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He wasn't on my ballot. I won't vote for him unless he has another strong run in pro wrestling. What he did in MMA has a 0.00 Blutarsky-ish impact on my vote. John

There was an Abby-Ogawa match later in the year where Ogawa juiced. I think Baba made an exception for Abby, but in a very limited fashion. John

There's always going to be people who say something's good before the majority cotton on. What's the majority? Choshu was a WON Wrestler of the Year. In the 80s. Was pimped to shit. Went into the WON HOF... instantly. The "majority" of hardcore fans at the time who talked about the subject (Puroresu) thought Choshu was pretty fucking great. That's not an insignificant number of people: it was the Entire US Population of Puroresu Fans at the time. There really weren't any non-Japanese puroresu fans in the US who weren't WON readers. Okay... perhaps one: me, who became a puroresu fan about a year and a half before starting to sub to the WON (after Dave's pieces in The National started coming out). How significant were those puroresu fans? WON Wrestler of the Year 1982 Ric Flair 1983 Ric Flair (2) 1984 Ric Flair (3) 1985 Ric Flair (4) 1986 Ric Flair (5) 1987 Riki Choshu 1988 Akira Maeda 1989 Ric Flair (6) 1990 Ric Flair (7) 1991 Jumbo Tsuruta 1992 Ric Flair (8) Right there smack dab in the middle of the Ric Flair Dynasty, Choshu broke in and was the first non-Flair to win the award during the Voting Period of the WON (those earlier 1980 and 1981 awards were before the WON started publishing). Significant. It's the equiv of a person today saying that all they've ever heard about was Babe Ruth, and it was amazing to look up the stats and see this Lou Gehrig fellow was pretty good... why haven't people talked about him... To which anyone whose been a baseball fan for any length and knowledgeable about baseball history would point out the contemporaneous record: MVP Award 1927 AL 1st 1931 AL 2nd 1932 AL 2nd 1933 AL 4th 1934 AL 5th 1935 AL 5th 1936 AL 1st 1937 AL 4th Sporting News Major League All-Star Team 1927 1B Lou Gehrig 1928 1B Lou Gehrig 1931 1B Lou Gehrig 1934 1B Lou Gehrig 1936 1B Lou Gehrig 1937 1B Lou Gehrig 1939 HOF So it's a discussion of... Newbie FAN: "OMG~! We've discovered a hidden GREAT here~!" Fan Who Has Been Around: "Really? Did you also just learn yesterday that Cock+Pussy-Birth Control = How Babies Are Made?" I mean... I guess there are STNG fans who might in 1994 have gone to Star Trek: Generations and wondered who this Kirk guy was, then watched the earlier films, and the stumbled on the original series and thought: STNG Fan: "OMG~! This Kirk guy is the MOTHERFUCKING! bomb! Why hasn't anyone talked about him?" Older Trekie: "Really? Seriously... really?" * * * * * Look, it's perfectly fine for folks who sport wood over Fujiwara to take great pride in their "rediscover" the greatness of Fujiwara and have at it in putting him on their personal Mount Rushmore of Great Workers. The reality is that folks who watched UWF in the 80s didn't pimp him as a great worker. He wasn't pimped in the 90s, either in the WON or online. Several folks watched him in the last decade, lost their shit for him, and helped reshape how people viewed Fujiwara. This is New Thinking, and that's good. But Choshu and Fujinami have been out there. They were pimped at the time. They were still talked about in the 90s as being greats in their prime. They were still talked about in the 00s as being great in their prime. I have a memory of Dylan pimping the DK-Fujinami match as being better than the DK-Sayama matches, and this before the Anti-Sayama Brigade fully took off (and as far as I recall, only Jewett was shitting on Sayama... and ironically the future Anti-Sayama Brigade were fans of much of his analysis of workers at the time). I've pimped Choshu-Fujinami and Choshu & Yatsu vs Jumbo & Tenryu matches from pretty much the moment I came online in 1996. This ain't New Thinking. It's just new people seeing the Same Shit that people have seen for 30 years. Bill James putting over Lou Lou Gehrig isn't a revelation, nor would he claim it was. It's simply seeing what those at the time did, and writing again about it: "This motherfucker could rake." John

Linda McMahon pulls WWE-style dirty tricks out of the bag Classic. John

If that's the case, someone might want to ask Flik to be one of the nominators/voters/whatever.

