ohtani's jacket

I don't remember a lot of the details either. The nominating/pimping process was a lot shorter. I think most of the arguments centered around workrate vs drawing power, but I might be getting my boards mixed up.

Yeah, everyone should watch the Caribbean Sunshine Boys. It got out of hand and they had to break them up shortly afterwards. Pete Roberts had plenty of great matches in his career. He seem a bit boring at first, but he was incredibly skilled and had a bit of the angry redhead to him. If you've ever doubted that Roberts could be entertaining check out his great TV match with Indio Guajaro. His feud with Wayne Bridges was fantastic too. I was surprised that Steve Wright didn't get more votes. He's a bit lacking in the matches department, though his 1986 bout against Marty Jones (as Bull Blitzer) is a classic WoS bout.

It was a lot of strong personalities arguing about things that mattered to wrestling fans at the time but probably mean nothing to younger voters. I agree that it was a product of its time, much as the first list was. One of the benefits of this year's list is the availability of footage. These days if you hear people talk about a wrestler, you can easily watch a bunch f their matches and form your own opinion. Back then, opinion makers mattered more because the footage wasn't as readily available, and way back in '06, a lot of us weren't sure there were 100 great workers because only the hardcore tape traders had access to a decent amount of footage.

So, yeah, Muhammed Ali... Time has not been kind to Chavo Jr. Poor Kido. WoS guys not doing well, as predicted by many. I think my favorite pick from this batch is Islander Tama. Nice choice.

Yeah, but you're incumbent on individual voters to take the time and effort to nominate candidates that they think are noteworthy (for whatever reason). Since you're relying on people's individual knowledge or preferences, you get oversights where someone like Megumi Fuji gets nominated but Hiromi Yagi doesn't. The nomination threads serve a great purpose in stimulating conversation and introducing voters to new workers, but the pool of participants in the nominating process was much smaller than the voting group. Yes, it was 10 years, but it was a slow 10 years for this message board. In retrospect, this place probably wasn't the best to host the poll, which is no doubt why it spread out to Discord and Twitter, but I get the nod to the past. The people in charge were very inclusive and wanted as many people to participate as possible, which is great and lead to a large turnout, but I don't think you can blame the large pool for voting for candidates that didn't receive a nomination. Personally, I would have given points to every wrestler that was voted for given that it doesn't make a difference to the end results, but the best answer is probably "You had 10 years." I don't wanna make it sound lie a major complaint. I don't think I nominated anyone, and I only participated at the 11th hour because I'm suddenly interested in wrestling again after six months of not watching anything. At least it was better than last time. I don't think the board ever recovered from the last GWE.

WWE Vault footage: Masa Fuchi & Mr. Onita vs Charlie Cook & Killer Karl Kox (12/26/1981) -- Kox tagging with a black guy against two Japanese kids is interesting. Some decent scrapping. Danny Hodge vs Khosrow Vaziri (01/08/1974) -- more Hodge is always appreciated. Young Iron Shiek isn't bad either. This was a bit dry, though. Raul Mata vs Missouri Mauler (08/10/1976) -- gotta love Raul Mata doing his best proto-El Dandy impersonation. Dusty Rhodes & Bill Watts vs Dory Funk Jr. & Terry Funk (09/29/1979) -- we had the first half of this already, but I don't remember seeing the footage that Dusty commented over. File this under "What to wear to a Street Fight." Steve Keirn vs Mr. Saito (04/19/1980) -- Saito was such a beast. I deeply regret not voting for him for the GWE. Hopefully others picked up the slack. The training footage prior to this clip is awesome. Dusty Rhodes & Killer Karl Kox vs Jos LeDuc & Pak Song (01/30/1979) -- worth watching for the heat alone. I liked LeDuc's promo too. IIRC, we have the TV from the week before if you want more of a lead-in. Harley Race vs Jack Brisco (either 05/18/1974 or 05/17/1975) -- I suspect this is from '75 as Harley had peroxide blonde hair in '74. The pick of the new footage. Hard to tell whether this was standard for them, but it was highly entertaining. Some of the positions Harley found himself in were hilarious. I know a lot of people don't like his selling, but I liked his goofy contortions. Jack is Jack. A better fired up babyface than he's given credit for.

