Mantaur Rodeo Clown

I've read through this thread and still have no clear conception of what the benefits to the nomination process are, outside of gatekeeping. Judging from the activity on most nomination threads as Ell McKell has mentioned, it hasn't spurred discussion. I think we need to also be realistic about how big a barrier of entry it is to the discussion and to the project, particularly with how far in the future 2036 will be. The nomination process would have to be significantly improved from now. I also don't think we should be punishing people who only found out about the project when voting got underway, as it is natural that is the exact moment it would break through to the public. Nobody is going to be going on twitter saying "Here my GWE poll for 2036, remember voting opens seven years from now guys!" Finally, the point that rankles me most is when I've read "well it's a non-issue, because [this wrestler who was not nominated] barely got any votes at all". That's a strange attitude to have, given there may well have been lots of voters who simply followed the rules and only voted for those who were nominated, even if they really liked BxB Hulk or Taz or whoever. You're essentially punishing people who can read instructions.

I can already tell you have the reading comprehension of a 14 year old child, because you do the annoying thing where you respond to a legitimate concern with a completely different tangent that has nothing to do with the price of cheese. My argument is that discourse has been reduced to such base elements that there is no room for reasonable discourse. It is precisely the reason why a push for Jerry Blackwell would mean fuck all. Because someone can just get 100k more likes saying "lmao Jerry PEDOwell? Over THE Goldberg?? This dude doesnt like Goldberg spearing Nunzio??? [clown emoji x3]" Dunk culture ENCOURAGES mediocre wrestlers getting nominated, because intelligent rebuttals are silenced. Which brings us to a ridiculous claim like "Lulu Pencil is better than Gentleman Chris Adams" I have eyes, for one. I don't consider them to be "people" at all. Yes I am very glad that the 25 or so incels that go to ChocoPro shows connected with her. But that doesn't make her anywhere close to one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. Just any random match you google of hers is actually an embarrassment, and the equivalent to watching your nephew play with action figures. As in, they actively make the art of professional wrestling worse by existing. Rehearsed, high school theater-kid level antics. If people connect with this, then they aren't really fans of the sport of professional wrestling. They probably also "connect" with funny videos they see on TikTok or video essays about speedrunning Sonic games. I get it man. You have some weird hang up about this meme middle aged Japanese woman. But seriously trying to imply that Chris Adams never connected with a crowd (a crowd of thousands of actual wrestling fans by the way) is veering into straight delusion. Adams showed incredible emotion through his matches, as both a heel and a face. Adams did it for longer, in front of bigger and more varied crowds, and did it better. Lulu Pencil is physically incapable of doing anything he did. Lulu Pencil's entire career is a low.

I can definitely see this argument, not just with AEW but all modern wrestling. The amount of non-bullshit finishes alone comparatively makes someone's match quality instantly soar. There's a bit to it too with opportunity (Roman Reigns and John Cena have been given more opportunities to have "good" matches on PPV than most wrestlers will ever receive), but I think most voters do try to adjust for that.

I'm not sure why you have cherry picked a period from 1989 - 1996, which makes absolutely no sense and flies in the face of the argument of recency bias. It's like literally the opposite thing to what I'm arguing. A comparison would be to analyze how many of the 2016 Top 200 were actively wrestling in one company at the time of the poll. For WWE, I count 11 in the top 200, and that's even account for the fact that there was a much smaller pool to choose from. For NJPW I think it's something like 5. To say AEW isn't an outlier just isn't true. We don't know the final list yet, but it is very likely AEW will beat those figures handily.

