Ditch

If you have formatting suggestions, I can update the master file, but having your own file is problematic when links are guaranteed to change in the course of a year.

103 bolded, yes. Ten from each year plus three from the "leftovers" vote. I'd really enjoy a subforum but it definitely doesn't need a thread for every match like the yearbooks.

Every week I will be highlighting a match that I think deserves love and might not get enough eyeballs as people select what to watch, which means not many Kobashi or KENTA write-ups because they don't need any hype. Not much 2000/2001 so it will skip ahead of y'all for a few months. Kanemoto & Minoru Tanaka vs Liger & Makabe, IWGP junior tag team titles, New Japan September 12th 2000 Background: Makabe was a somewhat plus-sized junior heavyweight at this point in his career, and his simplistic moveset was balanced by the power advantage he had over other juniors. Why I think it's underrated: This aired on New Japan's somewhat obscure SXW program, which meant it was hard to come by initially. I only found it because of a positive review by Stuart of puroresufan.com. The match relies on Japan's standard "young lion underdog tries to make good" story, with Makabe holding his own against the much more skilled champions. This isn't an earth-shatteringly great match, but it's very solid and builds to a few excellent nearfalls off of relatively small moves. What it deserves: Top 100 consideration / on the bubble.

Most complete version is 25 minutes, which is enough for me to say that it looks very good, isn't MOTY, but I can't say where it falls between "very good" and "MOTYC". That's why I highlighted matches that did best in the year-by-year votes, so you can narrow it down to 100/150 matches and still get the vast majority of what would likely be on your ballot.

Holy shit what happened with 2000...

Thanks. Links updated.

Indeed. Nothing else of note aired in any significant length. Interesting to think about what NTV might have in the archive though.

CC '96 came at the worst time: after the TV time reduction in '94,, after they were releasing multi-part comms like for CC '95, and before Samurai TV at the end of '96.

Thanks, fixed.

This. And ultimately, wrestling at its best does the same, which is amazing because it's worked.

It's the fact that Elway lost badly then came back to win, whereas Kelly just kept losing. Western NY sports was such a black hole for the longest time; Bills 0-4 in the Super Bowl, Sabres lost to those damn dirty Flyers in '75, Syracuse Orangemen get to the Final Four finals twice and lose. At least we could take comfort in the fact that Marino and Elway were blanked in the big one as well... until Elway showed he still had something left in the tank. At least we got Carmelo Anthony for one year to finally win a championship. Unless you could college lacrosse, which nobody should.

Oh man do those matches not hold up. The same two suplexes from Momoe and the same three kicks from Maekawa and the Momoe hurricanrana... for half an hour. I liked them a bit at the time but it's so beyond repetitive to watch now. Joshi as a whole did badly, in part because the biggest joshi fans didn't participate much, and in part because joshi seemed to develop a lot of the problems of men's wrestling several years earlier. Momoe vs Maekawa would have been fine at ~15-18 minutes, but they were going 25+ pretty much every time. Ditto Toyota vs Ito; how many Boston crabs can we be expected to sit through? Compare to how wrestlers like Suwama, Sugiura and Shiozaki struggle to fill 25+ minute main events over the years. They can do 15-20, and they can do "hot 10 minute finishing run", but they can't hold your attention for the body of an 'epic'. I gave 2000s joshi a chance and so did a lot of people. Those matches just weren't going to do well in the decade vote. Even something like Kong vs Satomura couldn't crack the top 10 in a weak year (2001).

I always forget about those Broncos wins. Probably because "1983 draft QB leads livestock-themed team to victory" is really painful to consider as a Bills fan.

Reality TV is considerably faker than pro wrestling, which I'm pretty sure has already been said to death but I never get tired of saying it myself. The "just right" unpredictability is crucial to so many things in the world of entertainment, which includes sports. The Super Bowl made a huge turn-around in relevance when the massive underdog babyface New England Patriots beat the mighty Rams (holy shit just think that one over football fans). The NFC had been dominant for so long that the AFC revival made it a big game again. The nWo was a ne plus ultra for unpredictable wrestling booking, from the Hogan turn to the nWo taped promos to the chaotic assaults on WCW as a whole. When it got to the point where the WCW babyface hits a finisher on an nWo guy and the crowd stands up and looks at the entrance for the run-in, it's gone all the way around to predictable. Likewise, Russo's post-WWF booking was possibly the most predictable booking you'll ever see because he forced swerves in at certain sorts of moments every time, regardless of the logic or backstory.

