ohtani's jacket

Watched an Azumi Hyuga match from 1999 that was better than I thought it would be but fairly uninspiring. Kansai was heavier and slower than in her prime but did a pretty good job working a knee injury. Then, for some reason, she dropped the injury storyline and resumed being heavy and slow and unable to bump for an all-action, go-go type in Hyuga. After that I watched a '91 tag between Kansai & Medusa vs. Rumi Kazama and Harley Saito which was pretty bad. Medusa and Kazama were fairly awful, but Kansai didn't bring much to the table and Saito did the most unnecessary bladejob I've seen in a long time. Just a pointless crimson mask. Just to make it a trifecta of bleh, I watched the Toyota title change again. I was really harsh on it in the Yearbook thread but it's a match that just doesn't work. It's one of those matches where they do a bunch of stuff then take it to the bridge, and you're suppose to miraculously care about the finishing stretch even though you haven't been entertained by a single thing so far. I prefer matches that suck you in and keep getting better and better. I honestly liked the Takako title defence more.

But there are countless more styles in music than there are wrestling. What is the wrestling equivalent of dubstep? It's hard to draw a parallel.

That's because she has a pulse. Yiou sure stopped defending the voting base in a hurry.

That's a real list, Jimmy. None of this bloody pandering from BIGBORE.

The rape porn thing seemed completely misguided to me since the direct audience were young girls, but it's worth nothing that the first hair match was considered excessively violent/extreme In Kansai and probably other regions too.

One of the greatest wrestlers to ever live. I would have had him higher but I'm glad he finished at a robust 50 instead of something forgettable like 47. What I'd give for some of his 60s British footage. It's a shame the only World of Sport stuff we have of him is a fairly lacklustre match from one of his return trips to England in the late 70s. I'm not convinced his British stuff would be better than his 70s work in Japan, but it would be fascinating to see him in his prime and working the British & European heavyweight style. One of those overrated greats. She could be brilliant at times with her selling and match layouts, but she could also be as flawed as any other girl you care to name. She wasn't a natural at all and it took her a long time to build up her aura as a dominant female worker. She's actually not that tall so it's to her credit that she was able to come across as menacing, but I always felt she got too much credit for her work on top when it was her opponent who had her nose to the grind selling it all. Too much credit in this case means Kong being treated as the one Joshi worker it"s okay to like. The token Joshi worker for people who don't like Joshi. That always irked me because Joshi is nothing if not a collaborative genre. You could say the same about any style I guess, but I always got the feeling that Joshi wore it's camaraderie on it's sleeve. She could be great, though, and indeed had many moments of greatness not the least of which was the Satomura feud in '99, which to me was her finest hour. Did somebody mention overrated great workers? By now everybody's read my thoughts on the transformation from early Finlay to Princess Paula era Finlay and the ten year wasteland up until his debut in WCW. Some people agree with me and some people like the mighty Jetlag do not, but from my very selfish point of view Finlay could have been the greatest but he chased the green. That's his prerogative and I'm reminded of Billy from Purple Rain ("This is a business, and you too far gone to see that yet!"), but it still sucks the route Finlay went down. Some good old man stuff that we were blessed to receive given the extent of his leg injuries in WCW, but a guy I have different expectations for than his typical fan.

Parv, isn't that King Crimson example exactly the same thing you did with BIGLAV where you voted for wrestlers whose work you don't enjoy because you couldn't ignore their case? Didn't you claim over and over again that doing so was the only fair way to construct a list? Are you now playing Devil's Advocate or is this an about face? To answer your question, if you were engaging in a music poll and plenty of folks were discussing prog-rock then yeah, you should probably listen to it to see where you stand on it. I don't think you have to vote for it if you don't like it, and I might not even bother sampling it because I'm pigheaded or whatever, but it makes sense to try new things instead of talking about your favourite records endlessly. One of the best things about projects like these is that it focuses your viewing/watching and gives you a reason to dive into stuff you may have always wanted to see or listen to but had put off or never gotten around to. I also see it as ongoing. One of my favourite things to do after any poll is to seek out the highest ranking things I've never seen or heard of before. To me the entire process should be about building knowledge and not reconfirming the status quo.

