tim

loses feud, cuts hair. trips is really dedicated to that sort of medieval warrior king motif he had going on.

this dude has 2 extended clips http://www.dailymotion.com/jlguyonvarch#video=xr156i

i've been teaching myself french over the summer and spent a couple of days mucking through the french internet to try to find some good video, but nothing much came up. we need an eccentric millionaire wrestling fan willing to drop unrefusable money on these ventures.

didn't it look really good when he started doing it, with him basically wrapping his giant arm around his opponents neck like a stf-choke sort of thing? or am i imagining things? i always thought maybe as WWE really geared up into its PG, kid-friendly marketing they wanted him to do it in a way that is "safer" as kids would inevitably try to imitate it.

cena's execution is actually outstanding; the weird stf is very much an exception. i think in 09 he had a match against miz where in the opening they did the "young punk gets out wrestled by veteran" schtick and cena's execution on basic 'technical' wrestling stuff was shockingly good. he did some pretty cool good looking mat stuff in the 2011 summerslam match. his power moves generally look very good. "bad execution" seems like a common criticism but it really seems to be 100% linked to his weird stf, cena is not a sloppy guy. i'd rate him above austin and bret.

certain americans got bent out of shape that barack obama wasn't wearing an american flag pin on his suit. flag stuff is definitely going to be much more inciting in the US.

a bit off topic but i've always liked the idea of a somewhat 'lesser' guy winning a world belt now and again. not something that should happen often(as it does with the constant mitb stuff) but i like the idea of, once in a blue moon, an over mid-card guy who has no business in the main event mix pulling off a huge upset, maybe making 1 or 2 successful defenses based on momentum and a huge boost of confidence, and then inevitably losing and not being able to keep up in the main event mix long term. makes for a memorable moment, makes the title hunt feel more organic, and i think might actually better establish a hierarchy based on ability rather than having an arbitrary 'its booking' feel.

i bought a ton of comps and tapes when i was in high school(probably not a ton compared to most of YOU guys, but compared to most sane people, it was a lot of disks and vhs'), and probably a bit my first year out of hs. haven't bought much in the past couple years; had all my dvds and tapes stored in my mom's basement, she moved and i guess assumed i didn't want them anymore and threw them out the only thing i have left is a schneider comp 25 dvd which happened to be in the box of my cd's that i've been carrying around with me between college apartments. so im traveling light again as far as wrestling footage goes. then again its been a couple years since i've been an insane mega fan watching tons of footage on a regular basis.

i get the sense that linda is just a busybody rich person who feels she is entitled to do something that makes her feel important. why not be a senator! same reason romney wants to be president basically.

at least successful fall back careers in writing doubtlessly await them

This is seriously a great match, and a SPECTACULAR performance from Regal. This is THE kind of match to put in the corder of Regal as an all time top tier great argument. His offense and selling were both out of control good in this match. How he sold the neck off the top rope hurricanrana, how he generally sold being drained and out of it after Psicosis' pretty long run of big offense, it was great. At one point he has Psi on the mat and is hitting him with palm strikes to the head and he starts selling the palm. There's another point, shortly after that I believe, where he's sitting exhausted on the mat after having Psicosis in something and just starts kicking him in the head. Not to take anything away from Psi who was pretty good here himself, but Regal was as good as he's ever been.

well, if you're trying to put together stats about who is the "best performing" wrestler on a program in the kayfabe sense, horowitz should actually be penalized for all his matches with such a small win ratio. he had more chances to win matches, but kept losing -- he clearly 'performed' poorly on the show. just like how someone with a 100% win ratio, but, say, 20 matches, should be put over youngblood because that guy also had more chances to lose, but kept winning. i guess it depends on exactly what you want your list to represent. if you're going for "best performer in kayfabe sense," which was the gist i got, horowitz should actually be especially penalized for how many matches he had, since he kept losing them. you could of course also just make a separate list for who had the most matches.

im not a statistics guy but i'll think outloud for a minute. it seems there can't be any 'perfect' formula to do this because the goal of finding out the "best performing" wrestlers is something relying on subjective criteria. so there may be a couple things you could try and do, look at the results of each, and see which best suites what you're getting at. you could maybe calculate the statistics of win/match-wrestled ratio and find each wrestler's standard deviation from the mean. scale it by some way related to number of matches wrestled. maybe by raw number of matches wrestled. that way a guy like horowitz is going to have a negative deviation multiplied by a relatively large positive number, which is fitting because he had a lot of chances to up his win % but didn't. youngblood will have a high positive standard deviation but scaled by a relatively small number. take the resulting numbers and rank based on that. or maybe there is a great formula to use and this isnt a good idea, but if you want try it and see if it makes your results look more sensible.

