NintendoLogic

That's where I stopped reading. Shoemaker is even more insufferable than usual in that piece.

The Stunners weren't Austin's idea. They were booked by Jarrett's buddy Vince Russo so he could then claim that Austin owed Jarrett. Austin still refused on the grounds that Jarrett wasn't a main event level talent, and Vince McMahon and Jim Ross agreed.

I wish Dylan would go back to his old avatar. When I read people's posts, I tend to imagine them speaking through their avatars (Loss as Flair, jdw as Kawada, Jerry as Sean Mooney, etc.). I'd rather visualize Dylan as Terry Funk than Frenchy Martin.

But it is the best Jarrett match ever. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure it'd be in Shawn's top ten. Anyway, in no particular order, I'd go with Flair, Funk, Bret (he's a US citizen, so I'm counting him), Eddy, Hansen, Lawler, Vader, Steamboat, Austin, and HBK.

When I wrote in the Flair/Bret thread that the NWA touring champ style sucked, I was thinking mainly of Race.

The elbow put down Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania. It's a perfectly legitimate finisher. And he had already hit Punk with two Rock Bottoms at that point.

I don't see Rock as someone who got favors from the boss. There was a clear miscarriage of justice. Vince wanted to enforce the letter of the law, but Rock insisted on having a clear winner and loser, thus running the risk of him leaving empty-handed and Punk getting away scot-free. That's a classic babyface move. I also don't see how the triple powerbomb wasn't protected. Punk pinned Rock 1-2-3 after taking forever to roll him into the ring. That's HHH-pinning-Booker levels of protection. Were you expecting Rock to do a stretcher job? Again, though, I suspect that this is a way to hold the title up and have Rock try to win it again at Elimination Chamber. My initial thought was that if they wanted to prolong Rock's title chase, they should've just had Punk retain by whatever means. But I suppose they wanted to send the fans home happy while still screwing them over in the long run.

There is no universally agreed-upon set of criteria, so subjectivity is inevitable. Which is like I'd like to move away from speculation about people's motivations. Are people going to favor criteria that cast their favorites in the best possible light? Probably. But it's not really relevant whether you first decide what's important and then see who best fits the bill or work your way backwards to stack the deck in favor of the guys you like. As long as you're open about the standards you use and apply them consistently, I don't see the problem.

Rock won after a restart against Chris Benoit at Fully Loaded 2000, but it was with a Rock Bottom.

First two matches were both solid. The tendency to give creative finishes to matches that are supposed to be feud-enders will never not piss me off, though. The Rumble was a lot better than last year's. Much less dead weight, much less reliance on comedy and nostalgia pops. The Bo/Wade segment sucked, though. It's one of those things that makes both guys look like shit. Rock/Punk was definitely better than Rock/Cena. It was an especially miraculous performance from Punk considering that Rock looked as blown up as Bulldog at Wembley. If the ending was so they could run an angle where they hold the title up and hopefully draw a bigger buyrate for Elimination Chamber, I'd rather they just have Punk retain. Overall, there was nothing earth-shattering, but everything was at least decent, so it's an easy thumbs-up.

From where I sit, I see a lot more unprovoked derisiveness from New Japan haters than unprovoked defensiveness from New Japan fans.

I have to say that I find Loss' argument far more persuasive, to the point where I would now rate Flair above Funk on a GOAT list. So this discussion has served a purpose.

I agree that psychology is more important than execution. But psychology can be taught. Worst case scenario, someone can lay matches out for you. But if you don't possess the requisite athletic ability to physically perform in a match, there's nothing that can be done. Look at Giant Baba. He "got" wrestling arguably as well as anyone who ever lived. But once he went downhill athletically, he relegated himself to comedy matches. And since we're talking about post-prime Terry Funk, remember that the guy was doing moonsaults in his fifties. He may not have been the athlete he was in his thirties, but he was objectively very impressive.

