funkdoc

i'd totally be willing to buy garea as a victim of the lack of footage. one of those "if he was that good toward the end of his career..." deals EDIT: definitely no pat patterson in that regard, though

case: i bet vader in the WWF will be a pleasant surprise for you! people make it out to be this huge dark period for him but it wasn't because of what he did in the ring, mainly just the booking and the kuwait thing. also benjaminkicks, i highly doubt you will be the high vote on KENTA as long as people like alan and joe submit ballots, lol. the likes of them and case are going to be massive outliers on sooooooo many 2000s japanese wrestlers. i rather like that...they're probably the only reason guys like tanahashi have any chance of making the overall top 100, and it's more interesting to me when more people are in the running. actually, that would be a neat thing to consider: whose list will end up deviating the most from the norm. the puro crew i just mentioned & matt d seem like the obvious frontrunners there...

yeah, i was just going to bring up the MNM match as an example of how the hardys were one of the only teams of their era who could deliver in a traditional southern tag

also i just remembered another issue: IIRC, rock was starting to be seen as a ~sellout~ by a chunk of the fanbase because he was doing movies and actually having success there. that probably played some role as well

hogan being as over as he was had little to do with the match itself, i would argue. it was more about being in the right place at the right time. to be more specific: toronto was arguably the biggest market for hulkamania WWF outside of the traditional east-coast base. they got WM6, the big event, stacked house shows, etc. lots of fond memories of the hulkster in that building. furthermore, this was right at the time when 80s nostalgia was just starting to become a hot trend - i believe VH1 had come out with I Love the 80s around this time, among many other things. just a perfect storm of conditions for hogan to get the reaction he did.

yea, stuff like the repo man & mr. hole-in-one was the only good use of darsow period

i am genuinely shocked we've gotten this far with no naoki sano

snuka is just an awkward fit for the time period, otherwise he'd be a really solid 5th for sure. have definitely run into my fair share of non-fans who know him as well i count mick foley's book when talking about what a big star he was in the attitude era, so it's only fair to count GI joe for slaughter imo. he has to be in this as far as why people still remember jake today...i'd say it was because of how much he stood out from others at the time, how cool & memorable his gimmick was, having a major role in beyond the mat (remember, wrestling was HOT when that film came out), and the recent DDP story that got a bunch of mainstream media play. heroes of wrestling also scored irony points with the hardcores (heck, i've live-streamed that show before and even the people who hate wrestling ate it up!)

i think the issue with late-career piper was that he was still hugely involved in main-event programs, delivering shitty matches and patch adams references most guys at that stage of their career aren't pushed that hard on national TV

"before hulk hogan, wrestling was in smoky bars and high school gyms"

fair points and something that needed to be said. i personally have no issue with hero, just stating where others might be coming from. still, though, probably should have posted a bit differently! matt hardy is an awfully similar case in a lot of ways, as i think about it. except he had that string of embarrassing public meltdowns that surely brought a lot more scrutiny toward him than anything hero's ever done. EDIT: re: health issues, that is a real problem with athletic guys who are huge. just look up the life expectancy of NFL offensive linemen or sumo wrestlers sometime. it's the effect of injuries after your athletic career is over that seem to be the main issue, as you can't exercise like you used to. and of course there's the risk of heart problems etc. that come with that territory. for an example a bit closer to home, think of shinya hashimoto - his weight sure didn't slow him down in the ring, but high blood pressure was apparently a major part of what killed him. granted, hero's not at that point now...but it is something to keep in mind. sidenote - while checking hashimoto info, i noticed that he was in a relationship with kodo fuyuki's widow. holy crap that had to have been a shitty few years of her life there with both of them dying

pol said he thinks "fat fat" is a better look for hero than "skinny fat" and i'm inclined to agree. still doesn't have the vibe of a murdoch or hansen though. kevin steen is obv a lot closer to that but i've seen people bash even him as looking like the guy running your local comic book shop. think the "indie" label colors people's perception of these things to some degree

i remember enjoying that summerslam 93 six-man but idk if you'd count that as a tatanka match

