Jimmy Redman

I'm not ranking Martel at all mate.

I don't think that's the same thing as wanting to stay in NXT because it's better. Plenty of guys have chosen wrestling over managing or announcing even if it might have got them less money or lead them to TNA. Estrada, Riley, Daivari, just off the top of my head. Wrestlers tend to want to wrestle.

You answered your own question there. Also, I like to think that a Pitbull gimmick in NXT is a direct troll on the DVDVR board.

I just feel like if we're judging psychology or good work by how much of it is understood or noticed by the entire audience, we can pretty much throw out like 90% of our analysis, because almost all of the things that we read into matches and workers would fly over the heads of the 99% who aren't us. Just seems a really odd thing to be critical of.

Not even I like the rematch.

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but for me personally, that's exactly it. He's a moves guy, and he's fucking awesome at it. He's probably the guy who's case rests on his pure physical ability the most for me. Certainly the most out of the modern guys. Cesaro is just a guy who will beat you up. There's nothing overly heelish about him, other than the times he busts out a kind of cheesy, Batman villain thing (like vs Zayn). His role is more as a foil, or a base, than an outright antagonist. And I have no problem with that. Not every heel has to be evil. Cesaro's appeal is in what he does physically and how well he does it. He has awesome moves, insane strength spots, can base and fly, throws in old school ground spots, and can brawl with the best of them. He's tough and cool and goofy and mean and talented all at once. Which all adds up to me not really about him having a proper heel character.

I think the only really good one is vs Austin. He is a great bumper though.

If that is true it must be Rock-related. He still has nothing to do officially right?

I've always been down for some WoS but chalk me up as another one who was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the British heavyweights. At this point in time I'm much more intrigued on paper by a random heavyweight match than a lighter weight one. Pat Roach, for example, is a guy who wasn't even on my radar until very recently and I ended up loving him. He'll place well. What I guess I've learned is that I am able to get into and enjoy styles that were previously foreign to me, if I take the time to fully immerse myself in them. Familiarity is the key to unlocking mysterious styles, I just had to keep watching until the point where everything that was unusual about it to me became normal, I accepted all the weird stuff as style conventions and went from there. Lucha, joshi, shoot style and puroresu juniors all come under this umbrella. I'm still slowly unlocking them all, but I can appreciate what I've seen. Like I sort of alluded to just before, when this project began I couldn't envision at that moment ranking any luchador or shoot stylist or joshi worker in, say, my Top 50. Not without going through the evolution I've gone through. They'll all be represented much better than I could have imagined in 2014. Funnily enough I think it's American workers who have suffered most with me, there are a lot of key guys who I either couldn't give the time of day, or who didn't grab me enough in my short perusal enough to continue considering.

I'll most probably be Sheamus' high voter. He's getting stupidly high for me. In terms of WWE Cookie Cutterness, I think his 2012 World Champ run really elevated him to a level beyond the simple "he's had plenty of good but soulless WWE matches" that people seem to place him in. His 2012 was insanely good, and came with not only a slew of good-to-great TV matches basically every week, but also really special, high end matches (vs Bryan, vs Show) and he himself worked as a consummate babyface world champ like almost nobody else has done this century. His ability to get the balance right between dominance and sympathetic selling was so on point, and he worked to hierarchy perfectly, which is something people like Dylan like to cite as a good trait. In particular, it's his arm selling throughout 2012 that impressed me. Bryan worked over the arm during their feud in April/March, but instead of forgetting about it and moving on the week after, Sheamus worked the rest of the year like he had a chronic arm problem. His arm was a genuine weak spot that the random midcarders he'd face on TV could exploit in order to create vulnerability. The only interesting thing about his summer feud with Alberto was the fact that Alberto had the armbreaker and it was a genuine threat to a guy with a bad arm. Even just the simple spot of a guy missing a tackle and running their shoulder into the post suddenly meant something in Sheamus matches, because when it happened it was a legit turning point, and Sheamus was always like "Fuck, not this fucking arm again." And most of the time he'd still overcome this setback and win (he was the babyface world champ after all) but it created the necessary drama in his matches in a really intelligent way. It was the thread that ran through his whole 2012, and again I think is something that really makes him stand out in the age of the WWE assembly line. He's capable of being much more than that.

I love football with all my heart, but it is the most frustrating sport I've ever played. I think it's because the in-game effort-to-reward ratio is so depressingly lopsided.

When I used to talk about GOT episodes I basically recapped everything in wrestling language. So many great heels, heel and face turns, SWERVES, matches, jobbers getting squashed, the works.

No. But Rey is a Top 5 guy, and no luchador is touching that for me when the entire style was unintelligible to me 6 months ago. It's not a fair contest. The fact that I'm considering a luchador for even my Top 30 say, is a huge testament to the impressions Santo and Casas have made on me, because I would not have bet on my doing so at one point.

As the noobiest of the noobs, I have Santo neck and neck with Casas and both substantially higher than Satanico. That's more of an indictment on me than Satanico, because I like Satanico, I just haven't seen much 80s lucha and lucha brawls are tough sells for me. I enjoy him, I just don't see the transcendence (yet). But Santo, on the other hand, I do find transcendent, and immediate.

Very drole Humphrey. Sadly Shelton's Momma won't make my GWE list (soz for the spoilers). If I was making a list of my pure favourite people or things or characters in wrestling, Shelton's Momma would 100% rank above Bret Hart.

I said after listening to the WTBBP podcast that I really cared about...caring about the guys on my list. One of the casualties of that is that Bret keeps slipping further down my list. I like some of his stuff, and appreciate what he brings to the table, but it doesn't really resonate with me and I just can't bring myself to care about Bret. He won't slip too far because I love his best matches, but yeah. He's not one of my guys.

