Childs

AWA - Good version of Curt Henning + Stan Hansen + Rick Martel + Buddy Rose beating the hell out of Shawn Michaels = a set I should enjoy. Georgia - I'm not sure the matches we have on tape are as good as the workers, by and large. Most of the stars peaked elsewhere. Memphis - Best announcer ever, two of the best wrestlers ever (Lawler and Dundee) at their peaks, concession stand brawls, Shinya Hashimoto brutalizing hick jobbers. My favorite American set that has come out of the '80s project to date, though it's agonizing to know how much great shit we don't have. World Class - My least favorite American set so far, because the good shit got a bit redundant, few matches seemed to reach their full potential and the promotion outright tanked for a few years before a shot of Memphis redeemed it. That said, you definitely want to see the Freebirds vs. the Von Erichs, the Dynamic Duo and Eric Embry among other treasures. Florida - Not enough tape. Mid-South - Big hosses beating on each other, long Dick Murdoch classics, Ernie Ladd street fighting in a golf outfit, hidden treasures from Houston, great Jim Duggan matches. It's hard to argue with Mid-South, though nothing from the set hit the peaks of Lawler-Dundee. WWF - Straight nostalgia that's not quite supported by the quality of the wrestling, though 24/7 has substantially beefed up our supply of good matches in recent years. There's something to be said for popping in a disc and feeling like a kid again. NWA (Crockett) - Probably the chief rival to All Japan for '80s supremacy. Flair's matches with Windham were the first "classics" I saw as a kid, and I still love them. The Midnight Express and the R 'n' R's defined what tag team wrestling should be. I totally bought the Cold War drama of Nikita beating Magnum and then fighting for his fallen rival after the motorcycle accident. Terry Funk's 1989 run is a great cherry on the sundae along with Luger's suprisingly excellent work from that year. In this case, the actual matches live up to the nostalgia. AJPW - Just a ridiculous collection of great matches, most of them involving Jumbo, Tenryu or both. The evolution from native vs. gaijin in the early '80s to Choshu's invasion in 1985 to Jumbo vs. Tenryu at the end kept it from getting too samey. The great matches of 1980-1984 felt a lot different than the great matches of 1987-1989. I'm glad other people seem to be digging the set. NJPW - Fewer great matches than All-Japan but more variety. I loved Choshu vs. Fujinami, the UWF invasion, the 10-man eliminations and pretty much everything the promotion cranked out in 1989 (Sano-Liger, Vader, Hashimoto, Nogami courting death, Russian amateurs, etc.) I loved working on this set, because a lot of the treasures we found came from nowhere, and guys like Hoshino, Sakaguchi and Saito came away with new reps. Portland - Great TV with hot promos bleeding directly into long, smartly worked matches. Buddy Rose held the whole thing together, and for a few years there, he was about as good as anybody. St. Louis - My favorite '80s stuff from St. Louis actually comes from All-Japan broadcasts. You can't beat the unintentional comedy of Hiroshi Wajima hanging out with Neil Lomax. Joshi - Hard to watch in big doses because even in the '80s, the matches ran to overkill. That said, it's hard to deny the heat generated by Dump or the greatness of Jaguar and Devil. Lucha - Damn shame that we don't have more footage, but the best of what we have rivals the best stuff from anywhere. Nobody did seedy, bloody hatred better than the top luchadores. Europe - There was a lack of hate and urgency to a lot of World of Sport. But the best stuff featured mat creativity the likes of which you won't see anywhere else. Steve Grey and Marty Jones could hang with anybody in the world, and every fan should see a little Johnny Saint before death.

Dibiase was a very good all-around performer. But for me, it was instructive to watch him team with Hansen in Japan. From his ring entrance to the way he portrayed his character with every movement in the ring, Stan came off larger than life. Ted, bereft of creative booking or the ability to cut promos, came off as a solid hand, nothing more. I though watching them together, in a foreign setting, it was beyond obvious why one was Top 20 all-time and the other was merely very good. As for the broader question about great matches, it depends what question you're trying to answer. Can someone be an all-time great performer without a bevy of great matches? Sure. I don't think many people would deny that Hogan was an all-time great figure in the business. But if you're debating the merits of guys as in-ring workers, it does matter. I love William Regal. He did all kinds of nifty shit that made me excited to watch his matches, even if they were only 10 minutes each. But I couldn't put him above Flair or Tenryu or Hansen given that they produced dozens of great matches for every one that Regal produced.

