Hobbes

Thanks! People saying they enjoy the show continues to blow my mind. Me and Matt disagreed a fair bit with each other about Fleisch/Storm on the new episode, but we made sure to mention reports of them doing better elsewhere. We both really liked revisiting Williams (and managed to dig up some interesting super glowing praise from Meltzer in 2002). I am always fascinated with "touring matches" and wonder if in the modern age Storm/Fleisch would've been more successful. I think for a lot of us in the bygone days of the early 2000s, our indie exposure was limited by our budget. If you were like me, most of your indie viewing was ROH, not because of interest, but because of finances. Nowadays the cost barrier is so much lower. What I'm trying to say is, if Fleisch and Storm had five great matches in places and an average one in ROH, a young ROH buyer like me might only get to see the average one. Nowadays, if you get into say, Ricochet/Ospreay, you can follow them all over the place for much cheaper. For the price of one ROH tape, I could get a month of FloSlam and see Ospreay/Ricochet in OTT and Evolve (I think). Or I could get a month of New Japan World, watch their super juniors match, and still have ten bucks left over. Wrestlers don't live or die off of one match in a prominent promotion like they used to I think.

Donnie B is horrible, and I agree about the first three shows being a trilogy. And alsoooo episode four is up: Matt and Trevor return to review ROH’s Road to the Title! The best show so far? The funniest show so far? We revisit one of the more famous single minutes of indie wrestling in fifteen years! We get invaded by the British! Why would you make out next to a dumpster? All is explained on the fourth episode of ThROH The Years! http://www.thecubsfan.com/2017/05/05/throh-the-years-episode-4-road-to-the-title/

I'm sorry. (Actually it's not a painful show to watch, it's just missing that one standout match of the first two shows.)

Episode three of ThROH The Years is here! On this episode Matt and Trevor review ROH's third show, Night of Appreciation. AJ Styles' ROH debut! Is Donnie B the worst announcer in wrestling history? Spanky has a major wardrobe malfunction! A gauntlet series with a surprising good match and a surprisingly disappointing one! Eddie Guerrero delivers one of the most raw real emotional moments in wrestling at a crazy crossroads in his life. We talk about it all and more! http://http://media.blubrry.com/joeversustheworld/www.thecubsfan.com/jvstw/ThROHTheYearsEpisode3-ANightofAppreciation.mp3

Thanks for the compliments everyone! Johnny: I really need to see some JAPW because the CSC seem great at their act but ill suited in early ROH. Lane: Thanks for the stuff about Frank Talent, that kind of stuff is really interesting to me. Next episode should be up next Sunday-ish, will post here when it is.

http://www.thecubsfan.com/2017/04/10/throh-the-years-episode-2-the-round-robin-challenge/ We gave you time to get over your Mania week hangovers but now it's time for the second episode of ThROH The Years! We thank some listeners and use a couple of their contributions, delve into the fascinating world of what Dave Meltzer thought of indie wrestling/ROH/guys like Daniel Bryan 15 years ago, and then review ROH's second show, Round Robin Challenge. American Dragon vs. Christopher Daniels! Low Ki vs. American Dragon! Frank Talent! Talk about human excrement! Hobbes keeps his mic steady and has notes! Three hours of discussion! Come listen to the only ROH podcast that started in 2017 that ends an episode with talk of triple dating Daniel Bryan, it's ThROH The Years!

Thanks to everyone for the feedback, it's very much appreciated.

I wish those early DVDs were still in print so it would be easier for people to follow along! I would love to hear from as many people as possible who decide to watch along.

Ep 2 is up! (Link and description deeper in the thread) Pleased as punch to finally announce me and Matt Feuerstein's new ongoing podcast project: ThROH The Years. We're going to be review every ROH event (Until we get tired of it) starting from the first show. Obviously the timing has turned out to be great/strange, and I think 15 years is just long enough to where these shows can be looked back at from a fresh perspective. To the best of my knowledge no one else is doing it yet in podcast form either. Where The Big Boys play is a show Matt and I are fans of and an obvious influence. First episode is up, a nearly 160 minute whopper where we discuss ROH as a whole and our history with the company before we review the first ROH show ever: The Era of Honor Begins. It features Super Crazy vs. Eddie Guerrero, Low Ki vs. Bryan Danielson vs. Christopher Daniels, Spanky holding a bag of Wendy's, Eric The Towel Boy, and the most homophobic segment in pro wrestling history. It was a ton of fun to make. It was my first time hosting and I feel I was slightly rough but I'll get better and overall I think we made a nice little podcast for you to listen to. Write to us with any comments or questions at [email protected] or hey, by posting here. And please somebody tell me what Spanky orders from Wendy's, seriously. http://www.thecubsfan.com/2017/03/26/throh-the-years-episode-1-the-era-of-honor-begins/

