JerryvonKramer

Which years are you talking about specifically? I mean when was Sting company ace? 1991-3?

Wasn't Sting effectively the face of WCW from about 1990 onwards? Sure, they didn't do fantastic business in those years, but he was always crazy over, always and had a ton of great matches against a variety of different guys. Considering Steve Williams, Konnan and Benoit are all in the HoF, I can't see any argument that says they should be in and Sting shouldn't.

What's the argument against Sting? Seems ridiculous to me that anyone would put Cena in there before him.

Been wanting to hear Loss on a show for ages. Need to finish 19 first, but pumped for this.

Awesome, will listen to this for the first time (modern focus means I don't usually listen).

Just out of interest how much time do you actually spend watching footage? Just wonder how you manage it being married and all.

This is interesting and will inspire a thread I'm going to make in a bit, but what is the show you did last night with Will that you mention?

You can have a smart / technical heel or a chicken shit heel vs. basically a Hogan. Don't see why that can't work.

Do speed and agility matter? Do strength and power matter? Do guts and determination matter? Do endurance and stamina matter? Do intelligence and knowledge of moves matter? The kayfabe answer in ALL cases is "yes". One of the things NWA / WCW always did well was have the commentators assess the strengths and weaknesses of a guy. Luger vs. Windham -- well Luger's giving up probably the height and the weight advantage there, but he's definitely stronger. Windham's got him smoked for intelligence and knowledge, but ... etc. etc. In fact, even the WWF did this sort of thing pretty well in the 80s. How many times did we hear Gorilla tell us "the longer this match goes on, the more it plays into Greg Valentine's hands"? Size is just one more differential. One Man Gang is a big man, but Rey probably has him beat in most of those other categories, so it's totally believable Rey would go over. As others have said, the biggest problem with the modern product is that it's often difficult to see now the real differences between workers. Guys like One Man Gang don't really exist. Hell, guys like Windham don't really exist. Everyone is like a 7/10 for every category, makes everyone samey.

Was pleasantly surprised to see earlier that the UK digital channel Men and Motors have picked up old runs of World of Sport. Watched Sammy Lee (aka Tiger Mask) vs. Sid Cooper. Pretty entertaining. Then there was the obligatory Giant Haystacks vs Big Daddy match but my wife walked in and we turned over.

While we're on Savage / Warrior, does anyone else like the Summerslam 92 match? I've always been high on that and the Perfect / Flair shenanigans entertained the hell out of me as a kid. Never see anyone talk about that match.

What about the Arn match where he jobs?

Man I pumped so many 20ps into that machine, can't believe I'm only finding out about this now. Must depend on where you are in the ring.

Speaking of Wrestlefest, I'd always assumed the woman in it was a young Lilian Garcia, but was it actually Mike McGuirk?

I didn't mean to say it's a bad match, I was just trying to make a point of saying "not that one", because I assume everyone knows about it. Incidentally, the matches from Houston in 1987 feature the worst commentary of all time. There is a woman on them and pre-Brother Love Bruce Pritchard. Have never forgotten how bad they were. Make Mooney look like Gordon Solie. EDIT: With a bit of googling I've found out they were Pete Doherty, Mike Mcguirk (the woman) and Bruce Pritchard. Doherty was the generic heel, not Pritchard.

Easier said that done. DiBiase did a powerslam from the Irish whip anyway, Perfect did a dropkick. Again, it was only Hogan and a couple of others who could do a back bodydrop.

I know I'm biased but I like his singles matches with DiBiase (not the 1979 one) The one from the Philly Spectrum, March 1988 isn't very good but the one from Houston, TX, October 9th 1987 is pretty good. DiBiase says "I need no introduction to you people, you know who I am" which is a nice nod to his MidSouth days. This was representative of a pile of DiBiase/ Hogan matches in 87 where DiBiase got count out wins around the horn. There's another one a few days later, also from Housten where Hogan gets the pin (think this was on one of the old Hogan VHS tapes). These are both decent matches. Even better is the one from September 10th, Boston 1988. And the SNME match from 1989 just prior to Survivor Series is also pretty good. None of these are "classics" as such, but they do demonstrate Hogan selling for a technically sound heel opponent and allowing him to retain his heat.

No they couldn't, it was only characters who could do a bodyslam. DiBiase didn't have a bodyslam, neither did Mr. Perfect and a whole host of others.

So ... this still begs the question: why stick with the nature boy gimmick? It just makes no sense at all to me.

Yeah but was Flair around during Buddy Rogers's peak? Still don't really get the idea of Landel during the "Nature Boy" gimmick when there was already someone on top doing it, and not just anyone, but Flair. I reckon it HAS to have hurt his career. Why didn't the WWF pick him up in the 80s? They picked up a hell of a lot of others guys who had "issues" during that time.

On a side note, is there any reason that Landell HAD to work as mini-Flair? I mean, isn't that bad marketing? Why didn't he just change his gimmick?

