Parties

Dandy and Satanico looked great as recently as last year, in two very strong singles matches. He's sort of in that Hashimoto/Steamboat/Kawada/Santito category of being held up as an all-time great while simultaneously leaving the spotlight, which leaves this situation where you have to go back and remember why he was great rather than just hearing it as status quo gospel. His peak was 25 years ago, and the footage isn't as well preserved/readily accessible online as it should be. But at his best he is the ultimate hybrid of technico who would get it done on the mat, but who could also brawl with the best of him if the situation required him to go catapult Casas into a row of chairs.

He deserves credit for knowing how to get actual heat on the mic in an era when almost no one does. But in-ring he's not remotely close to being good enough. His crowning achievement is that Heyman booked the Dudleys to win the tag titles on the night that they were leaving the company. His heel champ stuff in TNA is very overrated and came off as low-rent, even against AJ. I have little regard for the circa 2000 weapons tags with Hardys/E&C. I agree with the sentiment for present-day candidates and wanting to evaluate modern wrestling fairly, but he's not the guy I'd hold up as a living legend.

From in-ring match quality, what WWF pairings are better? I had both the submission match and the MSG match very high during the SC poll of best WWE. I could see Tito-Valentine, Sarge-Sheik, Savage-Steamboat being considered better. I like Backlund-Valentine a lot too. Benoit-Regal was awesome. It's a somewhat dubious achievement in that there aren't many elite WWF matches period, and few feuds that produced multiple great matches. Garvin and Valentine only have those two from what I know. But saying they're "among the best" doesn't seem hyperbolic given what they'd be compared to.

Definite top 20 contender. Can't see him lower than 30. I have him above Liger, Kawada, and Kobashi.

Looks like a prodigy now, but way, way too early to list him. Even if you include his NXT run, he's only been around for two years. Everyone on my current list had better two year stretches (or several of them) than the one he's just had.

Huge and underrated talent who looked great everywhere he went. Unfortunately everywhere he went felt like down periods and dead promotions. He's like a Jamie Dundee/Eric Embry/Derrick King type who you want to see turned loose in a bigger spotlight but never really got the opportunity. He did have some main events in AAA that probably did good business, just not really at a time when people on message boards were talking about AAA as a place to see great workers. Ditto a lot of his stuff in NOAH. Carrying Kotaro Suzuki in years of meaningless undercard matches is not an ideal showcase.

Not sure what he'd get in on unless you really loved him in ECW (where he was clearly a step below Tajiri and Little Guido, both better career candidates) or loved him as a rudo against the Space Cadets. Is his Perros del Mal stuff full of unheralded gems? Mexicools had a few good moments, but nothing to get him into an all-time top 100.

The Cesaro thing is interesting. There was all that news in the last couple months about how HHH was very high on building him and Tyson Kidd as top of the roster singles stars. The Steph stuff wouldn't be as bad if she would pick one type of shittiness and stick to it. Either be an obnoxious overpushed heel who would make 2003 HHH blush, or be a self-congratulatory brand-obsessed modern executive taking credit for the "real" public relations parts of the show. Trying to be Sheryl Sandberg and Cersei Lannister in alternating segments just ends up negating both approaches.

Most of why that production was great was that they did 1/3rd as many jump cuts, stuck to the hard camera, and didn't overlay horrible aggro-rock over everything. The result looked like a beautiful hybrid of early 90s Clash of the Champions and Sumo Hall mid-90s Super Juniors tournaments. I've said this before, but the biggest problem with Dunn's production is that it comes off like the work of someone who's never watched sports. He's asked to shoot a football game, then decides he's shooting a Scorpions video.

I prefer Taker as a heel (albeit one who gets lots of cheers, against mega-babyfaces like Austin and Jeff Hardy). It'd be tough to get people to boo him and I really don't expect them to do it as HHH/Vince have too much reverence for him, but turning heel would probably help his matches as he could stick to plunder and brawling. Generally speaking I like when veterans turn heel near the end of their run, as it makes sense from a "desperation" perspective and you can tell the story of eventual babyface redemption that allows them to retire on a high note. Michaels was basically the heel going into his retirement, and that seems the blueprint for how they now want top stars to go out. How much Taker merch do they sell at this point? It's not nearly as crazy as turning Cena or Reigns heel.