The Smackdown match with Albert Victator mentioned is also a lot of fun, and in particular Kane does a really cool counter to the Baldo Bomb. Two matches aren't really gonna change my opinion of him, at least yet, but if the question is "Are there good Kane matches" then the answer is yes. Granted I think he was the lesser worker both vs. Vader and vs. Albert but he didn't drag the match down and was not without his merits. EDIT: Watched this half way reasonable match from 2004 vs. Edge. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEBkbLNwAmA I don't think it's much to write home about but worth considering the differences in his selling mask vs. no-mask. With a mask he's selling effectively as a sort of otherworldly monster, who may be affected by offense but never really seems "hurt" or at too much of a disadvantage. Without the mask he's selling just like a regular really weird really strong big guy bumping reasonably. Also it's worth noting that for a guy who spent a good chunk of his most well known work under a mask he can be pretty emotive. Granted this is a small sample of a big career so I don't know if his mask/no-mask performances are really as different as they seem consistently and I'm probably not gonna keep watching a bunch of Kane matches to find out, but for me it's enough to think twice about accepting Kane being worthless or even below average.

Kane's always been one of my least favorite wrestlers, but I just watched Kane/Vader and enjoyed it a lot. Vader is definitely the star of the match but Kane really is pretty good. I dug his selling: he was noticeably affected by Vader's offense, but never came across as being in any real danger, just as a temporarily dazed monster who would keep steadily coming at Vader. Vader's strikes were obviously the stars of the match and were seriously awesome, and there's this GREAT moment where Vader catches a go-behind on Kane and just starts pummeling him from behind. I'd say it's worth everyone watching just for that spot but the whole thing was fun.

This is tangential but I don't know if I'd sign off on "best way to rank wrestlers is by the quality of their matches." I think it's perfectly possible for 2 average wrestler to have a really good to great match if it's laid out well for them, they have some interesting spots worked out, a good story and a hot crowd. Neither would have to do anything particularly impressive -- just follow the 'recipe' more or less, hit the stuff they're supposed to hit well enough, etc. If I'm trying to think about who's the "better" wrestler I won't be thinking who had the best match, who had more good matches, etc etc. I'd be more concerned about how they perform -- if applicable -- in less "structured" matches where it's highly unlikely most things were planned out in advance: brawls, mat wrestling segments, etc. I'd look at things like how they sell: is the performance believable, do they incorporate the injury/selling in a novel and interesting way somehow, etc. I'd look at how often they add interesting, creative touches of whatever in their matches as guys like Finlay or Regal or Henry often do. At this point when thinking about how good a worker is I'm much less interested in how good their matches were; I've seen plenty of well constructed matches wherein two guys are giving more or less standard performances. Match quality and performance quality need to be divorced.

I took the early bus today that went by the Prison around 6:30am and a group of guys who looked like they had just posted bail got on, towards the end of the ride they started talking about UFC and wrestling, including just randomly saying the names of 80s managers(Mr. Fuji, Bobby Hennan!) and one inexplicably said "What UFC needs is someone like Ms. Elizabeth."

This pretty much describes it for me. First of all it's my favorite match from a personal standpoint. It's the first tape I ever bought -- I guess it was late 2004 when I was 15, I found goldenboytapes.com and ordered a one-match VHS because the tag line "Greatest Tag Team Match Ever" hooked me. Had only a vague knowledge of AJPW at the time and didn't yet recognized the names Misawa, Taue, Kobashi or Kawada. Right away I loved it. Obviously it was like nothing I had ever seen. I didn't know all the intricate back stories etc, but the drama and emotion was plainly evident and the action was amazing on its own besides. This part will sound like a cheesy line people just make up to over-play how good something is, but I remember at the end of the match thinking "Wow, shorter than I expected", then the 40 minute time mark came up on the screen and I was like shit. I was just that completely entertained by the match. So with all that in mind even trying to looking at it objectively, I'd still have no problem saying and arguing that it's the GREATEST match of all time. Aside from the sum of all its parts coming together as being amazing, as Childs said, there are so many constituent moments that stand alone as being amazing themselves, and really there's just SO many of them. My favorite spot is this moment where Kobashi is down by the corner, Kawada is on the ropes about to come down on his knee, Misawa tries to interfere, Taue catches him, PUSHES him down on Kobashi's knee, Kobashi sells it like death, the announcer is CRAZY, the crowd is just INSANE, and and then Kawada comes down with a knee to the leg. It's almost a sublime moment in wrestling, it's the cap of a cool, energetic exchange, it's important in the story of the match, it feels like Kobashi has just been completely destroyed, and the crowd hit a crazy fevered pitch. And really there's a couple moments like that. When I was really getting into watching a bunch of new wrestling and was seeing the Sacred Cow matches for the first time there were a couple times I saw a new match where I initially said "Okay, now THIS is the best match of all time." -- 12/96, some classic lucha, 6/94, etc. But then when I watched this match again I always came to the conclusion this was definitely better. There's a lot of great matches out there and I can surely appreciate people liking other matches more. But even when I try to divorce my personal attachment to the match, for me this comes out heads and shoulders above everything else, and the gap even between it and the group of matches I'd consider "2nd best match ever candidates" is appreciable.

