brockobama

Just doing my job, ma'am.

Duggan has been the big revelation for me so far in this process. Happened upon his SNME match with Rick Rude last year when I was working on the Rude case and was amazed by how much I was enjoying this Cro-Magnon American Monarchist bellowing with board in hand. Had seen some of the DiBiase Mid-South stuff when I was a kid just getting into wrestling and wasn't impressed by it so I thought I had this dopey old legend figured out, a big guy with a big character but short on skills. After the Rude match I vowed to do a deeper dive. Watched 60 matches or so over the last few weeks, nothing exhaustive, but it's enough to get Duggan on my list. Before anything else I'll mention that his mechanics are rock solid. He never strays too far from straightforward brawling but within that style he hits all the right notes, with great punches and pinpoint timing. His bumps are in the floaty Buddy Rose mold but I think he brings much more weight to them, resulting in a more natural feel that doesn't feel out of place in a Mid-South bloodbath. Moreover Duggan's deceptively lithe. He spins and twirls well for a guy his size, being more flexible in the middle and lighter on his feet than you'd expect. You watch his stuff with fellow dancer Buzz Sawyer and it's halfway to ballet. (Ballet is an apt comparison because Duggan has a certain girlish playfulness to him, as with the way he swings his hips to set up the three point stance or how he grabs his hair up in a ponytail. He comes across as a big, burly man who's not afraid to play teatime with a young niece and that's very endearing.) He's not often in the position to sell from underneath for an extended period of time but because of this lithesome quality he's always good at it, going weak at the knees after some shot to the head and doing some great "swinging blind" selling second only to Funk. I also love his glassy-eyed expressions when he's down and out, something you see a lot more in his post-WWF career. This gracefulness contrasts with Duggan's overall appearance and that's another thing I really love about the guy. One of the first thoughts I had, watching his early Watts stuff, was "goddamn I've never noticed how heavy his footfalls are" and it really emphasized how much he does in every match to appeal to the crowd. Whether it's in caveman stomping around the ring or little glances (and sneers as a heel) or barking at them directly or "should I do it?" questioning or the ubiquitous thumbs up and HOOOOOOOO, Duggan is constantly doing something to get the audience to engage with this ludicrous, larger than life character. He has an expert understanding of when to prod the people (and why) and when to return to the ass-kicking. I can't say I ever saw a Duggan match with a dead crowd; even with the motley crew of late 90s WCW being the most indifferent towards him, he was able to work his way into nostalgia pops and good-hearted chuckles in those C-show matches. He was always fairly cartoonish in Mid-South but really reaches another level in WWF, electrifying fans in an undeniably fun way. One of the things that impressed me most in this project was something I saw repeatedly in the Savage feud, where Duggan would jerk his head around to look at the crowd after avoiding a pin, showing that he's still alive, and the place would EXPLODE. Man knew how to connect with people. Duggan's commitment to being a cartoon wrestler is perhaps his greatest strength. Both in the broader Captain Caveman shtick and the more explicitly patriotic stuff, as well as in specific gimmicks such as the football pads match with Dr. Death or the oft-maligned martial arts match with Meng, the dude is giving himself wholly to the inherent absurdity of pro wrestling in a way that is very charming. Everybody talks about how his WWF run is so much worse than his stuff in Mid-South but I think his performances are much stronger and it results in matches that last with me longer. In WWF Duggan becomes somebody who can out-hulk up the Hulkster, bringing a more overwhelming energy to that comeback than Hogan ever did. In WWF Duggan can play up to Andre's level, being the rare sort of wrestler whose outlandish personality isn't outshone by a literal giant and instead makes them both feel bigger. In WWF Duggan unlocks his ridiculous comic timing, as with the aforementioned Rude and Savage matches. Arguably it all culminates with the Yokozuna feud. The knockdown challenge angle in '93 is an incredible bit of bullshit and the peak of WWF's 90s warbaiting, being fun (and dare I say stirring) in a way I never felt with Hogan's and Luger's patriotic victories. The man certainly has his downsides. I was always frustrated with how light Duggan's offense was, delivering kicks and stomps and kneedrops that pale in comparison to his punches, with his droopy clothesline being the worst perpetrator of all. It never feels like he uses his size to his advantage; I wouldn't say he's working small necessarily but that he rarely comes across as being as big as he clearly is. In spite of his popularity he can also get lost in a star-studded tag, not just playing second fiddle to the likes of Dusty Rhodes and Butch Reed and Bill Watts and the RNRs but feeling like he's not contributing anything to the match. The one where he's tagging with Jake the Snake against Andre and Rude is maybe the first time I saw him not get shown up in a tag and even then he's firmly behind Roberts in the crowd's eyes. Even more than his in-ring style, Duggan seems like a limited worker in terms of the sorts of matches he can get over in. While I'm no expert on the era, I find issue with the comment about how bad Duggan was for younger opponents in WCW. The initial angle with Stunning Steve is pretty infamous but I think it's perfectly in line with Austin's other feuds at the time, this young loudmouth heel pinballing around for an energetic babyface. Duggan certainly doesn't no-sell against him (or against Vader in his next feud, nor with regular opponent Steve Regal) and if he does so later on it's in his role as a past-his-prime, over-the-top character wrestler popping the crowd. Hard to judge him for not being more giving in three minute Worldwide matches contractually obligated to contain 90 seconds or more of HOOOOOOOOOO. He also spends way more time wrestling the likes of Mike Rotunda, Bobby Eaton, Curt Hennig, Bubba Rogers, The Barbarian, and Barry Darsow than anyone else, so I find the assertion that he was dragging down a multitude of youngsters pretty silly. On the contrary, I think his WCW run added a lot to his case. Early on he looks more energetic and spry there than he had in the last few years of WWF, going back to the Savage feud at least. He's clearly feeling the effects of time, being both skinnier and slower, but he makes meaningful adjustments to account for that; he's a lot choosier with his bumping and gives way more wobbly-legged, wide-eyed old man selling performances than ever before, best exemplified with his taped fist match against Big Bubba and the tag against Flair and Arn. I'm not quite as high on his Vader matches as others seem to be but I really like his stuff with Austin and Regal, two feuds full of crowd-pleasers. Beyond that he becomes a great C-show babyface, a guy divorced from anything too serious but who remains a fun presence centering meaningless matches around a little bit of selling and a lot of shtick. You laugh and don't think too hard about it when he says something like "Saturday Night belongs to me!" because ultimately it doesn't matter. It's the perfect role for Duggan, a guy who was rarely ever a title contender despite his popularity over the years, getting to fool around and be charismatic doing nothing of consequence. Then that's all flipped around with that Goldberg match in 2000, an exceptional bit of wrestling TV. Duggan delivers the most moving promos of his life before and after a cancer scare, building up to a bewilderingly great showdown with monster heel Goldberg who works over the man's missing kidney while Duggan throws the heaviest punches of his career and sells his ass off. I watched that early Friday morning and I'm still buzzing about it days later. Twenty years into his career, half a decade past his last meaningful push, the dude still takes my breath away in a three minute squash match. Don't know where Duggan's gonna end up on my list but there's no way he doesn't make my top 100. He's wacky and weird in all the ways I want out of wrestling.

