Loss

I'd say everything after The Gordy List fits as well in this thread as that one Done.

Just that one post? Can you indicate which ones I should move and I'll do it.

I feel like I still have so many years to fully explore, but off the top of my head, I'd go with 1985, 1986, 1989, 1992 and 1997 as my top five. Picking between those is agonizing.

I'm with you on Gene Okerlund. He was a tremendous salesman, and I think he fit the WWF landscape perfectly at the time because he was a character himself. I think he generally made interviews better. I think he was a highly effective hype man for big shows. The hotline scam was highly profitable in WCW. I support Gene Okerlund for the HOF 100%.

I'm not even entirely sure I agree with him that ring announcer isn't a money role. I do think some guys get over more as stars because of how they are introduced. I'm not sold on that, but I'd be willing to hear an opposing argument to Dave on that idea.

Well, that part has never been addressed.

Dave has called Finkel the greatest ring announcer ever, but has also said ring announcer is not really a position a company can't do without, like a wrestler, announcer or promoter. So the argument against Finkel in the HOF is the unimportance of the role of ring announcer, not Finkel's talents.

Goldberg's facing Brock at Survivor Series (likely to set up a bigger Brock vs Shane match, keeping in mind that Shane was the biggest draw at the last Mania, apparently). I think the business model is a little unstable currently, no? Stop it! Your wanting things is why we got the pointless Sting run.

The idea of Shawn Michaels having a Shawn Michaels-style match at 51 years old and at the Royal Rumble instead of Wrestlemania and against AJ Styles hyped randomly like this makes zero sense and isn't happening.

Also interesting to think it in terms of my own values, both personally and in how I approach wrestling. I think I value #2 to such a high extreme that maybe the other categories don't have much impact on me at all. It's why I tend to shoot down any thoughts on wrestling that can't be applied to all wrestling. Because fairness is such a core principle for me that drives how I look at everything.

Can women blink in WWE without it turning into some self-congratulatory fake "moment"? It's definitely a big deal, but the magnitude of it can speak for itself. They don't have to hammer us with it.

Listening to Tori Amos to prepare for death matches was always my favorite thing about him. Everything else I can do without.

That whole thing is so weird that I don't even know where to begin. Foley engaging the fan in DMs, Foley working-shooting-shooting-working in his responses, the fan posting it publicly, even the fan having this weird half-kayfabe thing going and recommending matches from C-shows. What planet is this?

Might this be true in wrestling also? The media within wrestling, inasmuch as it's a separate entity from the in-ring, usually works hard to contribute to that narrative. Jim Ross has talked about heels bailing to the outside as "running" while babyfaces bailing to the outside as "regrouping" being instilled in him by Watts, among other things. You see things like Hogan getting the second entrance, even as the challenger, because he is the babyface. I get what you're saying, but in the end, the morality is manufactured in both mediums. We've talked a lot about Hogan being an asshole, but because he's cheered, he's the good guy. Maybe the wrestlers are more overtly playing into it in wrestling as part of a bigger, more aligned manipulation, but that's in fact the whole point. Much like athletes aren't specifically looking to create drama and have exciting games, wrestling is an attempt to manufacture the natural emotion that comes from sports. The morality in wrestling is entirely relative -- what's right is always just what's popular.

My understanding is that they thought Watts was so abrasive and hard to work with that they decided their problem had been listening to too many "wrestling" people. They went in the extreme opposite direction as a conscious choice. They didn't like having drunk fans. They didn't like having a hardcore base that was so vocal about everything. In other words, they hated wrestling. To me, Watts going represented a major tipping point in American wrestling. It showed how bad of a job everyone -- including Vince to an extent, but everyone -- did to build for the future.

I realized after I posted this that this really biases wrestling as a television presentation for cameras over wrestling for a live crowd. So maybe I should temper it a little. That's an interesting conversation on its own that I don't have the slightest idea how to begin.

When it's there, it matters a lot. A match is more than a match. It's a presentation.

Intent is owned by the creator. Interpretation is owned by the beholder. I suppose there's no good reason to ever full stop factor out information if we have it (yes, I realize that's different than what I've said on this topic before), but as a general principle, I just don't care. If I pick up on a piece of psychology that was just happenstance on the part of the performers, so be it. The end effect is the same either way. I admit that it may or may not say anything about the workers, but that's in a way the whole point. Where the water gets muddy is if you then use that heavily distilled, biased knowledge of intent in some cases to pivot to judging the talent involved based on these decisions that you assume they are making. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but I see that as irrelevant. If a viewer sees it, it's real. It's equally valid whether it was calculated or not. When I judge a match, I might sometimes comment on what I think they're going for, but what I'm ultimately interested in is the viewer impact -- not just on me, but on their intended audience. Intent matters if we are judging wrestlers personally, but I don't see that as my role. It's just not something I'm comfortable doing, not only because I don't feel like I have enough information to do it fairly, but also because it feels deeply personal in almost an aggressive and judgmental way. If I'm going to review and critique stuff, my role is to judge the meal, not the chefs. So to me, the best chef is the one who makes the best meals. Grandma's homemade risotto may have been made with more love and care, but if the kid who went to chef's school and followed a recipe made a better risotto, then he's a better chef within the confines of my ability to understand on the other side. In pursuit of omniscent truth, he may or may not be a better chef than Grandma, but I don't have that knowledge and I am not capable of getting it. I can only comment on what I see with my own eyes, or in this example, taste with my own mouth.

Sons of Lou Thesz vs sons of Karl Gotch is the short answer, but I'll talk more later. The big difference to me is side headlocks, hammerlocks and armbars that are more present in the NWA style. The AJPW style is the NWA style. The NJPW style incorporates martial arts a little more and has more sudden movement and is a little crisper. Moves like the cross-armbreaker are common. I also feel like the NJPW style has more credible finishers and a lot of moves are presented more as instant death.

I would expect it to do one. I've sort of come around on that. It's not at all what I want to see, but there is an audience for it. Once.

I love people voting on the HOF. The company line can finally be, "You fuckers are the reason (Wrestler X) is not in, so SHUT UP!"

Bret Hart also doesn't seem to be aware of anything anyone has ever done in wrestling somewhere he wasn't working at the time. He's like Flair in that regard.

Let's just talk about the Network, please. There are other places to talk about the rest of it.

I think it's relative in the sense that people doing "stuff" that isn't expected is usually well-received. A heavyweight doing a rare typically cruiserweight move may not always be great, but it's more interesting at least than a cruiserweight doing a typically cruiserweight move. Cena has for sure gone off the deep end at times over the last few years. The Styles match was the culmination of years working themselves into a corner with all the false start main event pushes of countless guys through the years. Plenty of guys have beaten Cena, then ended up lower on the card when the feud was done. At that point, if the goal was to cement Styles as the top guy they had to go scorched earth to make the point, if only so people would actually believe it. It's not a match style I typically enjoy, but that's one case where I get it. I'm not sure there's another way at this point that beating John Cena can genuinely, permanently cement a guy as a headliner.

I think generally speaking, it's harder to take a heel seriously who walks alone. That's what heels do -- they outnumber people. Having a second or a loose alliance with another wrestler gives cred.