GOTNW

Their best in ring year in recent memory was 2013 (many will argue it was the best WWE year ever) and that was after the chop ban and everyone was using it.

They are a transitional weak strike in WWE so does it really matter how many guys do them?

After thinking about it, I can't really come up with lucha guys other than Rush and Perro Aguayo. I have to be sleeping on someone. Lots of guys like Casas that have good looking chops but don't stand out that much. Some Jap guys that come to mind now: Kenta Kobashi Go Shiozaki Kensuke Sasaki Shinjiro Ohtani Genichiro Tenryu Yuji Okabayashi Daisuke Sekimoto Yoshihito Sasaki Suwama (by two handed chops I meant the SUWAMA-style chops, not the Tenzan/Killer Khan Mongolian Chops) Toshiaki Kawada Tomohiro Ishii Tomoaki Honma Tatsuhito Takaiwa Masato Tanaka Hiroshi Hase also had neat chops I'm editing him in Lots of guys who have chops that look really good but don't rely on them that much so I don't know what to do with them (Omori, Kohei Sato/Shuji Ishikawa, Minoru Suzuki etc.) Pretty much anyone who worked Big Japan in recent years knows how to throw some hands. For US Indy guys other than Roddy and I'd also mention Low Ki. And Super Dragon.

I need to think about this more. Only american boy I would consider is Stan Hansen. Wahoo I haven't watched enough to properly judge but yeah he's good. Prime Joe is a good call. Steamboat and Flair aren't really any better at chopping than Roderick Strong in my book. Lucha folks I have no idea how to judge really. I mean I have no idea how hard RUSH hits but his chops look awesome. I actually wouldn't consider Hash because Kesagiri Chops are a different beast in my book. But two handed chest chops and chest slaps (you know what I'm talking about) still count. One japanese guy I want to give a shout-out to before I come back with a huge list is Naomichi Marufuji. I've seen him bloody up someone's chest with those things like three times by now, you can talk shit about him as a worked all you want but he can chop, especially since he made chops the focus of his striking and dropped his weak-ass elbows in 2012-2013.

But it wasn't a "real fight" by all acounts. He asked Inoki permission to finish him at the end, didn't get it and then stormed off. If he wanted to have a "real fight" the match would've looked much different than it did. How do you even envision Maeda buying time and trying to work a match with a giant broomstick if not doing what he did?

I have no idea what you're talking about with Maeda making it worse. He didn't do anything. Andre literally stopped co-operating in the middle of a pro wrestling match. What do you expect Maeda was gonna do, grab the mid and say "well folks I'm sorry to say this but pro wrestling is fake and Andre doesn't want to play with me anymore?". Doing a bunch of low kicks and some takedown attempts is something I really don't see as an attempted shoot, all it was was Maeda buying time and trying to stop the match and the illusion of competition from falling apart. If his low kicks fucked up Andre's knees, well, that's Andre's fault quite honestly. If he didn't want to work he could've just went home. Everything about that situation screams an Inoki power play designed to screw Maeda over (I believe the match, which would've been a pretty big deal at the time, wasn't even announced). Really all I see is people defending Andre when he doesn't warrant on based on the myth of him being a gentle giant or whatever (and everything I've heard from shoot interviews and such indicated that was far from the truth).

You could say the same thing for chops, elbows, lariats etc. Murakami, Tenryu and Dundee are just some of the guys I saw matches with punches. The punches aren't treated as nearfalls so them not finishing matches isn't a big flaw. I don't think it's a matter of variety or even structure. Ohtani vs Murakami and WWF Attitude Era brawls don't differ that match if you were to write them out using play by play yet I think one is awesome and the other bores me to tears. Execution does matter, but often times (specifically in WWE) matches striving to look like out of control brawls almost can't work because how against the micromanaged norm that idea is.

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.

Should have probabaly stated I was specifically referring to modern japanese wrestlers. Camera mugging isn't a thing there. In almost all cases the important feedback for them is that of the live crowd (often Korauken). It's.........different. American indy wrestling I'm not getting into. It was always going to be corrupted.

