ohtani's jacket

I'm not entirely convinced that Baba was better than Inoki. I need to watch more of Baba's JWA stuff before I make any grand statements about that, but I think if we're being honest that it helps that Baba founded that wee thing called All Japan that some people like. Just a few. I also think it helps that he was a goofy looking bastard and people are kind of mesmerised by how strange looking he is and how he moves around the ring like some kind of puppet. The older he gets the less human looking he becomes until it's like Stan Hansen vs. an alien. That's a unique brand of charisma. If you've never seen him in the mid-60s when he was bulked up and had muscles then that's a sight to behold. Forgetting about how he looked, I dunno if I buy the master psychologist chess master stuff that gets thrown out about him, but he had some great matches against The Destroyer, Billy Robinson and likely more, and then some fun old man performances that are a bit overrated in terms of how much credit Baba gets for them. We live in an age where maestro performances get credited more than ever before and Baba's old man stuff isn't on that level, IMO. .

Another strong run from a cult favourite. Maybe he could have finished a little higher but that would require a perfect world where people stop bitching about WWE booking and watch BattlARTS. From his Inoki worship to being a student of Fujiwara, there's a lot to love about Ishikawa. He kept shoot style going for as long as he possibly could even after MMA was dead and is still teaching real pro-wrestling in Canada. He's a guy who, along with the likes of Minoru Suzuki and Osamu Nishimura, really feels like the last of his generation. I don't think we'll see their type of worker again. But he's also versatile enough that he could have been a pretty good junior if he'd only done pro-style. Really good worker. I liked what Matt said about people voting in 2006 for an idealised version of Blue Panther that didn't really exist. I just don't agree about the real Panther being better. Let me clear something up straight away -- Panther is a GREAT mat worker -- he just doesn't work the mat enough. The old line that you'd get two to three minutes of great matwork in any Panther match was a myth and so whenever you see a Panther match where he hits the mat and it's not that good then naturally it's going to be disappointing. But when you see good Panther it's everything you hoped it would be and more. The problem is that there's so much lucha footage that's never been watched and never been discussed that searching for good Blue Panther is a bit like heading down a rabbit hole. I've talked before about how he's an overrated singles worker and not that great at trios and I'm pleased to see a bit more criticism filtering through to the lucha candidates as it's a sign that people are taking them more seriously as workers in my eyes. I like Kurt Angle in the same way that I wanna finish a box of chocolates if my wife opens them or a packet of biscuits. I wouldn't ordinarily eat that kind of food but if it's open I'll scoff it down until it's finished. I like a lot of his WWE stuff even if it falls off the rails. If I'm gonna watch a spotty guy with selling and pacing issues I'd rather watch one with an amateur background than a discipline of Shawn Michaels. Never seen one of his TNA matches. Seems like it would be worse for you than choccies or a bickie. Funny seeing Brisco drop straight after Angle since there was a time when people were hoping Angle would be a throwback to Brisco or his spiritual heir or some shit. One of them was the consummate wrestler and the other is like pro-wrestling junk food. I'll let you guess which is which. One thing I'll say about the Brisco footage we have is that as good as he looks in the first part of the 70s he looks just as washed up in the latter half. And I personally haven't seen a ton of merit in his 80s footage. A while back I opined that you can condition yourself to just about any worker if you watch enough of them. I also believe you can find redeeming qualities in the most maligned of workers if you try hard enough. I'm struggling to think of any for Mutoh I'm shocked that Ohtani remained in the top 100. I thought nobody watched his juniors stuff anymore. Weird how so many Joshi workers can fall out of the top 100 but Ohtani is still there. Maybe some of the younger voters were more familiar with his 00s work. I wrote this about him recently in response to Parv: The thing I appreciate about Slaughter the most is his sheer commitment to his gimmick. It's a gimmick that should have been cartoony as shit but he lived and breathed it. Was there anybody who didn't believe that Sgt. Slaughter was real and that Bob Remus wasn't an actual drill sergeant? And no, you can't say the same thing about Hillbilly Jim or any of his friends. Slaughter was real dammit. He was even in GI Joe.

Yes, it would be feasible to watch everything that's out there. OJ has pretty well done that in fact. I started doing that in 2009 and still haven't watched everything. If you only watched the stuff that aired on The Wrestling Channel it would be shorter but you'd miss a lot.

The main picture of Breaks isn't a picture of Breaks. Well, it's a picture of him in a headlock with his butt sticking out, but you get what I mean.

