Dylan Waco

Just submitted my ballot. I know a lot of other people feel like a weight is off their shoulders, but if I'm being honest I'm actually a bit sad. This feels like a real chapter in my fandom closing. Obviously I am not going anywhere, and will still be a part of the scene to one degree or another, but this does feel like the end of a era to me on a personal level that is hard to articulate fully. Very excited to see the results and other full lists. I'm especially looking forward to talking to my brothers both of whom submitted their ballots yesterday. We discussed things throughout but we had a strict no spoiler discussion when it came to looking at each others lists, or even discussing major specifics of where we might rate people until we had put our ballots in.

Naniwa wasn't nominated?

I'll be at both ROH shows, Evolve Friday, WWN Supershow, Mania and Raw. I'll order the Evolve show I miss and of course I'll watch Takeover.

I actually respect this stance a great deal.

I wonder if HHH would make my top 600 of the nominees. Might be worth exploring

Barely anything at all is missing. Maybe not even a minute

With Ayala the most famous match is the Inferno Match, which I like a lot, but it's not the first in the series and not my favorite. I think the first of the matches is the Texas Death Match from 7/87 which is probably my least favorite of their matches, but again I like it a lot. I believe the Barbed Wire match from Anniversario 87 is next which I think his a great match, followed by the aforementioned Inferno Match. Not sure when the Loser Leaves Town match is. Maybe 89. I love that one too. All of them are on YouTube, as is the crazy angle with Colon's wife. While it's not as good as the Hansen feud (nothing is), it's a pretty amazing feud considering the limitations of Ayala.

I mentioned this way back when in this thread, but it is a tad irksome that Martel lacks a great brawl, and I think that may part of what is hurting Jetlag's ability to invest. Don't get me wrong. I think Martel is great. But for all the great selling performances he's put in, and strong fired up comebacks I've seen him make, I don't think I've ever seen a Martel match where I felt he was in severe danger. For an all time great babyface that is actually pretty rare, and pretty much all of his contemporaries have matches or situations I can point to where that occurred. There are a lot of matches I could recommend, but I'm not sure he's an easy nut to crack if you are looking to see a babyface really fight back from near death. For what it's worth my favorite under the radar match of his is probably the Saito match from the AWA, and pretty much anything from him in 1980 Portland I love.

Well I would honestly give all that Banderas stuff a look if you are into him because I feel he had a really unique and transcendent quality on the island. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Sewell match. If you are into the type of brawl found in Banderas v Venom, I really think Invaders matches with Perez and Embry are the most directly comparable. Have you arched the Colon v Ayala feud?

I swear this isn't a troll, by are you averse to watching Invader matches?

I honestly think it's all at least decent, but I think the Venom brawl(s), Sewell ladder match, and amazingly enough the Vamp match might be my favs. The thing with Sewell v Starr Corp is cool too.

That's my fault. In the last week I thought about it and intended to and forgot.

The studio element is one of the bigger points of comparison. Invader was the guy who carried the tv in the ring in my view

Have you watched the Ron Starr and Ayala TV matches or his tag work? I'll rate him obviously, but later tonight I was hoping to write some about Dundee who I see as very comparable to Invader in a lot of ways.

I don't think that's wrong, but I'd like you to name names for comparison sake if nothing else.

I would add a few others matches of note include the Kevin Sullivan brawl which is not a great match, but a fun example of Necro going to war with another famous brawler who is really more mystique than ability and having a fun match, and the New Jack retirement match from PWS which has got to be the best New Jack singles match of all time by a wide margin. Necro is a tough one for me because I find bad Necro to be absolutely unwatchable and depressing. I can't deny his all time great matches, or his aura, but I'm not sure he has the consistency I ideally want out of a top 100 candidate, and his duration of quality is limited. It's possible he has more years as a middling-to-poor worker than he does a great one, but I also think as a big match worker he is better than a lot of people who I will absolutely rate. He also is one of maybe two or three indie guys from the last fifteen years who I think has a transcendent quality to his best work. He would absolutely make my top 10 indie guys of the last fifteen years, but not top five. I have room for five indie guys on my ballot, maybe even a few more, but not ten. So Necro is right on the bubble.

