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She actually did turn things around these last few years and went on a vegan diet. I know she had plenty of issues with drugs but I'm still surprised she died so early.

Quick comparison between two of the main accused murderers talked about in this topic Carlos Colon -Had sound mental abilities and a clear motivation for wanting Brody dead with him buying WWC shares -Used his influence to cover up the situation after it happened and is rumored to have played a role in stopping Brody from getting proper treatment -Later ran several angles playing off the tragedy, indicating lack of remorse Chris Benoit -Had the brain equivalent to an 80 year old Alzheimer's patient and was showing all the classic symptoms of CTE like memory loss, paranoia, and depression. -No clear motive, making it unlikely to have been premeditated. -Placed bibles next to the bodies and killed himself, which could be taken as him realizing how horrible what he did was. Yet Colon is the one people don't have a problem ranking and who people are willing to make excuses for, whilst writing off Benoit as a cold blooded killer despite all indications of him having severe brain damage. The best explanation I see for such a huge disrepancy is that people feel more of an emotional connection to Benoit's situation than Colon's and I'm not sure why people seem to offended at the suggestion of that being the case. I don't think Benoit possibly committing domestic violence a few years before says much about him as he likely already had CTE by that point, but even if we do presuppose that he was just the kind of guy who enjoyed beating his wife, so what? As Jingus put it, he'd hardly be the only guy in the business like that, so at worst he'd just be the unlucky one with just the right combination of brain damage and steroids to take things a bit further. Getting on a high horse and basically saying "I love Steve Austin even if he beat Debra. But I cant rank that dude with CTE for being such a horrible person" is dumb.

What I don't get is the seeming double standard of people struggling so much to comfortably rank Benoit whilst being so enthusiastic about Carlos Colon. Colon strikes me as just as, if not more, awkward to watch since he orchestrated Brody's death entirely in cold blood for petty political reasons and, thus, was just an evil scumbag without the same brain damage Benoit had. If the issue is that it was his matches that destroyed him then I don't see why people wouldn't have a rough time with Misawa for wrestling a style that even more directly led to his death.

Maybe Cena/Rock WM 29 would be a better example of the self-conscious epic than these Undertaker and Kobashi matches? It's pretty much a textbook example of 2 guys who think kicking out of finishers is the key to an epic match and I haven't seen anyone defend it as much more since they barely even sell the cumulative damage.

In NOAH the self-conscious epics were more something that worked their way into the juniors matches in the mid-2000s due to American influence rather than anything you ever saw from the heavyweights. Example would be the 2005 KENTA/SUWA match, which starts out great with some awesome SUWA heeling before forgetting about that getting into a bunch of near falls for the finish just to make it epic.

I don't get the hate for his 80's work at all. He was in a lot of the top matches of the DVDVR and always looked like he could hang just fine with whoever he was in with. Even the stuff I've seen that didn't make the set like the match with Abdullah was still awesome largely because he had such great charisma in the ace role and such a great connection with the crowd.

As someone who actually lives in southern US, I see the confederate flag relatively often and have always just seen it as a way of showing southern pride with nothing to do with racism. I've never seen anyone complain about it or act offended and I think that's because people who grew up in the region understand that there is far more to the history than just slavery and racism. The "confederate flag=racism and nothing more" talking point strikes me as something recently created by SJW's who don't know much about the region's history beyond the sterile and simplified version taught in middle school.

When I was getting my English degree I was taught the ideas of charlatans like Freud and Lacan as if they were still considered respectable theories and that was it as far what I learned about psychology/neuroscience and how it influences stories. I think English academia's slow reception of science and welcoming environment for pseudoscience comes down from the heavy influence of post modernist philosophy and its claim that there are no concrete truths. Given the huge presence of third wave feminism at most colleges, that jells pretty well with finding female oppression or arguing for whatever bizarre theories you might need to get a paper out in academia's publish-or-perish field.

