jdw

People praise each other (and of course rip each other) in the business world as well. We're having a send off for our VP on Friday which will be filled with people praising her 30 years with the company. They do it in politics, in scholarly fields, in research, etc. Praise, respect, and criticism are not exclusive to Art.

The link to "can porn be art" is of limited use. If we define Porn As Art, it means *all* porn is Art. MILF Hunter, Seymour Butts, Bang Brothers, the stuff in Japan with tentacles, rape porn, and that's not even getting into the illegal stuff. No one ever said that The Devil And Mrs. Jones might not have some artistic qualities.

Good. We've made progress in the past decade and a half.

Define why Wrestling is Art, but Porn isn't Art.

Exactly, it's art. The people who rail against it being an art form are pretty funny to me; it's like somehow acknowledging that something like pro wrestling is an art form dirties the word art in some way. Low brow, high brow, whatever you want to call it, art is art and pro wrestling is art. Some of us here had the discussion on Wrestling As Art : Porn As Art back on the DVDVR boards in the late 90s or early 00s. Suspect it bled onto other boards. Every argument made for why Wresting Is Art could be countered with an similar example in Porn. Porn is a business. A fantasy entertainment business, just as fake as pro wrestling with it's own kayfabe to "make it look real" that pro wrestling has employed over the years. It's not that wrestling or porn dirty up the word Art. It's just that they're not really art.

Valeria Messalina beat us to the idea by almost 2000 years.

Interesting look at star ratings in book and film review. As pointed out earlier, I suspect we all knew Dave lifted Jim's lifting of Dooley lifting it from his local movie / record reviewer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_%28classification%29 I don't really assign star ratings to stuff I watch anymore, and tend to go "Eh... I don't know" when Hoback asks me the stars after something good that we've watched at Wrestlemania. I'm more a "that was good" or "that was solid" or "that was a helluva match" guy now. But I've also been around for decades of people having issues with star ratings and trying to come up with something new. I'm not terrible against 1-10, but I also tend to toss out that it doesn't really add more slots than the 5* system. It's not 1-5 or 0-5 in integers. Dave's has 21 slots due to the 1/4, ignoring the "negative" and +++ that he rolls out occasionally. Ebert's 0-4 stars had 9 slots since he only did 1/2's. The problem with star ratings and 1-10 scales rarely is the "system". The problem is with the reviewer / applier, and also the consumer. People tend to cram a ton of stuff up into the higher end, rendering it somewhat meaningless. If Dave's regular system through much of the 80s, ** was an average match, **1/2 was above average, *** was good, and ***1/2 was very good. You still have 8 slots do describe and differentiate below average matches, and six for stuff that was above "very good". The **1/2 and *** and ***1/2, and stuff in between those ranges, stopped having meaning. How many people back in the 90s went out of their way to seek out a ***1/2 All Japan match? Or Lucha match. Etc. The concept of Very Good lost that meaning. A rating of Good meant nothing. Much of that is on the reviewer / applier. Some of that is on the consumer. I'd toss myself in that as well. I recall thinking that the 11/30/93 Baba & Hansen vs Misawa & Kobashi was one of the more entertaining and amazing AJPW matches that I'd seen that year, just mind boggling in how good it was with the name "Baba" attached to it. When Dave got around to writing it up, it got ****. I was annoyed: there were loads of matches that year that he'd given **** to, and damnit, this was better than any of them! It should have had another quarter or half snowflake added to it! **** is an excellent match. It leaves margin for ****1/2, which use to be a MOTYC. I wasn't really arguing that Baba & Hansen vs Misawa & Kobashi was a MOTYC, as there were a number of those matches in 1993 that were clearly above it not just in AJPW but elsewhere. So... WTF was I going on about? It was an "excellent" match, and **** is a good rating for it if the rating has any true meaning. All of us did it / do it. We contribute to what could have been a useful system being of marginal value. Of course Dave (or any other reviewer) doesn't help if they're tossing out 30+ ****1/2+ ratings in a calender year. Who cares about a "good" *** match if there are 200+ matches rated above it. * * * * * It really doesn't matter what system one moves to if the same reviewer / consumer issues remain. Which of course they will. We see it in other forms of entertainment. That doesn't mean to stop doing them if you dig doing them, or to stop digging the rankings someone else does if you find them useful. It just means that there is no Magic Bullet that would create a perfect ratings / rankings system. Any new one would soon pull in the short comings of the prior one.

