ohtani's jacket

Because shoot style workers were trying to do something just a little bit different from standard pro-wrestling. I don't give two shits that Brock was a WWE wrestler who fought some MMA fights and returned to WWE, but I do think Koshinaka and Tamura's shoot fights are interesting along with Funaki, Sakuraba and even a guy like Minoru Suzuki, although in his case he has a later period pro-style career that's arguably stronger than all but Tamura's worked shoot career. In any event, I only ever presented it as something I would keep in mind and that was in reaction to Dylan's question.

On one hand, I've got people telling me that careers are just as important as how good a worker a guy was, and on the other I've got someone telling me career narratives don't exist. Steve Williams and Alberto Del Rio didn't have significant MMA careers. Why are you trying to pretend they did? Anyone who thinks Sakuraba's present NJPW work isn't shaped by his PRIDE run is kidding themselves .Apparently, he had a big pause in his pro-wrestling career and the PRIDE/MMA stuff never happened. Give me a break. I don't really have any interest in a long, drawn out argument about what MMA was in Japan in relation to pro-wrestling since it barely exists anymore in the same way that shoot style barely exists, but I believe my original point was it was something I would keep in mind in regard to candidates such as Sakuraba. Funaki and Tamura if I were to vote, which I'm not. Others can draw a line in the sand if they like.

If there was a single person on the face of the earth who thought his pro-wrestling career was good.

Not all of Finlay's WoS work is bad. The first three years or so are amazing. Before he adopted the whole green and white shamrock look with the mullet and moustache, he was a phenomenal worker and I'd argue his tag team with Skull Murphy is good enough that he'd make a list of unexpectedly great tag wrestlers. When WoS is cancelled and wrestling becomes a stand alone show, and Finlay starts doing dates with both All-Star and Joint Promotions with Paula in his corner, that's when the quality drops off.

Grappling, shooting, you can use whatever verb you think fits best. The Shamrock shoot is more similar to Tamura's longer works than it is dissimilar. There's an interesting compare and contrast that can be made with the Kohsaka work. I would recommend anyone looking to get into Tamura to watch the Tamura shoot. It's not like anyone's going to vote for him because of the Shamrock fight. But it's more meaningful to what Tamura was about than watching him face Vader.

I probably wouldn't vote for Sakuraba, but if I did I would compare his MMA career to his early UWF-I and Kingdom work as well as his later New Japan return. I wouldn't vote for him solely on the basis that I think his PRIDE fights were great up until the Silva massacres, but I do think his MMA career informs his pro-style work. It's hard for me to watch his early shoot style stuff and not think of the what he accomplished in MMA, and likewise it's hard to watch his present day matches without thinking of the beatings he took in his later MMA fights. It's all part of his career narrative and the fact you should ignore it or dismiss it because a shoot style wrestler went one step further and had a shoot is something I'll never fathom.

I'm sure there was an element of digging the cool heels, but when you find a heel worker so sympathetic that you watch matches from their POV that is not standard pro-wrestling storytelling. Maybe heel fans do it all the time, but I can't remember seeing it when people discuss US wrestling, for example. Have you ever seen anybody talk about Tully vs. Magnum from the POV of Tully, or Dibiase vs. Duggan from the POV of Ted? It doesn't seem to happen.

It's awesome, but it's not a pro-wrestling match. Doesn't bother me. It gives some insight into how good a grappler he truly was and you can also use it to judge how good/realistic his worked shoots were.

People always knew Kawada was the heel from 5/93 on. We talked about it all the time online, that Misawa and Kobashi and Jun were the faces, and that Kawada and Taue were the heels. Knowing he's the heel and viewing him as one are two different things. Kawada was an internet darling the same way Benoit was. People watched the big AJPW matches from his POV. They didn't (at least in my experience) watch the matches from the POV of Misawa, or Misawa and Kobashi, overcoming the dastardly heels. It was viewed more along the lines of a sporting rivalry such as Borg/McEnroe, Sampras/Agassi, or what have you, and I stress ]i]what have you]/i] as I don't want to go round and round in circles about analogies. One of the talking points about AJPW used to be whether the heel/face roles were the same as in US wrestling. MJH argued many times in the past that there were clearly defined heel/face roles. Others didn't see that as they were caught up in the chase narrative. That's the way I remember it. I may be wrong, but I think there's a history of internet fans not really viewing Japanese workers as heels but rather as favourites whether it's Akira Hokuto, Mayumi Ozaki, Genichiro Tenryu or indeed Toshiaki Kawada. All of those workers were heroes to online fans and whatever heel/face dynamic there was in Japan or in the matches was meaningless.

