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Instinctively it feels like this would result in a net loss of viewers. But even if it does you could start a new wrestling company for $500 million year so who cares? This is probably a litmus test for a lot of programming in the future.

Mabel was also ungodly tall. Puf is listed at 418. He’s fun to watch though he’s mostly a comedy wrestler. Bojack is 6’, around 350 and uses his size well.

Good lord I'm going to have a hard time figuring out what shows to see that day.

Could always induct Baba

I'm not ready to celebrate Breaks but dementia is an awful thing.

Stacey Leilua was great in Young Rock, but she wasn't playing a wrestler.

Eugen Sandow only made it to 58. I picture those guys just as likely to die of strangulated hernias or tuberculous or the same things that killed everyone else in the ninteenth century. But if you avoided the clap, as Jimmy Dugan would say, you could live as long as you would today.

No wonder the Honky Tonk Man ended up doing all those shoot interviews.

Two advantages for Kidd. 1. Often promoted by Meltzer as the greatest lightweight wrestler ever. Whether that's true I don't know but he probably has a case. 2. Because of the nature of Kidd's case and that he largely comes from a previous era than the other three, the merits of his candidacy are different.

Good a place as any to note. Njpw upgraded their service but in the process their archives are gone and will take a year to migrate everything to the new service. Absolutely devastating.

I wouldn’t mention it if I were in Wilkes-Barre either.

Agreed here. There’s little understanding for how voting dynamics actually work.

Ric McCord at Starrcade '83. Never before or since has such an ugly jobber had such good hair.

Strap matches are one of those matches were it works best when you don't overthink the booking. Like traditional cage matches, every promoter has been overbooking them since the 1980s.

Bailey to me feels like a modern Manami Toyota. Go go go, not a premium on selling but terrific action. Also tremendously adaptable, saw him work a show in Tony Deppen’s brewery with literally just a mat on the floor.

Austin in late ‘98 was running out of opponents, so I don’t think Williams in theory was the worst idea. But once he started I think it was very quickly apparent that Williams was not suitable for a main event role.

The first series had cast members ranging from 58 to 71 years old. Duggan and Atlas are now almost 70 and Hillbilly Jim is 71, so I would use one of them for continuity. William Regal would work well on something like this. Combine his character with the exotic animals he would insist on bringing in.

Putting bad wrestler in with good wrestler to cover their weaknesses is just a logical booking move. Gulas and Eaton is obvious and mentioned above. Jerry Lawler once won a tag team championship with Plowboy Frazier (Uncle Elmer). William Regal started his career teaming with Big Daddy. I'm gonna go ahead and nominate Ric Flair and Triple H though and duck the incoming tomatoes.

Larry Sharpe is quite notable as trainer of the Monster Factory, source of a great deal of the northeast US talent for a couple decades. He passed in 2017 but the school I believe has a series going on Apple+. President Ram got some fame as a very young girl in the same makeup doing a possessed demon gimmick. Kind of cool that she's giving it a go in adulthood but if that match is any indication, she has a ways to go.

That sounds apocryphal given that Strongbow wrestled previous Japanese tours as Joe Scarpa. Given how prevailent the native american gimmick once was in wrestling though, I could see a similar story with a different wrestler.

See Randall "Tex" Cobb, a journeyman who went 15 rounds with Larry Holmes in a fight so one sided that Howard Cosell quit boxing. Cobb once beat Earnie Shavers by KO after Shavers wore himself out trying to KO Cobb.

Here's an obscure one. Journeywoman Malia Hosaka had one match in the WWF, a dark match before Raw at the Meadowlands in 1999. A show I just happened to attend.

Considering all the collaboration between WWF and USWA, Gilbert is a little surprising.

Arn Anderson and Bobby Eaton in that one-off in ECW. The Original Sheik in ECW, same year.

So this project grabbed my interest a bit, NJPW World is reasonably cheap for Americans and I love unorthodox wrestling. So I ended up watching this match last week. My takeaway from the match was that it was kind of...good? For much the reasons you described. Eddy was an interesting figure. I looked into him and found he passed in 2021. A Rodney Eddy, son of Everett Eddy, was murdered in 2015 in Erie. I assume that's the Eddy of karate fame.