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Kareem was great and exciting as hell to the fans of those NWA UCLA & NWA Lakers territories, the two greatest style and profiling territories of all-time... WOOOOOOOOOO! He was even exciting as hell to the fans of that otherwise craphole NWA Milwaukee office before he left their sorry asses to walk that long, immortal aisle back to Los Angeles. And let's be honest and admit that Flair was boring as fuck to the Rock'n'WrestlingCeltics WWF fans of the 80s... and really even in the 90s. And we all knew what the Nature Boy thought of those asshole Celtics Fans:

You're hitting your average: two shots at me already in this thread. I think I'm up to exactly zero shots at you this calendar year.

That's not true though is it? Lance Russell doesn't go in the same category as Jerry Lawler does he? I thought there was a non-wrestler section of the ballot. There are two types of HOF's on the current Ballot: Wrestlers Non-Wrestlers The wrestlers are broken down into Regions. I'm trying to be more realistic to what Jim Cornette did with the Midnight Express, and what Hennan did with The Family and also when sitting next to Monsoon: they were Performers. They didn't do what Vince did behind the scenes, or what Sam Muschnick did, or what Paul Bowser did. They were part of the "show". Dave doesn't really think things through like that. Of course... there would be fewer Managers and PBP/Commentator guys in the HOF if they had to compete with Wrestlers for votes.

I'd have to go back and look at the 1996 HOF issue to see if we even cared to treat them differently. They were just HOFers. "Managers" don't even exist anymore in WON-speak. Dave killed it off in 1997, then came up with "Non-Wrestler" in 1999 in light of Mr. McMahon. It's what Heyman is currently winning. They are Performers. It's what Hennan was, and what Cornette was, and what Heyman is now. They are closer to the other performers (Wrestlers and PBP/Color) than they are the bookers and promoters. Sure... we could go nutty 1. Wrestlers 2. Managers / Non-Wrestlers who aren't PBP/Color 3. PBP/Color 4. Bookers 5. Promoters 6. Other Important Office Guys Who Aren't Promoters/Bookers 7. Trainers So we can go all nutty finding someone who did The Septuple. But really, 1-3 are in the same boat, while 4-6 are in the same boat, and 7 is kinda-sorta in the same bucket as 4-6 since they often have been tied to promotions.

Sheik's been lying for years. Are you really offering him up as a witness for the reality? As far as Ricky, is there anything in what he's said over the years that Verne was there every day leading training? I believe that was my point: full credit if often given to one "trainer" when that person might not even be regularly involved in the training. Or worse: full credit is given to multiple "trainers" for one wrestler, so that we end up with 300% of the credit for training Ric Flair being handed out to Verne, Billy and Josh Klemme. Just a guess: it wasn't even called "The Verne Gagne Wrestling School". It was just the AWA trying to train some new talent, seeing who made the cut and was worth more time. Over time it's been dubbed the Verne Gagne Wrestling School.

I think even in the case of Billy that it's somewhat doubtful. He was working pretty fulltime in the period that Flair went into training up to his debut. The AWA was a massive territory: Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa and Manitoba. He also made five trips to Hawaii with kind of nutty turn around times. Look at a nutty example of travel: 12/25/1971 Minneapolis, MN 12/26/1971 Milwaukee, WI 12/27/1971 Denver, CO 12/28/1971 Duluth, MN 12/29/1971 Minot, ND 12/30/1971 Fargo, ND Again, not saying he wasn't involved or that he played an important role. But...

Manager and PBP/Commentator would be with Wrestler in the Performer group. Office would be Owner / Promoter / Booker and arguably Trainer. It's not unreasonable to say Vince did the Double. Clearly as a Promoter, and one certainly could make a case as a Performer as Mr. McMahon being the lead heel of an insanely hot promotion. I'd buy it.

Who did Verne really train? Was he the guy there training those wrestlers all the time? Or did other people run the training process? I never got the sense that Verne was even as hands on as Stu Hart, whose training candidacy as a HOF has long been poked at by people.