Off topic, but who does that entail besides the obvious names like Austin, Rock and Hogan. Lesnar was mainly known as the "fake wrestling guy" in UFC and despite his recent film success, Batista isn't really a large name yet. Every one of those names eventually came back and made nice, sometimes more than once. Only exception I can think of is Savage. Maven appearing on infomercials and the Surreal Life and Stacy Keibler being the arm candy of Clooney for few years before promptly disappearing after breaking up aren't people I would say became bigger than the company. trish stratus has also become a thing in the fitness world with her yoga DVDs or w/e. steadier & easier money than wrestling, i'd imagine

there's that random nitro tag vs. eddie & jericho before jericho really became a thing. that's p. much the platonic ideal nitro match

ooh, just remembered a good one! steve disalvo in early 1991? WCW as Minotaur. by that time he looked like a fatter roided trent reznor, and his gimmick consisted of occasionally yelling into the camera with a goofy expression on his face. he also had a bionic arm because Reasons, and jim ross on commentary said he was wrestling at "a tortoise-like pace". think he had all of 2 matches on TV and a brief house show run. did some jobs to JYD, who i didn't know was still around by that point

When I saw this on TMZ I lost all respect for him. What is the story behind this? The Hogan Knows Best era of his life is a blur for me. I didn't even know his son was in a car wreck. IIRC it was something like: hogan's son and his best friend were out street racing and got into a huge wreck. hogan came out of it OK but his friend was left more or less brain-dead IIRC? the hulkster proceeded to say what a negative person the kid's father was and how that brought that fate upon them (like The Secret sorta), or something like that.

thirding the love for the WM7 match! i just figured i was biased since WM7 was only of the only wrestling tapes we owned for years, but that is such a fun big vs. little match

oh yeah, missed this one before! the extra-weird thing there is that junkyard dog also came back during that time and was his tag partner! totally random "cup of coffee" stint. wasn't bill watts still in charge at the beginning of '93? bringing in those two has his name written all over it, and if my hunch is right this may have been one of the last things he ever did in WCW. really seems to make a lot of sense - maybe watts had plans for them and the new regime ditched them. EDIT: '93 WCW might be the biggest goldmine for this thread. i already saw the blackhearts mentioned, and there were a bunch of other random guys getting featured for a little bit there. big sky, the cole twins beating several "name" teams, charlie norris ripping off tatanka's gimmick right down to the undefeated streak, the colossal kongs as the world's fattest JTTSes, RVD as young martial artist "Robbie V"...

actually, they were money inc.'s main rivals. that feud was the focal point of their survivor series match, and i suspect that would've been the tag title match at mania were it not for hogan coming back. also, something i swear i remember from my childhood that i've never seen *anybody* talk about: after the nasties turned face, they did a thing where jack tunney called for stricter enforcement of the rules against double-teaming. the nasties were doing a random squash match, and the new policy got them DQed! i couldn't believe it as a kid because i knew the boring guys using their real names NEVER won, so that was a huge shock to me at the time. really, among guys who all left the WWF around the same time, i'd say babyface nasties easily did more than the natural disasters during that timeframe. to say nothing of the beverly brothers, or koko in high energy...that was a big transition period for the tag division, as i think about it.

yea, any case for these guys would be built on out-of-ring character work. well, unless you love ladder matches more than anything else in the world!

no way do i agree with the latter, especially. demolition were already on the way down the card - jobbing the tag titles clean was a big sign. had to get whatever value left from them at that point. i also don't think there was going to be a ton of money in the former regardless of how it was done, just because of sheer timing. that was a peak point for wrestling burnout, combined with all the steroid & sex scandals. WCW brought in hogan at a much better time since that stuff had worn off to some degree. EDIT: to actually add something of my own here, cutting off the summer of punk the way WWE did. that was the most mainstream press i recall wrestling getting since the attitude era, though i wasn't around for the trump & mayweather stuff. daniel bryan's fate was a similar story but one you can't really blame the company for, given his injury risk.

ok, then donald sterling since that's a much more similar set of circumstances. people were mad at his private conversations getting blown up too...but there was plenty of history to back that up. hogan has that in general scuzziness if not racism specifically, which is enough in the eyes of many

IIRC the national enquirer first broke the story of john edwards cheating on his wife once in a while they're actually right about something

this team was responsible for an actual interesting thought from scott keith, which is enough for top 25 in my book! to be specific: he said that beefcake sucking actually helped the original dream team by making them more coherent, with valentine doing so much of the work. when they switched him out for bravo, the work became more evenly split since bravo was seen as a better hand than beefcake...but he wasn't that much better if at all, and the team suffered for it. wonder what yall think of that one