Childs

Also, if you're wondering about that ringing sound on Loss' phone, don't worry, it's gone after the first segment.

Hear us try to make sense of our own gender politics and the WWF's take on geo-politics. Yikes. Seriously, though, these yearbook conversations are fun because we get to cover so much ground. No matter what you like, we probably touched on it.

That argument basically penalizes Bock for wrestling in a bigger promotion with more good workers. I have no problem with anyone saying Buddy was better or that he got more out of limited opponents (in fact, I just nominated a match against Tony Borne that illustrates his genius on that front). His creativity and versatility as a performer allowed Portland to put on good television week after week. But he shouldn't win the argument just because he was a shark in a duck pond.

Here's my snapshot 50: 1) Stan Hansen 2) Toshiaki Kawada 3) Yoshiaki Fujiwara 4) Genichiro Tenryu 5) Ric Flair 6) El Dandy 7) Jumbo Tsuruta 8) Mitsuharu Misawa 9) Jerry Lawler 10) Tatsumi Fujinami 11) Rey Mysterio Jr. 12) Riki Choshu 13) Shinya Hashimoto 14) Nick Bockwinkel 15) Buddy Rose 16) Satanico 17) Kenta Kobashi 18) Terry Funk 19) Hijo Del Santo 20) Bryan Danielson 21) Negro Casas 22) Vader 23) Eddy Guerrero 24) Ricky Morton 25) Jushin Liger 26) Volk Han 27) Bill Dundee 28) Steve Regal 29) Ricky Steamboat 30) Finlay 31) Barry Windham 32) Bret Hart 33) Bobby Eaton 34) Randy Savage 35) Naoki Sano 36) Pirata Morgan 37) Kiyoshi Tamura 38) Billy Robinson 39) Akira Taue 40) Blue Panther 41) Yuki Ishikawa 42) Dick Togo 43) Rick Martel 44) Steve Grey 45) Tully Blanchard 46) Arn Anderson 47) Dick Murdoch 48) Greg Valentine 49) Dustin Rhodes 50) Steve Austin

Stray thought. You guys mentioned Inoki aging poorly. That's largely true of '80s Inoki, but I've watched some '70s Inoki lately and that version actually ages well.

Also, this was a great listen. I found myself wanting to jump into the conversation multiple times.

Can't imagine who would do that Will.

Yeah, I didn't mean to diminish Buddy in that respect. I know we've both talked about how nasty his offense was as we've gone through the Portland footage. I guess what I love about Bock is that there was a ruggedness to even the simple stuff he did. And it always suggested to me how tough he was beneath all the heel window dressing. But it's parsing between two guys who'd both me in my top 20 all-time.

I love Nate but didn't think that piece was anything special (nor do I think he intended it to be.)

Magnum is a good comparison in the sense that he's probably a nobody to the current audience but carries that mythic "what could have been" quality for a certain segment of longtime fans. On the other hand, his reputation as a worker hasn't really suffered from people taking second looks. He was solid at worst. There's none of that weird dissonance you get with Brody, who was so admired by Meltzer and others but who looks like shit on tape.

Zach Lowe writes about basketball, and fairly well at that. Grantland has many good contributors. (My favorite is Rany Jazayerli.) This puts the lie to me? Won't dispute that. Have you read Dead Wrestler of the Week? You seemed to be giving Shoemaker a pass because his material is intended for a general audience and not for wrestling crazies such as the posters on this site. My point was that Lowe (along with Rany, Keri, etc.) writes about the NBA for the same general audience, yet is beloved by hardcore basketball people. Are the posters on this board going to be a tough audience for any wrestling writer? Sure. But the folks here are also apt to get excited about a really good wrestling piece. Writing for a general audience needn't make you uninteresting to a more discerning audience. And yes, I agree that Dead Wrestler of the Week was better, both in concept and execution, than his Grantland stuff.

I voted for Bock and suspect the gap might widen if we had more tape of him. I love Buddy. He was maybe the most imaginative wrestler I've ever seen and also a great athlete. But one of my absolute favorite things in wrestling is a tough heel champion -- a guy who might stooge a little and has no regard for rules but when the chips are down, will beat your ass to keep his gold. Bock was as good as anybody I've ever seen at that and with slight tweaks, made the same character into an effective babyface. He just really fit what I want out of my wrestling.

