Loss

They do. Undertaker got mad at DDP bumping on his side and complained to management, who made him start bumping on his back. I think he wrestled another 6-7 months.

I've said this before, but the reasons careers tend to go longer in lucha libre is that they don't take flat back bumps. Then there's Ric Flair, who didn't take flat back bumps because of the plane crash who had a long career and still gets around well today. Then there was Diamond Dallas Page who never took flat back bumps and had a productive career well into his 40s that came to a halt when WWE told him he needed to start taking flat back bumps. It's not a cure-all, but it's a start.

I think another way to say a whole is greater than the sum of the parts is to say a wrestler's charisma is strong enough to be a more important part of their overall package than any of their merits and faults.

Whether or not WWE's actions were racially motivated (and I really do not believe they were at all), I still understand why it came up. The black employee of a white billionaire playfully grabbed his boss to remind him to be chivalrous to his daughter. That one interaction is informed by race, gender and class. Just because I don't personally think this is a case of racism doesn't mean it's not worth discussing it.

Bray has established an accidental career trajectory, one where he's booked really strong in the first few months of each year, then doesn't really do much of note the rest of the year other than play Even Steven with the stars.

I would definitely categorize Hashimoto as greater than the sum. There are other guys in New Japan like Junji Hirata and Takashi Iizuka that are arguably better wrestlers, but they don't have the charisma, presence or ability to generate emotion from an audience through facial expressions and the ability to pace a match of Hashimoto. And you can't really quantify those things.

Thanks for reading my little blurb on the air. It's appreciated. To follow up on that, I do agree that Watts selected talent that wasn't right to execute this vision. To his credit, he did eventually figure that out and made the needed changes, but by then, he was nearing the end of his run. At first, he didn't seem to realize the top talent in 1987 wasn't the same as the top talent in 1992. By the end of his run, he was pushing Austin, Dustin, Pillman, Foley, Douglas, Benoit and Scorpio, with Vader and Sting as the main event constants and Steamboat and Windham as the working vets, with Flair on the way. He was also giving guys like Orndorff who could still go new leases on life. He signed Regal and RVD. Given who ended up having a successful rest of the decade, it's tough to paint him as too out of touch in that regard. He was out of touch on talent when he started, which meant he was out of touch when this show happened. But he was a quick study. It's sad that early 1993 was when WCW started getting really good under him, which also happened to be right when his time there ended.

Ditto You guys will be cited as evidence of HHH's massive drawing power at some point.

I'd want to probably think about it a little more before really declaring it, but I'm pretty sure every single wrestler I'm ranking for GWE is someone I'd describe as being greater than the sum of their parts. I think any great wrestler is more than just a list of their attributes. They have intangibles that maybe on paper don't make them seem like great wrestlers, but they manage to make whatever their "objective" flaws are irrelevant or in some cases even endearing. There are wrestlers that don't fit this bill and it's probably why I wouldn't rank them. Brad Armstrong is one who comes to mind as less than the sum of his parts -- mechanically miles better than Shawn Michaels (and it's not like there's huge daylight between him and Benoit and Eddy either), yet Shawn is the much greater wrestler.

I'd like to see everyone who gets even one vote ranked instead of just the top 100. I like the idea of a countdown megathread with a single post for each person that has a picture, the person who voted them highest (and where they ranked them), a few blurbs, etc. That's how the Smarkschoice poll results were rolled out and it worked well. People also posted their reactions within the same thread, though, which meant it was a few hundred pages when all was said and done. Maybe a second megathread just for reactions? I'm ambivalent on how it's spaced out. I don't know about a podcast just because I don't know feasible it is for everyone to block off however long to listen to each one, although as a supplemental thing, it's a great idea. As for weighting, I have some thoughts on that, but yeah, a separate thread probably works best.

That was fantastic.

The Taka match is really a testament to the winning formula of the WWF at the time (of which HHH was admittedly a key part) than it is a great performance.

It's really tough for me to separate my personal dislike of him from his performances, because I do think he's largely responsible for the decline in quality in the most major league wrestling company in the world over the past 15 years. He has the same cult of self surrounding him that guys like Rock and Hogan do, only he doesn't have the other attributes they do that make that somewhat tolerable. His insistence on looking strong at all costs, even at times to his own detriment, permeates everything he does. I'm sure if I tried to think about him objectively, I'd probably find a decent amount of great matches and have at least a halfway good impression of him, but I can't. His contributions to my wrestling fandom are a net negative.

Who in the world even has these tapes? As someone who has searched for this stuff in recent years, nothing came up at all through the usual sources.

Because Vince McMahon was the guy who brought that level of quality control to wrestling.

I hate even saying this here since it has nothing to do with DiBiase, but I'm not sure where else to say it. On the subject of shoot style, I think too much emphasis is placed on it being a "style". Is it really *that* different than something like Antonio Inoki vs Billy Robinson from 1975? I feel like if it wasn't wrestled in rounds and pinfalls were counted, it wouldn't be seen as its own thing so much.

FMW's famous anal bomb death match.

Have at it.

Dave clarified this on his breaking audio today. He asked for the release months ago and was told he couldn't ask for one by Vince. It's just that it was only recently reported because that story only recently got out.

I guess because they already did a tease like that at the end of 2014 and didn't want to get everyone's hopes up.

Yep. I suspect it's the real deal, but in the back of my mind, I also think it would be a HELL of an angle to set up a big Wrestlemania match. A heel antagonizes him just when he seems ready to finally walk away. Still, that's not what this is. It's in the back of my mind, but this is the real deal.

I said to Dylan elsewhere that I do think it's possible I and some others overrate him at least a little because he's so easy to like. If this was a Nicest Wrestler Ever ballot, he'd probably win in a cakewalk. His disposition makes him a natural babyface. In terms of getting heat in ROH, I think there are so many contextual asterisks there that it's not something I would hold against him too much. Others did get real heat in ROH, yes, but they also weren't having the types of matches that would sell DVDs. I am wowing at myself as I type that one because it sounds like the exact same arguments made against Bryan when he started flirting with the top in WWE. ROH was a strange animal though, in that people were so sick of the WWE-style presentation of wrestling that they were willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater in terms of staples of American wrestling such as babyfaces and heels. The idea was really just to deliver matches with high star ratings, and any character work was really just given lip service for the most part. I don't say that to excuse him. In fact, I'd rather look at his heel run in 2011-2012 WWE. He was over, but again, he's so tough to dislike that he didn't have nearly as transcendant a heel run as he did a babyface one. When I watch matches from him against Punk and Sheamus in 2012, I also see a guy who isn't really taking crazy bumps that much, and is doing as much matwork as the WWE style would allow. I don't think he started really going overboard with the ugly bumps until he turned babyface.

I think he's a better comparison to Barry Windham.

Dusty is an interesting one because he was definitely a gigantic star who was part of some successful and memorable moments after footage became more common, but we really caught his best days more than 60% joined in progress. There is footage of him when he was younger and of his babyface turn, but not nearly as much as I'd like to see.

I might watch wrestling hammered, but I don't think I'd ever talk about what's good or bad after watching hammered. Besides, I'm more fun when drunk than any wrestling match could dream of being.