Jimmy Redman

I said this in another thread recently, and I'm sure it sounds insane to some people but honestly, for me it's Shelton Benjamin. He has four matches that I'd put in my Top 100 without even blinking. I'm pretty sure I can't say that about anyone else I'm not voting for.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I am only so far into it yet but there is a MOMENT in this, and you'll all know exactly what I'm talking about when you get to it, and this moment, I mean God love you Parv, but for anyone who has ever argued with you or your system during this thing, that was just about the greatest payoff spot in pro wrestling history. Five fucking stars.

I'm five minutes into this NXT episode and they just announced three matches (Sami/Shinsuke, AA #1 contenders match, Bayley and Asuka teaming) that made me positively pee myself with excitement. Meanwhile I feel absolutely nothing for any match on the Mania card. It's just mind boggling that WWE and NXT belong to the same company. UPDATE: The first minute of the girls tag was amazing. Nia knocks Bayley down, tags Eva in and holds Bayley's arms back for Eva to hit her. Eva tags in and takes her sweet ass time playing to the crowd and twirling around that Nia is eventually like "Fuck it! She's beyond help!" and has to let go of Bayley and get out of the ring. Eva finally turns around and the newly-freed Bayley takes her down and goes to work on her. It was like the most gloriously glorious piece of wrestling incompetency ever. It may be meta as fuck but a thousand stars to whoever thought to work Eva's matches like this. Every single thing she does in the ring is so incompetent and stupid, and everything Nia does in the ring are things she has to do because she has to work for three people due to Eva having the talent of minus one wrestlers, and if she left anything up to Eva they'd be completely annihilated. I love how the first time Eva slapped Asuka, Asuka smiled, but the second time Eva slapped Asuka, Asuka had this really blank, kind of bewildered look on her face, like she had trouble believing that anyone could possibly make it to the age of 31 when they're that unutterably, incurably dumb. Even after witnessing the way that Eva began the match. I love everything.

Dark Angel is Sarah Stock is Sarita right? I enjoyed her in TNA from memory, don't think I've seen anything else of hers.

I think Miz is another guy who I'd class in the "if it was Top 150 I'd have nominated him" pile. Guys like that include Swagger, Drew Mac, MVP, Shelton Benjamin. Shelton actually is someone I seriously considered nominating and now regret not doing so. Not that I really would have voted for him I don't think, but just to have the thread and make a case for him. He's in like at least four of my absolute favourite matches of all time, Top 100 stuff, and he also had a really good TV run on Smackdown in 2008 when nobody was looking. I'd put him in a Top 150 for sure for those highs. I'd have also considered girls like Awesome Kong, Victoria, Mickie James, Ayako Hamada, Gail Kim, Melina, Beth Phoenix. Fuck it even Michelle and Layla. Jesus, I'm now getting more excited about my hypothetical 101-150 than I am about finishing my ballot.

Never thought to ask but you rate Trish over Molly? Yeah definitely. Molly I like, don't get me wrong, it says more about how much I like Trish than that I don't like Molly. Molly was good. But I think Trish was much, much better at being a heel, better at being a face, better at projecting character and story in her matches, and had better matches. I think the only thing Molly really has over Trish is mechanics. As an almost aside, I think she gets a bit of a pass with people because she's not a model and is from that early 00s period and thus the instinct is to think she's better than any good looking blonde sheilas who followed, but if I did a deep dive on them I'm not sure that I'd take her body of work over, say, Melina's or Mickie's or even Michelle McCool's. Tiffany and Kelly have higher highs. But on the surface that kind of talk sounds ridiculous, because Tiffany was hired out of a catalogue and Kelly can't run the ropes and what not. Anyway I don't mean to diss Molly because I like her a lot. Sometimes I feel like watching every Divas match ever and Ranking the Female Workers like OJ has with Europe.

I think the point is that it was jarring to have Jericho be so vehemently anti-Canada when his opponent is someone who's identity is so tied to being American. The Canadian nationalism they just built up in the audience is wasted on him. It would have been more effective if his opponent was someone Canadian, or at least someone geo-politically neutral. I don't think anyone was seriously suggesting that Swagger was coming out to defend Canada. Just that he was an odd choice of opponent under the circumstances.

Same, but with Rey one spot higher.

I think if it had been a Top 150, I would have nominated more women. I am all about the US girls but couldn't really justify anyone beyond Trish with only 100 spots, and I don't have much knowledge of the indy-only girls.