I told myself I wouldn't bump my post until I had built up somewhat of a library. NOW IS THAT TIME. Between the fact that I am a slow writer and family issues, I haven't written as much as I'd like, but the site now has over 20 whole shows reviewed, and a handy sorted list tab to find exactly what you want to read. Every PWG release from this year is up there, along with a mess of Evolve, and fun stuff like the SCI 2016, NEW Wrestling Under The Stars V, and even a CZW show. My reviews don't use star ratings but in recent months I have switched to a similar word based ranking system that I explain in my "About" tab. My reviews are long, but don't recap the action move for move, it's all just thoughts and opinions. Every review ends with a show summary and a ranking of the matches from best to worst, with brief summaries of the full match reviews, so if you don't want spoilers you can read that for a quick recommendation, watch the show, and then come back for in depth thoughts. Or don't. Don't do anything you don't want to do! https://workthehands.wordpress.com/

I third this. The few minutes during the WING segment where Dave, Kris and Bix just went on tangents about obscure 00s indy guys made me want a whole Exile on the subject with the three of them.

I like long shows. One of the advantages of the form is that there's no time constraints. Does it mean that I have a huge backlog of podcasts I want to listen to? Yes, but I'd rather have too much entertainment than too little. Quite frankly, even if all podcasts were thirty minutes, there'd still be too much good stuff to fit into my day. The nice thing about the PTBN podcasts is that most of them focus on older wrestling, so there's no real rush to listen to a show immediately. That said, I think timestamps are great for shows that cover a lot of topics. Allowing people to easily skip parts of a show they may not be interested in is a big help.

Hey, I just started a new blog devoted to reviewing whole indy shows. Just finished PWG All Star Weekend 11 and am going to work my way through Lemmy and Bowie before I start on Evolve. Do you like words? There are some words. https://workthehands.wordpress.com/

I'm a little over halfway through the DVDVR podcast and it is a glorious trainwreck. Everyone making fun of their own lists. Everyone making fun of each other's lists. Everyone making fun of Dean. Will constantly trying to get Dean to give more than a five word justification on why he ranked anybody and then calling him senile. A great show so far.

I feel like this show should have been posted in one massive podcast just to throw the gauntlet down to the Zellners and Lapsed Fans of the world that a new bar has been set in the great wrestling podcast length wars.

Flair certainly faced some challenges in his career, and what he accomplished ranks up there with anybody, but is his career any more "improbable" than Bryan's? We're not talking about just another undersized talent that broke through in WWE, we're talking about a guy who was the complete opposite of what WWE values, in terms of appearance, but also in terms of temperament. He didn't have the mic skills of Punk, he didn't have the flash of a Michaels or a Rey, and he certainly didn't have the drive to be the top star that Punk/HBK/Bret had. He was a polite, undersized, unassuming looking vegan who had no desire to play the political games most top WWE/WWF stars throughout history have played. Bryan suffered three concussions shortly after he debuted as a wrestler, and went on to suffer countless more, yet still had a 15 year career. He was fired by WWE twice before he made it as a top star, and WWE went out of their way to bury him as a boring virgin geek character for much of the time he spent there. Yet somehow, he managed to become one of the most over wrestlers in the company, and built a fanbase the hijacked WWE's PPVs and television week after week until they finally relented and built an entire WrestleMania around him. This was a guy that Gabe Sapolsky once thought was a nice complimentary piece but couldn't be "the man" in ROH, a company literally built for guys like him. The fact that he forced himself to the top of not only that promotion, but WWE, is about as improbable as it gets. More so than Punk, Bret or HBK. Only Rey compares.

