Reel

Larry rules, and I think his reputation, at least generally, that he's some stalling Memphis heel to the Nth degree, is mostly bullshit and makes people write him off. He is good in 1970s WWWF, he has a good match with that sack of flour Stan Stasiak in 77, he's good in his tags with Garea after that, good in squashes with the likes of Rodz and Rivera, and the the Bruno feud is godhead. His Georgia stuff has some praise in this thread, which I haven't seen, but I'm sure it is at least good. He has the Bockwinkel feud, the stuff with Saito, good matches with Slaughter. The WCW run has standout stuff pre and post Dangerous Alliance, the Regal stuff of course, and even when he comes off the golf course to wrestle Scott Hall in 1997, he's still good. Criminally underrated in my view.

The 1997 MSG match against Cactus is the one that comes to mind for me.

Catching up on some current CMLL, and this isn't an all-timer or anywhere close and it's somehow sub-Real Player video quality, but Casas is still doing standout stuff in trios at 60 in an empty arena. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yEN4aTGgLaz6xtQC7NnfEiPy_fH47FpP/view?usp=sharing

The 2009 Elimination Chamber probably won't show up in a greatest Rey matches list, but he practically wills that match into being great. Also, he and Kidman have a couple of matches with Haas/Benjamin that I think are really great.

Working #1s: Daniel Bryan, Hijo del Santo, Tenryu, Flair, Funk Everybody Else: Kawada, Steamboat, Hashimoto, Misawa, Cena, Lesnar, Akiyama, Rey Mysterio, Fujiwara, Hansen, Chris Hero, Mariko Yoshida, Yuki Ishikawa

I nominated Megumi Fujii purely as a 100 candidate, and when I get down to finalizing my list if I'm not agonizing over my last few cuts, I'll probably put her there, but I think it's more likely that I have 150 people I'm considering and just try to get the 100 best on my ballot.

If Gulak was having the run of matches he is currently having on Main Event on a WCW C show in 1992 instead of modern WWE, he'd be on a lot more lists and I wouldn't be the first person posting in this thread.

Shawn is supposedly very hands-on with NXT:UK and if you watch that show, you don't really get any of the melodrama that you get with Gargano/Ciampa/Cole etc, even in the empty arena setting, where we have seen a lot more ACTING to replace the crowd, the Reigns/Uso stuff for example. So, I think it might be a case where Shawn likes that stuff, and guys like Gargano want to do that stuff too, and maybe we can blame Triple H for embracing that mode of storytelling, NXT is still his show afterall, so we see Shawn's fingerprints on that stuff. On the other hand, his other philosophies and views on wrestling manifest differently on other wrestlers and other shows. None of this matters for me, again if we were gonna blame wrestlers for negative influence, I'd dock Kawada 10 spots for every bad set of Kawada kicks I've seen on an indie show, but I do think that the "Shawn turned NXT into a weekly version of the Flair retirement match" thing is only partly true and only partly his doing.

if we're gonna dock Shawn for the NXT melodrama, should I leave Kobashi off my ballot for every horrible corner chop sequence from the last 20 years?

the rey escorpion match linked above should put him on everybody's list

he went from "awesome old guy taking stupid bumps on random shows" to "meme wrestler" very quickly

come for the banter, stay for the Fancy Dan appreciation

and then he ranked him at 51

again, i was only really impressed by her starting last year, but here's the stuff from 2020 I dug, all from seadling vs Yoshiko - Passion Accelerates vs ASUKA - Delivered to You vs Yoshiko - Closer to You with Tsukasa Fujimoto & Rina Yamashita vs Hiroyo Matsumoto, Yuu, & Ayame Sasamura - In Love with D with Tsukasa Fujimoto vs Yoshiko & Hiroyo Matsumoto - Seadlinnng: 5th Anniversary with Tsukasa Fujimoto vs Yuu & Ayame Sasamura - Grow Together with Tsukasa Fujimoto vs Yoshiko & Sareee - Shin-Kiba NIGHT

I really like the Ziggler match too, not as high as some other people in this thread, but it is certainly better than the sum of its parts. Every match of his later WWE run seemed to have that spot where a guy hangs onto the ropes in the tree of woe for no reason, only to get stomped, and there are few things in the history of wrestling I dislike more.

