Mantaur Rodeo Clown

I thought the exact opposite. I think he's been terrible in AEW, mainly as his body has failed him and he lacks any of the explosiveness that made his act so exciting in his prime. Putting the belt on him was a horrible decision that reflected in the poor ratings and declining interest at the time. In contrast, having recently revisited his early NXT stuff, he looks great. He was clearly more motivated and in shape knowing it was likely his only chance to impress Vince/Hunter, and the Balor matches are actually well-worked breaths of fresh air to revisit. 10 years really does fly by. As an aside, I am still furious that Vince stopped their Dallas match to clean the blood off Joe's face. That was an all time gusher and made Joe look like an absolute killer. Instantly woke up the crowd who were drained from Nakamura/Zayn and made the match.

I don't want you to think I'm being ironic in anyway ohtani's jacket. This is actually a pretty fascinating post. The lines that jump out at me being This is such an interesting point. Danielson certainly saw how a gimmick on being the "American Dragon" who wrestled in Japan and was a shoot grappler would get over in 2000s independent wrestling world. He was a "master technician" long before he was a master, much like Ric Flair was a living legend long before he actually was. Living the gimmick. But yes, he had trouble selling himself as legit dangerous with his size and his lack of athleticism. Compare it with Kurt Angle or Brock Lesnar who also had the shooter gimmicks, but moved so differently in the ring. If you've haven't watched Wrestling Road Diaries in a while, please revisit it. It is just 90 minutes of camcorder footage showing that Bryan Danielson GETS the business. He is a worker in the old school sense. That's why he made it to WWE before so many of his peers, and why McMahon saw he would have a use for him. How many people get fired for fucking up a major angle with a shoot necktie choke, and get hired back straight away? I think he did his better stuff much later in his career, when he gave up trying to be "legit" and just worked as a canny, veteran wrestler who can take a beating. His Brock match is actually fantastic, he had some genuinely classy matches with Orton on Raw in 2013, and his AEW run has more hits than misses, which is rare for someone with as many miles on their body as he has.

Don't understand anyone not considering him for top 100. Consistency obviously has a place, but when a wrestler's ceiling is THAT high, if they have THAT sort of command of a crowd for so long, they're one of the greats. See: Okada, Nakamura, Orton I don't think lazy is ever the right term. No pro wrestler is lazy. There are much easier way to be lazy than take bumps every single week. You just work yourself into the bosses ear, or you stay at home for months due to creative differences. Lazy is Kevin Nash in WCW. It's Miro in AEW. The more correct term is unambitious. Nakamura has an over act, Orton has an over finish, why mess with an all-time great formula. Keiji Mutoh had the fans hooked just on pure presence and aura. Because he was that good. Revisited some of the Tenryu matches in '99. Just good plain fun with surly old man Tenryu against Norwood 4 Mutoh. Then the spectacle slop brawls with Jinsei Shinzaki and Liger. The 2002 Kawada match another classic in his renaissance, where he was probably more influential than we give him credit for, in terms of pacing, momentum and big finishes.

I mean of course, minimalist with respect to his current role in AEW. He is merely Jerry Lawler in comparison to guys like Ospreay, Fletcher, Takeshita et al. Obviously nobody actually wrestles like Jerry Lawler these days, because then they wouldn't get booked. I think there's something to be said for being a flexible, versatile base when you're a heel. Instead of just overpowering every match and making it a Flair match or an MJF match or an Ospreay match, a heel who can adapt and showcase the face more is actually a talent. Whether that means he can't raise a mediocre wrestler up is another thing

I can't see how you can praise Ospreay and then damn Omega at the same time. He is essentially just baby-Omega, but with less sense of match structure or pacing. He is every bit as "pretentious" as Omega, just with less presentation skills. It's interesting you say he'll be number one in a decade, because unless he learns to actually work a match on something other than his freakish athleticism, I think he will decline rapidly and people will sour on him.

The Rock stopped being a full-time wrestler, at the peak of his powers, at the age of 31. Most wrestlers don't even have it figured out by then, and he was the biggest star in the world. And now he is more famous than any wrestler ever, barring perhaps Andre. As such, he is the greatest What If of all time. Magnum T.A would have been big time. Brian Pillman would have been electrifying during the Attitude Era. Bret could have had a great return run after WCW folded. But none of them would have been The Rock if he had stayed through the 2000s. The impact on him leaving on business was clear, and when he did return to skyrocket ratings again, he'd simply been away too long and lost too much. ' For that reason, I don't think he can be rated at the top end of any list. But a shoe-in for the top 100.

While I'd be delighted to be wrong, I'm fairly certain Omega is now well and truly on the downslope of his career and we've probably seen the best performances we're ever going to see out of him. It makes it appropriate then to judge him now. I think he is a very talented wrestler with a good, well-rounded act. He is a middling promo in English, and a surprisingly compelling one in Japanese. He is versatile as both a heel and a face and can work a midcard comedy match as well as an hour-long main event. He is also a terrific hardcore wrestler. In terms of the industry, it might be harder to find a single wrestler that has had a greater impact in transforming the landscape of professional wrestling in the past 10 years than Omega. A feather in his cap. Omega's uncompromising pursuit of his vision of professional wrestling does however, come with downsides. It has limited him and his performances to a certain degree. He errs into hokey, cartoonish selling too often, and falls into his classic tropes without variation too often. His matches and acclaim have in part contributed to a cargo cult pursuit of high spots and explosive action for crowd reaction that ultimately had harmed professional wrestling, although he can't be held to account too much for that. And I don't know if I've ever seen a greater chasm between how good a wrestler is and how shitty their gear looks. On the Okada series alone, he would make my top 100. How high he goes will take some revisiting. I have watched him wrestle live several times, including being lucky enough to watch him put together a very good match in Tokyo, (over)rated 5 stars by WON. But there is an undeniable presence to him and electricity to his work live that makes me thing he is destined to go down as at least one of the top 25 wrestlers of all time.

I do not think Samoa Joe was much better in 2022/23 than he was ten years earlier. Booked much stronger maybe, but clearly slower and less explosive, which formed a pivotal part of his act. I mean Tozawa is probably a rough one to judge as well, simply because his situation in WWE is so different to his time in Dragon Gate or the American indies. He very clearly has a comedy role, which doesn't afford him much opportunity to show off what he can do in long, serious matches. On the flip side, I am certain he makes more money than he has ever made in his life and is much less at risk of injury. How do we judge someone who makes those life choices? Is it unfair to criticize them? That's the main point I'm driving at. Nakamura is probably your key example. Obviously he was older and worn down from working a very hard style for so many years, but it's clear he took an early retirement after his NXT debut, and has never really shown the greatness we saw in the early 2010s despite being given many opportunities to do so. It might be more fair to criticize Nakamura for it, but again, what obligation does he have to us to kill himself in matches and not enjoy surfing on the beach and hanging out with his family? I will absolutely pay your first point. It shows adaptability and versatility. Truly great wrestlers get over everywhere, no matter what they're given. They turn chicken shit into chicken salad. One of the biggest feathers in Danielson's cap is he got over in WWE despite being given very little and being put in a position where many would have failed. As for your second, that's all down to personal preference, which I respect. The truth is that so many wrestlers simply do not get the chance to be consistent. Injuries, booking, changes in the industry, personal issues. A pro wrestler staying healthy, clean of substance abuse, well-booked and kept in prominent positions where they can show off their stuff in the best light. So very few get the chance to do this for 10-15 years. But many more get the chance to do it for a few years at a time. I feel like it brings an element of luck into the discussion, which is far harder to measure. I appreciate you straightening out the analogy, you're correct. My point was, no one with a brain should detract from Coppola's work on Apocalypse Now or The Godfather simply because he made a bad movie at the age of 85 in an exercise that was the Hollywood equivalent of yardtarding. A great match reflects on a wrestler forever, and their eventual decline due to unavoidable circumstances should not detract from their legacy. If Ric Flair had truly retired in 2008, his legacy would be far more dignified to many people. But to fault him for a) needing money and b) truly loving and needing wrestling more than any of us on this site ever could, seems like an unfair way to criticize a pro wrestler when determining their overall greatness.

I reject the premise of your post. You say you don't count aging as a factor, then list Samoa Joe, who is a perfect example of someone becoming worse because of being worn down by age and injuries. In 95 per cent of cases, a wrestler will be bad to start with, then hit their peak, then slowly get worse as age and injuries accumulate. Very few exceptions break this trend. You should judge someone on the best parts of their career, their ceiling. To judge someone for continually wrestling after their body breaks down is unfair, and doesn't take into account the financial reality of wrestling as a job rather than a purely creative pursuit. A great film does not get diminished if a director has made a few flops since then. Why should pro wrestling be any different?

Psshhhh. Ospreay is tough. On one hand, I find his matches interminably dull. Just spot after spot with no rhyme or reason, 90 per cent of the match wrestled at a sprint with only a cursory nod towards something resembling selling or a storyline. He has no real versatility whatsoever and just does one single match, a maximalist spotfest that goes 10 minutes too long. Even worse, I think his matches selfishly burn out crowds, showing a lack of restraint that hurts the rest of the card. Get your shit in and fuck the rest of the boys in the back. He has an average look and is a cringeworthy promo. But with all that being said, there is no doubt he will be one of the most influential wrestlers of his era. Wrestlers coming into the business do and will continue to want to wrestle like Ospreay. They want the oohs and ahhs of the crowd brought about by his clearly elite athleticism. His pace is so quick that it actually does elevate many opponents who otherwise would be content to sleepwalk through a match (Okada) and forces them to work at a pace more in tune with the ADHD modern audiences that he thrives in front of. He clearly loves wrestling, and has been devoted to growing it as an artform all around the world with his particular vision. I hate his style and I hate the direction he has moved professional wrestling, but there are many who think he is clearly the greatest of his generation because they hold opposite views. Open to being convinced of his greatness, but his recent run in AEW against guys like Fletcher/Takeshita and the like have only magnified his worst impulses.