I think shoot style is a lot easier to appreciate if you have experience with jiu-jitsu or a similar form of grappling. Traditional style is presented as 90% strength and conditioning with guys powering through holds and trading finishers. Shoot grappling and, by extension, shoot style is 90% technique, so in that respect it's the most built around strategy of all styles. It may not be something an 8 year old would get but, the strategy element consumes the whole match with things like positioning, weight distribution, prediction, etc. I'm not saying you need to go join an MMA gym to get shoot style but just watching something like a Gracie Breakdown or basic BJJ tutorial on YouTube could go a long way in showing how there's far more to shoot style than lucha style flashiness.

Completely disagree with this review. You might have picked up on it on the commentary, but I think it's a key part of the match's story to understand that both guys were amateur wrestling greats who went to the same college. Hence, the match is basically worked like two old jocks who want to prove they're the better wrestler, it makes perfect sense that the match would be worked around matwork and one upsmanship. Since matwork was so rare in AJ as you mentioned, that actually makes the match feel pretty special when watched in context and I'd argue what they did was the exact opposite of lying in holds since both guys were constantly struggling for position and looking for submissions. Those opening minutes are what sets the dynamic for the rest of the match, so it's far from meaningless or blown. That figure four spot you ragged on isn't just mindless screaming and grunting but the match's big climax with Hase selling being trapped in excruciating pain while the jock in him can't help but egg Akiyama to do it even harder.

Working wrestling matches goes all the way back to Ancient Greece and Rome when people would accept bribes to give up matches. If you watch the films available of stuff from the 1920's and earlier, though, you'll see matches just look like the guys are shoot wrestling until a possibly predetermined finish. I think the modern working style was invented in America around the 1920's when people got tired of watching several hour long amateur wrestling matches.

The thing with improvements in sports plays is that a lot of it is driven just by access to better doping methods so guys can train harder/more often. Not only do the drugs obviously close the age gap by letting guys keep going at a high level into their 40's, but I'd argue they also partly close the genetic gap as well, hence the tightening of competition. I can't blame guys for comparing players from the 1920's to today if your sport only runs for a few months and you need something to talk about for the rest of the year, but I've never been interested in debating fantasy match-ups like Tyson/Ali as there's far too many variables to account for. I don't see how any of this applies to wrestling, though, since people don't rate matches based on how difficult they are to execute as athletic endeavors but on how entertaining they are as artistic endeavors.

Again, it's debatable if this is covered by the first amendment since you're talking about a site distributing an unknowingly filmed sex tape without the guy's consent. This isn't just some tabloid digging up celebrity dirt. It's more like that deal when a bunch of celebrities got their iPhones hacked and had nudes distributed online, and even Gawker's own sites were against it. No matter how you look at it, Gawker fucked up by posting clips from the tape.

Emphasis mine. It's also worth noting that the judge accepted a clearly inappropriate question submitted by a juror about whether Emma Carmichael had intimate relations with Nick Denton or A.J. Daulerio. Whatever you think of Gawker, it's hard to believe that they had a genuinely fair trial. It certainly wasn't a great day for the American justice system. How many of those prior cases are comparable to the news outlet obtaining a sex tape that was filmed without the guy's consent and posting it for millions to see? With the role Gawker played in getting this sex tape out there and keeping it out there, it is an important thing to consider if they actually were just using their right to free speech to report something news-worthy or actively invading someone's privacy for clicks. Also, one of Gawker's former editors mentioned during the trial that his cut-off for posting celebrity sex tapes was four years old. Sarcastic or not, something like that seems far more damaging to their case than anything the judge said.

I think a big part of it was Hulk and the judge wanting to make an example out of Gawker. Not only did he lose tons money and have irreparable damage to his long-term due to the tape filmed without his consent, but Gawker acted like total dicks about it because they thought the first amendment made them invincible. I agree that it would have been a lot easier for Hulk if he just asked for a settlement and kept the tape out of the news, but he did the right thing by giving the case a proper trial.