I don't care for SuperStar teams, unless they happen to be "my" teams. Suspect you feel the same way: that recruiting class that got Ty Lawson, Brandan Wright, Wayne Ellington, Deon Thompson, Alex Stepheson & William Graves on the heels of getting Tyler Hansbrough & Danny Green & Co. the year before... I'm thinking you loved that. I'm largely the same way. I have no love for the Heatles, though admit that I loved Jerry West working the deals that got Shaq and Kobe. I never had a problem with Manchester United being a super team relative to the rest of the EPL, even when I loathed Real Madrid when they took it to the next level in the early 00s. I never shed a tear that the Lakers were able to add #1 overall pick James Worthy to a Lakers team that just won the title with Jabbar, Magic, Nixon and Wilkes... thanks to fleecing the Cavs via the Don Ford Trade. Because some of my teams over the past 40 years have been SuperStar Teams, I'm probably more tolerant of a team like the Heatles. I don't loath them, nor think they're evil. After all, the Draft and free agent restrictions as concepts are more evil. I get why they exist: if they didn't, teams like the Lakers or the Knicks would have gotten all the talent... or some billionaire buying a scrub team would. I love the Warriors story, and pulled for them and the Spurs through the season and playoffs... especially since the Lakers were busy tanking. I like the team they put together, the staff, and the special advisor a/k/a Hall of Fame Player a/k/a Hall of Fame GM a/k/a Log. They had a great season, and I would have been a bit annoyed if they fell flat in the post season. On the flip side, Lebron became compelling as the Cavs fell apart during the post season. Frankly, he was compelling in the regular season once the team got its shit together and you saw how much better guys like Mozgov & Shump & Smith were as role players with him than elsewhere, and we got more proof of what a good Waiters Island is. If they won the title, I think that you, Jag and me would have moved him up close to where Yohe had him ranked when we did our Top 50: Lebron #4 - Yohe #9 - Jag #10 - jdw #11 - Elliott There is something compelling and "good" about watching an all-time great play at a high level when the "possibilities" still exist on just how high he'd going to end up on that list. You get a player or two every generation who are Top 10 level, and rarer still where you get them and wonder how close they're going to get to Russell. I'm happy how the series came out. The Warriors won which was awesome. By dragging a bunch of role players from 0-1 to 2-1, Lebron put another nail in the coffin of assholes like Skip Bayles who've spent a decade crapping on him.

You could say that the Cavs owner is Evil, since he really is an Evil Bankster. The problem is that the Warriors owner Lacob is a Venture Capitalist at KPCB who are every bit as evil as the banksters, but just shine their shit up nice (i.e. point to their Good Investments and ignore their Vulture Capitalism, etc). Then there's Peter Guber... So it really is Evil over Evil. Lebron really isn't evil.

It isn't even a sport. That notion was out the door more than 100 years ago.

Entertainment. Not so sure what's wrong with calling it that, other than our general annoyance over Vince replacing "wrestling" with "sports entertainment" so we all just don't want to use the word he's co-opted. I mean... Vince was a dick to go that route, but he did pick the correct word.

Agreed. Pro-wrestling can be a great craft. And there's nothing wrong with that. The pedestal on which so-called "art" is put on to the detriment of anything else really make it seems like you have to call anything "art" to be able to praise it. Pro-wrestling has never been an art. It doesn't keep it from being awesome at its best. Wrestling is as much of an artform as 70s and 80s porn is. But that's an old discussion.

