Kadaveri

This has to be Aja for me because her and Vader have very similar strengths, with the one big difference between Aja's peak was twice as long and her longevity as in 'still capable of having very good/great matches here and then' wrestler is almost as long as anyone. She has a bit more variety of performances too. I know Vader was always effective just being Vader, but then Aja was always effective just being Aja, but she could be more than that. She could cry, show emotional loyalty to her friends (see the tags with Bison against Bull), work comedy matches with Sakura Hirota, do a veteran puts over the new Ace with Meiko Satomura and show some complex conflicted emotions like she does in the Megumi Kudo match. It makes her a real multi-faceted character rather than just monster. I don't think Vader ever did stuff like that.

I think something Jericho has to be given credit for is his ability to get almost any act over. The one exception to this is he couldn't make being buried by Triple H work, but other than that is there any significant period of Jericho's career post-1998 where he wasn't getting good reactions from crowds? And this is across multiple promotions now he's had NJPW and AEW runs as well. That all has to count for something. Barry Windham just seemed like a totally dead act for most of the 90s. That being said, I'm not sure who I'd rank higher at this point.

Arn Anderson vs. Bobby Eaton - WorldWide 01/26/91 Arn Anderson vs. Barry Windham - Saturday Night 06/06/92 Arn Anderson vs. Steve Regal - Superbrawl 1994 Arn Anderson vs. Ric Flair - Fall Brawl 1995 Now these aren't singles matches on the level Andre's very best, but I do think they're examples of Arn having just about the best match that anyone could possibly have expected. None of these were big main events, Arn was never put in that spot as a singles wrestler like Andre regularly was. I think when you combine how much more consistently good Arn was (I've seen a lot of really horrible Andre matches, and I'm talking athletic prime Andre here) I think how much he excels in category trumps Andre peaking a bit higher in his top end stuff.

I had checked out of this thread, but for the record me saying Manami Toyota is "not especially influential" earlier was not me saying she's had NO influence. The point is she seems to have an inflated reputation with older Western fandom than what I see evidenced justification for. The Mayu Iwatani talk is another example of that; completely basic stuff like "prolonged selling" just gets pulled out of thin air and attributed to the influence of Manami Toyota. If anything (remembering the thread title) Mayu sells more like Shawn Michaels than Toyota, and there's about as much evidence that she was inspired by him.

Let's try that again... Well firstly it's a collective failure of the IWC that this match doesn't even had a PWO thread until now This is an incredible must-see and one-of-a-kind match. Sometimes it feels like you're watching a legit riot rather than wrestling match it's so out of control and unpredictable. Dump jumps Yukari with the microphone and just beats her over the head with it and leaves her a bloody mess, and it just keeps escalating from there. Yukari is so brave she keeps getting back in the ring to fight this monster. Dump starts running around with scissors trying to stab everyone and suddenly Devil and Chigusa are now involved trying to stop her. A nice detail is how Dump always back off a bit from Devil, who's never intimidated by her unlike the other babyfaces. They have history. The Commissioner comes out and DQs Dump, and if you've watched 80s Joshi you'll know you need to go WAY overboard to get DQed here, but Yukari insists on restarting the match. Then Dump extends a handshake and pretends she's gonna play fair now, but just distracts Yukari so Bull can stab her in the back with scissors and then they both beat her up. She's just so damn evil! I got legit upset seeing her do this despicable act. Amidst all this chaos, this is still a traditional brave babyface vs. despicable cheating heel at its core. Dump just takes everything to new levels of evil. ***** 5 Stars. This is one of the greatest matches of all time. I count everything before, after the bell and in between the restart as one complete awesome package.

I wouldn't really describe Bret as an input candidate. His output isn't on the level of Flair's but it's still pretty damn good and clearly better than Regal's.

I just do not get this line of argument and I don't remember anyone ever saying this about any other wrestler. If someone generally likes Joshi but doesn't like Yumiko Hotta does that mean they must not really get Joshi? If they don't like Johnny Saint does that mean they must not really get WoS? It just seems very bizarre and arbitrary to put her on a pedestral like this. She's far from the biggest Joshi star ever, stylistically she's not exactly representative of even just her era (Aja, Dynamite and Bull were the other world champs in her peak and she works nothing like them) and long-term she's not especially influential seeing how no one really works like her anymore, yet in 2021 Stardom has a bootleg Dump Matsumoto as their top heel. Why out of all the big stars of Joshi is she the one you have to love or you must just not get the whole genre (or whatever you want to call it)? And I'm really not one of her biggest detractors, she's probably gonna be #95 on my ballot or something. I just find the discourse around her weird more than anything else

I think you're inadvertently penalising Bull for being extremely good at getting the best out of lesser opponents. There's plenty of footage of Aja Kong in 1990, and she never looks remotely like a great wrestler in any of it unless she's wrestling Bull. Just lots of aimless smashing. With Bull she gets plugged into a structure. Maybe try this match if you haven't seen it: Bull Nakano vs. Yumiko Hotta 01/23/91. It's a handheld of a house show but probably the best place to see Bull have great main event with someone who clearly isn't in her league.

