El-P

PPV 40 Wait. Is this PPV actually GOOD ?!? With a ratio of good/bad stuff clearly in favor of the good, and nothing that makes you want to throw a brick on the TV (well, computer screen) ? Of course not everything works. David Young vs James Storm was very indierrific and actually I though that Harris looked better doing less complicated stuff in his solo outings. They are still teasing some sort of AMW split BTW. Young is Siaki and Desire’s pet at this point it seems. Brian Lee & Slash vs Sandman & New Jack was more watchable than anything involving the Harris Twins, but still pretty bad. Hey, Justin Credible shows up ! This is really turning into an ECW reunion show at this point. I guess it beats the WCW version. Glad they finally give James Mitchell some promo time though. On the "not bad" front, Kid Kash has a decent match with Mike Sanders, although the fact he’s selling so much really shows he’s not 100%, as he’s got a legit knee injury. But he wasn’t terrible like the previous week, and Sanders worked hard. Kash did a fake apology to Trinity, who did a moonsault. Kash then leaves her behind while she gets ganged up by a bunch of SEX. Kash is a very good sleazeball. Second surprise of the week is Mike Awesome showing up, out of shape and sucking wind. Saturn had to carry the load while Awesome pretty much did his usual spots, only slower and with less intensity. Well, it was ok for a Nitro match I guess, but Awesome really didn’t look like his old self from even his WCW years. Glen Gilberti is keeping on being good on the mic and in the ring, this time having a really solid brawl against AJ Styles. Interesting how he worked well in that style and was actually convincing if you forget he’s the freaking Disco Inferno. Well, AJ rules no matter what, so I guess that helps too. The finish was insane though. Putting Disco over AJ clean ? It's good to be a friend of Russo. D-Lo Brown had his best match yet against Raven, short all action sprint that was extremely well worked. I said it before, Raven really strikes me as better than ever, the bumping, the feeding, the execution. And D-Lo, stupid outfit apart, looks excellent. Dinero & Larree work well as the new stooges, so well that they actually have a fun Clockwork Orange match against Jeff Jarrett at the end of the show. Laree really impresses me by her intensity and bumping, showing absolutely no fear taking bumps into gimmicks. Jeff Jarrett beating unmercifully on a woman, on the other hand, comes off sleazy and cheap. You can say whatever you want about Dreamer, but at least he understood that the shot on Francine or Beulah was efficient if it was one big spot. Here Jarrett just doesn’t care and comes off rather shitty to me. Not exactly a good match, but fun stuff that builds well to the Raven match coming up. And the match of the night, XXX (Skipper & Daniels) vs Jerry Lynn & Amazing Red. Ok, now we’re talking. Excellent match, going all action before they settle down a bit by beating on Red. Daniels is easily the best of the four, as Red sometimes does stuff that are too funky for perfect execution and Lynn kinda rushes through spots at times. Overall, super strong match. Oh, and the masked luchador is clearly Low-ki, it only makes sense that way. Lynn & Red win the titles and have to fight against each other now. Well, at least it’s another very good match on paper. So yeah, some good undercard matches, a super main event and a good angle/brawl setting up the main feud. Solid stuff. Let’s just pretend Eric Watts doesn’t exist. You know Russo is booking this though when he puts Gilberti over Styles and when the main babyface doesn't give a shit about hitting a woman. 2003/04/16 AJ Styles vs Glen Gilberti 2003/04/16 D-Lo Brown vs Raven 2003/04/16 XXX (Skipper & Daniels) vs Jerry Lynn & Amazing Red

If I had it to do again I would still require nominations, but ditch the three match rule and replace it with something more straightforward. More specifically I'd probably just have it where anyone can start a thread at any time on any wrestler without the need for a larger nomination thread, the only catch being that they need to write something about why they are nominating them. I don't care if it's a single sentence or longer (I'd prefer a paragraph in an ideal world), just something saying "this is why I may vote for X." Yes, I agree with this. Sounds pretty much the way to go. Don't just throw out a name, justify it, and there you go.

I'm very surprised Steve Williams did as good as he did atthis point, it seemed a lot of people were down on his AJPW and hated his WCW work. He was my #89 this time around. I had Tajiri at #72. I wonder if I don't overrated him a little bit simply because he was so great in ECW. I don't think his WWE years had much (really, what really good matches did he have over there ?), and I wanted to watch the SMASH stuff but didn't get to. Very interesting career. (more Ric Flair talk already ? want to kill the unveiling thread or what ?)

