Dylan Waco

Fucking post of the year right there. I would note that the guy who went before Dustin in that open challenge was taken to the hospital.

If Goldust had been booked differently/closer to a main event role in his first run with that character I actually think he'd be in the conversation for GOAT. As far as The Shield I agree with tim and this is coming from someone who was huge on Ambrose for years before he came to the WWE. On Rollins I think the long term prospects for him are strongest as a babyface

Kerry was great in that match

Fuck this is going to be awesome. I can not wait for Crazy Eddie stories, tales of the glory days of Danny Marlow including conspiracy theories about his possible progeny, top five East Ridge workers of all time, details on the day UEW closed down, tales of traveling to "far off" indies in exotic locations like Cleveland, TN, et. I don't even give a fuck if no one else reads this thread, this shit needs to be documented somewhere. My only question is whether or not this thread should be more inclusive, i.e. about other "hometown indies" as well. I don't want to stop your momentum talking about this stuff, so one way or the other keep posting.

I should have jumped into this thread earlier. A few things: I think the WWC question is debatable for two reasons. One I think they actually briefly went out of business in the early 90s (93?) so it's a non-continuous territory. Secondly because of the nature of the promotion geographically it's hard to know what to call it. In terms of geographical area covered, it's almost certainly the smallest territory by a wide, wide margin (I don't count one off towns like St. Louis or Houston as territories in any meaningful sense, though they were meaningful cities). Yes they ran multiple shows a week and yes they were wildly successful. Even now there big shows do better than the big shows of any indie promotion, and there regular attendance is better than many promotions that have much higher profiles with "smart" fans. But I don't think they have run anywhere other than PR in years (I know they used to run Trinidad semi-regularly) and it's not like they are likely to in the future. In there heyday I think they qualified as a territory because of how they cycled talent, but it was a really unique place. I guess on some level they still qualify, but it's arguable. Either way I love WWC and want Borique to come in here and set me straight and explain to me the details of the WWC/IWA war, but that's probably best suited for another thread. I also think the distinction between territories and regional feds is interesting. I actually have a hard time disagreeing with it, even though I also struggle with the idea that SMW wasn't a territory since they ran a regular loop, cycled talent to one degree or another and stayed within very narrow geographical limits. ECW is admittedly tougher to nail down, but my thought is that they were never really a territory in any sense of the term. On AWA expansion I have talked at great length in my dreaded threads of doom about how real and stupid the expansion efforts were. It's not just that they idiotically tried to move into Alaska (and Vancouver) of all places, nor is it just that they tried to expand some with shows in Pa and Jersey, nor is it that they did one offs in weird places here or there (I want more details on Phoenix which Meltzer seemed to imply was a regular town in a mini-debate I had with him over the AWA's markets at the F4W board recently). It's that they did this at the worst possible time and at the expense of their own local, far more stable, base areas. What would often happen is they would do split crews, diluting an already weak talent roster in areas where they were needed and in some cases were at least somewhat successful even fairly late in the invasion game. My research seemed to show that shows with Blackwell, Sarge, The Roadies, and a World title defense in some combination could still draw pretty well later than some remember. They had to load up the shows to do decent numbers which wasn't a good sign, but what they damn sure couldnt' afford to do was spread the non-existent wealth around - and that's exactly what they did. Of course we've discussed before how the logic place to move into was Detroit and there was probably a real chance to do it that Verne flubbed, but that's a different matter. It seems weird to say and might come off like pandering to Khawk, but my thought is that the loss of Winnipeg was the absolute death blow, as it killed off a stable town, where they could have potentially worked some decent tv off of TSN and maybe scrambled back into Brandon as another loop town within reach if things continued to spiral in the States. More importantly it just looked really bad. It was late in the game and really past the point of no return already, but I think that really accelerated the decline. It still amazes me that their best city in the dying days was SLC

God damn I am livid that I forgot that hooker/pimp story for my write up, but man alive is it Rossville as fuck. You need to start a "hometown indie" thread Devon

