Ditch

I feel the same. After watching lots more 80s Flair matches, and after being let down by so many of Bret's most-hyped matches, I prefer Flair as a worker. Throw in the '80s Flair promos and it isn't even close. Flair was The Man on The Mic. I have a sense that a big portion of Bret's fandom revolves around his being on top in WWF for years and being arguably the best worker of any WWF ace. There's no case for Hogan or Undertaker or Rock or Cena as an all-time great technician, but Bret has a veneer of respectability. The thing that gets me is how thin Bret's top matches list is for someone touted as a top 10 level worker. -vs Perfect -vs Owen -vs Austin -vs Bulldog -vs Backlund -vs 1-2-3 -vs Piper -vs Benoit A lot of those are only standouts because they took place in promotions that hardly ever did technical wrestling: '90s WWF and 1999 WCW. Bret vs 1-2-3 is a fine Vet vs Young Lion match but those are a dime a dozen in Japan, and Flair certainly made lesser young wrestlers than Waltman look like a million bucks. Bret vs Benoit from Nitro is a lot like the Eddie vs Dean ECW farewell; analyze the actual content without the emotion surrounding the event and it's not special. Bret vs Piper is good but not mindblowing. Bret vs Perfect are all rock-solid technical bouts, which Flair did hundreds of times. Likewise with Bret vs Backlund. Bret vs Bulldog from Summerslam is absurdly overrated. Bret vs Owen from Summerslam '94 doesn't hold half a candle to Flair vs Morton as a cage match. I think Bret vs Owen from WM10 and Bret vs Austin from WM13 are overrated but I'm well in the minority there. I really love Bret vs Austin from Survivor Series '96. Bottom line is that it seems like Bret has a good handful of very good bouts and like 5 or so legitimately GREAT matches that stand up to scrutiny. Flair has hundreds of good matches and dozens of great matches, against a MUCH broader spectrum of opponents. It doesn't even seem like a fair comparison.

I ranked it 15th for AJ in the '90s.

I've re-watched it like 5 times and I don't like it. Don't *dislike* it either. But then I'm that way with just about every big Takada match (vs Vader, vs Albright, vs Tenryu, vs Maeda)

My take from 5 years ago: "There is some downtime but remarkably little given the length. They do the little things right, they do the big things right, sometimes the little things are done so well they BECOME big things. 40+ year old, chunky Jumbo dishes out maybe the most dramatic dropkick I have ever seen. Taue gives the performance of his young life, maybe the best pre-CC '95. Taue going after Misawa with elbows is so great. Kawada kicking Taue in the head is great. Jumbo is Jumbo. Head and shoulders above the other iterations of this match, heck above every Jumbo/Taue AND Misawa/Kawada tag."

More for the drop list: Jun Akiyama vs Akira Taue (AJPW Championship Carnival 03/26/99) Yoshinari Ogawa vs Kentaro Shiga (AJPW 06/09/99) Vader & Gary Albright vs Kenta Kobashi & Jun Akiyama (AJPW 07/23/99) Though I still vouch for the Team FMW vs Honda/Izumida tags...

Low Ki was dressed as a video game character.

From 2011, asking where Hash ranks among Japanese wrestlers:http://board.deathvalleydriver.com/topic/5...reciate-debate/ 57 votes. 11 for top 5, and 25 for top 10. In the '07 Smarkschoice vote he was the #8 Japanese male. That's pretty good. As for Jumbo, maybe it was further back than ten years, but I don't recall a ton of "Jumbo as GOAT" discussion until mid-decade. And now that pendulum is swinging the other way...

I don't see that at all. More, "NJPW juniors were overrated". There's still plenty of respect for Liger, Kanemoto, Ohtani, and Samurai gets his due. But now there's equal-to-greater respect for the NJ heavies, especially Hash.

Choshu and Fujinami would go up after the '80s sets, especially Choshu.

Hash: 24Mutoh: 53 Chono: 72

Hashimoto, along with Jumbo, was really underrated... like a decade ago. Now the only people who rate him behind, say, Mutoh are people who haven't watched much puro. Talk about Hash not being appreciated is fighting an old fight that has already been settled. He's generally rated as a top 10/15 Japanese wrestler now. I'm very glad that many people took the effort to put Hash over and turn the tide. I for one started out not enjoying Hash and now I love him. In terms of his peak versus Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi, I still take the latter three without hesitation. Better highs and better lows. We can play "what if they switched companies" all day long but the bottom line is what actually happened. I think a good comp to Hashimoto is Tenryu: pudgy, stiff, wrestled a wide variety of opponents, and often dealing with inferior competition on the opposite side. Tenryu is solidly in front of Hash, and not just because of longevity. I can see where someone would prefer Tenryu to Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi, and vice-versa. It's harder for Hashimoto, who has a much more limited moveset and a much smaller number of MOTYCs in his resume, to get that Top 10 worldwide/GOAT level of support. [edit: of course as I wrote the post someone says they like Hash over Tenryu...] I'm not sure much of anyone from Japan is significantly underrated at this point. Over the past 5 years we've seen surges in support for Fujinami, Choshu, Dick Togo, Fujiwara, Yatsu, and additional top-tier support for Tenryu. Maybe the problem is that a lot of this discussion and 'new consensus' is taking place on forums with the uber-hardcores, but isn't finding its way to places like the WON community with broader reach among what I'd dub 'mainstream' smarks. The kind of people who learned about puro from ROH and think Dragon Gate is mindblowing. But in that case we're dealing with straight-up ignorance, and the puro-watching community outside Japan has always been small so that's nothing new. Where this can become frustrating is that someone like Fujiwara can't get a fair shake in HOF discussion despite having major historical significance and being a great worker, because his matches don't appeal to casual puro fans and he apparently isn't seen as a big deal in Japan. So anyway... Hashimoto is underrated by people who haven't seen any Hashimoto. But for people with a reasonably significant amount of puro viewing under their belt, he gets love.

