Childs

That's a good way to put it, Matt. The Apter mags had a big influence on me viewing the NWA as equal to or better than WWF, which was of course the only thing most of my friends watched. They were also responsible for me realizing there was a wider wrestling world, populated by Abby, the Von Erichs, the AWA and other stuff I never got to see on TV. I remember being really excited when Luger showed up on NWA TV, for example, because I'd been reading about his exploits in Florida. I doubt my interest in wrestling would have gone beyond the early WWF fad if not for the mags. They animated the whole landscape for me.

My overall rankings would be pretty similar. I love Warrior-Savage, but it wouldn't have a shot to be my No. 1. As good as the overall spectacle was, the actual wrestling wasn't as compelling as the work in the matches you have right below it. War Games was more of a mixed bag than I remembered, with some truly great moments and some equally glaring flaws. It'd probably be more of a 25-40 match than a top 10 for me. The Fantasia-Thundercats match was the only one you ranked really high that I just didn't get. It wouldn't be in my top 100 for the year.

I had a similar thought reading through the thread, though I do believe Meltzer had a significant influence on the evolving internet discourse. But yeah, even as a 10-year-old kid, I saw Savage-Steamboat as exciting in a very different way than Andre-Hogan. I saw the NWA as a "good wrestling" alternative to WWF and Flair as a guy who had great matches rather than just getting by on star power. And I wouldn't have any awareness of Meltzer for another decade.

Most of the very best matches are included in the highlighted stuff, but I don't see much difference between say, the bottom half of the highlighted stuff and the non-highlighted.

Terry Funk comes to mind ... He was involved in Hansen's entry to All-Japan, his own "retirement" match there, the Lawler empty arena match in Memphis, the turn on Flair after the last Steamboat match in '89, the Stud Stable feud with Dustin and I'm sure countless angles in Florida, ECW, Over the Top, etc. that others would be better qualified to list.

It was a classic year for All Japan, with the Misawa-Kawada feud reaching full flower and Doc hitting his peak as the top American. In New Japan, Tenryu beat Inoki at the Dome and then blew off the WAR-NJ feud in grand fashion by jobbing to Hashimoto in a great match. It was a sneaky good in-ring year for WCW, with the strong shows in the first half of the year and the Dustin-Stud Stable feud carrying into the fall. Love it or hate it, the Big Egg joshi show on 11/20/94 was quite the spectacle. You had Vader invading UWFI to fun effect. In lucha, the 11/6/94 PPV was a gateway drug for some U.S. fans, whether you think the main event holds up as a classic or not

No one's disputing any of that. And if you feel the record isn't complete enough for you to form an opinion on Andre, that's fine. But it's silly to suggest a good Andre vs. Vader discussion is impossible for everyone on the board.

Of course you can have an informed discussion of their work. I have a good grip on peak Andre. Would my appreciation of him be more complete if there were more footage? Sure. But I don't know why you're portraying Andre the worker as completely obscure. We're constantly comparing wrestlers without complete accountings of their careers. Why treat this as some special case?

This is the same issue we often face when comparing wrestlers across eras. Take what you know and make a choice. Or don't. But who gives a shit about fair? It's an opinion. I'm voting for Vader in a very close shave, because as Loss argued in the other thread, his style was just so durable in creating excellent matches across promotions. That said, I probably like Andre's best couple of performances better than Vader's best couple. Again, anyone who hasn't seen his 4/1/82 match with Khan, go watch it now.

Misawa was a phenomenal hot tag -- the way he'd come in as the ace and set everything right for Kobashi or Akiyama. Hashimoto was great too. You could just sense the coming ass beating as he waited on the apron. And he always delivered the goods. People have rightly mentioned Dustin, but I always thought his pop was a fun hot tag as well, with the rapid-fire elbows and the weird, pseudo-effeminate gestures.

I would say Lesnar, at his best, is a great big man, though not with a large enough body of work to rank with the greatest ever.

I wouldn't even say his size was a major factor in the way he worked against Misawa and Co. I mean, he was a rugged bomb thrower, sure. But we could say that about dozens of excellent workers who don't seem to fit this category. As others have said, "big man" isn't sharply defined. I guess for me, it's important that the guy's size be essential to his character. In Vader and Andre matches, for example, almost everything happened in reaction to their size and/or power. I actually don't think there have been a lot of great big men who fit that conception.

Why are we calling Akira Taue a big man? Just because he was the biggest guy in his peer group doesn't mean he worked a "big man" style. Putting him in a group with Vader and Andre doesn't make a lot of sense.

Renewed love and appreciation for Andre was a major theme of the New Japan DVDVR set. The Hansen and Khan matches give a sense of what a mobile Andre could do, and I wouldn't hesitate to call them classics. Some of his other matches from the set show how expressive he was and how well he connected to a crowd even when he started to slip athletically. I agree the Vader comparison is tough because of the disparity in footage, but what we have suggests Andre was a really great wrestler in his prime. I don't consider Baba a "big man" in the Andre, Vader sense. His height helped him, obviously, but he wrestled as a classic ace, not as a guy whose size was the dominant factor in his matches. I'd say Hansen and Brody wrestled more as "big men" than Baba. And if we're counting Hansen (which I probably wouldn't), he'd be my choice.

That depends on the state/nation, as some states and countries do allow lawsuits on behalf of the estate of the deceased in cases of libel/slander. There is no way anyone could successfully sue Dave for saying Chris Benoit killed his wife. That is the accepted truth and has been written thousands of times by myriad publications. It doesn't come close to a libel issue. That said, I don't think this is a big deal. It's just another in the long line of odd things Dave has written over the years. He's not careful in his phrasing and never will be.

