dawho5

90-95% of what Kobashi does is anywhere from good to absolutely brilliant to me. It's that 5-10% that works my last nerve and seems to wipe all the good stuff out when I'm watching. I've said it before privately, but Kobashi is a huge blind spot for me in something like this. Because there's stuff he does that I can't get past even if I know he's an incredible worker otherwise. So if I come across as overly negative on the guy, I apologize. It's just for whatever reason a lot of his negative qualities hit me just the right way where I forget the many more positives he brings to the table.

I think that part of the problem is that there are accusations being thrown around about the board when no actual opinions on wrestling or wrestlers are presented. Generally people who post here expect you to have your own opinion and be willing to express it, regardless of what they may think of it. Yes, maybe some of the people are dismissive about certain wrestlers or criticism of others. But they will be dismissive of you if you lack the confidence or commitment to your own opinions that is required to express them in a forum like this. So don't be afraid, just write what you think/feel about wrestling and all will work itself out. Also, keep PWO the same. It's great as is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acb3ZFdGF3I This. Misawa/Kawada are still teaming and young, which is certainly an interesting part of the watch. But this is Hansen's match all the way. The really great stuff starts when Hansen comes in and starts stomping on Kawada's head while Spivey has him in a Boston crab. He gets chased out by the ref, but Hansen decides that it's time to up the ante instead. What follows is some of the best character work Hansen ever does.

Thirded.

Pierroth Jr vs. Mogur (1/12/90) Really good match. Pierroth's cheating can't win him the first fall, as Mogur really ups the ante with a big powerbomb for the 3. Pierroth heels it up by continuously rolling into and out of the ring to buy himself time. Mogur is working the back of the head/neck, which Pierroth is selling so well. Pierroth catches Mogur with a backwards headbutt to the groin while trapped in a neck figure 4. That leads to the inevitable win for Pierroth in fall 2 and now it's Mogur's turn to take a powder. But he's back in after just one time to the floor and the ending is a nice sequence of counters, some of them really gritty elbows and knees to break up submission holds. Liked this match a lot. Steve Veidor vs. Gwyn Davies (5/26/76) This is absolutely incredible. Davies as the heel is tremendous, picking his spots perfectly to sneak in the cheating and piss off the crowd. Viedor is perfectly good in his role, but it's Davies who makes this match great. I love how he gets increasingly pissed off when Viedor makes his comebacks and finds ways to get nastier. This is the kind of wrestling that is right up my alley. Bull Nakano vs. Devil Masami (04-18-1993) Early is pretty good back and forth. Masami getting a bunch of big-seeming nearfalls right after the floor brawling seemed wrong. Nakano working over Masami on the comeback was the best part of the match. Nearfalls at the end were really excessive and overdone. Least favorite match of the 3.

I've organized my thoughts on this a bit more, so here goes. You see a definite difference in matches where Kobashi is working against Taue/Kawada and matches involving anyone else. In fact, you see a big difference between Kawada/Taue matches and Kobashi/Misawa/Akiyama matches as the 90s go on. In the continuing effort to top themselves, they chose distinct directions. Yes, there is variance within the two methods for sure. Kawada and Taue certainly had some different ways of going about things. As did Kobashi, Misawa and Akiyama. But the big split for me is the frequency of the big bombs and how they were used. Kawada/Taue had an approach that involved a lot of emphasis on the work between the big nearfalls and making those nearfalls count as much as they possibly could. Misawa/Akiyama/Kobashi placed more emphasis on the bombs themselves (very often to keep the crowd popping) and I think this applies especially to Kobashi. He fell in love with the response that all the big moves and nearfalls got. There is one match I highlighted where this becomes very clear. He hits some kind of neckbreaker variation, gets no pop at all on the nearfall and immediately does the same thing again so the crowd does pop. And I think this tendency of Kobashi's is curbed by Taue and Kawada, but his buddies Akiyama and Misawa choose to go along with it. And it produces those wonderful finishing runs where you see big suplex -> nearfall -> laying around to sell accumulated damage over and over again, which gets worse as they get to NOAH. And the reason that I hold this against Kobashi so much is because there is so much that he does that I absolutely love. Kobashi working over a guy's ribs is a tremendous thing. Kobashi working as face-in-peril is so very incredible. Kobashi working 40 minutes of intense, gritty mat-based stuff with Kawada in the 1/19/95 match is absolutely amazing. When Kobashi decides to work a headlock, surfboard or knucklelock sequence it's always gold. But he very often reverts to "look at all the cool shit I can do" mode to get pops from the crowd and it really pisses me off when I think of all the other things he could be doing.