Did Jumbo even do headdrops other than his great looking, but relatively safe Backdrops? Compare this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xgnD1T6aCA to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhpiB4U2oRk It's night and day. Misawa's offence was heavy on German and Tiger Suplexes and he'd already used the Vertical Drop Tiger Driver by 1991. Steve Williams was using Backdrop Drivers as early as 1990. But the change really came when Misawa became the ace and Kawada and Kobashi followed his stylistics. German and Tiger Suplexes aren't really head-droppy, except later when they started jerking off with them. And yeah, you can find Jumbo backdrops that are just as dangerous looking as Kawada's, including Misawa eating them to the point that you'll cringe. Doc had been doing a dangerous backdrop for ages. I don't recall it ever being called a backdrop driver until he dropped Kobashi on his head in a six man tag. It was the backdrop drive in their singles match later on the same series, and then again when trying to hit it against Misawa to end the series. The Tiger Driver '91 wasn't an intentional headdrop spot. He did it twice in 1991, couldn't control it (i.e. accidentally was dropping people on their heads), and shelved it until El Clasico when they rolled it back out... on rare occasions initially. It's really just a collective thing of the direction heading in a certain direction. As soon as he started main eventing, for obvious reasons. Cool... that means Fujinami invented All Japan style. Setting aside Fujinami and other juniors that moved into main events, there is some irony that Misawa's first television main event after moving up from the junior division had another junior in the match on the other side. Should we give that other wrestler co-credit for bringing juniorism to All Japan main events? Or should we get worried about Dynamite Kid beating Misawa to main events in All Japan and inventing junior-style heavyweight work? Seriously, when I watch Misawa vs Jumbo, I'm trying to figure out the impactful influential junior stuff in there. It's hard for me to get blown away with his top rope stuff when Tenryu had been doing the fall away elbow for years (with Kawada lifting it as his protege), while Jumbo did missile dropkicks in the 70s. It's a good thing that the Lariat and Riki-Larit and the Enzugiri aren't strikes. Wait... they are. One can mix it around. One can point to either backdrops getting more dangerous with Jumbo and Doc earlier in the decade, or with Doc escalating it intentionally with the backdrop driver in 1993. Kobashi ate the first series of them. Part of the storyline of the Misawa-Doc match that followed was that Misawa avoided fully eating it (kicked off the ropes to alter it), and didn't get truly killed dead with it until the title change, though others had by the point (Kobashi year again in the 1994 Carny). It would be wonderful if you actually factually back up your statement. Misawa went form Tiger Driver>Tiger Driver 1991>Emerald Flowsion>Emerald Flowsion KAI>Fireman's Carry Emerald Flowsion while simultaneously, at all points during his career, having other believable match ending maneuvers (as in, he actually won matches with them, not just "they looked great and got pops"). And sure, people won matches with strikes before him, but those strikes were mostly lariats. It wasn't an inherent part of the style like it had become when Misawa was on top. Like Kobashi wasn't rolling out stuff like the jacknife power bomb or the orange crush or a variety of other stuff. Or Jumbo adding a slew of finishers throughout his career: good luck finding him using the power bomb in the 70s. Or perhaps a more challenging, difficult one. Watch some 60s Baba matches and look for his finishers. The watch his 70s stuff, and try to figure out when he adds the running neckbreaker drop and the russian leg sweep. Adding finishers is kind of a All Japan thing. Folks had been doing it for years. We've joked about Jumbo's Big Bag of Moves similar to Harley's. the slight different is that Jumbo used a ton of them, and kept adding to it over the years. I thought it was something that everyone who follows All Japan knows: they added shit. Misawa didn't invent it. Well watching a 10 minute ***1/2 match would be a lot more entertaining than watching a 25 minute *** one. Hashimoto's first three defenses of the IWGP Title were all longer than 10 minutes... 20 minutes... 25 minutes. They were all longer than Misawa-Taue: Feb-28-93 Triple Crown Title: Mitsuharu Misawa © defeats Akira Taue (22:33) Dec-10-93 IWGP Title: Shinya Hashimoto © defeats Keiji Muto (28:57) Dec-13-93 IWGP Title: Shinya Hashimoto © defeats Power Warrior (25:17) Jan-04-94 IWGP Title: Shinya Hashimoto © defeats Masahiro Chono (28:00) I seem to recall Meltzer had the Sasaki match at or above ***. He had Hash-Mutoh at ***3/4 to the **** of Misawa-Taue, while Loss had it at ***1/4. Meltzer had Hash-Chono at ***. Hash was working long (for the pre-Clasico era) title matches. They were methodical. Hash tended to get praise for them, more so than Sasaki and Chono in those two. Just not the level of praise that Misawa got against Taue having to follow Kawada-Hansen.