Perhaps I'm being willfully obtuse, but I'm really struggling with this. What is so overtly political about these influences, origins and development? Do people think professional wrestling in Japan would have developed differently in Japan if not for this Western influence, or not at all as more likely the case? Dylan was specifically referring to American cultural imperialism. From all accounts, MacArthur was a law until himself in Japan and often butted heads with the state to department. He was nicknamed the "Emperor of Japan" for good reason as he had full control over the country during the immediate post war years. So perhaps this imperialism is more accurately a type of MacArthurism. Since MacArthur didn't directly impose professional wrestling upon the people of Japan, you can perhaps argue that his reforms led to its development. One of MacArthur's reforms was to remove martial arts from Japan's physical education curriculum and dissolve the central regulatory authority for martial arts, which led to years of confusion over what was legal and what wasn't. Now I don't think MacArthur intended to eradicate traditional Japanese martial arts and replace them with good old American pro-wrestling, but you can certainly argue that the years judo spent trying to cleanse itself of its militaristic colour and the failure of professional judo to establish itself as a newly reformed sport paved the way for pro-wrestling (and boxing) as an alternative to traditional Japanese combat sports even if professional judo fell apart because of the same mismanagement and financial problems that plague most upstart wrestling promotions. It's drawing a longbow, but I'm trying to make this political. Since we know the main power brokers behind early pro-wrestling were the wrestler-promoters, the TV executives and the yakuza, and not US promoters per se then the argument becomes whether the content reflected American cultural hegemony. Here, the argument has always been that it reflected the Japanese post-war inferiority complex. Perhaps the American workers were showing ass for the Japanese from the comfort of their culturally superior position or perhaps they were just working the audience and putting on a form of (lowbrow) entertainment. Perhaps they imported the traditional US narrative of the "good" American wrestler vs. the "evil" foreigner and flipped it for the Japanese audience and thus the narratives were culturally imperialist, but in terms of entertaining the masses how is tecnico vs. rudo any different? Rudos were meant to represent the corruption Mexican fans faced every single day in Mexico City. Rikidozan defeating Americans in hand-to-hand combat obviously meant something different to a country that had lost a war to those same opponents but it's still tapping the same vein. And frankly it evolved from there as has been well documented. So does it boil down to the working style? Japanese wrestling is closer to American wrestling, they work a different style down in Mexico, from left to right, etc.? I still maintain that lucha libre didn't develop in a bubble cut off from the outside world. From what lucha historians have said, the Phantom comic strip (American) was hugely popular in Mexico City in the late 30s and had a huge influence on the look of Mexican luchadores, and El Santo is said to have been directly inspired by Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask (French), which was also extremely popular in Mexico during the 30s. An untold number of foreigners have passed through Mexico over the years. Look at how many foreigners worked the UWA during its heyday. Territories close to the US border were more heavily influenced by the US style of wrestling than in the capital, but aspects of those territories filtered their way through to every strand of lucha libre as workers moved around the country. Yes, there are elements of lucha that are distinctly Mexican just as there are aspects of Japanese wrestling that are distinctly Japanese, moreso than people realise given the language barrier and lack of access to the media, insider info and cultural understanding. Are there more distinct elements in lucha? Perhaps, but you could just as easily argue that Meltzer and the early tape traders embracing Japanese had just as much impact on the way we perceive it as US cultural imperialism. Perhaps that was because it was easier for them to understand than lucha and more readily available on tape. Perhaps it was because the major US stars worked there in the 80s so it was easy for them to identify with. Perhaps it's the flipside to cultural imperialism which was the exoticism regarding Japanese culture that occurred after the war. Perhaps the political aspect here is that people have always looked down on lucha libre while extolling the virtues of Japanese pro-wrestling. But I honestly do not see the difference between Japanese fans' interest in professional wrestling post-war and golf, or dating, or baseball as a national past time. They imported all those things from the US as well. Are those cultural evils? They were big on jazz as well, Parv Wrestling in Japan in the 50s and early 60s had its feet in the black market and all of the corruption that surrounded the post-war rebuild, but on the surface it was considered something that uplifted the spirits of the depressed and lethargic Japanese populace. It was uniformly seen as a positive at the time and still remembered that way despite its fragile underbelly where its number one star was actually a member of a race that most Japanese despised. But that's pro-wrestling for you. That's all I've got.