I don't know if that Bryan character was necessarily supposed to be a pure heel as much as something that straddled the face/heel line. I vaguely recall an old Observer during this period where Dave said Bryan's character was meant to be a face against the heels and a heel against the faces. It very much felt like his character was the cocky asshole who kept saying saying he was the best in the world, but who was so good you almost couldn't hold it against him because he just might be right. The old "I have til five referee" spot is a pretty good encapsulation of his persona at that time: he is not usually breaking the rules, but he's bending them to their limits, which again, made him come off as a guy who was being a prick, but a prick you admired because he was so smart. Now, was it effective in terms of drawing heel heat when it needed to? Not always, as my recollections of that time period are that Bryan only got booed rarely against the absolutely most over stars. ROH at that time though was very much sold as a workrate promotion, where every DVD needed to have a "buzzworthy match" as a selling point. I don't know if under those constraints if Bryan, as the ace of the promotion, was going to be able to do some of the more toned down, traditional things to get a better heel reaction, and still fulfill the overall marching orders of the company. The character he did was about as good a middle ground as could be done I think, and got him more over than ever before within ROH. The Hero/Punk IWA-MS marathons came before most of Bryan's longer matches, and quite honestly are probably a bigger part of those two's indy legacies than Bryan's. Bryan probably did lengthier matches more often than his peers, but that was probably at least in part simply due to the fact that he had more opportunities to have the free reign to do that than others did, as most of his longest matches came during his ROH title reign when he was the focal point of the promotion and had the run of the place. Super Dragon and Joey Ryan worked a 60 minute iron man match, AJ and Christopher Daniels worked a 60 minute draw in PWG, and Punk would go on to work the two hour long Joe matches. Bryan by comparison worked the hour plus match with Aries pre-title reign, and then had his string of lengthy matches as champion, the two with Strong, the Cabana 60 minute draw, the Nigel 60 minute draw, the Joe 60 minute draw. The Cabana and Nigel matches happened on the same weekend for ROH, so those in particular felt like they were being done more as a gimmick than anything else. Bryan generally though seemed to like 15-18 and 20-25 as his two sweet spots for match length, although he tended to like to work 30-35 in his highest profile matches. In terms of "padding his stats", while the sheer fact that he worked 60 minutes plus probably bought him some attention and cred from some circles (Although again, not as much as the Hero/Punk matches brought those two), I don't think they really padded his case as a great worker by people in the long term. None of those Bryan epics seem to be viewed as anywhere close to Bryan's best by most long term fans of his. The Aries match comes closest in terms of how it's perceived, but even at the time it was released on DVD, I recall fan reaction being split on if it was great or far too excessive and masturbatory. The Colt draw got some "You've got to see this" buzz, but only around the fact that Bryan separated his shoulder eight minutes in and still went 60. The lengthy Strong matches weren't universally praised either, despite a hard sell from Gabe, and were mostly overshadowed by the weird worked shoot "these guys really don't like each other and are being unprofessional" stuff that went along with them. I don't think many people would consider Bryan's 60 minute draws with Joe and Nigel to be his best matches with either guy.

I'm a big PWG fan, in part because they only run ten shows a year. If they ran weekly, would it get desensitizing? Sure. But ten shows a year of bleeding edge spotfests I can enjoy. I don't think I've ever sat through a PWG DVD in one sitting, but I don't see that as a negative, just like how I don't see the fact that I would vomit if I ate a whole chocolate cake in one sitting as a negative of chocolate cake. I feel about the shows the same way I used to feel about those marathon IWA-MS shows: if I had to watch them live, I might not enjoy them as much, but I don't have to watch them live. While the majority of PWG is focused on highspots, crowd interaction comedy, and hot nearfalls above all else, it's a narative a little overstated by some. In the last year PWG has booked Timothy Thatcher, Drew Gulak, Drew Galloway and other guys that don't fit the "American Dragon Gate" narrative. PWG also includes regulars like Roderick Strong, Chris Hero and Mike Bailey, who are workers that even a lot of people who aren't fans of PWG overall still enjoy. The majority of the PWG product still is go-go-go, but the overall vibe of the promotion ebbs and flows, and I feel at times in the last 6-8 months the overall product has started to move a tiny bit back to being more varied. BOLA night 2 of 2015 in particular is a pretty varied card, and probably the show that prompted Dave to make that misguided comment about PWG being the most varied promotion on earth, as cards like that are a rarity for PWG, not the norm. That said, I feel pretty confident that most people will find at least one match to like from that show, between Hero/Thatcher, the Lucha Underground tag, Bailey/Galloway, and the hardcore brawl main event. All very different matches. Again, that kind of variety isn't the norm for PWG, but they're capable of it. Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't plug The Beaver Boys vs. Andrew Everett/Trevor Lee match from last year's DDT4 show. I've talked about it here before, and the show as a whole was probably PWG's worst of the year, but I believe it's an incredibly underrated match that kind of bridges the gap between what people expect from PWG and what some feel PWG is missing. It still has a good pace and lots of highspots, but it has a great traditional tag structure, some nice little detail work, and a very good, almost perfectly consistent leg sell job from Andrew Everett. I don't know if it's worth buying the whole show for that one match, but if you can see it, watch it.

A modern pick would be Timothy Thatcher and Drew Gulak. I see people who think they're two of the best wrestlers going today, and people who say they refuse to sit through another one of their matches. I feel like many of these other picks are great, but some of them are more divisive as time has passed and a backlash has formed. Thatcher and Gulak are provoking extreme reactions from people in the moment.

I was about to mention this. Joe on a previous show cut a very brief, very intense promo about that situation to set the first Necro match up. Joe generally cut this kind of calm and collected "I'm the man" cadence on promos at this time, and here he was just screaming about how Necro was fucking dead for what he had done. It wasn't some lengthy intricate storyline, but I appreciated them going the extra mile to give context for a dream match that could've easily gotten away without it.

