Childs

In Baltimore, we got both NWA and WWF syndicated shows when I started watching in 1985. WWF aired on Saturday morning and NWA on Sunday. We also got UWF syndicated for a stretch. We didn't get cable until later, so I was always jealous of the kids who had TBS and USA. Baltimore was a good place to grow up as a wrestling fan overall, because it was competitive ground, meaning we got strong house shows from both the NWA and WWF at the Civic Center downtown and at the Cap Center outside of DC. WWF was the gateway drug, as it was for most kids my age, but by the time I turned 10, I fancied myself a "serious fan," so I preferred the NWA and its longer, more serious matches. I don't think the NWA ever overtook the WWF with the more casual elementary school set. And by the time we got to middle school, most of them had probably moved on to something else.

You really think Bret Hart was a better tag worker than Ricky Morton?

I thought the Bulldogs were really over during their initial rise to win the tag titles. Their matches don't hold up very well, but when I'd go to house shows, they seemed like bigger stars than the Killer Bees, the Hart Foundation, etc. I completely agree that tag wrestling was more emphasized, both as a draw and as a craft, in Crockett, AWA and most of the territories. But it's amazing that, crappy as it usually was, '80s WWF tag wrestling was so much more emphasized than WWE tag wrestling is now. At least the teams had real identities and mid-card feuds that were a notable part of the product. Bryan and Kane are probably as over as any WWE tag act in awhile and yet, do we have any expectation that they'll be a team in six months? (Not that I want them to be, given Bryan's greatness as a singles wrestler.) Overall, I'd say Vince's disdain for tag wrestling has been bad for the art.

Is that opening line a party suggestion, Loss? Sounds fun.

Don't think that's fair, NintendoLogic. Jerry was open, for example, to embracing Jumbo as an all-time great when he participated in the DVDVR All-Japan voting. We all have our favorites, guys we see in the best light no matter what. Jerry at least makes a real effort to explain what he loves about a Dibiase or a Flair.

I don't necessarily agree, Will. I thought the passage on Goldberg read oddly and that the other facts presented didn't line up with the idea of him having a pill problem. At my newspaper, editors are taught to apply extra scrutiny to any information that could be libelous. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if a good editor was stopped short by that passage and double checked it with the writer. That said, mistakes slip through the cracks and sometimes, you just have to apologize and eat the discomfort.

John, you might be able to answer this better than the rest of us: Is Dave self-aware about the sloppiness of the weekly product? It would just drive me crazy to put my name to copy that raw, even if the volume of information is astonishing.

As someone who has made stupid mistakes in print and felt that sinking feeling, I can sympathize. But I agree with Loss; in an ideal world, this would spur Dave to address the systematic sloppiness of his product. He often fails to convey what he means because no one has edited his copy.

Matches that I can't recall seeing elsewhere in the thread - Sakuraba vs. Kanehara from Kingdom 12/2/97 and 12/8/97

I like that Flair worked his ass off night after night because he took his responsibility seriously. I like that he worked holds competently in an old-school kind of way. I like that he hit hard and conveyed a really vicious side when challenged. I like that his matches don't feel like someone reading off a blueprint but instead like a master performer riffing off some basic structures and character traits. I've just never found Bret as viscerally exciting as Flair. I think of Flair trying to up the intensity of his offense after losing an amazing first fall to Jumbo Tsuruta, of him trying to grind Ricky Morton's face off in a steel cage, of him scrambling desperately to run out the clock against Barry Windham, of him going shot-for-shot with Ronnie Garvin, of him trying to tear a piece out of Terry Funk's ass at the '89 Bash. I like Bret Hart, and I was a huge fan of his circa 1996-1997. But he never sucked me in the way Flair did in the aforementioned moments. And I find it amusing that Bret fans cite believability as a mark in his favor. Do I think Bret spent time dreaming up ways to make his matches more believable? Sure. But he thought about it in such a pro wrestling way that if anything, his "realistic" spots come off as more self-conscious than Flair's carny shit. His face-first run into the turnbuckle looked great, for example. But is that remotely what it would look like if someone tried to sling you around in a fight? Hell no. So it really just comes off as Bret saying, "Hey, I rethought a basic tenet of pro wrestling to make it cooler." Which is fine but takes me back to what I said in the Bret thread: He never stopped feeling like a calculated performer. If you enjoy his highly logical approach, that's great. No skin off my butt. But it's that level of obvious calculation that keeps me from getting into his matches the way I do with my very favorite wrestling.