Great little run from Dick Togo. I haven't really dived into the stuff that was pimped by Dylan, Segunda Caida and WKO during his traveling years, and I don't wanna That 90s Guy who talks about how his Michinoku Pro stuff still holds up (though it really does), so instead I'll simply say that since the fall of the Japanese wrestling system he's been one of the pioneers in taking his talent on the road and using his wrestling skill as a passport to see the world. Japan is a really small island (or group of islands, I should say) that happens to have a heck of a lot of people on it. But even in a city the size of Tokyo, the pro-wrestling world is really only a scene and boils down to the handful of neighbourhoods where it's concentrated. There are so many people who never ever leave Japan and so much talk within Japan about the need to be "global" that for Togo to embark on the wrestling world tour that he did is, I think, the best thing about him. Other guys have done it too like Taijiri and now Ishikawa up in Canada and it's a great alternative to the choice most wrestlers face in the current Japanese wrestling climate where you either open some bar or tiny restaurant or bust your ass trying to produce wrestling shows and hold some tiny promotion together. And from a fan's perspective it adds to the worker's resume and gives it a depth and variety that wouldn't be possible if they only stayed in that small Japanese scene.

My first reaction to this was Pillman was a 115 guy max. I thought maybe if I liked his Hollywood Blondes stuff more or his Loose Canon stuff, I could justify him in the top 100. Then I started to remember just hoe much Pillman I like. There's the Luger stuff, the Flair matches, the War Games '91 performance, the feud with Windham, the Liger stuff, the match with Rude and the tag team with Windham. That's an incredible amount of stuff to cram into four years from 1989-92 and doesn't even include the legendary Rip Rogers stuff. I feel a bit like Jimmy Redman pimping weekly WWE television workers, but perhaps now I feel more affinity with her than ever before.

There's an established list of great Bull matches. Whether people agree that the matches are great or not is up to the viewer but let's not pretend thst they don't exist.

The crowd pop for all of the nearfalls down the stretch as well as the finish. The pop for the finish turns into an Ozaki chant.

I've got no beef with Thunder Queen. It's an hour long Joshi match so it's hardly going to be perfect (without putting an understatement on it), but I still enjoyed the twists and turns, and I thought Kansai and Kyoko put in tremendous performances. Aja was also strong in her role. The riffs I used to enjoy most (Ozaki and Takako) kind of paled in comparison to Kansai and Kyoko, but I'm on a Kansai binge watch and was thinking ahead to the August clash with Kong, and I keep on thinking Kyoko got hard done by on the GWE list. So a bit of a same place, different time feel to it 15 years on from when I first watched it. That's as good a proof as any that there's plenty going on in the match w/ all sorts of different subplots. I don't really care about its place in the pantheon of great matches anymore. It held up for me.

I've got no beef with Thunder Queen. It's an hour long Joshi match so it's hardly going to be perfect (without putting an understatement on it), but I still enjoyed the twists and turns, and I thought Kansai and Kyoko put in tremendous performances. Aja was also strong in her role. The riffs I used to enjoy most (Ozaki and Takako) kind of paled in comparison to Kansai and Kyoko, but I'm on a Kansai binge watch and was thinking ahead to the August clash with Kong, and I keep on thinking Kyoko got hard done by on the GWE list. So a bit of a same place, different time feel to it 15 years on from when I first watched it. That's as good a proof as any that there's plenty going on in the match w/ all sorts of different subplots. I don't really care about its place in the pantheon of great matches anymore. It held up for me.

Jeepers creepers, the heat for the Inoki/Tenryu match is off the charts. The beginning is everything you'd want from Inoki and Tenryu at that point in time. Then, just as I'm thinking "man this kicks ass," they go and do that sleeper spot. To Tenryu's credit he sold it well, but the match would have been SO much better if they'd just kicked each other's ass for 10 minutes. Inoki vs. Masked Superstar was another mediocre bout against a foreigner. And y'know, Masked Superstar was a pretty good worker (some might say even better than that.) Inoki, at least once he became iconic, just wasn't very good at working against non-mat wrestling foreigners. Should he have found some way to adapt?I don't know .All I know is that it's the wrong Inoki to watch. I don't think much of Rusher Kimura, for example, but the heat for his matches with Inoki is tremendous and the sight of Inoki pummeling his bloodied face into submission is completely surreal. And Isamu Teranishi is such a tremendous little shit at ringside. I enjoyed the Thesz/Gotch vs. Inoki/Sakaguchi tag for the maestro exhibition it was. Possibly the least conventional tag match ever, but it lulled you into its mat-based rhythm. Too bad the guy who uploaded it on YouTube forgot to include the final 10 minutes, or maybe he did and New Japan made a copyright claim seeing as how it's on the world site. The DM was taken down after a claim by Sky Perfect. Ah well, that's what you get for not paying for stuff I guess. I've almost done my dash on Inoki. There's stuff I'd like to watch like more of his early JWA work but the only place I can find it is on some dodgy Russian site that wants my cell phone number to register. Yeah, that's not gonna happen. I'd also love to see more of his Backlund matches but apparently they're not in circulation. And that damn Bock match. Will it ever return from its online grave? Maybe a trip to Champion is in order.

