The Man in Blak

Eh. I didn't read Maeda's approach and going low as "buying time" as much as "okay, you giant jackass, let's have a real fight then." Maybe Maeda's reputation colored my perception there. Like I said, he's a guy I want to revisit. The urban legends (?) about it potentially being an Inoki power play are fascinating, though. And, to be clear, I don't subscribe to the idea of Andre being a gentle giant either. There's no question that he shouldn't have come to the ring in the state he was in.

Maeda being a professional is the only thing that kept him froom shoot KOing Andre's drunk ass. The Choshu shoot kick was an accident. If you watch the footage Maeda pats Choshu on the back to warn him he's going to kick him. I won't dispute that Maeda was handed a bad situation. (It's something that I kept in mind for Andre too, who made my list, but ended up lower than I would have placed him otherwise.) I do think he took that bad situation and made it considerably worse, though. Having said that, I didn't pick up on that detail from the tag with Choshu, so I'll rewatch and keep an eye out for it.

Maeda's probably close to the top of a list of "second chance" entries -- candidates that I don't regret leaving off my list, but want to revisit anyway to challenge my opinions -- that I'll have coming out of this project. I dig shootstyle. I dig 70s/80s New Japan. Everything feels like it should be in place for me to love watching Maeda work, but it just doesn't connect for me. I felt like the Fujinami match, in particular, was almost a carry job. One other factor for me (and I feel like a minority when it comes to this): professionalism. Maeda's incidents with Choshu and (especially) Andre played a non-negligible role in keeping him off my list as well.

"Disingenuous"?

Depends on wether we are talking about reality or WWE narrative. I am still holding out hope that it is Shawn and he just misses the list. I will be genuinely surprised if Shawn is not a Top 50 guy. If anything, I think he's got a shot at the Top 25.

One last bit for the (sigh) objectivity/subjectivity debate - I think the middle ground word that people are looking for is "rigorous" (see my post at the end of this thread full of depressingly familiar discussion here): http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/31256-match-ratings-doing-away-with-the-meltzer-formula/page-8 (And maybe for the sake of everyone here, we should revive that thread and redirect discussion there so that this thread can get back to focusing on GWE reactions? Or maybe create a new GWE Philosopher's Dilemma thread, since this zombie discussion w.r.t. GWE will never die?)

I'm at 84 left, which is more than I thought I'd have. (And maybe more than I'd like to have, really.) That number took quite a tumble over the last thirty reveals. _____________________ 47. Shinobu Kandori (#146) 48. Naoki Sano (#126) ... 59. Dynamite Kansai (#125) 60. Yoshihiro Takayama (#123) 61. Yoji Anjoh (#214) ... 68. Devil Masami (#135) ... 72. Yoshinari Ogawa (#184) ... 76. Emilio Charles Jr. (#193) ... 78. Sabu (#149) ... 81. Perro Aguayo (#140) ... 85. Megumi Kudo (#195) 86. MS-1 (#192) 87. Antonio Inoki (#132) ... 92. Mayumi Ozaki (#133) ... 94. Masaaki Mochizuki (#194) ... 100. Animal Hamaguchi (#375) _____________________ All in all, the rollout has been amazing.

Kandori's the first one out of my Top 50 and one of my favorite discoveries through the entire GWE journey. Damn.

No Mochizuki or Cima on your list?

If you take Steiner's early 90s run -- featuring the 1990 WCW TV gauntlet of Flair/Anderson/Eaton -- as his Cuban Linx I, I think the Raekwon comparison could still work out, actually. Well, other than the implication that Rick Steiner is Ghostface Killah. You know what? Scratch that. Forget I said anything.

Close!

This is amazing. Best GWE day ever.

Michael Elgin received no votes. Don't think he was nominated. He was nominated, but I don't see him on the list of nominees not receiving votes: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/33782-nominees-not-receiving-votes/ I don't remember if he was listed on the form for submitting ballots, though.

We're up to 184 and this is still a mystery. I don't think it will be Triple H, but that's only because, at this point, I'm thinking Triple H is going to end up making the Top 100.

