Kadaveri

He returned in DDT last month btw. Mecha Mummy was doing a post-match beatdown on Chris Brookes and then Ken The Box walked in and saved Giraffe Boy.

This is what Dylan Hales said about Jumbo on his countdown podcast in 2016: "The way I would describe the way I view Jumbo is the way many fans view John Cena. There's like a begrudging respect for the fact that he has great matches, but there is a complete disconnect from him as an entity who exists in the wrestling business. I simply don't want to ever see him work. Some people have critiqued my position as being "well you're just sick of him. You're a contrarian who doesn't like that he's well regarded." No. There's literally no other wrestler in the history of wrestling that I feel this way about. I would rather watch The Great Kojima wrestle than Jumbo Tsuruta. I would rather watch The Great Khali. There is no one in the history of professional wrestling who I'd like to watch less than him. I just have contemptuous view of the way he carries himself. Something about it just feels dismissive and antithetical to the ethos I like in wrestling. It's a very visceral and difficult to explain thing because it's such a unique emotion I don't feel about anyone else. To me Jumbo is just a void of interest. I can't imagine a more intrinsically uninteresting wrestling personality. He exemplifies everything about the Ace role that I find boring and stale and stagnant and ill-defined and sort of irrelevant. Not only do I not want to root for him, I don't want to root against him, I just want to root for the match to end. Everyone raves about Grumpy Jumbo, and that's probably my favourite stage of his career, but he's not even a Top 50 guy in terms of projecting grumpiness. To me Jumbo is like a 0 in character work, or a -50 maybe even. To me, his character is "Guy I don't want to see wrestle. At all."

Thanks that's a lot better.

Someone needs to work out which pro-wrestler is actually in the Ken The Box suit so we can add it to their case.

Is there a version of this match without a nauseating amount of clipping?

Watched this the other week and didn't think to put a review here. I don't usually like forearm exchanges but this match has got one of the best I've ever seen. They absolutely stiff the fuck out of each other you can hear every single thud. It's a wonder they didn't cave each other's ribcages in. Tomohiri Ishii would cry if he had to get hit by Miyuki Takase. ****1/4

This handheld recording of a Madison Square Garden handheld recently turned on YouTube so thought I'd give it a watch. The match starts 30 minutes into the recording. It's hard to tell exactly how good the match is because of the poor quality of the recording. I'm not going to give it a rating, but I can at least say I sat down and watched the whole thing and enjoyed it and got pretty excited at some moments. I feel this is probably a great match and I unrealistically hope WWE will release it one day... You can hear two fans chatting all through the match. The highlight is one of them talking about how Toshiaki Kawada and Mitsuharu Misawa are no longer a tag team! I didn't know such chat happened at WWF house shows in 1993.

20 years to the day since her classic with Akira Hokuto and Meiko's delivers another banger. This was so well worked for a zero-stakes TV match with no real context, snug limbwork and hard strikes that you can hear connect and really helps overcome the lack of crowd noise. ****

If that had a crowd it's probably the greatest Smackdown match ever...

Assess this match with the knowledge that JWP were building up Devil to end Kansai's 2 year title reign at their next major show, whereas Bull was just making a one off appearance.

I want to see the argument that KAORU is 'maybe' better than Bull Nakano.

I appear to be an outlier on this but my favourite Kobashi vs. Taue match is the 03/21/95 Carnival match. It really boosts the narrative of Taue realising "Hang on a minute. I'm a giant. I should just destroy everyone!" and then going through the tournament wrecking everyone.

I've been watching everything on tape of the 1986 Japan Grand Prix this week and you can add having great matches with 17 year olds while maintaining hierarchy to Chigusa's portfolio. She has a wonderful performance against Kazue Nagahori here where she controls like 90% of the match as she should. But it's not a squash. She balances being totally focused yet relatively relaxed about the whole thing. Like she knows Nagahori is way below her skill level, but she's not gonna take any risks of even getting hurt because this is a long gruelling Round Robin tournament so she needs to pick up those 2 points as cost-free as she can, and this approach lets Nagahori get just enough to show some fighting underdog spirit and get herself over a bit, without ever looking like she might win. I don't this match could possibly have been better without undermining its purpose within the promotion's wider narratives, achieving that's exactly what I'm looking for in GWE. Chigusa's so so good and it blows my mind that anyone ever thought that Lioness was better.

You know until some YouTuber uploaded this 2 months ago I'd never seen anyone even mention this match and there was total consensus that Aja had zero noteworthy matches until 1990. Wild that something so great was just sitting in someone's tape collection for so long.

For what it's worth, there's a huge chunk of wrestling fandom who think "late era Cena" was the best John Cena stuff ever and it's still remembered very fondly. Probably the majority of hardcore fandom outside this website tbh. Cena's 2015 US Title reign with the weekly open challenges has been canonised by WWE probably more than anything Cena has ever done, enough that they've reenacted it with Roman Reigns and AJ Styles when they held midcard belts. It's really for those reasons that I can't hold it against him to any significant degree even though I much prefer 2006-13 Cena. The PWG/movezzz style was very in vogue in that 2015-17 period and the WWE had a bunch of new wrestlers who made names for themselves on the indies wrestling that style. Cena - probably with direction from on top - adapted his style to better fit the circumstances, delivered what the company wanted from him and gave the fans what they wanted to see.