Kareem is Flair. Worked forever. High peak, longer than just about everyone's peak. Still excellent late in career, though not quite as good as "rated". Then washed up and embarrassing at the end, but still fawned over. Loved by some, hated by others. Dominant Champ through a declining era of his promotion, then still around when the business went back up through the roof with other talent carrying the promotion. Around for so long that some just wanted him to go away. Bill Russell = Jim Londos. That fucker refused to job unless he got his big payday to put over another star (Pettit & Wilt), Then promoters realized Pettit & Wilt weren't really Championship Material, so they quickly put the Belt back on Russell for another run. Russell then walked off into the sunset without jobbing the title, and will take it to his grave. Nah. Pat Riley is closer to Vince as a master manipulator, working angles and deals, doing both booking (Head Coach) and promoting (General Manager). Up and down run career. Glory days that are fondly remember by people who cut their teeth on it (Showtime Lakers vs Rock 'n' Wrestling). Some ugly times (Knicks vs Diesel Era). Some interesting times with some quality, but not quite peak stuff (early Mourning Miami era vs good early 90s stuff and parts of the 00s - 10s). A second peak era (Lebron Heat vs Stone Cold - Rock peaks). Wears on people, even his allies and especially his wrestlers/players. Holds a hell of a grudge. Hard to say who Phil is. He made a career out of getting the best out of some high end exceptional talent, while being supported by organizations the complimented that high end talent with quality stablemates. That he was able to pull out three distinct quality runs (Jordan Bulls, Shaqkobe Lakers, Kobe's I-Me-Mine Lakers), none of them short one hit wonders, is also impressive and hard to find a match. There really isn't a big failure in there either: his 2005/06 - 2006/07 Lakers teams were weak on talent behind Kobe, Kobe was in total egofuck mode at the time, so 45-37 & 42-40 out of those teams wasn't bad coaching. 22 year run, two years sitting on the sidelines so 13 Finals in 20 seasons of coaching. Pretty nuts. I can't think of an office/management equiv that's like that in wrestling. I'm sure there are bullshit self promoters who would claim that level of run, but no one in wrestling is close.

Inoki wasn't a real trainer, as others have pointed out. One can also debate whether he's really a HOF level promoter. Office credit probably is more warranted towards Hisashi Shinma in the 70s into the early 80s when Inoki was at his prime. "Promoter" is a bit limiting. Choshu wasn't exactly a "promoter" in New Japan, but he was the key "office" / "management" person during their 90s run. Patterson wasn't a promoter, but one could argue that he is at least a borderline office/management HOF candidate. * * * * * "Trainer" has always been a problematic HOF category. Loads of people take credit as the "trainer" of a wrestler. How much time they actually spent training said wrestler is debatable. Then taking all that the people they trained, and trying to figure out how much credit falls back to the trainer, tends to be pretty spurious. Someone trained Richard Fliehr. The "Ric Flair" that came out of that training process had a rather small amount to do with the Ric Flair who is a HOFer. Most of Flair's training came on the job in Mid-Atlantic. A chunk of the balance was observational: stuff he saw Stevens and Bockwinkel and others do that he pulled into how he worked. Does the person who "trained" Scott Hall deserve any credit for what Scott turned into? Not a hell of a lot. He was pretty shitty in Florida and in the AWA, and not much better when first coming to WCW. He clicked a little bit of the way with the Diamond Studd persona, then clicked to the full degree as Razor. Anyone think his trainer did such a great job with him that it took 8 years for him to find himself fully as Razor? I'm not going to say that "trainer" is an utterly overrated concept. But from a HOF standpoint, it's of pretty marginal significance. I wouldn't even count it as being significant enough to warrant being part of a "trifecta". The important one would be people who did The Double: HOF level as a wrestler / performer and HOF level as a office person (Owner / Promoter / Booker). There have been of course a number of people who are Doubles.

You would be wrong.

I'm wondering where the "upper mid-card-y for his whole career" thing comes from. He was in main events on his first tour of Japan in 1968, and won the promotion's world title in his second one. He worked a ton of main events and semifinals in AWA. I'm sure khawk could say more, and it's been years since I sifted through Clawmaster/Jim Zordani's AWA results... but there was a lot of Billy high on the cards. I think Billy's been often poorly characterized by "history". You use to get, and perhaps still do, comments in pieces by Meltzer and others than Billy was a colorless technical wrestler. You watch Billy against Baba, or him working a tag opposite Dory & Terry with Horst, and you pretty clearly see that Billy was very colorful. He has no problems going toe-to-toe with Terry in "color" to add a spark to a match, or play perfectly off Baba as their match goes on. Same goes with the "mid-carder" stuff.

I've been trying for 20 years to articulate what I've felt when watching Flair from 1993 onward. In a paragraph Dylan does it far better than I have in several hundred thousand words. I need to copy & paste that somewhere to use in the future. 1 Edit mine.

