NotJayTabb

Love that Shelton/Viscera match. Watched New Years Revolution on a whim last month and was really surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Really fun match that no-one talks about.

Back in 2003, that tag cage match was THE hyped TNA match online. My first ever exposure to TNA was buying a VHS of that week and the following week just because I wanted to see the cage bout.

A couple more shows to update. By the way, if anyone else wants to talk up show's they've been to this year, please feel free. The more the merrier WWE (Nottingham Arena, 17/04/16). My mum and I have gotten into a bit of a routine with Christmas presents, where every year I’ll get her tickets for the Strictly Come Tour as one of her presents, and she gets me tickets for the post-WrestleMania WWE UK tour. This year was no exception, and so I sat in really good seats for a really fun house show. The main event was Roman Reigns defending the title against Sheamus, and I was heartened to hear Reigns get a generally positive response. There were a few pockets of boos, but they were immediately drowned out by a wave of cheers. Match was really good too, both guys seemed happy to work snug when they really didn’t need to, and the finishing run was really heated. Elsewhere, there was a Women’s title three-way with Charlotte, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks that was fun, but no-one was buying the nearfalls (even kids knew the title wasn’t changing hands in Nottingham), a really good Usos vs Dudley Boys match and Sin Cara being surprisingly over in his match with Tyler Breeze. Only real letdown was Cesaro, who looked really off in his match with Rusev, with his strength spots looking laboured and his uppercuts barely being in the same postcode as Rusev’s head. Given he’s looked fine on TV since, I assume this was just him working off the ring rust. A week later, I went to Triple M Promotions' debut show (23/04/16) in Whittick. Now normally I wouldn’t set foot in Leicestershire without a face mask and a couple of shots of penicillin on my person, but then I don’t normally get the chance to meet my number one entrant on my GWE ballot. Triple M normally run Q&A sessions around the UK, with the likes of Kurt Angle and Ric Flair doing “An Audience With…” shows in the past. This time, they had Bret Hart on tour, and decided to put together a wrestling card to coincide with this. As it was St George’s Day, the main event was an England vs Scotland themed match, with Stixx taking on Jack Jester. I don’t think Stixx gets anywhere near enough credit for being a great wrestler, he’d easily make my top 10 workers in BritWres. He’s a big guy, who moves so well, great bumper, makes his opponents look great then can cut them off with a beautifully timed move. The match was really good, with Jester building up a load of heat with his pre-match stalling and Stixx getting a big pop for pointing to Bret when applying a Sharpshooter. I thought the whole card was really good – a great opener between Joseph Connors and Nathan Cruz, an insane brawl between the Hooligans and the London Riots, a fun three-way spotfest with Jake McCluskey, Robbie X and Chris Tyler….when you’ve got guys like Dave Mastiff and Tyler Bate in a pre-main throwaway 6man tag, you know the card is stacked. Plus, I got to met Bret, so a pretty great night all in all.

Not to mention his offense which is some of the worst around today. His punches, swinging DDT, & ZIg Zag finisher are all terrible. Plus, he now does the superkick at least a half dozen times in his matches. The Usos do it a lot too but at least they can sell & have great dives. The worst thing about his swinging DDT is watching his opponents having to hold Ziggler in the air until he slaps their back to let them know it's time to go down. It's so transparently awful

I remember being really disappointed when they repackaged him as the Dog. Partly because I knew it meant he'd be popping on TV with more regularity, which was the last thing anyone wanted, and partly because dogs are awesome and Al Green patently was not.

I've enjoyed some of the podcasts on the GWE, but generally as background noise in 20min chunks. If I've got 3 hours free to spend on wrestling, I'd prefer to just watch some wrestling.

