Loss

Talk about it here.

Talk about it here.

I was defining this thread as wrestlers who had the most good matches and got the least credit for it, not wrestlers who should have been pushed harder. In that case, I'd argue Jericho, who became a star and seems like a weird pick. However, he was over enough at the height of his popularity that he could have been the guy to step up and carry things after Austin and Rock left. Maybe he wouldn't have been quite at that level, but he could have been in that spot as the top babyface to build around if he was booked properly.

Chavo Guerrero Jr. seems like another good pick.

Mike Awesome died in the 00s. It feels weird praising a guy's decade who died after he hung himself within said decade. My 00s watching is my weakest of any decade, but I'd probably say Averno, in terms of being really good in lots of matches with bigger stars, but never really getting that much hype for it.

Probably very few fans, but I really don't like the idea that it's because he wasn't in the WWF. It's probably true, but it's a truth I hate for that reason. But most WWE fans have probably never heard of Lou Thesz either. It doesn't mean much.

I definitely agree that some matches look better on paper than others. Of course I notice when wrestlers show up in great matches repeatedly. On the subject of opportunity, at the risk of saying something contentious, I can't think of a single wrestler in history who hasn't been put in a position to have good matches. Every match has the potential to be good. I've seen great five minute matches and lousy ones that go an hour. I've seen booking tricks both help and hinder the quality of a match. Call me an optimist, but every match has the opportunity to be good. And I don't subscribe to the theory that it's not the role of some wrestlers to have good matches. Does that mean their role is to go out there and stink up the joint? Explain this, Matt D.

I am so behind on 80s sets, even though I have them all, so I feel weird for even participating in this thread. But ... the Mid South set was fantastic and was my favorite in the sense that I got through it pretty easily and found something to like about pretty much every match on the set.

Was Misawa a consensus pick that was definitely better than Kawada and Kobashi in each of those years? Also, I would disagree that the worldwide standard of work was higher in the 90s than in the 80s. Wrestling moves were more advanced, but that's really it. If anything, wrestling was dumbed down from the 80s. Had wrestling not changed, a guy like Bret Hart would have been traveling to All Japan to defend the NWA title, with everyone involved needing to figure out how to have great matches with each other.

For someone to be as much of a wrestling fan as me and not have a favorite wrestler probably seems odd, but I don't. I have my personal opinions on who the best and worst wrestlers are, but my personal attachment is not to wrestlers themselves. It is to matches, angles and promos. In other words, the performance is what grabs me (the message), not the wrestler (the messenger). I just wondered if anyone else sees wrestling in these terms. I'd love to participate in the Fave Five thread pinned at the top of this board, but I don't have a clue who my five favorite wrestlers are. I could list my five favorite matches easily. It's the difference between rating a meal and rating a chef. I'd much rather rate a meal. I'm not comfortable rating a chef. I am the same way with music -- I don't have favorite artists as much as I have favorite songs. I don't have favorite actors, just favorite movies. In some ways, I get the "You've never been in the ring" complaint. Not in the sense that it means you can't have opinions about wrestlers, but more in the sense that you really don't know who contributed the ideas that got over the most. And I don't really care about that. I recently made the math analogy. Count on your fingers, do your work on paper or put it into a calculator. I don't care. Just get the right answer. Am I bonkers for looking at everything this way? Am I the only person here that looks at everything from this point of view?

I don't think Flair has to be better than every other wrestler who ever lived to be the best wrestler who ever lived. He just needs to have had a better career full of more great matches than any other wrestler who ever lived. That's my metric. We can find things about everyone at that level that annoy us, Flair included. "Best wrestler of all time" and "most talented wrestler of all time" are two completely different things. Flair would be my pick in the first category. Barry Windham would probably be my pick in the second, and in no way whatsoever is he a GOAT contender. If I considered Windham a GOAT candidate, it would be totally based on a hypothetical. Ranking wrestlers based on talent instead of output is rating wrestlers on the hypothetical instead of the reality of what they managed to do with the skills they had. If someone is going to argue against Flair as a GOAT, I don't think the way to do it is to point to flaws in his style, or point out that other people were better at some things than him. Microtargeting Flair's weaknesses is a pretty useless exercise to me, much like microtargeting any wrestler's weaknesses. I think the better way is to look at all of his acclaimed matches and point out why they aren't as great as they are made out to be.

...if I bitch about Gorilla'smarks stubbornness in those incidents where he actively disagrees with the referee's decision. then do I enter smark territory? (Note to the new guys: I used to be an announcer in a very small but legitimate company called USWO. I would have been a wrestler, if I hadn't been born with a mild case of cerebral palsy that made me way too clumsy to run any real spots. But my weird little career is a much longer story, and I'm all too human and can't avoid telling stories like the time Bobby Eaton forgot his own spot that he called;) If there's not a specific booking point you are trying to get over in doing so, yes, probably.

Geez dude, that's an awful lot of self-deprecation. Relax, we're all just working stiffs, talking about tumblers who wear underwear outside and pretend to fight. No need for the "I respect the business!" or "I bow to your clearly superior knowledge!" self-flagellation. It brings back memories of Chris Coey's swarm of simpering fanboys, all afraid to offend the wise old master, which is never an atmosphere conducive to useful discourse. Relax, we've known Jose for a long time. He's being overly deferential as a joke. And yes, feel free to start the thread. You can do that in the main forum if you like.