Rematch was 4/6/93 and is also on the set.

We're no-selling it in tribute to DK and Sayama no-selling those tombstones on the floor.

WAR I think.

UFC is even more monpolistic than the NFL, MLB etc. because at least in those leagues, you have groups of rich owners driving up salaries by competing with one another. You would need a Dana in charge of each fight camp or something to create an equivalent labor market in MMA. I suspect it will take some time for fighters to cease being grateful that UFC pulled them out of the gutter in terms of earning potential. But if the sport continues to thrive, some attempt at labor organization seems like a down-the-line possibility. It will be interesting to see if it ever gains more traction than it has in pro wrestling. Given the current set-up, I can't see the sport following a boxing model and splintering in a million directions.

I think you'd also want Tenryu vs. Fujiwara from 11/24. It's a dream match-up for a lot of people on this board and was pretty damn good as I recall.

I'm listening to the Observer audio analysis, and I can't believe that Bryan regards this as a long-range plus for the fighters. He should be chained to a wall and forced to study guilded age economics or, hell, the WWF purchase of WCW.

WRONG and Meltzer is totally right. A) They do hold up. 4/21/83 is still one of the best matches of all times and has the privelege of being a match that can't be duplicated While on a rant, a lot of Sayama's backlash and DK's too for that matter is that people always tear down what is obviously the best out there. People always tear down people who are better at something so they can feel and cheat themselves up higher in the totem pole of life. The scary thing is that people don't even conciously know when or why they're doing this. Than they embrace mediocrity or something not quite as good as the best as a way to justify not getting their self esteem by actually going out and doing something .... I have to go but I continue on this rant if i have time. You are comparing 80s matches to other 80s matches from a 2011 brain. I am one of the few who can actually put myself in the 80s. Also, you are comparing 80s to s80s in what you think is good wrestling from your perspective, not what was actually great wrestling than and what is actually great wrestling now. Yeah Will, your mental time travel skills are for shit.

It also seems like Dave fails to understand that looking back at old art using standards which have evolved over time is something that we do constantly as thinking humans. Yes, it's helpful to understand how various works were viewed in the context of their times. But in other fields, it's generally accepted that as modern consumers, we're still allowed to judge them. And I'm not saying Dave is dumb. This is just a real analytical blind spot for him.

Loss, I was curious why you guys chose this one over the Superbrawl match between these two? I haven't watched it yet, so there's no implied criticism there at all. Just curious.

Going more than 15 or 20 minutes in a singles match was certainly not his thing. But I can't think of a ton of matches where that weakness got in the way (the Jumbo broadway is an obvious exception.) In fact, he was pretty damn good at working to his strengths. Most of his peak singles matches were short and intense. He left the epic stuff for tags, where he was tremendous as the guy who would run in to create game-changing moments. I guess I can see the criticisms of his headscissors- and scorpion-centric control segments. But he rarely held them long enough to lose the crowd, so they don't bother me too much. I don't know if he carried people exactly but he brought an intensity to matches that lifted other great performers. Jumbo and Tenryu, for example, both got more interesting when he showed up. Fujinami, another all-time great, had his best matches with Choshu. Some of Hashimoto's earliest great matches were against him. Fujiwara had one of his best matches against him. I guess what it comes down to is that for all of his technical deficiencies compared to other all-time greats, he had a rare ability to make matches feel big and charged. Throughout the New Japan and All Japan reviewing, I never groaned when I saw his name on match list, because I knew his presence promised some sort of excitement. I can't say that about too many guys.

Yeah, Choshu was probably my favorite guy on the New Japan set, though not technically the best. He's like the Jerry Lawler of Japan. If you can get past perceptions of a limited moveset, he was awesome at making pro wrestling feel alive and meaningful.

Are you saying Tenryu didn't match up well with Hansen? I thought they matched up great -- one of my favorite All-Japan singles series of the the '80s.

JDW and others can probably speak to the issue of Tenryu perception over time, but I've always gotten the sense that his physical awkwardness was a big part of it. It's a less pronounced issue than with Baba or Taue, but he did not come off as a natural athlete. The constant contrast to Jumbo probably didn't help on that front. To his credit, Tenryu turned his lack of grace into an advantage, building a style that emphasized effort and desire to inflict damage from any and all angles. He was like the Rocky Marciano to Jumbo's Ali.