Firstly, let me just say thank you for writing such a long, detailed post. Always appreciate the efforts. I think you are slightly off-base with your train of thought, but love the response anyways. To say that a company that has only existed for 7 or so years (and those years being the LAST 7 years, including a pandemic) but somehow managed to have over 12.5 per cent of the greatest 200 wrestlers to have ever lived on planet earth wrestle for them is a mathematical oddity, to say the least. I mean here's the problem here. You don't see a problem with them making it that high, so nothing to see here? Except there are undoubtedly others, myself included, who find it laughable that they ranked so highly. So where are we at now? The argument is that, taken out of time and context, they do not nearly have the bodies of work to support their positions when measured against wrestlers far below them. MJF being a prime example. I'm under the impression most people are voting based on the in-ring ability of a wrestler. Which makes his placement all the more ridiculous. His booking and lack of house show appearances means he has the equivalent of maybe a couple years work under his belt compared to an 80s worker on their schedule. I'd say his match catalogue is filled with self-indulgent, awful overbooking and overreaches. The argument is, without a significant boost from recency bias and AEW fans who have never actually watched the guys he is desperately trying to emulate and steal from, he wouldn't be considered by multiple voters (!!!) as a top 3 wrestler of all time, let alone top 100. I don't understand this. He did make the list. The whole list is what we're discussing. I mean, just because there are 100 entries doesn't mean the list ends there. Particularly how the master list has previous years going back into the 100s. He's still on the list, and hundreds of spots above wrestlers whose primes were decades before him and thus probably suffered. I understand your point, but the odds aren't in your favor. We're trying to discover who the greatest wrestler of all time is. It is natural that people whose careers have ended and that we have had years to watch and study will do better. We are judging on accomplishments. Not the potential of someone looking forward, or someone whose career is still nascent. It is the same in any field, be it films, music or literature. It is very rare that any greatest list is filled with films from the past 5 years. It isn't nostalgia, it's merely mathematical sense. What are the odds that not only are many of the greatest wrestlers of all time wrestling right at this moment, but that they are also already among the greatest while halfway through their careers? What are the odds that these modern wrestlers have already superseded those who had careers that stretched decades longer and have survived through the decades by the power of their work? And I respectfully disagree. I'm not saying people like Bianca Belair or Konosuke Takeshita aren't talented. I'm saying we have barely even seen their careers take shape yet, and their strong performances are only explained by a lot of younger voters.

They were just names pulled out of thin air. I could just have easily have said Mike Bailey or MJF or Swerve Strickland , all of whom fit in the same category of being beneficiaries of wrestling in AEW, and none of whom I believe are warranting of a top 100 vote in a conversation about the greatest of all time.

It probably helps to delineate between "AEW guy" and "guy who has wrestled in AEW". I don't think anyone considers Okada an AEW guy, despite him being there for years. Same too with say, Punk as a "WWE" guy when technically he's been all over. The overrepresentation comes from guys who I don't think have pedigree at all to be in the conversation, but have just happened to work at AEW throughout a hot period. Like Jungle Boy or Kyle Fletcher et al. This also so tied to the fact that it was much harder for people around the world to access ROH in 2006. You're putting in serious work if you're trying to watch that as someone in South Africa or Brazil etc. Whereas even people in the developing world can watch 1080p highlights of AEW Dynamite from the comfort of their toilet. So that obviously influences voting more. If those ROH DVDs were easy to access, maybe the vote would have looked different. Ah well you've just said it

That’s interesting, but tracks with what I was saying regarding the change in the fanbase, and of internet wrestling culture over the past 20 years. More focus on learning and discovering vs a focus it seems on having your in-group wrestlers “win” and beat the out-group wrestlers. Again, I also understand it’s also the widest voting pool yet this year, so that probably influences it too.

Isn’t this a fairly banal observation though? WWE has consistently had one of the best rosters, if not the best roster, in the world since the 1980s. It’s natural a company paying seven figures in US dollars will have this. The argument is more if AEW wrestlers are overrepresented because of internet smark fandom. I honestly don’t know the answer, but I assume 2006 was much more full of ROH/TNA representatives for similar reasons

lol It’s evident that is NOT what everyone is doing. People are voting on different lines, be they cultural, political or social, animal, vegetable or mineral. You will never be able to control how or why people vote. But certainly I think the excitement or discovery aspect is not prevalent. All the reactions I have seen online have been about rankings, about who voted for who, and how high. “Oh thank god so-and-so dropped! I can’t believe this person isn’t ranked higher!” It’s quantitative discussion, it’s stats, it’s become analytics and taken as fact. It is very much about the list first and foremost, even if as you say, that’s not what it should be about. Maybe there are posts out there asking for Mad Dog Vachon recommendations, I don’t know. But the list is a reflection of where a certain subsection of the community is at, how they view wrestling, and how they believe it should be discussed.

