gawd, it only took one pedigree for HHH to pin Booker!" It absolutely is that bad and makes no sense. I just went back and timed it, and there's a gap of over half a minute in between the pedigree and the cover. That's a pretty big pause. It's the worst kind of "delayed selling" bullshit, where a guy is just sitting there helpless, then outta-nowhere he suddenly has the strength to hit his finisher but then somehow doesn't have the strength to crawl right after that.

How do those rectangular, obviously-not-square sections register as being anything close to "25x25"?

The short version is, the building's normal capacity as a football stadium has about 80,000 seats in the stands. "How many people were sitting in chairs on the floor?" is the magic question that nobody seems to know the exact answer to. While there's certainly a hell of a lot of people down there, it's never looked to me like they could possibly squeeze 13,000 extra fans into the floor section. Maybe half that, at best.

I wonder what Wade would've thought about Deadpool. When the most currently successful movie in the country leans SO heavily on the entire "we know that you're watching a movie, and the characters in the movie will frequently remind you of that fact and make a bunch of jokes about their fictional nonexistence" then maybe people should stop whining so damn much about how breaking kayfabe is gonna drive away the audience.

For one day, in one building, would co-promotional shows count? The "Bridge of Dream" Tokyo Dome show from 1995 comes to mind, when all the Japanese feds put on one match apiece in the world's most overstuffed supershow. The big Wrestling Summit show from 1990 with Hogan/Hansen would be another one, plus pick-your-favorite WCW/NJPW crossover.

I might vote for Kofi. He'd be awfully low on the list, but he might be there. I like the execution of his moves a lot better than most of you guys seem to, I just don't see that much sloppiness. (As opposed to, say, Konnan in the late 90s; now THAT'S sloppy.) He does his job well, keeps the crowd into it, kids especially seem to love him. I've never understood the claim that he's supposedly so dangerous; he's basically doing a bunch of the same offense and highspots that Rob Van Dam used to, but in a much safer manner and with far fewer injuries.

I guess we can chalk it up to societal differences, but Mexican wrestling seems to have done a not-so-great job of preserving its older video tapes of pre-80s wrestling as opposed to their Japanese or American brethren.

Mid-to-late-90s WCW probably wins just for the sheer number of wrestlers that appeared on their shows at some point or another. They had most of the old WWF and NWA stars from the 80s who were still around, most of the superstars of the WWF Attitude period before/after their primes, plus whomever they signed away from ECW that month, especially plus tons of luchadores and New Japan guys. I mean, seriously, here's a short list: Steve Austin, Ric Flair, Jushin Liger, Rey Mysterio Jr, AJ Styles, Akira Hokuto, Mick Foley, Randy Savage, Eddie Guerrero, Vader, Bret Hart, La Parka, Terry Funk, Ricky Morton, Bobby Eaton, Sabu, Steven Regal, Dusty Rhodes, Great Muta, Chris Benoit, Arn Anderson, Shinjiro Otani, Barry Windham, La Parka, Hulk Hogan... it truly was a Who's Who of talent, all sandwiched together in less than a decade.

Difference is: like Loss said, we've got a relative shitload of Rikidozan on tape. Looking around, I couldn't find even one complete match for Santo, it seems like all we've got is a little bit of heavily-clipped footage which was edited into his movies. It's nowhere near enough to really get a handle on how good he was. As for Rikidozan himself: I dunno, he struck me as a slower and more basic version of Bruno, lots of sorta aimless and repetitive brawling. It certainly worked and he knew exactly how to play his audience, but it's the sort of thing I watch more out of historical interest than because I'm really entertained by it.

I saw him in person at TNA a few times in 2003, and he didn't look like all that time in OVW had done him much good at all. Same old "teenage backyarder pretending to rassle" feeling about him as always. Astonishingly, he did work a brief tour of All Japan in 2005. Even teamed with Mutoh for a couple of matches. Three of the dates were supposedly TV tapings, so he might've made tape.

That's the thing, stock dividends aren't counted as part of salary. Income and capital gains are kept strictly separated for tax purposes. Vince's share of the stock is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred million dollars.