MIsawa was working big matches in that manner before Kobashi was even fully pushed. He introduced the junior-esque aspects, strikes being sold like death, started the headdrop madness and presented the idea of constantly introducing new finishers as soon as the old ones were devalued. I guess you may be correct in that it was Kobashi's influence that took the style the furthest it ever got but in terms of overall influence there's no question who was more important. I would be interesting in some timelines on when Misawa: * introduced the junior-esque aspects * strikes being sold like death * started the headdrop madness * presented the idea of constantly introducing new finishers as soon as the old ones were devalued The strikes thing pre-dates both of them. So does the "new finishers" concept. The juniors thing isn't terribly relevant since one guy is a former junior who moved up to the heavies and was a marginal player for four years after that even with his juniorism. Then the other guy happened to have the most juniorific finished in the company, and worked more like a junior than any heavyweight in the decade... from the start of it to the finish. Headrops was Jumbo, not Misawa or Kobashi. In fact, they along with Kawada and Kikuchi were in the eating end of them, all at the same time. Then Doc added his dangerous backdrop (which mophed into the Backdrop Drive, first eaten by Kobashi), and right in the same time frame Kawada was adding his dangerous backdrop that was more head droppy than what Misawa or Kobashi were doing. I didn't have Misawa-Taue at ****. But Meltzer had it at **** at the time, and Loss had it at ****. Hence picking a not-so-random match. You didn't care for it as much. Lots of others didn't. My guess is that if Hash got that same match out of Taue, we all probably would like it more than Misawa doing it. I think Hash was great in it. Mutoh was passable in it.

The whole Silver thing was oddly interesting. He's over as a babyface. First he was the Anti-Stern. Stern went from being the only Babyface Commissioner into being a Grumpy Old Heel Commish who no one liked in the end. Then Silver dropped the hammer on Sterling, cleaning up the mess that Stern and the other owners had ignored for decades. Yet the whole halftime thing felt like Dusty ESPN rolling out Jim Crockett Silver to let he be part of the show and suck up to him. It was a bit funny that Silver wanted to talk about Hoops rather than Business, and seemed to take Sage back a step for being a Commish up on all sorts of thing. One would prefer not to see Silver sucked into going the Dixie Carter route and letting it go to his head.

I'd be happy to take 1993 All Japan to the desert island. First show has Hansen bouncing the chair off Kawada's head to set the tone of one of the major feuds in the year. The Last Match of the Year has Kawada's sublime performance and Kobashi's biggest win to date, putting an exceptional wrap on the year. In between are a load of watchable singles, tags and six mans, with a variety of performers. Old storylines fading away, and new storylines starting. The only thing missing is Jumbo, especially the big Jumbo-Misawa Triple Crown with Misawa defending. On the other hand, Jumbo & Co. vs. Misawa & Co. would have entered it's 4th calendar year. With Jumbo out, we instead got the fresh Misawa & Kobashi & Co. vs Kawada & Taue & Co. feud. Not a bad trade off.

You thought Kenta has a shot of winning that? If we're going by a Tenryu Made A Lower Guy Look Like A Winner standard, then in the Kawada-Ace that I got to see, Kawada made Johnny look like he was going to win. Just totally laid his ass out for Ace's transition, sold the fuck out of Ace's attempts to put him away, etc. I've always thought highly of that Kawada-Ace match. I now have a new reason to add some more snowflakes to it.

Watched the Takagi match, and the whole fun, goofy Giant Series. Never for a moment thought that anything other than Tenryu getting the winning the singles match was going to happen. In New Japan, anything could happen. After all, Choshu put over Hash in 1989... and 1990... and 1991 along with Chono and jobbing all his G1 matches. Choshu has established the concept that top guys could lose, even guys like Choshu who were bigger stars than Tenryu. That was an underlying element of the NJPW vs WAR feud, and Choshu worked the curveball on it: Tenryu wasn't booked to job to the younger guys until heading out the door, and instead only did to Choshu and Fujinami to save the putting over of a young guy for bigger impact. Didn't fell it against the UWFi guys other than Takada. Hara? Old friend going out the door, if you watched it live maybe you get swepted up in the possibility that Tenryu would put his old friend over. Not really a standard way to go out, but you never know. Does Tenryu have Jumbo-Misawa moment where he really put over a lesser guy and elevated him in a meaningful way? One really can't point to Hash. Like I said, he had three singles wins over Choshu by that point, including a Dome win. He was the IWGP Champ at the time, and not a flukey one. He'd already been elevated and "made" almost five years earlier and repeatedly since. Again... Tenryu isn't Flair. For those of us who were Flair Fans at the time, you actually got worried that he was going to job to guys, include ones below him. Part of that was because he did.

