El-P

Flair. Simply because he didn't do that for 90% of his time on top. Plus, kayfabe-wise, if you punch a guy a hundred times, something should happen. If it doesn't, your great looking punch actually kinda sucks. Plus, punches are supposed to be illegal in pro-wrestling. So many heels got so much out of arguing with the ref that no, it wasn't a closed fist. Lawler just went through punching like a machine-gun in a time it wasn't supposed to happen that easily. That bieng said, chops have became way overused in the 00's, and the Woo chant got annying pretty quickly. Also, a weak chop is way more ridicule than a bad looking punch. A bad looking punch, well doesn't look good, but you know it's fake. Weak chop, well, it's *really* a weak chop.

I'll be 50 then if I get there. That would be quite a thing to participate in another GWE poll, basically once every ten years of my adult life. Advices ? Don't burn yourself out.

Really haven't seen enough Garvin, although I think the Valentine stuff is just ridiculously overrated (and I'm a Valentine fan), as is the Flair match and the Memphis stuff. So there. So no way he would make my top 100, although I'd need to see more, really. 2 Cold was my #46. One of the best worker in the world when he was in ECW, was totally screwed up by going to WWF and given a ridiculous outfit (although the gimmick would have worked if they had pushed him, it's not like Scorp couldn't cut a promo). One of my biggest regret of that time is him not going back to WCW instead. Scorp vs Benoit, Eddie, Rey, DDP would have put in the picture of the best guys around. Had a super solid career in Japan too in the 00's. Yeah, Scorp is a great wrestler. I'm glad he got in the top 100, I didn't expected it. Wonderful surprise.

Hopefully him and Piper drop soon. With Dusty gone, we can go to the really good ones. Because really, inside the ring, neither of those three were much (Piper being the worst by far).

Mister Bob Backlund. My number 35. Some of the best matches in the company's history. One of the most singular worker ever, no one works quite like Backlund, which is a rarity. Great matches in the 70's, great matches in the 80's, great matches in the 90's. Say what you want, he's got the resume.

Battlarts is the one japanese indy that I never got into simply because I had other priorities in buying tapes. Nakamura was my #29. He's not my highest post 00's vote though. But yeah, I watched a few of his big matches over the past years, just incredible in this setting. Week to week, no idea, but he's the best big time wrestler today. I didn't vote for the Destroyer this time around. Haven't rewatched anything, in 2006 it was exactly when I was getting into some of his most famous stuff.

Two kids ! Amazing. Glad things are going well for you ! Thanks AsukaFan. I agree counting your blessings gets you on the right track and helps relativize a lot. Don't worry people, I'm overplaying the "depression" element a bit here to justify me diving into Russo land again, although there's a reason why I'm getting back into a project right at this moment. But the true hard times were actually last year at the same period and for the following months. PPV 38 Jerry Lynn finally gets his X-division title match !!! After seemingly making his peace with Konnan, he faces Kid Kash in probably Kash’s best TNA match. Not a great by any mean though, but Kash taking the time to sell his injured knee and acting kinda heelish is a vast improvement over his usual stuff. Lynn gets screwed by another odd looking « luchador », so I guess Konnan was just swerving him. D-Lo Brown vs Jeff Jarrett. Oh man. First, Tenay insists on saying D-Lo was IC champ, which is why he’s familiar the big match pressure. Yeah, keep on making the NWA title look third rate. Jarrett is an awful babyface, physically threatening Goldilocks, acting like an asshole to the point you’d sympathise with Gilberti’s points in the opening promo. Plus, although D-Lo is really solid, they have a bad Double J Special : boring brawling outside, totally rushed sprint with often poor execution from Jarrett (fancying himself as a tough guy is a complete miscast), kicking out of each other finishers (is this a John Cena match ?), bad ref-bumps and run-ins galore. D-Lo had a better match with Chris Harris. Plus, post match sees Jarrett hitting Alexis Laree, now aligned with Raven (which is cool), with a straight chair shot to the head, with awful execution to boot (I guess he thought it was « someone else » ?). Russo’s handprints are all over this show still, with useless feuds like Siaki vs David Young which only leads to more man on woman violence and terrible midcard acts like the Second Generation stooges (I didn’t even watch that Eric Watts video, sorry). More super efficient booking by piling up « surprise debuts » in the same segment. So New Jacks debuts to team with Sandman & Saturn. Ok, he does the exact same crap he was doing in later ECW. But anyway, he gets a reaction. Then, at the end of their match vs Harris Boys & Chris Daniels (poor guy), we get the surprise debut of « This is the man who used to be Bart Gunn in the WWE ! ». Please. He gets crickets, as he’s been in All Japan for years now and no one has cared about him in the US since the split of the Smoking Gunns. Both surprise debuts in about ten minutes, way to get the most out of them. Exactly the same problem with the booking on top, as Jarrett seems to be feuding with four people at the same time. I won’t say it again, but man, Don West is so bad. Enthousiastic but terrible. Wait, not as awful as Mark Madden or the current WWE robots, but still annoying as all hell. Why did Russo recruit him to begin with ? Oh, I guess it's because he had zero experience in pro-wrestling. Mainstream cred ? 2003/04/02 Jerry Lynn vs Kid Kash

