W2BTD

KENTA, Danielson/Bryan, Tanahashi will almost surely be in my Top 10. Just by taking the temperature in the threads and on the site in general I doubt anyone else will have Tiger Mask & Dynamite Kid top 20 or higher. Davey Richards could possibly crack my list, and I suspect I'd be the only one to rank him. Same for Gedo, but neither are any sort of lock. And of course, Satoshi Kojima. Probably won't make most of the lists, and he'll likely be in my upper half. I might be the lone vote for tons of other random guys like Mike Awesome, Stevie Richards, Kenichiro Arai, Go Shiozaki, Bobby Fish, Eddie Edwards, Terry Taylor, if they end up making it.

I had Tanahashi #25 on a Top 100 list I did in 2011. He was already pretty great by then.

Bumping because i'm interested in hearing some thoughts on Tanahashi after what to me was his best overall G1 to date, including the best Tanahashi/Nakamura match to date. He had 6-7 legitimately great bouts, half of which were MOTY contenders, and the most impressive thing about it was that nearly every match was very different structure wise. The last month may have been the best run of his already HOF career.

Does "ROHrific" mean "super fun", because that's what the Ishii match was. Two bowling ball shaped pit bulls mauling each other. It was fantastic. Elgin arguably carried Yujiro to his best match, then had a bordeline 4-star bout vs YOSHI-HASHI of all people on the final night, which was easily the best singles match of YH's career. The Elgin/Honma match wasn't the best match of the tour, but might have been the most fun. I thought Elgin was being guided along early in the tour, and he probably was, and he was in a block with good, smart veteran hands like Kojima & Nagata, but by the end of the tour Elgin was more than holding his own and in some cases carrying matches. There was a tag match involving a couple of young lions & Yujiro where Big Mike basically held the entire thing together. In a world where Tanahashi wasn't beyond brilliant, you could make a realistic case that Elgin was the most impressive worker on the tour (although with a gun to my head, i'd still choose a few others).

I should note that Wild Bill would be #1 on my list of in match trash talking. The man was a master of his craft.

That's... a lot of wrestlers. I'll take a shot at tiers, then maybe come back and attempt a proper ranking. I'll do it without thinking very hard about it at first, going off of first instinct and who I enjoy watching more in general. Tier 1 Pillman Smothers Jarrett Armstrong Poffo Candido Taylor Landel Pillman might be the worst of the bunch, I suspect he'll fall lower than the rest if/when I rank them, and he might even belong on Tier 2. I'm way higher on Armstrong & Poffo than most people, I think both are criminally underrated. Terry Taylor is the best wrestler on the entire list. Come to think of it, i'm probably higher on him than most people, too. Tier 2 Pritchard Fulton Gilbert Keirn Lane Slater Irwin Rich Maybe swap Pritchard with Pillman. Comfortable with the rest being a tier below my top tier. Tier 3 Roberts Gibson Travis Parsons Embry Mantell Fuller* Haven't seen a ton of prime Fuller, so I can only go off what I've seen. Probably would be fair to say the same about Roberts, but I saw all of the World Class stuff and he never impressed me at all and came off like "just a guy". Never "got" Embry, but that should shock no one who understands my taste. The rest are fine, but below the other tiers imo. Tier 4 Tatum. He's terrible. Cant stand him. Go away heat.

I would have had Naito beat Doc and then lose to Tenzan to knock him out. The Tenzan loss was set up at the presser with Naito disrespecting him right on through during the match. It was pretty much a given Tenzan was beating him. The Doc loss is a head scratcher, but at the end of the day nobody is going to remember it in a month. All anybody is ever going to remember about Naito from this G1 is how he broke out with a new gimmick and beat Tanahashi, AJ, & Ibushi. The only loss that was really stupid was Honman losing to Yujiro. Once Honma finally won the big one, I don't see the point of losing to Yujiro. Had Honma not beaten Ishii, I wouldn't care.

Naito, Goto, & Shibata have come out of this tour far stronger than they entered it. People make way too much of random losses in a league and lose sight of the big picture sometimes.

He won New Japan Cup and had an IWGP title shot earlier this year, so there wasn't a pressing need to push him hard here. I agree he could have won another match or two, but his performances, especially early on, were MVP caliber.

One match to set up the break up, and then a few matches in Europe, where presumably the break up hadn't aired yet.

Sammy G didn't have anything to do with the NWA, he had nuclear (and I mean NUCLEAR) heat for saying he was glad a River City Wrestling fan was dead (it was a mentally disabled guy too, to make things worse), all over some beef he had with the promotion, so basically every promotion in Texas, even ones like Inspire that have heat with RCW, pretty much blacklisted him. Sammy is a tremendous talent who is wildly immature. Dalton isn't an NWA guy, either. Inspire pulling out of the NWA was only a matter of time once Tharpe & Ronquillo split. Biss always dealt with Ronquillo. Inspire really only was part of the NWA because they wanted to book the women's title out of their office, which they were controlilng for a short time. They weren't interested in booking the other champions. Anyway, NWA BOW out of San Antonio is running a show in Austin next month, and that was the last straw for Inspire, because neither Tharpe nor Jax Dane (who runs BOW) asked Inspire if it was cool to run Austin. Inspire felt that as affiliates, it would have been the right thing to do if they wanted to run their city.

LOL, well there you go. Safe to say I would have been annoyed.

Love Dalton and love Starks. Haven't been able to go to Inspire in about 6 months or so due to work, and this is the first match i'm gutted about missing. How was it? As good as Dalton is, his ceiling is clearly as an indie guy with his size/look, but I think Starks will eventually end up in NXT if he sticks with it.

