Kadaveri

Ryback has an interesting anecdote that after claiming he could be the next John Cena Triple H bluntly told him that WWE doesn't want another John Cena and that Cena's the last marquee name WWE will ever have. The business model now is that WWE The Brand is supposed to be the draw, not any individual star. What's most peculiar is that 2013-16 period where NXT really grew and became a hot show it was super babyface heavy. Look at acclaimed shows like Takeover: R-Evolution and Takeover: Brooklyn from 2014 and 2015, the babyfaces won EVERY SINGLE match. When is the last time that ever happened on a WWE PPV? Of course, once NXT started to get more integrated and became the 'third brand' it became a heel territory as well.

Her favourite overall wrestler is Eddie Guerrero yes but she was also a huge Joshi fan as a teenager. She once answered "who are the greatest female wrestlers" with "It doesn't get much better than Akira Hokuto and Mayumi Ozaki circa 1992" and has talked more generally about being on internet forums downloading 90s Joshi rather than doing schoolwork It's a shame every interviewer does nothing but ask her the same questions about Eddie but never someone like Ozaki. Sasha's heel mannerisms and 'creative cruelty' when she's on offense are quite similar, I bet there's an influence there.

There's not much tbh. A lot of goofing around not really wrestling and then she gets injured in the TLC match. The only good match I have down for her before the pandemic was Kairi & Asuka vs. Charlotte Flair in a handicap match on Raw 12/02/19. Better than it sounds.

The best WWE main roster Kairi stuff to look into is the Kairi & Asuka vs. Bayley & Sasha feud. Some recs: Kairi vs. Sasha Banks - Raw 07/06/20 Asuka vs. Bayley - Raw 07/06/20 Asuka & Kairi vs. Bayley & Sasha Banks - Raw 13/07/20 Asuka vs. Sasha Banks - Extreme Rules 2020 Bayley vs. Kairi - Raw 07/20/20 Asuka vs. Sasha Banks - Raw 07/27/20 The matches Kairi isn't in she's valeting Asuka. You can always skip them if you prefer but I thought they'd help with the context and seeing her perform overall (plus you're seeing more of 3 other nominees anyway).

Another match like this I gave almost as much weight to arguing she was great in 2015 is Sasha vs. Brie Bella on Main Event 10/21/15. I know right, not exactly an obvious place to be looking, but she has a legit good match with Brie who I must stress (and most who've watched a lot of this era will back me up) was one of the worst workers on the roster. You wouldn't even know that if this is the only Brie Bella match you watched.

I'm not going to rank Benoit but the other cases probably aren't going to affect me. I think Benoit is peculiarly difficult case to separate the art from the person because you're constantly being reminded of what he did when watching his matches. I don't think there's any wrestler in history who was so constantly reckless and brutal with his own body. Literally even on random Smackdown matches he's crashing headfirst into the announce table on suicide dives, getting dropped on his head with brainbusters and regularly using the flying headbutt as a signature. Add on that his habit of taking particularly brutal unprotected chairshots to the head (sometimes to the back of the head). Now when you find out they did an autopsy after his death and he had the brain of a 85 year old Alzheimers patient, how can you not see that coming out of his work? We'll never know for sure if this contributed to him doing what he did, but it's likely enough that I just can't enjoy his matches anymore.

Drawing doesn't matter for this project but just FYI, Dave Meltzer will tell you that Sasha's one of the very few wrestlers of the last 5 years who is a demonstrable ratings draw (her competition are guys like Goldberg). This goes back to the 2016 feud with Charlotte, where their matches were doing the biggest numbers of anything on WWE TV in the football season that wasn't Goldberg returning and nothing else came close. And just last October the Bayley vs. Sasha match on Smackdown did their biggest rating of the pandemic.