Purely speculative, but isn't WWE's relationship with Gabe/WWN an attempt to put their eggs into his basket and replace ROH as the unspoken farm system with someone under their thumb? The perception - right or wrong, but probably right - is that ROH was at its best under Gabe's vision - not the current regime - when coupled with guys like Bryan, Joe, Nigel in their primes. And that WWN's more appealing to WWE because they don't have TV? Uhaa is already coming in as the professed blue chipper. Personally I'd rather see Busick, Thatcher, Gulak, Sabre, End, and Tracy Williams as the NXT recruits of the future than Cole/Redragon/War Machine. Plus Strong - universally considered the best guy on the US indies right now - has as good a rapport with Evolve as he does with ROH. And if you look at the veterans on both sides, I could see the WWE having more faith in the company utilizing their future endeavored guys well (Baretta, PJ Black, Galloway, Hero) than the group building around ex-TNA guys who WWE has never wanted (Daniels, AJ, Lethal, Aries - plus Kaz and Sydal, both of whom left WWE on bad terms). ROH's biggest problem right now is that aside from Moose and Dalton, all of their young talent come off very green/generic/lame. Gabe probably has more advocates in WWE than Delirious does. Cesaro, Joe, Danielson, Rollins, Harper, Neville. Not sure where Owens and Zayn fit on that loyalty spectrum, but they're probably Delirious guys given when their pushes came? Ambrose has pretty apathetic things to say about Gabe, but that's more that he's critical of the entire indie scene he came up in, and found Gabe to be a bit of an internet geek.

Summerslam feels totally up in the air right now. I'm going to it live and have been wondering what it's gonna be for months now, with not much certainty in sight prior to this Sunday. Battleground and the next night’s RAW feels like it should reshuffle the deck and put a lot of people into new feuds with a five week build prior to SS. But I could also see them using the show to blow off certain things that are already getting stale (Reigns-Wyatt, Rollins-Authority, Rusev-Ziggler, New Day-PTP). Alvarez was also cryptically predicting that a guy who “hasn’t been gone from the company but also hasn’t been on TV” will interfere in the main event. Only he made it sound like it wouldn’t be Taker? So maybe Sting, to continue the idea of him as vigilante who’s always getting in the Authority’s way? Still, seems odd that you’d have two gothic guys with the same gimmick both do run-ins in the main event. Regardless, does it seem fair to say that Summerslam is shaping up to be some variation of: Lesnar vs. Taker, possibly for the belt? Rollins vs. Sting, in some kind of revenge angle with stips? (I could also see this being some combo of Rollins/HHH/Kane vs. Sting/Reigns/Ambrose?) Reigns vs. Wyatt part deux? Rusev vs. Ziggler in a stips match that gets their valets involved? Owens vs. Cesaro for the US title / to save this show? Ryback returns from staph infection to face Miz or some other lame challenger(s)? Nikki vs. Charlotte, or triple threat trios tag among the whole division? Part 3 blowoff of New Day vs. PTP? With five weeks to go, still seems really unclear where they’re going with the show. Hard to say what’s happening with a number of big guys: Cena, Reigns, Ambrose, Orton, Jericho, and Sheamus are all question marks. It almost seems like they’ll need some kind of multi-man stipulation match just to get the younger midcarders on the show. Or else Neville, Barrett, Harper, Dallas, Miz are all left out in the cold.

A guy who came up as a shoo-in for Will and Dylan on Grimmas’ podcast, and who I need to see more of to know where he ranks. Valentine matches are among the best in WWF history. Liked him a lot against Savage in ICW. I’ve seen way too little of his NWA stuff, save the Tully match with insane chops.

Top 75 guy. Probably higher. Great as a junior in New Japan, great in Fujiwara-Gumi. Really fun '91 run in SWS against guys like Rick Martel and Chavo Classic. Hands down the best worker in UWFi, and often booked as the #3 guy in the promotion behind Takada and Tamura. Really good in BattlARTS. Inexplicably good tag partner for Ricco Rodriguez in Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye. One of the best and most consistent guys in the history of NOAH, who held his own with Misawa/Akiyama/Honda during the company's prime. Had an awesome title match at age 42 with Misawa in '07, which wasn't awesome in a "two old guys getting by" way but a truly athletic slobberknocker kind of way. He did a tour of UWA in the mid-eighties where he tagged with Super Astro and Villano III against guys like Black Terry, Negro Navarro, Shu el Guerrero, Pirata Morgan, Herodes. I'm sure it's all lost to the annals of time, but that's holy grail stuff for me.

Ogawa won't make my list and I'm perhaps the biggest Inoki/shoot style apologist here. But because it came up, I'd add that Ogawa-Coleman was much better than it should have been. Way better than Ogawa-Frye. He was almost 40 at that point and looks 10 years younger than that. I do wonder what Ogawa's status would be if he could have worked in recent NJ against Shibata, Sakuraba, Styles, etc. Age-wise he's within a year of Sakuraba, Masa Funaki, Minoru Suzuki.

Totally fair that not that everyone who worked back then got great reactions. It's not to take anything away from Garea. You would call guys like Garea and Goulet "great". Better than the more lumbering MSG midcarders of their era for sure. I would call "great" a stretch, esp. in a Top 100 conversation. Wouldn't even say he was among the top tag workers of the years he was with Martel. Re: crowds, I can only speak for myself in acknowledging that I sometimes glorify older workers by the great reactions they got. If I watch something Garea's era of WWF on mute, it's a very different experience. Was he hot, or was wrestling hot? Chicken or egg. That's not to say Garea and co. didn't earn it, but they had much better booking/presentation/kayfabe to work with than today's WWE guys. Most of this stuff looks cooler in hindsight. Their romanticized legends grow with age. Again: if he were on RAW tomorrow, we'd all love him and be fantasy booking him into feuds with Cena, Sheamus, Cesaro. I'm being critical and a bit pedantic, but it's a top 100 discussion. Anyone who's drafted a list right now knows how stiff the competition for a top 100 really is. The bottom of my current list is filled out with guys like Slaughter, Ashura Hara, Scorpio, Carl Greco. All truly phenomenal workers with "Best in the World" caliber moments in their careers. And they barely make it for me. That's how tough 100 is. But there are much worse qualities to have than a generous, upbeat definition of what's "great". In all sincerity: more power to you, bruddha.