Hansen's range is incredibly underrated. His series vs. Kobashi is great for how much he is willing to give Kobashi (think 7/29/93 and the 94 CC match) for large portions of the match. Speaking of the 94 Champion Carnival, watch the Kobashi, Taue and Williams matches in order to see a guy who is usually working monster gaijin do this incredible job of working from underneath because of the injured ribs. His 2/28/93 match with Kawada was possibly the best back and forth pure brawl I've ever seen not involving some kind of hate-filled feud. And during this match Hansen does the best sell of the stretch plum EVER. The Misawa matches are great for a few reasons. For one, in the 93 match, Hansen does this incredible reversal and works on the injured arm of Misawa (which also plays well off of being KOed by an elbow in a previous match) only to lose to a rolling elbow. It's like this complete turnaround of the way the natives used to work over Hansen's arm in the late 80s and Hansen would lariat them for the win anyway. The elbow almost-KO shot nearfall was a nice touch too. I think Hansen cemented Misawa as the ace just as much as Jumbo did in 92-93. The 99 RWTL is Hansen as one of the most over sympathetic babyfaces ever. It was meant to be his last run and the Taue/Hansen team is faced with Burning in the finals. Really incredible heat for this match and another completely different performance from Hansen. Hansen is one of the guys who is responsible for putting over the major players of 90s AJPW. What was really great for me is he treated each of them differently as far as how he wrestled them and what he gave them. I forget which matches, but there are a few where he has Misawa-style long comebacks with short bursts of brawling offense to stay in it while weathering the storm as well.

It wasn't just DVDVR as far as resentment for his title run. His match vs. Takayama on 9/7/02 had Takayama destroying Ogawa early while making fun of him for being the title holder. I get that was part of Takayama's thing at the time, but the crowd didn't seem to mind much. Great match though. Some more from the 2000s - vs. Kobashi 11/1/04 - Superstar Sleaze caught that I hadn't watched this and I was glad he mentioned it with Misawa vs. KENTAfuji 4/25/04 - easily one of the better matches either KENTA or Marufuji has been involved with with Kotaro Suzuki & Tenryu vs. Sasaki/Morishima/Nakajima - Tenryu and Ogawa make this match, Ogawa vs. Morishima is so damn great in a way that you just don't see in Japan very often

I wonder if Parv is one of those SF guys who can do those ridiculous long combos that do 1/4 life and pounces on even the slightest openings to do so. Never put that amount of time into SF games, but that was really impressive stuff to see even if it sucked being on the other end.

I treat this as a more case-by-case deal as wrestlers go. Dragon Kid is easily one of the most spectacular and influential high fliers I've ever seen once he goes into his arsenal of flips and fancy stuff. But he can't do shit otherwise and that brings him way, way down for me. Vader is pretty one-dimensional when you get right down to it, and his act is really similar everywhere he goes. He's a big bully who beats people up and then squashes them like bugs with his body weight, but still bumps around at times. I think he's fucking great. A lot of it probably comes down to how a one-dimensional wrestler can fit that dimension into matches with multiple opponents. If they can make it work it's a positive. If not they need to find some new ways of getting things done.

I always love watching Fuerza. He really gets his role as a rudo and seems willing to go to almost any length to play it. Also, the spinebuster/ballshot/did he do a ballshot? stuff is gold every time I see it.

That was one of the matches that spawned 90s AJPW style. I don't have my notes handy, but it may be THE match that did just that. They had a few at least good singles matches in that period. My guess is that is the one though.

It's coming across to me as rovert trying to find reasons not to do the project or back up his opinions. My question is this. Until you've reviewed matches for and started a bunch of threads for more modern guys that you like, how do you know? I've reviewed more than 3 Tanahashi matches that I know of during the 2000s and I know there are more than 3 in his microscope thread. I'm fairly certain that you could find 3 match reviews for every major NJPW guy just based on this year's G1. Which by the way got more than it's share of support around here if I'm not completely wrong. Basically what I'm saying is that you should review some matches if need be and nominate people who you think deserve a look. My feeling is that people will at least go back a few years and youtube things just to see if there is something there worth seeing. Yes, there will probably be negative responses. I get down on Kobashi a lot and read how that goes in his nomination thread. And I will absolutely look at some things again when I go through 90s AJPW again. You can't take that as "nobody here is giving my ideas a chance" though. If a few are dismissive of your views and direct about it, too bad for them. They don't make your experience here (or they don't have to), that's up to you.

I enjoyed his tag team with Tajiri in 99 a lot. Two of the best ever guys to spend any amount of time in ECW working as a tag team? Yes, please. I liked how they varied their double teams as well, not just sticking to the same ones but throwing a bunch of variations on the same beginning over 3 or 4 matches. More teams need to do that.