I was wondering who the other Zenk voter was. Excellent pick. My ballot - some of the 90's might be in the wrong order, I changed my mind when submitting 1,Bret Hart 2. Stan Hansen 3. Rey Mysterio 4. Jushin Liger 5. El Hijo Del Santo 6. William Regal 7. Randy Savage 8. Daniel Bryan 9. Negro Casas 10. Tatsumi Fujinami 11. Ric Flair 12. Ricky Steamboat 13. Terry Funk 14. Mitsuharu Misawa 15. Jerry Lawler 16. Nick Bockwinkel 17. Jim Breaks 18. Toshiaki Kawada 19. Barry Windham 20. Arn Anderson 21.Steve Austin 22. Eddie Guerrero 23. Owen Hart 24. Kevin Von Erich 25. Jumbo Tsuruta 26. Bobby Eaton 27. Dick Togo 28.Tito Santana 29. Greg Valentine 30. Davey Boy Smith 31. Roddy Piper 32. Genichiro Tenryu 33.Finlay 34. Tully Blanchard 35. Sgt. Slaughter 36. Larry Zbyszko 37.Hulk Hogan 38. Christian 39. Fritz Von Erich 40. Curt Hennig 41.Kerry Von Erich 42. Shinya Hashimoto 43.Bob Backlund 44.Ernie Ladd 45. 2 Cold Scorpio 46. Jeff Jarrett 47. Dustin Rhodes 48. Tajiri 49. Sheamus 50. AJ Styles 51. Mark Henry 52. Tracy Smothers 53. Randy Orton 54. Johnny Saint 55. Vader 56. Billy Robinson 57. Yoshinari Ogawa 58. Sean Waltman 59. Dusty Rhodes 60. Andre The Giant 61. Jim Duggan 62. The Great Sasuke 63. Necro Butcher 64. Kensuke Sasaki 65. Giant Baba 66. Koji Kanemoto 67. Super Delfin 68. Kenta Kobashi 69. La Fiera 70. Steve Viedor 71. Shinjiro Ohtani 72. Super Dragon 73. Tom Zenk 74. Jerry Blackwell 75. Doug Williams 76. Rick Rude 77. Brian Pillman 78. Ronnie Garvin 79. Buddy Rose 80. John Cena 81. Rick Martel 82. Zack Sabre Jr 83. Matt Hardy 84. Psychosis 85. DDP 86. Pat Roach 87. Chris Hero 88. Sami Zayn 89. The Barbarian 90. Batista 91. James Mason 92. Mick Foley 93.LA Park 94. Terry Taylor 95. Steve Grey 96. Ikuto Hidaka 97. Adrian Street 98. Alex Shelley 99. Samoa Joe 100. Hayabusa

Kronik were so bad, never understood how their name (a "witty" WCW reference to drugs) matched up with the team. That said, I watched Great American Bash 2000 the other day, and Kronik vs the Mamalukes was actually ok. No resting and it looked like Vito and Clarke weren't afraid to work snug with each other.

The idea that someone going at that speed and slamming both of his feet into your face wouldn't be painful is baffling to me. Just ask Cody Rhodes...

Malice once had a surprisingly decent match with a knackered Vic Grimes on an XPW card, much to my shock

I had Rey at #3. Just a remarkably consistent guy, and someone you could slot in on TV with anyone for any length of time, and he'd give you a decent match. His offence to me always looked more effective than someone like Michaels because it worked with the fact Rey is such a tiny guy. Rey wasn't flipping for the sake of flipping, he was trying to build more momentum to ensure he was able to knock his opponent over or have enough velocity on a flying headscissors to make sure his opponent didn't just catch him. The 619 is much-derided, but he'd build up a lot of momentum before pivoting between the ropes to slam his feet into his opponents face, so to me it always looked painful. AND he could be an effective heel - unmasked dungarees-wearing Filthy Animal Rey was still a decent wrestler, but man I wanted to see that irritating runt get his comeuppence.

I like some aspects of Graves' commentary: heel cheerleader for Eva Marie and his outspoken despair at Mojo Rawley are both strong points on his resume. I agree that having both commentators ganging up on the Drifter is counterproductive - I also think they've missed a trick by having Samson already lose a few matches. Taking this guy the fans despise and giving him a long winning streak would've made for fun viewing. Certainly he should have beaten Crews at Takeover, losing his first big match makes little sense.

Yeah, I prefer to watch a full show. I like a bit of lightness and shade throughout my wrestling watching and sometimes having a well-paced sprint, a competitive squash or a comedy match on a card makes the bigger matches feel more important.