Hey, no one from my list yet ! Glad we got rid of Kerry already. Overrated worker. His great matches aren't that great, except Jumbo's, which is an all-time great performance by Tsuruta. The claw is dumb as fuck. And all the Von Erich throw awkard looking punches. Hey, actually, John Cena is the best Kerry von Erich ever ! Kerry is like the Bulldog to me, a talented piece of luggage. Except Bulldog had way more raw talent.

(I'm sure the unveiling will happen when I'm in the plane... damn)

Blame me for not taking the time to watch that insane amount of PR TV I downloaded once (I say that for PR as a whole, no idea if I would have ranked Colon).

Gordi ! So cool to hear from you ! Life in Japan still good ?

Aside from everything else that's been said to debunk this nonsense: chops make more sense than punches from a biological standpoint in a worked match. You really can chop a guy in the chest as hard as you possibly can, a hundred times in a row, and have him still come back for more. In what universe can you punch a guy in the head as hard as you possibly can a hundred times in a row (clean shots, not the grazing jabs that count for points in boxing matches) and have them still be as fresh as a daisy, or even not break your own hand? One of the most common complaints you'll hear over and over again from non-fans after watching an average American match is "it's ridiculous that they hit each other that many times in the face and nobody even has a black eye". This. Plus, since they actually chop each other to pieces like in the infamous Kobashi vs Sasaki match, the skin does turn blue. Throwing a gazillion punches to the face with basically no effect just looks stupid in the end, especially when you never win the match with, well, a final punch. Punching a guy in the face is not akin to slapping his chest with an open hand. So yeah, there's a difference. Not saying chop exchanges can't be lazy as fuck, as Benoit used to do in WWE for instance. The Kobashi vs Sasaki spectacle was amazing and it was a good fit for this match and its setting. And it's the fact they go so long that makes it great, because it's so ridiculous no one expects them to go to those lenghts. When it became just a formula, it became as dumb as a Ric Flair goof spot. Fun and dumb. And when Kojima did his own version, it became just bad.

Voted for 13 of them. There are a bunch of them I voted for in 2006 than I didn't vote for in 2016. Off this bunch, I only regret not voting for Devil Masami again.

Voted for four of them. Could have voted for six from memories.

You can't possibly be boring if you had Nobuhiko Takada is your top 30 in 2016. From my top 30, Takada, Ozaki, Yoshida and Sano are gone, in that order.

The answer is yes. Especially the forearms ones. Drove me away each time I tried to watch puro in the late 00's.

In what ways ? I didn't rate Lawler in 2006, I rated him this time around. Plenty of guys I loved in the 90's have dropped from my list too. My rating of Takada comes from rewatch of UWF and UWF-I/NJ done in the 2010's up until last fall. I rated Nick Bockwinckle in my top ten, way ahead of Flair. Bock wasn't even in my list in 2006. I could go one. So, really, not at all.

Hey now all that money I used to spend on shipping actual fucking VHS tapes to and from my house back in the day was totally worth it. I threw some money down the drain. No idea what to do with those NTSC VHS nowadays.

No-sell comeback + piledriver. Punches amounted to shit since it wa 95% of his offense. But anyway, I never bought in the Lawler hype as this GOAT candidate and miracle worker. I like Lawler quite a bit, I think he's very good and I love some of his feuds. I guess it's not enough.

Offense = punch. Defense = punch. Comeback = punch. At some point, do something else. Like, anything else, even basic stuff. Please. It's just lazy now. Plus at some point, if you throw a terrific looking punch but at the end of the day you can't punch out your opponent for good, you're actually a shitty puncher kayfabe-wise, no matter how good it looks. But the killer is the no-selling comeback a-la Hogan. Wait, Lawler hasn't showed up yet ? My bad. (I voted for Lawler. But in the lower end of my top 100)

Luckily we're past the workrate mentality that included wisdom like "chops=great tehnical wrestling" and pretended amount of moves used is a valid criteria to judge wrestlers on.Personally I still like that some people talk about 'limited movesets' because I take those 2 words as a code that means 'ignore everything I say about wrestling' The criticism for "throwing a gazillion punches" has nothing to do with limited moveset actually. I'm a Choshu guy, so, moveset, really...

Throwing a gazillion punches per match really betrays you as a not so great worker anyway. Oh wait...

I just noticed that I voted for Takako Inoue. Who wasn't nominated. That sucks. She was my #60.

They look like shitty open slap. Still look better than Cena's.

Dusty in the top 100 isn't a good news at all. Neither are Kerry von Erich, Hulk Hogan, Undertaker...