Gregor

I'd guess that people just know him more now. In the past ten years he's written autobiographies, started a podcast, and done other stuff online. It probably doesn't help that the general opinion of his wrestling is lower than it was 10-15 years ago.

The match in that feud in which the tecnico side pushes back, even more than the hair match, is the November 13 one with Dandy, Atlantis, and Pierroth against Fiera, Emilio Charles, and Satanico. I don't know if you've already watched it or if it's even on YouTube (it definitely was at one point), but I thought that it was the best part of the whole feud. Here's a picture if you need proof about Fiera getting his and don't mind being spoiled:

That's probably true - I'm not familiar enough with the guy to spell his name correctly, let alone give an opinion on how good he is - but either way I'd be disappointed in Undertaker if he rejected the match for that reason, given how many wrestlers made concessions when working with him. Even now they still have to. Regardless, the chances of the match being bad shouldn't be a reason not to book it. If Strowman's nowhere near over enough for a win over Undertaker to do anything for him (and a loss certainly wouldn't), that's a reason. WWE needs stars a lot more than it needs good matches right now.

Maybe it's because I've never seen Stroman at all, but the idea of Undertaker turning down an opponent for being a big lug who can't carry things in the ring is funny. Luckily for him, Hogan was okay with that kind of opponent back in 1991.

I'm worse about this for matches than for wrestlers. A wrestler can change my opinion after a bad first impression, largely because I'm watching a bunch of stuff from that promotion and can't avoid watching anyone more than once, but if I don't enjoy a match the first time that I watch it then that sticks with me. I might appreciate it more on a second viewing (if it gets one), but it has a ceiling and I'll probably never consider it great or a personal favorite.

If you're including things like booking and how over the wrestlers are, I'm not sure that 1999 is worse. There was a lot of awful stuff then, but the first three months of the year had Austin-McMahon and Rock-Mankind. The crowd heat from the Attitude Era is kind of overrated (for undercard PPV matches, the crowd was generally silent between the entrances and the finishing stretch), but it beats now for sure. Commentary was better. More wrestlers felt important, and the top guys felt more important than today's. Even pay-per-views like No Mercy and Armageddon were must-see shows. Match quality was at an all-time low, and a lot of the matches felt unimportant because they were just filler until the angle advancement. Is that better or worse than 50-50 booking? Oh, of course there's the fact that wrestling was a lot cooler then, too. RAW from after SummerSlam 1994 until about midway through 1995 is really hard to watch. It got better, but it didn't become a good TV show until late 1996. I've never seen any of it, but the guest host era sounded like it had to have been unbearable. Was it?

Two - what a terrible wrestling fan I am. I kept tabs on WCW's results for the first few months of 1999 and would even switch to Nitro when RAW was boring me (I distinctly remember doing this when Undertaker was harassing Sable). For whatever reason WCW felt more real, with their metal guardrails and longer matches, and I could never tell if that made it interesting or too intimidating. Switching away from RAW always made me feel guilty for turning my back on the promotion that had introduced me to wrestling, but by the summer I didn't care about WCW results anymore and felt guilty for that. I was a weird little kid.

Overrated even as a pure character. As an announcer he was up and down, as a foil for Austin he was great, and since then he's been bad more than he's been good. The trial of Eric Bischoff is maybe my least favorite wrestling moment ever.

The best part about this is that I actually went out of my way to check if Cruz vs. Ramirez was online (and not just on YouTube) before I posted that. When the first page of results already had videos not even remotely relevant, I assumed that it wasn't and added it to the list. It's as if the internet exists just to spread the message of my stupidity as far as possible. Thanks for the links, though.

Remembered some more: Emilio Charles Jr. vs. Atlantis from 1992 The AAA match in which Eddy turns on Santo Metalicos vs. Cavernicolas isn't online anymore Psicosis vs. Hijo del Santo from 1994 I think there was a Santo vs. Heavy Metal match that got **** in the MDA and one that got **** from Meltzer, and I don't think either is the one that's online I've been going from "best matches not available online" to "matches that someone called great one time and also aren't online," so I'll cram a sock in it now.