I've actually got a big list of what I've labeled "ongoing cases", numbering about 30 in all. About half of those are people who would have a good chance at making my list if we voted now but could either shoot up the thing or fall off entirely depending on how the next few years go. As for the folks who will make or break their case in the coming years, Barbaro Cavernario, Roman Reigns, Trevor Lee, Sasha Banks, La Sombra, Bayley, Yuji Okabayashi, and Shayna Baszler seem the most likely picks.

Steve Austin, Bryan Danielson, Aja Kong, Shinya Hashimoto, Negro Casas, and John Cena are the only ones who feel like strong contenders at the moment. The back half of the top ten is a real fluid thing for me. Mick Foley and Antonio Inoki are probably the most likely picks after that. The more I watch Andre the higher I want to put him, which seems sort of wild.

Right now I'm in the weeding out portion of making my list. I started out with about 70 or 80 wrestlers who A. have a good shot of making my final list and B. I know well enough that I'd feel comfortable voting for them if we turned ballots in today. Along with that I put together another group of about 300ish wrestlers who fall somewhere in the spectrum of "I'm fairly familiar with this wrestler and know how I feel about their career" and so far I've been whittling that list down to a more reasonable number. Generally what that means is watching a few dozen of their most famous, well-regarded matches or at least matches from their most notable runs and giving a simple pass or fail grade based on whether they have any real chance at making the top 100 if I do a deeper dive on them later in this process. What I find myself looking for most often are moments of transcendence, which isn't just exciting performances in big matches. It can be how someone carries themselves in a post-match angle or how they interact with the crowd on a smaller show or what they do when a match goes south. What I want is an indication that somebody is more than just a person who learned how to do a scoop slam that didn't kill anybody and was charming enough to appeal to children, something that indicates an exceptional quality of some kind. A lot of times that can simply mean taking me by surprise, subverting a preconceived notion I had about them going into a match. I was watching some Rick Rude stuff recently for this project and found myself sort of wowed by how fun and engaging Hacksaw Jim Duggan was in this random SNME match, in spite of never having any sort of love for the guy in the decade plus that I've been watching wrestling. So all of a sudden he's going on the list of people I want to dive deeper into. In that vein I'm also keeping in mind that I'm going to keep running into these wrestlers I'm deleting from the big list as I do deeper dives into the ones that remain. I think it's useful to stay open to the idea that someone could creep back into consideration later on in this process and not get hung up on the fact that I went "hmmm, naw" back in 2021.