The "let's strike each other for five minutes while making goofy faces" trope is something that is more a recent creation that was created by modern workers misinterprating why the strike exchanges guys like Kobashi, Takayama, Kensuke Sasaki, Hashimo, Tenryu etc. had worked. Even at something like having a three minute chop exchange Kobashi is just so much better than the modern guys. Not to say he isn't guilty of doing the same thing but it worked with him, partly because there were no weird pauses in the strike exchanges and the guys involved actually sold the damage and made it look like they were struggling to win the battle of striking instead of putting over their macho insecurity.

You're talking me into ranking Lawler (and about 30 other guys I ranked below Kobashi) over him.

Everyone here has watched a Rock match, and most people here haven't seen many Maeda matches. That is probably the real reason. One guy was on TV and having big matches at the peak of wrestling's popularity. The other guy is a shoot style worker that you'd have to scour the internet to watch. It makes perfect sense to me. Although the counterpoint here is that because The Rock is so prominent, most people have seen all of his worst work from watching him week in week out, which can count against him. Whereas people who have seen Maeda are more likely to have focused mainly on the pimped stuff and not seen him at his worst. I'd say it's much more likely the opposite is true. Those who considered Maeda are the most obsessive of the insanely obsessive wrestling nerds, so it's much more likely they dove deep into a lot of styles and revisited stuff specifically for this project. Rock voters probably forgot half of his disappointing stuff and I seriously doubt an average Rock considered as many styles and workers as an average Maeda voter. Grimas could provide statistics for this so we can see who's right.

Pretty insane to criticize Lawler (presumably) for not being able to punch out his opponents when he was the 25x Memphis champion or whatever.

If it's a great punch what difference does it make?

I know I would much rather watch past his prime Maeda bullshit his way through a RINGS match against some dude from Georgia than about 80% of Rock's stuff.

Luckily we're past the workrate mentality that included wisdom like "chops=great tehnical wrestling" and pretended amount of moves used is a valid criteria to judge wrestlers on.

Exactly half of my ballot made the final list.

The Rock's punches are like a Marufuji Superkick, it looks great the first time you see it but then you watch more wrestling and you're not 11 anymore and you realise how stupid it looks. Would still take both over Thatcher's headbutt.

So... a glorified midcarder who hasn't done anything in the last 2-3 years is one of the 100 greatest wrestlers ever to you? And better than some of the names you didn't rank? Fair enough :-) Both things I mentioned were extremely important in how he was perceived but didn't matter one bit to me.

Christian did well for a glorified midcarder who hasn't done anything in the last 2-3 years. I snuck him in on my ballot but didn't expect him to do nearly as good as he did. I want to find my "I hope the results prove me wrong" quote because so far it's been the opposite.

And recency bias is always going to be a factor. Maybe it wasn't so much for like, Joe and Danielson in the smarkshoice poll but it was for Kobashi (who's done almost nothing to add to his case since then and I say that as someone who loves the 2007 return match and his retirement match about as much as anyone) and Zayn's been around much longer than both Danielson and Joe were at that point in time. Anyway I have zero problem with him ranking even if I didn't vote for him.

Pretty shocked anyone is using Waltman as an example of someone being better than Zayn/Generico when most people making a serious case for Waltman watched obscure indy matches from early 90s like the Lynn feud and the guy has a bunch of shit performances on mainstream wrestling TV. Makes perfect sense he'd be out by now.

He doesn't fit any of these so at least Daisuke Ikeda and his dog made the top 100 losing Maeda hurts a little less now.

Canon and go screw itself Choshu is way better than Liger. Sure the canon says: "but liger has been having good matches for two hundred years!!!!". Well, so much of that supposed good stuff is him just going through his shtick I don't like his shtick nearly as much to see him as this GOAT candidate. Sure, I'll give him credit for being good that long, but even in 2015 I find watching a Choshu match way more intruiging than watching Liger stuff. Something like Liger-Breeze got plenty of praise when to me it seemed like a clear subpar Liger house show performance and an underaverage match. I always find binge watching Choshu way more interesting and rewarding.

I love how we're already past the outrage and just focused on making as many bad jokes and puns as possible. Jericho making the list will be the best one.