funkdoc

if i were doing this, i would strongly consider him just for getting a good match out of RVD IIRC that was the *only* match in ditch's 90s AJPW top 50 that didn't have any of the big 4 in it

there has to be a good sports comp for akiyama out there. yao ming, maybe? someone who was destined to be seen as a failure no matter how great he was...

the four corners thing is about all of them being part of the same generation, i always thought

man, papa shango really was the katie vick of his day huh? the latter was why i stopped watching regularly, while the former scared the heck out of me since i was a kid at the time. stuff like that & nailz was perfect for me at the time, just as the new age outlaws were later on.

yea, somethingawful is about as hardcore as most places get. and while you have a MOTYC thread and a puro thread there, the bulk of the discussion is WWE and the bulk of *that* discussion is bitching about the booking. one of my friends gets mocked there for rating G1 matches ***1/4, because to them that's the rating you give to del rio raw matches. meltzer orthodoxy is as far as they ever get there.

genuinely agree with this, they missed out on big merchandising potential with this guy heck, on marvel vs. capcom 3 tournament broadcasts, the most popular commentator always calls taskmaster "la parka" because of the skull mask. people still remember him!

yea, put me down as not a fan of pre-89 *or* post-92 rude. a definite "no" imo, as fun as he was at his best

holy shit look at vader's twitter account (@itsvadertime). NSFW btw his recent stuff is way better than that digiorno's schtick imo, and he's lost a lot of weight too! good stuff all around

reminder that lawler got a better match out of 1990 junkyard dog than flair did the definitive "working smart" guy in my view

you could compare it to movie fight scenes, no? also you have to remember that this stuff came way before actual MMA got popular - heck, shootstyle basically spawned MMA in japan IIRC. so this was people's first exposure to this kind of stuff! that would explain its success at the time, but you clearly seem to be wondering why people still enjoy it nowadays as well. where i think you diverge is your assumption that real fights MUST inherently be boring. my suspicion is that people who love shootstyle tend to lie more in the "real sports tell better stories than pro wrestling" camp.

heck, even in 1990 itself we had king cobra...

yeah i figured as much re: JYD, thanks for the replies everyone! =) was just one of those weird little things bugging me for a while... also thanks for the article dylan, surprised you mentioned han & hamada after making some posts suggesting you weren't thrilled with them as candidates!

since JYD is on the ballot, here's something i've always wondered about: i remember seeing scott keith at some point claim that JYD was "one of wrestling's earliest steroid abusers" or something similar. if he got that from meltzer...then maybe meltzer sees "helped make steroids en vogue" as part of his legacy and that's a reason he's always so down on him? no idea, but i've had this in my head for quite a while so figured i'd ask!

los misioneros de la muerte feel to me like they should be a slam dunk. i would definitely be a bit strategic with my votes in something like this, though. it's fun to think about this even if i don't have a ballot! i would currently be leaning: colon, rnr express, cien caras, los misioneros, villano III, huracan ramirez, JYD, patera, the sharpes, big daddy i tend to be interested in giving the older stars love. i think i heard there's a "veterans committee" for this HOF though, which would change things up a bit for me. jimmy hart & jerry jarrett would be my slam dunks for non-wrestlers, probably bill apter as well (since inducting the entire company doesn't seem like it would happen). leaning finkel & don owen for the last 2 since the crocketts seem safer.

the murdoch thing has been stated by a number of folks. tito santana was one and he definitely doesn't strike me as the usual delusional carny type. the most common refrain i've heard was "he wasn't really THAT racist for the time, he just believed the races shouldn't mix", to give you an idea EDIT: i've also suspected that this is a reason meltzer always tends to be so down on the guy whenever he gets brought up. no idea if that's true though!

sam got cut from the rams, but he played very well in the preseason and they're the most loaded NFL team at his position (defensive line). hardly a death blow to his football career, and i would expect him to catch on with a practice squad elsewhere. everyone seems to have said nothing but nice things re: his work ethic & not being a locker-room distraction like many were afraid he would. the attention regarding the latter all seems to be directed at ESPN rather than sam himself. all this is to say that there's no way in hell he becomes a wrestler at this point. not even close.

