jdw

Wait... what? People say only AJPW knew how to work? This is little more than an inferiority complex. The biggest AJPW fans online also like things as varied at NJPW, AJW, Stone Cold and The Rock, Flair and the MX, Hayabusa, Bob Backlund, UWF-style... christ, one of the best things Jewett ever wrote was breaking down how well worked the Stinky Face Match was. People talked about All Japan *exactly* how people talk about Hitchcock. I could pop in *any* of my Criterion Collection releases of Kurosawa films, flip on the Commentary track, and listen to someone break down and put over Kurosawa in ways that *vastly* go beyond anything that Frank or I ever did. There's every bit as much leeway in pro wrestling. There are people who like Hulk Hogan, and there are people who like Ric Flair. There were Shawn Michaels Fans, and there were Bret Hart Fans. There were Misawa Fans, there were Kobashi Fans, and there Kawada Fans. There were AJPW Fans, and there were NJPW Juniors fans. There were ECW Garbage Fans, and there were WCW Fans, and there were WWF Fans. Toyota vs Hokuto. And on and on. This is just insecurity. Flair vs Steamboat was also seen as a perfect way to wrestle. Shawn Michaels was seen as a perfect way to wrestler. Liger and the Juniors was seen as a perfect way to wrestle. Stone Cold and The Rock were seen as a perfect way to wrestle. People treat Bob Dylan and The Beatles like they treat AJPW and NJPW Juniors. They treated the WWF and WCW online in the late 90s just like they treated the Celtics and Lakers in the 80s... christ, RSPW was one big argument between the camps over which was better. Your comment was that 90% of the voters has seen 0 Jumbo before he died. I call bullshit on it. And I'll stand by that. "Plenty" isn't 90%. You're shape shifting here. The comment on Choshu was about people coming to think of his as great, and my response of No Fucking Shit - he was thought of as great 30 years ago. It would be like a 20 year old posting online that finding out The Godfather is great is a revelation. No shit: it want the fucking Oscar, and if you asked around you would have been told it was great. Before you try to pawn off that no one in the 00s talked about Choshu being great, plenty of us put over Choshu prior to the 80s NJPW set. Christ... I've been publicly trying to get Ishingundan in the HOF, including digging up old WON quotes for Frank to put into his pieces on them. I've regularly put over "past his prime" matches like 11/90 vs Hash, 1/93 vs Tenryu and 8/96 vs Hash. It's been out there. I became a baseball fan in 1972. Do I get credit for "discovering" Babe Ruth despite the fact that people were talking about him all the way back to 1914? Seriously? Are you going to take credit for talking about Tokyo Story despite it being talked about for decades, long before you saw it? Jesus, Donald Richie, love him or hate him, was writing about Ozu before the two of us were born. God bless new fans coming in an watching stuff for the first time, adding new life blood to the fandom. We need it to continue on. But let's not get goofy about it. On 1wrestling? Guys like Scherer watched Jumbo back in the early 90s when he was *active*. To act like is has significant meaning is way off. We have the desire to think that opinions, such as GOAT, starts with the first time we run across it. That's largely delusional. As it will in 50 years when some folks have a revelation about Kane again being the GOAT Movie after several decades of being pushed below other films.

Eh, i've seen a decent sized amount of matches that got 15 to 20 mins from the original tv run, so either I had great luck or you had bad The original TV was clipped, but I were a lot of AJW Classics shows that came out. The original series ran 77 episodes, most of it covering the 80s. There were several series after that, but given the number of matches on each show (even the two hour ones), they look to have some clippage. Dan's lists of those things over on CM are from 2009, so I don't know how much since then has come out. I guess that all of the AJW 80s stuff got sent to Will at some point for use in the 80s project, hopefully with people able to sift through all the variations of matches to find the complete / most complete versions that can make the set. Anway... there looks like there a pretty fair amount of AJW 80s stuff available, especially the bigger matches that would make Classics. They're likely the source for all the AJW that's on Youtube. John

Stan didn't work holds especially well. In a sense, he seemed to know it and tried to work around it. Stan was also to a degree a spot-centric worker. Stan-Taue in the 1994 Carny was a story match. You don't get a lot of that out of Stan over the course of his career: a lot of his matches had more of a "feel" to them than a "story". Sure, you'd have consistent spots / items pop up, like Work Stan's Lariat Arm. Some of them turned into good story matches. In others, it was just time filler. That's not a massive weakness, more a work choice (like Flair's "I've Got Stuff To Do" choice). But it's there. Jumbo... his sustained selling could be off. He'd sell some stuff really great, and then other times he'd be fine quicker than you'd want. I'll leave Terry and Lawler to bigger fans of his than me. John

MSG and Philly cage matches weren't bullshit. Pretty standard WWF cage match finish from the era. Randy pinned him all around the country. They had a lot of dark matches at TV tapings. I want to say that one of two of them have seen the light of day. John

I'm wondering if the Tanahashi stuff can be broken off into it's own thread... "Current NJPW" of something. There has been a lot of good discussion, very little of which relates at this point to Dave... and it kind of gets buried in here around other Dave stuff. Wonder if it might be worth being broken off to seed further discussion of NJPW. John

