Reel

Despite me waffling on it earlier in this thread, I had her 100 on my ballot, and really it came down to this: I wanted it to look like my ballot. I don’t know how strenuously I’d defend her being better than one of my last cuts, like Adrian Adonis for example, but I had Han really high, and Tamura very high, and if you’re willing to rank greatness in a small sample, you have to at least consider Fujii

I feel slightly okay about my ballot

I have to believe that Eddie would not have had a decade of main events built around a fake cop and some sort of spiked flail.

My sense of things is that the non-stars: Arn, Eaton, Togo, Kikuchi, Tito, Morton are gonna be the major casualties of new people finding their way onto ballots.

Sure. Really what I was saying is that a guy moving from not really being a factor to a top 100 guy because he had good matches with Templario is not the same as having good matches with, I dunno, Niebla Roja.

I've probably seen less than 100 current-day matches, total, over the last 3 years, but it strikes me that this list of Mistico's best matches is exclusively against a list of guys who were the best guys in the promotion when I quit watching.

Shinya Aoki’s first year, before he got too DDT and too ‘just another guy’ stands out to me. He was sort of purpose-built, especially his personality as a fighter, to be a pro wrestler in a way, and in the beginning when he was still mostly an MMA guy, he was like my idealized version of a wrestler.

I think my ballot should be good, but there are people, who I could see getting votes, like Brad Armstrong or Ray Gonzalez, who haven’t had a comment since 2016, and was curious if those votes would count. We’ve already seen proposed ballots with people who aren’t nominated and may not meet the footage requirement.

Are we still doing the 'You can't vote for them if no one has commented on their thread since 2020' or have we handwaved that rule?

A lot depends on the demographics of the voters come 2026, but I'd imagine a lot of the post-2016 NJPW guys are gonna take a big jump, and probably at the cost of a lot of the 80s and less mainstream 90s candidates.

I don't entirely blame him for it, but his influence on modern wrestling has made it so so so much worse.

When he's not running for 60-foot clotheslines, I think he's generally inoffensive, but I can't say great is a word that ever comes to mind when talking about Kuroda.

I'd say he has been easily the best guy in NOAH since the pandemic based on my watching and can't really think of anyone particularly close, although I've been watching less and less NOAH since 2019. He's one of the few guys around anymore that has any sense of hierarchy in his matches and that goes a long way for me. If he's wrestling Quiet Storm or whoever, he's just gonna beat the shit out of him or knock him out, he's not going to set out to have a good match, and that goes a very long way for me.

I think I've seen enough to say Buddy will make my ballot. I'm willing to dock the limited footage guys to a certain extent because I'm partial to the argument that with limited tape and a higher chance of the footage getting lost to time, the stuff we have isn't representative of the whole, but Rogers is in two of the three best matches we have from 1950s and 1960s (Thesz in 50 and O'Connor in 61) and is pretty much always good.

I think, to some degree, it's fine to see gaps in footage and draw some conclusions based on previous work, or do the opposite and say it's wrong to give credit for footage we don't have. I think those are both acceptable viewpoints. I don't think it's in the spirit of the project to rank wrestlers based on 'what could have been' and in Fujii's case, it's not like we are missing footage. I'm pretty sure we have her entire career on tape.