ohtani's jacket

That's not exactly what I said, but you never were very good at following someone else's argument.

Name some.

All Japan is the greatet style ever created and you can't say the same about touring NWA champ style? I thought Williams told me people like you don't exist. How many singers, actors, directors, writers or artists in general are eclectic? Not very many. Creative people generally draw from the same well every time. I really don't understand your versatility argument when you have such conservative views on wrestling.

That's true of most lucha workers, though. The majority of lucha trios aren't workrate trios matches where everyone stands out. Usually there's a central feud and the other guys are window dressing or the match is flat because they're mailing it in or taking it easy that night. What's more, Santo is a technico which means he has little schtick to work comedy all match like a Satanico or Emilio or Fuerza. With Santo, it's more about the same moves, the same match patterns and the same performances in singles matches. Often the matches are excellent, but you can usually call what Santo is going to do in the ring.

Rey in the WWE is so much better than Rey in WCW or AAA it's not even funny and I don't even like the spots he does or Michael Cole's god awful commentary about the HEART AND SOUL OF REY MYSTERIO! He just had flat out better matches.

Maybe, but one of the biggest gripes about lucha is that it's illogical and it's full of exaggerated, theatrical bumping. Fans accept it as part and parcel of lucha and see it as both comforting and amusing, but US wrestling gets held up to a different light. Different expectations, I suppose.

No, it didn't shed any light on Big Daddy. It was a digest version look at the history of British wrestling not some 18 1/2 hour Ken Burns epic. There was some footage of Rocco, but it was one of those documentaries where they give generalised answers for everything (such as the decline in popularity) and you accept it because it's a doco and not meant to be a thesis on the subject.

Where are all these matches where the arm work is paid off?

It's from '95.

Yeah, Atlantis Chronos Goth I think she calls herself.

I think Funk had one of the great personas of all-time. As others have mentioned everyone knows someone who looks or acts like Terry Funk and he had tremendous range from serious right through to deranged, my favourite being affronted like the time Flair told him he wasn't top ten material. But he's one of those workers where I'll pick chunks of his career to watch. I like his stuff in Memphis, the NWA and WCW more than any other period of his career. Do you think his brawling, his selling or his fun persona prevented him from having better matches?

Lucha is huge on schtick especially in trios, but just as there are multiple ways to work a trios match, the best workers have multiple routines. The Brazos and Infernales are good examples of this. Casas, Dandy, Panther, Santo etc. are all great workers, but they basically wrestled the same match again and again depending on the stip. Most of the time there's a comfort in that as Jerry alluded to, but El Hijo del Santo, in particular, is one of the most repetitive workers of all time.

Arn did comedic stooge selling all the time. It was a big part of his repetoire and he was great at it. I don't care about the Flair flip. It's a signature spot and signature spots are part of pro-wrestling. I don't really think they affect the integrity of a match. The best skill you can have as a pro-wrestler is to be able to do your schtick within an otherwise serious match. McManus, Breaks, Satanico, Fujiwara, Arn, Funk were all great at this.

The doco was fairly good. There wasn't much in it for the hardcores aside from the new footage, but I liked the women's reactions to Klyondyke Kate, the weird medium/adviser/spokeswoman for Kendo Nagasaki and the Johnny Kincaid poem. I also want to see Steve Logan vs. Masambula as much as Pallo/McManus.

All righty, but we didn't even have sports magazines in New Zealand during Iaukea's day.

Oh yeah, Sting can't compare to the biggest star in the history of New Zealand. Did we even have a mainstream in Iaukea's day? And as for Williams being a star in Japan, where were the national endorsements, the movies, the household name? Williams was a star for wrestling fans in Japan the same as Sting in America. What Dave wrote was pretty convincing, but he should really stick to the US examples.

Gotta agree with Loss. Flair was flat in this.

Flair/Luger was an infinitely better match-up than Flair/Sting but I'm not sure that has anything to do with it. To me the Flair/Sting dynamic never really worked. Even watching the Luger/Flair matches years later, I wanted the Total Package to kick Flair's ass and take the title. With Sting it was more whether poor little Borden could overcome his knee troubles and hang in there.

To be honest, I don't think Sting was ace material. He didn't have the mic skills for it and I'm not sure he had the right look either. To me he was an Intercontinental Championship level guy, the equivalent of which was probably the US Championship but I never felt that belt was handled as well as the IC title so bear with me. With better booking he may have had a more successful tilt at the mainevent, but Sting's saving grace is that his work wasn't all that bad during the period in question. Given that Sting's work wasn't the problem, I have my doubts whether better booking would have helped the company's bottom line. A down period is a down period and few (if any) companies have been able to avoid them. It's possible that people started tuning out and houseshow numbers dropped because Sting didn't catch on, but I suspect it had more to do with Crockett as people knew it having run its course. Sting would have had to have been one of the great all-time attractions to prevent the downslide. Having said that if business had been a little healthy or Sting had drawn a few good gates from time to time maybe he'd have a stronger case. It seems WCW was still Flair to a lot of people during Sting's run and I wonder what things would have been like if it was obvious Flair was never coming back ala Hogan and the WWF. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems Bret was accepted by what remained of the WWF audience moreso than Sting was accepted in Flair's absence. Not that I mean to make living in Flair's shadow into the latest excuse for Sting. If he'd been overwhelmingly popular he would have made people forget about Flair. I just think the mechanics of what makes someone a star in pro-wrestling is interesting.

You could make a case for Moncrief as one of the top three players in the East in '82-83.

I don't think Sting's 1990-93 period should be used as a positive or thrown out. I just think it should be properly assessed and weighed accordingly, because to me there's a big difference between a guy who bombs on top because he's a terrible promo and a bad worker and a guy who is handicap by injury, poor booking, a downturn in business and politics even if the end result is the same. Who were the top 10 draws in the US from 1990 to 1993 and how much more did they draw in comparison to Sting? If Hogan's drawing power was reduced during the period then how can Sting have been expected to be a big draw? It's all well and good to say he failed and that's that, but I don't see how he could have realistically overcome those obstacles and I can't think of anyone who drew under those sort of circumstances. But this is getting a bit redundant and he's not going in anyway so it hardly matters.

Labeling Sting as a failure implies (to me, anyway) that he was responsible for that failure in some way. To date, no-one has explained what his failings were. KrisZ already ran through the booking and from the numbers it doesn't look like anyone could have done better than Sting in the period. So unless there's some overwhelming reason why Sting was poor in the ace role what is he being taken to task for? Because he wasn't a national draw on the level of Hogan? Sting on top may have been a failure, but how exactly did Sting fail in the role? And why does Hogan get credit for the NWO when he turned around and fucked the whole angle up, ultimately destroying the company? It was a hot angle that revitalised Hogan's flagging act and unlike Sting he didn't get the legs cut out from under him. None of this is a reason for Sting being in the HOF, but I don't think it's as simple as Sting dropping the ball. I also think it's stupid how non-American candidates are elected into the Hall without half as much analysis of their drawing ability as Sting. There wasn't even a single argument about McManus for example.

It actually got AJW temporarily kicked off the air in some regions of Japan if the story is true.

That '82 Devil/Jaguar match is clipped so it's a tough comparison, but by '85 she had began a face turn after being phased out as the top native heel.

That's not the argument I would make against Edge. Does anyone make that argument against Edge? I've probably forgotten the arguments against Edge. I thought people had counter arguments for Meltzer's points about Edge as a ratings draw or whatever it is. My point really is about timing. If Edge were to get in because he came along at a time when business was strong and Sting doesn't because he was on top when business was poor then how much of it is based on each man's merits or lack thereof and how much is sheer dumb luck?