Al

A lot of these guys are tough calls. Off the top of my head my choices would consist of Hans Schmidt, Ivan Koloff, Sting, the Fabulous Moolah, the Rock 'n' Roll Express, Sgt. Slaughter, Dr. Wagner Jr., Mr. Wrestling II, Carlos Colon, Lou Albano and Gorilla Monsoon. Others I'd strongly consider include Steve Williams, Big Daddy, Red Bastien, Jim Crockett. Schmidt is the best candidate on the ballot IMO.

Who has though? I mentioned in the previous post, I've seen him lose the belt to Koloff on a shitty handheld where I couldn't even see what was going on. I've never come across any other footage of his title reign. Almost everyone that talk about Sammartino's first reign are basing it off of being 8 years long and have probably seen even less of it than I have. Bruno vs Baba: I think Bruno's reign is a fair pick. Eight years uninterupted, drew houses, including Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. Defended against all time greats like Killer Kowalski, Fred Blassie, Giant Baba and Ernie Ladd.

Usually minor league baseball audio is free and accessible at milb.com. He seems pretty happy in his role, claims on Twitter that baseball is where he wants to be.

Probably just because it was one of the biggest angles of '81. I'm blanking on what other famous angles took place in 1981. Flair won the title, but it was in a town where he wasn't strong and the win was kind of an afterthought. Maybe a Race/Rhodes title change or Tommy Rich's moment in the sun? Patterson/Slaughter in WWF.

I had an incident within my own family where a couple was murdered. Their 13 year old daughter had gone out with a 42 year old man. They told him off, he came back and killed both of them (the husband and wife). Plausible. But as far as Benoit my first news was just "found dead" and my first instinct was carbon monoxide poisoning. I was at a ballgame so by the time I got the news the details were out.

Yes. The book was written in 1956 so it was still a fresh incident at that time.

Next week, Punk pawns his WWE championship. Raw draws a 6.5!

As far as the tribute show (and I can't believe this came up again after a four year old quote), WWE came up with the easiest thing to do for television and let it ride. They made a mistake but I think in corporate they had bigger fish to fry. One thing I've seen from Raw the last several years is that with their massive production, they really don't like to improvise. A tribute show was their first (obvious) reaction. I thimk when the details became apparent in the afternoon they just said "fuck it." I'll say this about Benoit with the benefit of hindsight. The big question to me has never really been the WWE cover up conspiracies or timelines. My interest has always been the mental state of Benoit at the time of the murders. Was he mentally competent, and if not what was the nature of that disease? Was it organic, the concussions, the steroids? Others can debate the latter. Knowing what I know now about mental illness, Benoit is as much a victim as a murderer. His brain was likely fried, and it's really a tragic end all around. Not trying to excuse the murders, but this type of crime is not the sort of thing a person does with a clear head. That's probably obvious, but it's worth stating.

Cubs (later Phillies) first baseman Eddie Waitkus was shot by a female stalker in a hotel room in 1949. Male or female it can be a scary situation.

Cubs (later Phillies) first baseman Eddie Waitkus was shot by a female stalker in a hotel room in 1949. Male or female it can be a scary situation.

If they wanted to do an ICW tribute show instead they should've just said so.

Piper was at his best during Hart/Perfect at Summerslam '91. His cheerleading of Bret Hart while Heenan boosted Mr. Perfect made a good match seem important and epic.

I thought about compiling win/loss records before. It is tricky for all the above reasons. And once you start editorializing over what wins matter more than others, the whole thing kinda collapses under its own weight. I think it only works restricted to one promotion with consistent boundaries. Check out baseball-reference.com's ELO Rater: http://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/elo.cgi This is the type of thing I would recommend. Rather than looking at actual win/loss records, let readers, fans and whoever take two wrestlers and pick which one is their favorite. I would love a wrestling version of that. Bill Dundee or Bobby Eaton? Haystacks Calhoun or Big Daddy? Road Warrior Hawk or Road Warrior Animal? Your rankings wouldn't be perfect and Kurt Angle would be wildly overrated. But it would be a great way to have fun and spark some interest.