Yeah, I've seen the Newman match. Felt kind of flat to me. My least favourite bout thus far has got to be the Yukon Eric match, tho. Long, slow opening fall where they work through Eric's strength holds then two quick falls to end it. (Sounds like some kind of reverse lucha criticism, I know.) The best thing you can say a bout it is that Schmidt's selling was consistent. Other than that it was Dullsville, USA. There's something a bit iffy about Schmidt's back breaker too, but maybe it was due to Eric's size.

Made it through part three. The Sheamus rant was the high point.

Arthur Psycho uploaded the match I was talking about. It's against Les Kellett's kid, Dave Barrie.

The Gagne matches aren't nearly as cool as the Thesz ones. Not sure what that means in relation to Verne vs. Thesz, but I thought I'd throw that out there. Buffalo seemed like a wilder territory than Chicago, would I be right in saying that? Schmidt's matches seemed much rougher in Buffalo. Did he bulk up in the 60s? he looks bigger than in the 60s Buffalo footage. i'm still not sure how I feel about his work. There was a guy commentating over the top of some Buffalo film who said Schmidt never changes his style and I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I do think he worked neat squash matches. He'd kick the shit out of a guy for five minutes then hit the showers. That was cool. I wanna see another guy stand up to him like Lou did, though. That's when Schmidt gets real good.

Is this the same JerryvonKramer who became rather impassioned when I suggested Jericho wasn't a great worker?