As far as I know Hijo del Santo vs. Espanto Jr. from 1992 has never been online. There's a Fuerza Guerrera vs. Negro Casas match that got praised in the Match Discussion Archive that I've never seen online. Bestia Salvaje vs. Huracan Sevilla isn't online (although it didn't get as much praise in the MDA). I could have sworn that Pirata Morgan vs. Masakre showed up online, but if it's there I can't find it. Javier Cruz vs. Ciclon Ramirez definitely was. The Atlantis/Dandy/Hijo del Santo/Lizmark vs. Blue Panther/Dr. Wagner Jr./Negro Casas/Felino match from 1996 got rave reviews in the MDA, but I've never seen it, and in fact I've never heard it discussed outside of that thread. Rayo de Jalisco Jr. vs. Apolo Dantes is another one I've heard about but never seen.

As a counterpart to the other thread, who are the least popular wrestlers on your list? Is there anyone on your ballot who you think won't make anyone else's?

Dean Malenko is an odd pick. I doubt he makes 50% of the ballots here.

I don't understand why it was Ross's job to adjust to Ventura's style more than it was Ventura's job to adjust to Ross's style. Also I agree with those who say that they didn't really notice the animosity between the two. To me they were better at hiding any conflict than the Ross and Schiavone team, as already noted.

I've never seen match structure as a weakness for 1994-97 Michaels. His matches in that time frame pretty much always went face->heel->face or face->heel->face->back-and-forth, with his opponent in control for as long as or longer than Michaels. As a heel, he generally got knocked around a lot before taking control, but I can't recall a match in which it felt like he didn't spend a convincing amount of time on offense. As a face, he did have a stock comeback routine, and sometimes it made his win feel a little too easy, but most of the time he mixed things up for longer matches. I can see the argument that the structure of his matches was pedestrian or generic but not glaringly bad. That said, "structure" is kind of a vague term, so that might not even be what you were arguing; when I think of structural issues I think of the complaints people levy at Bob Backlund matches. I'm genuinely struggling to think of an instance of him telegraphing a spot in order to do something flashy. His flashy bumps were generally off Irish whips, punches, and backdrops - not really stuff where telegraphing is going to happen. When he tried flashy offense it didn't always look good but more because of execution than because of an awkward, obvious setup.

That's really sad. I always assumed he'd be one of those guys who lived forever, just because he always seemed to be in such good shape for his age. R.I.P.

I'm probably the only one, but I kind of liked Owen's "damn road sign" outfit. I don't think it's possible to have a worse outfit than Giant Gonzalez's WWF one, but those one-legged tights are up there. Benoit's tights with the giant stain in the crotch area were bad. I hated this Jericho outfit because that design was just a random squiggle, but maybe I couldn't see what it was supposed to be. He seemed to have a lot like that. Mascara Sagrada's outfit looked really cheap. The mask looked like it just had a piece of plastic glued to it. 1999 WWF had two unrelated gimmicks with attire made to resemble underwear.

I doubt you'll recognize my username, but I always enjoy reading your posts, even (especially?) when you're just ripping on poor Jim Ross's podcast. All my best.

Virtually the exact scenario that I'm proposing happened in 1996, a year and a half later. The only difference is that it was a 7.5-month reign rather than a 6-month one. It's not did not happen unthinkable for it to have occurred slightly earlier. Even if it were, I'm amused by the idea of half-baked fantasy booking needing to adhere to lousy or outdated WWF protocol. "I was watching back in the day and I didn't think he was world champion material" isn't enough to convince me that a brief run for Bigelow would have been a disaster, at least one worse than the one that actually occurred. I don't know what qualities he had that made him unfit to advance past the midcard in your eyes, but the company was willing to overlook them to put him in their biggest show's hottest angle and most important match that year. That point is mitigated somewhat by the fact that whoever they put there would be someone they viewed as expendable, but he was objectively more than a midcard act to the WWF. The company had Bob Backlund as their top heel for several months just the year before. Bigelow was definitely more over in early 1995 than Backlund had been before his turn and push.

