funkdoc

yea loss's definition there basically guarantees anyone who fits it would be an influence candidate as well. dynamite, benoit, bret, & shawn would be other obvious examples.

hase/sasaki/masa saito imo, also would put chono in there over eddie or jericho or dibiase

i think this speaks to something more fundamental: your love of extraordinary violence & hatred, your idea that this is what wrestling *should* be about. you seem to have a hard time buying the stiffest, hardest-hitting motherfucker losing to someone relying on quickness/athleticism and smarts and timely moves in the clutch. having been a fan of the NFL for a lot longer than you have, it's easier for me; that league has undergone a similar transformation over the past couple decades, where teams that fly in the face of old-school ideals can win it all. i basically see someone like rey as equivalent to the peyton manning colts, and they DID win a super bowl eventually... really, as i think about it, it makes a ton of sense that it took the legion of boom to get you into that sport!

"my ethnicity is my gimmick" is such an outdated idea that's guaranteed to kill your good will with the crowd. i guess you can point to the rusev/lana stuff as an exception, but at least they were cheesy enough to be entertaining. and don't forget that segments like him getting that medal or w/e absolutely put the crowd to sleep. also sheamus's main calling card as a worker is stiffness, and that's something the modern crowds don't seem to care about as much

re: sheamus, it's interesting how quickly people have forgotten that just a few years ago, he was what reigns is now. they saw him as the next cena at one point, but got cold feet more quickly than usual.

I think this is on point. The modern adult fanbase has a LOT of crossover with fans of comic book franchises and shows like Dr. Who. The entirety of 'nerd culture' is predicated on defining your identity through the media you consume, so it makes sense that such a fanbase would be more inclined to drop large sums of money on the product. As an aside, this kind of fanbase (and the shift of mainstream culture towards this kind of thing in general) is why WWE should be pushing guys in the Daniel Bryan/Sami Zayn/Bayley mold HARD. But they're out of touch so instead they still see Roman Reigns as the next big thing. bingo bango bongo!!!! this actually reminds me of cody rhodes's blog post after dusty died - at one point he made an offhand comment about the fans wanting to cheer for a seth rogen rather than a clark gable. i assume he was referring to bryan with that one, but it's an interesting general point that p. much echoes this. this also takes me back to an onion AV club comment that i've posted about on here before, talking about why ~hipsters~ weren't watching wrestling. that was in the CENAWINSLOL days before NXT existed i think, and we can clearly see how changes in recent years have started bringing in a different fanbase...but we still have a lot of the general malaise limiting potential growth atm.

since cesaro got brought up a bunch here, i'm just going to say that he should've been the one to keep the real americans theme. it was different enough and over, and swagger was obviously going nowhere once that team broke up.

i thought brodus was dominican

@SRKfunkdoc only talk about wrestling occasionally. lots of thoughts on competitive gaming (video games, tabletop, fantasy football, etc.) and social/political stuff. more than anything, i post links to live streams of people beating video games really, really fast. you wanna learn who can beat super punch-out blindfolded, i'm your man! btw, parv is @JerryVonK i think

Probably the opposite. They made the big jump in the results in 1992, the year they worked in the US a good deal. fair enough. feel like working japan builds a mystique, and that translates to big things if you work the US and don't completely fall on your face a la tensai

i've thought about this before. someone on here used to say that sting was "the sabermetric candidate", but i think that statement miiiiiiight apply more to these types? it's tough though the problem is that pro wrestling has been at a low point in terms of cultural buzz here during this era, and there's also the perception that the brand is the draw. i will say that i probably fall more on that side of this argument. i just can't get past the fact that WWE didn't miss a beat when they lost guys like angle, hardy, and punk. sorta like terrell davis's pro football HOF case being hurt by the success of other random RBs in denver after he retired, ya dig?

seriously yall this is siiiiiiiiiiiiiiick get in there!!!