Those held up wonderfully, so much so that I put them on top of their respective years. I even liked Kobashi/Takayama *more* when I watched it in 2011.

Not nearly as depressing as the last couple years have been, but it sure doesn't hold a candle to the '80s or '90s. I do think there are many great matches that aren't well-known, yet at the same time you could probably make a comparable or superior top 100 matches list from just 1993. As I delve into the '90s, I find plenty of hidden gems that would be MOTYCs in the 2000s but are deservedly also-rans in the year they happened. Two really stark quality declines when comparing 2000 to 2001, and 2006 to 2007. In both cases I don't think the quality ever returned to the previous level. And even with 2000, you had a killer top ten but not much after that. All that said I think it's well worth people's while to at least watch the top 100/150 highlights from the decade. Not much fat in there, and a broad selection of what Japan had to offer.

DEADLINE: 11:59PM EST, December 31st, 2014 THE FILE: http://theditch.biz/BestOf2000s_Japan.xls (updated August 16th) This has pretty much everything: matchlist, download/viewing links, voting instructions, etc. Feel free to share the link wherever. You input your ranks in the file and mail it back. BACKGROUND: Over at DVDVR, there was a really good year-end vote to cover 2006. I ran it for 2007, then decided to cover the rest of the decade and try to find any hidden gems people had missed. There was so much footage because indies could afford to tape and Samurai TV offered tons of airtime, and I wanted to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. I'm confident that every legit MOTYC is on there. THE MATCHES: There are 326 matches eligible. That is a lot to get through. I don't expect people to watch everything, which is why I've highlighted the top vote-getters from the annual votes. Realistically, nothing that isn't highlighted will place in the top 20 here. You can do a top 50 or a top 100 based on how much time you want to put in. Every style and probably every relevant promotion is represented. All the famous matches are in there, plus a lot that YOU haven't seen but really should. I won't promise you'll enjoy everything; I certainly don't. But there will be something for anyone with even the remotest interest in puroresu. I encourage people to ask questions about the matches (ie. background), offer their thoughts as they go through, etc, in the thread in order to keep it somewhat active through the next 365 days. Any minor suggestions about improving the excel file are also welcome.

Watching this and Nagai/Naruse back-to-back, I thought this was much better. More heat, better exchanges, and it was a bit tighter.

One more for the WCW/WWF comparison thread.

I don't watch WWE, but I follow news/results, and it sure seems like the Shield has been left behind...

You know wrestling is cursed when even Reggie White dies young.

I grew up without access to WCW until 1995, when the cable TV line (which stopped 50 yards from my house) was extended. I quickly came to prefer WCW to WWF because it had more of everything; more starpower, more styles, more little guys AND really big guys, and more wrestling. Mid-90s WWF was a low period, and I never much cared about Russo-era 'attitude', so I preferred WCW until early 2000 when the in-ring product for WWF became very good and WCW's in-ring product hit a nadir. Mentioning the survey is something I wish more people knew about. WCW fans were conditioned to enjoy WRESTLING more than WWF fans, and Russo had such New York tunnel-vision that he couldn't accept that he needed to change his approach somewhat. Rather than an edgier version of WCW but with more wrestling than WWF, we got an edgier version of WWF with as little wrestling as possible. The survey bore this out perfectly, and it's why WCW's business collapsed when the in-ring product declined in mid-99 and went off a cliff under Russo.

Yeah and then Russo took a bunch of "risks" in '99 to try and come back. Everything in moderation.

I remember thinking at the time that Hogan attacking DDP made DDP look important, because Hogan typically acted as a target that would draw guys out to be attacked by the nWo rather than an attacker himself.

I thought Kobashi did a decent job of targeting the neck and using stuff like the katahajime, which is rarely used in puro, rather than it just being restholds.