remember when HHH tried to get the sleeper over as a finisher again during his reign of terror? think that was the same time when every main eventer did a spinebuster, although that wasn't a finish. i actually think things have gotten simpler in WWE compared to a few years ago, fwiw. the lack of those cool tag-team spots is probably more due to their on-again/off-again relationship with tag team wrestling in general.

the NFL didn't run prestige games on Thursday in past years because they were on the NFL Network, which wasn't even available at all on Comcast for a good while. now that they moved to network TV, the schedule has been significantly beefed up with lots of classic rivalry games. also i would say the overlap between wrestling and football is significant, just because *everyone* watches football

i'm no historian but #1 seems pretty well off the mark to me. the consistent pattern i have noticed is that the value of a title depends on the value of all the wrestlers competing for it. when people bring up this point, they never mention all the rapid-fire WWF title switches between austin/rock/mankind, or the 1-day reign for kane. all of those guys were booked well enough that they mattered to the fans, and their title wins didn't stretch any credibility. on the opposite end, JBL's reign didn't seem to elevate the title (more the opposite, if anything). i knew a bunch of people who had stopped watching and said "wait, BRADSHAW is the champion??? ahahahahaha", which was also my response at the time. granted i don't have hard numbers here, so maybe i'm wrong, but that really came off as a random midcarder getting the belt. memphis is one of the most infamous examples of hotshot booking with the title, but i would argue that was because of how often they would have terrible wrestlers come in and almost instantly win the title. think king cobra or the dragon master. then you look at someone like the snowman, who by all rights should have been one of those random scrubs as well...but they came up with a genuinely hot angle and the fans bought into him. a corollary to this is that i believe you can elevate secondary titles by having top guys feud over them. WCW, believe it or not, was really good at this when luger had the US title. flair went from world champ to immediately challenging luger for the US belt, but his promos emphasized that title being a stepping stone to a world title shot so it still came off as a big deal. so tl;dr i don't think the length of title reigns matters so much as how high on the card the title is, how over its champion and top contenders are, and whether said contenders have done enough to earn a title shot in the fans' eyes.

we need an Irrational Steroid Transformation Debate Thread for bravo vs. davey boy

it still amuses me that the old washed-up windham has a pinfall win over HHH speaking of which, that run got real creepy when he stopped wearing the facepaint yet still went by "The Stalker". especially since he was a babyface, lol

HOLY SHIT HOW DID I NEVER SEE THIS wowwwwwwww, i definitely remember you from the real old days when i actually posted on SRK, but never made that connection! that was indeed me, haha. i haven't played fighting games since my 360 died and i found work and such - all my gaming time now goes to speedrunning the game in my avatar, or netplaying power grid. also was totally not expecting to see mvc2 sentinel here, that's a pleasant surprise! fyi this dude helped make a sick mod for street fighter 4 called SF4 Remix, good times~

d...damn... if only his name were donald:

there are also some really new people here who should count as "active". myself, pol, shining wiz, a few others... i do think there is a great potential for groupthink here, in part because there are folks like dylan who put inhuman amounts of work into big comprehensive arguments. it's just not realistic to expect a strong enough counter to stuff like that, so "patera is a HOFer" (just an example) may come off better than it should here. there is no Dark Dylan to battle him! but even beyond that, the entire basic structure of the internet makes it a breeding ground for hivemind mentalities. this place does about as good a job as you can hope in combating that, but it's just the nature of the beast once a place lasts long enough. also speaking of dylan i just noticed he became a mod. must be real new, good stuff!

i just find duggan & bad news (& bravo, good call there) more interesting examples since they were clearly lower on the totem pole than the rest of those guys, yet still got similar protection duggan was kinda like koko in that his gimmick could keep him over, but unlike koko he needed to look strong for his gimmick to work. i think that was the difference.