I would take the famous Funaki/Rutten match into account if I were voting. I'd also have Tamura's shoot with Frank Shamrock in mind if I were voting for Tamura. I wouldn't vote for Sakuraba, but if I did I would take his PRIDE matches into account.

The career thing should make ranking wrestlers a piece of cake. If I want to vote for: Adrian Adonis Adrian Street AJ Styles Aja Kong Alan Sarjeant then it's obvious that I would rank them in this order: Aja Kong AJ Styles Adrian Adonis Adrian Street Alan Sarjeant The only interesting thing about careers is when people form an argument about them -- eg. this guy's career is overrated, this guy's is underrated, here's an unexplored part of so and so's career. Otherwise it's just towing the line and that's boring.

I think the appeal of Casas is that he was an outrageous, flamboyant character who walked the thinnest of lines between being legitimately tough and effeminate as hell. It's not spoken about much, but Casas is about as close to an exotico worker as you can get without being an exotico and for that type of wrestler to come in and completely rule Arena Mexico is a testament to his genius. Probably the most impressive thing about Casas is the way he waltzed into Arena Mexico in 1992 and took head of place at the cathedral. It was brash and audacious and something few others could have done. Satanico is more of a wrestler's wrestler. He has a better build for wrestling (bigger neck and shoulders), better grappling technique, more knowledgeable wrestling skill, and just a more solid worker all-round. He was better on the mat than Casas and had better offence. Casas is an excellent worker, but his mechanics have never been as good as others. What sets him apart is his showmanship. No matter how brilliant Satanico might be, there's no way he could match Casas for flair. In fact, I'd almost draw a parallel between Satanico the genius guitarist and Casas the flamboyant front man. That's not to say that Satanico doesn't have charisma of his own. He certainly does, but it's based on him being an excellent wrestler and not because of how extroverted he is. I think their great matches cancel each other out to a certain degree. Satanico has the Cochisse match and Casas has the Dandy match. Satanico has the Dandy feud and Casas has the Satanico feud. Satanico has the Morgan hair match and Casas has the Fiera match. One advantage Satanico has is that he was part of an all-time great trios team in Los Infernales whereas Casas' best trios work was in the lead-up to singles matches. Casas probably has longevity on his side even if I'm not a huge fan of his work post 1999. I always favoured Satanico in the past, but my respect for Casas is ever growing. It's a tough call. The way I would decide it is this -- if you offered me Satanico's entire match output or Casas' which would I take? The answer is Satanico's.

I'm sure there were people who were sympathetic towards Kawada for the simple reason that they liked him or they wanted to see him overcome Misawa. After all, a huge part of the Japanese psyche is in appreciating the fight in the underdog or the guy who is hopelessly outmatched. But at no point do I think people thought Misawa was a dick the way people dislike Man United, the Lakers, Duke or the Giants in Japan. The audience that went nuts for Misawa upsetting the apple cart against Jumbo didn't suddenly turn on him because he had a rival in the form of Kawada. Misawa may have been a dick at points. From all accounts, he didn't really like Kawada, but the narrative that was spun around Kawada when I first got into Japanese wrestling was that his feud against Misawa was a chase and I don't think that's quite true.

Agreed. Talent in practice matters more than just having the talent. But whether they realize it or not, everyone has already agreed to that in terms of how they are ranking guys anyway. Everyone in the top 100 is bound to have talent. Talent in practice for the majority of people relates to matches and performances and not careers.

If they think he's one of the 10 best workers they should since it's not like his career was bad.