Pro Wrestling Rossville 10/12/13 Mega-Rumble A pseudo-suburb of Chattanooga, Rossville, Ga is the birthplace of Terry Gordy, and in some respects the epicenter of the North Georgia/East TN wrestling universe. There are a bunch of guys who live there and train there. Several promotions have run out of Rossville over the years, including the currently active Empire, which I think is one of the better indies in the States. Rossville is also an amazingly epic, seemingly endless, skid row. The main drag Rossville Boulevard is jammed back with a combination of decrepit buildings, seedy businesses, and sprawling empty concrete lots littered with crack pipes and hypodermic needles. One of those empty lots is directly across the street from a massive pornography store. In this lot an old man (think Randy Savage in his last years in terms of look) sets up shop every day with two massive canopies where he sells tons and tons of his own porn on both VHS and DVD, as well as a wildly diverse collection of shoes. Just a bit further up the road is a Mexican restaurant/night club called the "Turd On," which is a well known meth front. Even further down is a cluster of deeply disturbing "thrift" stores, one of which has a box filled with body parts from action figures that are for sale for a penny a piece and another which regularly stocks adult diapers and bullets. Almost every corner has a liquor store, pawn shop, payday loan joint or some business built around the promise of seeing nude women (pornography store, strip club, nude car wash, et). Years ago my wife, my father and I were driving down the road at about noon and in the middle of the street there was a single prosthetic (hopefully) leg, inside of a full pant leg, as if an amputee had been running across the road and half of his pants had just fallen off in tact at the seam. None of thought it odd or even said anything at the time. Later upon reflection "it was Rossville" seemed to be the conclusion we reached when trying to figure out how such a thing was possible. Of course this preface wasn't really necessary, but I thought it was worth including because it gives you a little local flavor if you decide to follow along with me and watch all or some of this show. More to the point it also helps explain the outright absurdity of this match. The Mega-Rumble is basically a twelve man royal rumble, except here guys come to the ring in one minute increments and when it gets down to the last two they have a match that most end in pinfall (the announcers stipulated that it couldn't even end in submission, which has to be the strangest qualifier I've ever heard for a match). I had originally thought this show was going to be held in the Empire Arena (i.e. a warehouse, which is actually in one of the nicer areas of town), but instead it is what I assume is a high school gym. When I saw the show was less than an hour and a half long, I figured this battle royal would be used as a filler to get a few extra guys on the show and it would go about twelve minutes. Instead they went about twenty and it was a who's who of mediocre North GA/East TN indie guys and then Drew Game. Drew Game is kind of a sad case. At one point he was one of the better and most unique in ring guys in the area. At his peak he was part of a really great local tag team with Drew Delight. I saw the two have a couple of really good matches for the old UEW promotion (based out of East Ridge, the birthplace of Dylan Waco, and an area that rivals Rossville in its trashiness) and my brothers, uncle and cousin went regularly and were huge marks for the guy. Delight is probably the best in ring guy to ever come out that indie scene and he is now semi-retired, working a handful of times a year at most and running the aforementioned Empire fed. Game never gets booked in Empire which makes me think there was a falling out, and he tends to turn up more often in the secondary indies that run the area, where he desperately tries to get good matches out of half trained twenty year olds. Yeah I know, you don't give a fuck about any of that and probably don't give a fuck about the match, but watching this match it felt like an inside joke on Game. He was the first guy in and worked the whole match. Hell the match didn't have an elimination until about thirteen minutes in. He was the only guy who seemed to want to do anything interesting, aside from Bane Lynch who did some dangerous as shit looking leaping knee to Game and then took a pretty cool fall away slam over the top when he was eventually eliminated. At times Game was standing around waiting for shit to happen and he just looked like a defeated man. There was one point where CJ Therell came out and I gasped. Therell is the only guy I've ever seen have a bad match with Drew Delight and even calling him "half trained" feels like a statement that gives him the benefit of