The SC poll was early 2006 though I think the discussion for it started late 05. And I think most of the people who participated in the pool knew about Jumbo before he died. A lot of those guys went back a decent amount of time online. John

Frank thought he was a good worker, but wanted people to open their eyes to the fact that he did a lot of the same goofy shit that other people did, some times even worse. On the other hand, Frank loved Flair's bitching, stooging comedy shit. I remember getting pissed off at Flair bumping for the Ref while Frank just loved it with comments along the lines of, "Of course Flair is a bitch... that's what's fun about him". I don't remember Coey talking about him much. Certainly not like he talked about Toyota. On the other hand, Chris also enjoyed getting folks riled up. So if he was going to be critical of Flair, he'd push it. Back to your earlier points: * Ric Flair invented spot fu on one hand Ric was a spot-centric wrestler. Unless one is really adverse to all criticism of Flair, you'll see that (i) once someone points it out, and (ii) the next time you watch one of his matches with an open eye. It's a bit like saying Stan Hansen / Toshiaki Kawada is stiff: it's right out there in the open. The reason I tried to get across "spot fu" is because in online hardcore circle I ran in at the time, the biggest thing folks were bitching about was Spotty Workers. Well, Flair is that, people... so ponder that a bit when determining (i) whether spots suck, or (ii) Flair is like a lot of workers they're bitching about. * sat in holds in matches with Brody and Sting on the other hand. This one was going at a few things. The Brody comment was aimed at a certain guy in St Louis who just talked out of his ass about a match. So we pointed it out. On a larger scale, the discussions about Flair In Holds wasn't about Ric being a lazy fuck and not doing lots of cool stuff in his matches. It was about how he worked holds. Watch his peers work holds, and watch Flair... and Ric just isn't good. It's not something he's terribly interested in. Frankly... Flair works holds for shit. He does lots of other cool stuff. Here's an analogy: Magic Johnson wasn't a good defensive player. Some would say he was a shit defensive player, though I might not go there because he did have defensive value as a rebounder relative to his position. But he wasn't good. He also wasn't a really good jump shooter, he wasn't strong from 20 with someone in his face. On the other hand... he was a tremendous passer. He ran the break great. Over time he added various things to his offense to the point that he was a bit dangerous in a variety of places on the floor. He was an extremely smart player. He was a good FT shooter, so if you fouled him it was a problem... and he was very good at drawing fouls. He was competitive as ALL FUCK, and he's kill you and himself to try to win. He came into camp in shape every year, and over the course of his career was at the cutting edge of modern (for the 80s) basketball training: he hit the weights and worked stamina that was well ahead of 90% of the NBA (as were a lot of the Lakers). He was an INSANE leader who made everyone on the team better if they had any desire to get better. He was a winner. Magic was a bad defensive player. He also is one of the five best basketball players ever to live... at least until Kobe and/or Lebron bump him lower. Jordan, Russell, Jabbar... then you get into the spot where Magic competes with a very small number of people for the #4 spot. He's also one of my 2-3 favorite players who ever played... maybe #1 if I thought about it some more. You can point out weakness / soft spots of great performers, even ones that are way up there (i.e. Top 5 of All-Time). If you're moderately objective and being honest, you can even do it of your favorites, even ones way up there (quite possibly #1). Magic... Flair. Two cool motherfuckers that I loved watching on TV and in the Fabulous Forum in the 80s. And two guys that were far from perfect at what they did... just really great. Pointing out their weaknesses doesn't mean they're not great. John

My thought would be to wait until the 80s project is done. It's the natural point at which to run such a poll. John

Yeah... I get blamed for all that shit. John

People love to talk about the greatest anything. There are tons of books, columns, discussion threads, etc. attempting to establish canon in film, pop music and any other kind of art. And yes, it's a particular obsession in sports coverage. If I wanted to inflame my newspaper's readers beyond reckoning, all I'd have to do is write a blog post saying Johnny Unitas wasn't one of the five greatest quarterbacks ever or that Cal Ripken was right when he said Adrian Beltre was a better third baseman than Brooks Robinson. People eat that shit up, so why should it be any different with wrestling? Exactly. Daniel himself does it. Jawdropping stuff to pretend it doesn't happen in other fields.