But when we watch guys we're judging them primarily on No.1. You might watch a match and think about where it fits into the context of a guy's career, but first and foremost you're judging the bout on the work. When I watch Jumbo work a boring control segment, I don't think "wow, what an amazing two decades the guy had." Similarly, if I watch an outstanding Kawada performance, I don't think "I wish we had more of this over a longer period." It seems to me that as you go through the Excite Series that there's something about Kawada's work that doesn't resonate with you as opposed to the career argument. The career thing is so arbitrary to me. The peak vs. longevity argument has always been a part of these debates, but ranking the guy with the better career seems pointless. How do you determine whether Flair or Jumbo had a better career than El Hijo del Santo or Liger? You place a huge emphasis on output as well as variety of opposition, but lucha guys ran laps around the number of guys Flair and Jumbo faced and other workers like Liger have the same amount of longevity. I'm not knocking you for holding Flair and Jumbo up as your standard. But how do you correlate that with Breaks where we don't really know how many four star matches he produced with how many different opponents? The way I see it is that relatively speaking Kawada didn't have that bad a career compared to Jumbo, so the question is how do they compare as workers not is there a guy who faced more deadset legends over a decade span as Jumbo while still working the Sam Houstons of the world.

There are many things that British wrestling did badly, but this has to take the cake. Watch this from the 18 min mark onward and tell me if you've seen anything worse;

I can't remember anyone who was super into Kawada viewing him as a heel. Akira Hokuto, who was technically a heel, had a similar fanbase built up around her.

I don't think that people who were super into Kawada in say 2001, which was really the lead up to the first GWE poll, saw him as a heel. His narrative was always that he was a bit of a hard luck kid. The entire narative surrounding Kawada when I first became aware of him was here is the match where he finally pinned Misawa and here is the match where he beat him to win the Tag League, etc. And to an extent, Baba did book it that way. But never to the point where his ace looked like a douche.

Surely, the most relevant point about Flair and Jumbo at this point is that there are 98 other spaces on the ballot.

When I first got info Japanese wrestling I felt the same way about Misawa. I generally saw the Misawa/Kawada feud from Kawada's POV and thought Misawa and Akiyama were like Batman and Robin. Then I moved to Japan and discovered that culturally Misawa was far, far more of an ideal than Kawada and my thinking changed. But you don't need to live in Japan to change your thinking on Kawada/Misawa. Instead of viewing Kawada as some sort of sympathetic babyface and wondering whether he'll ever be able to beat this guy, it's better to view him as an Owen Hart type character who knows he'll never be as good as his senpai.

Of course Jumbo didn't have to travel much. The money was in Japan and people came to him. Jumbo was fortunate to work in an era where the Japanese economy was booming, where the territory system still existed, the promoters he worked for were still young and healthy and had connections to offices around the world, the TV stations were prepared to bankroll wrestling and put it on during golden time, and a shitload of Americans were in their primes. If Jumbo had needed to rely on Japanese talent to have great matches he would have been fucked because the best Japanese talent was in New Japan at the time. None of these things have anything to do with Jumbo's ability as a worker. If Jumbo had been born the same year as Misawa, Parv wouldn't think he was a GOAT candidate even if he had the exact same strengths as a worker. What I'd really like to see Parv do is critique Jumbo. If Jumbo was so good then why did it take Choshu jumping ship for Jumbo to adapt to the changing wrestling landscape? How come even though Jumbo was a far superior worker to Choshu he was so slow to see the writing on the wall? If not for Tenryu would be have had a fire lit under his ass? If not for the younger generation would be have had a late career bloom? Credit to Jumbo for adapting but there seems to be extenuating circumstances that aren't being taken into consideration

Indikator, are you part of the Wrestlingdata team? Because I found a mistake there the other day.