What you are describing is normal, natural and unavoidable. In the same way that someone born in 1975 might naturally think 80s JCP was the greatest wrestling ever put to tape. Humans have a natural inclination to mistake the novelty of things they consume in their youth for profundity, and must argue towards its historical import in order to justify their own positions. If the wrestling I like is the best ever, it must reflect well on me for having superior tastes. (No I am not referring to YOU with this post, you narcissist. Not everything is a personal attack, you are on this website. You are clearly an autist too.) I have said previously, For someone born in 2005, which might well be the median voting age, AEW's rise represents the first time in their entire lives there has been something resembling competition in the North American market, it's understandable that would excite them. What you are missing is how the wrestling community, and society at large has changed from 2006 to 2016 and onwards to now. This forum is a fine example. An absolute husk of a website that is buoyed by this project, but otherwise only a vestigial tumor that is referred to obliquely on the actual dominant forums of X, Discord, Reddit. All of these platforms boost the dominant group-think opinion, and more importantly, stifle genuine criticism and argument. Whereas in 2006 one could have long, detailed conversations over the course of day or even weeks on wrestlers, with thoughtful replies and research, this has been replaced by a frenetic "I must dunk on my interlocutor" culture limited to three sentences or less. This works in tandem with a sort of toxic positivity that has pervaded the space in the past decade or so. Previously, on a forum such as this, another person would tell you that "actually no, Lulu Pencil isn't a better wrestler than Chris Adams you fucking [Eugene], watch some more wrestling, mark". That simply does not happen on modern social media platforms, everyone wrapped in swaddling clothes in their echo chambers. In fact the most engagement I've ever got on this forum was a PM telling me I had said a nasty word. The GWE discord is horrific with this, full of parasocial weirdos with strange Freudian psychosexual hangups about joshi. (No, I'm not talking about you and your GENUINE love for Aja Kong, stop making this about YOU.) As El Boricua rightly points out, there is no pushback against the recency bias that infests so much criticism, because anyone that would have coherently offered an argument is a) normal and has kids to raise or b) shouted down by the teeming masses who think Bianca Belair is worthy of being 400 places above Dan Kroffat. No, you're all wrong, and you're all [Eugene]. So when you are a young impressionable teenager, and you think AEW wrestlers (or Ice Ribbon or whatever the fuck) are the best of all time, and no one is disavowing you of that notion like they used to, it becomes a universal truth. As such, it is natural that other wrestlers will fall, with no sustained campaign for them. The only ones to really survive are the types that have been Ned Flanderized into WHOLESOME HECKIN CHUNGUS GRANDPAS like Terry Funk or Negro Casas. There are many, many sub-95 IQ slop posters online who must prove their bonafides, and thus choose to blindly swallow narratives about an obviously great wrestler who importantly has no problematic moral issues or ties to current doubleplusnotgood ideologies that can be used as signifier of someone with taste. "It doesn't matter my shitty opinion on such-and-such because I like Terry Funk, and this proves my knowledge". I would say they have all watched about four Terry Funk/Negro Casas matches collectively. The list is actually a fairly accurate reflection of the fanbase (the semi-orgiastic celebrations after Rollins and HHH appeared spring to mind), not any reflection of actual talent or canon.

HHH is a good wrestler. Without sounding too harsh, he's a victim of a system that constantly rewards mediocrity. He was good in the Shield, decent in his first singles heel run in the WWE. Nothing exceptional but nothing to warrant the criticism he gets now. But he was simply continually pushed, as part of the chosen crew they were going with (see: Roman) and there was no way they were ever going to stop pushing him. Unlike wrestlers who constantly feel their place on the card under threat, he never had to adapt, evolve and grow as a wrestler. So while his act has stagnated, his body has continued to deteriorate, meaning he can't even cover up these deficiencies like he used to be able to a decade ago. If you'd put him in the cutthroat environment of the 80s or 90s, he'd have been dropped down the opening match long ago.

I'm inclined to agree, and I think its just natural as time passes. For a lot of voters of a certain age, 2012-2014 NJPW is likely the first time they'd ever watched a Japanese promotion while it made a hot run. Not digging up old tapes of 90s Champions Carnival matches, but actually watching it live as it happened, with wrestlers who were visiting your city, and had t-shirt you could buy. It's natural that has an impact on any wrestling fans. For the same reason 2021-2023ish AEW/WWE will both rate highly as time goes on. For many votes (and more every year) it will be the first time they ever experienced the North American scene being truly hot with two companies firing on all cylinders. Some very good wrestlers from yesteryear will be hard done by, but such is the way of things

Please do continue, always enjoy seeing posts with a bit of effort put in, so your views are greatly appreciated. Top kek. The fact that Aries has pretty much worked everywhere and even got a decent WWE run despite his outrageously bad reputation of being difficult to work with speaks to his talent. A guy that size in the business probably always felt he had a chip on his shoulder at the best of times, but really couldn't stop being his own worst enemy for long enough to produce consistently great stuff.

Promo: 4/10 Matches: 5/10 Look: 11/10 Sid is pretty much what every pro wrestler should aspire to look like. Sadly it's not enough to get him over the line. You could maybe argue he's one of the better squash match workers in the history of the business, but I don't even think he has that stitched up. Obviously Goldberg and even guys like Razor are far ahead of him in that department. Always glad to see Sid though, you just wish he a) cared about wrestling more and b) could actually wrestle

I'm talking about more broadly, not just this dead website. Most discussion these days happens on Twitter, Reddit and Discord, populated by people who were in fact childhood fans back then. And they all think he was great. It is also funny to read those posts you linked, which just go to show how myopic wrestling fans have always been, Phil Schneider saying "Shawn Micheals is personally the most loathsome thing in wrestling. I have such a visceral hatred of him, the fact I enjoyed this match as much as I did was pretty much a miracle, and it was all Cena." Clearly so far from being able to objectively look at a match it's hilarious.