Ha ha, well if you're a matches guy and I'm "skills and attributes" guy, all I can do is say again why I don't think "great matches" are the be-all and end-all. Crowd reaction counts a hell of a lot in wrestling. Face reaction, heel reaction. For me, any GOAT argument for any guy starts with that. What sort of heat did they draw? How over were they? That's why I've argued time and time again that in any GOAT conversation, stuff like your DiBiase basketball skit or your Rude promo at Superbrawl II has to be "counted" as much as getting ***** ratings from Metlzer and legion IWC reviewers. For one thing, we've seen that ratings are subjective and tastes change. Is Tom Billington seriously still in the GOAT conversation? Are his so-called 5-star classics still considered 5-star classics? Common wisdom in 1998 would tell you that Dynamite Kid had lots and lots of great matches. Do we still think that? But go back to Rude in 92 and those boos are as loud in 98, as loud in 2008 and they will be as loud in 2018. The crowd reaction was the crowd reaction. He did his job. He was effective. I can't even remember off the top of my head who he wrestled at Superbrawl II, but sure as hell I can remember Rude being really fucking over at that event. Point is: there may come a day when we don't think the "great" Cena matches are great anymore. Tastes and consensus may change. The status of a match is seldom set in stone. The status of someone's overness is more concrete, more fixed, easier to measure. -------- Anyway, these "out of ring" skills always already translate into "in-ring" skills. Working the crowd, psychology, charisma, persona ... all of those things feed into how the crowd is reacting during the match. So, assuming the noise isn't pumped in, a massive pop is still a massive pop and a dead crowd is still a dead crowd. There's an argument to say that a match that took place in front of a dead crowd didn't work. If they didn't care about Dean Malenko's innovative submission holds, they didn't care. He chose the wrong night to do it, and so he had a "bad match" -- at least in the eyes of the promoter, at least on the level of entertaining the crowd. Coming back to Cena and Hogan then ... the argument here comes to: what sort of crowd reaction did Hogan have his whole career and what sort of crowd reaction did Cena have? Aside from a few occasions in 92, and a difficult stretch in 94-5 when he was, in my mind, very badly handled by WCW (needed a much firmer boss basically), can you really say there was ever a time when he wasn't over? If Hogan isn't demonstrably top babyface ever ever -- judging by IN MATCH crowd reactions -- then he's got a lock case for top 2 or 3. And DITTO on the heel side - he's gotta be in at least the top 5 or 6 conversation there too, if not higher. Cena isn't touching top 20 for face and he's just not in the heel conversation at all. You can argue that's because he's been mismanaged or because he's working at a time when kayfabe is so broken that crowds are very difficult to manipulate in the way they once were, but the fact is there's never been a time when he was unambiguously over over. He was never Hogan over. Hell, he was never even Warrior over. SOME of it will be down to angles, promos, and all the other "out of ring" aspects of the Cena package, but you've also got to say that the in-ring performances have to come to consideration. Look at a Hogan match. Simplest wrestling formula going. Yet almost 6 years into that big WWF run he was STILL massively more over than Cena ever has been. Why? Surely there HAS to be a part of it that is down to the in-ring performance. The connection with the crowd, the ability to work the crowd. My bottomline on this is that you can produce a list as long as your arm of Cena's greatest matches, but was he as over as Hogan was? Did you ever play that game Total Extreme Wrestling? One thing Adam Ryland got exactly right there: two guys can't have an A* rated match if they aren't at least a B+ or A rated popularity in that territory. They can have As across the board, but if they aren't over that rating is going to be capped by their popularity. I honestly believe that you can't ever take overness out of the equation. You just can't, even when judging "in-ring performers" I realise that could throw up lots of odd arguments: Junkyard Dog or Dean Malenko? Well JYD smokes Dean for overness doesn't he, but obviously he had few good matches. You have to make a judgement call on how far Dean's matches and technical ability can outweigh the fact he was never that over. For many many fans, the JYD vs. Malenko argument is a no context. I think it's pretty close. I'M STILL TALKING IN RING HERE. JYD's overness counts for, A LOT no matter how shitty he was after 1983. It's a close call -- Dean probably shades it, just. Hogan vs. Cena is nowhere near as close a call. The gap in technical ability is much narrower and much more debatable. The gap in great matches is narrower too (Hogan still has his share). But the gap in overness is huge, so the answer has to be Hogan.

If Hogan himself was here though, you know he'd argue that "better results" means bigger buyrates and bigger gates. Does Cena even compare with Hogan as a draw? If you take matches as the criteria very very few guys from 80s WWF are going to fare well, it wasn't exactly workrate central. Take Steamboat based 100% on his WWF work. His "output" there probably doesn't match Cena's, even if you argued that Cena never had a match as good as the Savage match. Are you going to say Cena is a better performer than Steamboat was? I don't see how you can do this in a fair way and give it to Cena.

Would it be fair to say that while Cena probably has more great matches, Hogan was by far the "better worker" in terms of crowd reaction, generating sympathy selling, promo, charisma, basically everything?