I'm trying to remember buying that a lower card guy was going to beat Tenryu. Maybe he jobbed a lot to lower card guys in SWS and WAR to make people believe he was going to job, or even a possibility that he was going to job. We probably shouldn't confuse him with Ric Flair, who got his ass kicked by so many people that when he was getting it kicked by someone like Sam Houston, you actually were worrying that Dusty had lost his fucking mind and was going to have Flair job to set up a match. Or actually jobbing to Mike Von Erich, rather than creating a possibility of jobbing.

http://tokusatsunetwork.com/2015/01/17/nobuhiko-takada-portray-black-shogun-super-hero-taisen-gp

He's 53. I'm thinking back to Riki Choshu in 1995-96, and he looked little different... just that he was 43-44 at the time. Misawa was dead at 46... I'm guessing if we dig up photos of him at 40 in 2002 that he looked about like this... well... maybe worse. Maeda in 2009 when he was 50: http://www.purolove.com/images/wrestler/njpwawards/gw2009maeda.jpg http://www.njpw.co.jp/data/greatest/maeda/images/maeda03.jpg I think some of you younger guys don't understand what happens when you get older.

I've written about that a number of times in the past. A standard ho-hum All Japan tv taping six-man match that you'd seen a dozen similar to before tended to be ho-hum in the context of its time, and can be ho-hum if you're watching it now in the context of scarfing down a bunch of other All Japan from the era. But... If you like the era, you've been away from it for a while, and you pop in some random **** tv taping six-man tag, you'll like go: "Fuck... these are better than I remember them to be. I don't even recall this being one of their best. Damn it's entertaining." I can't remember the random match we watched that got that reaction a decade ago when talking about it. I do recall watching a random tag league match, and a Jumbo & Taue vs Gordy & Doc being better than I recalled. This was the match about four years ago I tossed out as an example after watching it: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/30157-mitsuharu-misawa-kenta-kobashi-jun-akiyama-vs-toshiaki-kawada-akira-taue-takao-omori-ajpw-new-years-giant-series-012094 Serious about the Raw analogy and the 1994 WWF analogy. One could extend that to New Japan: similar matches in New Japan in the 90s are lost gems or forgotten classics or "why has no one ever talked about this match?!?!" stuff. With All Japan, I forgot it when doing the Pimping Post and there was a lot of additional stuff I tossed out in it. That's what I was trying to get across. Misawa and All Japan have baggage. High expectations. Mass of stuff pointed to and talked about and pimped. A natural move of some away from the old war horses and consensus, which certainly I've done as long and often as others around here. For some there might also have a tinge of discomfort at some of his work as it escalates and you now know that it killed him. Hash has none of that baggage. He's not a blank slate, since a lot of us have been pimping him for years. But his mass of Usual Suspects Matches being pimped was always smaller, which creates all sorts of new avenues for people to stumble upon.