2:18 into this video Britt Baker's lying getting medical treatment saying she hopes Dave Meltzer liked her match and her goal is to get 5 Stars from him. I feel like a big change in wrestling the last decade is wrestlers/road agents putting together matches not really to get over with their live audience, but to try and get over with this one guy by doing stuff they know he likes. It's part of why everything is becoming homogenised.

WWE felt like a hot promotion from late-2012 to mid-2014 I'd say. Certainly when you look at the crowds, who're so consistently enthusiastic about the show it's looks like a different universe to WWE just a few years later. Even if it's cheering for Bryan when he's not there at least they've actively FOR something. Punk retiring, Daniel Bryan getting injured, splitting up The Shield and Lesnar becoming the absentee champion ended that, and that's before the Roman Reigns debacle.

They just said medics put his eye back in and he made a gradual recovery.

The full match is 30+ minutes long. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plzoAtIMF3w

Mate it got uploaded with sound just this March. Now watch it again! My thoughts on Panera generally are there's a good chance she was a Top 100 wrestler ever. 02/27/85 is the best Jaguar Yokota match I've seen (and that covers a lot of ground) and you can see from the Lola match that Pantera was putting a lot of her style into it. It wasn't some Jaguar carryjob. But her problem is add a couple of great tags against the Crush Gals and that's her entire case. Unless a lot more footage surfaces I'm not gonna consider ranking her, I need proof not inference. Can still enjoy those matches though.

Chigusa for Booker Of The Year

Braun Strowman getting released is so grim because it was less than a year ago that WWE put out a documentary where Braun said the stress of working for WWE had him contemplating suicide. Then him and Vince had a "not boss to employee but like a father to son" talk where Vince reassured him that Braun was very important to him and he "needed him for the long haul" and then Braun realised how much Vince cared about him personally. They put that in the documentary.

Bayley winning with the Super Bayley to Belly was cool because it's the same move she hit on Charlotte in the Four Way at Takeover: Rival, only for Sasha to break up the pin and get the win on Charlotte herself. It proved that Bayley can win the big one (and indeed was already good enough six months ago).

Dave Meltzer on the first "this is awesome" chant: So this is the story of the birth of the “This is Awesome” chant. It was actually done for the first time during a bad match with Abyss vs. Money Brown vs. Raven at the TNA Victory Road PPV in Orlando. When it was done, it was a mocking chant, started by MLW podcast host and wrestler Mister Saint Laurent (MSL), done sarcastically. The chant as a positive started soon after, at FIP shows in Central Florida, and that was by people who had been at the TNA show. It garnered popularity when it spread to ROH, particularly the October 1, 2005 match in New York between Kenta Kobashi and Samoa Joe

The hypocritical thing is it's the types who scream about "cancel culture" the most who're suddenly demanding censorship now someone's said something they don't like. They should never be taken seriously when they frame their actions as "defending free speech."

I doubt the full match exists except on an archive shelf somewhere. GAEA rarely did commercial releases, it marketed itself more at TV viewers than the hardcore tape buying wrestling fan.

I think there's a Phase 6 in 2005-06 where Flair stopped trying to have 'workrate' at all and just became as close to a deathmatch wrestler as WWE would allow. I love that year of Flair more than anything post-1993 and it actually adds to his case a little bit for me.

I feel pretty good with the idea that Sakie Hasegawa is the 101st best wrestler ever. So my first question of candidates going forward is "Are they better than Sakie Hasegawa?"

It kinda does hurt him with me a bit. I always got annoyed by Shawn's overly melodramatic tendencies, but it's hard to know how much to penalise a wrestler for that stuff because we don't know how much is them and how much is just them doing what the company tells them to. The last three years have conclusively proven the silly histrionics were 100% him and he probably would have been even worse if let completely off the leash.

Yep the idea with the watch parties is to showcase the range of what a worker can do, I think that's a better introduction than just "here are their 5 best matches". But I do urge everyone to just watch all the Ikeda matches if they liked what they saw. They're all at least "very good".

I don't agree with this. Flair was 47 years old in 1996, you wouldn't expect a wrestler that age to still be good so I don't hold it against him. Otherwise you're giving an unfair advantage to e.g. Ricky Steamboat for retiring relatively young. The way I see it, you can add to your case by still being great while old (e.g. Bockwinkel) but you can't subtract from it, because you're past the point where it's reasonable to expect you to keep adding to your case. Asuka wasn't bad when old. Asuka was bad in her early 30s. You'd expect a Top 100 Greatest Wrestler Ever to still be at least good at that age, and I haven't seen the JD'Star stuff Jetlag is talking about but I can at least say in ARSION she was bloody awful. We should compare wrestlers at similar stages in their careers for meaningful assessments. If Ric Flair turned really bad in like 1985 then I would hold that against his case.