It's hard to nominate Japanese shows from the '80s because we don't have a great idea what it was like to watch them top to bottom. You could say the same for a lot of the '90s shows as well. I guess I'm not surprised to see Big Egg mentioned. But to me, the idea of sitting through 10 hours of Joshi seems like a truly vile form of torture. I'll tell you anything if you just make it stop!

Anybody watched the NJ Dome Show? The praise on the WON is beyond effusive, and I could imagine really liking Sakuraba vs. Nakamura. Not trying to hijack your thread, Dylan. I'd just be interested to see a review of the full show by someone trustworthy.

Candido's a guy I don't "get." He was good, not suggesting otherwise. But I don't see why he has retained such popularity among the hardcores.

Hase would drop to the lower reaches of the top 100. Koshinaka would fall out entirely. Hash might jump up a few spots but probably not into the top 15. Hash is one of my very favorite wrestlers -- love everything from his entrance music to his incredible ability to up the intensity of a match when he took a hot tag or started a comeback. Dylan described it well; he just had that rare ability to change the tone of a match without doing anything overly showy. I do associate him with Tenryu in that respect, and not surprisingly, they were great against each other. I'd still rate him below Misawa and Kawada, because their best stuff was the best wrestling there ever was. I'd rate him above Kobashi, because I prefer the short, hot matches at which he excelled to Kobashi's more epic stuff. But if we're talking longer singles matches, Kobashi blew him away. Hash matches started to drag if he went too much past 20 minutes. Him vs. Choshu is interesting, because Choshu is his spiritual godfather. I'd probably take Hash by a nose because he worked a little harder.

It was striking how immediately this established the difference between a Tenryu-centric promotion and All-Japan. It wasn't built around escalating offense so much as escalating nastiness. Certainly worked for me.

I hadn't seen this in a long time, but watching it in context put over how spectacular a spotfest it really was. I always think of the Fantastics as a lesser Rock n' Roll Express on some level. But the R n' R s could not have pulled off this match.

I liked the same stuff about this as you -- the start with the guitar, Rayo's headbutts, Caras' reluctance to give up his mask. But it struck me as a letdown overall for a big mascara contra mascara. Not enough blood or desperation.

He's the best overall WWF worker from the yearbooks that have been released so far, though he wasn't necessarily the best in any given six-month stretch you might spotlight. It's certainly to his credit that he could have a very good match with 1-2-3 Kid as easily as he could with Diesel, with Bob Backlund as easily as he could with Steve Austin. And those matches weren't all the same, despite Bret always feeling fairly similar as a performer. I guess my biggest complaint about Bret, the one that would keep him out of the upper ranks of my GOAT list, is that his performances rarely got past feeling calculated. He just didn't cross over to that place where he seemed like a guy fighting for his life and his honor (which is funny, because he took his character seriously enough that he actually was kind of fighting for his honor). Maybe he reached that place in the Austin match from Mania? I haven't watched it in a long time, so I'm not sure.

Tim, this ended up bumming me out, because several of the matches you praised aren't on the set, and now I feel like I have to get the Ginnetty set.

It's much better than the June match, more coherent and as Ditch said, better at establishing Misawa as a guy who could go toe-to-toe with a heavyweight instead of having to wrestle as an opportunistic cruiserweight. The June match had the "holy shit" ending, but this one featured better performances from both guys.

I liked the obit but god, that retelling of the history of Strikeforce was the WON at its most agonizing.

Watching Dibiase in AJPW does him no favors. He's solid but looks very much like a B+ guy when he's in the same match as Hansen.

I look at it both ways at different times. Matches are very important to me, and when I go through a yearbook, for example, I'm always comparing them in my mind. I identify more with the way you think about wrestling than with someone like MattD, who writes intelligent, enjoyable posts but doesn't seem to prize transcendent matches. I would never advocate someone as GOAT if he didn't have a long list of matches that really excited me. That said, I'm very attached to certain wrestlers -- Hansen, Choshu, Tenryu, etc. -- and prone to give them the benefit of the doubt in matches that might bug me if other workers were involved.

I think of a technician as someone with an above-average assortment of moves that he executes very well. That isn't Shawn Michaels, who was all about bumping and charisma. If Shawn Michaels is a technical wrestler, that illustrates the absurdity of the term. And no, I don't think of Dibiase as a technician either, though his offense was better executed and more painful looking than Shawn's.

This is an aside, but how the fuck are we talking about Shawn Michaels as a technical wrestler? Even the best version of Shawn had a notably limited repertoire.