Satanico, Pirata Morgan, MS-1 vs. Mascara Ano 2000, Universo 2000, Cien Caras (AAA, 7/23/93) Another short match. The Infernales had fancy duds on, and for the most part this was a classic Infernales beatdown, the same routine they had done to so many other teams over the years. I did enjoy the Dinamatas' comeback in the second fall, however, especially the way they threw Pirata and MS-1 over the barricade and into the crowd. There was an extra emphasis on Cien Caras vs. MS-1 in this bout, starting with the amusing screencap at the beginning of the footage and continuing throughout the bout. MS-1 was past his best at this point, but I loved his exaggerated selling, and Caras has always been one of those guys who seems extremely limited but is actually pretty clever. Next up is the title match.

I love Killer Karl Kox. Was just watching him last night in the WWE vault footage.

Regardless of the pros and cons of the nomination system, I'm surprised by how many Joshi candidates didn't receive a nomination. I thought there was a big push for Josh this time round.

I voted for some of those names. I didn't realize they would be ineligible since Grimmas made a post where he said he wasn't going to be overly strict about it. I guess that was before he received close to 500 ballots. I have mixed feelings about the nominating process. For starters, it requires people to register an account here, which is a pain in the ass, and the list often wasn't updated for months at a time, which is a deterrent similar to how long people have to wait for approval for a match review to be cleared by a moderator. Unless there was some other way to nominate wrestlers on Discord or somewhere else that I don't know about. Anyway, there are a lot of great workers on that list. Some of them I'm not sure how they weren't nominated.

Satanico, Pirata Morgan, MS-1 vs. Mascara Ano 2000, Universo 2000, Cien Caras (AAA, 7/18/93) This was a shorter match that ended in a silly double DQ after both teams accidently hit a referee despite having done far more dastardly acts in the match such as removing a mask and hitting a wrestler with a chair. Interestingly, despite it being ostensibly Satanico's feud, they positioned Satanico and Pirata Morgan as 1A and 1B, and they seemed happy to share the lead with Pirata being the one to blade this time. That said, given how heavily involved Universo was in the angle, I guess this turned into more of a trios feud than what would be the standard build to a Satanico vs. MA2k apuestas match. You can probably skip this unless you want to watch all of the chapters in the feud.

I've gotta say as one of the original voters in '06, I'm impressed that you guys generated ten times the number of voters this time. Kudos to you guys. I kind of wish I'd gone with my nationality over where I live. There are no other hardcore New Zealand wrestling fans on Wrestling Twitter?

Is there a specific reason why young people aren't interested in All Japan or 80s territories?

Satanico, Pirata Morgan, MS-1 vs. Mascara Ano 2000, Universo 2000, Cien Caras (AAA, 7/9/93) Y'know, I didn't realize what a big deal this was until I saw the teams in the ring. This is Los Infernales vs. Los Hermanos Dinamita. If this had happened in a CMLL ring, we probably would have been raving about it. It may have been smokier and slightly more authentic, but this was still a decent scrap with both Satanico and MA2K blading. I imagine that this the complete opposite of what 1990 tape traders were looking for from 1993, but it does show that there was more variety on the cards than assholes like me gave Pena credt for. It's also a chance to see more prime Pirata Morgan, which shouldn't be overlooked. Especially since he didn't return to CMLL for that great '96-97 period.

Tito Santana and Greg Valentine are the ones I am disappointed about. Especially the Hammer. How the f--k did I forget about the Hammer? I even voted for his dad.

Octagon, Perro Aguayo Sr., Rayo de Jalisco Jr. vs. Mascara Ano 2000, Satanico, Universo 2000 (AAA, 7/2/93) I always wonder about the kayfabe reason for luchadores continuing to team with each other after they've had a dispute. Is it a contractual agreement? Like the match was already booked so they had to work it? There's a whole lot of waiting around in matches like these since you know there's going to be a blowup. Sure enough, Universo and MA2K attack Satanico and Pirata Morgan makes the save. Satanico took a fair old whipping in this bout, first from the tecnicos and then from his partners. I'm curious to see how fired up he is in the next match.

I threw something together and already I see a couple of names I left off. Not that it will make a huge difference to the outcome, but I blew it, as eliot would say.

More of the same from Chris Benoit and MVP. It wasn't a bad match, but it also wasn't the classic they were trying to sell it as. MVP worked a bunch of new spots we hadn't seen from him, which was interesting for the viewer but less so for the audience who couldn't recognize any of it as signature stuff. Benoit's stuff that had been conditioned to, and so he got a solid reaction from his adopted hometown. The match was too short and lacked any serious jeopardy. The narrative flipped from MVP is so great to Benoit is a future hall of famer without so much as a two count. I think they had a better match in them than this but they were hindered by time restrictions.

