NintendoLogic

Right. I never meant to imply otherwise. Flair's matches are samey in the sense that AC/DC's songs are samey. That doesn't mean there aren't differences between them. And what I'm getting at is that Flair's matches frequently deviated from that core. Like you said in the psychology thread, "Wrestling that makes sense is good wrestling." And a lot of what Flair did didn't make sense.

I don't see how this is true at all. It is one thing to say the nature of wrestling encouraged less variation/experimentation in earlier eras. It is not the same as saying "well those matches may not be good now, but they seemed good to people at the time." At this point, even Flair's most ardent defenders acknowledge his weaknesses in psychology and storytelling, but they note that he had fundamentally different ideas of what he was trying to accomplish in a match than, say, Bret Hart. That's closer to wrestling relativism than wrestling universalism, for lack of better terms.

I'm not interested in getting into a semantic debate, so I'll just note that you defended the way Flair worked by noting that his schedule as NWA Champion didn't afford him the opportunity to scout his opponents and mix it up. I completely agree with that, but I would submit that that argument is closer to "matches of past eras can't be judged by standards that didn't apply in that era" than "the fundamental elements that make a match great don't change."

That's the thing. If you look at Flair's individual matches in isolation, they're fine. It's when you look at a bunch of them together that they they start to have a samey feel and you start to notice his tendency to shoehorn in his signature spots. You know this. You discussed it in great detail in the Flair formula thread. As for that poll, I'm pretty surprised that Dave didn't include Manami Toyota considering how much he's pimped her as a GOAT candidate.

In his most recent book, Jericho readily admits that he had no real understanding of psychology before coming to the WWF and basically being trained from scratch by Pat Patterson.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but isn't Ric Flair the obvious counterexample to this argument? He's readily admitted that his matches don't really make sense when looked at in the aggregate. As such, they're not really timeless the way something like Baba/Destroyer is. But he's considered great because of the context in which he worked.

I just realized that the dude who gave Takada flowers before his match with Vader was none other than Yngwie Malmsteen! Unleash the fucking fury!

PROTIP: If you're going to C/P something, put the C/P'ed portion in italics or quotation marks or something so they can be readily distinguished from your own words.

Having good matches with Punk, Christian, and Henry hardly qualifies you as a superworker.

I think Randy Orton is a far less justifiable inclusion.

You know what, I'll go there. Davey Richards?

It's actually pretty funny to see him repost his old rants and be all "Wow, was I a dumbass or what?" in the annotations. If I can change and you can change...

I don't like celebrities being involved in Diva matches. The Divas are largely worthless in the ring, but they're still on the road all year busting their asses for relative peanuts. I don't begrudge them the opportunity for a Wrestlemania payday.

Didn't AJW have a bit of a size fetish? Manami Toyota and Akira Hokuto are 5-6, which is pretty freaking huge for a Japanese woman. I suppose Hokuto vs pre-roids Rey would be a plausible matchup.

If it's a legal wrestling move, how is it not wrestling? I'll admit that my views on this front might be a bit idiosyncratic. I've been playing Street Fighter competitively off and on for over a decade, and the viewpoint in the SF community is that playing to win is paramount and anything other than things like game-breaking glitches is fair game. So I have an instinctive disdain of self-imposed limitations to avoid appearing cheap or dishonorable. Here's a more detailed explanation: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/intermediates-guide.html On a related note, I've been watching a fair amount of World of Sport lately. Specifically, I've been watching a lot of Marty Jones on OJ's recommendation, and it seems like every one of his matches ends up degenerating into a brawl. After a while, I was like "Dude, if you're going to end up throwing forearms every single time, why not just do it from the get-go?" Yes, it happens a lot in old-school NWA too. But there are exceptions. To take two examples, Baba/Robinson and Jumbo/Brisco are largely mat-based, but they also have strong storytelling. I haven't really seen a lot of that in lucha. Every chain wrestling sequence might have a clear winner, but it hardly ever leads to a sustained advantage. Instead, the match resets and they start from scratch when they lock up again.

