ohtani's jacket

Is that Amano match online? She had a quietly great career, which impresses the crap out of me because she should have faded away when JWP semi-folded. I would be really surprised if workers like Yagi, Yoshida or Hyuga got much of a look in, though.

The best Aguayo match we have on tape is the 1986 hair match with Chicana, which IMO is one of the greatest lucha matches of all-time. I know a lot of people like their early 90s cage match, but I thought it was weak. I liked the spectacle of Perro vs. Mascara Ano 2000 at the first Triplemania. I also liked the 1992 Chicana/Aguayo match from CMLL. Aside from that, I think you have to scratch around a bit. There's the Gran Hamada matches from the original UWF (including the handheld one), some stuff from Los Angeles and New Japan Classics, and the UWA tag with Babe Face that was on the DVDVR lucha set. A Santo vs. Perro match is floating around out there too. I think it's from the early 00s. I know Noodles and I loved the Perro vs. Universo 2000 apuesta match. I wish I'd bothered to watch the recent footage from Juarez that was pulled.

Emilio is a really disappointing singles match worker. It's not that his singles matches are bad as such, they're just slight and feel too short. He's one of the all-time great trios worker, though. I could hear an argument for him being a better trios worker than Fuerza but it's a bit like choosing between your kids. I agree with cad above that Fuerza was better at being the leader of the team and I think that's because his star shone brighter. Emilio was like the ultimate number two guy. If I were the lead rudo, Emilio would be the first guy I'd want on my team.

fwiw, I think it's actually Dalbir Singh. They mistyped it on television all the time and Brian Crabtree would constantly mispronounce his name. Anyway, Singh swings between great stuff with Roach/Rudge/Steele/Roberts to some of the most insanely boring stuff you'll ever see. His match with Bret Hart is a contender for the most boring WoS bout of all-time, IMO. I know the poster here, PeteF3, thinks he is a Randy Orton-esque black hole when it comes to charisma and called him the most boring of the WoS workers. I liked him enough that I sought out everything he has on tape. From memory, his run as champ was a bit of a disappointment and he had weight issues toward the end of his TV run, but he's a guy who had plenty of good matches. Check out the Regal bout from Sun City to see him working outside of the UK.

The esteemed John Lister always says Joint Promotions' plan was to have Arion drop his fake NWA World Heavyweight title to Big Daddy, but Arion balked at jobbing to Daddy and put over Bridges instead.

Maybe a bit of a cheeky comment, but it's amusing to me that a guy in an anime costume strikes you as more of a wrestler than a guy in black trunks. Anyway, I'm the complete opposite. I think Liger has a ton of annoying tendencies and gets the same free ride that Panther does. All of the flaws people point out in juniors wrestling are inherent flaws in Liger as well yet people act as though he was great in spite of those shackles. That's when they'e not giving him praise for orchestrating the whole damn mess and being the architect of a style they think is flawed. Wrestlers basically fall into two categories for me -- guys who I want to watch everything they've ever done and guys I only want to watch if it's against the right opponent -- and Liger falls squarely into the second category. I love watching his matches against Ohtani, for example, but I don't have any interest in watching Liger carry anybody. I think he's a good worker, and I'm not beyond enjoying him, but Casas at his best was otherworldly. Santo vs. Liger is probably fairer comparison, or Rey vs. Liger, because of the mask, but 90s Casas, which is the only Casas I'm really connected to, was actually a pretty tight worker. I wish it was still on YouTube because I never got a chance to write about it, but he made a green Eddy Guerrero look a million bucks in Juarez through grappling not bumping and stooging. To me that's an excellent wrestler. I do love Liger's palm strikes, though. They're fantastic. He's overrated on the mat and I don't think his selling is as wonderful as others do. Great execution but iffy match structure at times. I would consider him top 50 material at best whereas Casas would be top 20.

That's a Saint spot, though Grey did it as well and Faulkner may have on occasion, but I don't remember it being one of his regular spots. It's a spot they cribbed from the legendary lightweight champion George Kidd, whose style Saint imitated.

Most of his bouts are face vs. face.

I don't expect anyone to agree with me about Saint, and in fact I've enjoyed most of the Saint I've watched recently. I saw him watch a match the other day where he bumped and sold for a big man, which I thought was interesting. But as I said above, if you've only watched his catchweight matches against other great workers, or his rivalries with Breaks and Grey, then you haven't really seen what a standard Johnny Saint match looks like. I'm talking about the the kind of bout Saint liked to work when he was the guy in charge. A regular, four-round television bout with no size difference, no rivalry, no heat, no building to a future title match, nothing. The most average of Johnny Saint bouts against a guy you've probably never head of before. Those sort of bouts were really just showcase bouts for the stars and made up the majority of WoS programming. If you like Saint, you'll probably get a kick out of any time he turns up on tape, but to me the standard Saint match is utterly disappointing and worse than just about any other star I can remember. They remind me of a fill-in issue on your favourite comic book or a single issue story that's sandwiched between ongoing storylines. Honestly, Saint wrestling a guy who has no chance against him and making him look foolish, while all the while grinning and clowning around, is shit compared Grey making everyone he faced look they're having a career night.