Because wrestlers are professional liars who probably have an agenda behind just about anything they say. They are also likely to rate their peers based on how well they got along personally.

I know this has been pointed out to me before, but it always surprises me to see so much time devoted to Brody criticism, when I personally can't recall a single person ever praising him. I get that he was praised by hardcores in the 1980s, but does he still have avid defenders? He doesn't strike me as a particularly contentious wrestler. The feeling that he sucked is fairly unanimous these days, is it not? Maybe Classics types defend him, but they formed all of their wrestling opinions decades ago and havent changed them. I would be interested in a huge Brody fan explaining his appeal.

I think Orton has safely cemented himself as a second-tier guy at best at this point. Punk has surpassed him, and Daniel Bryan probably has too. The Shield looks on track to do so as well. Plus, he has two wellness violations.

I should have mentioned Undertaker too. He has some matches I really like. However, my biggest problem with the Undertaker is that his act feels so entitled and selfish. No one ever really points out that having someone who is seen as a cut above every single week-to-week guy who will never put them over in a meaningful way is counterproductive. He will end his career without passing the torch to anyone, and he only sells for guys he sees at his level. If he was a full-timer and everyone in the company was coming after him constantly while he held them off, that would be fine. But the setup right now benefits Undertaker and no one else. I will be very surprised if he has a Michaels/HHH-level match with Punk, simply because I don't anticipate him respecting Punk enough to sell so much for him and let him kick out of the tombstone. Undertaker matches always feel really self-indulgent, like they are making this big production of how much he deserves to be respected, instead of just letting his work speak for itself. When I see him wrestle, it's also a frustrating reminder that it would be nearly impossible for Vince to get *that* behind someone who doesn't prove themselves as a draw first ever again.

I think longevity is helpful in comparing wrestlers, but it's not useful in isolation, and without context. There's a difference between being "great" for 20+ years, and being one of the best in the world for 20+ years. There are wrestlers who have been great much longer than Flair, but Flair sustained a GOAT-level peak longer than anyone else I can recall. I look at that as 1982-1989. He still had gas in the tank after that, but Ric Flair as the idealized version of "The Man" was never the same after that. I can't think of anyone else who had as many good, great and classic matches in an 8-year period. I'm willing to admit that I may be wrong, (As I told Dylan recently, I was wrong once. It was a Thursday.) but anything after that doesn't really factor into my opinion of him, whether I like it or don't like it. I may have learned to love it at times when he pulled out a great match, but it was no longer the best thing going today. Being great for 8 years is impressive, but plenty of people fit that bill. Being the #1 guy in the promotion while also being the best wrestler in the world for an 8-year stretch is something I can't think of anyone else ever doing. (1987 and 1988 are the two years where I'd probably argue that he wasn't for various reasons, but he was still in the top 2-3 at worst.) So I use the phrase "best in the world" loosely. He had a very strong case every single one of those years. The guy is the biggest reason I want to do 80s yearbooks. Release a 1985 Yearbook and see Flair alongside everyone else in wrestling at the time, and there's no way his GOAT case isn't sealed. At least that's how it plays out in my mind. Watch a yearbook from any year in the 90s so far. The biggest takeaway is that "Wow, All Japan had some great matches", not "Wow, Kawada had some great matches." That's the difference between those guys and Flair for me. I think we have to be careful saying guys like Casas "double" Flair's longevity. Just because he had an all-time classic in 1987 and an all-time classic in 2012, we shouldn't assume that based on that alone, he was delivering them every single year in between. I love Negro Casas. He's probably my #2 GOAT, to be honest. And in most years that I have seen a Negro Casas match, I have seen a stellar Negro Casas match that is one of my favorites of the year. But he probably wasn't one of top two or three wrestlers in the world every single year from 1987 - 2012.

You by far have higher standards for match quality than anyone else I can think of. I don't even point that out as a bad thing. I just think you can be pretty critical. So it doesn't surprise me that a list of wrestlers you don't really care to ever watch again is a long one.

I look at it like doing math. I don't care if you count on your fingers, use a calculator or do it in your head, as long as you get to the right answer. I'm slightly more interested in how wrestlers get to a great match than I am the use of calculators, but the point still stands. What I care about above all else is the end result. I want to see results. I'm very middle management that way.

El-P is a big fan of Raven. It's really hard for me to name wrestlers I don't like, because I'm not someone who thinks about wrestlers individually as much as I do matches. I could name wrestlers I don't like, and they're probably most of the same wrestlers no one else likes. But I can probably also name matches of theirs that I like quite a bit.

RAVEN

Carlito always struck me as a lazy fuck and I never liked him as a result, but I really may have been worked by his gimmick.

If his specialty was potatoes, no one would frown on that at all. The best chefs aren't necessarily the ones who can cook every possible thing.

I personally don't care for the 619 at all for the same reasons I don't really like the stinkface -- it's not really a natural way for wrestlers to lay and sell. You'd never see a wrestler sell while laying on the ropes during a John Cena match, for example. It doesn't take anything away from Rey for me. I can hate the 619 and love Rey.