I'll admit that as old as I am it's difficult for me to fathom that anybody needs to fill in a gap about Randy Savage even if it personally took me years to see his pre-WWF work. But here's a legitimate question: how much Randy Savage do you need to see before you can move on to somebody else? People keep talking about deep dives, but unless you become super obsessed with Savage, you're trying to get to the bottom of some sort of argument, or you're struggling with how you feel about him, surely you can trust people to point you in the direction of his 10 best matches or something. Yeah, you're not going to be exposed to his flaws and everything, but watching too much Savage seems like a waste of time to me. Using you theoretical three hours a week, you could finish Savage in a week or maybe alternate between six different workers and clear them all in a month. IF you dedicated the time. I personally think it's wrong to deep dive on a particular promotion or style as opposed to specific workers. I also realise it's pointless to be talking about this now that the project is over. Regardless of how it seems, I don't have strong feelings about the voter base or the results one way or the other. I made my peace with the process a long time ago. I'd just prefer an ideal world where everyone was super dedicated to the project, invested all of their free time in it, watched a ton of shit and argued endlessly about it. There were plenty of people who did that, but a lot of them did so privately or in other mediums such as Twitter or podcasts. The nominee threads were kind of threadbare and most of the discussion revolved around tired old subjects. I was really thankful when Dylan came and posted a ton in the final weeks even if I didn't agree with all of his takes. I liked what you wrote about one man's discovery being another's old hat. I can't argue with that. But regardless of how new the hat is, I would still argue that the discoveries are more important than the stalwart picks. When I do a list, there's always going to be stalwart picks that I still think are the best of XYZ, but half my picks are going to be new discoveries that catapult their way up my list. That's the exciting part of taking part in the project. Especially a project that lasts TWO YEARS. If I had taken part in this project the way I usually do and come to the conclusion that the wrestlers I thought were the greatest of all-time before we started are still the greatest of all-time, I would have been sorely disappointed with myself. You could hand your ballot in on day one if that's the case. Lastly, I thought I mentioned that Breaks matches aren't samey. There's at least half a dozen variations on a Breaks match. I don't know if that comes across in TWC footage, but he had different match types he'd work.

I watched quite a neat Devil & Debbie Malenko vs. Kansai & Plum Mariko tag from 11/93. It was longish and had the same rhythm throughout, and there some gaffes that, to the layman, made it seem like Malenko wasn't familiar working with the JWP girls, or vice versa, but it was cool seeing Dynamite work someone outside the usual suspects.

It's worth debating. Why was the "God of Wrestling" and the spiritual father of the biggest promotion in Japanese history a European and not an American imperialist? Why was Inoki infatuated with Mixed Martial Arts and not promos, TV squashes and Southern style tags? Baba, I think, was more infatuated with America. I can imagine him holidaying in Hawaii and buying American-made.

Why are you talking about 10 weeks? Voters had two years. If you watched 3 hours of pro-wrestling a week for 2 years, I estimate that you could watch at least 750 matches. That's more than enough matches to sample a wide body of workers, but it requires that you do nothing but focus on the GWE project. which I assume only a few people were willing to do. People no doubt were distracted by the modern product, other hobbies or life in general. The number of people who've said they didn't manage to get to WoS or some other style is telling. And those are folks who were on board from the beginning and much more committed to the project than people who came on board later or submitted a ballot without participating in the discussions. Of course it's not possible to see everything, but they gave folks two years. What's the excuse when the stuff is so accessible? I don't really agree with the American hegemony talking point especially people are celebrating that Flair, Funk and Hansen finished 1, 2 and 3 and trying to tear down the so-called Japanese pillars, but I do agree that there's no excuse for people not checking out Puerto Rico, Europe or Mexico. If you didn't do that then all that really says to me is that you didn't participate. You voted, but you didn't truly participate. Perhaps the counter argument to that is that I needed to catch up on Randy Savage, but if I'm being honest I wouldn't vote in a poll where I had to catch up on "Randy Savage" unless I absolutely threw myself into it. Also, there was no curriculum. It was entirely up to the people participating what they watched. The onus was on the individual. This happens in every poll I participate in. There are the people who watch things and the people who don't. While I'm here let me cross reference something. You mentioned in the other thread that getting into a new worker shouldn't have any bearing on people's final list, but what was the point of the nominating period if not to pimp workers that people ought to discover, pay attention to and potentially vote for? Folks may as well have submitted a ballot based on what they'd already seen. The whole thing could have been over with in three weeks. Being excited about Breaks or Hase didn't influence your ballot? Really now?