That's their Cup Final Day match from 4/19/78.

Mine was Verne Gagne, ;p

From memory they have jump cuts, which makes them difficult to watch.

I don't know if anybody is going to take him seriously as a candidate at this late stage, but there are three of his 60s matches available from Iraq and another 70s bout from WoS.

Okay, I think I get it better than I did before.

Panther is kind of interesting since in theory he's had a second career after unmasking in '08.

I don't want to start this insanely circular and terrible argument again, but didn't Flair finish 7th in the 2006 SC poll? Do you really feel as though he will climb multiple spots? If anything, we don't really have any new jaw dropping footage and his work after 06 was actively bad. I think it's reasonable to assume he might fall slightly, although he still seems like a lock for the top 10. Nah, Flair was still on TV in 2006 and him not retiring was one of those perrenial smark axes to grind. Also, the DVDR 80s projects happened in those 10 years which reminded everyone who took part in them why Flair was so highly thought of in the first place. I think many of us -- here on PWO -- sat down and watched and re-watched more footage than happened in 2006. And with that footage watching, as Will says, the cream will rise. And Flair has consistently been in highly ranked matches from basically every set. As far as I recall, nobody had an ax to grind with Flair in 2006 for not retiring. The criticisms of Flair in 2006 were the same ones you've heard before. I don't think the dial has moved at all on Flair in the past ten years. As for footage watching, there was a shorter polling period for the Smarkschoice poll. Folks shared matches digitally, but there wasn't a lot of time to explore stuff. Most of the viewers were heavy watchers though and had been for a long time. That was back in the days where there were more match reviewers and more websites trying to be like DVDVR. There was a lot of stuff watched in the five year lead-up to the poll when many of the participants came online. There were some things in that poll that new. The idea that peak period AAA wasn't the be all and end all of 90s lucha was new at that time. Stuff like Memphis wasn't as appreciated as it is today or Portland or AWA. 80s New Japan wasn't that popular. But everyone who was involved as a big fan.

Well, it's nice to see Ray getting some love.

i wanted to know who your highest ranked wrestler for Japan was because I'm interested in the standard for Japanese wrestling. Nothing Vince, Cornette or Heenan did to get heat is remotely comparable to how performers drew heat in Japan so the idea that we should be able to put two and two together and realise why Cornette had so much more x factor than Misawa is not particularly helpful. On one hand you're saying it's not about stardom, drawing or anything like that, and on the other hand you're putting out how over guys were and how much heat they got. Then you're saying it's about angles and storylines and character work, which don't seem overly intangible to me, and x factor, which clearly is intangible. To me the notion of x factor or intangibles is "was there something about this guy that made him popular?" Something that may not be easy to explain or to measure, but something you can get a sense of. If Dory or Bob are a 0 or 1 then there's no logical reason why they should have ever gotten over anywhere. Neither of them were the most charismatic workers, but zero charisma? Neither of them were great character workers, but no character work whatsoever? Six to me is too low for an all-time great, so we clearly have different ideas about how to grade these things, but it's more informative to me how Misawa ranks compared to Rikidozan, Baba, Inoki, Choshu, Fujinami, Tiger Mask, Mutoh, Chono, Hashimoto, Maeda, Takada, Tenryu and Kawada so I have some idea what the baseline for Japanese workers.

When I think of Jones at his best, I'm thinking of the worker from '76-85 or so. In his early stuff he looks a bit green to me and when he starts gaining weight he's not quite the same. I'm not a huge fan of his World Mid-Heavyweight title defense streak in the late 80s, though that's partially due to Dale Martin's choice of opponents and the fact that the matches were hacked to bits when they aired. Jones was a surly bugger and came across as a hank of misery at times. He was a bit like Finlay in that if he didn't rate an opponent he'd eat them alive. If you asked me what was good at bout Jones from '76-85, I'd say he was the best version of Dynamite Kid imaginable in that his execution and his intensity were off the page compared to anyone else. He had two great rivals in Rocco and Finlay and he would have had a third in Kid if Dynamite had stayed in England, but he was head and shoulders above every one else in his weight class. We know how a few of his predecessors wrestled such as Marino, Royal and Logan. Pallo too. But we don't know what Billy Joyce or Norman Walsh were like. With the heavier men we know what the traditional European style was. With the lightweights we know it was all modeled after Kidd. But Jones feels like a trailblazer. Despite his Wigan training, he wasn't just another Billy Riley disciple. From the time he made a name for himself his approach seemed to be to do things harder, faster, stronger. I've never thought of Jones as the lesser man in any contest. Instead, I see a better Rudge match than Terry's earliest work. Better Rocco matches than the best of Rocco's 70s output. A better technical display from St. Clair that anything he showed prior to being pushed to the British title. Better matches with Finlay than anything else during the Princess Paula transition. Better television tag matches than all but that Johnny Saint tag w/ Steve Best against Jeff Kaye and Ian Gilmour. Sometimes his matches fall short -- matches against Roberts, Cullen, Bond and Martin come to mind -- but only by a matter of inches either a finish or a round short of being great. He didn't work a classical British style (i.e. dressing and undressing holds), but I think that had a lot to do with his weight class and what guys in that division were trying to do in the late 70s. I don't think he lacked charisma, though he was a grumpy prick as far as faces go. I find that kind of endearing much like his lazy eye and those crazy bifocals he'd wear. All I can say is if you offered me the choice of the complete matchography of Jones, Breaks or Grey, I'd have to think twice. I'd probably take Breaks, but I'd be sorely tempted to choose Jones. I had a chance to get a Roach/Jones catchweight match from the late 70s, but it was incomplete so I passed it up. Still that's a kind of holy grail for WoS fans who've seen enough of the stuff. I genuinely wanna see all his matches from a ten year period, which is the highest compliment I can pay a worker.

