NintendoLogic

Kawada was using the rabbit lariat in the early 90s. Did he only do it to Taue?

I don't know if I've ever seen anyone get over as a main event heel as quickly as him. Seriously, what a dick.

Scalia is perfectly willing to abandon originalism when it would take him places he doesn't want to go. Check out his concurrence in Gonzales v. Raich.

I don't think this is a fair criticism. The point of the skit is that Vince is so clueless and out of touch that he doesn't realize what he's saying is horribly offensive. Dick Murdoch worked with plenty of black wrestlers despite being a Klansman. And Strom Thurmond had a black child. Racism is a continuum, not a binary state.

You guys remember how we were discussing what Vince McMahon running for office would be like? Donald Trump is showing us.

I think you're making a flawed argument here because whether you liked something or not doesn't necessarily make it "better". I could tell you that I liked Plan 9 From Outer Space more than Citizen Kane and you could probably see where I was coming from even if you didn't agree with me, given that it's a matter of taste, but you'd probably still think I was an idiot if I gave Plan 9 a higher rating. I know Kane is better. You know Kane is better. I know why it's regarded as a groundbreaking masterpiece. Doesn't mean I don't get a bigger personal kick out of Ed Wood and his nonsense. This analogy has limited value, though. Plan 9 is a fundamentally incompetent film on pretty much every level. It has no artistic merit except as kitsch. The wrestling equivalent would be something like Abdullah the Butcher vs. Zeus. And just about anyone would agree that Flair/Steamboat is a better match than Zeus/Abby. The question comes when you try to compare matches that have passed the threshold of competence. How do you compare Flair/Steamboat to Hart/Austin or Misawa/Kawada or Dandy/Casas or whatever? At that point, it's almost entirely a matter of personal taste. You're basically trying to rank flavors of ice cream.

My point is that talk about "the business" and the best workers being the ones who draw the most money is largely a smokescreen to deflect criticism of workers by fans.

Even though 99% of the people in the business don't treat it that way? There's a reason everyone calls it "the business" - because that's what it is and how it's approached by damn near everyone in it. I doubt "artistic integrity" and other such pretentous buzz phrases are considered much, if at all. Even Bobby Heenan stresses that the point was to make as much money as possible. They may say that, but when you ask them about Brad Armstrong, they praise him to the moon.

Art is form and content. What content does wrestling have? "Wrestler A is tougher than Wrestler B"? "Wrestler A is more skilled, but Wrestler B is really good at cheating"? If wrestling is an art form, it's a highly degenerate one.

Marty Jones vs. Terry Rudge (taped 11/30, broadcast 12/4).

I had meant to post this in the MITB thread, but it somehow ended up in the EC thread. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/31144-elimination-chamber-2015/?p=5677577 I don't know if I accidentally posted it in the wrong thread or if I initially posted it in the right one and it got moved for some reason.

Setting aside the match's internal storyline, I think Cena/Owens was a glimpse into the future of WWE main event style. With all the guys who cut their teeth in the indies and/or Japan coming in, it's inevitable that matches will feature more nearfalls and high-end offense. Guys like Ambrose and Harper have been working in that vein for a while now.

I actually wrote a mini-treatise on wrestler names a few years ago. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15399-wrestler-names/

I was just about to give them credit for giving the world champion a decisive clean victory and then that shit happens. Fucking bullshit.

Props to Ambrose for not completely blowing off the leg like Shawn in the SS95 match.

That was like the best possible PWG match.

As part of his Dusty retrospective, Scott Keith reposted an old recap of a shoot interview from like 1999 in which he said the following: "He talks a bit about Japan and how he wasn’t a big fan of Giant Baba (now there’s an understatement), and so he got caught up in the NJ-AJ wars when he worked a New Japan show and defended the NWA title there. Backstory: All Japan was an NWA member at the time, but Baba HATED Dusty, and in fact his booking of himself to the World title in 1986 caused a major PR problem between Crockett and Baba." What's the story here? Did Baba and Dusty have some kind of falling out? Did Baba think Dusty exposed the business? Or is this just some third-hand RSPW rumor that Scott passed along as undisputed fact as was his wont in those days?

I don't disagree with the last part, but I think that the worst All Japan heavy was better than the best New Japan heavy. Here's how I see it: Actually, now that I think about it, I'm open to being persuaded that Hashimoto was better than Taue.

I find it interesting that so many of the people who are negative on HBK's post-comeback work also effusively praise John Cena. That strikes me as rather inconsistent, as I'm hard-pressed to think of any criticisms of post-comeback Shawn that wouldn't also apply to Cena.

My mom grew up watching Florida wrestling in the 70s, so she was pretty bummed about the news. She told me about how when she was 16, her German cousin was visiting the States and she took him to whatever the main civic center was in Orlando at the time to see Dusty vs. Ivan Koloff. That must have been quite the shock for someone who, if he watched wrestling at all, was probably used to the likes of Horst Hoffman.

And Christopher Lee. Anyway, the truth of the matter is that I'm far too desensitized when it comes to wrestler deaths for one to have any kind of emotional impact. Still, it's really cool to see all the awesome Dusty promos people have posted in remembrance.

That raises the question of how much you should penalize someone for not having great matches in an environment where no one was having great matches.

I think HBK/Taker HIAC works great as a self-contained match. Shawn gets himself put in a situation where he can't run away from Taker, gets beaten within an inch of his life, connives a way to escape the cell, but he still can't escape Taker's wrath. The problem is that it set a precedent for HIAC matches to be focused on stunt bumps outside the cell rather than brawling inside it. But I don't think it's really fair to blame Shawn for all the lesser workers who took the wrong lessons from his matches. As for the Mania matches, I haven't watched the 26 match since the day it happened, but I think that 25 is as good as the modern WWE Main Event Epic style gets. I think the style as a whole is pretty degenerate, but they had as good a match as you can have while adhering to the tropes of the style.

No wrestler in history consistently had great matches with bad workers, so I don't think it's fair to hold that against Shawn. On the other hand, the transitive property doesn't really work as a means of comparing wrestlers. Some guys just don't have chemistry with each other. Jumbo Tsuruta and Mitsuharu Misawa, two of the greatest wrestlers who ever lived, both struggled to have great matches with Stan Hansen, another all-time great. And Austin's matches with The Rock consistently delivered. I wouldn't use that as an argument that Rock was a better wrestler than Undertaker. I'm honestly not sure which way to go on this. Austin's best blows away Shawn's best, and Austin's worst isn't as bad as Shawn's worst. But the gap between Austin's very best and the next level down is pretty steep, and Shawn has a much higher volume of good-to-great matches.

Tenryu didn't have great matches with everyone under the sun for 20 years. And even if he did, there's a pretty big difference between "great matches" and "the greatest matches of all time."