The Man in Blak

I lost out on four of my Top 10: 1. ??? 2. ??? 3. Nick Bockwinkel 4. Tatsumi Fujinami 5. ??? 6. Negro Casas 7. El Satanico 8. ??? 9. ??? 10. ??? They were replaced by Flair (#11), Lawler (#15), Mysterio (#20), and Kobashi (#26) -- even though they were out of my top ten, I don't mind trading the two luchadors for Lawler and Mysterio, especially since I ended up low-balling Rey more than I realized. Just curious...why did you want to see Jumbo or Kobashi outside the Top 10? Other than the fact that I had Liger much higher than Jumbo and Kobashi on my ballot, I'd also like to see a little more diversity in the upper tier outside of the usual suspects from AJPW (and Crockett).

When Parv and I interviewed Tito Santana , Tito said he'd go to Fuji for advice a lot on matches. You could literally hear Parv's head spin around. How much of Strongbow and Fuji's prime do we have on tape? By the time we get to their 70s run in the WWWF, Strongbow was already over 40 years old and Fuji wasn't far behind him.

Huge pop for "Hegelian dialectic" showing up in a wrestling podcast.

I would be stunned if Bryan missed the Top 10. Then again, I think he's the only guy that could give Flair a run for his money at #1.

If I remember the stats shown for the ballots/average of the Top 10, the #9 guy had the lowest number of ballots, but the highest average ranking: I'm thinking that could be Lawler. I'd like to see Jumbo or Kobashi outside of the Top 10, but it's probably going to end up being someone like Liger.

You should probably hit that chinlock soon or else you won't have anything left for the Hart Foundation when the tag list gets revealed next month.

I think the discussion of feminist critique for wrestling is worth its own (awesome) thread -- there are many different schools of feminism and we could burn page upon page discussing how various matches would play within feminist conventions (male gaze, etc.).

And a couple of people did just that in the GWE forum for Rose, which maybe gets to a big point for the whole process: encouraging everybody to submit a vote is great (and certainly something that I would carry forward into the 2026 edition of this list), but I think that encouragement should also extend to the GWE forum itself. So many people have talked about the destination being secondary to the journey, but I don't know if the PWO pitch for inclusion (which, again, was ultimately a positive) mirrored that philosophy as much.

I'm not sure if this was meant as a response to me, as that's not what I meant with my previous post, but I can see where I might have came across that way after re-reading it so, with apologies, I'll try to clarify a bit. With Rose, the "watch every match from 79-82" talking point comes up so much from various people that I actually think it might be a little unnecessarily intimidating. Rose is unquestionably a guy whose case is enhanced by footage because one of his big selling points is how well he was able to adapt to the grind in Portland; it provides additional context to his output. For someone like me that was a little more focused on the performance/input side of things, though, I found a lot to like with Buddy Rose very quickly. And that's really all that I was trying to say. It wasn't that anybody that didn't rank Rose didn't watch the footage; if you didn't find anything there with what you watched, then that's your take and that's cool. For me, I didn't need to embark on the four year footage dump to come to that conclusion. Also, I did initially find it odd that so many people were high on Buddy in the GWE forums, but I think this is just a recurring theme; we've seen it with other candidates like Tamura as well. Just part of the process.

Benoit on 61% of the ballots. That's actually not as much of a drop-off as I expected. I have a lot of thoughts on the notion of "disappointment," but I want to hold them back until we see more of the list (and the immediate sting of seeing guys like Satanico show up early subsides). I do see the list reflecting a very different GWE journey than I took and I agree with Matt that improvement over a list from ten years ago that 90% of the voting population didn't participate in only takes you so far. I can also tell you that I didn't watch every Buddy Rose match from 79-82, but I didn't have to do that to see that he was great (and #19 on my list). He's an instance where the list not only doesn't reflect my own journey, but didn't really seem to reflect the GWE forum discussion through the process either.

I didn't realize that Fujiwara didn't make the 2006 list -- even if it pains me to see him under some of the people ahead of him, that's a commendable jump. Michaels, Styles, and Benoit (who I overlooked when I counted last time) are the surviving entries missing from my ballot. Robinson (#25) and Fujiwara (#17) are my fallen soldiers from the Top 25.

The four Top 50 entries that I'm missing: Shawn Michaels Brock Lesnar Tully Blanchard A.J. Styles I joked about voting for fictional video game characters instead of Styles at one point, but he ended up being one of my last cuts and he's probably the only one out of this list of four that I feel a twinge of remorse about leaving off, in retrospect. Of course, it shouldn't be a surprise that so many people have 45+ out of these 50 - they didn't get to be the Top 50 overall by accident. (Still fun to consider, though.)

There's going to be enough of a voter percentage gap for Lucha that I'd think that even someone like Bret or Shawn might have a better shot at this than Santo. (Though I hope Santo finishes high, regardless.)

Post-UFC Brock Lesnar has been one of the most advantaged workers in history. If you spent multiple posts decrying the inclusion of the Undertaker because of how protected he was under the gimmick, my eyebrows are going to start escalating if I see you stumping for Lesnar, especially at a Top 50 level (which is where it looks like he could very well land).

For those that would position Jericho's late WWE work as being ambitious -- how is it different from other upper-card matches in modern WWE?

I've got 62 out of the next 74. Ikeda, Virus, LA Park. Chicana, Scorpio, Garvin, Onita, Toyota, Undertaker, Tajiri, Santana, and Hase all fell off on the way to the Top 75. No top 25 losses for me, but six are gone from my top 50. (Ballot so far in spoilers below.) It's sort of weird (but good weird) that we still have Jack Brisco and Harley Race yet to come, along with Angle, Austin, Samoa Joe, Dick Togo, and Jericho. And how high can Jim Breaks go?

