Ma Stump Puller

On a serious note I don't think anything on his part in terms of like people realising his stuff was somehow ass, there's just more varied taste with the people voting now as opposed to in prior editions where it was almost unilateral gospel that AJPW was the greatest thing on Earth, Manami Toyota was the biggest female star of the 90's and NJPW had far worse matches than them. Tastes have branched off over the last decade or so and there is no one single line of thought that the majority subscribes to. There's also maybe the possibility that people might have been burned by his post-90's work because Kawada is quite spotty after the early 2000's, idk I don't remember people being crazy for him and Muto in like 2005 botching nearly every big spot they were trying to do.

More based, for one. I thought Tanahashi was a much better heel than face overall, his invader work just hits a lot harder than a lot of his more pure babyface outings and lets him flex his Shawn-influences a lot more overtly than the occasional flashy move. He's an incredible heater and it sucks that aspect of him in NJPW very rarely came up bar the occasional flash where he'd skirt the rules in a big match or tease.

I'd bet on Kong making it actually, she has a lot more exposure with modern voters through her work in the 2020's and her case is more biased towards longevity which typically is something more considered than things like peak or, god willing, how many times they won the WWE championship.

His Naito match was solid and his Kaito series of matches the two had were pretty entertaining. Looking back on it Old Man Muto in NOAH as much as some people memed on it (and it was at some points quite the meme) was quite an endearing long term story all about battling against his limits and needing every little trick to survive against a never-ending torrent of challengers. That's honestly one of the main reasons why I had him so low on my list, his ability to consistently reinvent his offence/presentation to adapt to the zeitgeist is almost unrivalled.

they weren't burned on his dogshit ajpw matches because they only started watching after that stint thankfully ended lol

I had Shinobu Kandori #26 on my ballot and I'm pretty good with that selection. She's a breath of fresh air in a 90's scene that can get overindulgent to a fault by for the most part just focusing on super uncooperative scraps, but not going overboard to the point where the match quality is compromised. Great grappler with a keen sense to give and take when it matters, also has shockingly good longevity past the 90's with her carrying Dump to her best match post-retirement and holding her own against Meiko in 2007. Her ability to make simple moves like a choke or armbar feel like "you're fucked" insta-death moves that everyone fears and no one wants to be stuck in is pretty unmatched. My mind boggles at the idea that she was considered a lump at some point in time, probably the same brain-trust that considered Hotta bad for being "too stiff" lmao

Nominations are there for mainly two reasons; #1 It encourages forum discussion (why did you nominate x, what matches do you recommend etc etc.) #2 It's much more democratic than a free-for-all Like I had a couple of people asking "why nominations?" It's because it allows people who want to make their unique or interesting takes to make them properly and get more coverage as opposed to just turning up with a list that says Toru Yano at like #8 and not elaborating. The way we have allows people to get interested in wrestlers or styles they would otherwise not even sneeze at normally which is always a cool thing, I know from experience that my nominations led people to watching and eventually becoming fans of said nominates which wouldn't be possible otherwise. There's also the matter of logistics, we have over 700 people nominated (!!!) all with individual pages, if there was no requirement how would we handle making new pages? It would still involve people having to say "hey does x have a discussion page yet?" and having to manually add them to the pile. It's not like the process is extremely tedious as it is when all you need is a name and 3 matches to recommend. You don't even need to be on the forum to do it, in fact a good couple were added via other outlets like Discord.

Yeah he's decent enough as a contrast foil to the actual great workers (Maeda/Funaki/Fujiwara etc etc) but when UWFI kicks off and he's giving himself like giga-pushes and never losing to anyone ever that era can certainly fuck off

It's a combination of her not being as widely venerated as Hokuto/Toyota by a lot of Western sources and her post-prime career being pretty forgettable as a whole and difficult to document. Toyota had a plentiful veteran career by comparison and part of Hokuto's myth is her relatively short but near-insurmountable 90's peak that burns out as the decade ticks to an end.

Very happy that Keita Yano finished #252. Going from a guy that 99% of people would've went "who?" in 2016 to having over 30 ballots cast and in the top 200 a decade later is quite something.