Other than the explicit comparison made a few pages back between Kobashi's number of great matches and Bret's number of great matches, right?

Wow, four straight entries off of my ballot: Kudo, Mochizuki, Charles Jr., and now MS-1. Mochizuki was pretty far down my ballot and I figured all of them would be coming up before the Top 100, but I'm a little surprised to see the other three so early.

Yoji Anjoh is the second entry off of my list at #61. Lots of 101-125 cuts in this group for me too: Nishimura, El Samurai, Rogers, Invader 1, and Chono. (And yeah, Invader 1 was a direct byproduct of being driven to check out more of his work after listening to the Exile episode on Puerto Rico, for what it's worth.) I feel bad about Nigel McGuinness, though, because I think I may have ended up leaving him off of my ballot entirely through a copy/paste error, even though I meant to vote for him in the 40-50 range. Just a total whiff on my part. @#$%.

I still only have one off of my ballot, but I'm expecting a big shotgun blast of Joshi, Lucha and shootstyle workers in the 100-200 range to dramatically change that. All three of those genres seem primed to have comparatively small, but very enthusiastic voting blocs that consistently ranked those workers highly, but not high enough to overcome the more generally appreciated groups of talent from the big North American and Japanese companies.

As long as Matt and Stacey don't mind, I'd say go ahead and throw it out there now -- the bite-sized episodes give folks plenty of options for consumption. (Also, SO EXCITE.)

I think "really stiff" is probably vastly overstating it, I don't remember anyone except for frequently-full-of-shit Bad News Allen claiming that Bret was physically painful to work. I hear more complaints about Stone Cold's punches than I've ever heard about anything Hart ever did. But on the subject of freak injuries, even Bret himself has occasionally mentioned "well, there was this ONE time I hurt someone" about a few different occasions (I specifically recall him talking about injuring Randy Savage's foot in a SNME match), so the eternal talking point about Bret being the safest worker ever is pure bullshit. I haven't rewatched the match to confirm, but there's also the story that Bret told on his podcast a few weeks ago where he started throwing shoot punches at Lawler during their SummerSlam match because he cracked him too hard with the crutch after the first match with Doink. I think Bret has a great record as far as safety goes, but that doesn't mean he was above taking a receipt from somebody that he thought was stepping out of bounds.

