Childs

Would everyone here agree that Japan is the most overrepresented sector in the HOF? I realize Taue is still on the outside looking in, along with Han and Tamura. But it seems like most of the borderline Japanese candidates have gone in, where roughly equivalent U.S. stars have lingered on the ballot. I say that as an impression, without any real analysis behind it.

Okay, but if saying that Bellamy was underrated and suffered from playing on bad teams and being traded a lot instead of putting up his early numbers for the Knicks, who he probably would've been drafted by in an ordinary year, is revisionism then is Dave's point correct or are you advocating deeper analysis and contextualization? Reassessing careers is easier in baseball and basketball, because we have detailed statistics and fairly refined notions of which numbers are important. Bellamy's record isn't all that hard to read. He had one of the best rookie years in NBA history, even if the raw numbers look inflated because of pace and because he played on a bad team. The next few years, he was still an All-Star but on the decline. And then he hung around for 10 years as a good/decent player who had peaked when he was 22. If you know how to read the stats at all (which OJ and jdw do), that's exactly what they show. It's exactly what the awards voting from his era shows. I feel like he's generally been rated properly. If someone says, "Hey, what about Walt Bellamy," we have pretty good tools to address the question. With wrestling, we often don't. Or the tools require a lot of work on the voter's part.

I'm a proponent of making them all wait, but I don't see any good argument for putting Punk and Danielson in now while making Tanahashi wait. I'm a huge Danielson fan, but being the top star in ROH just doesn't strike me as a major point on a HOF resume.

Bo Jackson was a bigger deal than Hulk Hogan for a few years, but he didn't do anything to keep himself in the limelight after he retired. So my guess is that for anyone under 25 (and probably for a lot of people outside the U.S.), he's not that big a deal. However, the idea that he was the last iconic baseball player is kind of silly. You telling me Derek Jeter isn't iconic? I'm also always surprised that people think Bo might've been a HOF in baseball. He never had even one season that would rank as a strong year in a HOF career. And he wasn't young by baseball standards when he got hurt. It takes a hell of a lot of projection, based on his physical gifts, to get him there. All of that said, Bo is the most amazing athlete I've ever seen, and I hope his legend persists. He's the rare modern man who still feels worthy of folklore.

I think the disconnect is Loss arguing that Hogan is a fringe figure because pro wrestling has mostly been a fringe element of pop culture. I agree with his characterization of wrestling, but Hogan reached his peak of fame at the one time when WWF was just as mainstream as Transformers or John Hughes movies. So, though I'd agree with him on just about any other wrestler, I think he has underestimated Hogan's stardom in this thread. I say that while acknowledging Hogan isn't on the level of Madonna or Michael Jackson and isn't a "respected" figure.

I probably don't hate the Dynamite-TM series as much as some. I liked their 1/28/82 and 8/5/82 matches well enough -- high-speed spotfests with pretty good execution. But the 4/21/83 match that Jeff Bowdren rated so highly was a mess, with all the down time and the broken bottle nonsense that led to nothing. Dynamite certainly had his strong points as a worker; he took crazy bumps, his high-impact finishers looked great and he carried an aura of real nastiness. There's just a lot of aimlessness in his matches, where he doesn't seem to use his great tools. As for Sayama, I can't deny that he connected with crowds, from Japan to Mexico to the UK. It wasn't just his costume either. He also got over big without the mask. I think his speed and spring really did come off as remarkable. But it's a little strange to watch in retrospect, because his contemporaries -- from juniors Fujinami to Hamada to lucha flyers such as Ultraman and Super Astro -- did similar stuff and did it more smoothly. I know a lot of people didn't see that other stuff at the time. But even those who did seemed to think Sayama and DK were something special. I don't begrudge anyone who cherishes those matches. They just don't seem remarkable compared to other stuff that happened at the same time, at least not on tape.

I think what comes across from all those Simmons excerpts, even the flimsier ones, is that he was writing from a point of view. Setting the question of inaccuracies aside for a moment, I never got any sense of POV from Shoemaker. Maybe: "Wrestling is racist, heh heh?" I should be the perfect audience for a critical history of wrestling, just like I was the perfect audience for Simmons' book or the Historical Baseball Abstract, way back when. But he didn't do a single thing to hook me.

It feels pointless to slag the dude over and over, but what a fucking useless excerpt. He doesn't make any kind of argument about racism in wrestling. He certainly hasn't done any reporting. It's just a warmed-over list. Would Simmons have picked a passage like that to represent his basketball book?

I mean, don't you want to see every example there is of Buddy working a mask, hair or loser-leaves-town-match? None of them could be bad, right? I also wish we had Piper challenging Flair for the NWA title in Portland. Regardless of the work, the atmosphere must have been nutty. Anyhow, just have to be happy that 1980-84 Portland is as well-documented as it is compared to other feds.