As Matt has pointed out, all things need room/time to breathe.

I can agree with this. Very often there are a lot of responses to posts about certain workers and the indies in general that come across as dismissive. And I think a certain portion of the hostility that comes into threads like this is because people like Joe feel there is a need for a strong voice in defense of the things that very often get shit on here. Which leads to angry responses from a few and ends up being an unsalvageable argument because both sides get dug in so deep that nobody is moving. And I'm sure there's lots of blame to spread around for that situation. Might be a better and more productive venture to find a solution though.

I have my share of opinions that don't run along the same lines as other people's here. And I will post them, but in a non-hostile way. Nor will I get overly worked up when somebody or multiple somebodies disagree. Very often I'll actually take their talking points into account when I find myself looking at something it might apply to afterwards. I can't say it always changes my mind, but I refuse to dismiss something just because it doesn't agree with how I look at wrestling. You never know when something will click for you and a match or wrestler or promo you didn't care for before all of a sudden makes more sense. I think that some folks (Joe is one of them, very often Parv comes across this way to me when arguing with certain people but not the majority) are so dug in at this point that it becomes an exercise in futility to argue. You can usually point to the exact spot in this thread and some of those mentioned above where things got personal and it stopped being a discussion. It is possible to disagree without attacking the points made by somebody else. Very often it comes down to the language you use to express what you're trying to say. I tend to look at the way I'm posting things and try to put more of my own thoughts and feelings on the topic rather than how I view what other people have written and my disagreements with that. A positive expression of your own thoughts is very often more conducive to a good argument than a negative take on somebody else's.

I ask because it has been something I've been thinking about on a broader scale recently. I'm 37 years old. If you talked to me at 25, 30, 35 and now, asking any questions you liked you would get different answers. I know this for a fact. The interesting part to me is that the gaps between the answers get closer to one another as I get older. My feeling is that my tastes in wrestling have changed in a very similar manner. I don't think it's ever going to stop. I do, however, know that my opinions will continue to change. To the point where I could go back and read something I wrote this year about a match and wonder what I was thinking about it if I dug it up a year later to the day. So I'm going to try and track my personal evolution in terms of watching wrestling and what I looked for/enjoyed. I started with WCW somewhere in 1996. Loved me some cruiserweight wrestling. I also enjoyed the internet darlings of the time quite a lot. I tried watching WWF but it didn't have the same feeling for me. There was a lack of all the cool stuff the guys I liked in WCW were doing. Then I got into tape trading and the NJ juniors and All Japan stuff blew me away. For the same reasons, all the cool stuff. I enjoyed a lot of the Hayabusa matches I watched. I thought RVD was a lot of fun to watch. Not saying these are inherently bad or good things, just giving a general idea of how I looked at wrestling. If you did loads of cool stuff, I liked watching the matches. ECW was incredible stuff when Tajiri, Lynn, Guido, RVD, etc. were wrestling. Then I stopped watching wrestling until I one day decided to start again. And oddly enough, the first thing I hit really hard was Stan Hansen. For whatever reason, it stuck. It's nothing like the stuff I used to watch and love. But the simplicity of it without losing any of the effectiveness really spoke to me a lot more than any amount of cool stuff ever could. I followed that up by going back through All Japan and I'm still up in the air as to the results on that. I liked a lot of what I saw and I think a lot of it does have value. But I'm a bit hesitant to start my rewatch of it all. Since then I've bounced around from watching stuff as far apart as the 1985 I Quit match, selected stuff from the 2014 G1, Chigusa vs. Dump, a bunch of Starrcade and WWE SNME stuff, and going through 2000s Japan. During that trip through 2000s Japan I discovered a lot of differences in the way I looked at matches from when I had started the All Japan project. Somewhere over the course of that I had really found a lot of the core things I like about wrestling. And my feeling is that I may find a lot more of the flaws in All Japan as I go through again. Because when I watch stuff like Tully vs. Magnum and see how that same level of hate and desperation, the way it seemed like everything was a struggle and this was a fight to the finish, can by achieved with so much less, I start to wonder if Misawa and co. had to go to the lengths they did. I understand that they had different audience demands, but they largely shaped those demands through their work. Watching through the Starrcade set, I found that matches that came in under 20 minutes (unless they featured very skilled and experienced wrestlers) got on my nerves. The Luger vs. Flair match from Starrcade had a great section of Luger work on Flair's arm. It was well done by both and it surprised me to have that reaction. The only problem was, they went right back to cycling through Luger power spots for the third time not long after. If you cut off enough of that match where Luger doesn't have to repeat himself with the powerslams, it's far better for it. One thing about the SNME set I'm seeing is how great Savage was. He's got this great, believable tough guy persona, but he'll hide behind Liz when Jake brings out the snake. And I think it's the Bret match where he does this incredible leg selling at the end. If nothing else on those discs clicks for me I'm glad I watched those two matches for sure. And last year I would have never even thought of watching it, so there's a pretty big change for me as well. I'm interested to see how other people see their own evolution as wrestling fans, what they think triggered the changes, things they might have been surprised to find out they liked. That's one of the things I like about reading people's posts here , seeing how they react to the same things I watch. I think that the way we came to where we are now, even if things have changed, is just as important as the opening part of a wrestling match is to the middle (where we are now). I also think that seeing that kind of thing would help a little in being able to see how other people view matches when we disagree with their conclusions.