I had Yoshinari Ogawa #24 on my ballot and was the high vote. My thoughts on Rat Boy are I'd say at this point well documented, I've spent more time than anyone else reasonably should have watching everything related to him from the 2000/2010's, mostly because I think his floor is still indisputably the widest out of anyone else I've really seen. He was fantastic for almost 3 decades-worth of material, even his momentous 2020's work with Kaito made him seem someone perfectly capable of working far greater than his ambition at the time allowed and he kept being sporadically amazing up until his final great performance with the Ridgeway singles in 2023. Before then you have, I believe, one of the finest career spreads you could possibly dream up; someone who was wrestling pretty well in the 1980's, was apart of the legendary AJPW six-man tags in the early 1990's, benefited immensely from the wider Jr heavyweight coverage of the mid 90's, then Misawa picks him up and we get his beginnings as a fantastic scrappy babyface that fills in the emotive/bumping hole that late-Misawa was leaving behind. He carries that into NOAH where he gets his career peak as champion in the early 2000's before spending the rest of the decade as an incredible multi-role talent who was either having these out-there British Catch matches with Doug Williams or getting over new fresh talent like KENTA and co. He exceled in tags, being the more watchable out of Misawa and co during their very long stint as champions with his stellar attention to detail and capacity to make other people seem like complete killers even if they were uber down the card (see Inoue/Saito etc etc). The neck injury changes a lot about his style. He has to do less stooge-bumping where he bounces all over the place and far more focus on crafty technical attacks, no longer being able to wrestle heavyweights but instead the Jr division exclusively. Could you imagine if, say, your favourite wrestler had to spontaneously wrestle in a whole different division? Most I feel like would struggle with the transition (especially in NOAH, where their Jr division was significantly more high-spotty) but Ogawa nails it from his first match and then the subsequent decade afterwards by knowing how to get these guys just enough room to do their thing without either slowing them down completely or compromising his own style to suit their own. His tag stint with Zack Sabre Jr I'd say from viewing made Sabre a significantly more refined act, letting him focus on creative limb-work and how to carry that momentum throughout a longer match without slowing down too much or giving up on the effort, and he gives him one of his greatest singles matches as well for his farewell match to boot. He becomes a lot more of a role-player as the decade continues, but you still have him giving people like Minoru Suzuki or Marufuji their best work or showcasing solid acts like Yuya Susumu to a wider audience. It cannot be understated how many times where, despite the match not being great, Ogawa is ALWAYS in a position where his work makes sense or is attempting to make it seem greater than it is. His only real weakness being that he had a tendency to drag out matches a bit longer than expected, a real Brian Wilson-ism where he tries fitting in too much all at once where the work can feel like it's making other elements inessential or compromising the quality as a whole but this is extremely rare and only truly comes up when his opponent is not capable of making the structure of the match (limb-work selling, comebacks etc) feel easier to watch than it should. So yeah, 3 decades of great matches, for me the undisputed best at going for limbs (even stuff like the eyes or head aren't safe!) one of the finest technical workers of his time etc etc. He should have been lower and it's a shame that despite heavily adding to his case since 2016 he finishes far above that rating. I suspect that his tendency towards subtle, smart wrestling and lack of GIF-able moments like certain other wrestlers was probably the main contributing factor but ig that's how it goes