This one http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/20302-toshie-uematsu-vs-yoshiko-tamura/

This is going to sound hypocritical given how I mocked the "wrestling must be logical" approach earlier but I've been doing BJJ for the past few months and even with my still shallow understanding of shoot grappling, it's just totally changed my views on mat work. Most long headlock spots, for example, just look ridiculous to me now because all I can think when I see them is "why is he just sitting there?" or "why isn't he trying to force his weight onto the opponent?" And sorry but the obviously cooperative nature of lucha matwork is something I can't unsee now that I see it. It would be great if the guys did stuff that resembled amateur wrestling but what I see is guys clearly letting go of holds and blatantly feeding limbs to do flashy shit that looks nothing like any kind of shoot grappling. I can still like it if I'm in the mood for it but I don't see how luchadors doing cool shit on the mat is much different in concept from US Indy or Dragon Gate guys doing cool flippy shit.

I'm kind of surprised no one nominated Yoshiko Tamura considering she had that match Loss rated at ***** and I thought she was one of the best performers in late 2000's joshi.

^I agree. If you want to see guys doing logical things to beat each other go watch MMA. I didn't participate due to lack of time but the handful I've went out of my way binge watch random matches from guys so I could speak of them in vague generalities I just couldn't enjoy it. I agree with JvK that it's much more enjoyable to be able to go in depth on specific matches. I'd argue it gives much more solidas the format by its nature is going to give undue weight to those 5 minute TV matches while we're often missing huge untapped sections of guys' careers.

Jericho's Smackdown promo was fucking great. Awesome visual at the end with him mocking the fans with fire raging in front of him. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sl5tqo4e9A4

He actually specifically mentioned borrowing from The Simpsons in that Attitude Era announcement promo. I think it's pretty easy to see the mind set behind the huge shift in booking style and burying the Hart Foundation towards the end of the year just by analyzing that promo.

I think 1997 WWF is a story of artistic integrity losing out to money and ratings. That period from the build to Austin/Hart at Survivor series to Canadian Stampede was by far the peak of the promotion up to that point with innovative angles, great characters, and some of the best wrestlers in the promotion's history in their in-ring prime. It also happened to be almost exactly when business was tanking and there was serious talk of WCW driving the promotion out of business. Vince saw that just being a great wrestling promotion wasn't what drew viewers so he looked at mainstream shows like The Simpsons and saw that he could be much more successful presenting a train wreck of constant edginess and craziness, hence the rise of Russo's crash TV booking and the DX shit later in the year. Taking into account those circumstances, it's not hard to see why he'd heavily favor DX leader Shawn Michaels over a Bret who disliked the promotion's new direction. I'd also argue that with Russo in his ear talking about the importance of working the Internet fans that Vince wanted to screw Bret both at Monteal and leading up to it to give a launch pad for the Mr. McMahon character.

I could see that argument if you're thinking about Kobashi as the late 90's/2000's main event ace, but Kobashi from 1990 up to the 1996 TC win is by far the best I've seen in the role of a fired up babyface selling his ass off. The coolest thing about Kobashi, though, is that on paper he's not a guy who'd fit that role well at all. Most of the guys listed here had a smaller build, yet Kobashi was a 6 foot tall guy with a big powerlifter build and even teamed with a small guy in Kikuchi, but he still pulled the role off because he was just so good at it.

Steamboat is someone whose good stuff I often see as being good in spite of his trademarks (melodramatic selling, cheesy karate kid/family man gimmick, over reliance on chops and arm drags), rather than because of them. I don't buy into the "Bret dogged it on house shows" talking point and think a lot of his best stuff was on house shows, but I'd still be willing to concede Steamboat as having a better catalog of matches due to the array of high end talent he got to work with. I'd definitely rather watch Bret, though, as he was a much better seller, more versatile, had more variety on offense, and could tell more nuanced stories.

I've always had a hard time buying into the idea that Misawa was this genius at laying out a match while Kobashi was an action guy driving the style into excess. These reviews are already doing a good job showing the understanding Kobashi had of working even early on and how long it took Misawa to get things in comparison. Also, while Kobashi/Akiyama might not have been on the same level as Misawa/Kawada as a rivalry for a variety of reasons, I think by the time you get to their title runs you'll see that a Kobashi defense against a lower ranked opponent smokes Misawa's equivalent.