Thank you for your utterly useless contribution.

History is replete with systems of mass commerce that also produced what many of us would call "art." The London theatre, the Hollywood studio system, Motown. All of these were craft machines designed to make money. Yet people operated as artists within each of them. The suggestion that a pro wrestler can't operate with artistic intent strikes me as untrue to the nature of creative enterprise. Bret Hart, for example, seems to have an artistic personality. He worked hard to learn the tools of his craft and then he used those tools to express ideas about himself, his family, etc. He clearly felt tensions between his creative impulses and the business machine he fed. You can argue against the quality of his art. But his mentality wasn't that different from those of actors, writers and others we more readily call artists. Bryan Danielson seems to have an artistic personality. He talks about the ring as his venue for self-expression and clearly feels some of that aforementioned tension working for the WWE machine. El-P mentioned Austin. In listening to his podcast, you hear a balance between practical business instincts and love for wrestling as a craft. He obviously admires guys like Regal and Finlay, who were never huge stars. So for him, wrestling exists on some level beyond conning the marks, even though he believes very strongly in that part of it. We have this notion that commerce is antithetical to creativity. I'm sure I believed that as a teenager. But it's bullshit. Ideally, any art strikes a balance between self-expression and connection with an audience. The corporate overlords can, and often do, help the artist find that balance, even if it doesn't feel that way in the moment. I deal with all of this in my own work, albeit on a low level. As a sportswriter, I work for a company designed to sell advertising and garner subscriptions/web hits. I'm lucky if a reader spends two minutes with one of my pieces before tossing the newspaper or clicking on the next link. But I still think about craft for craft's sake -- all the time. And every so often, someone in my line of work produces a piece that says something deeper about the world or connects in a more lasting way. So I'd absolutely agree with anyone who says newspapers and magazines aren't particularly conducive to creating art. But I'd strongly disagree with someone who says they never do.

Because pro-wrestling has *never* been an artistic expression. Well, I guess there's no arguing beyond this point, because that strikes me as an absurd, "the sky is green" statement.

No. But pro-wrestling's only goal has always been to draw money. Period. You can make music, litterature, cinema, painting for the sake of it, for experimental researches, to express yourself, to protest against injustice, to stay alive, to heal other people. Pro-wrestling never had any other aim but to get money from its spectators. Pro-wrestling is basically psychological mass manipulation. The "pro-wrestling tell stories" argument has become amazingly overstated in recent years. The stories pro-wrestling tell are amazingly simplistic and limited, and aimed right at the reptilian brain. Bad guy = boo. Good guy = cheers. Bad guy cheats = me sad and angry. Good guy beats the shit out of bad guy = me happy. It's a low-brow form of entertainment born from the carnivals, it can be fascinating and great to watch, but no great wrestling match can be compared to a great work of litterature, cinema or music. Nor it shouldn't, because it's different. This is plainly wrong. It's easy to find wrestlers discussing craft outside the direct context of drawing money. Meanwhile, all the other art forms you cite have deep roots in craft and trying to earn a living. Now, you can argue wrestling is a limited canvas for artistic expression compared to writing or film. I'd agree with that. But why insist there's a clear line between ART and craft? It's a pointlessly reductive argument.

When people use drawing data to paint a richer picture of a guy's career and context, I find that valuable--thinking Dylan on Blackwell as an example. When we fall into the same old debates in which someone invariably tells us wrestlers care only about draining money from the marks, I find it some of the most tedious stuff in all of wrestling discussion. The Beatles turned money-drawing craft into art, and it's a lot more fun to talk about how they did it than to have someone come in and say: "Well, pop acts were motivated by money." No shit, right? Can we just accept that and move on.

I'm surprised how often people want matches to go longer. I almost never have that reaction to wrestling anymore and am more likely to feel the opposite. The Shield-Evolution match was good in the big moments and in the overall message it delivered, but the pacing was weird. Though I'd have to watch again to be sure, I felt they re-used the same idea of a protracted Evolution beatdown once too often. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if they'd milked some drama out of attempted eliminations at various points in the match. Instead, it hit me as a long match with a somewhat rushed (though effective) finishing sequence. I get that they were pushing the idea of Evolution wanting to destroy the Shield. The heat sections just dragged for me. Anyway, it was a strong B show with few moments of real downtime and some holy shit moments like the Cena stair toss.

Misawa was always ahead of Kawada, and I don't think just because of age. Baba acquiring the Tiger Mask gimmick and putting the mask on him was also a big, early sign of faith. Misawa's ascent was slowed by injuries, but they treated him as a player way back in '84-'85, a good 3-4 years before Kawada was any kind of presence on TV. Baba saw Misawa as a future star long before 1990.

Fujinami and Choshu actually worked the mat quite a bit in their remarkable '83 series -- not intricate matwork but intense battles for position and leverage that set the tone for their matches. I agree about 1980, which was cool because of the way he worked as a jr. heavyweight ace against a succession of very different opponents.

Some other Japan ones that came to mind: Jumbo in '91, Tenryu in '89 and '93, when he carried the WAR/NJ feud that's among my favorite things in wrestling history, Doc in '94. The '80s lucha set makes a damn good case for Satanico in '84. I wanted to pick a Fujinami or Choshu year but couldn't isolate one for either guy. My favorite Flair year is probably '87, because I grew up on the Windham and Garvin feuds. But it lacked the territorial defenses that made his earlier years so chunky. Eddy in '04 stands right near the top of best years from the '00s.

I think Rey was the best worker in the US for that decade You'd probably put Danielson No. 2 right? Those strike me as the only two who were consistently near the top for most of the decade.