What I wrote in the pimping process Just watched this for the first time in 17 years. This 100% *must* go on the set. About 26:50 of a 27:03 match aired, which makes you wonder why they bothered JIP'ing it. Let me put it this way: * this isn't the best six-man of the era * if this was on Raw tonight with the WWE equivs of these six guys (beats the shit out of me who they are), and they put on this match (i.e. did their equiv of the spots at this pacing, selling, and drama), people would give it ***** and call it one of the greatest TV matches of all-time, if not the greatest TV match of all-time I'm not shitting on the second point. That's the level these guys were working at: they could fall out of bed, have a match that isn't even one of the best in this genre they mastered (tv taping six-man tags) and it was at a level way up there in the sky. And we fucking took/take it for granted. Seriously... as you watch this match image the 1994 WWF equivs in here. Bret & Razor & 1-2-3 Kid vs Shawn & Diesel & Owen. Admitting that Owen is above the level of Akiyama and Omori, but what the heck... I can't think of another lower ranked 1994 WWF guy who can work a bit to slip in there. Then imagine them doing their 100% best possible in a straight, non-gimmicked match where your exchanging things the AJPW six do for things the WWF six did regularly... on the best level they could do it at where things are clicking... it would be an amazing match especially if the fans stuck with it, got into the beat down section (which is amazing since in this one it was the young *heel* getting beat down), then were losing their shit (and I mean LOSING THEIR FUCKING SHIT) down the stretch. People would cream over it. This is an amazing match, but just one of many so we take it for granted. The reason it needs to go on if for what I said in the earlier post, and have talked about many times. This is the clearest glimpse at what could have been. Omori hangs. He more than hangs: he fits in. He works well with Jun. He takes a monster sized ass kicking from Kobashi and Misawa, who seem to be channeling their Jumbo to payback Kawada & Taue for all the ass stomping they did of Jun the year before. Taue, Misawa, Kobashi and Kawada are as good as you would expect, with Misawa and especially Kobashi being roughter than you'd expect... and that Misawa-Kawada magic dynamic that was so regularly there early in their rivalry. What's great as they don't take away from the fact that Omori is in there and a big part of the story... but inturn, Omori doesn't take away from the fact that this is Four Corners with their junior parterns involved. Things just naturally fit together. Pretty simple structure: 9 minutes of standard spots to suck the crowd in 9 minutes of kicking then shit out of Omori 9 minute ride to the finish If you've watched enough All Japan six mans from this era, as you will have by the time you get this (thanks to the 1992 and 1993 and probably 1991 sets), you know that there's about an 80% chance that one of two people is eating the pin in this one. Bonus points in this one: the obvious two don't eat the pin. One of the Four Corners does, and the folks pinning him kick the living hell out of him to finally put him down. This is one of those where if you didn't know the finish you'd be thinking they set up for the finish right before* the very final run: "Well, X is back in. He'll probably look good, then get cut off and they'll let him kick out of a few things before pinning him." [jump ahead] "Well... he's out... maybe Y? Or are they going to cycle through back to him." [couple seconds later] "Wait... they're really kicking the shit out of C... could it be?" Real good match. In no way pimping it as a MOTYC since AJPW produced any number of better matches in the year. The six-man on the closing night of the series is the famous one, which Ditch rightly pimped earlier. But holy shit... better than I remember and better than I expected when popping it in. If something like this took place on WCW Saturday Night, people now would be thinking they found the Holy Grail of Lost Matches. The loss of 60 minutes of AJPW TV a week was a tragedy because we stopped getting "****1/4" matches like this. Omori getting sent over to be Hansen's partner was a tragedy: the first of many bad booking decisions by the Babas after the Four Corners starts. #1 Misawa & #4 Kobashi & #5 Akiyama & #8 Asako #2 Kawada & #3 Taue & #6 Omori & #7 Ogawa World Tag: Misawa & Kobashi vs Kawada & Taue vs Doc & Ace All Asia: Can-Ams vs Akiyama & Asako vs Omori & Ogawa Yeah... that wouldn't have sucked in 1994. I don't know about anyone else, but I also certainly could have done a better job of using the 20+ minutes a week of TV to showcase that talent. Fewer tapings, getting the crap off TV time, getting the All Asia matches onto TV, and doing a better job of using commercial tapes. Can we blame this one on Baba's cancer? Make sure to get the Akiyama vs Omori Cup final from the same series, then the Kawada & Omori vs Kobashi & Asako to start the next series. John

I don't have a problem with the concept, and we all coin terminology or steal it from elsewhere. As mentioned in another thread, people have been using forms of the concept for a long time. Dibiase is probably the definitive guy over the years for the concept. Suspect guys who have been around forever in these work discussions like Dylan and Childs would nod their heads that they've seen it with Ted over and over and over again. Concept is interesting, and certainly has made a lot of people stop to think Not putting words into El-P's mouth, but I read the comment on it being a Peeve is more in the sense that's rapidly devolved into a meme/trope that's just a quick cudgel to wack a worker or discussion over the head with. That was the felling I ran into in the 1993 Wrestler of the Year discussion when it was tossed out. I don't think Parv and I disagree that radically on Kobashi or Kawada in that year. I have a different top down perspective from him simply because he's watched the equiv of Best Of while I watched all of it, and have been a part of the 22+ years of people spouting off to what a wacky great year Kobashi had. I know what's behind people praising that specific year. When I saw him toss out Great Match Theory as the reason people talk about that year, it hit me as a misapplied concept that was passing into tropeville. It's quite likely that I wasn't as nice as possible in explaining why Kobashi's 1993 was quite the opposite of a GMT year, but admittedly I can be sharp and abrupt and assholish in response. I respect Parv for taking a step back, sifting through any sharpness of my response, and seeing what I was trying to get across. I think he better understands why people point to that year. Concept is find. Coining a name for it is cool, and kind of fun. I do it to. Turning it into a cudgel? It reduces, or frankly eliminated, the value of something that could have sustained value. People see GMT tossed on and go, "Well fuck it... not going to bother with this."

Don't be ridiculous Matt. jdw is about to tell you they've been using the term since at least the late 80s. Heck, they were using it when he was watching a match with Meltzer and Yohe in Tokyo in 1993! I jest, I jest! Nah. I was joking about it in PM with Jerome after he posted, did a google search and found the same post that Matt did. We both got a chuckle out of it being in Bret vs Flair (along with Matt's alternate name of Great Match Paradigm).