Loss

People hated the brand split when it was around. It is a great thing in theory, but WWE wasn't disciplined enough to stick with doing it the right way, and there's no evidence it wouldn't run into the same problems this time around. When Punk and Bryan were champions of their respective brands and having forgotten matches against each other in the middle of random Raws, you see how much world champ vs WWE champ really meant. END THE BRAND SPLIT was a rallying cry throughout the 2000s for a way to freshen up WWE. People want it back because they want WWE to freshen up, but as we've seen before, it won't work. Their institutionalized creative woes run much deeper than a brand split can alleviate, and they'd rather reshuffle their entire business model than earnestly face those problems.

They had something like 9 broadways in 12 days or something insane like that. But yeah, on the NWA handhelds, 35 minutes of one of them made tape.

Liger is going to be in my top five. I absolutely consider him the greatest junior heavyweight of all time, but also, he's developed an almost age-proof style without seeming like yesterday's news. It's easy to forget he's been performing at a high level for nearly 30 years. He will not be my #1, but I do think one could definitely make a #1 case for him and it wouldn't be far-fetched at all.

Looks like they will face League of Nations, but maybe not. We'll see.

It was weeks into the project before Flair even came up for discussion that time around, and it took a lot of pushing from yours truly to get people to even really consider him. People were not excited about him at all. JDW and Frank were the first people to ever really criticize him, and people took that and ran with it even farther than they did. It really was common at that point for those participating in the voting to consider Benoit and Eddy better than him, and the final results bore that out.

Because This Is Workrate was a pretty prolific poster and talked about him constantly.

Gotta love the elitist attitude. It's true. I won't even deny it.

Ann Calvello was tremendous and wasn't even really a wrestling bio.

I agree with the premise that they knew it worked, but aren't sure why it wouldn't work with just any high-flying Mexican in a mask.

People who had Geocities pages with names like SuckIt316 who later used terms like IWC. Those are the Shane-o-Maniacs.

I felt last time around like Jumbo was a foregone conclusion for the top spot and this time, I don't think anyone is, so that's a good thing.

I always thought Mascaras sucking was just something that caught fire based on Mick Foley's book more than anything.

Brody 2/11/83 in St. Louis Jumbo 6/8/83 in All Japan Steamboat 3/17/84 in Mid Atlantic Reed 8/10/85 in Mid South

Adonis and Murdoch guzzle opponents? Never heard that talking point before. Which opponents? That was the common point raised after people watched their matches on the 80s New Japan set.

By the way, the 1978 tour wasn't just any tour. He got a pinfall win over Baba in a tag match, which showed they had plans for him. I'm not sure why he never toured in 1979-1980 and that would be interesting to discuss, but not in a thread about Kenta Kobashi.

Not to mention that the repeated Germans are something guys like Kurt Angle would get criticized for.

Serious question about Brock. How is him eating up opponents okay when guys like Hansen and Brody or Adonis and Murdoch get criticized for it? Is it a matter of him just eating people up being more entertaining to watch or is it something else? The only reason I'm not ranking Brock is that I think he's pretty one dimensional. He can kick ass in a fun way, but I don't see a strong grasp of psychology or the ability to sell or anything like that. I don't see how Brock is demonstrably better than The Road Warriors, who I don't see get much praise as workers.

John Cena, Chris Jericho, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe and Goldust are the only ones that have a chance, and I'm not even 100% sure they will all make it.

Yeah, Bill DeMott was a fall guy for merely executing the directive he was given.

Vince has said Kurt Angle will never work for him again because he doesn't want an Olympic gold medalist to die on their watch. He's been saying that for years. It's never happening.

That point, for the record, was that Ric Flair has probably been mentally ill for at least 20 years, and when so much of his greatness was routed in his self-confidence, I'm not sure his latter years tell us anything all that valuable, other than that he had regressed. Wrestlers are capable of change -- not just physically, but mentally too.

I was editing my post while you were posting.

I said this to Matt in a private conversation and felt like it should be posted here: If I tell someone the potato is the best food ever, I don't think the proper way to start investigating that claim is to eat a burned one. I'll let him add his response here if he chooses, because it was an interesting one.

I'd be hesitant on that explanation. I really enjoy the two matches with Hogan in 91. I've written about them here before (though years ago, so always, there's a caveat there). But they weren't supposed to be great matches. That wasn't his role on the card. So it's more of a case that we weren't put in a position to know how good he was because it wasn't his job to have the sort of matches that would have shown us until years later. Undertaker serves again as a example of being a character first and having that drive his matches rather than being super focused on having the best match possible. People have this tendency to believe that if someone wasn't having workrate matches, then they were not capable of doing so rather than it being a actual choice to play with the medium. Early work as Mark Callous indicates at least a certain level of competency for a young guy but he was simply another guy in WCW. It wasn't until he came to WWE and started acting like a zombie that he was able to capture the audience. Why in the heck would he go back to a less successful formula just so he could become just another guy? Snowflakes don't make for good wrestlers regardless of what one might think. Roman Reigns has bunches of good matches, but his character is so empty, he hasn't connected with the adult audience regardless. I feel like this point conflates the idea of having the best match possible with having a workrate match. A workrate match isn't necessarily the best match possible. But I think the better question is why it took Mick Foley coming in for Undertaker to finally start having good matches. The idea that he made a choice is certainly a valid one, but he made a choice to be a less interesting wrestler in order to get his character over. I don't think music critics would praise groups like Genesis or Heart for abandoning their initial sound for a more commercially appealing style. I wouldn't criticize him too much for it, but I don't think those years reflect in a *good* way on him. You compare Undertaker to other attraction types like Kamala or Killer Khan and there is proof that guys doing similar gimmicks where workrate specials weren't the priority still had good, enjoyable matches.

He did that in 07, after 4 years of being the worst wrestler in a major promotion. As Matt noted, sometimes watching someone post prime does not reveal much. How extensively has this claim that Ric Flair was the worst wrestler in a major promotion been vetted?