The problem with this is that I think it misinterprets what wrestling is. If you're saying that someone should be able to compensate for diminished athleticism by working smarter, you're assuming that wrestling is mainly a mental activity. But it's mainly a physical one. With that said, I wouldn't discount matches after one's prime entirely, but I view them as roughly equivalent to bonus questions on a test. They can't count against you, only for you. But I wouldn't take them into account for head-to-head comparison purposes unless I thought their primes were close to equal.

OJ. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?show...p;#entry5530949

I'm pretty sure the Sun City part of Phil's review was a joking reference to the protest song by Steven Van Zandt. I haven't seen anything stating where that Regal match took place, but Tiger Dalibar Singh and Gama Singh drew several big houses in Durban, so if it's a match in South Africa where an Indian guy is the ethnic babyface, that's probably where it took place.

I thought the handspring elbow counter was more of an uranage than a release German. Regardless, I'll echo the praise for this match. Vader totally looked like WCW Vader, and Mutoh was kind of foreshadowing Hansen/Kobashi with all the pin attempts he was going for at the end. Mutoh's no-selling comebacks were pretty annoying, but this was great otherwise.

We're in agreement about Hash/Ogawa being a disaster, so let's move on. That's not how the formula works. Look at your own post about the Bruno/Backlund formula. The first match ends with the babyface getting DQed after losing his temper or the match getting stopped due to blood loss or some other schmoz. The babyface doesn't get a decisive win until the blowoff. If it were a standard match and Cena had to resort to hitting Lesnar with a chain while the ref was down, that might work. But it was a no-DQ match. Within the context of the stipulation, Cena's win was perfectly clean.

I had planned on responding to SLL's last post, but recent events have rendered a response superfluous. If you want to know what going out of your way to not protect someone looks like, look no further than Dolph Ziggler's current booking. Anyway, tomk with the run-in: We've already been over this. To make this argument, you picked an arbitrary starting point that omits Cena's year-plus reign and his earlier 280-day reign. Not to mention that in 2012, Cena was in the main event of every PPV where he was on the card despite holding the world title for exactly zero days during that period. Divorcing the ace from the world title doesn't constitute not protecting the ace. Unforgiven wasn't supposed to be the blowoff. They were clearly building toward Orton taking the title from Cena at No Mercy, but Cena got injured.

Dropping stuff from one's repertoire while not adding anything new does not constitute reinventing oneself.

My take on Regal is that he's absolutely outstanding at the little things that add spice to a match. But he's not nearly as good at the big picture type stuff, so the whole tends to be less than the sum of its parts. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single Regal match that was really strong from a storytelling standpoint. Also, someone needs to tell Phil that Durban, South Africa has a huge Indian population. In fact, it's the largest of any city outside of India.

From the F4W Raw report: JBL said a while back that the key to being a bad guy is to have no redeeming qualities and not do anything that could be perceived as cool. So burying heels for being geeks doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to get JBL over.

My first post was probably unnecessarily harsh, so I apologize for that. Still, while Jerry is willing to make arguments for the guys he likes, he seems to struggle with following those arguments to their logical conclusions and tends to shy away from addressing the strongest objections. That's what gives me the impression that they're not entirely thought out.

Hash/Ogawa did ratings that were objectively great. Russo may have produced a slight uptick in ratings (though that was probably more due to Nitro going from three hours to two), but they were still nowhere close to parity with the WWF. That's great and all, but it doesn't answer the question of who in New Japan was so big that it would have undermined the storyline of Kawada as invader. Also, just out of curiosity, how tall do you think Kawada and Sasaki really are? By who? Where in the formula does Bruno or Backlund get a pinfall victory in the first match? Other than special cases like the heel getting an automatic rematch after losing the title, the babyface getting the 1-2-3 ends the feud. Why would you? Cena won. There's nothing left to settle.

The problem is that Jerry operates under the assumption that the guys he marked out for as a kid are the end-all be-all of wrestling and works his way backward to whatever argument he thinks will lead to that conclusion.