highflyflow

I’ve been meaning to get to it, my eyes lit up when I saw that notification lol. God bless Kadaveri

Watched a bunch of her work last year, 50+ matches from her early 90s AJW work to the peak ARSION stuff and her post-prime in the 2000s. The AJW work obviously doesn't hold a candle to her later career work, but she's consistently good and has a fair amount of gems to her name during this period; I especially like the 6/5/91 tag with Hokuto against Bull and Kyoko Inoue, and 1996 Japan Grand Prix match against Chaparita ASARI. She shows herself to be a real sympathetic worker, and a standout bumper to boot, but I would say it's more of a complimentary period than a true case-builder for this list. The ARSION work, on the other hand, is absolutely unreal, and the bulk of her case. Just mind-meltingly great stuff with everyone from Rie Tamada to Ayako Hamada to Reggie Bennett to AKINO to Aja Kong. Her Queen of Arsion title matches against Hiromi Yagi and Mikiko Futagami in February and April of 1999 respectively are legit classics in my eyes, incredible in construction and execution. The speed and precision with which she moves on the mat made my jaw drop at various points over the course of watching her work, and cemented her as someone I felt compelled to vote for. Her later period work is also quite underrated in my view, too; she's often talked up as a peak candidate from 1998-2000––for good reason––but the Megumi Fujii match in 2003, the AtoZ tournament matches against both Hotta and Momoe Nakanishi on the same night, the 2004 Carlos Amano match, and the 2006 NEO title match against Yoshiko Tamura prove to me that she was still great well beyond that peak and her later years probably haven't received enough critical examination. Hell, her 2017 retirement match against Leon is still really solid and impressive, a respectable final match for a great that wrestled for nearly three decades. Mariko Yoshida's a lock to make my list. At her best in ARSION, her style makes even a style as celebrated as 90's AJW's seem stale and bland in comparison. One of the most compelling figures in Joshi history, and maybe second only to Shinjiro Otani in terms of convincing me that they actually give a shit about winning and losing a match. RECOMMENDED MATCHES: w/ Akira Hokuto vs. Bull Nakano & Kyoko Inoue (AJW 6/5/91) vs. KAORU (AJW 8/28/94) vs. Chaparita ASARI (AJW 8/4/96) vs. Reggie Bennett (ARSION 5/5/98) vs. Mika Akino (ARSION 1/17/99) vs. Hiromi Yagi (ARSION 2/18/99) vs. Mikiko Futagami (ARSION 4/14/99) vs. Aja Kong (ARSION 9/17/00) vs. Megumi Fujii (ARSION 5/24/03) vs. Yumiko Hotta (AtoZ 11/9/03) vs. Carlos Amano (GAEA 4/30/04) vs. Yoshiko Tamura (NEO 11/3/06)

I love Devil, but Chigusa at her best is arguably the best babyface of all time. Devil's best has never given me that kind of feeling, regardless of how more refined her style may have been.

Anyway, Adam Priest is a phenomenal pro wrestler, one of my favorites over the past three years. Not to compare them style-wise or even quality wise, but he has a Jim Breaks like approach to his matches when wrestling as a heel: he could outwrestle his opponents, but he’s too busy whining and throwing fits. Very very good as a babyface as well, so add that in for versatility. Wouldn’t consider him yet due to lack of longevity but he’s definitely a guy I could see being a major player in 2026, especially when Tony Khan inevitably signs him to a long-term contract.

If you ignore the contextualization for that relatively low ranking as well as the other, broader pool that has him much higher, then sure I could see that. Doesn’t change the fact that there are plenty of people that consider him one of, if not the best wrestler in the world.

On Voices of Wrestling’s list of top 50 wrestlers of 2025, Adam Priest ranked #40, additionally impressive considering his brand of professional wrestling does not normally mesh with the tastes of that specific site. In the 2024 VP100, Adam Priest ranked 15th, making 58 out of 84 ballots and outranking prominent names like Swerve Strickland, Will Ospreay and Gunther. He will probably finish just as high if not higher in 2025’s iteration, which rolls out next month.

We should absolutely nominate and vote for the best wrestlers ever based on attendance numbers, I agree.

