The Man in Blak

We're up to 292 and I've only had one casualty on my ballot so far -- Animal Hamaguchi, who was my only GWE nominee, was my #100 -- but I wish I had more than that, even if having more entries outside of the community's Top 100 might make a ballot seem less valuable or legitimate for some folks. There's an element of advocacy in a ballot, I think, and it feels like a missed opportunity to see a candidate that just barely missed your ballot show up much earlier than you expected in the community results. I don't know if a down-ballot appearance by Garza or Koshino would have made a significant difference in their placement here, but I would have (selfishly) felt better about advocating for them in spite of that, I guess. EDIT: And Leo Burke too. Ugh. Even with that being the case, the discussion that's emerged from some of these early placements has been great. It's already been mentioned, but I'll reiterate that the defense of Quackenbush as a #6 vote was awesome. Outside of my #1, I think I've got a decent shot at being a high vote on 2-3 candidates and Sangre Chicana is one of them.

Not only was this a really bad joke, but it's a really bad joke wasted on somebody who wasn't even nominated. I am ashamed.

Well, at least it wasn't Flair, I guess.

I apologize if you've already posted about this elsewhere, funkdoc, but how do you feel about shoot style wrestling? Something like RINGS can definitely provide something closer to a traditional sports feel in presentation and structure. On the other end of the spectrum, I think the Chikara recommendation is sound. Even something like PWG might be more up your alley, even though it's not that far away from conventional wrestling in feel. Lucha Underground is a bit trickier to recommend. I think you might enjoy the different approach to TV production, particularly in how angles/vignettes are shot, but I think you might potentially find some of the dynamics in the intergender matches to be objectionable.

I'm holding out hope that the mystery wrestler that's tied with Nash is Glen Jacobs.

I've been wondering if I'd ever find a picture that felt right for my PWO avatar. Then the day came when Tommy Dreamer was nominated for Greatest Wrestler Ever.

In an attempt to avoid rehashing old discussions, I'll just call attention to this as something that I think is near the root of the "problem" here. If you point the same set of questions to great rock music and great jazz, you're going to get different answers. Action movies and documentaries. MMORPGs and fighting games. There are certainly commonalities that genres can share, including different mechanics and expressions to how they work, but they don't always work together in the same way across a given artform. Frantic handheld camerawork that adds tension and uncertainty to a horror movie is going to feel incredibly dissonant when applied to a romantic comedy. So yeah, to me, desirable approaches to criticism have to assess how it all works in concert, even if leads to slightly contradictory conclusions about particular aspects on the whole. If you always apply the same expectations, you're going to end up with fundamental disconnects to entire segments of the artform. (And yeah, I know that's another thread too, but I think all the navel-gazing that we're having over critical frameworks with this process should give you a hint that it's not just carnival work. ) It's not a taste thing or a reader-response thing -- it's identifying and acknowledging a deeper issue of structural differences that can, nonetheless, still end up with a similar end product of expression. For criticism, I want to examine how it all works together and, if there are areas where it doesn't, tease apart those failings or incongruities within the context of the work itself first before consulting a Grand Unifying Theory of Whatever that dictates how Things Should Work. So, yeah, lucha is going to have different tenets of "good psychology" because it working in a different structure with a different audience and a different cultural context. Maybe the more productive line of discussion is identifying those differences to form a better understanding of how it works within them. (EDIT: Which is what Loss is driving for with his last post, woot. (EDIT EDIT: So much for not rehashing discussions, lol.))

I was an asshole. I'd be down for seeking out more Super Crazy recommendations, particularly from the indies before and after his time in WWE. Most of what I saw outside of the big ECW run didn't really stick with me, though, which made it easy for him to get lost in the shuffle.

I don't know that I would have taken advantage of it, but it would have been interesting, in retrospect, to have offered an option to submit a ballot of 150 entries. I guess you could see it as an inverse of one of the questions from the original Smarkschoice poll, where there was an option (as I understand it) to only submit 50 entries on your ballot. Ten years later, so much more footage is available and the problem has evolved from "not enough great wrestlers" to "how can I fit all of these people onto one freakin' ballot." There will always be cutoff casualties, though, no matter where the threshold is set.

This was awesome. All of the GWE shows have been fantastic and this was no exception. Both Matt and Stacey came across as naturals too, despite being first-time contributors to P2B (and first-time podcasters?). Great job!

I could see a golden age candidate grabbing a #1 vote and still sitting around the lower 300s, based on lack of exposure. Lou Thesz, maybe?

You are the only cloud yeller. Ladder clusterfucks are fun! Even by the usual standards for ladder clusterfucks, I didn't think it was that great, but that cloud totally deserved it!

Hector Garza was one of my last five cuts -- seeing the results now, I wish I had found a spot for him. Ditch has a good amount of Takaiwa recommendations on his site, though many of them are tags.