Jun's lack of drawing was why his first run was handled that way. Misawa wanted to build NOAH around Kobashi and Jun, just as he wanted to build All Japan around them. He personally put Jun over in the singles match in Feb 2000. He put Jun over himself and Taue on the first NOAH card (Jun took both falls of the 2/3 over the two). He put Jun over Kobashi in a singles on the second card. He had the two headline the first "big" card of the promotion, which Kobashi getting his win back. The only reason Misawa won the GHC Title tourney was because Kobashi was out, and the "first" winner needs to have some gravitas to establish the belt, which is consistent with the JWA --> AJPW --> NOAH line of thinking on establishing belts. In turn, Misawa set up Jun to challenge on the company's first Budokan... and put him over again for his first big singles title. He then got put over the company's top gaijin, and got to go defend the title on New Japan's Tokyo Dome card. He got put over Kobashi on the company's second Budokan. It didn't work. It basically never worked well for Jun as an Ace in NOAH. To a degree, Misawa protected him a good deal. Look up the number of times that he challenged for the title between 2001-2009 and *lost*. The only one I can recall was the Dome match with Kobashi. The other times he challenged for the belt he ended up winning it. He wasn't used in GHC matches as a "challenger" to make others look good by jobbing to them. Instead he seemed after that first failure to be saved in the holster as a fall back if someone else failed. To a degree like Bret Hart after his first run.

Kobashi was out from July of 2006 to December of 2007. After being out from Jan 2001 - Jul 2002 with the knee, with the exception of a Budokan comeback in Feb 2002 that set him back. After coming back in 12/07, as mentioned he worked no singles matches before going back out from 09/06/08 - 03/01/09. He was back out again from 12/23/09 - 07/23/11, then worked under 50 matches in 2011 through Feb 2012 before he was beyond done, with the exception of the send of match. He basically was done after July 2006. He never again was pushed to GHC level.

The problem is that none of them were really Drawing Stars. Jun really wasn't either an an Ace level. Some of the problem was that puroresu overall was in a down cycle, and the success of Pride didn't help a great deal. But it took more than a decade for any of the "next generation" to draw to the level of building a company around. Even the current "hot" drawing of New Japan is of a debatable level relative to what the prior generation did in the 90s.

Kobashi was barely on the roster: he was making a comeback that year, and as I said never worked a singles match that year before going out for the year on the same card where Sasaki won the belt. So if we take Misawa as the only star on the roster. He's the one who put Morishima over. He'd tried to get other people over in the past in NOAH, each of whom also put Morishima over in either the chase or after he got the belt. NOAH was fucked. It really wasn't Misawa's fault that none of the fans bought anyone as being an Ace other than he and Kobashi. He kept trying from 1998 on to get someone else over as the Ace in both All Japan and NOAH. They all failed, except for Kobashi's one period of being healthy in NOAH.

01/21/07 GHC Title: Mitsuharu Misawa © defeats Takeshi Morishima (20:05) (Budokan) 03/04/07 ROH World Title: Takeshi Morishima © defeats KENTA (9:44) (Budokan) 08/19/07 GHC Title Shot - Block B: Takeshi Morishima [2] defeats Go Shiozaki [0] (18:08) 09/09/07 GHC Title Shot - Block B: Takeshi Morishima [7] defeats Jun Akiyama [6] (16:33) (Budokan) 09/09/07 GHC Title Shot Final: Naomichi Marufuji defeats Takeshi Morishima (9:14) (Budokan) 12/02/07 Takeshi Morishima defeats Naomichi Marufuji (22:58) (Budokan) 03/02/08 GHC Heavyweight Title: Takeshi Morishima defeats Mitsuharu Misawa © (20:22) (Budokan) Part of it might be that he had the ROH Title for a large chunk of the year, and also was going to be jobbing to people in the US at a certain point. On the other hand: * he got the title shot against Misawa, and was made to look impressive * he got to beat two-time champ Jun at Budokan in the Title Shot Tourney * he lost to former champ Marufuji, but it was also booked to give Morishima the tougher route (back-to-back matches + Jun) * he got the win back in the heads up match on the final Budokan of the year to set up the big match with Misawa Then: 06/14/08 GHC Title: Takeshi Morishima © defeats Takashi Sugiura (25:01) 07/13/08 Takeshi Morishima drew Kensuke Sasaki (30:00) 07/18/08 GHC Title: Takeshi Morishima © defeats Takeshi Rikio (13:24) (Budokan) 09/06/08 GHC Title: Kensuke Sasaki defeats Takeshi Morishima © (22:02) (Budokan) He beat four former champs: Misawa, Jun, Marufuji and Rikio. The other ones on the roster were Ogawa and Taue. I guess I could go look to see if he'd beaten Ogawa by the point, but it really wouldn't matter... it was Ogawa. Taue didn't really mean much. Kobashi was kinda-sorta-back, but he also went out after that September 2008 Budokan for six months or so. He didn't wrestle any singles matches in his 2008 comeback, so he's pretty much out of being an opponent. There's only so much they could do with him. They probably shouldn't have fed him Jun in the chase, and instead saved him. But honestly... it was a thin roster. Misawa kept trying to find new Aces. People liked some of the wrestlers he tried, but not enough to pay to see them as Aces.