It comes up in the AJPW classics as well.

It's not exactly grand psychology, but it is...cerebral, I guess. And it's something I really, really enjoy and appreciate when I see it, and I couldn't care less if I'm the only one who sees it. That's everyone else's problem, not mine. And sometimes it is very obvious to their audience. The Cena/Punk matches, for example, were based around the idea and they got people to bite every time they countered or switched up a spot.

This is what I'm trying to say a lot of the time, so thank you.

just came in here to say exactly this it was such a huge concept among that crowd that you eventually had people using it to describe shit like Kelly Kelly matches The Kelly Kelly vs Beth Phoenix series did actually build upon itself quite well.

I think there's something to be said for the fact that we all feel like we have a good grasp of Flair's philosophy as a worker from what he's said over the years, and so knowing that it's hard to give him the kind of...benefit of the doubt when it comes to thought process and motives. Like, when we evaluate someone else and see some sort of deep psychological thread or "smart" work in their matches, we generally feel comfortable attributing it to the worker as something they've orchestrated. But really, we usually don't know exactly what they were thinking when they were working, and they could have deliberately done it just as easily as they could have been winging it and trying to pop the crowd. But we give them the benefit of the doubt because we see it as smart work, so we'd like to credit them for it to make a case for them. With Flair, we know from the man himself that his approach was to get his shit in and pop the crowd, so it's harder to attribute some kind of deep thought to his moves in a match. He gets no benefit of the doubt because we know better. Like, if Kofi Kingston had done numerous interviews saying that he only did shit to pop the crowd and get his shit in and wasn't thinking deeply about building each match from the next and what not, and everybody knew this about him, I would find it a lot harder to argue for him doing that in his thread. Or if I did, it would be in a "lucky he stumbled onto this multi-match arc" way. Or you'd maybe attribute it to his opponent. But it's hard to give him that credit if you've heard from the horse's mouth that he wasn't trying to be smart at all. I think people react to Ric that way now. If we had never heard a peep about his working approach from him, we'd be a lot quicker to give him credit for the smart things that happen in his matches, the same way we are with other workers that we simply don't hear from.

Like Matt said, it's particularly symptomatic of modern day WWE, mainly because modern WWE is the land of endless rematches and so much damn TV, so two guys can often have multiple matches in a short space of time (whether in a PPV series, or a TV feud, or just a "we have nothing for you so here, have a match on Raw, and Smackdown, and Superstars, and Raw again") and so creativity and "learned psychology" is necessary to differentiate the matches and make them interesting and compelling. To bring it back to Kofi, I found the Swagger matches particularly impressive because there was no feud, it was just that they were both in the SD midcard and thus wrestled each other every so often. They could have easily just painted by numbers and been done with it, but they took the time to really think about their matches and their history and be as creative as possible, for the betterment of their matches. I may have been the only one paying attention, but I appreciated it.

To try to answer it better, it's when a wrestler appears to "learn" from a previous match or matches with an opponent by coming up with counters to their moves, counters to the counters they made to my own moves, and generally acting like they remember the previous matches and are trying to learn from them. Thus, matches build upon one another in a series. You'd sort of need to watch an entire series of matches to really see it. Good examples are the Cena vs Punk matches, the Orton vs Christian matches in 2011, and in this particular case, Kofi vs Swagger matches from 2010. To me it's a way in which wrestlers can treat wrestling like a sport, without necessarily being physically realistic. Kofi Kingston is goofy as shit and has ridiculous looking offense, but when he faced Swagger two weeks in a row, in match #2 he had counters or an answer for things that Swagger hit him with in match #1. It's like Kofi (in kayfabe) sat down during the week, watched the first match and thought "If I got caught in that situation again, how could I get out of it?" And thus had a game plan for when they met again. I like that in a wrestler. I can look at a match and go into detail on specific moves if you like, but that's the general idea.