I'm asking this in a cold medicine haze, and more as just something to throw out there. Most of the talk on Shawn has been on his 90s run, since most people are happy to dismiss his 00s run out of hand and acknowledge his Rockers run as good. Well I've watched a fair bit of 90s Shawn lately, and I have to ask people who are down on him, what exactly about his 90s run doesn't hold up? Speaking mainly of his 95-retirement run, since his early midcard heel run is a bit different. But I mean really. It just seems to me that everything that has been pimped as great still holds up as great stuff. Both Razor matches. The Jarrett match. Great Owen matches in 95, 96 and 97. The Mankind match. Davey Boy matches. Vader at Summerslam is great aside from a 5 second tantrum. Bret in Montreal is a great brawl before Montreal happened. The Austin PPV match is a great match nobody ever talks about, plus the tag with Austin. The Undertaker matches. What are the Diesel matches but immense carryjobs of Nash? What are the Sid matches but immense carryjobs of Sid? I think the only real controversial match of this period is the Ironman, since a lot of people have problems with that one (I actually love it, for the record). It feels like to me that the main thing that shifted about Shawn's work during this period is not that it got any worse, but that people branched out of mainstream US wrestling and discovered a lot of people who were great too, and are still discovering them to this day. His 1996, for example, doesn't stand out as such a great year anymore now that we can compare it to the 1996 of people like the Pillars or Hash or Tamura or whoever else. That might mean that it shouldn't stand out, but I also don't think that means that the work is any less good. I feel like Parv talking about Flair now when I say that it's revisionism gorn too far, but that's kind of the impression I get. People talk about Shawn being an asshole or him being a lame babyface in 1996 or whatever, but I don't really see people offering any relevant criticism of his matches. I want to point out as well, that I watched both ladder matches with the weight of every ladder match since in the back of my mind, and yet they still hold up as great and really blow away gimmick matches. I watched the first HIAC with the weight of every HIAC since in the back of my mind, and it still holds up as a great gimmick match spectacle. The idea of Shawn as an innovator of gimmick matches sounds like a line that WWE feeds people, but at the same time it's kind of true and I feel like the way that these gimmick matches hold up even now is pretty impressive. Even things like the Royal Rumble gimmick of holding onto the rope and dangling your feet, that's something else Shawn brought to the table that has been used in every Rumble since. He has an inherent knack of looking at a gimmick match and working it to it's maximum effect. I'll have a lot more to say on post-comeback Shawn, I just wanted to throw that out there as my overall impression of his 90s run. It was really good with a bunch of great matches, some all-time WWE matches, it's a run that holds up watching it now, and I'm not sure what anyone's problem with it really is.

This is why I can't participate in any kind of HOF for matches or Greatest Matches Ever type project. My best matches are my favourite matches, I can't even pretend to objectivity so when I start rating Shelton vs Viscera and Divas matches over Flair vs Steamboat and the like I'll screw the whole thing up and get run out of town.

That last part I disagree on. The time around the Shield matches was the best stretch of matches in Bryan's WWE career I think.

To quote the post Loss mentioned, I think it's good food for thought. I think Matt D is the best example of No. 4. I feel like I am very much a No. 3.

I've never been on board with that complaint. For one thing, Benoit was always presented as a superb technician who had excellent grappling and submission skills. Just because he didn't have real life amateur experience doesn't really change that fact in pro wrestling. For another thing, Angle never really used his amateur skills to school people on the mat, so it would be incongruous for him to suddenly bust it out and for everyone to pretend that he's untouchable on the mat. He'd been very much touched by a fair few guys. Hey-o. I have a massive problem with Shane Fucking McMahon keeping up with Angle on the mat, because Shane was borderline untrained and it was fucking ridiculous. But I have no problem with Angle competing with guys who were portrayed as the very best pro-style trained wrestlers, like Benoit or Shawn or Eddie.

Well I mean I'm being a bit coy here because the match has absolutely nothing to do with Shelton and he could have been replaced with a robot and nothing would have changed. But his name is on the match so he gets the credit I guess. I feel like I have a longer post on this in the future, but the short answer is that this was Shelton's Momma's PPV debut and it's the funniest match I've ever seen.

I want to be clear that I'm saying that as a compliment with zero irony, and the following is definitely one as well. This may be getting into weird tangent territory, but I do love your accent, and after listening to it for hours on end I feel like, I dunno, it's so distinctive that I'll probably start channeling it the next time my Southern accent is called upon. Also, I haven't had a chance to get past the first hour yet, but I do appreciate the shoutouts. If my recommendations and pimping have helped to get someone like Cena so over with someone so curmudgeonly anti-modern as Parv, I feel like half my GWE job was done. The other half was my Shawn case...but hopefully I have more words to spare for him yet.

Actually can I say, one of my favourite things about listening to these shows is that I have heard so many Japanese and Mexican wrestlers' names spoken aloud for the first time by Chad. So when I see these names from now on I'll be reading them in my head in a broad Southern drawl.

Could you name them, Jimmy? The HBK one jumps out - unsure of the others. The Shawn one is my least favourite of the four actually. I said without blinking, but that's the one I'd blink at, but only because I haven't seen it in ages. If I rewatched it and it was fresh in my mind I feel like I'd say yes. That finish goes a long way with me. The others: vs Hunter - Raw 29.3.04 Money in the Bank 1 - WM21 vs Viscera - New Year's Revolution 2006 I'm cheating on my GWE list by thinking about my Top 100 matches list. Procrastination 101.