pantherwagner

It hurts him that he was there from 75-87 where he had solid business and the wrestling was awesome all the way through, but he had his lunch being eaten at the box office by LLI/UWA on smaller Mexico City and Mexico State events. All over the country they were still doing very well. But that "distant second best" perception is hard to shake off. But he should definitely get credit also as the "cleaner". When Paco would get too lazy or stupid they'd send him on vacation and he'd come in and fix everything.

Moolah is a worse candidate than Styles, right?

Quick thoughts on Mexico. This is not my final ballot. I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN MEXICO CANDIDATES Atlantis: YES - I have been back and forth on him depending on the year. Really tempted to wait for 2 years to see what masks does he add to his collection. Cien Caras: Absolute YES and it's a crime that he isn't in because of his work being bad during most of the 90s Hector Garza: God bless the poor guy but no. Karloff Lagarde: Yes. I was a big supporter of his during the early 00's. Blue Panther: Absolutely yes. L.A. Park: In the future probably yes but I'd rather wait and see. Huracan Ramirez: Need to think about it. Probably yes, but I may want to vote for some non-Mexico stars who are more deserving. Vampiro: Nope. Villano III: Strongest candidate on the ballot. Dr. Wagner Jr.: In the future probably yes but I'd rather wait and see. Dr. Wagner Sr.: Yes

It's time for the 2013 Hall of Fame elections. The criteria for the Hall of Fame is a combination of drawing power, being a great in-ring performer or excelling in ones field in pro wrestling, as well as having historical significance in a positive manner. A candidate should either have something to offer in all three categories, or be someone so outstanding in one or two of those categories that they deserve inclusion. The names listed below are those under consideration for this year. To be eligible, a performer must have reached their 35th birthday and completed ten years since their debut as a full-time performer, or be someone who has been a full-time pro wrestler for at least 15 years. Longevity should be a prime consideration rather than a hot two or three year run, unless someone is so significant as a trend-setter or a historical figure in the business, or valuable to the industry, that they need to be included. However, just longevity without being either a long-term main eventer, a top draw and/or a top caliber in-ring performer should be seen as relatively meaningless. The maximum number of wrestlers that you can vote for all the categories is ten. You can pick as few as zero if you don't believe anyone on this list deserves inclusion. For wrestling executives, managers, announcers and other outside the ring performers, you can vote for them and they are not counted against the ten. You can vote for as many as five of them. --- I FOLLOWED THE HISTORICAL PERFORMERS ERA CANDIDATES Gene & Ole Anderson The Assassins (Joe Hamilton & Tom Renesto) Red Bastien June Byers Pepper Gomez Rip Hawk Dick Hutton Ciclon Negro Dutch Savage Kinji Shibuya Wilbur Snyder John Tolos Enrique Torres Count Billy Varga Von Brauners & Saul Weingeroff Tim "Mr. Wrestling" Woods I FOLLOWED THE MODERN PERFORMERS IN U.S/CANADA CANDIDATES Bob Armstrong Batista Edge Owen Hart Curt Hennig Ivan Koloff Brock Lesnar Fabulous Moolah Pedro Morales Dick Murdoch Ken Patera Rock & Roll Express (Ricky Morton & Robert Gibson) Sgt. Slaughter Jimmy Snuka Sting A.J. Styles Johnny "Mr. Wrestling II" Walker I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN JAPAN CANDIDATES George Gordienko Gran Hamada Volk Han Masahiko Kimura Yuji Nagata Seiji Sakaguchi Kensuke Sasaki Mike & Ben Sharpe Kiyoshi Tamura Hiroshi Tanahashi I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN MEXICO CANDIDATES Atlantis Cien Caras Hector Garza Karloff Lagarde Blue Panther L.A. Park Huracan Ramirez Vampiro Villano III Dr. Wagner Jr. Dr. Wagner Sr. I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN EUROPE CANDIDATES Jim Breaks Big Daddy Giant Haystacks Horst Hoffman Billy Joyce Kendo Nagasaki Jackie Pallo Rollerball Mark Rocco Johnny Saint I FOLLOWED WRESTLING IN AUSTRALIA/PACIFIC ISLANDS/PUERTO RICO CANDIDATES Spyros Arion Johnny Barend Carlos Colon Domenic DeNucci Killer Karl Kox Mark Lewin Mario Milano NON-WRESTLERS Bill Apter Dave Brown Jim Crockett Jr. Jim Crockett Sr. Gary Hart Jimmy Hart Howard Finkel Jerry Jarrett Takashi Matsunaga Gorilla Monsoon Gene Okerluind Don Owen Jesse Ventura Stanley Weston

We worked 350 days a year (even the AWA guys say that!)