no offense, but i think you might be in a bit of a bubble of your own here. or maybe you're misunderstanding the point. i know a number of people IRL who have never heard of john freaking cena yet know jake the snake, the undertaker, stone cold, and some others. none of these people have ever heard of the sandman, or ECW period. that's the kind of crowd i think people here are referring to - the total non-fan, the proverbial man on the street. it might be a generational thing causing this argument, but i haven't seen any of my lapsed attitude era fan buddies bring up the sandman. idk

a lot of people get nominated just to spur discussion more than anything else. not in a trolling sense, but more like "hey maybe this guy isn't top 100 material but he's underrated and it would be cool if people talked about him a little more" or you have cases like ultimate warrior where the nominator will seriously vote for him, and has given a detailed defense of it on here

dig that name at #500 for real though, has anybody cared about this in forever? it's a holdover from the pre-internet days when the magazines were how you learned about other promotions & wrestlers. heck, ahmed johnson allegedly got laughed out of vince's office for using his placement in the PWI 500 to ask for higher pay. and that was the mid-90s...

It's worth noting that George "The Animal" Steele called up Wrestling Observer Live to claim that he'd never heard the term whilst working in wrestling not too long ago. Now, he could have been lying because he is a wrestler, after all, but he primarily worked in the Northeast, which if he was being honest suggests that at least in the New York office it wasn't part of the vernacular of the business. this actually reminds me of a study i read about a while back that found racist sentiment to be least common in areas that don't have many people of color. the impression i get is that the southern territories had a far higher concentration of black wrestlers (and particularly black main-eventers, who would be the most threatening to white people) than new york did during that time. if that's the case, that could be part of the explanation. of course, the word also has much less of a general history of casual use on the east coast than in the south, which is also in some part a function of the above phenomenon.

well this is already a greater positive response than the entire MVC thread combined much love, PWO. much love

Failed world champ? being compared to hogan & flair, and anchoring a promotion as it's heading downhill, will give you that rep with the general fanbase see also: akiyama, jun

re: undeserving HOFers etc. if you'll notice, the vast majority of the weakest HOF selections have come from the japan category. e.g. ultimo, dr. death, hase, sasaki, masa saito it seems clear to me that those voters are either more lenient or just have a totally different view of the HOF than we do. so i would never count out nakamura... anyway bryan seems really likely to get in this year, esp with the sympathy from all his injury issues. and i think doing what his crew did for the indies is a significant enough achievement for the hall, given what an important talent source they've become

martel has a double stink on him: all those boring matches as the model, and the "failed world champ" thing not surprising that only the turbonerds would give him a fair assessment

that has to be another feather in brock's cap for any GWE voters out there, but...yeah

coffey: there's been discussion on this a while back. i think WWE fans care more about good matches now than ever before, but their idea of "good match" is an all-action spotfest with cool moves and a hot finishing stretch and their favorite guy winning

MJH: the thing you seem to ignore in your arguments here is that many on this forum overlook execution issues with certain male wrestlers as well. tenryu & cena are the most obvious cases i can think of, and don't tell me they haven't done stuff that's looked worse than anything in these NXT women's matches. i think you can argue some people have a double standard, but not based on gender - it has always struck me as strange that HBK & tanahashi take so much more shit here for weak offense than the above two. i have my own hypothesis as to why but it would hugely derail this thread sooooooooooooo

yea, i'm of the opinion that the match itself playing off the surrounding context in satisfying ways should be counted in its favor. basically what grimmas said i'm not the english phd here, but this was how i was always taught to read literature as well... EDIT: people do tend to abandon this line of thinking for projects like yearbook viewing, i will grant. i wonder if that's more what parv is getting at - that people will wonder what all the fuss was about when they go back and watch sasha-bayley years later. just look at the common consensus on misawa's big win over jumbo (a match i'm shocked wasn't mentioned in the OP)...i recall maybe a couple people who still talk about it as a MOTY, but most took a more detached approach and went "yeah this is really good but not special"

aight, i didn't know how much of that was out there. like halfway through titans atm, curious to hear about more 70s