Yeah sorry I had a complete brain fade there because I kept thinking in "2001-21" terms. Meiko is absolutely better in 1999 and 2000. 2001 I have Bryan above her. I may change my mind on this if I deep dive GAEA more, but at the moment Meiko's BITW case for 2001 is almost entirely down to two great matches with Akira Hokuto and Aja Kong. Now they're not carry jobs, but she was still very clearly the less important worker in those matches. In fact I think she kind of annoys me in the Aja match with her constant spamming of the Death Valley Bomb for nearfalls, which is totally her habit and not Aja's. Bryan's 2001 is when he first got buzz (I'm too young to have witnessed that in real time but the narrative checks out) but his matches with Low Ki, which are both very innovative and hold up incredibly well to this day (a lot of indie stuff from that era totally doesn't). He's working a shoot-style influenced more mat-based style, but gets it to fit within the classic narrative structure of the American wrestling those audiences are used to do (if that makes sense) to produce something that appears really unique and new to them, but isn't too foreign that it doesn't get over well because the fans don't really know what's happening. On the individual performance level, I think that's a higher level of achievement than Meiko wrestling great matches with far more experienced all time great workers that are well within their typical style. Plus it's not just the Low Ki matches. I'd also point to his performance at the King Of The Indies tournament (he was the standout) where he has really good (I can't remember quite how good these matches were now so I'm being cautious) matches with Brian Kendrick and Doug Williams in the same day but they are two very different matches. He's great already in a more limited way, but one of the best things about following Bryan's career is never seems to really get worse at anything. He's always expanding his horizons, learning from mistakes, incorporating new styles into what he can do. I'm looking forward to do this year by year, but this'll do for the Meiko comparison. Of course the real BITW in 2001 was Steve Austin by miles anyway.

Oh Yoshida's gonna rank for me and I'll write a lot about her at some point. Her Arsion run where she'll float between a purely mat/technical style to incorporating more power moves depending on her opponent/how the match develops is exactly what I want from a wrestler. Much better than Toyota But back to Toyota, and to make something clearly, my issues with her selling aren't concerns about 'realism'. I don't really care about realism in wrestling. What I care about is making matches compelling, stuff being meaningful, keeping things fresh and adapting appropriately according to the situation. For example I absolutely loved AJ Styles vs. Brock Lesnar where AJ's flying around staying out of Brock's grasp and attacking his legs to slowly chop the beast down. That's a cool narrative and shows AJ has a brain and is constructing a match that it makes sense for him to have specifcally against Lesnar. Is it realistic? Of course not, realism means Lesnar crushing him in 5 seconds. I don't care. Toyota's style of "sell absolutely nothing once you go on offense" doesn't irritate me because it's not realistic, it's irritates me because it ruins matches for me. It's not compelling at all. Especially when you watch a bunch of them, and you start to notice that in singles (in tags she's different) Manami has basically the same approach to every match no matter who it is or what her opponent does. Her opponent gets on offense, often submissions, Manami will scream like she's being tortured to death and contort herself all over the place. Eventually she'll turn things around and she'll sprint around hitting loads of dropkicks/big moves as fast as she can without selling even 1% of anything. It's the same thing every time. You could work her legs for 10 minutes, work her left hand, just slap her in the head for ages, it's all irrelevant as what comes next will always be her running around hitting moves like it never happened. Her opponents are irrelevant to her. The story of a match to that point is irrelevant to her. Sure, she's an incredible athlete and the speed at which she hits her moves is astonishing, but she might as well just do segments called "exhibition of Manami Toyota hitting moves super fast" and skip the whole wrestling match thing. It'd be of equal substance. And I'll accept that she did have audiences go batshit for her, with a big caveat. Over time it becomes just the frantic movefests they're reacting to, and nothing else. An example of this I've rewatched recently is the 01/04/92 show which has two big matches. 1. Manami Toyota vs. Toshiyo Yamada in the semi-main and 2. Akira Hokuto vs. Kyoko Inoue going last. Watch the Toyota-Yamada match, and you'll see for the first 20 minutes or so that crowd is dead as hell. You can see the fans in the front row turning to each other chatting and not paying much attention. It wasn't like this a year back, but by now Manami's style has trained audiences that nothing in her matches means anything until her sprinting movefest starts. That's what they're waiting to see. The match as a whole, they honestly don't seem interested at all. I'd be much kinder to this if they'd just get straight to the crazy moves right at the beginning and not waste my time. Sprinty spotfests have a place. Then we have the Hokuto vs. Inoue match right after, where you'll see this isn't just part of the style or that crowd being bad. They're really engaged throughout this whole thing, in fact they're about as loud in the first 5 minutes of Hokuto vs. Inoue as they were at any point in the Toyota-Yamada match. They're invested in the outcome, Kyoko is really over as a babyface and they're rooting for her to win, and the wrestlers react and play to that and get the crowd into it even more without doing anything that spectacular yet. Now I get that Manami's way of having matches is 'her style' and that she's consciously chosen to abandon certain fundamentals of wrestling in favour of other priorities. That doesn't mean it's great. After all that though, there's still a chance she makes my Top 100 because the Aja & Hokuto matches are so great and despite her aggravating habits in singles matches she's still been in some of best tag matches ever. The nature of tag matches either hides the serious flaws in her style, or she just doesn't feel the need to indulge in it in this context. I'll have to think that one through more though.