Williams isn't the first guy I'd think of if I were compiling a list, but he definitely had an interesting career. You've got his early territory work that's being reevaluated with the Houston footage, the MVC years that people seem torn on and the run of great All Japan matches. I personally think his 7/94 match with Misawa is one of Misawa's masterpieces and the 1994 Champion Carnival final is one of Kawada's best as well. He also had the run with Johnny Ace and pretty much supplanted Stan Hansen as the company's top gaijin ace. I remember really enjoying the MVC's WCW run during the WCW Smarkschoice poll but haven't had the time or inclination to revisit it. I didn't like their All Japan stuff the last time I ran through it. He's a guy I'm predisposed toward liking because of his look and his amateur background. I get a bit disappointed when he's not the wrestling machine I want him to be, so I don't think his territory work would do much for me assuming that he most brawls. Not a bad pick. Don't understand the groundswell of support this guy gets. Maybe I need to watch his ECW stuff. For some reason I can never separate him and Dick Togo in my mind and I always end thinking Togo is better. Watched a bunch of his matches against Mysterio during this project and they topped out at *** maximum. Just seems like more of a decent hand than top 100 all-time, but I could change my tune if I watched more. I love Tito Santana. I mean I really love me some Tito Santana. Steamboat, Martel, Hennig, whomever you wanna name, it's Tito Santana all day long. But I still maintain that he doesn't have as many good matches as a worker that talented should have. And not because he worked in New York instead of drifting around the territories. In an ideal world, you'd have an early 80s WWF card where you had a strong Backlund match on top and an excellent Tito Santana match on the undercard on every single billing, but it just didn't happen. Never really got into Gordy in any way, shape or form. He's in plenty of tag matches I dug, but I'd have to go back and watch the Killer Khan match to see whether this placing is anything more than "okay, Gordy." So maligned it's become ridiculous. One of the best teenage talents I've ever seen. If he'd stayed in England he would have been on par with Marty Jones. His match against Jones in '83 is one of my all-time favourite WoS bouts. I love early Finlay but even early Finlay is a watered down version of DK at that time. It was mostly about attitude w/ DK. He looked like an asshole and wrestled like one. Whether that was because he had a chip on his shoulder, a Napoleon complex or he just a shit is fun to speculate, but his football hooligan look and his viciousness in the ring was compelling stuff. And his execution... I think you could justify him at 78 simply based on his execution. Of course it all went downhill quickly as his body crumbled, but he put out some memorable albums. Go Kid! Kick those detractors in the teeth. Finished too high. Dig the Manny stuff against the Rock 'n' Roll Express, think his WWF work is a blackhole and am slightly amused by how overrated his 1992 has become. Make no bones about it, Rude was a good worker, but those rest holds.... He has to be a candidate for best worker who was absolute shit on the mat. Versatile worker. Could work a number of different styles. Wasn't really a master at any of them but I think people refer to his accessibility its in large part due to his versatility. Underrated bleeder. Possibly his biggest strength since he sold better when he bladed. Quite an erratic seller actually. Could be really good when the match called for it and at other times lousy. Disappointing on the mat. That remains his biggest sin for me. Had a couple of really great matches but not as many as quite a few folks who fell outside the top 100. His part-time All Japan gig was boring. A few years back I got into watching old Hogan matches. I enjoyed a great many of them especially the blood feuds and the hot sprints. But honest to God, watching Hogan is like staying home from work sick and getting into the daytime soaps. If you keep watching them for long enough at least one of the storylines is gonna get you hooked. You'll come back for more all right, and by the end of the week you might even convince yourself that they're really well written, but if you have any sense you'll go back to work the following week and forget the whole thing ever happened. Apologies to Hogan and soap fans. Went higher than I was expecting, I guess because of the Anniversary show stuff from recent years. I only really care for a slither of his long career (from '88-00 or so) and mostly disregard the rest. Matt probably has a better picture of him than I do (at least from 2000 onward, I'm not sure how much prime Atlantis he's seen.) Great trios worker, especially in the difficult and often quite demanding position of being the glue that holds the tecnico side together. Underrated mat worker. Panther's best opponent. The 8/91 match is still the most pure lucha match I've seen and a thing of impeccable beauty. Love the '97 bout as well. Overrated apuesta match worker and not as good at brawling trios as regular ones. Highly disappointing during the dark yeas when everyone jumped to AAA. Casas and Dandy pretty much ruled the roost during that period and Atlantis pottered about doing jack shit. The Mano Negra feud still makes me forlorn. I love Mano Negra, why couldn't that have been better? If I'd been booking CMLL in those years, you would have seen shit like Brazo de Oro vs. Atlantis in a class title match and a host of other fantasy booking. Love watching him work with Emilio even if only one of their singles matches knocked my socks off. Their trios work together is lucha heaven. Still can't figure out why he leaves Dylan so cold. Worst pick so far. I'm prepared to believe that his 2008-09 run is the peak of his career because his 90s stuff holds up about as well as his look from that era. Easily the worst of the workrate heroes. Somehow he managed to ride on Benoit, Guerrero and Malenko's coattails and we ate it up because WCW was on a roll. Like most folks I dug his shtick in '98, which was similar to what Foley was doing at the time, and rallied behind him during the era where everyone wanted him freed from his WCW contract. Jericho should be working against Goldberg on PPV! Vince would know what to do with him! WWF would make him a star! How naive we were. Like everyone else, I was super excited when he made his debut on RAW and had that promo duel with The Rock. That was fresh at the time. Then he started having matches and it was obvious that this guy couldn't really work. At least not the WWF house style. His fans will fill in the rest because I gave up watching WWF after the shitty, shitty Jericho vs. Benoit feud. God that was atrocious.

If he had ended up in Mid-Atlantic or Mid-South instead of WWF. If he had jumped to WCW in 1991. If he had homesteaded in New Japan instead. But if you've ever watched a young Bret Hart in a territory From the evidence we have, Dynamite might have become the best of the WoS workers of his era if he stayed. I get that point. He didn't stay though. He jumped to Calgary and became something else instead. And now he's above all of them, generally by far. But if you've ever watched a young Bret in the territories then you know he pretty much sucked outside of Calgary.

By what logic should Bret Hart be #1? My point is being it's no affront for DK to be considered the greatest British wrestler.

Enough of this Dynamite Kid British stuff. He was the best of the WoS teenage workers and would have easily been as good as Finlay, Rocco and Jones if he'd stayed in England instead of going to Calgary.

I don't think Jerome was talking about the board as such but his own opinions.

How long was the nominating/viewing period? 18 months? Two years? I'm not sure it needed to be that long. I know there are a lot of people who used that time to their own benefit, but would the final list have been that much different if we'd crammed it all into nine months?