Already nominated. https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/56217-cody-rhodes/

Just as input is super important to you, output is super important to me (as is input, to be clear!), and while I think it's a crowning achievement for Bret that he was able to have the amount of great matches he had in the environment that he did, it doesn't necessarily move me when I compare him to upper tier guys. That stuff is while he'll coast into my top 30 with ease, but it doesn't help his chances of cracking my top 10. To draw a comparison that's probably more favorable to you than the standard Pillars or Flair ones: is it more impressive that Bret at his peak was having great matches with Diesel and Backlund and post-peak Hennig than Aja was with peak Hokuto, Toyota, Bull, Kansai, etc? Probably, yeah, but Aja's output simply dwarfs Bret's to me, and I wouldn't even say he stands head and shoulders above Aja as an input candidate or even above her at all really, so I feel comfortable saying she's at minimum a top 10 wrestler ever while Bret's in that next tier or two down.

I've seen a decent amount of people say that Bret is in their top 10, or even their #1, and I still have yet to really understand why. Don't get me wrong, it's not for lack of enthusiasm towards him; he's probably one of my top 5 favorite wrestlers ever, but I can't really see him that high. He's like a perfect ideal of an input candidate, always offering thoughtful touches to his matches, great offense and selling and the like. However, the output, while great, leaves a little to be desired when you compare him to the very top tier guys, and he's obviously hurt by longevity. These are both understandable, the former of which due to the environments he worked in and the latter by his unfortunately premature retirement, but all the same they do stand as significant enough criticisms in my mind that I don't feel comfortable ranking him quite that high, despite having a deep love and admiration for his work. I am willing to be swayed, though, so does anyone have a good argument for Bret? Is there any Hart Foundation tags or Stampede work I'm missing that boosts his case so significantly?

I understand why his stock is down, and I promise I'm not commenting due to recency bias from his recent match with AJ Styles a couple days ago, but I really do feel like Nakamura's case might be getting overlooked. The WWE run is largely not great, but it's not like there aren't gems to be found in there, and I think his peak work in New Japan truly is as great now as it was in 2016 when he got on the list. I'm not as familiar with his 2000s work as Tanahashi's, but I love their series going back to early 2008 and I could see him getting boosted by a critical re-examination of that early run. If I vote for Nak, it'll be on the fringes since his last 10 years have been what they've been, but I do think he's worthy of discussion still.

Been going through Tanahashi's career for the last several months. I'm still in 2011 now, so I don't have a complete enough picture yet to make a concrete projection on where he'll end up for me, but needless to say it will be extraordinarily high, for the reasons provided above. Just such a compelling and intelligent performer that consistently gets me invested in his matches through his attention to detail, both within the match in a vacuum as well as in telling stories across a series of matches or sometimes a year or even multiple years as a whole. Great matches 22 years apart (2004 and 2026), with plenty in between. A defining worker of a generation who practically molded an entire group of highly acclaimed workers from the ground up.

Roddy is one of the first guys I think of when I think of the process of comparing wrestlers across eraS for this exercise. For example: Ted DiBiase finished at 42 in 2016, no doubt a beneficiary of so the 80s Mid-South set and some heavy pimping in his and other nominee forums. DiBiase retired at the age of 39 after a very respectable 19-year career, and the bulk of his case comes from a 4-5 year window in the mid-80s, primarily his Mid-South work but adding in some of his All Japan stuff and some strong title matches with Savage in the WWF. Not many people are making the case that DiBiase's run as the Million Dollar Man adds much to his GWE case, which is how he spent the last 7 years of his career. Strong, on the other hand, is 42 years old, 25 years into his career, has been, at worst a good but generic/flawed worker and, at best, one of if not the best wrestler on the planet, for 20 of those years, has shown he's still one of the best guys in the world in AEW the last two years, and has shown no signs of slowing down. I know DiBiase is probably a bit of low-hanging fruit, but Strong's resume just looks so much more impressive to me there, and that's against a guy that cracked the top 50 last time! It's that kind of logic that makes it easy for me to put more modern guys above wrestlers that have been hyped for decades, but I wonder how everyone else feels about it.

Yeah I was gonna say the same thing but didn’t really feel like fleshing out an argument. I think if you widen the scope to maybe 15 years it’s a much more representative sample size; perhaps even 10 years, with the obvious capacity for greatness afterwards (Misawa would benefit from this).

I really just have never bought the idea that Flair's had "15 years of crap" or any kind of detracting statement in regards to the twilight years of his active career; the idea that his WWE run is considered a negative for him, and a strong negative at that, is baffling to me, because I consider him to be a reliably solid member of the Ruthless Aggression era and honestly one of the better wrestlers on the roster period. I guess if you compared Flair in 2005 to Flair in 1985 then he doesn't stack up in comparison but...why would you do that? Flair at 56 is not gonna look the same as Flair at 36. I still think he had matches ranging from solid to genuinely great with the likes of Eddie Guerrero, Randy Orton, Chris Benoit, Shawn Michaels, Big Show, Mick Foley, and Triple H.