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Misawa/Kobashi 1/20/97 1984 NJPW Gauntlet 1992 Royal Rumble Fuck short matches. If this is all I can watch I'm bringing something long.

I first noticed him playing himself up as a huge star in the aftermath of his 2013 run that had him being used as a mid carder putting over guys like Fandango. I can't blame him for it if being humble means he's seen as someone who should be putting over fucking Fandango.

I haven't seen enough Super Dragon to comment on him but Necro seems like the opposite of Triple H, in that people ignore a lot of bad and place a lot of weight on a couple insane deathmatches. Even in those matches, though, he didn't really seem much better than a Danny Havok or MASADA who can come up with some creative spots and take some nutty bumps. I'd love to be proven wrong if somewhere there's a treasure trove of matches where he's showing the top 100 genius he definitely wasn't showing in ROH, though.

​But can't you say the exact same thing with the roles reversed for 03-05 NOAH Sure, I would just say that Misawa's run on top was longer. Kobashi brought incredible charisma, no doubt. But I'd argue Misawa brought as much, just of a different and subtler sort. In fact, he'd be the definition of a great intangible wrestler for me, because he was so effective at projecting himself as ace without a lot of obvious emoting. Misawa's run was certainly longer, but I think there's an argument that Kobashi's is more impressive because he didn't have anything approaching prime Kawada, Kobashi & Taue supporting him. It was essentially a one man show with a rotating cast of dance partners as opposed to a HOF ensemble backing him up. But still not sure its enough for me to put it ahead of Misawa's run. I'd say that's a pretty big point against Misawa. He had great chemistry with Jumbo and those guys you listed, but he was pretty rarely the type to step in with some random guy and pull out the best match of their career like Kobashi and Kawada would.

The flat back bumps talking point is nothing new. I've seen it repeated since the CTE stories went mainstream in late 2009/early 2010, and the more I think of the idea the less I'm convinced that switching to rolling bumps would be some magic cure-all for wrestler injuries. The lucha comparison doesn't work because 1) it doesn't account for confounding variables like schtick-based 6-mans being far more common than serious singles and there being far less traveling and 2) you're just assuming old luchadors aren't banged up as well and continuing because they need the money or that the maestros style in specific works well to hide their physical decline. Also, Flair is hardly a paradigm of health these days. I also have doubts if people acting concussions are the only injuries that matter have much actual experience playing any kind of sports. There's shitloads of other horrible things that happen to wrestlers like torn rotator cuffs, ACLs, back muscles etc. The media acts they just get some expensive surgery and move on but the truth is serious injuries stay with you for the rest of your life and likely to cause issues later on. Look at all the surgeries Rey has had for example. If you don't want to see guys get hurt just stop watching wrestling. Hence, the concept of wanting moves banned or condemning matches that have such moves sounds utterly ridiculous to me. I wouldn't risk a concussion on a head drop, just like I wouldn't destroy my knees off high flying moves, but these guys grown men who have every right to decide what they do to their bodies. If some guys think a head drop would push a match to the next level they don't need some internet smarks who've never stepped foot in a ring policing them for it.

I think the shift happened in late 1997 during Bret's last few months with the company. It seemed like that was where Russo started getting a lot of power as there were a lot more short meaningless matches and edgy shit compared to earlier in the year. The crash TV style doesn't seem like it would have jelled with what made Bret great and he wasn't on board with it, either, since he stopped letting his kids watch the show. When Vince was telling Bret what he had planned in the lead up to the screw job he was just going to job him out to DX and Austin, so, even if he just wanted out of Bret's contract at that point, that still doesn't far off from what would have happened regardless.