Adding to some of what Dylan went through... The series with Backlund produced good matches in three different feuds: 1979, 1981 and 1984. It's certainly a matter of taste, and of one doesn't like Backlund's style of work you're not likely to enjoy them. But if you do: * the 02/19/79 draw is great * the 11/23/81 match after the title was held was good * the 04/23/84 MSG match was very good I've seen the 1981 match where the title got held up... doesn't stick with me. I also have watched the full version of the 1982 Philly blow off in the cage (rather than the chopped version the WWF/WWE usually releases)... I don't recall it either... I'm guessing Hoback and I were talking about something that distracted us during it. The 1979 return match in MSG off the draw *wasn't* good, and probably does a good job of capturing what a lot of us would see in the WWF in the second half of the 80s with Greg: he's just not terribly interested in doing much. It's a pretty stark contrast to the great draw. Which is probably what one would get from Greg if going through his career and watching Everything that's available. The high end would be very good. He'd have a fair amount of solid stuff. But there would also be times where he wasn't into it. I don't think he was every as consistent in sucking as Muraco was. But I do also recall seeing him live a number of times where it was just killing time. We clearly don't have the best of his stuff, which was probably his two Mid Atlantic runs around the 1979 trip to the WWF. Obviously the holy grail for Greg would be to get several singles matches with Steamboat. I think Greg's not an unreasonable candidate. Perhaps not quite in, but also not an embarrassing one to be on the ballot and talked about. John

I think the only thing that exists is the 12/04/79 Fujinami vs. Valentine match. A number of other matches were identified by Dan G as being on Raijin's wonderful list, Raijin went off the grid before Dan was able to get everything.

We did: it was NJPW vs WAR. John

They also had the short match in 1991 at WrestleWar. John

Saito getting "reevaluated" recently to "favorable"? I'm guessing that I missed the period when people thought Saito sucked? John

The booking committee at this time had Flair, Ross and Cornette on it if I recall correctly. I suspect that Dave was more dialed into that committee than any in the history of the WON in terms of getting truthful info (i.e. in contrast to talking to Paul all the time during ECW's run but having to sift through Paul's bullshit, halftruths and delusions). So whatever Dave was writing in the WON at the time has a fairly high probability of being true, especially relative to what Gary "remembered" two decades after the fact. John

I'd add in that Yamada's SSP gets brought back after the mask ripping "exposes" that Liger is Yamada. People "knew" that Liger was Yamada, but he avoided the move under the pretense that he really wasn't Liger. It's pretty damn cool to dust it off here given the mask ripping gave a reason for it. John

Nice piece. Here's another funny one: Linda McMahon Doorhanger: Vote For Obama … And Me Yeah, she's toast, and hilariously toast given it's her second dance of pissing her money away. Nate's forecast: Projected vote share: 52.4-45.7 (Murphy +6.7) Chance of winning: 92%/8% That might actually be "low" as there has only been the PPP poll in the last 13 days. That's a period where (i) Mittmentum stopped, (ii) Obama reversed a chunk of his post-1st debate losses, (iii) that Obama add was perfectly timed for this final weekend, and (iv) Linda Fatigue has set in. Here's another reason it might actually be low, looking at Nate's Presidential forecast: CT Projected vote share: 56.3-42.8 (Obama +13.5) Chance of winning: 100%/0% Two things come to mind: (i) Linda might be more unpopular in CT than Linda, and (ii) that Obama ad might just give some coattails that split the difference between where he has Obama projected and where he has Murphy projected. If Obama does in fact win by 13 points, it's hard to see Linda not finishing 9 points behind. John

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/20...nate-races.html PPP leans Dem, at least in 2009 & 2010. But this was interesting: