Robert S

I had a silly thought: wouldn't the Wild Samoans be decent candidates going by influence? Just consider the list of wrestlers, that would have never stepped into the ring without them: Family: Roman Reigns, Yokozuna, Rikishi, Samu, Tonga Kid, Umaga, Rosey, The Usos, Jacob Fatu, LA Smooth, Manu, Sean Maluta, ... Trainees (going by cagematch): Michael PS Hayes, Batista, Kidman, Rocco Rock, Kanyon, Virgil, Snitsky, ... Not all guys on this list turned out to be stars, but there quite some good names on this list.

fixed Seriously, I am used to turn down the volume of my TV to tune down the announcers, now I have to turn down the volume to not hear the terrible acting by the wrestlers? Why does a 30 minute wrestling match have as much talking as a Shakespeare play? Also, why to the tease us by having Jey come out fully dressed in white when there is not a chance to see any blood (especially in a match that should have blood, going by pre PG-era wrestling logic).

I realize that Helms' public problems are like ages ago, but still, you would not exactly pick him to be the guy speaking sense. Though someone should explain to those people that masks are primarly meant to protect others, not yourself.

They could just call him Chasm.

The torrents are missing stuff and some files are corrupt. Or so I heard. Allegedly.

I don't follow modern wrestling too closely, but wasn't the MSG show after the Elite dropped out of ROH due to the formation of AEW?

That can't be legal, right? I mean they obviously can stop talent use the companies IP on Twitch or whatever, but I really doubt that they can say "go on, use whatever name you want, we will just pay you less". Sure, you can setup contracts to work that way, but you cannot interfere in contracts that way.

Meltzer talked about this in the past as well. When he came up with the additional list (I forgot who helped him on it, probably someone like Steve Yohe, I would assume - in the initial listing in the Observer (August, 19th, 1996) he does not list anyone in particular), at first he went "Moolah should be in, no doubt about it", but then after thinking about it more deeply, it turned out to be not so clear and that's why he put her on the ballot instead.

Is that the official Twitter account of USA Network? If so, I guess it is a coincidende that they are using Gabe Sapolsky's commentating catchphrase here?

For Stu Hart I guess is in as a combination of his trainer career as well as being a long-time promoter and the top start of a smaller territory. I doubt that Dragon is in for his training. How much training did he even do? Going by cagematch, he his listed as having trained 68 wrestlers. But looking at the individual guys, the first group was trained or co-trained by Dos Caras and the later groups by Skayde. Some guys also had some pre-training from Animal Hamaguchi. On Wikipedia, the following people are listed as gotten inducted due to (at least some part) their trainer career: Stu Hart, Killer Kowalski, Diablo Velasco and Martin (Farmer) Burns. I don't really get Kowalski, he might have trained a lot of people, but not many ended up being stars, so I guess for him training was only a minor part for his Hall of Fame case.

Looking at the super young mega talented Dortmund roster, in two or three years they might be the team to beat.

Hiroshi Hase might be a candidate. I am sure he had his number of tag team / six man tag main events but apart from that? In New Japan he was not far enough up the card to get lots of main events, I suppose, and afterwards he did not wrestle that much (he has no year with more than 30 matches after he left NJPW). There are other guys who did not main event much during their more prolific eras, but had main event runs early on in their careers in territories (e.g. Dynamite Kid or Bobby Eaton). How much did Mildred Burke main event?

The weirdest addition to the ballot is Kevin von Erich as a single candidate. There must have actually been people petitioning Dave to put Kevin there, which seems to strange. Also Joe Higuchi seems to be a weird candidate. What is the draw here? Being a long-time referee or being the liaison for gaijins? Either way, there is nothing about him that screams "Hall of Fame" in the slightest.

For me it's Perry Saturn.

How do you come up with / believe such numbers? I mean even if you don't trust the testing numbers at all, one look at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard should tell you everything you need to know. True story: When all COVID-hell started to break loose, my boss argued with the excess deaths statistics that this is all just fake news. When one or two weeks later there were significant spikes in the graph starting to show up, he came up with the weirdest explanations about the number, basically in a "the cure is worse than the illness" kind-of-way, ignoring that countries with a high number of cases had a fittingly high excess death, even if they a have good public health system.