way too many doubts. Sure enough about a minute or so in he botched up an exchange that involved a clothesline off the ropes, something I've only seen Bo Dallas do before him. When Therell came out I thought to myself "christ, who's next, Logan Alvey?" And then Logan Alvey came out. I don't even know if I can describe why that is so hilariously awful, but it was. Needless to say the match didn't get better. In the end it came down to Game and Jason Hampton, another indie guy who has been around forever. Hampton is interesting in his own right because he's one of the only local guys who seemingly never gets pushed into main events, no matter what random as fuck, third rate indie he is working. To be fair to Hampton he does work the better promotions in the region to (namely Empire and DSCW), but he basically will work anywhere. The last time I saw him he was passing out flyers/trying to scalp tickets outside of a WWE show almost literally in my brothers backyard. He didn't look good then, and he looked even worse now. He took a couple of spots from Drew Game, rolled back in the ring, hit a ball shot off camera and then a double underhook DDT and pinned him. Drew Game is my friend on facebook, and I expect some sort of death threat after writing this, but the conclusion I reached here is that he needs to get out of wrestling. The guy has talent, but ten-plus years in if you are working opening match battle royals for Rossville indies, where you are expected to hold together a match where the majority of guys involved struggle running the ropes, and the end result is you take a fall from a guy I've never seen win a match who looks to be in the worst shape of his life....I mean I know wrestling is a work but my god. Mikey Watkins v. Ryan Vega Vega is a rookie coming out of Empire. Watkins is somewhat I am not all that familiar with, but he came out of TWA which just closed up after a 20-plus year run. This was put out there as a sort of "Young Lions" type of match and to that end this was not bad. I can't say it was a good match, because there were a lot of senseless moments and you can tell Vega is green as grass. On the other hand Watkins is an impressive flyer. His spots were dynamic and I got the feeling against the right guy he could almost be Amazing Red-ish in terms of putting a match together in a smart way, while still getting his shit in. To his credit Vega took a version of the Dustin crossbody bump and Watkins took his finish like a champ. This was kept short and as a result was pretty watchable. Vega might actually end up pretty good himself, but he's got a ways to go. Matt Fortune v. Joey Lynch Matt Fortune is probably a top twenty-five guy from the area, maybe even top twenty. That sounds more insulting than I mean it though, because there are a lot of guys from that area that I think are good. Lynch I have seen twice on an EWA show and wasn't overly impressed. One of the things that really holds Fortune back to me is that he is a good heel, good at building matches, has some fun spots, entertaining on the mat, but he goes full blown Kurt Angle all to often on the stretch run. Well on the front end of this match we got him as a solid heel, we got some fun mat spots, hell we even got some really clever cut off spots. Lynch was over as a face and things were looking pretty good. I even liked the comeback of Lynch with his shooting star press near fall, which felt huge in this setting. And then Fortune ran up and hit a German off the top rope. Yeah it was a reset spot and yeah it wasn't even the worst spot in the match because Lynch won with a stupid as fuck Canadian Destroyer thing. But man did it feel like I dagger straight into the heart of a match that had been pretty good before it. In the end this was more annoying than anything, because the last bit felt like a "fuck you" to the first three quarters of the match. Lamar Phillips/T-Bone v. Wyld Stallions v. Keith Hamil/Leroy Lewis v. The Movement This is elimination rules. My first inclination was to bitch that KT Hamil wasn't in this match teaming with his brother as he is one of the better guys in the area and they are a good team, but in turns out he is in a singles match next so I can't bitch. My second thought is that this match will probably mark the fourth or fifth different way I have spelled the Hamil Brothers last name in a review and I'm still not sure what the correct form is. Anyway, I have enjoyed The Movement this year, though they are not even close to the best indie team around. Going in I kind of figured they would go over and the match would be built around them working with the other teams, two of which I think are makeshift and the third of which (Wyld Stallions) are a decent fourth or fifth generation replica of the RnR Express with more neon (it would probably be more apt to compare them to the RPMs, but you get the point). Instead