It's all too common for me to watch an episode of the TV, hear them allude to something super cool "next week" and then realize we don't have "next week." That's piled on top of them hyping non-TV matches involving all kinds of cool stips. I love watching Portland TV, but as with most '80s footage, it presents its share of tantalizing agonies.

Where are you seeing youth vs. experience? Hash started in 1984, Hase in 1986. They were very much of the same generation. And who was the outsider?

I'd love to see where both would be if they didn't stray from their "reasons for notoriety." I.e. if Tyson hadn't become such a train wreck with the rape, the arrest and some of the batshit stuff he's done and said since, and being someone that TV show and movie producers would bring in as a cameo or whatnot (BTW, Mel Gibson was dropped from Hangover II because of his antisemitic and off the rails drunken tirades rubbed the actors the wrong way, which is fair, but they'd rather do scenes with a CONVICTED RAPIST?) Train wreck was part of the deal with Tyson from early on. The Robin Givens interview came when he was still clearly the No. 1 boxing star in the world. There was never a version of him that wasn't headed down that path. I was thinking last night about whether Tyson is clearly bigger than Hogan. He probably is, because he was such a huge figure both for straight sports fans and in tabloid culture. Particularly surreal is his third act as a beloved old crazy, touring the country with a one-man show. That I did not see coming, though perhaps I should've, because Mike was always super-engaging in doses.

But Hogan really wasn't small potatoes, Loss. My mom and dad knew who he was. Everyone at school knew who he was. And that continued for several generations. I mean, when they play Voodoo Chile at Camden Yards as the walk-in for one of the Orioles' relievers, someone in the press box invariably strums an air guitar and makes a Hollywood Hogan joke. I'm not saying people regard him as anything more than a cartoon sprung to life. But he's extremely well-known.

The classic Observer that went online this week is the original HOF issue, which gives an interesting glimpse of Dave's thinking on all the members of the first class.

But isn't the current product less necessarily important to us as hardcore fans that it ever has been? We're able to dive into footage from all sorts of past eras and experience them on week-to-week levels of detail. I could probably be an engaged wrestling fan for the rest of my life without ever watching WWE in real time. So a lot of the time, I don't give a fuck if WWE is good or not. Of course I think it'd be better if the dominant promotion in the world was great. I got excited about Summerslam, just like everybody else. But in reality, I often read these sorts of threads and shrug, because I know I'll be fine either way.

Yeah, people are conflating the question of biggest mainstream star with the question of biggest wrestling star. Rock is certainly a bigger star to the average person than Bruno Sammartino or Steve Austin. But I don't think he's been as important to the WWE/WWF's business as those guys were. To be fair, his role in the last three Wrestlemanias gives him a better argument. Hogan still resides on another planet from all those guys.

I haven't watched nearly as much lucha as OJ, so I'm less qualified to talk about title match standards. That said, Satanico and Cochisse obeyed the spirit of the form by depicting their rivalry as one of wrestling one-upsmanship rather than blood hatred. They worked with ferocity and incorporated little gestures of disdain, but the match was ultimately about which guy could outwrestle the other, not which guy could leave the other lying bloody at ringside. I love that they created such an intense vibe without going full MS1-Sangre Chicana. That takes an incredible degree of skill, and it's why this is one of the best title matches I've seen.

I love where he describes Harley Race as a "local wrestler."

What about Taker vs. Bret?

Where would you put him all-time among WWF/WWE stars? Behind Hogan, Bruno, Austin, Cena, Rock? Would he go above Backlund? HHH? Macho? Not making an argument so much as I'm curious what people will say.

Why must we treat this as a binary issue? It's what they do well plus what they actually produce with it. Very few people here have advocated rating workers solely by counting great matches. I know you know that, having participated in a number of these methodology conversations.

Matt, have you watched the Satanico-Cochisse match yet? To me, that's about the perfect title match.

I'm with some others here in that I'm currently more excited to watch Martel (and probably Santana) than Steamer. But Steamboat's best matches were so damn good, and he was incredibly consistent in that last WCW run. Honestly, I don't see much of an argument for Santana over him. Martel, you could probably at least convince me that he did more things well than Steamboat.

Not enough people have seen their stuff. Maybe that will change with the interest in UK workers as WON Hall of Fame candidates and with the eventual release of the DVDVR Euro set. Ohtani's Jacket has done excellent work laying the foundation for discussion. I definitely see guys like Steve Grey and Jim Breaks as candidates for the upper reaches of GOAT lists.

Not just you. Barr was a very involved ref, but his tone was all over the fucking place.