Loss

I'm thinking mainly of that hair match from '91 where she teamed with Bull against Jungle Jack. I think she blew every single move she tried in that match.

I will say that on the yearbook project, Kyoko's sloppiness really dragged down my opinion of her. She has a lot of positives as a wrestler and personality, but her execution was not really one of them.

Ha! 25 years in the South followed by five years in the Northeast and five years in the Midwest where I've tried to sound like the locals as much as I can has produced that strange landing point for my accent.

Kyoko Inoue at 211 is probably the single biggest difference between 2006 and now, if I had to guess.

Something that tells me we're not terribly far apart: I'm almost certain that Lex Luger has more ****+ matches than Steve Austin. Far more, even. Yet I can't imagine ranking Luger above Austin, and I'd be really shocked if anyone did.

I just noticed that we still haven't seen Lex Luger.

Duggan cleans up well. Handsome kid.

Honestly, less women have dropped at this point than I would have expected. Most of the women I ranked still haven't showed up, which is a big surprise.

El-P, could we argue that DDP exposes the flaws of WWE's approach to wrestling as well as just about anyone? Here's a guy who was in great shape and started a main event run in his early 40s. Four years in, he showed no signs of slowing down -- he was never going to be a huge headliner or anything, but he was a serviceable upper card guy who still had plenty in the tank when he arrived in WWE. WWE turned him into an opening match comedy guy, ostracized him politically and he had to retire from injuries in less than 12 months.

I think Tully was a better singles wrestler. He had a shorter run, but peaked higher within it. He was more of a catalyst, and a less respectable heel. And Parv, I was totally kayfabing that one. I looked at the clock when we had about 30 to go, muted myself and sighed really loud.

Part of Bret's impressiveness, and why he ranked in my top 20, is exactly that -- that he had the run he had in the WWF. I think you could argue that having a 4-star match in the WWF was harder than having a 5-star match in All Japan. Because he spent most of his career in the WWF, he had no chance of producing a body of work like the All Japan guys or Ric Flair. The divide is that I don't see that as a factor in voting at all. You did what you did, and that's what you did.

Your post, by the way, really helped me understand the flip side of the argument. Thank you. I'm getting there.

The short simple answer to this is that sometimes there is more to being a good worker than having lots of good matches. I like Dylan's point and see that as legitimate argument, although not the one that sways me the most personally. There are exceptions (like Owen Hart, for example, and it's the main reason why I put him on my list) but I'm not someone who usually cares too much about working effectively to your card placement and working to get the goals of the promoter over and all that. (But again I can see why other people do care about that and use it as a non-match quality way to rate a worker) But there are absolutely ways to show your worth as a wrestler without being able to point to a list of great, or even good matches. Maybe a guy can work interesting spots or moments into matches that aren't so good. Maybe he's the bright spot in otherwise crummy matches. Maybe a guy can work really interesting finishers that stick in your mind, even if the match that proceeded it wasn't great. Maybe a guy is an unbelievable spot monkey who can blow people's minds with the moves they can do. Maybe a guy can express a range of emotions in a match, or he's great at selling, or working a limb, or whatever else. Maybe it's whatever else he's doing as a performer that tells you that he's a good worker, even if you can't point to specific matches that can be rated "good" or "great". There are many reasons why a match might not be great and a lot of them have nothing to do with the work going on in the ring. Fuck man I'm not explaining myself well at all. The one guy I can point to for sure as evidence for me is Santino Marella. That guy was so great as a comedy worker, just totally getting it. He understood his role perfectly and knew how to be entertaining. He came up with cool ass spots to do in his matches that worked and got over and popped the crowd. That Cobra was a brilliant goofy comedy finisher. He had great crowd control and kept his segments, promos and matches entertaining. I could watch him work all day, and if it was a Top 150 I'd have nominated him for sure. I can also list his really good matches on one hand. To me he has proven his value to me as a worker, from all of the great comedy work he does, all of the ways in which he keeps my interest in his segments and matches, and his talent at things like timing, crowd control, selling and emoting, etc. He was wildly and consistently entertaining. He just doesn't have a lot of individual matches that I could point to as being particularly good. And I couldn't give a shit. I can see finding things to enjoy about a worker who has their moments of isolated fun for sure. I just don't see any wrestlers like that coming up on a GWE list. Did you consider Santino? That's all I'm saying.