Post your favorite bits of wrestling TV. By which I mean, not necessarily particular promos, or great tv matches(though both can be a part of it) but moreso well-executed/memorably story arcs, angles, segments, fun over booked matches, etc etc. You know what I mean(I hope!). Triple H vs. Ric Flair RAW stuff. Awesome story, great Flair promo, actually got me pumped up and excited to see the match whose outcome I know that happened like 9 years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWq7bkkq4zo (does this forum have youtube embedding?)

I just watched the Summer Slam ladder match for the first time in quite a while and really didn't think much of it. I mean I hate to be the guy to really harp on someone not telling a body part throughout a whole match but it just felt egregious in this case. I mean, Razor THOROUGHLY destroyed Shawn's leg and they devoted a not insignificant chunk of the match to him doing so. It felt to me like after that the leg injury and the dynamic around it hindering Shawn's climbing needed to be THE source of the drama in the match, basically its defining characteristic, but it just felt sort of absurd how quickly it became a non factor. Now I don't mean to take this in the "Shawn can't sell" direction but moreso point out that Shawn is, I guess I'd say, conceptually lazy. Shawn CAN sell an injury to a crowd, and he can emote like hell in the ring. He could have sold that leg for the duration and had a very dramatic match built around it, still being able to work in big spots but actually centering it around the drama of his injury and in the process have a really unique ladder match. But he didn't, and that 'conceptual' laziness has always been my problem with Shawn -- and a lot of darlings of certain corners of net fandom. The long RAW match vs. Cena is something I should watch because I remember in 07 being specifically impressed with Shawn's performance.

Don't know why but I was thinking about this today. Is anyone aware of substantial online communities of 'smart wrestling fans' somewhat akin to the greater DVDVR region we're in? Are there similar groups of Japanese fans who traded lots of tapes back in the day and talk about finding cool new matches from the US or Mexico? Is there a sizable German message board where people are putting together comps with the aim of critically viewing a bunch of obscure wrestling from Japan, Mexico, etc etc? Is the english-speaking online community unique in the scope of our deepest level of wrestling fandom?

Good match. Like how Adonis and Murdoch immediately took control by taking things to the outside, right away setting up the dynamic between the big dumb american wrestlers and the real Japanese athletes. Murdoch and Adonis were great isolating one guy and cutting him off at every turn, really just felt suffocating, and the crowd was really responsive to Funjinami's and Kamura's comeback teases. Really love Adonis's theatrical, over the top bumping. I guess you could say it was TOO cutesy, but I thought it worked really well to highlight that FUjinami and Kamura were the skilled natives who had it over Murdoch and Funjinami with wrestling, but were being dominated mainly by size, brawling and cutting corners.

Probably liked this more than most or all of the Dynamite Kid matches, but still wasn't in love with it. One great thing was Gilbert's facials and general body language putting over Sayama, and showing him really over his head against this guy who was running around throwing out stuff never really seen before. Neat ending too.

Seriously internet wrestling fans still continue to baffle me. Acting indignant at the idea of ZZ Top hosting, and holding Seth Green of all people as the lofty standard that all future WWE guests should be measured against.

Has to be one of my top 10 matches ever. Love what the lighting does to the atmosphere, just makes it seem so much more gritty and desperate. Chicana ducking the punch and unloading on MS1 while the crowd EXPLODES is one of my favorite moments in wrestling ever. Towards the end the they just seem so drained and sell the fatigue amazingly well(MS1 tripping over himself trying to the get the turnbuckle for the splash is one of the little things that sucks you in and makes you believe how grueling the match is), with the slow, deliberate counts adding a lot to it. Of course the post-match is also on par with the match itself. Love it.