Dylan Waco

Random thought - what if Dolph runs in to cash in his title shot during the cell match during a point where both Punk and Ryback are "out." Then he ends up eating the fall from Punk. Would be idiotic, but it's an out

I had no clue this match was not in a cell

That was a few months ago Hunico/Epico are actually a very good team. I thought that last match was the best match on the show bell-to-bell so far. I could see an argument for Orton/Del Rio but that weird top rope spot was....weird.

Man I loved PTP v. Rey/Cara. Cara has been doing the impossible and dragging the best tv match worker in history to boring matches, but this was good stuff. PTP were really great in this match. I've been high on them from the jump, but there heeling was really good stuff here. Cara was kind of the Tanahashi to their Suzuki (on a lesser scale of course) as a guy who was there and did fine for what he was asked to do, while the other guys did the bulk of interesting stuff. Young was fun on the apron, Titus shit talking and throwing around Cara like a piece of trash and little things like the sunset flip spot/double suplex step over were really cool. Rey looked really sharp to when he was in there. You could quibble with the the way Rey got up on the shoulders of Young in the lead to the finish, but other than that and Cara almost spiking himself on that reversal I thought this was really well executed.

As a Carolina fan, FUCK Steve Spurrier.

Gabriel v. Cesaro was a fun title defense for Cesaro, but it makes the decision to have him lose clean on Raw even stupider. That uppercut spot was great and I liked Claudio's grappling spots even if they were mainly just ragdolling. Would love to see him work a program against a healthy Rey

Stream problems towards the end of Kofi v. Miz which is too bad because it was the best possible match I could have expected from those guys up until that point. The stairs spot was cool and Miz was shockingly believable as the aggressive guy targeting the injury. Finish looked okay on the replay I saw.

"you don't see Johnny Banana's becoming world champion" is the greatest thing ever uttered on a ppv broadcast.

I think Sandow is awesome, but Rhodes is a guy who shifts from interesting to boring all the time. The match was a lot of fun up until the finish which was just idiotic. Were they really trying to protect both teams? Bizarre.

Agree with Will here. I couldn't possibly care less about either guy and yet the match really sucked me in so that is a big win. Some very interesting and unique spots and while it was somewhat counter heavy at times they made since and were worked in well. The spot with Del Rio coming off the top was clearly flubbed and bizarre but they recovered well and the finish worked well. Both guys REALLY do need to be rebranded though. Even after a quality match I still don't give a fuck about either guy.

There are two separate questions here. The first I think is an attempt to articulate a point that is not irrelevant but is overdone by some who are reflexively hostile to what they view as "revisionist" thinking. Do people get tired of "old" things and hype up things that are "newer" to them? Yes. Does that in and of itself mean that one can not fairly analyze the "old" in relation to the "new?" No. Of course it is possible to overrate the new at the expense of the older and that is common. But that is somewhat contextual. How much Tully had you watched prior to the Horseman set and your podcast projects? How do we know you aren't hyping up something that is newer to you at the expense of the older more "familiar" stuff you've seen in the past? I'm more interested in why you think he is a great on the level of the guys mentioned in this thread than whether or not your views on him may be benefiting some because you are more well versed in his career than you were five years ago. Exoticism is a relative term that I'd rather not use. Hell there are some would argue that your interest in non-Brit wrestling is innately "exotic" even though your fandom has always been directly tied to the American product. I'm less averse to a discussion of obscurity, but I think that is something you have to look at in context too. Different things are obscure to different people. The second question about matches is interesting. I really don't think Sarge does well on the metric of depth of great matches. Sarge's strengths are that his best matches are all time greats and he tended to have solid performances where you could see his mechanical strengths shine even when the bouts were incomplete, not competitive, really short, et. But I don't see any case for him having a deeper pool of great matches than Savage, even sticking just to the 80's. He's got Final Conflict, the Starrcage 85 main event, a couple of tremendous matches with Sheik, the great Otto Wanz match no one has seen......some love the Backlund Cage Match, but I don't think it's a great match and even granting that to him for the sake of argument it's hard to see how he gets over the half dozen mark of great matches. Savage has great matches with Lawler, Steamboat (multiple), Tito(multiple), Bret and arguably Hogan. These are all singles matches and not all gimmick matches unlike with Sarge. If you go the next level down to good/very good matches the gap really widens in Sarge's favor. I really doubt anyone would even dispute that to be honest. At best Sarge is "even" with Savage in terms of sheer number of great matches in the 80's, with Sarge having the edge in terms of who's best matches were better. But that's granting a LOT of latitude to Sarge and ignores that Savage had many more good matches. Anyhow the point is that even by the standards of the metric you've set Sarge doesn't stack up as clearly better. On Tully? You've watched a lot of Tully recently - make the case. What are his great matches and where is the depth? The best of the Garvin matches is about as good a match as I've seen from the 80's in the States and of course there is Magnum in the Cage. But give us more on this metric. Tag matches included of course. By no means am I saying he doesn't have the depth. I'm just saying it would be more interesting to me if you made the case. I could, can, have and will make the case for Buddy Rose and others. Do the same for Tully. I don't think Tully looks out of place with those names I mentioned. I could see him right in the meat of those names - above many and below many. Top five? Seems like a stretch and a pretty big one.