I guess the only one I'd feel strongly about is #2. I am very pro-619, for starters. In fact you can pretty much sum up the differences between our respective tastes with how we each feel about Rey Mysterio. But in general, I mean I don't think I love exhibitionism all that much, but spectacle and flippydoes, sure, I love that shit. Wrestling is a spectacle to me, and if that involves doing things that are ridiculous or not really realistic looking, so be it. I love Rey, I love Kofi, I love AJ Styles, I love dive trains, I love a certain level of flippydoes. I'd like to note though, that this doesn't mean I don't also love effective offense or realistic moves or whatever else you'd consider to be opposite to flippydoes. It's not a zero sum game to me. I love both. I love anything as long as it's good. That's what I mean when I say I can't nail down a set criteria. I could try to do what you do above and say "I love this, this, that, that, not this, not that" and end up listing a lot of things that would sound contradictory, and not really be able to say anything without the caveat that there are many exceptions where I don't like/dislike it. Because it all depends, depends on context, and really just depends on whether or not I like it, for reasons that are literally undefinable to me.

Thought you'd like that one.

Sure. Like, I'm not going to entirely love everyone on my list because I'm still going to rank a guy like Hunter, whom I hate a lot of the time. BUT the key for me is that there are times when I absolutely love him as well. When I look back at things like the Taker matches and read what I said about them at the time, I remember the feeling and remember all of the things that someone like Hunter is capable of when he's good. So I'm just choosing to focus on that and ignore how much he shits me when he's not doing good work. I'm kind of like you in that my "system" doesn't factor in negatives. I'm focusing on the positives when I rank people. In practical terms I think it just means that as I finish the end of my ballot, I'm going to end up going for guys that I really, truly care about. I think I'd regret ranking a guy who I see as like a good worker but have no strong feelings about (or that I dislike) above someone whom I can really get excited about their case. The difference between Ted DiBiase and Kofi Kingston, basically.

LA Park is one of those guys who just hits the wrestling sweet spot. He's such a great idea, and so good at being La Parka (or LA Park) that he can go anywhere and do anything and be endlessly watchable. Do I want to watch him stooging through a mid-90s AAA trios? Yes! Do I want to watch him in a 6 minute Nitro match? Yes! Do I want to watch him having a crazy, bloody, mask ripping, chair throwing brawl for his very name? Yes! Do I want to watch him get squashed by Goldberg in 13 seconds? Yes! Do I want to watch him throwing down with Santo? Yes! Do I want to watch him do his dance and then turn around and eat it? A thousand times yes! He's one of the few guys who can get me into big lucha brawls, which is no small achievement. His is a name that is bound to peak my curiosity when it pops up on Youtube or whatever. That man just gets me going. Between him and Psicosis I apparently have another type, so if anyone wants to throw any more solidly built rudos who bump and stooge in wacky outfits my way, I'll be sure to invite you to the wedding.

This show was a blast and got me through 2 hours of mould scrubbing, so kudos for that. One thing I feel I should say is that you mentioned not knowing how younger people are on Tully since he hasn't been talked about much, but I am pretty high on Tully and he'll do well on my list. Higher than yours, in fact. So there's one. My other main takeaway is from early on in the show when Parv asked "Do you love everyone on your list Chad?" And it became clear as it went on and certain people were discussed that the answer was no, particularly for Parv given the nature of his system. I kept thinking about that every time a name would come up that Parv would just sigh at, and it made me realise that for me personally, when it comes down to it, I DO want to love everyone on my list. Wrestling is a labour of love for me, and the most fun I've had during this project has been talking about guys I truly love like Cena, Rey, Sheamus, even Kofi Kingston, or in discovering new people I can get excited about, like Akira Hokuto or Mark Rocco. I don't want to put anyone on my list where if I was doing a podcast, I'd sigh when their name came up. That really wouldn't be true to who I am as a wrestling fan.

By that point the attempts to make Angle a "heel" were basically parody. They had him do all this outlandish, clearly out of character stuff like the anti-troops stuff and Daivari and "I'd make Jesus tap" and shit, and it all came off as laughable rather than legitimate attempts to get heat. They even had Angle admit after he said those things that he was just saying whatever bullshit he wanted because he knew the crowd wouldn't boo him anyway. I'm not sure if there actually was a way to play Angle in late 2005 that would have got him real heel heat against Cena because at that point in time crowds were vociferously rejecting him as a "bad wrestler" and putting him up against Olympic wrestler, smarks wet dream Angle was never going to get him cheered no matter what. But yeah I agree it wasn't like Angle wasn't willing to heel it up. I think there's something to be said for structuring Cena's matches better in 2005, because he tended to be treated like he was a useless lug. They had him sell for 90% of the match into a super quick comeback-win finish, which reinforced all of the stereotypes about him not being able to wrestle.

I did my tag team list today just for something to do.

I thought the crowd was kind of dead by Full Sail standards. Like, distractingly so.