Loss

Bix, I'm listening to the F4D podcast right now and really enjoying it. I hope you'll go back and do a show after every category. I'm also hoping you'll get to talk about Rockers/Rougeaus without running out of time. EDIT: And you're getting to it now!

Was the plan ever for Liger to win the heavyweight belt? I recall reading that he was going to win it at some point, but plans changed. That may be incorrect.

I think something that hurts Garvin is people translate him as being a bad champion into being a bad worker, when that's not the case at all. They pushed him just past his limitations and paid for it, but as a high-level midcarder pushing the champ to the limit, he rocked.

What are some good post-1996 Otani matches I should see? I can't stand his heavyweight stuff for the most part, but maybe there's some latter day stuff he had before bulking up that was good. The reason I didn't rank him higher was because I couldn't think of an overwhelming amount of good stuff before or after 1996.

Ugh, Hase needs to be higher there than he is.

Undecided on Muta. Brief periods of being good-great and far longer periods of being lazy and uninspired.

I don't know about that particular match, as I haven't seen it in forever, but I have seen other Flair/Garvin matches that are better than the WM III match for sure.

Thought I'd give a very early draft of the Japanese men. I'm not sure how I'm going to rank them compared to their American peers yet, as I'm still working that out. But I know they will be in this order. Still need to see the shoot-style guys like Volk Han, Tamura, etc. Also, strangely, I've never seen a Naoki Sano match, and will try to see his best stuff before the deadline. I also want to make a point to see some more of the stuff from guys like Ishikawa, Ikeda, Otsuka, etc. I'm coming up with so few guys. I feel like I'm missing a ton of people for some reason, but can't figure out who I'm missing exactly. 1. Jumbo Tsuruta 2. Toshiaki Kawada 3. Jushin Liger 4. Mitsuharu Misawa 5. Kenta Kobashi 6. Shinya Hashimoto 7. Nobuhiko Takada 8. Genichiro Tenryu 9. Masa Fuchi 10. Akira Taue 11. Kazuo Yamazaki 12. Akira Maeda 13. Tiger Mask 14. Tatsumi Fujinami 15. Hiroshi Hase 16. Shinjiro Otani 17. Giant Baba 18. Antonio Inoki 19. Yoshiaki Fujiwara 20. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi 21. Riki Choshu 22. El Samurai 23. Taka Michinoku 24. Kuniaki Kobayashi 25. Ultimo Dragon 26. Gran Hamada 27. Dick Togo 28. Shiro Koshinaka 29. SUWA

08/21/86 - Dump Matsumoto v Itsuki Yamazaki (AJW) 10/10/86 - Dump Matsumoto v Lioness Asuka (AJW) I may have nightmares about Dump Matsumoto tonight. I wish I was kidding. These matches are unbelievably emotional and they're so basic that it's no wonder the audience understands exactly what's going on. If someone told me Dump Matsumoto was the greatest heel of all time, I'd be inclined to believe them. I've NEVER seen a heel so menacing -- just from these two matches -- someone who's mean just because she feels like being mean. And mean is an understatement. I'm sure at the time, all the screaming girls in the audience were wondering exactly what it was going to take to stop this disgusting bully, and it looked like nothing could be done, because she had so much backup and they were tougher than anyone else. These two matches are like Mid South specials with the volume turned up about, oh, 10,000 notches. My take from watching these two matches is that Dump's matches resemble the big fight scenes in movies far more than they do traditional wrestling matches. So unique and captivating. Dump is going to place very highly on my final list.

I see that as a good thing, not a bad thing. The dedicated fans will stick around to see the project through to its completion, and the people who were only half-interested from the start will not. New wrestling fans will come along and old ones will stop watching. It's the circle of life. It actually took about 9 months for the first project technically, and in fairness, it was the first time anything like that had ever been attempted. Now that the process has been established, I don't think it will take as long in the future.

I'd love to see it end, because they've screwed themselves over by taking the number of main events they can do and dividing them in half, but at this point, they're so far in that they can't really go back without losing a ton of money. Anyone who is tired of HHH should be thankful for the roster split, because without it, his reign of terror would have been even worse.

I never did like it as much. When people would say it was US MOTY for '87, I'd be surprised at that point of view, considering that's when Flair had all of those great matches with Barry Windham and the first War Games happened.

I've said this before, but everything on the Internet is typically spoken in absolutes and extremes, and is usually a backlash to a preceding viewpoint. That originated when Meltzer created this group of hardcore fans by declaring that wrestlers who had the most physical matches were the best workers, and that Ric Flair was the unquestioned best wrestler of all time. Then tOA came along with the reactionary viewpoint that Flair wasn't particularly great and that work holding up over time and being "smart" was important. People got sick of some of the attitudes of posters there and a backlash started to the overuse of phrases like "moveset" and "high end offense", where people are now focusing more on story-based matches. The truth is somewhere in the middle of everything, as is usual. Ric Flair is a great wrestler, and is one of the very best wrestlers ever. That doesn't change. In fact, after watching tons of footage for months trying to get a handle on the SC 100 list, Ric Flair is likely to finish #1 on my list overall, because if anything, my opinion of him has improved in the last few months and continues to improve almost every time I find a new match of his I haven't seen before. A more demanding, physical style does make a match easier to get into and can make it more exciting, but at its core, wrestling connects with people, and a match with all the flashiness/stiffness/high flying in the world is a bad match if it doesn't emotionally resonate with its audience. AJ Styles is not a horrible wrestler, and I've seen him in some very good matches. But it goes back to the reactionary viewpoint. When a merely good wrestler is being pimped as this extraordinary wrestler, sometimes, some of us are guilty of going overboard in bringing the other viewpoint down to make ours stronger. I know I've done it, because I've criticized Styles as much as anyone. So if there's one habit I wish everyone - self included - could get out of, it's responding to extremist points of view with an equally extremist point of view. Mark Henry had a few good matches. Shawn Michaels, for all of his annoyances at times, has had a 20+ year career where he's been good-great most of that time. Michaels is worse than his biggest supporters make him out to be and better than his biggest detractors make him out to be. You can say the same for Mark Henry, AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, Necro Butcher, modern-day Kenta Kobashi and any other polarizing wrestler you want to mention. Wrestling in Japan hasn't been as good since 1997 or so, but that doesn't mean that every single Japanese wrestling match that has taken place since is among the worst ever that has taken place since 1997. Everyone is guilty of it.