MVP was once again presented as the next big thing in the WWE despite not having the tools to back it up yet. I liked the matwork and the parts where they kept things tight, but once the bout opened up it was fairly generic. JBL was awful on commentary again. I don't remember him being this bad. The finish was odd. I don't know if it was planned or not, but it fell flat.

My second ever Briscoes tag match. More of a workrate match than the first one, partially because it was a PPV bout but also because they ran a big post-match angle with Kevin Steen and El Generico. The Briscoes appeared more than capable of working an extended sprint, and it was a fun match with some cool bombs. Claudio looked like a European style heavyweight brought up on a steady diet of puro tapes. i can see why he has his fans.

I thought this was pretty average. it was really four singles stars meandering about in what might as well have been a fatal four way give how little teamwork there was. There were some decent exchanges between Danielson and McGuinness and Danielson/KENTA, but they felt isolated from any sort of narrative. The most experienced tag worker, KENTA, was under-utilized, and I can't really see what people see in Morishima. He looks like the love child of Riki Choshu and Terry Gordy and was basically a lump of clay for McGuinness to work with. Perhaps some of his singles stuff is better.

This was good when they were stiffing the shit out of each other and cussing at one another, channeling whatever Kingston's favorite puro tapes were at the time. I haven't watched a lot of Kingston, so I don't know if he makes this much noise usually or if he was just trying to sound like one of his Japanese heroes. The match was less convincing when it was time to do some moves and add a little structure to things. I kind of thought they should have continued brawling and made it completely minimalist.

There is a lot of talk about this match being a punishment for this, that, and the other thing. Whatever the case, it certainly didn't hurt either man. I'm not gonna lie. I was feeling the 45 minutes. It was slow going at times. I didn't care for Cena's mind games and shitty acting at the beginning. It builds into a fairly exciting match, however, especially once Michaels hurts his back. What it proved was two-fold -- t showed that Cena could hang in a long, standard wrestling match, and that Michaels, as annoying as he could be at times, was capable of excellence during his comeback. Michaels had worked some good matches since his return, especially some of his TV carry jobs, but this match was on a different level. A level he had probably only reached with Angle, and possibly Benoit. I kind of liked their WrestleMania match more, but this is clearly the one that folks remember.

Octagon, Perro Aguayo Sr., Rayo de Jalisco Jr. vs. Mascara Ano 2000, Satanico, Universo 2000 (AAA, 6/25/93) I either didn't know, couldn't remember, or didn't care, that Rayo Jr wrestled in AAA during 1993. He got a big entrance here so it must have been his TV debut. The match went pretty much to script: the rudos attacked the tecnico they hated most, the tecnicos fought back, MA2k and Satnico got into an argument, and Satanico walked out on his partners. Both Perro and Rayo teased taking Universo's mask, Satanico did some fun stooging for the tecnicos (probably an underrated part of his game), and there was enough backstory between the competitors to keep the audience engaged. Never reached any great heights, but far from dull.

El Hijo Del Santo, Octagon, Perro Aguayo Sr vs. Fuerza Guerrera, Mascara Ano 2000, Satanico (AAA, 6/18/93) Satanico continued to beat on Octagon here. This time with a little help from Octagon's old nemesis Guerrera. It was weird seeing a young(er) Mascara Ano 2000. It may be my imagination but he seemed bigger than the MA2K I'm used to. Perro looked older than dirt even in 1992. Santo didn't do much here, but Octagon finally fought back against Satanico, and I've gotta say, I don't know how good a singles match between them would have been, but I've really enjoyed their interactions. There was a fun sequence between Fuerza and Perro too. That's a matchup I can't remember seeing before, not that I've watched a lot of matches with Perro and Fuerza together. We also got some brief interactions between Santo and Satanico. As far as I know, we have one record of a singles match between them from 1991, and not a ton of interaction between them prior to this match. I'm not sure why they were kept apart aside from the whole CMLL/UWA thing, but a singles match between them done right has to be up there as far as dream matches go. The actual story here, however, was a falling out between MA2K and his partners, which led to a lengthy program between MA2K and Satanico. Of course it will take a couple of matches yet until the feud explodes. Unfortunately, Santo is replaced by Rayo, but we'll see what Satanico cooks up.