this match ended up being built up as the Stallions return after a one year absence. Amazingly, I was most impressed with T-Bone who I have largely avoided on the SCW shows I've watched. Now I kind of want to go back and give the guy a chance. He's basically a poor man's Jerry Blackwell, a big rotund guy who will crush you with offense or take absolutely crazy bumps for a guy his size. At one point Leroy Lewis fucking murders whim with a Minchinoku Driver and then a Death Valley Driver on subsequent exchanges and I thought they might end up breaking the ring. Lamar Phillips was pretty fun as the standard douchebag heel too and I thought the match lost a little when they got eliminated. Parts of the segment with the Stallions and The Movement were pretty decent, but I've seen much better out of The Movement this year, and Cory Cox of the Stallions constantly getting down from the apron and then struggling to get back up was distracting and strange. As a whole the match was pretty disjointed at times, and down right messy during the first exchange with The Movement and Stallions after it got down to those two teams, but it was still a fun match. KT Hamil v. Adam Jacobs Jacobs is a carriable guy, who can't lead a match himself and is better off against big dudes. Hamil isn't a big dude, but he is one of the best guys in the area - in some ways the best - so I was excited for this. It ended up being a pretty decent match, but it suffered badly from being face v. face and not having a ton of time to develop. Hamil is best off working as an underdog babyface or a chickenshit, lunatic bumping heel and this didn't play to either strength. Instead they worked a traditional match, starting with some pretty sharp mat work, building to some slightly bigger spots, a few momentum swings tied in and then a finish. There was one spot that was a bit too cute and didn't come off, but over all I really liked several of the individual sequences, my favorite probably being Hamil's running lariat or the superplex to the floor tease. On the other hand a few things were just a bit telegraphed (probably hurt some by the camera angle) and the finish felt out of the blue. This wasn't bad by any means, probably about as good as it could have been all things considered, but it is still probably the worst Hamil match I've seen this year. Cyrus The Destroyer v. Tank - No DQ Now this is an interesting match. My brother (Exposer) saw this exact match at a Pro Wrestling Chattanooga show earlier this year and said it stole the show. At the time both guys were working Empire as a part of separate stables and for most of the Summer the promotion built to a match between the two for the company title. They had this really heavily hyped exchange in a six-man tag match at the companies flag ship show during Mania weekend and their singles match was promoted more than anything else in the companies history - and then Cyrus no showed. I won't go into the details but Tank ended up with the title, Cyrus ended up feuding with Torque in DSCW (a couple of really good matches between these two are on youtube as well) and they just completed a tournament to see who gets the first title shot at Tank which was won by Shaun Tempers. Right before this match starts they announce this is for the Empire belt which I think is kind of funny because I can't imagine the Empire promoter is happy about that, but what the hell do I know. As a match these are two big guys, who are really athletic and can cut a pace. I really think this was hurt by going on last because the crowd seemed sort of tired by the time this went on and when these guys didn't really cut a pace and instead worked a straight brawl it didn't get over as well as I would have thought. On the other hand, aside from one chair spot were Tank seemed to senseless wait for Cyrus to charge and hit him, I really did like this. Most of this was just big dudes clubbing each other, but I really liked the toe-for-toe punch exchanges and I enjoyed all the big spots. Tank got color, Cyrus hit his really great looking Vader Bomb splash, Tank hit his really great looking corner rolling senton which literally shook the ring and the finish was pretty satisfying. Ultimately I still think a match like this is going to come across far better live then it does on a long shot stationary camera, but I did like it. Overall Thoughts: This wasn't all that good a show, but I enjoyed watching it because I enjoy watching wrestling in this setting. This show also had a real variety to it which helped as none of the matches had similar themes and after the opening battle royal, every match had at least aspects to it that were very enjoyable. I wouldn't advocate anyone go out of there way to see it, and the good workers on the show have all had much better matches this year, but as a whole it was better than the sum of its parts.