One of those early Hulks, Kirby clearly is drawing the Hulk as having the ability to fly, and Stan is just sort of ignoring it. It's really weird.

Co-sign on ASUKA. Arez, Aramis, Villano III Jr, and Demonio Infernal are all guys in Mexico I can see contending in 2026 if things keep going the way they're going. CMLL is so weird, so who knows if anybody in that promotion will have a chance to put together matches, but Templario and Soberano Jr might have a shot. The DDT guys, Takeshita and Ueno, seem like their going to get a lot of chances to have great matches in the next 5 years, and have been pretty good so far. One of the great disappointments of the last few years has been Shinya Aoki devolving from one of the best booked wrestlers in the world into a DDT comedy wrestler, so who knows with people in that promotion. Shotaro Ashino in AJPW, and Kaito Kiyomiya in NOAH fall into that same bucket. There are U.S. Indie guys I like, like Garrini, Josh Bishop, Thomas Shire, but they're gonna need great years for me to really think about them seriously. Ilja Dragunov is a guy I really like and could see putting together a top 100 resume by the time 2026 rolls around.

Megumi Fujii Fujiii really only has a case for a 100 vote, so this nomination might purely be for me to put her there on my ballot, but here's her case. She has 3 matches, and I'm not sure I'd call any of them great, you could make the argument for the Yoshida match, but in all of them, she looks incredible. Everything is slick, everything is crisp, and she looks like an absolute killer. She would go on to be one the best fighters in women's MMA, but all of these matches take place before the bulk of her run in that sport. Considering her at all is going to be a stretch, but she has a sort of extreme version of Volk Han's case, very few matches, but each one has something special. Megumi Fujii vs Mariko Yoshida MMA Rules Arsion 6/1/2003 Mariko Yoshida & Megumi Fujii vs. Ayumi Kurihara & Kyoko Kimura - Ibuki 6/5/2005 Fujii Megumi & Natsuki Head vs Yoshida Mariko & Shibutani Shu - Ibuki 3/19/2006

He for sure has a lot of good matches, and when I said his matches weren't that good, I meant that in the sense that they weren't up to the level of his reputation. I will say that he was great in angles, I just don't think the matches ended up being especially good, in terms of being good matches and not necessary parts of angles, outside of the Dusty/Dustin tag, the Savage MSG match, and maybe some of the Jake stuff.

The thing that hurts Ted, and I think this came up last time, is that his WWF run is so lackluster, and people make excuses for that, but the fact of the matter is his matches mostly just aren't that good, and in big spots, he doesn't shine. Like, the Ultimate Warrior has a far superior top-end output than Ted, and I don't think most sensible people would say Warrior is better, but working the same shows on the same schedule, that crowbar outperformed DiBiase. If your most visible stuff is underwhelming, it takes a lot to overcome that, and I'm not sure Ted has enough great stuff to overcome that, whereas someone like Martel seems to be able to overcome the Model being an underwhelming in-ring run.

Panther in Monterey in 2000 is the one that comes to mind immediately.

One of the wrestlers I'm considering for #1 at the moment. One of the most aesthetically pleasing wrestlers of all time, all of his spots look so good, and in a style where that isn't always the case. He can brawl, he can do high spots, he can go to the mat. Plus he has the Santo aura.

This account on Archive.org has a ton of great stuff PuroArchive

I've been watching some of the matches from when he was the trainer at Santino's school, they're mostly all on youtube, and I'm not going to say they're great matches, but him slapping the shit out of random Canadian trainees is awesome.

better than the MS-1 match