It has got to be Jaguar Yokota. 90s names like Mayumi Ozaki or Kyoko Inoue are helped on this conversation because AJW ran more themed shows with visibility than in the 80s. If they had booked their supercards in the 80s like in the 90s (both in number and spreading the names on top where "lesser names" are given their chance to shine without the spotlight always being on Crush Girls or Dump's Army) the discussion would be very different and we'd be talking about Jumbo Hori or maybe Noriyo Tateno at the same level at least as far as work goes.

Can't complain about your top 5 but I also think that Pirata and Emilio on their best day were better than Satanico, even though Satanico had a much better career as a worker and as a star. I'd have put Espanto Jr. on the Great Workers but he didn't have the longevity of most of the rest and we don't have much 80s footage of him. But anybody that ever made Fray Tormenta look like he was awesome deserves the praise. Surprised at your ranking of Virus. Not complaining, just surprised. Read it out loud and he seems to be an odd name out on the list. Ringo is too high IMO. In the 90s I suffered through hours and hours of his Arena Coliseo midcard trios stuff with his shitty spin kick. Texano, Silver King, Cruz maybe too low. Talisman was awesome and he's a guy that you will really like. Very strong hand but I'd put him a small step below the guys you have as excellent.

It's a terrible gimmick but even more so a Wrestlecrap idea if they think they can attract Mexicans by using Puerto Ricans doing a Spanish gimmick (though to be fair bullfighting is pretty big in Mexico too). The McMahons and their writers still think that there's a magical group of millions of people called "Latinos" that will support anybody that speaks Spanish.

Jikkyu Power Pro Wrestling? I actually wrote a partial, "enough to get you through the menus" FAQ for this like a million years ago. http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/571482-jikkyo...g-96/faqs/27975 Yeah, that was it! I remember your guide too, pretty sure I had it printed out at some point though if my memory is right by 2004 I wasn't really playing that game at all except for maybe a week long "nostalgia run" or so. That game was pretty good once you had it figured out.

I played a lot of Tecmo World Wrestling. I loved that it was a Japanese game and you had tons of cool moves like german suplexes or giant swings that you'd not see on American games. Like a lot of kids here, I spent a lot of time playing Wrestlefest. Weirdly the machine wasn't a hit at all at the arcades in Barcelona and you could see it popping around from place to place in the neighbourhood, but it was forever at the arcade in my father's town in the countryside. After NES I didn't have a videogame system until PS3 but I played a lot of Emulator games in the mid 90s. I bought a bootleg CD-ROM once with a shitload of SNES games (and I made a lot of money reselling it as a friend from a well-off family had a CD-ROM recorder when those cost at least a thousand dollars). There was what was my favourite game for a very long time: the Super Fire Pro Wrestling of All Japan women. If I recall they had two games and this was the first. I only knew Toyota, Kong, Nakano and Hokuto but it didn't matter (it was only a few months later in 1994 when I got my first 90s AJW tape and I became a fan). You had tag matches, moonsaults, dives and tons of other features that I had only seen in my dreams. It took me a very long time to learn how to do stuff and what each option meant as there was obviously no guide and it was all in Japanese. For the longest time I couldn't figure out how to do pinfalls. This was my favourite game until I got a copy of one of the men's SFPW X Premium. That CD had a lot of wacky games: a WAR game with Tenryu and a bunch of clones (can only remember a Muta clone), a crappy Akira Maeda RINGS game where he'd fight other style fighters, a JWP game that was alright but nothing special, and one that I really loved called Ikkyu Pro Wrestling where you had exploding matches and all kinds of good stuff. There may or may not have been a Cutie Suzuki wrestling game but that one may not have been an SNES game. These games were the reason why I learned katakana, which I still remember 20 years later, even if I have never bothered much with hiragana which my Japanese friends think is very weird. As a side note, in the late 90s I'd probably have given my left nut to own the PC-FX All Japan Women game that I saw announced on the Gong magazines. Years later I realized that it was a shitty select-your-move type game, kind of like the WWF Microleague games.

There's an old Bob Barnett comp tape, probably a Lucha Looneys, with a clip of a Bob Brown match where his balls pop out during a small package. Then Bob puts the clip again once or twice more in super slo-mo just so you don't miss the action.

Not really a modern name but Enrique Vera or post-AAA Fishman being on the main event of lucha start-ups meant the promotions were fucked from day 1. Still agree with Loss and Bix that Al Madril is the best example probably in the history of wrestling, but it's not a modern name either. Post ECW Sabu being called to be on the main or semi main was also an almost sure-fire way to make sure your indy promotion wasn't going to last too long: this happened on at least three countries with XLAW, MLW, Tokyo Pro, probably a bunch of others.

When I lived in South Africa I regularly went to a Virgin Active where three quarters of the weight room were rugby players or looked like them and I have never seen so many HGH guts at any gym ever in my life including gyms in Santa Monica. It's pretty serious shit over there.