This doesn't personally affect me much and I don't want to derail the thread so just to answer... The increasing public awareness of Lawler's "legal troubles" puts some people off enjoying his matches. It's like a smaller scale Benoit problem.

Randy Orton vs. Seth Rollins at Wrestlemania 31 was totally average until that jaw-dropping finish convinced half the internet they'd just seen a great match.

That this is wrong and it comes from transferring the roles of men's wrestling into Joshi when they're not the same. Joshi very rarely has giants/superheavyweights that are common in men's wrestling, because they just aren't many women who're actually big enough to play that role. The size difference between Aja and e.g. Manami Toyota is on the Stan Hansen-Toshiaki Kawada scale (if Kawada were a few inches taller). Her 'monster persona' is more about her ruthlessness and skill in inflicting brutality than just her size.

I just remembered this video from 2015 and have now convinced myself this is how Bianca Belair got to main event Wrestlemania:

I think the best match of all those is actually the Bayley vs. Asuka match on Raw 07/06/20. It's most memorable because there was a bit of a miscue on Asuka's spinning backfist so she wallops Bayley hard in the face, but Bayley just keeps plowing on. I went 4 Stars on that one. The Bayley vs. Kairi match on Raw 07/20/20 is also really good and the only time Kairi ever really worked like her heroic Stardom character on the WWE main roster.

These are worth checking out: Bison vs. Kyoko Inoue - 08/18/91 Bison vs. Toshiyo Yamada - 04/25/92 Bison vs. Aja Kong - 06/21/92 I think she just doesn't have enough to make a Top 100, but I guess that depends on how much you think a wrestler can make their case through tag performances.

Even if that is the thinking, I think it's just a failure and I don't value it at all. I can accept wrestlers doing this kind of thing if they don't blow off selling entirely. Joshi workers do tend to sell less than most, but I don't buy attributing Manami's specific antics to the style when I've seen too many performances where Bull/Hokuto/Aja etc... will still sell some amount of pain/exhaustion when on offense, which does get across that they're pushing themselves to their limits amidst great adversity. Toyota doesn't do that. She'll literally go immediately out of being in brutal submissions for 10 minutes to running around perfectly well like the match just started, rendering everything that happened to that point completely meaningless. If the Undertaker threw Manami Toyota off Hell in a Cell she'd be running around hitting dropkicks 1 minute later like it never happened. I think the typical Joshi philosophy was having as much action as possible within the confines of sound wrestling. As in, how hard/fast can I possibly go at this point in the match while adequately selling the damage I've already taken and maintaining the story of the match? That's what they're going for. The best workers of that style as much as possible achieve skirting close to the line of 'dropping selling too much to up the action' without crossing it, less good workers will cross the line sometimes. With Manami, it's like she simply doesn't acknowledge the line exists.