With regards to how mainstream the list is, I think it's important to look at the number of wrestlers who made ballots. 557 different wrestlers received votes, which to me is a testament to how much footage people we watching. The mainstream US/puro guys will have done well because people have been watching them for years. People have seen countless matches by Bret, Savage, Arn and other guys who were deemed unreasonably high. When we're discovering new styles and areas, we don't have that built in knowledge, so we can only follow the recommended matches and make our journey from there. Guys like Santo and Casas are almost a gateway into lucha, the first guys you watch to get into the style, so it's likely that people getting into lucha will have rated them highly. From there, people will have taken different routes. I gravitated towards La Fiera and LA Park, both of whom scored well on my list, other people will have gone off in different directions and favoured other guys they're discovering for the first time. Same with WoS - Breaks did well amongst people who will have watched it for the first time because he's so easy to get into. From there, the number of WoS candidates spread throughout the honourable mentions shows that a lot of people have been watching the footage. We've been watching the mainstream guys all our wrestling lives, some of us have only been watching WoS/lucha/Japanese indys for a couple of years. People talk about "the journey" of GWE, but I think it's most important aspect will be it's legacy. GWE is nearly over, but I'm still watching WoS on YoutTube, still planning on working through the lucha DVD's I bought last month that I've not watched yet, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

I've got quite a lot of wrestling shirts, though you'd really have to be into the Brit indys to know that my "Henchmen Gym" and "Big Griz" shirts related to wrestlers. I think it helps that people are getting a bit more tasteful in their designs - Chris Brookes is a guy who has really nice looking shirts, the kind I'd buy even if I wasn't a fan as they look so good. WWE wise, I've not got as much. A Brie Mode shirt and a Nunzio shirt that I bought for £5

Got to be Vader, surely?

Man, last time I posted in the reaction thread, I was so smug about none of my top 10 dropping, then in two days I lose Santo, Regal, Savage, Casas and Fujinami. Top 4 still intact for now though. I also want to agree with Jimmy Redman's post. I'm a relative newcomer to the board, only being active since July, but I've gained so much from this process. Since I started watching footage for this project last February (it took a long time for my account to be activated, but I started watching from the day I registered), I've discovered guys I'd never seen before. Guys like La Fiera, Yoshinari Ogawa and Steve Veidor were barely on my radar 12 months, and they all comfortably made my list. Heck, I was the Steve Veidor high voter. In the process, I've also been reconsidering guys I've loved for ages and weighing up their cases. I remembered how much I loved M-Pro guys like Togo, Delfin and Sasuke (who all made my list), I wrote a long blog post looking at matches the Barbarian had in Japan and even if I know I'm going to probably have to defend my #1 pick in a few days (spoiler - it's Bret), I learnt so much from the GWE, and most importantly, enjoyed it every step of the way (If I have one regret, it's not sneaking a vote in for Rampage Brown at 99. I probably do like him more than Alex Shelley in hindsight. Plus, I'd have a badass avatar)

Buddy Rogers? I think that's a good shout, especially in terms of influence.

Trying to think of a decent analogy for Cagney. We're missing a chunk of footage, but what we do have (The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, Angels With Dirty Faces, White Heat) marks him out as a GOAT candidate. You've also got influence to consider and performing different roles (a man as comfortable hoofing through a song-and-dance number as hatching a villainous plan)

I think my high vote team of Sheamus, Ernie Ladd, Fritz & Kevin von Erich and Jeff Jarrett would be a fun heel squadron. Especially with my #1 pick to come and Veidor, Zenk and Mason on the subs bench

My first thought was Barry Windham. He's a guy I see ranking highly, but not being anyone's #1

The opener to Spring Stampede 99 with Juvi is generally considered his career peak, I believe. Blitzkrieg kept up with Juvi pretty well

In no way, shape or form trying to compare it with Benoit, but what was the situation when Verne Gagne had Alzheimer's and was involved with the death of a fellow care home resident?

Grimmas, sorry to be a pedantic arse, but you've got that Gordy got 0 top ten votes, but also that the highest vote was an 8

Pretty sure it was Luger, think he's talked positively about the experience on Twitter. I also liked Riggs, seem to remember he had a really good match with Kanyon on Thunder shortly after the Flock broke up, while he was still wearing an eyepatch. Also though he was quite good with his "I get better looking every single day" gimmick. Definitely better than Bagwell