Jay White Inexplicably does not have a nomination yet despite being a fairly prominent wrestler over the past 10 years or so. Jay White exemplifies a minimalism that clashes strongly with current North American wrestling's obsession with maximalist. More spots, more near falls, more finishes, more crowd chants, more stipulations, more everything. Jay White has a less-is-more attitude that makes him stand apart from his peers, but ultimately makes him mismatched from his current booking and overlooked. A tremendous look, a good promo, a solid base for different styles of wrestling and an endless gas tank that makes him versatile as wrestler. He may simply just be too young still (32 at time of posting) to rank in the top 100, but he is certainly putting together a very good resume. Matches Cash Wheeler & Dax Harwood vs Jay White & Juice Robinson - AEW Collision, 07.15.2023 To my mind, the best tag team match of the decade so far. Everything is picture perfect, every wrestler working in concert and combining beyond the sum of their parts. As Salieri says, move one note and there would be diminishment. Jay White is stellar in this match, phenomenally selling the fatigue of the match and getting the stipulation over. The visual of Juice dragging Jay back to a corner after a fall, and Jay selling like death in his lap is absolute gold. Jay White vs Adam Page - AEW Wrestledream, 10.12.2024 Any of their matches together are very good, and veer away from the trend of AEW matches in this period. They don't go for diminishing returns with endless kickouts. They don't trade momentum back and forth endlessly until any throughline is lost. Good, solid legwork leading up to a spectacular finish. Jay's smoothness in the ring is clear in the match, as is his ability to read a crowd and adjust. Jay White vs Kota Ibushi - NJPW G1 Climax 2019 - 08.12.2019 Just a wonderful, bombastic performance in the NJPW style, at the tale end of the era for this sort of match. Wonderful heel work throughout by Jay, probably the career performance up to that point for him. Jay White vs Juice Robinson - NJPW G1 Special in San Francisco, 07.07.2018. The match is great, but for me, this is all about the one spot where Jay White suplexes Juice into the barricade, knocking Jim Ross over. Apparently, JR had voiced his concerns earlier in the day about it. Before you know it, Josh Barnett is acting like a mega-mark, storming the ring to protect the honor of his commentary partner. Is it a work? Is it a shoot? I don't know. Either way, Jay White's reaction (planned or improvised) is pure heel genius.

In the running for my number one spot. The guy was just born to be a professional wrestler, and every day I get down on my knees and thank Mrs Stone Cold for bringing that little kid from Edna, Texas to the Dallas Sportatorium to let him dream. In ring classics, legendary promos, iconic look, incredible versatility and unmatched impact on the business and art of professional wrestling. His only detriment is that the mind was willing, but the body was weak. Injuries hampered and eventually prematurely ended a GOAT career. If he had the fortune of wrestling as long as the other old timers like Taker, Shawn and HHH, this wouldn't even be a discussion.

I think I would have a lot more love for Haitch if he had ever learned how to be a face. Contrary to popular belief, he can work. He's just not a very sympathetic guy naturally, having the body of a Greek God. There's no impulse to cheer him on as an underdog, and while he certainly tried many time during his career to be the "cool" face, the truth is that he is a wrestling nerd like the rest of us and isn't cool. Hence most, if not all of his face runs, were abject failures to me. I cringe thinking about how hot his 2002 return wasa, and how quickly Hogan stole his thunder. How much he clung to the DX branding in 2006, and absolutely drowned on during his face run in 2008 on Smackdown. The desperate beg for applause and sympathy after the Brock matches. Can you be the best wrestler of all time if you can only really play a heel successfully? Food for thought.

I can't see it, personally. I'm sure many fans enjoyed his NXT matches with Gargano, but to me they represented the worst, most overindulgent impulses of the wrestling business at the time. Two wrestlers performing out their own trite MARVEL movie of a match, escalating continually with no consequences, borrowing the worst excesses from Reseda and inserting it in front of an overly generous crowd. Cole has never really progressed past this point for me. He has never shown me truly great selling or psychology, nor have any of his matches wowed me with the structure or clever pacing. I also find him tremendously overrated on the mic, a beneficiary of being a big fish in a tiny pond and one of the only people on the indies at the time that didn't sound like they had some sort of learning disorder. Let's not get into his look. I would love to be convinced otherwise, but I feel as though I've seen all his must-watch matches, including the "star-making" 2012 match against O'Reilly which was saved by the color. Will reassess.