I have had lunch with Dave too, I can't recall a lot of details other than he had cut himself while shaving and he had this distracting giant plaster covering half of his chin. By the way, while I think that finding Dave without a vague idea of where he was would have been a quest, Nagoya St. isn't nearly as busy as any main station in Tokyo or Osaka once you move a few blocks away other than east.

Why don't you post a few links to what you consider your best articles? I read the Texas one, WXO and Black World Champs but browsing cageside seats is a pain in the ass. I am looking for good content that I can read on my phone via Pocket during long bus or train rides... On a similar note, is there anywhere on PWO a megathread on great wrestling articles? It would be a great reference to have one place with stuff like the interview with Nancy Benoit's sister, Snowden's top stuff like the Ric Flair deal, things like the recent DDP article on Jake/Hall, or the Final Days of Randy Savage.

I'm in Korea and many little children that can't even be 10 years old have their parents' old Samsung Galaxy S or S2 or whatever. Everybody has got a freaking huge phone and even so, many girls add these huge Hello Kitty protectors on top of them.

By the way the newest big trend in European cities is Taiwanese bubble milk tea. The last time I went to Barcelona I saw four chains that had open in 6 months. There are a couple of stores in London with huge queues of Asian students at any hour during the weekend.

Last year I worked in Hook, next to Basingstoke in Hampshire. Basingstoke had a smoothie shop, a Ben and Jerry's and a frozen yoghurt place. They all seemed to do fairly well though I dont know if they are still around. I think those business (outside of London) only work in shopping malls or next cinemas. I had to reply to this because I don't care for ice cream but I'm a huge fan of frozen yoghurt. If you love dessert cafes you need to travel to any eastern Asian large cities: Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Bangkok, doesn't matter, there's shitloads of them all over the place.

Al Snow is a guy that got a break because he was lucky enough to have a couple of "great matches" with Sabu and Marty Jannetty and somehow there was always somebody taping them (you'd probably want to take your own eyes out with plastic coffee spoons if you had to rewatch those today, but I'm going with what the general opinion was at the time). His ECW stuff with Nishimura and Benoit solidified that status. He probably would have a better rep had he chosen WCW over WWF.

Nailz working New Japan tours in full gimmick in either 1993 or 1994 was really out of place, even if he was a MN buddy from Hawk and Norton.

Was the one match he was good in the Dr. Wagner mask match because that match is guaranteed on the lucha set!!! Yeah that was pretty good and I remembered there's this 1966 match of him where he's good too. Maybe we've just seen the wrong matches. Who knows.

A few days ago I read Ray Stevens' biography as it was posted on a classic WON last week. I remember back when I was heavily into tape trades he was the second biggest letdown ever once I got to see the footage. After reading for years and years and years about this "legendary superworker" all the stuff that I found of him on tape was not very good. I just assumed his best stuff was never taped. That being said that was a decade ago and I'm sure a lot more footage has surfaced. Is there any must watch Stevens matches that I should track down? In case anyone is wondering the biggest letdown for me was El Solitario. I was always told by pretty much everybody that he was the best worker in Mexico for decades but he is actually terrible in most of the dozen or so available matches with him and is only good in one of them.

Pretty sure he said/meant Don was Blears' daughter's boyfriend. That makes more sense. He was talking about it in between the cuts of podcast parts 2 and 3 and I just couldn't make sense out of it.

Did I just hear wrong or Dave said on the Q&A WON from a couple of days ago that Don Muraco got into wrestling because he was James Blears' boyfriend?

Just so El-P doesn't feel alone I also don't see what's so great about the Wyatt family (but yeah no crazy hillbilly cults in southern Europe I guess). If they are going to do this Shield gimmick of ganging up on people they better get the two big dudes up to speed because the beatdowns look really bad. I hope they send the ginger one for a week with Finlay so he can teach him how to stomp properly. Wyatt seems to have great delivery though so he could eventually breakout but the other two could be dead weight pushing him down. I'm sure they have a pretty good plan for them so I will have to see how this develops but IMO the gimmick is walking a fine line between creepy/great/unique gimmick and mid 90s wrestlecrap. (Disclaimer: I have never seen them on NXT because I don't watch it) I also don't know if Ziggler will have legs for a long run as a babyface. He's looks too much like a fratboy douchebag. It's smart to book his key moments with the more hardcore crowds though because then you can make sure he'll get a great reaction. I didn't care about the gimmick but I feel sorry for Fandango, it's like he got a concussion, are pissed that he had to rest up and they lost faith in him, because he looked like he was getting ready for an IC title run. Almost everything else they are doing seems to be a winner, though. Really intrigued about future Henry vs Shield matchups - that should be pretty awesome. Brock vs Punk will be great, too. I thought Warrior was supposed to appear on Raw (read that on somebody's facebook so it may just be a silly rumor). It's a shame there can't be a mania without a Taker streak as a main event selling point because I'd love to fantasy book Sting/Taker/Warrior vs The Shield.