Other than knowing ahead of time who the captain of each team is. And having to learn that referees don't enforce legal men and make the others stand on the apron. And then wondering when they don't if you're seeing a bad match or if that's just the style. And wondering why you can't hear the crowd, and not understanding the hierarchy of moves. It takes some time to understand. I love lucha and still don't entirely get it.

Trios matches aren't elevated by execution of the structure so much as they are by the quality of the pairings. In most cases, if you have two pairings out of three that work, you have a good match. At least that's been my experience.

Even before that, Scott was the guy with the super cool moves. He blew people away at the time. I don't know that he's *that* much better than Rick, but I do think he was more likely to make an impact on the viewer. In that sense, a huge gap feels appropriate.

The three matches from this week's show that I watched today featured a lot more playing to the crowd in the building. It made all the matches seem much better. It makes me wonder if Vince saw guys doing it at Takeover, saw that it got over and came across well and loosened the edict. Charlotte is very over as champion. It's going to be a big deal when she drops the title and finally gets her comeuppance. Dave said Natalya has been doing jiu-jitsu training with Josh Barnett lately, and I thought she looked great in that match. Zayn-Styles was solid but not as good as it should have been because of some crossed signals. I'm sure it would be much better happening again. Cesaro-Owens was terrific. Owens did some great work on Cesaro's shoulder and again, I really liked how everyone was playing to the crowd in their matches.

Thanks. That struggle was maybe the biggest reason I didn't want to submit a ballot for so long. I knew it only be good for a few minutes, then I'd want to re-do it. At a certain point, I just had to stop.

He won? That wasn't really clear to me. I thought he just abandoned the match and the ref threw it out.

I appreciate the responses to my HHH question, but I want to change how I'm asking it because there's still something I don't understand. Are there a hundred wrestlers we can name who are better or worse than their match resume would suggest? I'm asking because HHH and Antonio Inoki are the names I've seen mentioned, which if there are only a handful of wrestlers to whom this applies means that an entire approach of how to rank wrestlers is being rejected outright because of a few outliers. On the subject of opportunity, I don't see how wrestlers not put in positions to have good matches have any way to prove their value as workers, at least not convincingly enough to rank on a list like this. I'm not saying that to dismiss anyone's opinion. I'm saying it because there are people whose opinions I value who disagree with me on this enough that I don't want to stop until I completely understand the opposing viewpoint. I'm not seeking to change anyone's mind or prove anyone wrong. I'm just looking for it to make sense to me.

I'm not sure why you're trying to suggest that wrestlers don't get praised for working stiff when guys like Vader or the BattlArts mainstays have basically received a ton of praise because of their stiff, hard hitting style. Based on that one psychotic interview with Ikeda (or was it Ishikawa?) we know they take pride in working stiff. This is one reason I didn't have Ikeada on my list. I think it's very relevant, but the issue is that we're unable to tell who actually hurts their opponent and who doesn't (other than the self-admission by Ikeda, or when opponents criticize guys like Vader and Goldberg...) I agree that some guys hit hard and it doesn't look great. But on average, I'd say it's far easier to make things look good when you're actually hitting harder. Because the praise comes from how the stuff looks. Sometimes, "stiff" is used as shorthand for that, but it's about appearance of pain inflicted, not actual pain inflicted. That's what wrestling is.

I don't know. Feels like the elites looking down on the commoners to me to separate it. But if people want to do it ...

No one gets credit for "working stiff". Unless we're taking the shot, we really don't know. But if their stuff looks good, they do get credit. Some guys hit hard and it doesn't look great. Some guys work really light and their stuff looks great. To me, it's more about execution than how much it hurt the other wrestler. I don't think we're rewarding carelessness. We're rewarding stuff that looks like it hurts. Whether it really does or not is irrelevant.

I feel like that post was an absolutist take. To imply that in order to say someone is being carried, they have to be literally contributing nothing in a match is silly.

I would like to seek clarification on one thing. Do the people who don't think HHH is a great worker genuinely think all (or even most) of the most commonly-referenced matches are great? Or are you just pointing to matches people frequently cite as great? He's the worker I've seen cited the most. For those of you opposed to using great matches as the key metric, is HHH the first wrestler that usually comes to mind in your head when you think about why? I'm trying to figure out just how much of this is about HHH.