Very good possibility of that in the near future. Greg my be on fairly soon as well.

Looking at the whole feel that I could reasonably see contending for a top ten (and doing this totally off the top of my head and in no order) you've got: Savage, Martel, Morton, Eaton, Steamboat, Funk, Rose, Bockwinkel, Blackwell, Lawler, Dundee, Backlund, Valentine, Flair, Fujiwara, Fujinami, Choshu, Tenryu, Jumbo, Hansen, Dibiase, Hennig, Satanico, El Dandy, La Fiera, Sangre Chicana, Gordy, Ron Garvin, Murdoch, Windham, Saito, Maeda, Kimura, Sarge and Tully. I may be forgetting a few in there and you could quibble with a few names here or there, but all of those names are guys I could realistically see in someone's top ten. I left off of the Joshi women not as a slight, but because I really haven't watched any of it in years, but you could probably add at least three or four more names to it from that category as well. Looking at that list I don't see how he could make my top ten. Even if I wiped out Lucha (which I would never do) I don't see how he makes it. But I could see how he might make the bottom run of someone's top ten. Do I think it would be crazy for someone to have him top five? Not really, but it would be an outlier and I'm not sure it would be easy to defend and this is coming from someone who has been accused of overrating Tully in the past.

I love Tully, but he's a guy who at absolute best rounds out a top ten. Sarge is great, but I don't think I'd have him top ten either at this point.

It's not that hard to understand when you take into account that he was primarily viewed as a tag wrestler, he was from a bygone era, and he hadn't been featured prominently on national tv half a decade or longer.

Greg Oliver was kind enough to link to this post at the books official blog. http://blogs.canoe.ca/gregoliver/ I have finished the book and have a ton more to say on it, though I'll hopefully get to in the coming days. Over all I thought it was a great book and the best of the HoF series. There are too many to mention now, but the pieces on Rufus Jones and Thunderbolt Patterson were really well done looks at guys that aren't often discussed in a positive light. I also thought the Bearcat Wright bio was excellent and made a strong case for him as one of the more forgotten guys in wrestling history.

Brock attack is the best finish though it won't happen. Second best option - which is dog shit - is probably some weird situation where Punk gets out of the cage and doesn't come back. I'm thinking he could hit a GTS on the ref to save himself and then when they try and get a new ref in he splits. It's horrible, but arguably a better option than a (clean) loss for either guy. Actually Cena hiding under the ring and turning on Ryback would be an awesome WTF, though it's borderline Russo-ey and probably unwise.

Link?