Zack Sabre Junior is a borderline case at the moment but I think he's making it. His big advantage is he works such a different style to everyone else that he'll basically always be pushed to some extent and his matches will always stand out. I don't like how finisher-centric almost all modern wrestling is so he's near-automatically bumped up for me by working in this environment without really any established finisher, or at the very least he's gotten over like 6 or 7 moves that can all believably end a match depending on context. It makes his matches so much more engaging than the usual NJPW style where you know no matter how many insane moves these guys are gonna pull out the match which always still end with a guy hitting their regular finish for the 1 2 3. He's also the only guy right now who manages to rein in Will Ospreay. Fred Yehi has been one the consistently good and 'different' wrestlers of the last 5 years for me. If he can keep that up and deliver a real classic at some point (he has nothing at 4.5 Stars or above atm) then I'm gonna be considering him. Kairi Hojo/Sane may be retired. She's super-talented and her favourite wrestler is Kenta Kobashi, which fits so much as she's so charismatic and incredibly likeable, but at the moment she just doesn't have enough quality stuff to make a Top 100. She didn't really get great until 2015. IF however, and I may be getting carried away here, she's just waiting for her WWE contract to expire so she can wrestle in Japan then that's exciting, because you know she's gonna get booked in main events with all the best talent there for as long as she wants to. I predict if she comes back she's gonna make a good Top 100 case by 2026. Takumi Iroha. She isn't nominated and cannot possible make a Top 100 list at the moment... but she's so good. She had a match with Mayu Iwatani in Stardom last year on a day's notice because Mayu's opponent got sick and it was pretty widely regarded (including by me) as the best Stardom match of 2020. A lot of newer Western fans literally didn't even know who she was until seeing that match and were blown away. In just wrestling ability I think she's better than anyone in Stardom. She has the best looking strikes in Joshi, sick powerbombs that makes crowds audibly gasp, she can work the mat really well and she's one of the few Joshi workers who'll make an effort to sell a damaged limb for more than 30 seconds (she's not a great seller really but better than most around her). But the output isn't there because she's only the Ace of the 8th biggest Joshi promotion with a roster of teenagers. Let's see how the next five years play out, the GAEA revival may mean bigger opportunities are coming for her.

I don't understand why you'd penalise a candidate for being bad late in their career when there was zero expectation they'd be good anyway. Are we holding Bret Hart's 2010 run against him? That SHLAK match was only a few months before Necro was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he was likely already seriously ill.

If anyone doesn't know Jun won the DDT Openweight Title (basically their world title) a couple of months ago and yep he's still yet to show any serious decline. His match against Kazusada Higuchi on 03/28 was one of my favourite matches of 2021 so far. He may have the strongest longevity/duration of quality case of any Japanese wrestler in history at this point.

Madison Eagles I need to rewatch a lot of Shimmer and Shine before I make a more developed push for her, but from memory she's my favourite of all the female indie workers of that era. She's such a stand out because she's 6ft 1 and muscular so can credibly fight like an offensive juggernaut. She's like the best version of a Charlotte Flair. Plus she's a lot better on the mat and as a character. She's a great in-match shit-talker and is as good as anyone on those shows at working up crowds during their matches. If anyone's including influence she's also one of the most important wrestlers almost nobody's ever heard of when you look at all the women she trained/mentored who went on to become something bigger. Madison Eagles vs. Jessie McKay - Shimmer - 12/09/10 Madison Eagles vs. Ivelisse Velez - Shine 10/10/14 Madison Eagles vs. Deonna Purrazzo - Shimmer 04/14/18

Terry Funk also once said that Masato Tanaka was better than anyone in All Japan in the 90s so... He's a bit odd sometimes.

I don't believe you could give John Nord etc Goldberg's push and it would be anywhere near as effective. To show this I'd suggest people go watch Goldberg's Nitro debut. Nobody knew who he was and the crowd barely pays attention in the first minute of that match, but by the end you see people getting to their feet in a "woah check out this guy/that was a helluva move" way. It's not like that was a regular occurance in WCW squash matches at the time. Plus, wasn't Goldberg's big push not even planned from the start? He was originally pushed as a heel on commentary, like he was just being built up as a monster for some babyface to beat until it became apparent that people thought Goldberg was aweseome.

I've only half-developed this thought, but I rewatched the Sasha vs. Bianca match today and noticed even more how it revolved around Sasha fighting dirty by using Bianca's hair against her, all building to that moment where Bianca whips her with the braid. Everyone who's seen the match remembers that spot don't they? This is an era where wrestling is so homogenised with supposedly dozens of 4+ Star matches every year which nobody remembers anything about by the year's end (e.g. every G1 Climax). Sasha doesn't do that. One of her special touches is so many of her big matches have these very memorable moments that belong to that match only. Bianca's braid, stomping Bayley's hand, stealing a girl's hairband, killing Charlotte with the kendo stick, that insane dive into Asuka's kick spot. She crafts singular matches which leave a lasting impression. It doesn't always quite work. An example I'd give is her winning the tag belts in the first women's Elimination Chamber match by applying the crossface with her foot as her arm was injured. That was a bit hokey. But I see the intention and value it and think it adds something to her candidacy.

He had some really good matches in the WWE Cruiserweight Classic in 2016 that are worth checking out. You'll get a good idea of what he's been like the last 15 years or so. You are right that his peaks aren't very high for a Top 100 candidate, his case depends how much you value him being a Master Of The 3.5 Star Match for a good 20 years now.