Yes, exactly. Diesel's title run was a flop critically and financially. Who cares about the spirit of a push like that? I get what you're saying, but we have an actual reality in which they stayed the course/trusted the process/kept the faith/whatever cliche you want to use, and with six more months of a strong push the guy didn't take. Would Bam Bam briefly on top change anything? Probably not. I liked the idea just because it meant that they'd have gotten more out of their roster than they actually did, when they pretty much wasted Bigelow after WM. He was a big, scary dude who got some slight mainstream attention. Why not try to do something with that? Saying that he was just a midcarder isn't really convincing. He was a midcarder because that's what they made him. I don't know if they could have removed the stigma of the loss to LT in time for a switch before SummerSlam; that's a genuine concern. Mabel wasn't the only challenger who flopped against him. It's like the saying about how if everyone you meet is a jerk then chances are that you need to look in the mirror. Diesel clearly wasn't compelling enough for his title defenses to be interesting on their own. I suggested that, after six months with the belt, he spend three months getting revenge and chasing the belt. That's a new situation for him, and maybe that would've sparked some interest. It might not have been enough motivation to get people excited, but it was more motivation than he got. No, it doesn't conform to 1995 WWF's ideas about face champions. That doesn't mean that the best answer is to give Diesel the same risk-free reign but with slightly better challengers. It's not like his run was this close to being a success, and maybe it would have worked if only he'd had better opposition (and, again, they didn't seem to know how to build up doomed challengers anyway). The Goldberg/Luger comparison was unfair. Six months is a lot longer than one, Diesel wasn't undefeated and thus didn't have a large part of his appeal based on that, and Goldberg was far more over.

There are plenty of reasons why it might not have worked, but I don't see Diesel needing the belt for a full twelve months as one of them. Bigelow can win through some form of cheating/interference, and then you have Diesel getting revenge and chasing the belt for a few months, stuff he'd never done before. It's a more compelling motivation than he had for any of his actual title defenses that year, and, if nothing else, it forces the WWF to book a heel strongly, something they totally failed to do in the first half of the year (and really didn't truly accomplish until Diesel's turn). The WWF still had the mentality that face champions needed long runs at that point, but they weren't that far away from shedding that view, and it's not like their fans had trouble at first accepting top faces who didn't have long reigns. If Diesel doing a pair of title switches really would have signaled that he wasn't the guy, well, that's how it ended up in real life, too. The reality upon which we're trying to improve is one in which a guy has a weak run on top, jumps to the rival company shortly thereafter, and plays a big role in pushing them ahead for a while. How much worse could things go? I can't imagine there are many hypothetical scenarios in which things turn out worse for the WWF than they actually did.

I like the idea of the Bigelow feud. For that to work, Bigelow probably would have to win the title, or else he'd look like a choker. He could take it at the first IYH (which would establish that important things could happen on those shows) and then lose it back to Diesel at SummerSlam. From there, either the renewed push keeps a capable wrestler in the promotion longer than it did in actual 1995, or he still does jobs on the way out, but they mean a little bit more because the guys defeating him get wins over an ex-champion. I don't think you can focus on challengers who would have good matches with Diesel. If you've made Kevin Nash your champion, then you've already decided to sacrifice main event match quality for whatever qualities you think he provides as champion. It's more important that your challengers look like threats, a difficult proposition when you have a seven-foot champion.

If this happens, I hope they induct him as "Native American Tatanka."

I've heard this opinion before and I've never gotten it. The contest ended when a third wrestler ran down to the ring too late to break up the pin and immediately got dumped outside. I don't mind a DQ finish if it's interesting and fits the match, but this one wasn't and didn't. If the match was a powder keg, the finish was a bowling ball rolling in from the side and smashing it to bits before it could explode. They had to have had better options for getting out of there without either guy losing. The Undertaker's appearance was cool, though. That said, in the end it was just one weak moment capping off 26 minutes of stuff that had really connected with me. That tiny little bit isn't enough to override all the stuff that I'd thought was great. From a standpoint of work, the finish wasn't the two wrestlers' fault. All they could do was work a good and exciting closing stretch before the DQ, which I think they did.

How much does a match's finish affect your opinion of it? A lot of times when writing about a match people will include something like, "The terrible finish just ruins it. Makes no sense and kills all the momentum they had going toward the end." I honestly can't think of a match like that for me, one that I was all set to consider great up until the finish happened. I'd easily consider Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind from Mind Games a great match, for instance, and I have absolutely nothing positive to say about the finish to that one. Everything else makes up for it. So where do you stand? What's the greatest discrepancy between how good a match was and how good its finish was? Does a match need a classic finish to be a classic match? Or if you'd rather just list your favorite/least-favorite finishes, go crazy.