Reel

At the end of the day, it's an art, not a science, right? Everybody's calculus is going to be different, and that's sort of the point of producing an aggregate list. I think the point to saying the list should be based on footage is not to emphasize technique or "workrate" as the only or main criteria, but to dissuade people from voting for the El Santos and Gorgeous Geroges of the world.

I really like this idea. I don't know how feasible this would be, but I love the idea of getting all 538 and having crosstabs where you can filter out for certain things like if you hand-waved Lucha, you mark that when you submit your ballot, and then you could filter out non-Lucha ballots. The beauty of the GWE, to me anyway, is that it's a list for guys like Virus, who is generally inconsequential to the history of wrestling but has a litany of great matches on tape, and not for a guy like Frank Gotch, who no one alive has ever seen.

These guys have at least 3 matches that made tape from Universal in 1990 and they're all good to great. The one on 3/5 is my favorite and this might be my least favorite of the bunch, but these guys have great chemistry.

This is a fun, and it never lulls or over stays it's welcome, but I wouldn't call it anything more than a good match. Dutch Mantel on commentary sets this up as a match that strongly favors Ricky Banderas, so we'll see how that figures in. Things start hot, with Gonzalez coming out firing. He hits a nice powerslam and heads out for to get the ladder. He goes to slide the folded ladder into the ring and eats the standard sliding kick into the ladder from Banderas. Ricky grabs the ladder and just chucks at Gonzalez's head. They brawl on the outside, Banderas takes an irish whip into a ladder, and takes a great bump that almost seems impossible on such a flimsy ladder out in open space. Some more brawling and ladder shots, and we end up back in the ring. Some more standard ladder match fare, bumps onto the ladder in the corner, some attempts to climb the ladder that are thwarted. Banderas chucks the ladder at a grounded Ray at one point. The absolute disrespect he throws the ladder at Mr. Ray-Tings with is awesome. As for Dutch's earlier point, Banderas seems to doing most of the ladder-based offense, but it doesn't seem as in Ray is totally out of sorts in this sort of match. Gonzalez has good territory babyface punches, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that this wasn't more of a brawl. These seem like two guys who should be bleeding all over this arena, and it just isn't happening here. There's a lot of action here with each guy is on a separate ladder, its convoluted, but it never seems like either guy isn't trying to win, unlike a good chunk of modern ladder matches. Gonzalez hits what I think is supposed to be a pretty standard vertical suplex off the two ladders, but in execution looks more like a shoot brainbuster, which sounds cooler than it looks. Things start to get overbooked as Savio Vega and Gonzalez's manager both try to grab the title, Ray eventually chases off Savio, but while that happens, Banderas starts to climb the ladder. Gonzalez sees this, quits chasing Savio, and runs back in and pushes the ladder out from under Ricky, but the ladder falls under Banderas, and he takes a nasty bump on the ladder. Gonzalez grabs the other ladder, climbs, and grabs the belt. Then roughly 79 people hit the ring and we're out of time.

I want to watch a bunch of Gonzalez, mostly because he seems like a guy who has gone almost entirely unremarked upon. He comes around during the doldrums of wrestling in Puerto Rico so he doesn't really have the sort of reputation that TNT or Carlos Colon have, but in a lot of ways he seems to be in the same mold as both, a top guy with a long run of prominent matches in major promotions in PR, just without the international notoriety of Vega or Colon. All that being said, there's not a ton here, Curt Hennig is just not very good, he's not in the bad way he was in early TNA, but he's wearing a shirt under his singlet, so this isn't the precursor to his fleeting Royal Rumble resurgence either. The vast majority of it is Gonzalez in two different periods of a very prosaic leg submission on Hennig, and its horribly uncompelling. There's a brief glimmer of an old Mr. Perfect spot where Gonzalez kicks Curt's legs out from under him, and that plays into the leg submission, which is fine I suppose, but its not anything I'm going to get all that excited about. Thankfully, outside interference brings this to a conclusion rather quickly, or I fear even more of Perfect lackadaisically slapping the mat while Gonzalez grapevines his leg would have ensued.

Decided to quit lurking here because it seems like Alan4L's mid-point GWE and the 5 year anniversary of the 2016 lists have jump started the 2026 project. I have such a fondness for the 2016 project and have been looking forward to turning in a ballot since I missed out on the process last time. I do think that something has been missing from the discussion though, at least in the way I view a project like this. For the individual, it is an opportunity to find new wrestlers, re-evaluate old wrestlers, and a way to foster discussion. But, I think the real important thing that comes out of a poll like this is 1) the list itself, which at the very least serves as a marker as what wrestlers the people who watch the most wrestling think are the best and 2) the podcasts, threads, and posts that are a product of the process. When BFI does their top 250, I'm sure the critics do it for themselves, but the most important thing that comes out of that is that it creates a sort of definitive guide to film. I think the most effective version of something like this generates a series of reference materials for people to look back on. Currently, and I don't see this becoming any easier, there is just so much wrestling available, and for a lot of people, I'm sure it's a struggle to know where to begin. But, if there were 100+ threads that contained a brief reason why someone thinks they're potentially one of the 100 best wrestlers ever and a few examples as to why, you would get close to the sort of thing I'm talking about. That's why i'm hesitant to advocate for a discord or slack, they just seem a bit more ephemeral, a bit more harder to access, whereas a message board thread, as outmoded as it may seem, is going to show up in a google search and seems like something that has more staying power, even if turns into some sort of archived stasis like the old smarks choice board. I don't know Grimmas, so I can't bully him into doing a zine like others in the thread, but I do think the ultimate success of something like this, aside from the personal enjoyment of discussing and contextualizing wrestling, is that something comes out of it that stands as a marker, I think the 2016 project started getting there, but I think that a lot of the best discussion and defenses are either mired in threads about BIGLAV, Great Match Theory, etc. or on podcasts that exists almost entirely on soundcloud at this point.