Ross was fantastic with timing finishes. I don't think any announcer ever did a better job of really selling the importance of a big move or a big event, just from the inflection of his voice. Let me put it this way. If you couldn't speak English and listened to all the announcers, Ross would probably rank a solid first.

Jesse was golden in that segment, but Vince deadpans the greatest line of the night. "Uncle Elmer having some problems getting the ring on the finger. I hope that's not a premonition of what's to come later."

Quick question: I'm trying to find a poll that might've asked for the best wrestlers of all time, by a Japanese perspective. Perhaps from a Japanese publication or media outlet. Does such a poll exist?

To a certain extent we'll always love wrestling the way it was when we were 12 years old. I always preferred watching those late 80s WWF PPVs over the Attitude era.

Yeah, I know, but it still looks fishy. See for yourself. The whole spot starts around 4 minutes in. Vader takes the bump at 4:10, and around 4:15 you can see him shifting his body around a little bit on the mat. The way he's positioned, he's clearly set up for the elbow drop from the bottom-right turnbuckle. But Shawn, inexplicably, goes and climbs the top-right turnbuckle. That's a pure fuckup on Shawn's part, because Vader isn't positioned anywhere near where he would need to be in order to make the move work when Shawn's jumping from that corner. Shawn is much too polished a ring general to make a rookie mistake like that, and that's why I think it just might've been deliberate. Vader doesn't know what's going on, and Shawn doesn't even really give him enough time to dodge before landing on his feet and stomping him in the face. (Also, why land on his feet at all? Just squash him with the fuckin' elbow, if you're intent on stiffing him here. Landing on his feet just broadcasts "Hey everybody, we fucked up!" to anyone remotely smart.) It's all the more apparent because they repeat the spot later (at about 3:45), with Vader landing in the exact same position as before, only this time Shawn climbs the correct corner and hits the move successfully. Forget the elbow spot. The reaction of the guy around 5:20 after Michaels is dropped onto the guardrail is pure gold.

Eight that I came up with. Hans Mortier, Waldo Von Erich, Gorilla Monsoon, Killer Kowalski, Nikolai Volkoff, George Steele, Ivan Koloff and Superstar Billy Graham.

Chyna. In terms of wrestling pushes, King Kong Bundy seems like a good example. Went from main eventing against Hogan to squashing a midget in one year.

As far as weight loss. There is a limit to your monster heels to the point where you want them to be in good enough shape to work rather than just being as big as possible. Adrian Adonis was better at 280 lbs than at 380. Yokozuna was better at 505 than 650, etc.

30-40 years ago I think it meant something. Losing the NWA title for example, that is a big, career changing deal. Now the positions of the top wrestlers are pretty much set regardless of wins and losses.

I had a burst of inspiration. The problem is that tag teams as main eventers made sense in the territory days. The traveling NWA champion only appeared occasionally. There were no NWA World Tag Team champions, so you could easily build up your own tag champions as meaningful as there was no distinctive champions above them. In the PPV era though, every promotion tries to sell its own champion as the World Champion. Not putting a world title match on a card jeopardizes your sales, and putting the singles title below the tag titles undermines your biggest attraction. The Road Warriors for example. Almost certainly the biggest tag team draw in history. Certainly one of the most popular teams. But they never main evented a PPV in the states. Even Crockett who boosted the tag belts as much as any promoter. Once PPV came about, no tag team ever really became consistent PPV main eventers.

A lot of people dislike Savage's matches with George Steele. They were pretty bad. But the feud itself was integral to setting up the Randy Savage/Liz dynamic. Without that feud, the Megapowers angle doesn't work. One of my favorite interviews involved Liz getting a box with flowers, Vince commenting that the package was lined with turnbuckle padding and Savage immediately flips.

According to Prowrestlinghistory.com, the first appearance for Hashimoto was January 10, 1989. (They list the Shogun and the Samurai, I assume one is Hashimoto.) So if Hashimoto were in Russia for two weeks or so after December 23, that timeline fits.