People are underselling his resume of good TV matches. The Big Show match from early 2006 is one of my favorites from him and cage match with Kane from 1999 is also a lot better than it sounds. The Taka match from 2000 and the Shelton one from 2004 are also really good examples of him getting the underdog over. The whole Mankind feud from 1997 is great, too, especially the MSG street fight. You could probably find a lot more TV/PPV matches if you went looking, but I think what's been listed is already comparable to a lot of the fringe candidates. Going back to the Andre comparison earlier, I agree that people are placing undo weight to his bad stuff and downplaying all the really good stuff he's been in. The 2002-2003 Ric Flair run, for example, it is commonly seen a low point in his career due to his out of control ego having him spend most of the time burying WCW and wrestling self-indulgent Shawn Michaels matches, and that's too bad as as the 2003 Tajiri handheld actually shows him being good in the Ric Flair role with the right worker. I'm not saying one good matches makes up for all the shit he did, but compare that to Hansen, who spent a similar period also burying many of his opponents, yet seems to get more of a pass for it as him just defending his spot and has people far more willing to look for the hidden gems.

#4 is inexcusable to me. They have mounds of TV and house show footagealready edited and remastered from 24/7, so there is no reason all that stuff shouldn't have been released within the first year, let alone getting slowly dragged out as it's been. NWA Classics is a good service, though, to fill that void of classics and newly discovered footage this service should have been. Only reason to subscribe to this is if you care to see the PPV's live.

Dave is well known as a guy who places a lot of stock in how things come across in the moment and his previous favorite was the 2008 Ric Flair retirement, so what's so crazy that he thought Bryan's retirement surpassed it? I normally don't even pay attention to Dave's opinions but ragging on him for that is just dumb.

This is already that show where they're sacrificing big matches to build guys up, though. HHH/Reigns is obvious, but Brock/Bray is what Bray needs to stay relevant and Taker/Strowman has the potential to be a star making battle of giants in a way that Taker/Miz or Sheamus couldn't possibly be. You'll also likely have the women positioned in the most prominent spot in Wrestlemania history. I'd say, though, that if there was a place where they needed part-timers it would be here. To fill up 100k seats you need the massive dream matches people have been years for like Taker/Cena, Brock/Austin, and Steph/Rousey, and there's really no combination on their current roster that could match the business of a card with those matches. Hence, the projected card strikes me as them giving up on the dream match model and just trying to build up who they can given the bad circumstances.

I read reviews to get a new perspective on matches if it's about I've seen or to get a feel for if I'd like the match if it's about something I haven't. I don't care much about what the consensus on a match might be or how my opinion of the match falls in line with. I don't think it's any different than writing literature criticism. I could completely disagree with a review but if it's well-written and gives me a new way of looking at a match I'd call it a great review. The "what more is there is there to say" just seems like a ridiculous cop-out to me since there's writings that have literally thousands of long journal articles published, so if someone reads 5 or 6 reviews and can't think of anything else to add that's more an indictment of the person as a reviewer than it is a statement on a match's popularity. On the play-by-play, I think it's gotten an unfairly bad rep because of the style used by Meltzer and his imitators where it's just list off the moves and crowd heat then tack on some snowflakes. I agree that's a horrible way of looking at a match, but play-by-play can be great if you're taking the effort to string those moves into an overarching narrative and giving your own bits of interpretation along the way. For the more complex matches, I'd argue that play-by-play style is actually far more effective (though much more difficult to do properly) than just a quick opinion paragraph.

To understand why no one is nominating CZW guys you have to compare them to other deathmatches promotions. BJW workers like Jun Kasai and Yuko Miyamoto have a much better case for top 100 inclusion than most of the CZW guys discussed so far yet no one is making a push to nominate those guys and the handful of reviews for BJW from the 2000's puro project all shit on the matches. Look at the review for Miyamoto/Sasaki scaffold from 3/07 and you can see there's still a stigma against deathmatches as just being backyarders doing stunts, and that's made it difficult for others to enjoy the deeper psychology of the matches. Even the guys who started in CZW but still somehow have managed to break that crazy backyarders stereotype and achieve fame, like Moxley, Callihan, and Younger have distanced themselves from the style and most of their fans seem to stay away from their earlier work.