I don't know how NOAH missed the boat. Misawa spent a year giving him the chase to the title, starting right after Marufuji bombed out. Misawa then personally did the job to put him over for the belt. Not saying they did a great job with him, or in setting up good opponents for when he had the belt. But it's pretty clear Misawa saw something in him, gave him the push to the top, and wanted it to work. It didn't. Just like pretty much everyone that Misawa picked to replace himself as the Ace. The one time it didn't was Kobashi's long run. But we also need to remember that Misawa's two prior attempts to puch Kobashi to Acedom failed.

This might be a bit extreme. I don't read him regularly at all, but going back a few pages there was the discussion of him losing his shit over Mania... more than a number of people here. When I was going to shows with Dave from 1993-98, he liked all sorts of stuff. People who loved ECW thought he loved AAA too much. People who loved the WWF thought he loved WCW too much. People who loved WCW thought he loved the WWF too much. Everyone who didn't follow puroresu thought he loved NJPW/AJPW/AJW too much. Wrestling Fans thought he loved MMA too much. His capacity to like a variety of stuff has always been pretty broad. I know we like to pigeon hole everyone, but it might not be a great idea. Less in the sense of Dave, but more in the sense of Us. I think all of us who have been around online for a long time, and watched the evolution of hardcore fandom, has seen We be on the other side of that stuff. Those of us who liked puroresu and watched/talked/wrote a great deal of/about it were Puroresu Snobs. We "believed there was only one Right way to work." I don't know how many times I saw that stuff tossed at us, and I got around the web far less than someone like Dylan. The reality is that most of us watched and liked a lot of different stuff. I got slapped as only liking AJPW, which was kind of funny given I spent money to go see NJPW, AJW, AAA, CMLL, the WWF, WCW, etc. A shitload of money in the era. You'd have other guys be labeled as Memphis marks, when in reality they were watching all sorts of shit, and digging a ton of it. There was the folks slapped as obsessed about the indy guys popping up in the era, which ignored that they every bit as much enjoyed watching Fit Finlay smack around someone. Do we have biases and things we like? Sure. Do they change over time? Sure. But we all have the capacity to like a lot of different shit. Dave really isn't any different. Is he having lots of fun with New Japan? Cool. Did he lose his shit for Mania and overrated it? Cool. That he still gives about pro wrestling after 50 years as a fan, 32 years of writing about it, seeing the ugly underside of it far more than almost any of us, and watching someone like Perro die... well, that's more than a bit amazing.

Like I said: kudos for bringing it back to life. It's the type of thing that folks have fun with, and I also liked reading people's responses. Cool stuff.

A wrestler getting pissed off about an 80s Observer audio recap is kind of a dumbass thing for Dave or Bryan or anyone else to give a shit about. Even if it was Jim Ross or Paul Heyman or someone Dave might be close with bitching about it, Dave really shouldn't give a shit. Even if they're bitching about it because of Martin repeating snarky shit Dave wrote about the figure back in his more snarky 80s days isn't something that Dave should give a shit about. If Dave was getting annoyed by Todd pointing out silly / goofy / wrong stuff Dave wrote, well... Dave needs to put on the Big Boy Pants.

Looks familiar. Though Kudos for Loss bringing it back to life. One of my favorite things to do, mostly for reading other folk's responses.

Zach isn't a big wrestling fan either, as Simmons pointed out in a recent podcast they did together when Bill was going off on a wrestling analogy.

Hmmm... this would be an interesting thread. What was it about, how did it go off the rails, etc?