Right. They teamed some before that, but The Hollywood Blondes gimmick that everybody remembers was probably less than 50 matches total.

These are two guys I really like, both very underrated imo, and while this was technically sound and well worked, I thought it was pretty boring.

I'd set the over/under of total Speed Muscle matches that Bill has seen at 1.

What do you want me to say man? I think they're terrible in every possible way. Spotty no selling bullshit from bell to bell that drives me nuts. Terrible tag match structure with little to no meaning behind moves and such. You get the point... Shit people say. Especially in this case. Moving fast doesn't equal lack of structure or meaning. Legit question, how many Speed Muscle matches have you seen? I'm guessing very few, because I don't buy that you are sitting around watching random 2009 DG Infinity episodes, and your complaints don't really correlate with their better matches, which do not lack structure or meaning behind what is being done. "Ugh, no." isn't a response that flies on this forum, and you know that. Shame on you. Imagine if I pulled that routine in the Dundee/Lawler thread. InYourCase was right for calling you out, man. If that was all you had to contribute, you were probably better off not posting in this thread. If you want to bury them, break down some specifics or pick a match and bury them That's rich coming from someone who routinely criticizes matches with the laziest critique possible, "it's so boring." And then offers nothing else of any substance besides said lazy critique. I offered more thoughts after Case prodded for more, and they are legitimate thoughts. I don't need to offer specifics on any match because I've found them to be universal in just about every of the 20 or so tag matches I've seen from Yoshino/Doi. They are representative of the greater Dragon Gate style; all flash and no substance. They run through spots just so they can get to the next spot. They sell in the moment but ignore said selling when it comes time to move to the next spot. There isn't any tag structure to their matches, rather a collection of spots that exist as some sort of blob of a tag match. It's all such shit and it's all they know how to do. Look man, I don't care whether you like the tag team or don't like the tag team, but I have to call bullshit on the "20 or so tag matches" you've supposedly seen from Yoshino/Doi. I'm not even sure I'VE seen 20 of their matches, and i'm an avid DG watcher & fan. They have roughly 40 matches that have made tape, half of which are hard to find bouts from 2005-2008 that I seriously doubt you tape traded/downloaded and watched in real time, plus two short bouts from TNA. As someone who admittedly HATES Dragon Gate, and with how hard it is to find the early stuff, I find it extremely hard to believe that you've done the kind of leg work to seek out hard to find stuff in a style you hate to have seen roughly half of their available matches. That, combined with your common stereotypical description of a Dragon Gate match above, when the Speed Muscle team very often worked traditionally structured tag bouts, leads me to believe that you are completely full of shit here. You review matches in multiple places. Do you have any write ups of Speed Muscle, a team you apparently actively seek out enough to have seen half of their bouts, even though you think they're terrible, readily available?

Maybe the most misused piece of talent of all time. I realize we're in the era of most guys working two TV matches per week, so maybe i'm being far too romantic of a long gone era, but we should still be able to count all of his singles losses on two hands tops. He's a 7ft 500 pound "just a guy".

What do you want me to say man? I think they're terrible in every possible way. Spotty no selling bullshit from bell to bell that drives me nuts. Terrible tag match structure with little to no meaning behind moves and such. You get the point... Shit people say. Especially in this case. Moving fast doesn't equal lack of structure or meaning. Legit question, how many Speed Muscle matches have you seen? I'm guessing very few, because I don't buy that you are sitting around watching random 2009 DG Infinity episodes, and your complaints don't really correlate with their better matches, which do not lack structure or meaning behind what is being done. "Ugh, no." isn't a response that flies on this forum, and you know that. Shame on you. Imagine if I pulled that routine in the Dundee/Lawler thread. InYourCase was right for calling you out, man. If that was all you had to contribute, you were probably better off not posting in this thread. If you want to bury them, break down some specifics or pick a match and bury them

Sure. And any & all positive contributions are feathers in the cap of a resume, regardless of age. But to me, when a guy is clearly washed up, whether he's 42, 52, 62 when it happens, I have a hard time counting it against him all that much. I do think funkdoc makes a valid point that in the case of Piper, he was still being pushed hard, so yeah, I can see people counting the WCW run as a negative if they thought it was bad. With that said, I look at late Misawa (or Kobashi, for that matter), where he could barely move, and none of that stuff means a thing to me, and he was pushed hard until the day he died.

They basically teamed regularly from about Feb to July or August, so maybe 5 months, 6 tops? They've got about 50 matches as a team, with many of those not on tape.

I can't think of another team that consistently delivers great matches as routinely as this one. They literally never disappoint. As I sit here and try to figure out where they'd land on my list, the answer is probably shockingly high. I'm stacking them up with other teams that I genuinely love, and they're coming out ahead of most of them.

Assuming this is the Austin/Pillman version, the entire run was four months long. Plenty of teams have short shelf lives, especially today, but how many teams that were intended to be a true team (real teams with a real run, not two stars doing some shots together) have a comparable arc to this one, in this case meaning a short flash of brilliance before breaking up for whatever reason?

One of my favorite teams of all time. Tama is one of the most underrated workers of the era, or maybe even ever. The run was a little short, but most people forget about the early part of the run as earnest lower card babyfaces. Then they did the cool heel turn in the face vs face match with the CanAms on TV, and the rest is history. Lack of high end matches or big PPV perfromances hurt them, but as a day in day out house show/squash match/TV team, they were really, really fun.

Neidhart was underrated in their first big run. He stunk later, but he added to the dynamic for sure early on. I forget how many teams we're ranking here, but they'd have a real shot at a Top 25 for sure. Maybe higher.