I had Yoshihiro Takayama at #31 on my ballot. Takayama is one of my most personal projects as I covered basically every single AJPW and UWFI/Kingdom match he was involved in (as documented elsewhere!) all because I wanted to prove that the man had classics well before he started having them by the dozens during his peak. I believe in the process of doing so that this was conclusively shown as such. Takayama as a worker has clear weaknesses; he was a man who, in his first couple of years in the UWFI, was conclusively not a great wrestler. He struggled to stretch his matches out to a reasonable extent and keep interest, struggled to reliably utilise his lumbering size, and struggled to match the more refined technique of his contemporaries. What does he do? He hones in on what he can do well; strike exchanges, intensity, and a great German suplex. And he does this over and over and over until those things are so refined that you stop caring about said weaknesses because he's just so good at throwing a knee to the head or slamming some pour soul on his head that you forget about the rest. He's a man who through sheer fucking effort became inevitable through drilling a couple of good qualities to the ground until they became more or less perfect. Same with his AJPW stuff, he comes in as a breath of fresh air as this short-match shooter and over time starts to get better and better at the house-style. He never becomes capable of doing super long affairs, but his understanding of pacing and how to escalate get much better to the point where he's outright dictating the tempo of a match completely off his presence alone. It's important to know all of this in context of his early 2000's peak because it's all learning curves that he has at that point completely overcome to become the finished main event product he was during those years. He very clearly had limitations but surpassed them completely and in doing so became one of the greats. After the peak is where I think my appreciation for the man grows more though as his stroke takes him out for two whole years and in doing so changes how he works. He's no longer quite as athletic as he was nor as fast but learns how to instead rely on his physicality. He becomes more of a old-school giant, he looms over people, works slow to accentuate their speed, focuses more on beating the piss out of people in control sequences as opposed to more back and forth stuff. It's a conscious choice on his part (I've seen house show matches where he almost flies around hitting people with dropkicks, for instance) and it clearly showcases at this point his capacity to find a role and act as it as well as possible. I'd describe his career at this point as a character actor actually. He's someone who is never the top dog but is instead always making the other person (s) involved look like either world-beaters or downtrodden victims waiting for their big comeback, in tags this goes further as he becomes the enforcer to guys like KENTA or Suzuki to back up their smarmy personas when they're getting componence. There's a loss of some raw capacity (speed, later on mobility) but the trade is even more versatility and as such his case is not only having a insanely top ceiling but also having a surprisingly wide floor where he can go in with anyone in any promotion and get reactions and solid work out of it. For me going back to his stuff meant I basically realised he had to be just at the edge of top 30 if only because of his shaky years both at the beginning and end (last year or so of his career he really can't do much of anything, unfortunately) but you've got so many positives that they outweigh those by a mile and a half.

I had Kaori Yoneyama at #39. I think what I said above suffices for my voting justification enough, she's supremely consistent with a near unsurpassed floor with lots of peaks thrown here and there when she actually wanted to stretch her wrestling muscles more than standard. Even if we erased her entire multi-year long stints doing i'd say good comedy matches she still has miles of matches to not only work with but fully endorse. Was a no-brainer for me.

Carlos Amano being #360 is great, big thanks to all 21 other people who found her as awesome as I did

Their trio of matches is interesting I think, they get progressively worse with each one because of their innate need to increase the amount of time with every match to the point where their last 40 minute affair is better in terms of the grappling but goes so long (40 minutes!) that you lose the will to live well before then

I had her low so I'm the opposite, pretty sick that so many were inclined to throw her on based on such a small sample size.

Oh no she does show up quite a bit during the early 2000's for JWP, this was just when they didn't have television slots so everything we have of that era is fancam, including a 30+ minute two out of three falls tag that reputation has it as a near-classic if memory serves.

I considered her for a bit but I hadn't watched her early JWP work (including matches that are only available on fancams). Maybe her weird 2020's comeback where she shows back up for one good match a year might swing her forward in 2036?

It doesn't take that much for nominations as well! You can just join the discord, ask someone to nominate with a mere 3 recommendations or post them yourself and that's it. You don't even need a account

I had GENTARO at #38 and I am at present contented with that choice. GENTARO is a marvelous talent that has I think two separate but interconnected sides to his career; you have his early to mid-stage career where he was a Bret/Shawn generation guy to an almost obnoxious degree (even down to doing the Michaels pose for his entrance and his old finisher LITERALLY being the Sweet Chin Music) but was nevertheless a very capable jr heavyweight who could pull off some really fun shindie matches with a whole host of different characters and had some really wacky spots in his pocket. The second half is him working a far more grounded technical wrestler who was more comfortable building to moments on the mat as opposed to high spots; this version picking more from NWA-style grindy matwork, more honed in around momentum changes and attacking limbs. In terms of style on the surface there's a big change for sure, but I think for the most part GENTARO retains in both a great sense of psychology. He really gets how to build to something, make the slower elements of the match feel more worthwhile by always adding in little counters or attempts at them, or by just selling the danger of any hold he himself ends up in. There's something to be said about the fact that he's happily having solid TV-length matches in the undercard for the last couple of years with the occasional technical epic when he probably could have been content doing a whole lot less at his age.