Eaton/Benoit were a good team. I liked the match with Scorp/Bagwell a lot

That's fairly new. I think it's a backlash toward All Japan's standing as the Unquestioned Best Wrestling Ever, and Jumbo has just been a victim of it. Before Jumbo, Flair was a victim of it. People get tired of the same stuff being played up all the time and are always on the lookout for something new. Jumbo as GOAT was a relatively new idea at one point, and eventually he became a safe pick. Eventually Tenryu will become a safe pick. I love All Japan, but I do think it got a lion's share of the discussion for years and years online, to a point where other good stuff - like the NJ heavies and FMW - didn't get nearly the same level of talk. I still think All Japan is better than those things, but I don't think those things should have been so ignored either. (Yes, jdw, I know you talked about some NJ heavies stuff at the time, but you were a single voice in a crowd of match lists featuring 6/3/94 and 6/9/95 over and over and over and over.) Realizing that every New Japan heavies match isn't horrible - with some being good and even great - has been the single biggest surprise for me watching 1992-1996. In short, I think anyone being down on Jumbo is more reflective of the ebbs and flows of talking about wrestling online than it is Jumbo himself. This is true to a degree, though I'm not sure that it explains everything. Tenryu's WAR run wasn't even on the radar for most people until the last few years (and frankly still isn't outside of a small group of people). It's true that people are looking for new things, but in looking for new things people also discover things that they legitimately find to be better. I completely ignored Lucha for years and years. Now I look back and think I was being a complete moron because there is tons of Lucha that is on the level of the best stuff from anywhere in the world. The same could be said for Europe. Portland footage practically didn't even exist - now we can confirm that Buddy Rose really was one of the all time greats.

I think Jumbo is a dreadfully boring wrestler at times. This is not to be mistaken with the Jumbo is Lazy talking point which I don't really see. I just think there are points where he is borderline Dory Funk Jr.esque in terms of not emoting or emoting in a way that I find uninteresting. Tenryu is a guy who works in these crazy, fiery burst of energy and can deliver more with facial expressions than Jumbo can (I guarantee you others will disagree with this and that's fine, but I don't think Jumbo was a master of "the look" the way Tenryu was). Having said that if you were saying to me "who was the better worker in the 80's?" I'd probably take Jumbo begrudgingly. I don't like early 80's Tenryu as much as some and even though I prefer Tenryu pretty safely toward the end of the decade (and especially in 88 and 89), if you are factoring in the entire decade Jumbo is probably the better pick. Where Tenryu really leaps ahead for me (besides the fact that I just generally prefer him) is 90's-present day. I like 70's Jumbo, but I don't like him as much as I like 90's Tenryu, particularly the WAR v. NJPW stuff which is really incredible. I'd honestly rate something like Tenryu v. Hash with the very best stuff from anywhere in the 90's though I'd probably be in the distinct minority. Jumbo's 90's run is something I would really need to go back and watch to be fair (though I have ZERO desire to do that), but I can't see enjoying it the way I enjoy 90's Tenryu at this point. Throw in grumpy, lumpy old man Tenryu being one of the best wrestlers in the world in the early 00's and his handful of good performances even in the last few years and I would rate him ahead of Jumbo. But in the particulars I just prefer the way he works. I've said this before, but I really hate the Jumbo character the way many people hate the John Cena character. I know he's a good wrestler, but he's someone I find almost completely unlikable. Tenryu just strikes me as a guy who can flip the switch better and has a dynamic quality to him that Jumbo lacks. I admit I can't even fully articulate it, but the energy of even something as secondary as Tenryu v. Hayabusa really stands out to me, where even the better Jumbo performances/matches (like say the Kerry match) really fade into the background with time.

Josh Alexander v. Sebastian Suave from C4

First Johnny, now Pat. I wonder if he has Loss on next. Guest thief

I don't see how I'm penalizing him. Again there is disagreement with how much Tanahashi added to the match. There is near unanimity formed around the view that Suzuki was the standout. Tanahashi's performance was far from bad. He was perfectly serviceable as the other guy in the match. I just don't think he contributed anything that pushed the match into "very good" territory.

I'm not a fan, but that's largely irrelevant to my point about the match. Even the people who are pro-Tanahashi aren't pointing to the match as a tremendous display of Tanahashi's skills. Almost across the board the big plusses are being attributed to Tanahashi. There are some that I think are being overly harsh on Tanahashi (Phil for example), but I don't really think I'm one of them. I'm not arguing that he was a hindrance to the match. Just saying that I don't think he added a lot to it, aside from the obvious fact that he's got a connection with Japanese crowds. Again it's a very good match. I wouldn't rate it with the best matches of the year, but it's more than "pretty good" also. There is nothing I have written on the match that borders on "man I fucking hate Tanahashi he ruined this shit" so I have no clue what the point of even posting this was.