Yeah, I could see Flair/Funk/Danielson as the three in question and the top three overall with that many votes coming in. If anything, I see Bret having a decent shot at falling out of the top 50.

It's cool to see that Bill Thompson submitted a ballot, despite not really being around for the last couple of months.

I wrote up my ballot during the Wrestlemania main event for maximum hipster points. Thanks to all of the PWO crew that put together podcasts to discuss their lists (which have all been fantastic), as well as all the folks like Steven and Dylan who helped handle the voting and nomination process.

I don't have a problem with the question in isolation, but I think it's a little disingenuous to frame all of this as though the question alone was the real problem while ignoring the context that surrounded it. GOTNW already tried to explain some of the reasoning behind the reaction here and, for the sake of keeping things Pro Wrestling Only, I don't know if it's worth a second round. If you want to self-reflect and maybe spend longer than a second thinking about why someone might react that way, then great. If you don't, then don't. At any rate, I thought Nakamura was great and I'm somehow who feels like he was uneven at best up until a couple of years ago when he had a personality transplant. I can envision a scenario where he would succeed in WWE, but it's not one that's rooted in any kind of reality.

Somebody's got to write a book on Shane McMahon vs. The Undertaker. Or, at the very least, a blog post with footnotes along the right hand margin. I wrote and submitted my GWE ballot during the main event and it still had The Undertaker's name on it...but I'm not going to pretend that I didn't wince a little bit while I was typing that name. The show itself was mostly a disaster but, really, quality is a secondary concern to the WWE at this point. All they ever need is two or three things coming out of any show to keep people hanging on and they'll do just that, no matter how bad things get.

I agree with you that the latter is obviously the primary reason that they brought suit; the concern (as I understand it, anyway) is that, by ruling against Gawker, they provide an opening for interpretations that can target the former. And I should probably make it clear that I think both Gawker and Hogan are garbage.

there's a difference between "nasty and spiteful" and the kind of stuff we associate with the tabloids. it's not the law's place to prevent anyone from digging up 20-year-old dirt on Bill Cosby, as long as there's evidence for it. The case is about privacy not about finding evidence for criminal activity. Did Hulk Hogan do anything illegal? No, but he did something that Gawker felt, rightly or wrongly, was of public interest and the problem with a ruling like this (if upheld) is that it can create a "chilling effect" on investigative journalism that would otherwise pursue more, ahem, legitimate items of public interest -- including illegal activities -- without fear of reprisal from the accused.

I don't know that a Super Workhorse Hulk Hogan draws the sympathy required for a match to make sense with Hulkamania as a narrative conceit, as a performative phenomenon where Hulk Hogan becomes a sort of audience surrogate/avatar that gets miraculously revived and super-powered by the "power of his Hulkamaniacs." It might work in an NWA setting where legitimacy carries the day, but I'm skeptical that it takes off in that period of the WWF where conflict is framed as a larger than life struggle. I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous. The big comeback, the wagging finger, the big boot and leg drop that miraculously carries the same impact as an intercontinental ballistic missile...all of it is completely absurd. But it's basically the concept of Hulkamania manifested in the ring itself and, without that reinforcement of the concept in the ring, I don't know that Hulk and Hulkamania engage fans in the same way, no matter how jacked up and charismatic Hogan would become. (And I feel like you can look to the later periods of Hulk as a babyface, where the sympathy was gone and his connection with the fans had disintegrated, as to how intrinsic that synergy was to his success.)

I don't know if that's necessarily true - from an in-ring standpoint, the things that made him so popular and iconic were the aspects of his performance that were so utterly contrived and hackneyed that anybody could hook onto them. Or to put it another way: I think it's very easy to fall into a trap of conflating historical importance with artistic/aesthetic greatness. Yes, there are moments in time where they synch up perfectly, but there are other moments where a performer or a match or any creator/work can be good enough in the right way at the right time to the right audience and end up being becoming important and influential at a scale far beyond the actual qualities of their work.

There are a number of things that WWE/NXT whiffed on with Sami Callihan as Solomon Crowe, but failing to capitalize on the storyline possibilities of having a wrestling hacker pull off something like this has got to be near the top of the list.

Bryan is literally one spot higher on my working ballot right now. I'm certain I'm lower on Rey's WWE TV resume (and everybody's, really) than most, but I do see Rey and Bryan as two of the only guys that frequently managed to sidestep or transcend the trappings of the style. Having said that, I do feel like Bryan's WWE babyface work offers higher highs than Rey and the stylistic variety in Bryan's work -- even if it occasionally dipped into indulgence with some of his notable indie matches -- is enough to outweigh Rey's (somewhat overplayed) advantage in longevity for me.