I had Tomohiro Ishii at #42 and I feel like that's about right. He's someone who I dug more of his early work as a upstart Choshu disciple in seedy indie promotions than later on when his style became extremely oversaturated, but if anything for me that's just more evidence of his greatness as a worker, he was not only able to popularise a specific philosophy to wrestling but he was arguably one of the best to do it, applying the same pacing to a variety of different situations without it ever feeling tired or overdone. I will grant that criticism that sometimes he's far too indulgent to people trying to do the Shibata match with him without then following the context or even any of the actual structure of said matches, but otherwise I think his immense longevity speaks for itself; to this very day he's still capable of the same quality albeit shorter and is a standout on AEW for his TV-length matches after nearly 30 straight years of wrestling.

He is truly the thinking man's wrestler

I had Kazunari Murakami at #45 and from the ballots I've seen I might even be underselling him a little bit with that ranking. Murakami stands out primarily for me as someone who had his "character" figured out from a very early stage. He starts off as a competent but green MMA guy but after 6 months he's already very good at the things he would become great at (brawling, offence, bursts of intensity etc) and that never really leaves him for the rest of his career even when age and injuries creep up on him. His work is chaotic in every sense of the word; some of his matches are incredible violent sprints that feel more akin to a deranged B-movie slasher than a wrestling match, and some of them are just flat out sloppy affairs that don't really get going any. He is for sure a crowbar in the sense that the man is not capable of having good matches with everyone. But the people he can have good matches with? He has INCREDIBLE work with them. People like Ishikawa Otani or Nagata come to mind as some of the greatest Puro brawls of the 21st century. People who can handle his kind of chaos are almost always having this epics that go maybe 8-minutes tops but are also somehow just long enough to not be overwhelming to the senses or boring. He's very good at managing to always top just at the peak of the heat rather than letting the match go on further than necessary, a skill that, needless to say, is almost a lost art these days. Not to also mention that while it's not a thing he does often his actual grappling is more than solid and he's able to keep up with the likes of Nakamura and the Battlarts crew when he's not working the gimmick of him being supremely weak to submissions. I think ultimately what appeals to people is his ability to commit to his character irregardless of the people or settings, he's always contributing something even if it doesn't always work out as well as you'd expect. There's something admirable about that that resonates with voters.

I had Kazuyuki Fujita at #47 and I suspect will be one of the few brave souls who will have him on their top 100. Fujita as I've described in greater detail earlier in this thread is very much a caveman who feels out of time after the peak of Inoki-Ism passes yet nevertheless still endures within the wrestling scene as this weird anomaly. He still can't take a backdrop or suplex bump properly but he has had some of the most fascinating matches of the last decade or so purely because his presence forces his opponent to tackle him in unique ways. You got a 20 minute Hideki Suzuki grappling epic in 2022 or him squashing aces like they're nothing in main event affairs. What was fascinating watching him was that Fujita always GAVE the impression that he was this stubborn worker but in actuality on recollection I noticed he was a lot more versatile than I gave him credit for, especially in recent years. His ability to fill roles in and get people over is very underestimated, especially when he's with someone who he actually wants to bump around for. His earlier stuff is also I think at times unfairly maligned as well, he is a solid sprint worker and carries a unique danger-factor about him where every move feels like a legit worldending disaster. For what he's good at he's very good at, and his negatives aren't nearly bad enough to be a detriment to his enjoyability.

The Pancrase work/shoot stuff (we know there was AT LEAST a couple of matches that were worked to a point or were legit shoots with a determined winner) is certainly interesting to investigate, I just figured it was too all over the place for now for anyone to really reliably use it to judge the rest of his career.