Cyclone Mackey is enough of a footnote in lucha history that lucha historians care about him. There is some debate over whether he was the first masked wrestler or another American from Chicago, but Mackey is generally credited as being the first wrestler to popularise the mask and there's even debate over who made it for him with saddler Antonio Martínez, who made the wrestlers' footwear, usually receiving the credit. The mask was a gimmick and first and no-one had the Aztecs in mind or even rural customs. El Murcielago Enmascarado was another of the important early masked wrestlers who was in the first mask vs. hair match and was, I believe, the first luchador to unmask. That clearly started a tradition and then Santo made the mask a staple. What you're saying about cultural heritage etc. may play a part in lucha's popularity, but from what I've read the appeal of lucha wasn't much different from the appeal of professional wrestling in post-war Japan. After the Mexican revolution, impoverished villagers moved to Mexico City in the hope of a better life. Those who could afford entertainment flocked to the movie palaces and the sports arenas just as Japanese people did during their post-WW II malaise. Lucha was a new form of entertainment imported from the USA just as it was in Japan. A Mexican brought wrestling to Mexico just as Japanese brought wrestling to Japan. I've read the arguments that the US remade Japan in its image during the occupation. There is undoubtedly some truth to that, but Japanese wrestling wasn't exactly Coca Cola, i.e. as American as apple pie. You can't talk about Mexico having an independent cultural voice and not acknowledge the traditionally "Japanese" aspects of Japanese pro-wrestling. How often are these overlooked because people can't recognise them? It's easy to spot the familiar US influences in Japanese wrestling but how often do people fail to notice the Japanese aspects because they're unfamiliar with Japanese culture? Was Rikidozan was a traditional Japanese hero or a transplanted American babyface? Did Kimura or Yamaguchi behave like Americans? I could go on and on. I tried thinking of examples of what makes lucha libre unique from American wrestling but for every example I could think of a counter example from Japan. And I think over time, the idea of cultural imperialism also falls apart. When Japanese wrestling made its resurgence in the early 80s three of the leading figures (Choshu, Fujinami and Sayama) had all been heavily influenced by Mexico not the United States. Similarly, let's not pretend that Mexico was closed off the rest of the world. There was plenty of cross-cultural exchange with the California and Texas territories. Lucha by all rights comes from Texas. Like I said, we're dealing with blanket statements. People have written dissertations and books on these subjects. If online posters want to take this political stuff seriously they ought to do plenty of research otherwise it seems like grandstanding to me.

Even playing in the background I dunno if I could get through 70 hours of GWE podcasts.

That strikes me as something different from cultural imperialism. If anything it's purely economic since foreign wrestlers have always been paid a handsome sum to wrestle in Japan, which is not the case in Mexico. I'm not sure I agree that lucha developed independently of the US. It's roots are in American wrestling the same as Japan. Lutteroth brought wrestling to Mexico from El Paso and used plenty of foreign talent in the early years of EMLL before developing Mexican stars. The first wrestler to wear a mask in Mexico was the American worker, Cyclone Mackey, and that was an idea that was brought over from the states.

This part is irrelevant as the SCAP post no longer existed after the peace treaty was signed in 1952 and MacArthur was fired by Truman in 1951 anyway four months before Rikidozan and pro-wrestling made their debut on Japanese shores. So while pro-wrestling may have been cultural imperialism it was entirely post-occupation cultural imperialism. See, it's a big topic.