That was like one of those good Attitude Era segments, but with way better wrestling. Dustin Rhodes is the best guy in the promotion in the ring right this second. I actually don't even think it's all that close considering how Cesaro is booked and the fact that Bryan's match are not built around Brie Bella hope spots

"They are nowhere near a sellout even with their strongest main event match." And after this I am even more positive than before that it's way to soon for Tanahashi to be in the Hall of Fame Also this description attached to a Marufuji match sounds like absolute hell on earth: "The match was all about reversing, blocking and side stepping the others' big moves." I will watch at least part of the show, but I really should stop reading peoples thoughts on these. It's possible I would actually get some enjoyment out of these main events on occasion if people weren't setting the bar absurdly high.

I wish I had been on this show only so I could have made a joke about this being at best the second biggest drawing show with Robocop as a main event bit player

Don't know. I have a list of Dynamite matches I really enjoy I could point to, but not sure what you have or haven't seen. I will say that I wouldn't judge anyone based on a match with Richards who I regard as one of the worst wrestlers alive.

Scorpio was saddled with a shit gimmick, was given nothing to work with and came over in a completely different era so it's a very difficult comparison to make. Windham might be a good pick but his run was so much shorter and The Stalker thing was way after his body had gone to shit and he quit giving a fuck. Martel is a much better face than heel - his tag work in the WWF was very good and while his heel turn yielded nothing memorable, I don't think he was really any better or worse than Hennig in the Perfect role. Duggan I won't argue with.

I'm trying to think of a guy who was as good as Hennig was that lost as much and I'm drawing a blank. You can find good matches with Hennig in the WWF. I like the Bret matches though I think they are wildly overrated, I really like a couple of his random tv matches in 93, he has some decent pinball performances here or there. But by and large he became the most flat and uninteresting "bump machine" heel in the ring that you could possibly conceive of in the WWF.

I would love to do another SC type poll, but I also think it's unlikely to ever happen. The problem is that the argument has always been "lets finish the 80's sets and yearbooks." Well that will take a while, but will eventually happen. However when that happens there will tons of unexplored more modern stuff that was ignored, shunted aside, under discussed, et. Some people don't give a fuck about lists and that's fine. I enjoy them because they bring about discussion, but I also feel like it is pointless to wait for a "perfect time" to do them because that will never come. On Hennig's bayface run, I actually think you could argue he was a sharper babyface in Portland than the AWA. I like the AWA babyface work a lot more than you - hell my favorite singles match on the set was a babyface Curt match - but the Portland stuff adds depth to it.

On Hennig I had him at fifty and struggled with him a ton. As a peak performer I feel he has a very strong case. I love him as a babyface and I love him as a heel. He was a good tag wrestler, often times despite his partners. He had great long matches and great short/sprint matches. He was a very underrated brawler, could sell his ass off, of course was a freak of a bumper, and early in his career had pretty good offense. His best matches stack up very well next to the best matches of other top workers during that era and the volume of solid matches was high. When put in the ring with other excellent (frankly BETTER) performers he was able to rise to the occasion (v. Rose, v. Bock, v. Hansen, v. Lawler). When put in the ring with middling guys or guys with limited talents or just guys who weren't all that over he could still put on good matches (v. Peterson, v. Snow, I felt he got more out of late stage Greg Gagne than anyone else by a wide margin). But the Mr. Perfect run hurts him in my eyes. If he doesn't have that Perfect run I could see a case for him several spots higher than he was. Without it he was one of many guys I considered for the fifty slot. If I were doing it again he'd likely get bumped out and Arn would get plugged in around 42 or 43.

Saito is another guy I agonized over because his best performances and matches are outstanding.

Shit if you could do it easily, you are a better man than I. It's crazy because when the Smarkschoice poll was done back in 06 it seemed like there were just over 100 people who I thought were really solid contenders for a list like that. Now there would be hundreds who I would consider worthy of a top 100. I said it on the show but my list started with 107 names and I chipped it down. Even still there were names I didn't even consider that have popped up here - Sano, Larry Z, Kudo - who maybe should have. Take someone like Chris Adams. Seven years ago if someone had said they were going to rate him in a top fifty I would have thought that was fucking crazy. But after watching a lot of stuff of his from the 80s and with the USWA Texas stuff out there now I wouldn't even dispute it if he popped up on someones list. There are a plethora of guys like that.