I love watching Rude at his best and I favored peak pretty strongly in my voting process, but I think he's benefited from the most egregious boost that we've seen so far. (Though Mutoh and Angle are yet to come.) Even with that, though, I can buy him and everyone else that we've seen on a Top 100. And count me down as another voter that didn't have either half of the MVC on their list, but would have ranked Williams over Gordy. I think this is definitely emblematic of his approach after he came back in 1996, but how does Bret's 1995 fit into your view?

Chicana was the biggest reach on my list in terms of footage seen at #29, but he was such a revelation. His brawling and fire are on another level, but he was very capable as a more technical champion working the mat against guys like Ringo Mendoza as well. It's awesome that he made it to the Top 100 but, as more footage becomes available, he could end up looking out of place at this point in the Top 100 by virtue of being too low.

I get the joke, but someone asked the question of what his best 00s matches were. and it was answered. And it's a good thing too, because I was starting to get worried that we'd never be able to answer whether the Undertaker was better than Bret Hart or not!

I personally found it really difficult to see a way that I could revisit Benoit's work and end up with a positive outcome. I didn't completely rule him out and I ended up watching some of his matches in the process of examining other workers...but there were so many other candidates, styles and eras to explore as a part of the GWE journey that it wasn't hard to find other priorities for focus. No judgment from me if you had him on your ballot, though. Agreed.

I've never seen any footage of it, but Dragon Gate's King of Chop tournament -- a tournament dedicated to finding out who has the strongest chop -- sounds kind of amazing. Also, Regal should be an honorary mention here at a minimum, if only for using his time on NXT commentary to provide one of the only satisfying kayfabe explanations for why you'd want to chop someone in the first place.

When you dredge up a thread that's been stale for six months -- a thread that effectively started with you questioning the motives of voters that might vote for somebody other than Flair as #1 -- it kinda comes across like you're jonesing for another pass at your favorite windmill. Anything for a pop, I guess.

I don't know what you are asking. Well, I guess that's only fair because I don't really understand what you mean when you're saying that here. Do you think people are just manufacturing criticism of Flair for the hell of it? Do you really think it's out of bounds to acknowledge that Flair has a great deal of visibility that would generally help him (and other Big Names, to be fair) with a larger voting population? The point was that we can see the narrative being written in order "to account" for the placement -- and remember, we still don't know for sure -- but the point is that he would have done darn well on a list done by just core regular PWO board members. So it is "disingenuous" in the sense that the narrative ("All these extra voters = Flair wins") doesn't reflect or recognise the fact that there are a lot of us here who had him #1 or top 5. It was starting to be talked about like Kurt Angle ranking or something like that, as a quirk of having 152 voters and "mainstream-erizing" the list. If that is the narrative being pushed, it is "disingenuous". I looked up the word just for good measure and stand by this usage. Usually, the word "disingenuous" has to do more with the intent behind an argument, but I don't know that it's worth squabbling over. The only comment that I saw in regards to Flair was OJ's "cult of the old" comment, which didn't seem at all connected to the other complaints pertaining to Undertaker, Hogan, Dusty, Angle, etc. -- maybe I missed something. Considering that you resurrected a thread dedicated to handwringing over Flair's ultimate placement in the list, it sort of feels like you're eager to go on the defensive here, even moreso than usual when it comes to Flair.

I don't know what you are asking. Well, I guess that's only fair because I don't really understand what you mean when you're saying that here. Do you think people are just manufacturing criticism of Flair for the hell of it? Do you really think it's out of bounds to acknowledge that Flair has a great deal of visibility that would generally help him (and other Big Names, to be fair) with a larger voting population?

74 left for me, with four taken out of the top 50: _____________________ 31. Jaguar Yokota (#114) ... 41. Chigusa Nagayo (#110) ... 47. Shinobu Kandori (#146) 48. Naoki Sano (#126) ... 59. Dynamite Kansai (#125) 60. Yoshihiro Takayama (#123) 61. Yoji Anjoh (#214) ... 67. Carlos Colon (#103) 68. Devil Masami (#135) ... 72. Yoshinari Ogawa (#184) ... 74. Low Ki (#107) 75. Chris Hero (#104) 76. Emilio Charles Jr. (#193) 77. Jerry Blackwell (#118) ... 78. Sabu (#149) ... 81. Perro Aguayo (#140) ... 85. Megumi Kudo (#195) 86. MS-1 (#192) 87. Antonio Inoki (#132) ... 90. Pirata Morgan (#117) ... 92. Mayumi Ozaki (#133) 93. Christian (#102) 94. Masaaki Mochizuki (#194) ... 96. Steve Grey (#108) ... 99. Wahoo McDaniel (#115) 100. Animal Hamaguchi (#375) _____________________ I regret ranking Ric Flair as high as I did. I'm torn on the WoS contingent -- I only ended up getting two WoS guys on my list, with a half-dozen guys being just on the outside in the 101-125 range, and I don't feel like that's truly demonstrative of my appreciation for the style. At the same time, I also had a really hard time ranking and distinguishing them within the style (which is something that continued exposure to the style will hopefully remedy after GWE wraps up). So, in the end, Breaks and Grey made my ballot, but the Cortez/Saint/Roberts/Roach/Jones/Rudge jumble ended up getting left off as a whole. EDIT: After seeing that Sano dropped from the 2006 Top 100, I regret not ranking him higher. Versatility is something that I tried to account for as a primary criteria so, in retrospect, Sano barely creeping into the Top 50 really feels like a lowball vote on my part.