This. We're giving the guy credit for being so good despite his limitations. Are we giving Hornswoggle the same benefit then? Kerry Von Erich should be a shoe-in for top 3 considering his limitations post-accident. Just because the matches are good in the circumstances doesn't mean Andre's matches aren't objectively much worse than when he was mobile, and don't aggressively rely on your suspension of disbelief for when he falls into the ropes and gets tangled for the 80th time because he needs to sit down, or needs to rest on someone in the corner for five minutes. Oh he's standing there again doing the spot where he chokes someone with his singlet strap in full view of the referee, because he can't bump anymore. If you're watching it without the foreknowledge that his body is deteriorating rapidly, it just looks like a you're watching a slow, lazy worker. I'm not saying he wasn't a decent worker by late 80s standards, but people are giving him far too much credit simply because he was Andre, he was over from years of having actually good match, and they very much want to like him.

Why would you even bother posting this instead of adding something substantiative? The amount of people crawling out of the woodwork on this normally dead forum to support this ludicrous nomination would be comical if it wasn't so sad.

People on this forum have this weird habit of taking one off-hand line and trying to frame it as your entire argument. I notice the criticisms I made about his actual work didn't merit a response? Or is it some sort of statement that modern wrestling is so bad that a competent journeyman is the best thing going right now? But let's go with this point on crowd sizes. I'm obviously not saying that The Rock performing in front of bigger crowds makes him a better wrestler than Adam Priest. It would clearly make this a moot exercise. But crowd sizes/drawing absolutely are contributing factors in trying to determine the greatest, in two ways: 1. It is easier to pop a small crowd than a big crowd This is pretty clear to anyone who has ever been to a small indie show in their life. Expectations are lower. Tickets are cheaper. Everyone is pretty much seated front row. It is so much easier for a performer to work a crowd when everyone is a few feet away, able to study their facial reactions, hear their banter with the ref, scramble out of the way when the brawl spills near them. Everything was over in Reseda. Everything is over at my local indie that runs once a month. You say it's a credit to Preist's case that he can get over in front of 100 people. Some of the worst wrestlers I've ever seen have been over in front of 100 people. Hell, Flex Kavana was over in the USWA despite being the drizzling shits, because there were 40 people in the audience. But getting a match over in front of 10,000 people at a Smackdown taping in Corpus Christi is a completely different skillset, and given the strictures of TV you mentioned, far more difficult. Clearly The Rock is capable of getting a match over with a huge crowd. Curt Hawkins said that when he's working out his matches, he even compensates his timing for the crowd heat he knows will be there. Is Adam Priest capable on entertaining a big crowd in an arena? We simply do not have that data. What's the biggest crowd he's ever had a match in front of? One match in front of less than 2,000 people at a Collision taping? One of the greatest wrestlers of all time needs to have a wide and varied skillset, and we don't even have this basic data point that hundreds of other wrestlers do. 2. Your employability is symptomatic of your pro wrestling ability Everyone will be quick to jump to the defence of indie wrestlers. But the question is: if Adam Priest was indeed the best wrestler in the world for multiple years, or even top 40 comfortably: why hasn't he been signed anywhere? WWE vacuums up most talent in the world, AEW is run by a guy who famously hires anyone and everyone. TNA is desperate for talent, international promotions too. You're telling me this guy is the best wrestler on the planet at some stage, in the pantheon of Funk, Misawa, Tenryu, Flair et al. and he can't even get hired by a major promotion outside a couple of freelance dates? What are these companies - with decades of experience and/or virtually limitless resources - missing? Could it be that in fact he is not as highly lauded as everyone says and that he's just an average wrestler that some people have blown out of proportion? Unless this guy is snorting oxy and posting antisemitic conspiracies on X, there's probably a reason with his work as to why he hasn't been snapped up. The brief of evidence would suggest the wider pro wrestling world agrees with my take. I am still waiting for someone, anyone to actually pitch him to me as a Top 100 candidate. This discussion could have taken place in any number of threads, mind you. I reiterate, this is not to say he is a bad wrestler. It is to say there are certainly 100 wrestlers who have ever lived that are better than him in almost every facet.

