Childs

Yeah, they meandered quite a bit, though if you want to watch an HBK bump-a-thon, this is a pretty good example. They did succeed in conveying that this feud had become too hot to be contained by a single, basic match. The announcers did a nice job of putting over the Taker dive as a big deal. As with a lot of stuff from '97 WWF, they managed to continue the momentum of a storyline without having an enduringly great match.

No way in hell it's 40 percent on Taft. And yes Matt, I imagine I would've had much more success interviewing people about Hogan than about John Kerry. Hey, we've taken a thread that began with a fairly ridiculous question and spun a unified (well, not quite) theory of celebrity encompassing Hulk Hogan, Molly Ringwald and President Taft. Hurray board.

Miniscule. Some of the most horrifying experiences of my life as a reporter have involved interviewing voters on election day. These are people who have taken the time to participate, so they're probably not the lowest common denominator. Yet the expanses of what they do not know are astonishing (and I'm no political nerd who thinks everyone should be able to name the secretary of the interior).

Is that really true, though? Taking head drops is a form of bumping, and that became a signature feature in All Japan, to a harmful degree. Kikuchi got over largely because of the way he bumped and ate offense. Tanahashi uses big bumps to help get his main-event matches over. I agree that Japan hasn't produced a lot of showy bumpers in the Flair/Henning/HBK sense. But I wouldn't go too far in saying it's not emphasized.

I enjoyed watching them work a more classic singles match, though Togo's attack on Sasuke's leg was pretty bland. I guess you could dock Sasuke for doing a handspring elbow off a busted knee, but honestly, that was his character in a nutshell. Togo's big finishing stretch looked great.

This wasn't a top-tier All-Japan match, but it is a feather in Kobashi's cap when I think about his place in GOAT discussions. He basically worked Hase's match and looked really good doing it, suggesting a versatility we didn't always see. Sometimes, I think I'm a little too hard on Kobashi because of his over-the-top moments. The list of wrestlers who hit the top level of performance as often as he did is extremely short.

Misawa did kind of work this like he knew he could weather the storm and put Jun away whenever he needed to. But I'm not sure that was wrong given their respective positions. Jun did a nice job laying in his offense and stringing together moves to make it seem as if his attack was escalating. I thought he could have gone back to Misawa's knee a few more times so the dropkick to set up his last rally would've carried a little more weight. Misawa was fine here, but he certainly didn't deliver the kind of layered selling that defined his best performances. The ending feel a little flat because the crowd hadn't invested invested in Akiyama's chances. So yeah, I agree with the "good, not special" consensus.

Yes, so much better than Mad USA!

I've found it fascinating to watch Hogan on the yearbooks, because as a babyface, he has come off as a huge creep, which basically fits my memories from the time. But as a heel, well, he made some pretty good points. I mean, what the fuck had Sting done to deserve a title shot? Why should Hogan let a little stooge like J.J. Dillon browbeat him? I kind of saw where he was coming from here, and yet he still came across as a douchey heel, which he was.

Hadn't seen this in a long time, but my reaction was similar to a lot of what's already been said here. It was a highly amusing segment that fit the NWO style of heeling perfectly. Nash, Waltman and Schiavone were all great in their roles. And yes, it feels more mean-spirited in retrospect because they didn't pay it off with the subsequent booking. But for a real-time viewer without the ability to see into the future, it didn't seem to cross any uncrossable lines.

I'm not sure I had seen this before, but it was an awesome installment in their series. I actually liked it a bit more than the April match, because it was tighter and had a cooler finish. I thought of Nintendo Logic's "ass kickingest matches" thread while watching, because this was pretty much the definition, with some of the sickest strike exchanges you'll ever see. Easily one of my favorite matches of the year.

Pretty much any Ishikawa vs. Ikeda -- 8/29/99, 4/24/05, 7/26/08 six-man, take your pick. The Fujiwara vs. Super Tiger stuff from the first UWF featured some great violence. Really, the whole New Japan vs. WAR feud. Just from recent lucha viewing, the Herodes vs. Tony Salazar match from 3/2/84 featured some awesome ass kicking.

Well, it's definitely true that when he's defending certain workers, he calls on the authority of other wrestlers he has spoken with. But as with many things Dave, he's not consistent about how he uses such arguments.

He's rated thousands of matches himself and has given HOF ballots to scores of non-wrestlers. So I don't think it's that. He seems to believe that you can't recreate context and/or that the quality of work can't transcend context. That perspective is rife with contradictions to the way he actually runs his HOF. But that's how I've understood his comments.

Yeah, we don't have a complete picture. I wish '60s NBA games were viewable en masse so I could have realistic mental images of Wilt, Russell, Oscar, Elgin, West, Petit, etc. I'm a huge pro basketball fan and it's always bugged me that, as much as I know about Wilt or Oscar, I don't really know them as players. I feel like with basketball, actually watching is more important than it is with baseball. So, getting back to Bellamy, it's possible to come up with a decent understanding of his career based on stats, awards voting and contemporary writings. I think we know enough to have a good argument about him as a HOF. But could the picture be richer? Absolutely, 100 times yes. Fortunately, we do have the footage to do some of that type of work with WON HOF candidates. And the fact that Dave, as a wrestling historian, doesn't see the value and fun in it is, at best, disappointing.

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.