That was a strength pre-WAR as well. He brought tremendous intensity to tags in which he was the biggest star by far. I'm thinking in particular of a match from '89 in which Tenta and Shunji Takano were the opponents, but there were plenty of others. It was like Tenryu just couldn't stand to be in a bad or boring tag match. Jumbo, by contrast, was often content to stay in the background of matches like that. Not a knock on him; it's just that Tenryu's effort in those kinds of matches is a real positive for his case.

I will be interested to see if a strong Jumbo vs. Tenryu debate gets going as people work through the '80s set. For me, Jumbo was unquestionably better from the beginning of their respective careers until Tenryu turned on him in 1987. Tenryu equaled or surpassed Jumbo in '88 and '89, when his style and spirit really drove the main event scene, despite his old partner's continued technical superiority. Jumbo regained the lead from 1990 through mid-1992 with his brilliant stuff against the next generation. But then Tenryu took the next 18 years (and counting) with his ability to persist as a top guy in various promotions, against a wide range of opponents. Of course, that's just the career bulk analysis. I'm more interested to see if people come away from the set thinking one guy's peak was clearly better than the other's. I've watched it all, and I'm still not sure.

No, people also took a pretty big dump on his once-revered NJ junior run in the voting for the '80s set. Takada is a guy who looks great if you do a superficial survey of his career. He was in a lot of great matches, no doubt. But if you look at those matches closely, he was more often than not the lesser performer. And if you take a big bite of his career, you start to see how often he gave flat performances or dragged matches down with his incredibly half-assed matwork. I would still consider him for a top 100, because in the right setting with the right opponent, he could make magic. But he was way too hit-and-miss to merit GOAT discussion.

The range of responses to Dylan's query is, in itself, an argument for the value of periodically revisiting the GOAT question. I know that when I began delving deeper into the worldwide wrestling scene, the threads associated with the Smarkschoice poll were some of the most valuable references I found. The ultimate answer didn't matter to me as much as the little sub-arguments, which gave me all kinds of ideas about what to watch and helped me to understand the community of critics that had evolved online. I hope the 80s projects, other polls, the threads around Will and Loss' yearbooks, etc. will provide the same service for the few souls who stray into hardcore fandom going forward. Whether you're talking about wrestling, baseball or TV shows, I find "who is greater than whom" discussions irresistible. They help me to frame my own thoughts about the stuff I like, and if the right people are involved, I learn. As for the original question, I don't think the GOAT field has expanded considerably since the Smarkschoice poll. I'm sure Lawler, Fujiwara, Tenryu and Hash would do better if we ran a poll right now. Benoit, Liger, Kobashi and Takada would do worse. But I don't know that the pool of guys pulling Top 5 votes would be significantly expanded. I can't speak to the change from 10 or 15 years ago, because I wasn't around.

I don't know, I thought it was neat to have a big fight involving the "lost" star of New Japan. It said something about where wrestling was going, even though it wasn't wrestling. With a project like this, I don't see the need to be super strict.

This was probably my favorite M-Pro match of the year. The 10/10 match might have been showier but not by much, and this one struck me as harder hitting. Hamada, Yakushiji and Togo all turned in great individual performances. The crowd was great. If I do a top 20 for the year, this will make it.

The beginning of this felt a little heavy on exposition and a little light on wrestling. But once it got down to Dandy vs. Santo, they delivered the kind of gritty violence you want from hair vs. mask. It was amazing to hear how little sympathy the fans had for Dandy, even after Santo's rudo turn. Dandy did a lot of great selling in the match, and I dug his attempts to fight out of Santo's submission. Santo was just vicious throughout. I liked a few of the CMLL trios from early in the year, but this still probably held up as my favorite lucha match of '96.

Thrilling stuff here. They did a great job of establishing their key weapons right off the bat, with Tenryu particularly shining at putting over Takada's kicks. The match lost a little steam when they went to the mat, but even there, Tenryu kept things interesting with his selling and attempts to hook Takada's foot. The stretch run was just breathtaking with Takada landing huge kick after huge kick and Tenryu responding with his chops, punches and lariats. I loved the moment when Tenryu seemed on the verge of being knocked out only to bull Takada over with a desperation sumo charge. I also liked Takada kneeing his way out Tenryu's quasi-full-nelson submission attempt. These guys could have coasted by on star power alone but good lord did they beat the hell out of each other. One of my favorite matches of the year.

That's interesting. I didn't respond to this match at all. Maybe I'll have to rewatch.