It's also worth noting that pro-wrestling as we know it in Japan really began in the post-occupation period so Dylan's line that it was imposed on them at gun point is stretching it a little. The allied occupation ended in April 1952 and Rikidozan was in the States at that time. I guess you could argue that his JWA promotion as an offshoot of the cultural hegemony of the NWA, but that would require more exploration of who was really pulling the strings in the 1950s Japanese pro-wrestling promotions. Nobody really talks about the influence that the mobster Nick Zapetti had on shaping pro-wrestling in Japan. Outside of Western journalists based in Japan, that is. Not really in our circles.

Japanese professional wrestling being a direct product of US cultural imperialism is a blanket statement that would take hours of research to properly assess. The first recognised pro-wrestling matches in post-war Japan were performed by a small troupe led by Joe Louis. They were invited to entertain the troops by a service association the same way Bob Hope would be. For all we know that's all pro-wrestling in Japan would have ever amounted to if not for Rikidozan, Toshio Yamaguchi and Masahiko Kimura deciding there was money to be made in pro-wrestling. Those three guys, and their backers, had more to do with importing of pro-wrestling to Japan than any American I'm aware of. And in the case of the latter two, their wrestling activities in the early 50s were deeply rooted in the failure of the post-war professional judo association. Rikidozan's biggest supporters, NTV and the Mainichi newspaper, have always claimed altruistic motives for promoting pro-wrestling. Their execs always say they were helping to restore national pride, raise the people's spirits and that sort of thing. Of course there were commercial interests too. Pro-wrestling and television had a symbiotic relationship in post-war Japan as we all know. Pro-wrestling was tailor made for TV and the Japanese were fascinated by television much like the rest of the world. I actually think the most interesting thing about the post-war period is that the Supreme Commander Allied Powers didn't seem to mind the portrayal of Japan vs. the West that every man in the street was aware of because the SCAP actively tried to disseminate nationalistic ideologies during the post-war recovery period. Much like the police didn't seem to mind how riled up the throngs of people got crowded around street corners, it seems the SCAP saw pro-wrestling as a positive distraction from the post-war hardships.

Smarkschoice lasted for a few more years as a message board after it stopped being.a site. It was hacked a few times and its contents wiped.

What I really wanted to say about "niche picks" is that I don't think there were that many obscure picks up and down the board. I could come up with far more obscure names than were voted for and I'm sure many others could do the same. Even if you look at niche picks as a sub genre that didn't receive much support, it's still what Parv would refer to as the "silent minority" since he's such a huge believer in consensus. I'd love to know what the hipster picks were that made the top 150.

I don't have a problem with people voting on what they know. In 2006 we voted on what we knew as well. But we didn't have two years and digital media to know any better. I think the issue that some people have is that too many people voted on what they knew too late or didn't take full advantage of the viewing period.

I don't believe that was the context that Parv was using niche in at all. He was referring to hipsters and "boring" vs. "exciting."

I'm kind of torn on Dick Murdoch. My feelings are similar to Matt's argument about Blue Panther in that I think I love the idea of Dick Murdoch far more than the reality. I love the idea of this fat, beer guzzling redneck who can blend comedy, brawling and mat work together seamlessly, and deliver a masterclass in pro-wrestling the way that people feel Funk or Buddy Rose do, but then I watch the matches and they're never as good as I want them to be. But I'll persevere because I really want to love Dick Murdoch. Well, she fell, but not as far as I thought she might. It's fair to say there's not the same cult of personality surrounding Hokuto as there was in the tape trading years. Though I will point out that during the years where people would pimp her '93 as the greatest year ever by any worker there were guys like Mike Oles rubbishing the claim. The things I liked about Hokuto are tough to get back into. I expended enough energy and emotion on her hard luck story back in the day. I was interested in seeing whether any of her post baby comeback work was worth reevaluating but I couldn't find the motivation to check it out. Maybe a worker I've closed the book on unless somebody comes up with a new take on her. I don't believe in Andre. I've seen all of his good matches, and I'm sure there are more out there, but it's not enough to rank him as the 51st best worker. I don't care how novel the dude was, the list of people he best in this poll who were consistently better than him is longer than 7 foot, 4 inches tall.

