El McKell

I have to believe if you sat down and watched the two mediocre Savage-Flair matches from December 1995 (the Starrcade match and the one from Nitro a few days before), you couldn't possibly say that either of them were better than every single Danielson match, surely

I hope neither Zack Sabre Jr or Fujiwara get in

Huge credit to these two for managing to have an effective emotional mask match when the audience all paid to see a different mask match they didn't get.

Everything in this match is well executed as you'd expect from these two and I think it's got some good Regal small detail stuff. But it's a pretty messy babyface-heel dynamic with a UK crowd where the older members of the audience want to root for Regal and younger people want to root for Chrisitian, Christian does clear babyface stuff like leading the crowd in claps etc, Regal does heelish stuff like using the ropes for a pin and getting caught by the ref. But the actual overarching structure of match is almost the opposite way around, with Regal in a babyface role and Christian as the heel.

I could see myself maybe just maybe ranking Yamada. I think she's often working with people better than her, which maybe could make her appear better than her talent warrants, but she does bring a lot to the table herself, her aggression definitely adds to the great matches she's a part of. I don't agree with Jimmy Redman from a decade ago saying she's a Chigusa imitator, I find her to be a lot more like Lioness Asuka if we're comparing her to the AJW 80s crew. She's not as good as either of the Crush Gals though.

It's more likely that you're living in a timeline where neither one ever gets in if that's any comfort to you.

I'm not consciously thinking about this question at all when ranking wrestlers and I don't think it's much of a real thing. Everybody is a product of their own surroundings and the wrestling from the past that they want to emulate. I think the degree to which FTR work a throwback style is being overstated here. They take many trappings and aesthetics from 80s Crockett tag wrestling while simultaneously structing matching in a way that is not very different from the PWG influenced AEW (or even NXT when they were there) house style. I do agree that their act couldn't exist as it is without the existence of 80s tag teams on TBS, but all wrestlers take their aesthetic from somewhere. I think they are buoyed what they take from 80s tag wrestling, but only in the same way that any act is buoyed by the things that make them different from the baseline of what's around them, an act that has no aspects that make them stand out is never a good act. So it helps their case because it is an interesting gimmick that creates opportunities to do interesting stuff in matches playing off the gimmick. It's all guesswork, because it all depends on how well they adapt their act to environments they'll never be in, which is why I don't like to think too much about this. But if I am guessing, in the right environment I think they could have been just as successful in another era. I think if promoters gave them a chance and they were worked at an era appropriate pace they could've got over well in JCP/WCW or AJPW from like 85-94. I do not think 80s Joshi wrestlers are an act out of time and it only seems that way because they were influential on 90s joshi wrestlers who has some influence on wrestling broadly, combined with the move towards athleticism as a selling point for wrestling more broadly. 80s Joshi wrestlers are clearly a product of their time and place, they are developing from their own predecessors in AJW and it seems so different from the other wrestling at the time because it they were not influenced by any contemporary wrestlers in other promotions. If 2000s wrestling looked more 80s lucha or world of sport then those would be the ones "out of time" instead. And yeah, I think if The Jumping Bomb Angels could get over with WWF crowds without being hyped at all in advance they could've also got over in front of Kansas City crowds.

https://vkvideo.ru/video640112534_456239026?t=2h34m8s There you go.

I'm certain one of the match types cad is referring to trios matches, because Los Misioneros de la Muerte were one of the first regular trios in lucha libre and help popularise the match format. The other is most likely the maestros style matches where old luchadors do a bunch of slow complicated matwork and fancy submissions in matches that feel more like exhibitions than competition.

This idea is something that I am struggling to understand so I would love to hear it expanded on or explained further. If you can't stand a wrestler how do you determine that they are in fact actually great? - Do you maybe have some criteria of what makes a great wrestler and then apply it to everyone whether you like them or not? If so how did you select that criteria? - Are you using reputation or business success or crowd reactions (or some combination of these) to determine greatness? - Do you actually enjoy watching these wrestlers your can't stand work but have some negative visceral reaction to them for some other reason(s)? HeadCheese is hitting at a very similar idea here, just making a different decision about whether to vote for these people. And again I'd be very curious to know what they think makes an objectively great wrestler when they don't actually enjoy watching them wrestle. If they could address the same basic questions to them as I did to Dav'oh because I'd be interested in reading their thoughts too.