Someone needs to create a Great Match Carcassonne where the farms and castles are replaced with wrestler's names and you score points by putting together the best wrestler vs. wrestler combinations. Bret was a big fish in a hugely diluted pond that was US and Canada wrestling in 92-97. I stack Kobashi being a guy with huge crowd appeal from a young lion to the day he retired in 2013 as a better testament to his connection to the crowd. Bret certainly has good matches with lesser talent but also has mediocre to mundane matches with really good talent which weighs into the house show effect with him. I again hate playing the what if game. Bret had plenty of matches with good workers as a tag wrestler and singles star. Bret did have a chance to have a showcase match in 1992 vs. Shawn Michaels. This match headlined a PPV and was given 26 minutes. Most at best call it very good. Name a Kobashi performance on the big stage where he was that flat for a huge performance making opportunity. Even the excessive Kobashi matches have pretty great heat. 1. Not all opportunities are created equal -- you're not going to get a lot of heat in a rapidly declining period for the company with a newly hotshotted champion and challenger in Bret and Shawn, respectively. (Also, that's one pair of finishes that didn't come up in the List of Great Bret Finishes -- Bret catching Shawn off the top for the sharpshooter and win in '92, then teasing that same spot as the finish in the '96 Iron Man match, only to see Shawn persevere and hold on until the time limit.) 2. If you're considering 1992 Shawn Michaels to be a great worker, I'd be very interested to see a further elaboration of that idea, especially since I put forward Shawn as a serious answer to the question posed by the thread topic. 3. On the other end of the spectrum, Kobashi had a lot of wind at his back with Baba's booking, as well as quality of opposition, throughout the 90s in All Japan. When did he face a situation like Bret's Survivor Series '92? How did he respond? I think a lot of the talk about "projection" and what-ifs is being misread (and maybe misrepresented) as an acknowledgement in contextual differences in opportunity. For me, it's not really about awarding extra credit to Bret or someone like Buddy Rose based on what they could have done in a hypothetical situation. It's about recognizing what they actually did in the context that they were dealt -- which includes identifying great opportunities that were squandered, mind you -- and then assessing and examining what someone like Kobashi or (yes) Flair did in a more fertile environment. Rather than jump on top of another sports analogy grenade (Bret Hart is actually Warren Moon!), I'll point to a concept in sports analysis that influenced my critical processes for this list: value over replacement. In baseball, there's been enough statistical rigor and research done to identify a rough output from a level of talent known as "replacement level" -- basically, the idea that any freely available player from the minors or independent leagues can be brought onto a major league baseball team and provide approximately value through hitting/defense/whatever. This level of output can vary based on the context of a given league - there was much more offense in the 2000s than in the 1960s for a number of reasons (legitimate and otherwise) and, thus, the expectations for a replacement level player as well as a great player are raised and quantified in conjunction to match that. As a result, if you're arguing about whether a player from the 2000s is more deserving of being a Hall of Famer than a player from the 1960s, you can't just do a nose-to-nose statistical comparison between the two and leave it at that; you have to make an adjustment on context and understand that thirty home runs in the 2000s doesn't mean as much as thirty home runs in the 1960s, even if they both put the same amount of runs on the scoreboard. So, yeah, there are a few things that I think Kobashi does better than Bret Hart, but I measure that observation with a caveat that I believe Kobashi had more valuable opportunities to not only demonstrate those skills, but use them to create a great match with a great opponent. (And, from here, we could probably sidebar for hours on the notion of what makes a great match, which is another key contextual difference that makes it sort of useless to just fling lists of matches at each other in my book.) In my eyes, the replacement level in 1990s WWF is different enough to warrant a deeper examination of what Bret was able to accomplish beyond a simple skimming of matches that met criteria for greatness that 1990s WWF had comparatively little interest in chasing. If you're only looking at the great matches, I'm not going to say that the approach is inherently wrong, but I would posit that it might be making less of an adjustment for context than I would personally prefer. How many 80s NWA wrestlers made your ballot? How high did the four pillars rank? And how curious is it that wrestlers from those two eras mysteriously seem to show up on so many people's lists? Ask old school baseball fans about Sandy Koufax some time.

It didn't stop them during Flair's first WWF run: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/12021-ric-flair-vs-bret-hart-wwf-boston-gardens-010993-60-minute-iron-man-match/&do=findComment&comment=5464841 And, to be clear, I count Souled Out as a missed opportunity for Flair too (as well as WCW as a whole, obviously).

To follow up on my point where great matches can be the goal with a specific tie-in to Bret -- I'd posit that the Souled Out feud with Flair was transparently built on the idea of providing a great match to establish Bret as a legitimate player in WCW and, for a number of reasons and extenuating factors, I think Bret and Flair ended up closer to Pretty Good than Capital-G Great. To me, that was a specific situation where Bret actually had the opportunity and didn't (couldn't?) fully capitalize on it. It's one of a few reasons why I specifically placed Bret right outside the Top 25. I snarked a similar request in my first post, but I edited it out because I don't know if there's anything less productive for this discussion than whipping out match lists and comparing length.

FUCKING EXACTLY!I think putting on great matches can be the goal, but I also think that it's easy to fall into a trap where we dramatically underplay the booking, announcing, and production that provides the foundation for greatness and, instead of that, we give the workers 1000% credit and responsibility for its creation.

I had Kobashi (#23) three slots higher than Bret (#26), so I don't feel like some grave injustice has been wrought by the comparison here. And, to answer the question posed by the thread title, I'd actually posit that Shawn Michaels is a fantastic answer to this question. And I don't think it's ridiculous to assert that there's a penchant for theatricality in his work that he shares with Kobashi either.