Onita's an interesting guy. I like the story of him being on the bones of his arse and crawling his way back up from the gutter. And he looks cool in pictures and shit. But as for his work... Nothing people say about his selling, facial expressions or flair for the dramatic ring true for me. He reminds me of some kind of B-grade Hong Kong action star and his matches for me are like the pro-wrestling equivalent of a VHS rental copy of American Kickboxer IV or something else kept slyly next to the porn section. I don't see how people can bitch about Hogan or Undertaker and turn around and vote for Onita. Seems like a paradox to me. NB: In five years time, I'll probably be telling people he's better than Misawa and Kawada. I don't get this guy at all. I'm sorry, but I don't. I mean I get what people like about him, but the same things people like about him would get panned if he were anything other than a indie-turned-WWE developmental guy. Would he have made this list if he were a Dragon Gate guy or a Joshi worker or a modern luchadore? Having said that, I'm sure the vast majority of people who voted for him don't have the same prejudices against those styles. But man, I can't believe people get upset about Harley Race's piledriver on the outside but not the kind of spots a Sami Zayn does. It would be easy for me to dismiss Cesaro as too high, but he's uncharted territory for me. I've seen bits and pieces of his work but I need Jimmy to give me a big list of the best Sheamus matches and what not. Until then I reserve the right to reserve judgement. Those pics were so deliberately and intentionally unflattering ;p I've written enough about Tanahashi in the past. Pretty much this generation's Manami Toyota or Shawn Michaels. Not as good as his biggest fans claim, not as bad as his detractors would have you believe. Whether you like him or not, you can't deny how prolific he is. The guy pumps out the matches. How fitting! Toyota and Tanahashi would make a great GWE selfie. Y'know, it's been 20 years since Manami Toyota was in her prime. I don't think anybody really needs to defend her anymore or explain why they don't like her. It's all written in stone somewhere. What I will say is that I discovered I like her immediate post-prime a lot more than i ever thought I did. I'm talking '97-02 or so. But then again I took an "I'm all in" approach to Manami Toyota which I think is the only way to go with a worker like her. Parv's line about him being the best ever at sitting up was one of the funniest one-liners in the history of this website. I kind of see Undertaker as a guy who evolved from a guy you'd wish would go away to a guy who was better than we thought he was. Somewhere along the way he started thinking he was even better than we thought and devolved into a guy you'd wish would go away. I imagine the next stage in the odyssey as Undertaker on his death bed and this monolith-type thing appears before him with the WWE insignia on it before suddenly and inexplicably he appears in the Gobbledy Gooker's egg on Thanksgiving Day 2090, boom, boom, boom, boom. I dunno, he wears makeup and thinks he's John Wayne. I was never really a Piper guy and find a lot of his shtick irritating to be honest. He's like a stand-up guy who'll either have you in stitches or make you feel a bit tense (as in that this "isn't really funny" uncomfortable sort of way.) He had some really good matches, but you need to cherry pick them as opposed to a lot of other candidates where they come thick and fast. I don't have a gripe about his placement, though.

Watched a half-decent Ken Patera match from 1980 and it occurred to me that these are the type of bouts that really hurt Inoki. I'm guessing more people are familiar with Ken Patera's 1980 than they are Chris Markoff or Kintaro Oki, and more inclined to check out a Ken Patera match than either of those workers. The fact that Inoki doesn't have classic matches with workers like Patera has to be a knock on him in some people's eyes because of the type of mindset that says: "If you can't have a great match with Ken Patera in 1980 then..." Especially with the Texas Death Match being in the same year and right there as a direct comparison. And Patera is just an example. Hansen and Andre are other examples from the very early 80s. Inoki seemed much better at working these type of matches against foreign heels when he was younger and more of a pure babyface. After the Ruska fight and all of the worked shoot MMA challenges it became more difficult/unappealing for Inoki to work your dime a dozen pro-wrestling match. Somewhere around 1979 he began to decline not only physically but creatively as well. If you look at the different periods in his early work, you've got the JWA stuff where he's striving to be a star, the early New Japan stuff where he's fighting to make his new business a success, the mid-70s native vs. native stuff that hadn't been done in a decade, and finally the Inoki vs. the World mixed martial arts challenges. This early 80s period is hard to define but definitely meh. Maybe we can call the "siphoning all of New Japan's profits" phase. With my mind on my money and my money on my mind.

Vote lucha,vote Joshi, vote shoot style. Vote British workers, vote Europeans. But don't overrafe Flair vs. Garvin.