That's the number that gets bandied around for regular arena seating plus the floor, though their site is saying 55,000. I'm sure you're right in that it used to be higher but I wouldn't know when exactly those changes took place and/or were enforced.

My understanding is that it's a combination of a much larger stage, possible legal restrictions that have changed over the years, and the fact that they absolutely did draw more back when the company was hotter. With a capacity of 57,000, supposedly, and the ability to cram people in like they can't today, I don't see 60k being far-fetched, especially for the UWFi feud or the Choshu and Inoki retirements.

Even more so than the bad acting that seems to hamper all of them to some degree or another, my biggest complaint about these 'cinematic' or 'special presentation' pandemic matches is their length. Between the comedy of the final few minutes and the Hager/Page bar room brawl there's plenty of good stuff here but it feels like such a small percentage of what is otherwise an aimless 35 minute crowd brawl with no crowd. Save for that bar room stuff--which itself is walking a fine line between being exciting and blatantly choreographed--the action is never impactful or emphatic, even when these guys are leaping off the stands and crashing through tables. The way this whole thing was presented didn't help, with the production emphasizing just how much empty space and dead air there is in an arena without any fans, something the rest of the PPV had actually done a good job of hiding. I liked many of the goofs here and thought Ortiz in particular shined in this setting but taken as a whole this was no better than any of the hammy, unengaging shit WWE's been doing of late. You could lop twenty minutes off this thing and lose nothing of value.

Do we have any empirical evidence that he is any more of a draw than she is

Adore this match. Simple, emphatic, believable drama and action. It's almost certainly my 2012 MOTY and one of the top matches of the decade. I reviewed this on my blog last year as part of a quick Regal retrospective and I thought that it was the sort of thing his entire career had been building toward.

lol was he really an internet darling at the time? That seems absurd.

I didn't get into it until well into my teens and I know maybe two dozen people for whom that applies. If anything I'd wager that's becoming more and more common, especially as accessible alternatives to WWE are popping up. The logic of it doesn't have to appeal to any sort of ingrained nostalgia more than in any other media. It's not like the only people watching superhero movies these days are folks who read Action Comics #1 when they were a tyke. Haven't listened to it in a long time but that's a cute show. Might frustrate a longtime fan for how surface it is, somewhat by design, but I'd definitely recommend it to anyone venturing into wrestling for the first time. This is definitely a big help too, illustrating to people how wrestling compares to or connects to things like theatre and sports instead of separating it on a bizarre little island.

When I was trying to expose friends and S/Os to wrestling during college in the early to mid 2010s I usually went with some amalgamation of PWG and Chikara, sometimes with a little Dragon Gate too. With younger folks I felt that showing them relatively recent flashy, colorful, smaller scale, often character-driven wrestling was better than something older or more violent or more melodramatic, the sorts of things that might confirm all their suspicions and preconceived notions of wrestling. It also didn't hurt that a lot of the people in those promotions were a bit younger and more real-world attractive than your average 80s vet or musclebound freak. This was a while later but Lucha Underground was real helpful too. Having something that looked and felt more like your average TV drama and less like Monday Night RAW made a big difference and I found that the cultural/language barrier wasn't so bad so long as people understood ahead of time that this was a fantastical, semi-foreign sort of thing. As far as specific wrestler are concerned, I found that an endearing underdog worked to hook someone in far better than a sculpted adonis or charismatic heel. No matter how strange and absurd the situation is, people can immediately understand a little guy getting beat up by someone bigger. I got a lot of mileage out of people like Bayley, Rey Mysterio, The Colony, "Speedball" Mike Bailey, Mikey Whipwreck, etc.

Anyone happen to be familiar with the state of PPV services in Japan these days? Based on how much it came up in Observers in the late 90s and early 00s I have at least something of a grasp on it during that era but I'm curious about how that's changed over the decades and how it might relate to wrestling. Also, been watching a lot of ECW Hardcore TV recently and it got me and my friend to talking about Shane Douglas and Francine. Has there ever been a better man and woman duo in wrestling, one where they jelled together perfectly, played their respective parts well, and both could talk? We bandied around Tully and Baby Doll, Sunny and Sherri and their various partners, but none of them felt like they were both on the same level as those two. We thought Sullivan and Woman had a shot but we've seen precious little of that footage.