In my opinion there has to be a challenge to conventional wisdom every step of the way otherwise you end up with discourse that amounts to "man, Ric Flair is awesome, and Terry Funk too." If you look through the list there are numerous workers who've benefited from challenges to conventional wisdom, and a few that have been hurt as well, but the greatest accomplishment of the list was in those victories not Flair holding out against the heathens. Not every challenge against conventional wisdom is something people are going to agree with, but I can't imagine watching a whole bunch of wrestling, particularly from the same wrestler, without thinking about somebody else's take on it or trying to form your own. Which isn't to say I can't enjoy wrestling for enjoyment's sake, I'm specifically referring to these GWE discussions. A lot of newer or younger fans talked about discoveries and journeys but for those of us who've around a while it was more about new takes and revisiting older stuff from a different perspective. It was about how much we've changed in the last 10 years and how that's reflected in our tastes and the stuff we like now vs. the stuff we used to like. People came to this project from different backgrounds and vastly different starting bases. That's what I dislike the term "niche" pick. If you've stopped following the modern product and spent the past 10-15 years watching nothing but older wrestling (with few exceptions), and you have a broad viewing experience, then there are precious little in the way of niche picks in the entire top 500. I could say that modern puro picks are niche picks but it's only because I haven't seen any modern puro. Niche picks are simply undiscovered workers that people haven't gotten to. The idea that Negro Casas is a niche pick (to choose an example) is ridiculous. I don't care how little people think of lucha or how much they prefer mainstream American wrestling or classic Japanese wrestling, Negro Casas is not a niche pick. A guy way on the outside like Pat Roach? Yeah, maybe, but Pat Roach is an oversight not some rare recording or unheard album. Fringe picks exist, but some of the people whom were named niche picks was ridiculous. Another pet peeve was acting like it's okay to challenge conventional wisdom on Ronnie Garvin but sacrilegious to do it to Flair or Jumbo. Everybody should be open to the same criticism. Finally, I think people took the list a bit too seriously. In 2006 people who watched a lot of tapes and people who tried their hand at being match reviewers got together and shot off a list. There were arguments and debates, but I don't think we were trying to create something that would be left behind for future generations to discover. Listmaking was popular at the time. That ended up shifting to viewing projects, which in turn fell by the wayside. Now it's podcasts that are all the rage. I'm not trying to belittle the hours upon hours of effort that went into this list, but the overall tone from the piece of how important it was that Flair finished No.1 is maybe not the victory lap it was referred to but meaningless in the grand scheme of how Flair is viewed now and forever basically.

There's a fun 5/94 handheld that pits Devil & Kansai against Okutsu & Fukuoka. I'm not usually a fan of the two strongest girls being on the same side but it works well here. The 1997 Kansai vs. Candy match was mediocre. Both girls were ailing in '97, but Candy was also a girl who never really found her identity and comes across as a poor woman's Cuty Suzuki. She's all right in tags, though, and the '97 Jaguar & Devil vs. Kansai & Okutsu tag remains a fun bout. It's a bit exhibition-y but in an entertaining way. Worth watching to see Kansai and Jaguar lock-up and Devil looked really sharp twenty years on from her debut. Speaking of Devil, there's an early JWP Project where she celebrates her 15th anniversary with a match against Kansai. The interesting thing about it to me is that Devil was still working the style she used in the original JWP. It's clear to me now that she changed her style during the inter-promotional boom to keep up with the times. She was a lot more rough and tumble prior to upping her workrate game. There's also a huge contrast between young, healthy Dynamite Kansai and the ailing version from '97. The 10/95 WWWA title defence against Takako Inoue is a solid bout, perhaps better suited to a JGP style tournament than a world title bout, but a solid singles bout. Kansai did her best impersonation of a female Hashimoto and there was enough history between them to make the bout mean something. Takako was a good worker who had a fun rise through the All Japan ranks, but it was clear she was never going to be one of the main stars. She lacked the offence necessary to be a top star. Too much of her offence was based around counters and clever but nondescript strikes. I liked the stretch run here and there was some good selling from both women. I'm getting a bit sick of Splash Mountain, though. Man I hate Kansai's industrial piping outfit. She looks like some kind of kindergarten space rocket project or a modern sculpture made from pipe cleaners. Her Sgt. Pepper's jacket was so much cooler. I also hate it when she dyes her hair. It looks so much better black with a slight crew cut.