At this point, he has to make the cut. And that's taking into consideration he lost 7 years of his career to an MMA dalliance that most other wrestlers simply would not survive the utter shame of. Everything he touches, he makes better. That's not to say he hasn't been a part of stinkers or boring matches. But he has made a career out of making the best of angles/matches/characters. Because he understands professional wrestling on a fundamental level that you really only see with the true greats of the sport. Honestly, half of what made his feud with Drew so compelling is the fact they were polar opposites. Drew has every physical gift in the world that Punk clearly does not have. But he doesn't get it. He doesn't have an intuitive feel for pro wrestling, and it's why he never broke through to the next level. His post-UFC run has been good enough to push him up a dozen ranks or so. He won't be nipping at Ric Flair's heels any time soon at the top of the list, but he's absolutely top 100.

I don't want it to seem like I'm singling you out or being a dick, I'm just saying this as a point of comparison since you brought up "low 90s". You yourself have said that The Rock would be a 90-100 ranking on your list, for a variety of well-considered reasons. So people putting Adam Priest even in that last decile is outrageous praise. I'm sure The Rock was fun to watch live as well. He just happened to wrestle in front of tens of thousands of people each night, instead of 100 people in a rec center in Tyrone, Georgia. I'd also say The Rock was far closer to being the best in the world at one stage than Adam Priest has ever been. Again, I'm not coming at you as you mentioned he won't make your list. But I think people have the blinders on for wrestlers they've had the chance to see live, or feel like they've caught early in their careers, and blown things way out of proportion.

The fact that someone would actually nominate Adam Priest as in contention for "the greatest or most significant or most influential" pro wrestler ever only tells you how far pro wrestling still is from becoming a serious art. I'm not saying he's bad, he performs very competently, hits his spots, doesn't fuck up. But come on. The best guys on your local indie show is still just the best guy on your local indie show. I mean this Anthony Henry match. That's what someone is suggesting is GOAT material? I mean he's taking a jumping tombstone piledriver onto a chair, kicking out, and then completely no selling it 30 seconds later so he can rapidly do his figure-4 spot they worked out in the back. Or this Slim J match. What happens? Yeah they just do a bunch of spots and trade momentum back and forth. Adam Priest does a few heat spots that last approximately 50 seconds. There's an apron bump. I am literally just describing any undercard match on any episode of AEW Collision. I'm supposed to watch this, and then watch Flair/Steamboat or Kobashi/Hansen and try compare them? I understand people have some sort of attachment to people they've seen live. Wrestlers who are "underground" that they feel they can claim some sort of respect by "discovering" first. I also understand how uncool it is to like major WWE stars in today's day and age. But Adam Priest is a good little hand in front of this crowd of roughly 100 people. But he wouldn't even scratch the top 500 wrestlers. Best in the WORLD? Get a grip. People that can honestly post on this forum that guys like HHH or HBK aren't top 100 material, and then suggest an indieriffic guy like this have rocks in their head.

Terrible look. No real sense of an engaging character in there. Matches are nothing special despite being constantly presented as a future star. Not a Top 100 wrestler.

I remember quite clearly getting the 2005 Bret Hart DVD and it opening my eyes to the world of wrestling and what it could be. One of the best documentaries they ever did. Then I turned 10 years old. I joke, but it encapsulates my experience, where Bret Hart's reputation as the best technical worker blah blah blah was very much simply clever marketing by Vince and himself. Was he better than Steve Keirn and Matt Borne and the other guys he was working? Sure. But was he really that much better than Hennig, Flair, Austin and the rest of the guys featured in his most lauded matches? I'm not so sure. He was a very good wrestler, who was put in a prominent position to have good matches by US standards. But outside of his genuinely fantastic peak in the 90s, he's all around pretty dull. He falls back on his five moves of doom an awful lot. Not to say that many other top ten candidates also do not, but it always felt particularly egregious from Bret because of his lack of emotion and single-minded persona in the ring. It is of course, a tragedy he was forced to retire so early, and would have still had a lot to offer on a return to WWE.

No. Longest sustained, failed push in wrestling history. Nearly killed the company in the process and now just subsists on Stockholm Syndrome of the young fans he didn't put off wrestling altogether. Matches, which mind you were mainly against the best workers available in the world, relied on cheap tricks and shortcuts in a pretty dull "main event" style. If I never see Roman Reigns SHOCK THE CROWD by SPEARING SOMEONE THROUGH THE BARRICADE again, it'll be too soon. Bad babyface, average heel. Really a testament to Vince's single-minded ambition, and a sign of how far he'd declined in his ability to make stars. He got there in the end, but probably an overall blemish on his record as a promoter.