Good show. I think one thing people have forgotten is how bad a lot of the crowds were during the last wrestling boom. Go back and watch those late 90s Raws and Nitros and a ton of those fans are just watching the trons, completely spazzing out when they see that they are on TV. In some ways those crowds had a real party atmosphere that most wrestling is missing these days, but much of the time they also felt like wrestling was only half of the reason why there were there. Between YouTube and social media, I feel like people have gotten that "I'M ON TV" thing largely out of their systems, and modern crowds are better for it. As Rob said, modern crowds are also a lot more forgiving. I see guys make major botches in the most smarky workrate indies going, Evolve and PWG, and no one chants "You fucked up" or even turns on the matches. Yeah, modern crowds chant, and a couple of them ("We are awesome" and "Wreeeeestling...Yaaaay") are really annoying, but usually the chants are appreciative and about what's going on in the ring. It's easy to be cynical about the "Women's Wrestling" and "You Deserve This" chants at the last Bayley/Sasha match, but I believe that was genuine appreciation from those fans and it prompted genuine emotion from the wrestlers, and isn't that what the whole fucking thing is about? Like the guys said, most of the worst chants come out when fans are bored. That's not limited to wrestling, I'm a hockey fan and I've seen fans chant for their local baseball team and throw food and jerseys on the ice when they're unhappy. If what you gives fans captivates them, their smarkiness goes way down.

I was recently researching the Hogan/Goldberg World title change for a podcast with Matt Feuerstein, so I actually have a quote handy from the Death of WCW about the booking of this. Now, I realize that Bryan Alvarez and R.D. Reynolds aren't exactly Woodward and Bernstein, but the book was endorsed by Meltzer, so I'm assuming the following story has been vetted:

There might be a difference between "favorite" lists and "greatest" lists but they do have one huge thing in common: They're generally only interesting if you know each voter's thought processes behind them. The sum total ranking of wrestlers from a few dozen people who I vaguely know isn't that fun. To me, the fun in these rankings comes from seeing what criteria each person uses, and how they judge each performer by that criteria. A bunch of lists of wrestlers means little to me, but people writing out their thought processes? I'll read those all day. Parv, there's no reason you can't make your list using your favored criteria, and I know that many people, including me, would be interested in reading how you interpret the project, how you're judging the wrestlers, and the thought process behind your decisions. You might be bored and frustrated by other list makers who don't use your criteria, but your list is still valid to you, and still has merit to the people who read it. When you add up all the rankings, the final list isn't going to be "the greatest", but it's not going to be "favorites" either, it's going to be a bunch of people each defining what a 100 wrestler ranking means to them. I think the enjoyment is going to be reading people's interpretations, not in who "won".

As someone who has just been observing (and enjoying) the GWE discussions for months, I'm not as surprised that people are having this argument as much as I'm surprised that they're having it this deep into the process. Parv seems to be looking for some kind of clinical, "authoritative" GWE list, one that tries to de-empasize people's personal tastes and where their heads are currently at as fans in 2015. I don't know if such a list is even possible, but if it is, it's been pretty clear from the start that this project was never going to fit that bill. The kind of project I think Parv is looking for.would need a lot of strict criteria, and could only be open to a very small, select group of voters who have seen a ton of footage, that are fans of an incredible spread of styles, regions and eras. Speaking as someone who just reads this forum, this project never gave off any impression of even coming close to attempting that. It's always been about trying to encourage as many people to vote as possible, using whatever criteria they want. If anything, I get the impression that for a lot of people, the poll is almost secondary to sparking discussion here. In fact, we know for certain that there's people participating on the GWE forum discussions that don't even intend to cast a ballot. I could get behind the kind of Parv's list is talking about, it would be an interesting exercise, but again, this clearly was never aiming to be that. To suddenly realize that now is perplexing. All that being said, while I understand that people are worried that Parv is stifling conversation by intimidating some people, I hope this doesn't turn into some kind of witch hunt to run him out of town. I like his podcasts, he provokes interesting conversations here, he's clearly passionate about his views, I can put up with him getting a little snooty sometimes and heavily sighing whenever Will started talking during the Fair for Flair podcast. I grew up reading peak jdw and Boston Idol on tOA, this is nothing.

But that's the problem, he's never going to get concrete numbers for things as it pertains to Daddy, because they simply don't exist. That's why I think the case to be made is just to forget about debating his drawing record and go for "Big Daddy is so strong in historical significance by being a house hold name that he should get in on that alone. He's to historical significance as Daniel Bryan is to in ring work. " Every other argument is getting too muddled, when the strongest argument for him might be the simplest.