El McKell

Dusty wins this in 2 straight falls. Tank Patton is the bigger man but never really seems threatening. Dusty carries this to an average match with charisma & dancing (he's obviously also much more mobile than 10 years later). Paul Bosche is awful on commentary **1/2

Not gonna throw a rating on this as it's joined in progress. I'm sure I probably would've liked all the bombs at the start of this clip, if it was preceeded by something less intense & we escalated to the big moves. Solid action though, lots of nearfalls & I think Harley's celebration made the title change feel like a big moment, even if none of the other presentation of it did.

I've never seen a Tiger Jeet Singh match, but what I understand about him from reputation is that he is the worst wrestler of all time & he was a heat magnet who was a hugely successful heel. We'll see if it's possible for both of those things to be true at once. The opening of this gets delayed because a fan throws something at Singh that takes a long time to be swept off the mat. The fan is also ejected from the arena, I think. I guess that tells us something about the heat. This is pretty boring in the early going, but I thought once Kobayashi started getting his arm destroyed with the chair it picked up and was pretty entertaining. I expected a hot tag to come at some point, but eventually the match just gets thrown out. The heels get DQ'd in the 2nd fall but just keep killing the faces bloodying up Kobashi. Our saviour from this is Inoki, he runs the heels off, takes his shirt off, and challenges Singh & Ueda to match against himself & Kobayashi. I definitely don't think Singh gives a bad showing here **3/4 A couple of weeks prior Inoki-Hansen was interrupted by Singh & Ueda. And now this ends with Inoki. So NJPW feels like we're building everything toward Inoki vs Ueda & Singh

Bobo Brazil is clearly way over the hill here, his execution of basic stuff like pushing out of a headlock looks awful. I think Stasiak bumping over the top rope back into the ring from a headbutt on the apron looked totally unbelievable. Worst match from a bad MSG show. dud

Both guys definitely have presence. This was slow but didn't really drag, maybe it could've used some more dynamic offense. But the crowd loving Bruno definitely helped. I think champions not losing the best on a count out is silly, but presumably this leads to a rematch **1/2

As an anti-Harley Race person I think there's a certain amount of people don't enjoying watching him get beat up for 90% of the match in most of his matches. And I think he doesn't have the matches that get recommended by taste makers like Baba, Robinson or Fujinami. His best opponent was probably Flair, but his most high profile Flair match fucking sucked. There's not a great 5 match sampler of Harley Race matches that'll get someone seeking more when they're starting to look into wrestling from that era.

# of my wrestlers made the 100: 67 # of my top 50 that made the top 50: 34 # of my top 25 that made the top 25: 15 # of my top 10 that made the list/ made top 10: 5 # of wrestlers that ranked 101 to 200: 23 # of wrestlers outside the top 200 (Hipster Award): 10 # of wrestlers outside the top 500 (Contrarian Award): 0 Rank of my #1 wrestler: 2 (Bryan Danielson) Rank of list's #1 (Terry Funk) on my list: 22 # of wrestlers' high vote, excluding #1: nobody at all Exact placements: 2, Satanico #52 & Katsuyori Shibata #53 Highest ranking wrestler who do not make the list: Dynamite Kansai, my #34, who finished #163 (I was the high voter on her in 2016, so I'm always overrating her) Lowest ranking of wrestler on my list: Clive Myers, my #87, finished #478

I thought Bull just staring at her while she did all that fancy nunchuk stuff was pretty lame.

Terry Funk has tonnes of volume of stuff though. What do you think is his prime and why doesn’t AJPW stuff from 76-77 count as part of it?

I was gonna say the two Andrade TV matches from back to back Smackdowns, but when I looked it up those were January 2019...damn time flies. At least the Gunther IC title match is in the window you asked for.

I don't think Mick Foley is a top 20 wrestler all time, but it feels kind of unfair to try to hold it against him that all of his best matches have a bunch of plunder. He's the best ever at plunder heavy matches, that's worth something.

Vader's gotta be a stronger candidate for not getting a number 1 vote than Mick Foley, no?

I wouldn't read anything into Kikuchi or Fuchi or any other lesser All Japan guys dropping when 00s NOAH guys saw an increase in support: Takayama, KENTA, Marufuji.

My Prediction for the top 5 is it'll be Danielson, Flair, Kobashi, Misawa, Tenryu in some order

I definitely think Kobashi is beating Terry Funk & that Danielson is #1. And I think Mick Foley has to be #17, surely