Jack Brisco has been outed by old timers as a heavy drinker and smoker who got away with it because he was so talented. He's hardly an archetype of a perfect athletic physique. If you want to see what the natural limit looks like you should go back to the early 20th century with George Hackenshmidt and other early bodybuilders/wrestlers who didn't even have access to steroids or other drugs used by bodybuilders today. Whether or not it's possible to come close to those physiques while wrestling hard matches every night and constantly traveling is a different matter, though. Natty limit for WWE wrestlers is probably CM Punk.

Even entirely natural power lifters and marathon runners usually end up with a multitude of injuries and joint issues just from how hard they push their bodies. Bodybuilders pay the price for pushing things to extremes, but that's really not any different from any sport. Let's please stop pretending health and athleticism aren't entirely separate concepts. Also, saying someone looks like an athlete is a hopelessly vague phrase. Depending on the sport, athletic bodies range from the sickly thin cyclists to massive sumo wrestlers. The things done by male gymnasts have a lot in common with the modern wrestling style and they definitely have that ripped as fuck look that's so shameful to be into.

This thread amazes me. I am shocked anyone could think this isn't one of WWE's best eras ever, let alone one of their worst. People conplain all the time about the 3 hour format but I'd say a lot of the early 90's hour long weeklies could feel just as long with them often consisting of forgettable matches interlaced with bad gimmicks. The 80's seem great if you're just cherry picking the best matches but full shows were often brutal to sit through, so there's really no comparison with the stacked cards WWE puts on today. The Attitude Era was the peak of WWE in terms of storylines and promos, but the in-ring action was at a much lower level and a lot of the storylines were just edgy shit that hasn't aged well at all. Smackdown was on fire at various points in the 2000's but Raw was the drizzling shits and since the storylines weren't any better than they today I'd give the current era the nod. Every era had its share of garbage and it's easy to forget that if you're mostly cherry picking historical footage. Example of that being 3 hour Nitro getting praised in this topic for lacking obvious filler, when if you watched full shows from that era recently you'd see countless cruisers barely getting enough time to work a spot match no sold by the announcers and just totally random shit like Luger working with Barry Darsow for no reason at all. The current WWE era just so happens to be the current one, meaning the shit is fresher on people's mind. The fact that there's a higher level of talent and ring-work than ever before also seems to have raised overall expectations higher than ever before, which has resulted in, I'd argue, an unfairly high amount of scrutiny.

Guessing you haven't seen the Fujinami matches from the last few years.

At least in my American college I was taught that there are a variety of valid ways to criticize things and the best way changes to fit the situation. Historicism was big but it wasn't taught as being infallible and the New Criticism was still common, especially for analyzing the technical aspects of poetry. I can see how New Criticism would be helpful to teach objectivity in journalism, but I think the reader-response style is better for wrestling. So much of it comes down to having that emotional connection with the wrestlers involved and we often see WWE booking based on how they think the audience on that particular night would react.

I haven't seen her NXT work, but I think she has a very strong case for female worker of the half-decade based on her work before that. Things like the heel JWP run, the SMASH ace run, the intergender matches, and the rivalries with Satomura, Kurihara, and Syuri are some of the main reasons why I used to be excited every time she showed up on tape. Also, I really respected how she was the only worker, male or female, who was trying to carry on the legacy of the BattlArts style and refused to cave into doing the joshi go-go-go style that she hated, even when it restricted the places she could work. It's amazing that she's become the first female Japanese worker to get pushed as a star attraction by WWE, but I'd argue she already has too much quality on her resume to be easily dismissed.

Everybody forgets Seth Rollins.

1. I see them as just different approaches to wrestling, though I'd also argue improvising is by nature inferior to planning in advance. I just don't see how it's possible to match the storytelling complexities of those AJPW epics without prior planning. For that reason, I have a rough time comparing shoot-style guys like Volk Han, who had loads of time to plan/practice matches, with old school territory guys, who had to come up with matches every night. 2. It definitely would affect my views on a guy as an overall worker if I found his best matches were planned by someone else. Famous example is Hogan/Warrior at Wrestlemania being laid out move-for-move by Patterson and their horrible Halloween Havoc rematch without Patterson. It's cool that they went out and nailed their performances the first time but there's a lot to be said about the importance of being able to come up with the best match for the current place and time without relying on outside help. 3. This question is a big reason why I have a much harder time ranking wrestlers than matches. Instinctively, I want to place a lot of stock in a wrestler's ability to lay out/call a match, but it's also something I'll never fully understand by the nature of the business.