Well, I'm sorry I don't see how Misawa is on the level of Ted DiBiase, The Sheik or Slaughter, or how Jumbo is on that low for what it's worth. I don't see how Bockwinkel can possibly be an 8 and the other three weren't proper wrestlers. In the case of the latter three, I have no idea what intangibles could be so tangible that they'd rank ahead of Misawa. Who's your highest ranked Japanese wrestler for intangibles? Choshu?

Dory's first tour of Japan in 1969 was, and still is, a pretty big deal since he was the first NWA World Heavyweight champion to visit since Thesz, and defended the belt against Inoki and Baba at pivotal moments of their careers. It meant more than any tour Flair had or any matches Flair worked in Japan. Dory vs. Inoki is about far more famous in Japanese wrestling folklore than Jumbo/Flair regardless of which match-up was better. The Funks wouldn't have become the most famous and beloved baby faces of all-time if Jr. had just toured as champ, but his tours as champ were the most meaningful outside of Thesz'. As for Brisco and Harley, I'm not sure what the feeling about Brisco is in Japan but he seems to have had a larger volume of title defenses during his run as champ which suggests he was more prominent. Race was revered in Japan. I don't know if it's really true (and I could research it if I can be bothered), but they used to say that in Japan if you achieved something 7 times you were considered a God of that thing and that Harley was considered a God of wrestling in Japan. It's not that Flair wasn't important in Japan. He was the NWA champion through much of the 80s. But he didn't tour as prominently as former champs and worked for the clear number two as opposed to working JWA or the pre-Inoki worked shoots era where New Japan and All-Japan were in their formative stages. What I was really trying to get at is that the Flair you love isn't the Flair that toured Japan. I think you see the Flair that toured Japan as another wrinkle in Flair's career showing his range and versatility. I wonder at times if working in Japan made him slightly uncomfortable, or if he simply should have played the heel champ role more. It doesn't really matter to me whether Flair was the Man in Japan or not, but it seems obvious to me that things that don't particularly resonate with you (like Misawa's stoicism) are being penalised in favour of Kobashi's similarity to Steamboat or Martel, which can only be personal bias and not an objective take on what was really going on.

I'm trying to remember why people were so high on Harley in 2006 and coming up blank. It may have had something to do with the All Japan Classics footage which gave a boost to most 70s workers in the early 00s. That was in the days before you could download it all at the drop of a hat and the opinion of tape watchers mattered more. Harley dropping off the list would suck. I don't think he will.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd see Ray Steele nominated. He's been one of my boys over the years. I even got comps of him made. But he's a guy who would have a hard time making the cut. He's cut from the same cloth as Roach. Singh, Roberts and Rudge, and any combination of those workers usually delivers a good match, but he's fairly bland compared to most pro wrestlers that people love. Just take a look at his haircut. That pretty much sums Steele up. Most British wrestlers look like a guy you could bump into down at your local pub, but Ray looks like the kind of fella a girl would take home to her parents in an old black and white British flick, or a Ken Loach/Mike Leigh style satire. I'm sure there were a lot more interesting heavyweights around in the 50s, 60s and 70s. The fortunate thing about Steele is that we have a decent sized sample of his entire career from his earliest matches to the end. There's a lot of Ray Steele out there.

Extremely talented guy, but I don't think I ever saw him have a truly great match. He was under utilised in Great Britain and was sill having good matches right up to the end of television with Roach vs. Martin being the last bout to air on ITV. There's no way I would rank him about Roberts, though I do think they were contemporaries in terms of skill.

So would you argue that Flair was as big of a legend in Japan as Thesz, Dory, Brisco, Terry or Race, or that the Flair touring champ was as over in Japan as it was in the territories?