Troyvang

I really am not a fan of Darby. I think those videos are laughable. His facial expressions are extremely cringeworthy. But above all, I just don’t find him believable. His look is just awful and I don’t think that any of his offense looks like it would impact anyone. Obviously I’m in the minority here and I get it, but I’m probably not ever going to fully get behind him as a top-notch act.

NBC lost their NHL rights, so that’s not an issue. NASCAR runs on weekends. Their are definitely other sports programs that could affect WWE though.

In the few months since I've been watching matches critically, I've gained a lot of appreciation for Joe. I knew he was good, but I hadn't really seen much ROH or TNA work. He's got a chance to be really high on my list and one of my top ranked American workers.

I'm watching his tables match with Douglas from SAW right now and he is throwing some awesome-looking punches. Just in general, great fundamentals.

I have watched this one and absolutely loved it. I only really knew Can/Am from their brief WWF stint and they blew me away, too.

I really love the Fantastics and especially Rogers. I don't know if he'll necessarily make my list, but either way, I needed to comment in his thread to mention that I think he's awesome and that dropkick is mesmerizing. If he had some good singles matches, he'd be a lock for sure

Kind of a varied mix, but matches with Hanson, Williams, Misawa and Takiyama stand out to me especially. Im just loving seeing all this new stuff right now.

So, when the 2026 edition started to ramp up, I decided that this was it and would be my gateway to dive into wrestling I’d never seen. Please bear with me on things that might be common knowledge to the community. So these rising and falling comments would be related more to the regular knowledge I had coming in. Rising: Kenta Kobashi i realize he’s accepted as one of the greatest of all time, but I hadn’t watched a match of his prior to 6 months ago. He now may be my favorite wrestler to watch just with everything he does in the ring. I know this isn’t exactly new news to most, but it is for me, haha Falling: Shawn Michaels I thought he would be a guy who would be near the top for me, but outside of a couple matches, really hasn’t matched my expectations. It seems like he is matching his opponent a lot and just isn’t as much of a standout as I thought he would be.

Thanks for all the great hours put into this. It's given me information about a place I never knew about and a desire to jump into it. Unrelated, but the picture above made me think of it: entrance robes that aren't made of silk or satin type fabrics always look like bath robes and there's really no way around it.

Man, terry being terry, makes it two matches before having to be removed. Good stuff!

This is great and I love the Paul Magers and Diana Pierce cameo!

This was really good! A nice, breezy read and I like your choices so far. Valentine and Martel hopefully being revisited down the road also makes me quite happy.

Me, too, but that was because I was in college, could only afford one subscription, and podcasts were more valuable to me at the time than written content.

It went up because it went digital.If he went to the Torch website or had somebody create a wrestler observer site while putting up the newsletter digitally and adding podcasts he probably would had been better off. Yes. Totally, completely agree 100% and really thinking about it, your latter option (just getting someone to create the site and be his co-host producer) would've been the best bet.

It's a mutual-beneficiary deal. Alvarez gets Meltzer, who drives subscribers, adds the content, and credibility to the site. Meltzer gets Alvarez, who gives him the means to distribute the product and the infrastructure therein. In my opinion, Meltzer is contributing and adding to the site much, much more, but I think even dave would say that his readership has went way up since hooking up with Bryan.

Yeah he's wearing a t shirt and in silver glitter it says fantasia, though it's pretty small

Re: Fantasia all Ross says is "it says fantasia on his shirt!" Then dusty talks about how Hayes always goes on and on about fantasia. I don't know where you got your info about Ross forcing the name there. Welcome to Oz!

You may have gotten autocorrected here or something similar, but it's the Spectral Envoy

Great! I look forward to listening to this in my upcoming days off!

Still to this day the greatest Christmas present I've ever gotten is the Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy I was given when I was 4 or 5. I remember it so clearly and whenever I go to my parents, my mom still has it in a place of prominence in my old room.

Sure, but I would only like to see him with no expectations. It'd be fun to see him rip it up on NXT and the mid card having good matches, but I wouldn't want to see thoughts and comments about how much he is underutilized or should be main eventing.

Hi everyone, Troy here. I've been on here for a couple weeks but will now officially introduce myself. I'm 26 years old, but my 27th is next week. I'm from Minnesota, small town born and raised and even though I spent a couple years in the suburbs I moved to a different little town where I teach middle school social studies. My wrestling fandom comes from my parents, and my first memories of wrestling were of really late days AWA (trooper, destruction crew, Greg Gagne), but my parents regaled me with stories of Bock, Mad Dog and the Crusher. From then on, wrestling was a big part growing up for me, with my Hulk Hogan wrestling buddy still holding a place as my best Christmas present. After AWA finally keeled over I started watching a lot more WCW and that was my main promotion growing up because we didn't have cable and Worldwide was always on channel 9 and it seemed like WWF came and went. During the mid 90s I fell off a little bit, but when we got a Dish in 98, my fandom really picked up as I was finally able to watch Raw and Nitro. That held pretty strong up until the time I graduated high school. As time has passed since then, I haven't watched a ton of current product, but usually keep current by reading reports and message boards and over the past 3 or 4 years I've become very interested in older wrestling and that's really what brought me here. As for what I'm into, I've always been most interested in big personalities and guys that are good on interviews. So Flair, Michaels and others have always been up there for me. Additionally though, I've also always liked the wrestlecrap side of things as well and if I can have a good laugh at something I'll most likely enjoy it. I look forward to further exploring the site and also more awesome old wrestling!

Although they always depend on who is performing it, I would generally say the cloverleaf and the stf are my favorites to see done.

I also think he was a person who died while he was really doing a lot of awesome stuff and had gained much acclaim from various aspects of the audience. Didn't have a long decline period where he stayed on too long, etc. And yes, talked about a bunch at the time.

That sounds fantastic. It would do a great job of addressing the past, but also starting a new chapter to go forward with.