William Bologna

I really like this as a category. I always thought Super Delfin was good at it.

I'm always pleasantly surprised by Akebono matches. I realize I'm grading on a curve; I never expect much from a 40-something retired sumo wrestler. A lot of modern wrestling lacks a sense of struggle. Akebono matches are nothing but struggle, most of it against himself. He sweats at an all-time level. You can feel the difficulty he has picking himself off the mat. When he finally lumbers into position to do damage, it means something.

Bamford Bamington Bigelow

All chaps are assless. It’s like saying “sockless pants.”

He was the ref in the match Ed Wood watched before he recruited Tor Johnson (George Steele). One of the great pro wrestling movie moments.

Orange Cassidy isn’t a body guy either, but look at them.

So Cole’s just completely given up on the gym, huh?

ROH was on my local ABC affiliate at 5 pm on Sunday (DC area). That's not a normal thing, right? There's no indication on their website that I'd be able to see them there.

Mark Henry is absolutely the #1 guy from the Attitude Era.

Fightmaster is a name in English, but apparently it’s garbled German referring to woodworking. It gained something in the translation.

You mean when he was making the exact same referee-related gesture as the other referees, including a black guy? When he was obviously indicating a three count, and the same mania that got people all pissed off about a Jeopardy contestant took hold? No egg on my face; I'm not the one who got trolled into hysteria by 4chan.

I just re-read Seanbaby about talking Fujita's impossibly thick head, so I'm ready. What should we watch? I remember kind of liking a title match against Nagata, even though he was doing a Goldberg impression.

Thank goodness they got Mox and Kingston out of there to clear the way for the Canadian Dork Show.

I went looking for some Dick Murdoch content, and I found Murdoch vs. Steve Williams (which was great). Ross immediately - immediately - started talking about football. It wouldn't have been any different if it had been Ed Ferrara doing commentary.

I recently watched the Wrestling Classic. I wouldn't recommend it except that Ventura is just off the charts great through the whole thing. He's a heel, but he's always right. And there's just something about the way he says "Gorilla." They really did us a disservice when they had him edited off the tapes. You might be right about Heenan. I remember getting pretty annoyed at him in that Rumble, and I was shocked to see it talked about as an all-time announcing performance.

Edge looks like he’s 500 years old. Flair would look better in that spot.

Kimura wrestled into the 21st century, but I was thinking more prime Hart time-traveling into prime Fujinami's position. I'm always surprised at how many people on PWO think so little of Bret. He did pretty well in the GWE voting, but the thread about him is a lot more negative than I would have guessed. I'd be interested to hear some detail on what you mean by dyed-in-the-wool WWF worker. He worked fine with Flair (I want to say better than Fujinami did, but it's been a while since I've seen Hart vs. Flair); he wasn't out of his element when Hakushi was doing Space Flying Tiger Drops on him. I can understand that Hart's character might not land for someone (I have a similar block with Kenta Kobashi), but your comment that he was subtle and nuanced gets to why I prefer him. I don't find any nuance in Fujinami's work. He does a pretty good fighting spirit babyface, and that's the extent of it. And as far as the actual work goes, I cannot imagine the guy who wrestled Owen at WM10 having a bad match with any of the more technically-minded NJPW guys. I'm thinking Hase as the dream opponent, and Hashimoto as the worst case. I don't know that I've ever seen a Hart match built around him getting potatoed, which is an area where Fujinami excelled.

Why is that one bad match his fault and not Misawa's? The idea that Bret Hart couldn't have a good match against Kengo Kimura beggars belief. He wrestled Choshu a bunch of times. Maybe I missed it, but nothing in Fujinami's work suggested any progression in his character or his attitude toward his rival. The one time he's supposed to show anger, getting himself disqualified for being too vicious, he can't muster the fire he needs to make it convincing. In his matches with Choshu and Inoki, the other guys are a lot more memorable than Fujinami. For a top guy, he was too often a bystander in his own matches.

Speaking of Shawn Michaels being a subtly unprofessional prick, did he undercut/sabotage Diesel at WM 11? I haven’t seen that match since it happened, and I don’t know the provenance of the claim.

The whole OK sign thing is a damn semiotics class, with an emphasis on working a work and working into a shoot.

You're moving the goalposts, because you realize that it's ridiculous to accuse the black guy being a white supremacist for doing the exact same gesture as Wuertz. The OK sign is supposed to be a white supremacist signal, not a QAnon one. They're not synonymous. It is possible for people to have some bad ideas without subscribing to all of them. We have two people in the same line of work wearing the same shirt making the same job-related gesture, but we're to believe that it makes one of them a white supremacist. I'll also note that while I couldn't imagine counting to three with my middle, ring, and pinky fingers, a majority of the people in that image are doing so. Maybe they don't realize they're QAnon white supremacists.

He is making exactly the same gesture as the second guy from the right. You seem to be assuming that because he has some opinions you don’t like, that means he has all the opinions you don’t like.

I went Brent. I watched a whole lot of Fujinami matches, and I enjoyed it, but at no point did he establish himself as a compelling character. Bret Hart the worker never did anything that Bret Hart the character wouldn't do, if that makes any sense, and I always wanted to watch that character. Fujinami probably has the better CV in terms of volume of good work (in large part because Hart got Goldberged out of having a late career), but Bret was better at being a pro wrestler. I think Bret could have done what Fujinami did, and I don't think the reverse is true. Put Hart in there with Kimura, Hirata, etc., and he'd be perfectly capable of wrestling good matches with them. Could Fujinami have pulled off the double turn with Austin or the feud with Owen? And I use those examples because, while there were promos involved, the storytelling was largely physical. That is exactly the kind of thing Fujinami wasn't any good at.

These are great, @The Thread Killer. Thanks for doing them. Interesting contrast between the two interviews back at which Eric is firing. In the Cornette one, someone is lying, and I think it's Jim. You know how in fake stories, the narrator/protagonist draws himself off and righteously tells off his enemy? It's always a full paragraph, and there are no interruptions or even usually a rejoinder. It often prompts bystanders to applaud and offer presents. This is one of those stories. The Hart thing is more of a difference of opinion. Eric thinks Bret was a sad sack loser, and Bret says "Nuh-uh!" There's a lot of gray area in something like that.

Magnitogorsk is the new Maritimes. Can't judge a worker until you've seen his work in Magnitogorsk.