I kind of want to put Tenryu to bed as there's other guys I want to watch, so here are some general thoughts on the man: He reminds me a lot of Negro Navarro in the sense that he got better as he got older. In none of the Misioneros footage we have from the 80s or early 90s does Navarro look as good as the worker he molded himself into during the mid-00s, and the same is true for Tenryu prior to 1989. I'd put his peak at around 1989 to 1996, and I still think it's a crying shame that after the New Japan feud wound down in '94 there was that gap period where he did bugger all until the UWF-i feud began. 1994 and '95 seems like a significant chunk of his prime that was wasted. Nevertheless, he was an excellent worker during that period. His execution issues weren't nearly as bad as I thought. When he did have issues they tended to be clangers, but once I'd watched enough of his matches I tended to ignore some of the general sloppiness surrounding his work and appreciate other aspects of his work like his amazing selling. As mentioned above, the biggest revelation for me was how good he was at selling. I knew about his facials and his nonchalant heel attitude, but the nuanced selling was something I didn't expect. Selling could probably be broken down into various categories if people cared to take the time, but one of the major ones is selling pain, and outside of Mayumi Ozaki I'm struggling to think of anyone who sold pain in a more realistic manner than Tenryu. He was fantastic at grimacing and favouring a body part. When he stayed down hurt it looked like a sports broadcast. Such fine, nuanced work. If I have one criticism of him outside of giving too much of the bout to his opponent and working from underneath too much (regardless of how good he was at selling), it's that his performances were often better than his matches, and I think that's a huge problem when comparing him to his peers who were, more often than not, the driving force behind their matches. I think he worked intentionally smaller matches than the epics that were in vogue during the mid-90s, but how much of it was a deliberate point of difference is impossible to say. The end result is that while I think he was a fantastic worker, and one of the best sellers ever, there's only a handful of matches that I'd consider the cream of the crop. You mileage will vary on that, however. Offsetting that to an extent is the fact he participated in two of the all-time great in-ring feuds -- Jumbo vs. Tenryu and Tenryu vs. Hashimoto. To me the chemistry in those feuds was better than in rivalries such as Kawada vs. Misawa and Misawa vs. Kobashi even if the matches weren't. I'd probably put Tenryu in the second tier of Japanese workers, but I'd be comfortable putting him there. In many ways he was an overachiever who had an in-ring career that was better than it had a right to be. I don't think he was the most naturally talented athlete to grace a pro-wrestling ring even if had been a rikishi, and he got better because of smarts and not really by improving his technique as such. I'm not sure if others will agree, but the more he aged the more he seemed to work like Terry Funk with the punches and some of the selling tics. Anyway, an interesting candidate and one I'm sure will do very well.

Ric Flair vs. Genichiro Tenryu (9/15/92) Initially, I had no desire to watch this, but it got a bit of play in the Yearbook for being Tenryu's best match since he left All Japan and Flair's best match since 1990 so I felt compelled to watch it. It's almost Flair's best match by default given how seriously wrestling is presented in Japan. I've never really felt like Flair was all that over in Japan and the lukewarm response to his stylin' and profilin' here seemed further proof that the Nature Boy gimmick fell flat in Japan. It was interesting watch Flair take it to the mat as he wasn't really a great mat wrestler, but then again neither was Tenryu. Flair kept things moving enough that you could ignore the nuts and bolts of what he was actually doing, and mixed in enough strikes that Tenryu was able to put over the physical contest. There was nothing really gripping about the fall, but I loved the way Tenryu sold his jaw. The biggest revelation for me about Tenryu has been how good he is at those small details. Unfortunately, he has a tendency to whiff on the big stuff and I thought the finish to the opening fall was pretty bad. It started with a press slam off the top rope where Flair had to raise Tenryu's hand because it was out of position and followed up with some weak looking offense and another terrible powerbomb from Tenryu. Perhaps he had good reason to lay Flair down on a bed of feathers, but it kind of signaled to me that this wasn't going to be hugely physical. The second fall wasn't hugely compelling. Tenryu took a direct approach to begin with and the transition for Flair to take back control of the match was a poke to the eye, which I thought was lame for a match being held in Japan. Flair ran through a few of his suplexes, which went nowhere as they transitioned into a stand-up contest, and then there was a bunch of legwork from Flair leading into the figure four. The figure four passage took an age, but at least Ric got a submission out of it. Thirty minutes into the video and Tenryu had given most of the bout to Flair, which highlights a tendency that Tenryu had, which was to give too much of the bout to his opponent and work from underneath too much. I think we can agree that the Tenryu you want to see is the guy doing soccer ball kicks and punting folks in the face and not with his back to the canvas all the time. Tenryu being Tenryu he sold the crap out of his leg in the most realistic manner he could think of. It's unlikely Flair ever faced an opponent who put that much effort into selling the effects of the figure four, especially since Ric rarely got a submission with it. There was another lengthy figure four passage, which I think you'd have to be reasonably invested in the match to enjoy. Flair strategy buffs would probably point to the set-up work Flair did throughout the fall, which is fair enough, but while Tenryu did a nice job of hobbling about and hanging on by a thread, I couldn't really get into the spirit of Tenryu taking a constant beating. The finish was straight out of Baba's playbook, though Tenryu desperately trying to get Flair back into the ring on a bad wheel was a novel twist. I'd go about *** on this. Felt like a bit of a chore watching it. I can see whether other people are coming from, though, as Flair had nothing like it from WrestleWar '90 onward. Wasn't a particularly great Tenryu match for me, though.