It would be silly to see them make amends after their "10 year rivalry" or whatever, but Austin and HHH teamed after HHH hired a hitman to kill him, so what do I know?

I did not make that story up at all. I was waiting to get my haircut this morning, and noticed a Randy Orton interview in a fitness magazine, so I read it while I was waiting.

I read in a recent fitness magazine interview with Randy Orton that Benoit doesn't even use a cup for protein shakes, he puts the powder in his mouth dry, then puts water in his mouth and shakes his head around. He does this because he doesn't like traveling with a stinky cup. Benoit is hardcore.

GH makes a good point comparing Pat Patterson to Raven. That was seriously spot on. Patterson is officially up in the air and I've no clue what to do with him. I want to discuss a few other guys mentioned here. Dutch Mantel - Should be talked about before some of the guys on the lower rung of the list, but in the end, he's 99% likely NOT to make my final list, so I'm not sure how much time I should invest in thinking about Dutch when I know exactly how his career has gone for the most part, but I've only seen a handful of matches from guys like Jerry Estrada, El Dandy and Emilio Charles. Tommy Rogers - Omission by accident who should be included, but will end up below Morton and Eaton a few notches. Timing is everything, and timing is the one thing that kept the Fans from being as over and remembered as the Rock & Rolls. Butch Reed - As I mentioned, on the next tier of guys I'd consider, and may end up bumping some of the guys I have ranked higher off the list. One thing I forget sometimes with Reed is how much I loved his tag team with Ron Simmons in 1990. I just think about Mid South and somehow forget the rest of his career. Mick Foley - Someone I should think more about that I keep ignoring for some reason, most likely because I think so many of the problems with today's wrestling climate are the result of Foley becoming a millionaire main eventer by falling off of a cage. I think he's a large, large part of the reason it's so hard to get traditional wrestling over anymore, because he raised the bar too high taking bumps at a level no one should ever take. He's responsible for the desensitizing of wrestling fans. Obviously, one of the best maniac brawlers ever as Cactus Jack, in an era where that thing seemed to be passe, and he kept it relevant and got over by being truly unique. A case for me where post-1999, the comebacks and Mr. Nice Guy persona have really hurt his legacy and made it easy to forget how wild he once was. I will say I would rank Foley over Jericho if only because Foley was a favorite of mine from 1989-1996 or so. Jericho is not someone I'm considering. His biggest strength is that he's good at everything and understood how to get himself over as a star. His biggest weakness is that he's not really great at anything (except for the occasional interview or match) and took his sweet time putting the whole package together. Buddy Landell - I'd love to, but I can't. Landell doesn't have that defining singles match that everyone can point to. Landell is more of a guy I love to death and enjoy watching than he is a great, great wrestler who belongs on a list like this. Fun as hell, but almost all comedy, which is fine with me, but also limits him when competing with other guys with more versatility. Bill Eadie - Another guy who was great in his time, but is not someone I'd call elite, if only because there's no one I listed, at least on the top half of the list, that he's miles better than. Paul Orndorff - Good at times, most of the time in fact, but the fact that he wrestled Hogan a million times and they never had a match that clicked for me is what hurts him more than anything. That puts him way behind guys like Savage, Perfect, etc., and outside of that series, he has a fun run as a singles heel in '93 WCW that was killed when they paired him with Paul Roma, and some good matches with Ted DiBiase that don't really paint the full picture of the feud unfortunately. Marty Jannetty - I like him more than Michaels in some ways, but voting for him seems ... contrarian for some reason, if only because if I vote Jannetty, I have to vote Michaels quite a bit higher, and Jannetty's presence on this would necessitate a higher place for Michaels than he deserved. Nick Bockwinkel - In the end, he'll end up much higher. I watched a cage match with him carrying an aging Crusher from '79 AWA and I'll be damned if he didn't have the match Michaels should have had with Hogan at Summerslam and didn't. Bumping all over the place like a madman and creating movement, but not at all in a way where he was going into business for himself. Bock has many shining moments, and will end up higher. For whatever reason, though, every time I think about him, I wonder about Ray Stevens, who I've seen almost nothing of, and wonder how they compare to each other and if I should bother seeking out Stevens. He won't be in my top 15 because of all the competition for the top spots, but I'm curious -- if you're ranking him in your top 15 and Barry Windham #20, does that mean you're planning on putting Bockwinkel ahead of Windham? Now THAT'S a discussion I want to have.

Yes, and they could feud with the returning Bret Hart.