I don't see at all how ranking wrestlers is easier than ranking matches. If you watch a match 5 times and have read a little about its background, you have a pretty well informed opinion on that match. Compare that to watching 5 matches from a guy for the GWE and reading a little about his background, which can only ever give you a very superficial understanding of them. I'd also argue that it works much better as a snapshot since it could be updated every year or 2 due to not requiring the same massive viewing/discussion project as GWE. Also, it gives a much better idea of what people like and how they rank the new shit with the usual suspects seeing the matches directly ranked instead of just the wrestlers involved.

There's just so much amazing stuff between YouTube and Dailymotion I can just load up on my phone and watch whenever, I have a justifying signing on to my desktop and downloading torrents. Let alone buying DVD's or hunting down DVD's I already have. I acknowledge there's some amazing stuff I'm missing compared to the tale trader guys, just like how there's some amazing they're missing by not having access to these companies' master tape libraries.

I'd argue it peaked with the Hogan/Andre rematch on The Main Event, since that was the most watched match in US history at that point.

I don't agree at all that he's stale to talk about. In fact, with all the handheld matches and other rare gems that have been cropping up on YouTube, I'd say it's pretty interesting part of his case to examine, especially given the old claim that he dogged it on the small shows. On that note, I have been watching some of said handhelds and rare gems lately, and I can confidently call the claim that he dogged it on small shows bullshit. His style may not have translated well to short Raw matches, but when he got time to work he seems pretty consistent in delivering entertaining and logically built matches often carried by his selling Bret Hart vs Undertaker 11/25/95 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v6kwCtwR3DY Match starts slow with Taker doing his invincible zombie shtick, but that ends up working really well to set up the rest of the match with it feeling like a big deal every time he sells later on. The size difference is worked very well with Bret usually relying on strategy and high risk moves to get the advantage while Taker relies more on raw power. Match builds to a hot stretch run that really gets the crowd going after they spent the earlier portion cheering for Diesel. Bret Hart vs Diesel 1/26/96 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwsi6s992hw Kind of a similar dynamic to the Undertaker match, but a lot more back-and-forth as Bret doesn't have to work around a zombie gimmick. Also, it's much shorter so it's worked as more of an action sprint. It doesn't reach the same heights as the Taker match, but does have a hot crowd throughout and Bret makes Diesel like a total badass throughout with his selling. Bret Hart vs Lex Luger http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13txz_bret-hart-vs-lex-luger_sport Not sure about date, but it's seems to be shortly after Wrestlemamia IX as Bret is a former champ against a still heel Luger. This actually seems like it's mainly a showcase for Luger as he really brings his working boots to show that he can hang with Bret. His control segment is really good stuff and I really dug his execution of the hold where his grinds his knee against Bret's back in particular. The credit to Bret here is that he knew when to step aside and help another guy get over as he always sells well for Luger's offense and when it's time for a comeback, the way that he sells on offense brings a sense of weariness and desperation. Haven't seen the Bravo match, but if it is bad I don't see it as too much of a strike against him considering it's 1992 Dino Bravo.

Interesting take on Jumbo/Terry. When I watched it as one of my first puro matches having seen barely anything from either guy I thought it was easily an all-time classic and was particularly blown away by the mat work in the first fall. Since then, I've rewatched it several times while much more familiar with both guys and the climate of the promotion at the time and I still love the first fall but always end up disappointed by what follows. I thought they had a really cool dynamic building with Jumbo testing himself against his mentor, long time rival, and current NWA champ in a straight wrestling match, only to stray too far from it into it feeling like just another NWA title match with Terry's bumping and stooging later.