It was very rewindish. There was some variation, mainly due to the reactions of Gonazalez, but there wasn't near the amount of deviation from the norm you would want in an extended sequence like that. It was so repetitive I actually could see people giving up on the match in the first ten minutes which would be a real shame

I don't think there is any question that guys come up and down depending on what people are watching at the time. I even referenced that on the show (I think?). The best you can do is try and be sensible about things (for example I haven't watched Misawa, Kawada or Kobashi in their prime in years but they all did well). Also I haven't seen the Mid-South set. I have seen a lot of what is on the set, but not the whole thing. I was never at any point as big a Dibiase fan as some people, though I acknowledge it's possible he could have placed toward the end of my list if I had seen that set from beginning to end a week before we did this show. Having said that I do think Windham is easily better than Dibiase. In fact I think 93 Windham - which most people cite as past his prime - is better than any year I've seen of Ted's career (possible a more complete viewing of Mid-South would change my opinion here).

Ray Gonzalez v. Carlos Colon - 1998 I have thought about watching this many times, but have always been scared off by the length as the idea of a Colon match going 25-plus in 1998 seemed pretty unappealing. It turns out I was right to fear the length, but wrong to think it might sink the match. This was a good match, that would have been great if it was eight-to-ten minutes shorter. On the one hand all of the work in the opening shine was solid and actually pretty impressive in the sense that Colon was still moving around very well and Gonzalez was busting his ass to make the boss look good. On the other hand it had a real "rinse, wash, repeat" feel to it. They established with the first couple of exchanges that Colon was the superior wrestler and then they just drove that point home, over and over and over. It kind of felt like an otherwise good AWA match that was hampered by a front end obsessed with beating the viewer over the head with the notion that the heels are inferior crybabies. Having said that this match had a ton going for it. I loved the transition spot for instance as I think Colon legitimately flubbed a spot off the ropes and rather than it hurting the match, Gonzalez took over attacking the leg. The early brawling on the floor was really awesome and violent and led to Colon getting color which is always a plus in any match he's in. Colon fighting back with the timekeepers hammer was pretty great too. The stretch run basically starts when Gonzalez lifts a club from one of the police officers and whacks Colon in the leg with it. From that point forward the whole match is basically about leg work, including some sick looking chop blocks from Gonzalez and a couple of really epic figure-four spots. I wish Colon had sold the leg a bit more on his comeback, but it wasn't an egregious blow off and it worked in the moment. Still the star of this was Gonzalez. He bumped and stooged like a champ and still hung toe-to-toe with the baddest man on the block. He looked like a guy you could build a promotion around and make real money with here. He ended up being one of the bigger stars in the company, but watching this it seems like he should have been bigger than he became

I wanted to respond to this because Childs is someone who has watched as much Buddy as me and probably about as much Bock as me - and yet his description of Bock here is something that I think fits Buddy at least much as it fits Bock if not more. With Bock I think the genius is that he wrestles damn near every match differently and he can turn on the stooging and/or champion in survival mode when necessary. These are also traits Buddy has. The difference is there are occasions I can think of where Bock would spend an entire match in peril, showing ass, et and survive via DQ or a fluke. I'm not averse to that sort of thing at all, especially because he didn't do it any match. But thinking back, I really struggle to think of situations where Buddy did that. A large part of that has to do with the 2/3 falls nature of Portland wrestling, but to me the description Childs makes here of Bock "a guy who might stooge a little and has no regard for rules but when the chip are down, will beat your ass to keep his gold," actually fits Buddy much more than some might think.

This is kind of funny, because Bret v. Arn was a comparison I mentioned when discussing Bret on the show

A day later and the only thing I'm still pretty hung up on is not including Arn. He should have been somewhere in the 42-50 range. A project like this is so much harder to do in the post footage explosion age. There are hundreds of guys I would consider worthy of a top hundred.

I've said this before, but they have appeared on the largest number of ballots I've seen. Easily. They also benefit from a fairly weak modern performers field

Ricky Morton and Al Snow had an excellent match on SMW tv in 95. OF course that's tough because it's well into Morton's career (basically the end of him being relevant actually), but Snow was getting over as a tag worker at that point and this was the first one not already mentioned that came to mind.