The knocks of Daniels for working too smooth are ridiculous. There's nothing as too polished. It's what you do with it that matters. Angle was not too polished either, his german suplexes looked like crap because of the flat back bump WWE rule. And his punches looked even worse than The Rock's. But he sure worked too fast, which made stuff sterile at times. Wait, as Angle dropped yet ?

No nomination, no committee, just let people discuss and vote for who the fuck they want, really.

It's too bad there wasn't a master list of nominees. That would have really helped things, especially if it had links. It sure didn't apparently.

Takes a king to know a king !

Hey, I voted for Lawler this time around.

I didn't forget to vote for her. But she wasn't nominated. When there's a sea of nominations, pages of forgotten almost-empty threads, it's easy to not realize someone hasn't been nominated.

So, the entire Portland run was great enough to counter 20 years of supbar in-ring work ? I really have a hard time believing that. Anyway, Piper getting in feels like a post-death tribute a la Dusty at this point. None of these guys (throw in Hogan) were that interesting from bell to bell.

Taker is much better than Hogan though.

Self-conscious critical wankfest is what's coming.

I guess a bunch of self-conscious Mania epics plus a bunch of truly awful matches were enough to boost Taker into the top 100. Blah.

Hum… Nakamura has dropped already… sorry...

I actually like Toyota's ranking this time around better. She was my #54. I'm glad the other girls are gonna do better. Can we drop Hogan now though ? This is getting absolutely ridiculous now.

What ? Hogan was nominated ? Are you sure about that ?

I've watched a bunch of Tanahashi matches since he got to the top of New Japan, and holy shit, what a great worker. The best Keiji Mutoh ever. He was #34 on my list. Yeah, I voted for both Tanahashi and Nakamura. I stuck in the 90's, I know...

Nominations are useless. You had a hundred threads with most of them getting no discussion at all and tons of joke nominations. Meanwhile, I forgot to nominate Takako Inoue therefore my vote was invalidated and no one talked about her while I'm pretty sure she would have gotten some votes. If Cuty Suzuki made it, it's obvious Takako would have. Anyway... And yeah, anonymous voters should not be allowed.

If the #86 doesn't end up my #86, it's gonna be pretty interesting to me. My #99 and #89 haven't dropped yet, which I'm very surprised about (especially #89 since his stock has dropped a lot I believe). Cesaro & Zayn making it around those slots make sense.

Douglas is ridiculously underrated at this point. Made my top 100.

Yep, I was thinking about using it more often actually so I don't have to use too many words to explain myself. Seems pretty clear to me.

I love Catrina's sexy ass and demonic feel, but Dario Cueto coming back as el patron is so much fun. I love how he made fun of Cage's little catchphrase. Over their two seasons, LU made me a current pro-wrestling fan again. Not a small feat. I'm glad we are assured of a third one.

Come on, The Triple Threat was great.

The funny thing about Onita is that pretty much all the guys coming after him and did garbage stuff totally ignored why Onita was so great at it and why he made a shitload of money : milking and selling. That's why watching the very early Onita FMW matches against martial artists is so revealing of what Onita is all about, because he basically worked the same way then : getting his ass beat, selling like a motherfucker, milking every comebacks like crazy. And then of course you got all the Onita mystic with the post-match crying and promo, which is insane even if you don't understand the language. But really, Onita wasn't about taking insane bump and bleeding like a stuck pig. Well, he was, but that's just a part of it. The main thing is that he milked and sold like a mofo. That's why he made shitload of money while all the garbage idiots (Abyss, looking at you) coming after just destroyed their body for basically nothing because all they got out of Onita was : taking bumps in barbwires. That was just a spectacular choice. Onita was like Takada, a master of epic spectacle.

This one goes for me as well. I draw almost perverse enjoyment out of watching that episode of Thunder with Nash on commentary just before he gets replaced as the booker. You can really pinpoint the moment where Mike Tenay dies a little inside when Nash starts talking about booking himself into angles.Also the entire Hogan/Bischoff period in TNA is hilarious culminating in the Immortal fiasco, which is a candidate for worst NWO ripoff ever. And then Steiner returns and for the following six months everything that comes out of his mouth is absolute comedy gold. Sounds like the TNA Hogan era is something... As far as WCW goes, since you weren't around the board it seems : http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/19237-wcws-highway-to-hell/ If you have never seen it and you really want to torture yourself I recommend you give TNA 2010/2011 the same treatment you gave to WCW (awesome thread working my way through it) and currently early TNA. I would argue that it is actully worse than either. I have never seen it, but since I diving into early TNA… never know where I'm going to end up… I don't think you could anyone worse than the end of WCW, as TNA has always been irrelevant while WCW was the legit N°1 at one point, so the fall was a lot more painfull. But yeah, sounds like something I might wanna watch...