This is nonsense. Zach Lowe puts the lie to what you're saying, writing to the same audience on the same web site. I know from my own journalism experience that experts in many fields appreciate it when their work is explained well to a general audience. Shoemaker's work on Grantland just isn't very good.

I guess Tanahashi isn't the worst candidate. He seems to be the biggest Japanese star of his generation, even if that's a bit of a booby prize. And regardless of what I think, many in the Observer sphere regard him as an all-time great worker. But it highlights the absurdity of putting guys on the ballot when they're still in their prime. Regardless of what any of us think about Tanahashi, this isn't the time to put a period on his career. It just defies common sense. I mean, we could stick LeBron James or Miguel Cabrera or Adrian Peterson in their respective HOFs, but why would it occur to anyone to do so? I get that wrestling is a little different given the never-ending careers. But it ain't that different, and it's unbelievable that this problem was allowed to persist after the Angle vote demonstrated the silliness of the time standards.

Well, it's no secret that there's a pretty big disconnect between the lovers of recent New Japan and a lot of the more frequent posters here. I've yet to see even one Tanahashi-Okada match I'd call a classic, much less a series of them.

Dylan, you've rightly built your Patera case around drawing/star power. But I'm curious about the overall view of his in-ring ability. I really like his Backlund matches, and I'm no great fan of Backlund. But was he regarded as a capable worker from early in his career? Is his in-ring something that could hold him back with any of the wrestlers who vote?

Excellent, fiercely contested match. I liked the way Sasuke and Nakajima set the tone with a tight opening mat sequence. Shaved-head Togo looked great, though really, everyone got moments to shine. I'm not sure I loved Kaientai pitching a shutout in the elimination format. But that was my only complaint.

The '97 RINGS has been great in part because the excellence wasn't confined to one or two match-ups. We keep getting hot matches from brand-new pairings. This was probably a touch more awkward than the promotion's very best stuff, but it never felt less than hotly contested. Nifty KO finish with both guys almost out of points.

I don't think I'd ever seen this, but it was a borderline great match, probably Shawn's best of the year to date. They did multiple spots that you normally wouldn't see outside a PPV. Somehow, Shawn always dialed up his offense against Foley. And Mick really put some oomph behind his shots as well. The proto-DX stuff was fine, but honestly, I wanted the match to keep going.

I don't have a lot of use for Tenzan, but Hash beat him into a pretty good performance. Hash just brought so much fire to these short, brutal matches that the opponent didn't have to be great.

This just wasn't my thing. I can't fault their commitment to the gimmick. And I liked the early part of the match, before the barbed wire spots became too elaborate. But when they started cutting the wire and wrapping themselves in it, the match just ground to a halt for me. And I think that was reflected in the lack of crowd heat for the title switch. It was definitely a spectacle, but it ceased feeling like a fight.

I don't know that it was smart in the big picture, but this was a hugely memorable moment from the initial NWO run. The release of emotion when Luger fended off Hogan's cronies was incredible. I remember being legitimately bummed when I heard that Hogan won the belt back at Road Wild. And it's not like I was a big Luger fan. They just had me sucked into the WCW-NWO rivalry, and I hated Hogan. It still comes off as a great moment in the yearbook context though it feels like more of a tangent given that we know the whole picture. It's noteworthy that when Luger and Sting have had parallel big moments on the yearbooks, Luger's have generally clicked better.

I always got the impression that Shawn's chairshot wasn't thought out; he simply snapped because the guy he hated spat on him. And yeah, I do think he was a sympathetic figure in the story, though he rapidly wiped that away by being an asshole on RAW.

It's really a shame that this match ended the way it did, because they had great chemistry and I would love to have seen some rematches with both guys healthy. Owen looked so good on offense that the botch felt like particularly sad irony. I wonder if the coming Austin storm would have been any different if he'd been fully healthy? Obviously, it couldn't have gone much better business-wise, but I assume we would've gotten more excellent matches in '98 and '99.

This was a great payoff to those Foley profile segments, and it felt like the first time Mick Foley was a fully realized character to the WWF fanbase. On the other hand, no one seemed to give a shit about HHH.