I'm gonna go after a big gun here, but I think if you compare Sasha's 2015-21 with Bret Hart's 1991-97, Sasha's more consistently delivered in big matches than Bret. That match she just had with Bianca Belair (Bianca's first ever PPV singles match) was better than any match Bret had with Shawn Michaels, and there was no rational reason to think that match would be great except "it's Sasha in a main event."

I am committed to doing something like this. Don't expect a reply for quite while though. Him being "best in the world for 20 years", is a totality thing. I'll write up some more concrete conclusions at a (much) later date, but right now I'll confidently say that apart from when he was out in 2016-17, I don't think there's a single year from 2001-21 when Daniel Bryan wasn't a great worker delivering classic matches. In his best years he's #1, in his "worst" years he's probably still Top 20 or something. Right now, and for the past few months when I started properly thinking about GME, the only candidates I'm seriously considering for #1 are Bryan, Stan Hansen and Kenta Kobashi. If Bryan were to retire today, I'm not sure what order I'd rank them. The thing which really drove me to 'predict' Bryan's gonna be my number one by 2026 was actually his fantastic match at Fastlane with Roman Reigns, adding 2021 to make 19 individual years now where he's had, imo, a 4.5 Star or better match. Kobashi and Hansen's cases are finished. Bryan is still adding to his already incredible portfolio, and I don't have any reason to think he won't keep adding to it going right to 2026 if he doesn't retire. I'm also not convinced there's a single year where Meiko Satomura had a better year than a non-injured Daniel Bryan, and she'll make my Top 100.

Who else ever had a singles match with Minami of that quality? And it's not even in her usual style (a lot slower paced). I'd put Bull above Hokuto too, but nah his comments about Aja are perfectly fair for 1990. I'm gonna be pushing for Aja elsewhere as she gets way better later, but the picture with her gets distorted by her feuding with Bull almost non-stop in 1990-92, making her look a lot better than she was until you dig a bit deeper. I've been part of the Joshi watchalongs Grimmas has been running and the only thing people are debating about Aja after having watched virtually all the footage available from 1990-91 is who's better out of her and Bison. I'll check next time but I don't think a single person thinks she's remotely close to as good as Bull or Hokuto at this point.

Even earlier than that Elliott. Here is Dave Meltzer in the Observer October 22nd 1990: And again on November 19 1990 I'm hardly a "Meltzer said it so it must be true" guy, I'm just pointing out that people arguing for Hokuto as a super great worker way before 1993 aren't really revisionists here; that's how she was talked about at the time, it's just been forgotten for some reason. I'd guess the reason why it's been forgotten is: look at the match ratings. Everyone goes back and cherry picks 4+ Star matches and you aren't going to get many of those from Hokuto in this period because she's spending almost all her time in midcard tags with workers nowhere near her level. But when you go by Charles' recent comments about assessing a wrestler's performance by "In each environment that this wrestler was in, did they do everything they needed to do to be as great and effective as the environment allowed?" she's way higher to me than wrestlers who's best few matches may have been a bit better, but were regularly in main events with top opponents and weren't anywhere near as consistent. I wouldn't argue for her as a BITW overall candidate anywhere in 1989-91 because Flair's got 89 locked up and I think Jumbo is just so transcendently great around 1990-91 that she can't really compete with that. But is she an obviously great wrestler with performances that significantly add to her GWE case? Absolutely.

We're not making new threads we're just continuing where we left off.

Oh yeah I completely endorse asking the questions and poking holes in his case. I think you'll also find that Bryan (and Flair actually) generally has answers too.

Io Shirai used to occasionally pull this out:

I'm not penalising Daniel Bryan for "Hulking Up" babyface selling in WWE when that's how literally every single top babyface has wrestled in that company since long before Bryan even arrived. It's clearly something that they are instructed to do from on high, and Bryan's done as well as anyone at getting the best out of the confines of that style. Imo it's fair to penalise a match for something like that, but it doesn't mean the wrestler is making a mistake.