Hello all and thank you for having me on your forum. I thought I would jot down my own criteria for what makes the greatest wrestler ever, mainly to hold myself to account with a strict, at least partly quantifiable rubric. But as all of us fans of pro wrestling know, sometimes there’s just a magic that can’t be quantified. In any case, here are five points I will be considered when ranking my greatest wrestler ever. 1. Look/Presence The first criteria is the one that is most immediately apparent. The airport test. The look. The aura. The presence. Wrestlers, of course, may not have a lot of control over their gimmick. They may not be able to choose what they wear. They may not be able to choose how tall they are, or how much hair they can grow. But they do have a choice in how they look. The Shockmaster may have been a shit gimmick, but Lex Luger would have looked a hell of a lot better under that bedazzled Stormtrooper helmet than Fred Ottman. But it is not all about muscles, rips and tears and striations and vascularity. Your presence and body language is just as important in the ring. Tajiri has always had a pretty unimpressive physique, and I would characterize his ring gear as “fancy trash bag pants”. But the way he moved in the ring made him seem quick, sudden, lethal. How many times have bookers tried to replicate Goldberg, and how many have failed because they lacked his physical charisma? The greatest wrestler of all time will have a great look and presence. 2. In-ring ability I characterize this as everything a wrestler does from bell-to-bell. It means the spots, it means the moves, it means the worked punches, it means the selling, the bumping, the flips, the dives, the flops and the finishes. But it also measures how good someone is at the art of professional wrestling. The art of the blade job, of the hot tag, the bump and feed. How quickly a match can be re-called on the fly to win a crowd back, or settle them down for a long haul. How good is someone at getting their opponent over, of getting an angle over, of being unselfish, or being incredibly selfish when the time demands. It also measures how safe a wrestler is. Wrestling is a work. It’s kayfabe. It is fake and gay. Hurting your opponent is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, and in my mind, an unsafe worker could never be the greatest wrestler of all time. 3. Promo If I wanted to watch amateur wrestling, I would. But I want great promos. I want great angles. I want to believe, and it’s still real to me damn it. This measures how good someone is at cutting promos, of selling me on a match. Of giving interviews, of controlling a live audience. This is an incredibly important aspect of being a wrestler. There’s an obvious barrier in that I do not speak Spanish and I do not speak Japanese. But human connection more often than not transcends the language barrier. I don’t need to speak Japanese to hear the crowd’s adoration for Naito and their indifference to Shota Umino. I can hear it clear as day. Some international promotions do not have as many promos as North American companies. But then, some wrestlers do not have as many matches available on tape. It’s all a balancing act. But the greatest wrestler of all time will be a great promo. 4. Versatility I believe William Regal was the first person I ever heard refer to what he did as his “act”. But it’s a perfect description. Every wrestler has an act, like a vaudeville show. The five moves of doom. The classic NWA Flair match. The PWG Superkick party. All instantly recognisable acts. It is my belief that in order to be a truly great wrestler, you must be versatile enough to perform several different acts. Babyface and heel. Traditional pro wrestling and hardcore. Singles and tag-team. There are exceptions. Ricky Steamboat only really ever had one act, the babyface, he just happened to be perhaps the greatest babyface of all time. But the true greats push themselves outside their comfort zones, work opponents and matches and crowds and buildings and stipulations and time limits of all shapes and sizes. The greatest wrestler of all time is versatile. 5. Impact and influence This criteria is my most tenuous, but I believe important all the same. How much impact has a wrestler been on the art or the business of professional wrestling? Truly great artists are copied, satirized, mocked, aped, revered, discussed ad nauseum. Why should pro wrestling be any different? This will, as a matter of course, be slanted towards older wrestlers who have the benefit of time. Who knows if someone like Jungle Boy Jack Perry will go on to be influential to generations of fans? (He won’t). But there are wrestlers we know for certain that have already been canonized as incredibly influential on the pro wrestling business. Shawn Michaels is a wrestler that has been both lauded and torn to shreds by different parts of the wrestling community. But I don’t think anyone can deny the influence he had on the next generation of wrestlers. From high spots to match structure, a portion of the generation of wrestlers after him emulated him as a high watermark for the professional wrestling they wanted to achieve. Whether the outcome was for better or for worse remains to be argued. But I believe the greatest wrestler of all time must be influential. In summing up, I only note that you should not give a single fuck about my criteria. They are mine, and mine alone. I certainly don’t care about your criteria, and that’s exactly as it should be. It’s the beauty of discussions like this, and I can’t wait to discuss it all with you over the coming period.