The comp predated Jumbo's death by number of years. I think Frank put it together in 1997, no later than 1998. It was one of the first things he did. Dean's Harley review put over Harley as much if not more (and I'm pretty sure More) than Jumbo. I'm pretty confident that in that 1997-2000 era before Jumbo's death, even the DVDVR folks would agree that we drove the AJPW discussion. Lord know, *I* get blamed for all that now. People do it in every form of entertainment, in sports, and damn near everything else. It's not even remotely close to a particular obsession of wrestling fans. Look... I don't want to be an asshat about this, but you flat out know that's not true, Daniel. You were the one complaining about an obvious movie winning the Smarks Best Movie poll. The Sight & Sound poll has been around prior to all of us being just sperm & eggs. AFI does film best film lists. Rolling Stone, along with countless other music magazines, has done best lists for songs, albums, concerts, guitarists, etc. There are lists of Best Comics, Best Comic Villians, Best Comic Heros. There are lists of the Best Books of the 20th Century. There are *several* books devoted to the Best Baseball Players, best Baseball Teams, best Baseball Dynasties, etc. Same goes for other sports: Bill Simmons had a national #1 bestseller that at the core was a ranking of the Best Players and the Best Teams. Wait... There are lists of best Presidents, Prime Minsters, Kings... This is not remotely a wrestling fan thing. And you know it. :/ Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth are sacred cows. Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game are sacred cows, and now Vertigo and Tokyo Story are. Christ. Maeda won a WON Wrestler Of the Year award. Hardcores who watch AJPW and NJPW in the 80s also watched UWF. Generally speaking, they didn't think much of Fujiwara. Were they wrong? These are the same folks who thought Jumbo was Lazy, Backlund was goofy, Sayama was great... Flair was the best ever, Tenryu was great, Fujinami was great... Like all of us, they were right and wrong on various things in forming their opinions relative to how other people see them. Which is funny since Meltzer back in 1983 was talking about how great Choshu and Fujinami were. In fact, I'm not entirely sure there's a point at which US hardcore fans didn't think that Fujinami at his peak wasn't great. Or that Riki wasn't a cool mutherfucker. There is some irony in catching up with 30 year old US hardcore wrestling fandom ideas. For our next trick, we'll think Sayama was great because that what US *and* Japanese fans "knew" back in the early 80s. John

I have no idea. Way too long ago. I just remember that I was a total newbie on japanese wrestling and that one of the name that jumped to my eyes as being talked as a GOAT worker was Jumbo, along with Liger, Misawa & Kawada. I knew Liger from NJ on Eurosport, the three others I had no idea who they were. Again, if anyone was, it was Frank. But 1998 was probably a year too early since AJPW Classics was still just starting to churn things out. Then again, someone may want to look up when Dean reviewed Jumbo-Funk, Jumbo-Race and Jumbo-Rusher. I think those three along with Jumbo-Mil were the four matches from the 70s that got people thinking, along with folks thinking about Terry more (since he was extremely well rounded in that match). Before that, he was generally thought of as an all-time great because that's the impression he went out on in 1990-92 when he was turning 40+. John

Actually, it never was out of control. Lord knows I have the rep for pointing out Flair's flaws. But I've also always said he was a great worker. "Out of control" would be the equiv that happened to Angle and Toyota. People extremely critical of them won't even listen to arguments that they're "great". That's coming from someone who has no love for Angle, and was annoyed by Toyota before... well... 100% of the other US joshi fans of the era. But the "hate" that I've seen tossed at the work of Angle and Toyota isn't remotely close to what's been tossed at Flair. What happens is that when one of my/your/our favorites is criticized, it's the biggest thing in the world and the people critical are big meanies full of hate. When it's someone we don't give two shits about (say Ultimate Warrior), we kind of laugh about it and move along. So we remember the criticism of our favorite in sharp terms, like it's out of control. When really... it's not. The criticism of Flair really wasn't/isn't at the Angle/Toyota/Davey Richards level. His fans are just resistant to the criticism, a bit like those Davey Richards fans that folks like to drive crazy by pointing out what they see as his shitty work. John

Jewett was probably the first to roll it out as an idea, and only after Classics churned out a lot of matches where people were able to see the 70s stuff in addition to the 80s and 90s stuff. 99/00 sounds about the right time frame. That he was an all-time great was thought of earlier than that. In 1990-92 he was generally compared to Flair as they were age peers, had been around for roughly as long, and were in generally similar roles: older wrestlers on top being challenged by younger guys. But among smart fans (which we all are a continuation of) of our general age range (i.e. not guys who grew up watching the wrestlers of the 50s and 60s), there was a rather large consensus that Flair was the GOAT. Dave certainly banged that drum, and Dave shaped opinion.

When was the GOAT poll? Jumbo died in 2000. I suspect that the majority of the people who voted for Jumbo in the GOAT poll (regardless of whether it was #1 or lower) knew who Jumbo was before he died. It wasn't like the voters in that poll all happened to discover puroresu in 2011. Certainly not 90%. It's fine to say that Jumbo as GOAT is something that popped more than a decade after Flair as GOAT talk started (which was in full bore in the WON no later than 1986). But lets not talk out of our asses. John

RIP to a damn fine hand.

Wow. I don't know quite what to make of it, since it was the only hit in Google's news archive. But it's used in such a throwaway fashion by the writer that you do wonder... what the heck. You've probably done as much work looking through old writings on the subject where if it were semi-commonly used, *you* would have run across it somewhere. John

The masses in England would pick Shearer. The futbol snobs in England would pick Batigol. John

I'd recommended this as part of the end run of the Footloose, who folks with the 80s set would have seen a decent amount in elevating the All Asia tag title into a relevant title on TV. They don't really go out with a bang, but that's sometimes how it goes. It felt like there needed to be "something" of theirs on here to bridge between the 1988-89 period where they dominated the AA title with good matches and the coming 1990-93 period where the title churned out a pretty fair number of good/really good! matches. John

Like watching paint dry... John