Better to have too many threads than too few. It's fun to hear the case for and against virtually any one. But that's kind of the curious thing too: you can make the case for damn near anyone, esp. anyone who worked in front of hot crowds in the 70s/80s. There aren't many guys from that era who weren't at least watchable. Garea and Martel were a good team by the standards of their day, held the belts, worked well together. But were they even one of the 20 best tag teams going when they teamed together in '80-82? For comparison I just watched Rene Goulet team with the Sheik against Crusher/Bruiser. From the rabid crowd screaming for the entire match, you'd think Goulet was a genius for hanging upside down in the ropes and selling punches like shotgun blasts. Point being that especially by today's standards of airing monotonous routines on TV every week, someone like Garea looks surprisingly good. He'd be one of the most entertaining workers on RAW right now. But I think that says more about RAW than it does about Garea being close to top 100. In even a tentative list that I've drawn up, it's amazing to me how great you really have to be to make the cut. 100 is brutal competition. So many awesome workers are left off a list of 100 that someone like Garea just doesn't have the resume (from what I've seen, which is no doubt not as much as many here).

If Tony Garea gets a thread, Tony Charles' is overdue. Hell, 2 Tuff Tony should get one if Garea is nominated.

I just saw this for the first time: awesomely simple poster. This could have been a t-shirt sold in 1988:

I figured someone would call me out on that. It might be harsh to say that he sucks now. I'm really only talking about the last year or so of Fujiwara, where he's been completely immobile and really can't do anything but half-speed headbutts. But he was having good singles matches as recently as a few years ago. There's no shame in being bad in-ring at 66. I don't want to see Flair work matches any more either. Fujiwara is almost certainly going to be Top 5 on my list: maybe for that reason I find it all the more dreary to watch him right now.

Brock is another very borderline option who will be quite low on my list if he makes it. He is discussed so much nowadays that he is both underrated and overrated. His post-2012 run has been hit or miss, but the hits have contained three of the best matches in company history, including one that main evented Mania and is one of the 2-3 best matches in WM history. More importantly, this thread inspired me to go watch Ogawa-Kawada for the first time in years. I don't know if it's better than Lesnar-Reigns, but goddamn was Ogawa awesome when he was in his zone. And it made me love Kawada again after a long while of being kind of on autopilot in my esteem for him.

"Who on your list have you seen have really bad performances, or appearances in really bad matches" is an interesting question. I've seen bad matches and outright bad performances from guys like Cena, Butch Reed, Piper, Dustin, Kawada, Windham. Then there are guys who definitely make it, but who I've seen suck simply because they got too old and broken: Choshu, Fujiwara, Flair. Foley is a very shaky borderline guy, simply because I've seen him have too many bad late-career matches. Inoki is someone who I absolutely shamelessly love and might list for fanboy reasons, but man, he has tons of terrible matches. He probably has more bad matches than good, honestly.

He is my current #100. I'm tempted to keep him there as a sentimental favorite. It feels like your #100 should almost be the sidekick of your list, and Tajiri is a tremendous sidekick. His Best of the Super Juniors appearance is really fun and give some insight into how good he was that young, in a totally different role of underdog working underneath. He has my all-time favorite Ohtani match on that tour.

Some days I feel like he's top 30, other times I have him closer to #80. His peak runs are truly brilliant and his Western States Heritage Title match with Murdoch is one of my all-time favorites. Love his Flair matches, love him as a Horseman, love him with/against Dustin, love him as beer-bellied Lone Wolf WCW champ defending against Scorpio at the Clash, love him as a guy telling stories on shoot videos. On any given night, he could look like - without hyperbole - the best wrestler in the world. Especially during that early '90s run. He is the world's greatest Kevin Nash, and had he not been his own worst enemy could have been the true ace of WCW through the '90s. Quite possibly the all-time squandered talent/wasted opportunity in wrestling.

He doesn't make it for me at all, and I think the tragic circumstances and the nostalgia that many fans our age have for mid-90s WWF have overstated his legend a bit, but the "What If?" of him working in WWF with Benoit, Regal, Finlay, Jamie Noble, Eddy, Brock, and Cena is really interesting. Feels like the Rock would have loved him too. I doubt he'd have been given many opportunities (save Smackdown/Velocity type stuff), but it would help his case for sure. There's nothing he does that I don't prefer from Bret, but when motivated he was a very entertaining and affable guy to watch.