I did not want to touch that one... John I always thought they looked fine. Hey, there's a thread idea: one in which we go into super-detailed discussion of strikes, and what makes them "look good" and why. That rarely gets discussed, it usually goes no deeper than "Lawler has better punches than anyone else on the WWE roster" which, while true, isn't very helpful for explaining exactly how that is so. Yeah, I sometimes wonder what exactly separates good strikes from bad ones. Like, Shawn Michaels apparently has the worst chops ever even though they always looked fine to me. I've also heard people say that Bret Hart's punches sucked because he stomped his foot when he threw them even though Lawler did the same thing.

Exactly this. Akira Hokuto is clearly a better wrestler than The Great Khali, but I wouldn't book her to beat him in a match.

I watched that minis trios match for the first time last night, and I hated it. As far as I could tell, it was just a mindless spotfest. The only part I liked was the comedy spot where I think Damiancito's teammates got pissed at him for accidentally knocking them off the apron. Since Jerry brought it up, I have some issues with the title match style as well. First of all, I'm philosophically opposed to doing matwork just for the sake of doing matwork. Like, why would you take someone down to the mat when you can just sock him in the jaw? Beyond that, the "creativity" that Loss spoke of is actually a minus for me. Every title match I've seen has at least one hold that absolutely could not be applied if the other guy was putting up even token resistance. Daniel (the aforementioned katakana man) summed up my feelings on the matter when he said that too much of lucha matwork boils down to "here's my wacky show hold, now it's your turn to do your wacky show hold." But the biggest problem I have is that the matwork rarely plays into the finish. It seems like the finish (at least in the first fall, which is usually the only one that's matwork-intensive) comes when one guy misses a move and the other guy gets an instant tap-out or does a majistral cradle or something. All the preceding mat sequences may as well have never even happened. I don't care how beautiful or creative something is. If it isn't going to lead to anything, it isn't worth 10 or 15 minutes of my time. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate and enjoy the very best of the style, like Dandy/Casas and Satanico/Cochisse, for what they are. But I have to be in the right mood. By contrast, Hansen/Kobashi is something I can always plug in and be guaranteed to mark out.

Chun-Li can shoot fireballs from her hands and do a hundred kicks in less than a second. Comparisons to video games and comic books are somewhat inapt because wrestlers don't inhabit a world where people are capable of superhuman feats. Yes, Undertaker and Kane can summon fire and lightning, but they don't do it in matches. I can kind of get this since that's how I feel about deathmatch wrestling. I simply don't enjoy watching that level of violence. On a certain level, I can recognize that Kudo/Toyoda is a great match. But I can't really endorse something that makes me physically ill when I watch it.

I'd say it's more like not wanting to see The Dark Knight because Batman & Robin sucked. I agree that Toyota-style sprint matches are virtually unwatchable. But Hokuto/Kandori is about as far removed from that as you can get. It's also a legit contender for greatest match of all time. I think it'd be a shame if someone didn't give it a chance because of preconceived notions of what women's wrestling is like. I guess I just have a different perspective. For me, sitting through a wrestling match, even a bad one, isn't much of a chore. If a match sucks, so what? It's not like you ever have to watch it again. Since everything's on Youtube now, you haven't lost anything but 20 or so minutes of your time. And if a match is great, you have a new source of enjoyment.

Just to be clear, what I meant that by that is that joshi encompasses pretty much every style imaginable, so if you can't find at least some stuff that you like, there might be some deeper issues at work.

I've actually been thinking about starting a general "X for people who don't get X" thread for a while now. I even specifically planned on addressing lucha and joshi. Anyway, I don't know how much worth my recommendations have since I'm hardly a lucha superfan, but I find that stipulation match brawls are the easiest to get into since they're about as straightforward as can be. Something like Santo/Espanto would probably be a good starting point.

I like lucha brawls, but they tend to run together for me, so I generally don't have strong feelings about one over another. And Che/Terry had the added problem of being overbooked to shit.

I've seen your top three lucha matches. I thought Okada/Naito was significantly better than all of them.

I'm not sure I believe that. I used to. But I think WWE main event style is FAR easier to have good matches in than any other main event style. I am more impressed by a guy who can work ten good tv matches, with ten different guys, none of them getting more than ten minutes than I am by a guy that goes 1/4 or even 2/4 in terms of delivering quality, lengthy, "big show" matches. But is WWE main event style easier to have good matches in than WWE undercard style?