Came here to post Maeda kicking Choshu's face apart so I'm glad it was already brought up. Alongside Bret vs Austin (which solidified Austin as a major star, pushed the company fully into the Attitude Era, paved the way for their greatest successes, and eventually allowed them to virtually monopolize the American industry for two decades), I think it's probably the most influential match in anything approaching the modern era. As for something a little more recent, my friends and I were just talking about Lucha Underground's influence again. I definitely don't think there's such a prominent place for luchadors on the American indies (or the top level American promotions, for that matter) these days without that show. What's more I think that model of season-based, production-heavy, dramatic storytelling-driven wrestling is only going to become more and more prevalent as the 2020s roll on. Things like the Broken Hardy shit or whatever it is WWE is doing these days is spreading it out further but LU is where I'd say it first caught hold with any meaningful audience. I was thinking about the UK scene too, something that was real hot there for a minute and served to get a few big names out there, but I'm not sure if it would really count. It allowed for (or necessitated, considering who you are) the creation of NXT UK, the first foray into the worldwide mini-brand expansion WWE's been working toward for 15 or 20 years, but the jury's still out on how well that or any other offshoots are going to do. If you wanted a single match that kicked it all off, I'd say the PROGRESS vs REGRESSION eight man tag from September 2014.

Certainly hope this doesn't just fizzle out in a year's time. Seen entirely too much of that. Good luck and godspeed.

As far as merch is concerned, haven't we been hearing for years that heels make far less in merch sales in the fed? The Bucks and co. are an entirely different animal, obviously.

Yeah, count me in on the "what Roman Reigns character?" crew. Was tempted to cite him as an example of milquetoast nerds in my initial post. It's a whole complicated issue we don't need to get into here but his lack of a distinct character beyond a few catchphrases and a general demeanor has to contribute to his unpopularity in some circles, on some level.

I'm contractually obligated to throw Smith Garrett in the mix here. Speaking of uppercuts I'm glad they're relatively rare, all things considered. A bad uppercut to me is way worse than most bad punches. Maybe not so bad as a weak elbow because those should be almost foolproof.

In some cases I think it's just the case of poor or limited workers. Cass has never leapt off the page as a vibrant character to anyone I reckon. That's just not where his skillset lies (and shit, it may not lie much of anywhere). Ishimori too, who's a way better wrestler in most every front compared to Cass but never a guy I've looked to for strong character development. I'm sure he's a swell guy and there are certainly points where I've found him to be sympathetic, but there's no strong personality there for me to dig into, you know? In other cases it's just poor writing. Ishimori's now part of the Bullet Club which should theoretically make him a heel but that stable gets murkier and less well defined by the day. Joe's in the process of turning face from what I understand and it sounds like they don't know how to handle taking such an intimidating, physical character and making him a good guy without going the Braun route and leaning heavily into comedy. These guys are veterans who have been working for years but when they're given bad material or little material at all it's hard to know where to go. Along with that I think at some point wrestlers became less interested in being characters and more interested in just being (what they thought was) cool. Why be a conniving trickster when you could be a superhero and do Phoenix splashes and cool poses? Why be a career underdog who has to fight for every opening when you could go 50/50 for half an hour with guys who outweigh you by 80 pounds? Why be heartfelt and genuine when a snarky quip you say in a match could end up on a PWTees shirt? I imagine you can trace a lot of this back to the rise in the modern indie scene and what influenced those people (more so the later generations) and how that sort of approach has come to define a lot of wrestling worldwide. Thinking of those early indie stars, I also think it's fair to say that there are just fewer real-life characters in wrestling today. Like, take Homicide for example. One of my favorite wrestlers ever, a guy I've written thousands upon thousands of words about, someone I'd watch do literally anything, etc etc. Dee's a card outside of the ring as much as in it, a guy who's lived a full life and developed a strong, strong personality for having had those experiences. You look around today and those sorts of people generally aren't in wrestling. Over the years as the industry/fanbase/whatever changed, these sorts of people were discouraged from being in wrestling and/or wrestling grew more attractive for certain types of milquetoast nerds. And don't get me wrong, there are lots of milquetoast nerds working today who I love, but it's impossible for me to describe them in depth the way I could give you a deep analysis of who Homicide is. They don't stand out in the ring as larger than life figures because no part of them truly is all that exceptional or interesting.

Yeah I go in cycles too. Weeks that I'm in the swing of things and doing a bunch for the blog I'm probably watching about 15 hours a week, usually not more than two weeks in a row. On the average week, though, I'm probably hitting closer to 6-8 hours. And not all of it is actual matches in the ring, as I watch a fair amount of shoots and interviews and whatnot.

Hey, at least this means Chihiro's gonna get the belt back sooner rather than later.

The "unified voice" idea is an interesting one and useful in this context, I think. When you have Vince steering the ship on an entire show that he wants done a particular way or Patterson laying out how a big Rumble should work, you get a central idea behind a big piece of work for better or for worse. But when you have six sub-ten minute matches on RAW with six different agents saying how they should go you're spreading that influence out more and more, which can be good in some cases but often is just sort of jumbled, I think we can agree. More and more it feels like that unified voice is being delineated out to other, smaller voices. It's less of a lengthy novel and more a collection of short stories by different authors.

I mean yeah, Public Enemy were huge.