A little history first. From 1996-early 2000s, I looked at stuff like Dean Malenko vs. Ultimo Dragon matches, Benoit, Eddy, NJ juniors stuff as some of the best wrestling you would ever find. All Japan was pretty sweet when I discovered it too. So I used to be (without really knowing it) a workrate fan. I still like watching a lot of that stuff, but some of it has really aged badly while some of it I still rate pretty high. How do you define workrate? Workrate is how much stuff the wrestlers in the ring are doing. That's the simple answer. The more complex issue at the heart of this question in my mind is the use of the term "rest hold". If a guy slaps on a chinlock or side headlock and the two wrestlers lay there for a few minutes to catch their breath, then it is indeed a rest hold. If the wrestler putting on the hold cranks on it and the victim is trying different ways of escaping the hold only to get shut down, it's no longer a rest hold regardless of how basic it might be. Then it becomes part of the discussion on workrate if you ask me. As mentioned above, bumping around when the time comes is also a part of workrate. I've never used the term before that I remember, but if we're talking about it. Is workrate important to you? Somewhat. It has been downgraded in importance, but it is still a necessary part of a good match in the sense that the wrestlers involved need to be doing something that works towards the story the match is trying to tell or supports the psychology of the match. What elements make up a quality match for you, and how much of that is workrate? A coherent story from start to finish has become a real big thing for me. And by that I mean a minimum of wandering off into filler material before we move on to the next chapter of the story. Which I think a lot of the "stuff" I have seen in modern wrestling tends to do. Good psychology is pretty essential to a coherent story being told in the ring so it's pretty high up there. It also gets the crowd into the match, which can elevate the way I look at matches. Efficiency and simplicity in achieving the above elements is huge for me. Consistent selling is something I've gotten softer on, but I still look for it. Workrate can certainly add a lot of fun to a match when the "stuff" fits into the way a match plays out. It really becomes a combination of a lot of different factors, but some I'm willing to go easy on if the rest are strong. Workrate is one of those things in the more common view of the term. Do we need to move away from workrate as a metric in evaluating matches? As stated above, I think wrestling has to be judged based on a combination of factors. To ignore any of them completely is going to skew the way you look at wrestling as a whole. It's just as bad to ignore workrate as it is psychology, storytelling or selling. How did the online communities view of workrate influence you earlier in your wrestling fandom? It was the big thing at the time. I had been a fan of the more workrate stuff before I hit the internet, but it only reinforced my views when I read a lot of it. My feeling is that when we are younger we tend to want to know that other people share our views in order to validate them.

Man, I had a cereal case (the ones that grocery stores get 16-20 boxes of cereal in) full of VHS wrestling I did that with. I believe there were several tapes with Best of Waltman on them too. Not that I have a working VCR anymore, but I always regret throwing that box away.

I wouldn't put together a ballot without comprehensive watchings of anyone I considered for my top 150. Which means I probably won't. Doesn't mean I don't want to be part of the discussion for wrestlers I have seen a ton of.

I would agree that the final year or so of All Japan was toned down, but once NOAH took off it started again and continued to get worse. I don't know if the younger wrestlers within NOAH (who had all been training while watching their heroes work in All Japan) just didn't get the reasons why Misawa and co. were toning things down or really wanted to get the big pops that the big guys got and went ahead with it anyway. Either way it stuck. And I wonder if Misawa couldn't have been a bit smarter and forced a general toning down of the style given it was his company.

He works the leg to kill the "lift up the knees" counter to the HFF. It's similar to how Kawada would work the arm so that when somebody blocked a jumping high kick he had time to go back on offense as they sold the injured arm. I like that touch for both.

So if there is a separate section for 3-man teams, it would be best to keep it to lucha so that the sheer volume of votes wouldn't put Freebirds and the Shield at 1/2 while lucha trios were delegated lower.