I actually think Jetlag's point is right about Hamada being a guy who is more unexplored than unavailable when it comes to footage. Even in the 90s I feel like he really hasn't been looked at closely. I own all the MPro stuff and I've made no real effort to go through it to take just one example. One other thing that Jetlag said that I do agree with is that Hamada was good much later than people realize. I remember him popping up on Real Japan shows and feds of that ilk in the last five or six years and still thinking he was a solid hand. Hamada, Sasuke and Kanemoto are all kind of in the same boat for me at this point as guys I could see on my ballot, but none of them feel like absolute must haves. My guess is one of those three will make it.

Great post Loss. I will say that one of the things that I am really taking away from all of this is that I'm not sure my idea of psychology is the same as others. For example, for years I have argued that formula is generally speaking a good thing because it creates a framework of expectations. Fans will expect one action, and get it more often than not. But when they don't, or when they get something like it but not exactly the same, they react on a different level because they are seeing something special and something that has been established over the long haul paid off. Obviously this is not the only thing I would point as an example of psychology, but it's one aspect of wrestling psychology that I have always found especially important. I'm not letting go of this, but this is something that is most certainly not meant for a casual "just flipping through the channels" type of fan. I do honestly think that if I was more ambivalent to that style of work, I would probably have a much lower opinion of people like Christian or Rey Jr or Ric Flair than I do.

The narrative we create in our heads about a match can never be known to be true either. It may be true to us, but there is certainly no aspect of universality in that truth. Even in instances where the narrative is hammered home by commentators, I'm not entirely sold on the idea that we can fully be certain that the narrative we have absorbed and believe in is in fact anything real or true. I don't object to this narrative creation as a means of analysis at all, but I don't see how it's any more or less based on known truths than analysis where intent is at least on the table for discussion is. I will say that those posts were extremely helpful in me understanding why some find it easier to rank matches than wrestlers. If I'm being completely honest I find the drift toward a focus on individual matches to be increasingly boring and uninteresting with time, and I say this as someone who has written more than my fair share of reviews over the years (though you'll notice I rarely do anymore). I do think I am probably in the minority in preferring to discuss and think about the wrestlers themselves than the individual matches, and I am beginning to doubt that I will have a place in the broader hardcore fan culture in another five years if that trend continues.

All of that is known to me. But it is also my belief that if you take a discussion of intention off the table you are left with no real framework for critical analysis, absent a narrow focus on mechanics that I find boring at best. If I reject any sort of discussion of intention I am effectively rejecting the value of a message board like this.

You don't have to watch a lot at once, but if all you watch is whats pimped the most you won't catch a lot of things. I've always known that but it's become more evident to me throughout this process.

I don't think it requires studious viewing at all. But it is enhanced by familiarly, as all wrestling is. I don't think that is unique to WWE, so if you object to the notion I'd love to know if it's a critique you would expand to AJPW as well.

If I had it to do again I would have nominated Drew Delight. He's an East Tn/Western NC/North Ga/North Bama guy that would be largely unknown outside that corridor, but I think he's the best all around talent that ever came out of there and I could have seen myself putting him in bottom three if I had gone back and watched enough stuff before the deadline. That said I can't really call him a major oversight because only my brothers and I would have really considered him.

To be fair "what if" adjustments in sports are a relatively modern practice, and they tend to be based at least in part on much more concrete core metrics (size of ballparks for example) than what anyone could go on with pro wrestling for obvious reasons.