There's the match bennyowens is talking with the rematch they liked less being 1st September 2019

I think your post conflates two things that I see as separate, getting reactions from crowds and ability to work well in different environments. If I'm trying to gauge how capable a wrestler is at entertaining me seeing them do it in different contexts demonstrates this capacity more than doing it in one context. A wrestler who works well in many environments is best, someone who works well in one environment but poorly in others is obviously worse, and it is not clear which box someone who only worked in one environment would fall into if they did work other places so they should be somewhere in between those two I just mentioned. How over they are and what reactions they get is only relevant to me for how my engagement is enhanced by a hot crowd, crowd reactions are an instrumental positive for me not a good in and of themselves. I don't think there the discussion is less interesting if the criteria revolves around picking who we enjoy watching. There's so much to discuss in what we think they do well, what we think they do badly, why do we like or dislike those things, how long were they good, how much does longevity actually matter, how much of their great matches is to do with them and how much is their dance partners, do they adjust to their opponents or do they force their opponents to adjust to them (and which of those things is actually more evident of greatness). I don't think adding a discussion of how over they were adds all that much. Although that could definitely still be discussed in the context of favourites/personal enjoyment, for example I think the best thing Bruno Sammartino has going for him in terms of making me enjoy a match is that the crowd reacts so big to everything he does, their excitement is somewhat contagious for me.

I just read Dav'oh's post in the WALTER thread where they talk about favourite or best vs greatest, that I think prompted this thread. I do not see any distinction between these at all for me. Firstly, it seems to me that some people talk about favourites and they mean things like: wrestlers they enjoy more then everyone else around me does, wrestlers who they have some childhood attachment to or wrestlers who they are currently excited about for whatever reason. I don't think I have favourites like this, my favourites are who I am most entertained by watching and I think that's also what I mean by greatest wrestler for the purpose of this project (and also what I mean if I said best wrestler). Wrestling is entertainment. So I believe the wrestler who is best at wrestling is the wrestler who is most capable of entertaining people. I am not making any distinction between best and greatest for the purpose of this project, I think from what Dav'oh said in their post in the WALTER thread they are inferring that greatest to them should include the scale at which the wrestler performed, big stages etc. I am reading greatest to mean greatest in ability to entertain. I think if we are all supposed to vote based on what we can see in the footage that makes more sense than greatest in scale and I think it means my criteria are both coherent to me and relatively in line with what most people voting are doing. This last point is not directly tied to what you're saying, but I think what I've said above might raise the question of how I determine who's most capable of entertaining and I think I have no choice but to rank these wrestlers based on how much they entertain me (adjusting for the opportunities to do so they are given by their promotions). Trying to gauge how capable a wrestler would be of entertaining the aggregate wrestling fan is an impossible endeavour & in the end the overall list is a version of that aggregate anyway.

What this project has been to me the whole time is who are the 100 greatest at pro-wrestling. For me, it’s about judging what I see on-screen: the storytelling, the athleticism, the presence, the ability to make me care. I don’t consciously factor in stardom, historical impact, or the size of the audience. It is a little ironic, though, to argue that we all need to agree on semantics while also arguing in favour of a definition that goes against the grain of how most of his here seem to already be interpreting "greatest wrestler ever". (please don't read this too harshly, I like that this thread exists). I 100% agree that the list of nominees includes names that make zero sense to me as candidates, whether that's Jim Londos who doesn't have any full matches on tape, Great Zako who's recommended matches appear to be in small rooms without a even a wrestling ring, or one note comedy acts like Antonio Koinoki and Andreza Giant Panda. But even though I'd never vote for any of these people, and don't really understand why anyone would I'm glad they have threads because they informed me a little about wrestling I'd otherwise not even know exists.

I think this misses the point being made when someone talks about how important how he was treated and presented by the WWE in his post 2012 run is. Many wrestlers get pushed but very few get to have the advantage of their aura being increased by being allowed to break the company's usual rules, which made him totally unique in that environment. Brock felt like an unbelievable spectacle in the 2010s because of a combination of his own talent and being allowed to do things that the WWE would not allow anyone else to do. The two biggest matches for making Brock what he was in the 2010s were the Cena matches at extreme rules 2012 and summerslam 2014, both of these were structed in a way that WWE never presents matches which is why they are so memorable. Although less impactful the two Brock-Goldberg matches from late 16-early 17 are good almost entirely due to not fitting in with typical WWE at the time, if main events even occasionally were 90 second squash upsets or 5 minutes of only finishers neither of these matches would be good at all. Brock deserves some of the credit for being such a spectacle in the 2010s, but so does the fact that he was presented so differently from everyone else in WWE in a era where most of the product was formulaic. How to split that credit is a tough decision for me to make.