I think this is at least partially a function of deference to the wrestling canon. If one removes the widely accepted hardcore fan notion of the artistic genius and depth of AJPW from the equation, it is very difficult for me to see any reason why Kawada and Misawa would care about something like "learned psychology" more than Cesaro and Kofi Kingston. I suppose you could make the argument that truly great wrestlers will sort of innately gravitate toward those sort of more subtly intelligent ways of working, but I think that's more of a stretch. To my eyes there are really two different arguments at play in this thread. One is a sort of denial-ism and seems to be led by Parv. Here the argument seems to be that much of what hardcore fans see as "learned psychology" is just an exercise in narrative creation on the part of the viewer. I think there is some truth to that, but much less truth to it than I would have believed as recently as two years ago. There are two reasons for my changed opinion on this. The first is my obsessive/immersive wrestling habits. I find that when I jump in and watch a ton of something at once I find these connective tissues more often. No doubt some of that is narrative creation, but in many cases I will see a spot from one match that is countered in a unique way in another that seems to clearly signal "you aren't going to do that to me again." In many cases it is so explicit that I think it almost defies common sense to see it as accidental, or lacking in intent. The other factor that changed my thought on this was getting to know more people in the wrestling business. I have zero interest in turning this thread into an "I'm an insider and know how things really work!" stroke fest. I'm not an insider and I don't think knowing people in the business makes me a "better fan" or some dumb horseshit like that. That said several performers I know have volunteered to me examples of things they have done in matches which explicitly played off of previous matches. This was not done in the context of a discussion on "learned psychology" and in more than one case was presented as something that they see as separating great workers from good workers. Now you might think that take is bullshit, and you might think it points to a less authentic way of performing (I'm sort of anticipating potential arguments from Parv here), but the theme of "learned psychology" as a deliberate practice among people I know is too consistent for me to be a denier, particularly as it pertains to modern wrestling. The second position - or the Loss position if I may - seems to be that even if "learned psychology" is a common trait of certain modern WWE performers, it's not really psychology in the traditional pro wrestling sense because it isn't catered to the correct target audience. I assume he would take any performer who engages in this practice in the WWE as being self humoring at worst, or playing to the wrong crowd for the wrong reasons at best. The deeper argument seems to be that psychology is largely about controlling the crowd, and this sort of inside baseball is ultimately ineffective at doing that. In that sense it seems to be a variant of denial-ism which argues that "learned psychology" cannot be real psychology in the WWE because of who their target audience is. I admit that I reject this argument in part because I see it as the Bush v. Gore of pro wrestling critical debate. While I am of course a believer that different crowds want different things, I am deeply suspicious of the idea that only WWE crowds are incapable of grasping these things, and thus "learned psychology" is not real psychology solely in the confines of the WWE. It is possible that this is a leap I've made and Loss is not actually arguing this, but it seems to be strongly implied if nothing else so I don't feel wrong questioning it. Here I would argue that A. I don't think the target audience is exclusively 8 year olds and B. Even if it is, true immersive/obsessive viewing of the product (which is unquestionably what the WWE wants) is going to result in people catching many of these things even if they are 8 years old or even younger. To the first point, while there is no doubt a struggle between Vince's vision and the vision of others, I don't see much evidence that Vince sees his core audience as young children. I think it is absolutely fair to say he wants to hook people as children and maintain them as lifelong fans, but he is not in the business of promoting a live action Spongebob Squarepants. He is very aware of the fact that he has adult fans, and I think his product is generally presented in an attempt to appeal to many audiences. Beyond that it seems obvious to me that being a good worker has never meant more than it means now when it comes to being pushed as a core attraction, and the WWE's own strategy seems to indicate that they understand that online/hardcore fans represent a substantial portion of their fanbase. To the second point even if Vince were promoting a product explicitly targeted to third graders, I don't think it means that working matches that play off other matches would the wrong move. In fact I think that working matches for an audience that is likely to be more obsessive in their viewing habits (as children seem to be from my own experience as a parent) is actually quite smart, especially when it comes to someone working within the context of a weekly television product. I know from my brothers that they seemed to pick out these things when they were younger and I don't think they were exceptions. I can also recall occasions sitting next to kids at wrestling shows where they had to explain to their disinterested parents why a certain move was attempted and failed and why it was significant. All of this suggests to me that this isn't over the head of 8 year olds by it's very nature whether they are the core audience or not. The fact is that Cesaro was one of the two or three most over guys on the entire roster when he went out with injury. I think there are valid arguments about whether or not he could be a top guy, but he was over. Christian was the ace of a lame duck brand, and his long title matches seemed to be worked specifically to get the crowd very invested in him and his work. He remained over despite being booked in a position that was ultimately destined to fail. Were these guys over because of their use of "learned psychology" (which I annoyingly keep putting in quotes)? That seems a stretch. But the point is that they weren't drawing critics when they were using it. So at worst those traits were embedded Easter Eggs for fans who were paying attention in performances that were connecting on a broader level. And to that end I think the critique of it fails. At the end of the day I think the real divide here is between those who immerse themselves in a product and those who watch less consistently and/or cherry pick. I don't think this is restricted to this debate either. I think similar things can be said about those who don't "get" lucha, or myself as it pertained to Joshi before I decided to just dive right in. I may write about this more later, but one of the things I've learned about myself through this project is that immersion is really critical to understanding certain aspects of various wrestling products.