I don't see how that works. Taker's streak, especially in recent years where it's a draw, is only possible because he rarely wrestles and isn't used as a house show draw. Goldberg was needed at every possible event.

You'll get that in the '91 set.

The extent to which they botched Goldberg's reign is remarkable. 1. The title win was a massive hot-shot, done in order to give Hogan more ability to do his precious dream/celebrity tags. If they did it on PPV it would have drawn a massive buyrate, maybe even bigger than Starrcade '97. If you're going to do it at Georgia Dome in Nitro, then... space it out! Announce Goldberg vs Hall for the week before with a title shot on the line, to give them two more shows to hype the Georgia Dome title switch. Hennig was fine as a first opponent. 2. As already mentioned, the stupid battle royal at Road Wild. Just do Goldberg vs Giant. 3. Goldberg doesn't even wrestle at Fall Brawl. He should have faced Jericho. IIRC Goldberg himself was the problem here. I do think the DDP match at Havoc was good, especially with how much they built the cutter. 4. No Goldberg at WW3. Plenty of other matches they could have done here; streak vs streak against Wrath (who lost to Nash in a hot-shot a couple weeks later), vs Bret, vs Scott Steiner. By Starrcade, you had just one interesting Goldberg PPV title defense. The way he was booked was so dull that it's no wonder he lost steam.

Does "we can't criticize that guy, he's dead" really hold weight in pro wrestling? Granted, in his case it was murder, but still.

I highly doubt Ultimo would be in without his role as a trainer, but that's only one part of the case (and he shouldn't have gone in). Yamamoto would be the only one where training would be paramount, though he also has his work as one half of the Yamaha Brothers. If there was like ten times the Yamaha Bro footage, his chances would be much better.

Now that I think about it, there are precious few Misawa/Kawada tags where Kawada is the champ. Good catch!

Love Jumbo's performance here. Just the right mix of vulnerability and strength for this part of the feud. Delivering both "wow, Misawa is tough..." and "dammit I'm the ace you little punk!" with facial expressions is quite something. Even though Jumbo wins, his selling puts over Misawa as a force to be reckoned with. Also, I think Misawa does a better job of wrestling heavyweight-style. I much prefer the match to the June iteration, though it does have some filler.

Reid will supposedly be starting in All Japan next month. Hopefully he got his stuff together.

Depends on the definition of 'good'. Two WWE Divas, hired based on looks, are sent out for a 3 minute match. Their job is to entertain the heavily-straight-male fanbase and serve as a tonal difference from the rest of the product. Is the match good by the standards of 1993 joshi? Of course not. But clearly it works, because Diva segments don't cause massive rating losses, Diva products make money, and people get their bathroom break in. Abdullah the Butcher was in a tiny number of 'good' matches, but he was effective in what he was doing and drew money from one corner of the globe to the other. Abby was never called on to do hold-for-hold masterpieces, but the fans who came to see him rarely left disappointed based on his performance. It's entirely possible for Divas to have a reasonably good 3 minute match. And I know Abby can be in a good match because I really enjoyed two of the Funks vs Abby/Shiek matches. What's frustrating is when a wrestler doesn't seem to be good from an in-ring aestetic point-of-view, AND doesn't seem to be good filling a niche for the crowd, whether it be titilation or bloodlust or nostalgia. The Brody argument comes into play here, because in theory he's an Abby-style "chaos and violence" wrestler but the matches tend to be really boring and soft. I'm sure we can all think of wrestlers who just seem to take up space without producing anything for the promotion. Nosawa Rongai comes to mind for me, because he pops up everywhere in Japan and just sucks at every level. But he's got all the right connections and is brought in over and over. That's usually the case with deadweight.

I see where you're coming from. The best ten matches, shows, angles, feuds, etc. are easier to enjoy than any ten wrestlers with their assorted highs and lows. The former has a much higher average quality. You can still break it down as "here's why it worked" without being focused on any one wrestler. Typically there's a lot more to it than one wrestler, anyway. It's certainly much easier to rate something concrete like a match or show than a wrestler. It really does take a tremendous amount of viewing before one has a firm grasp on a wrestler's body of work, and even then it's hard to take all those performances and distill them into a coherent opinion. That's why I find all-time wrestler ranks to be so problematic; precious few people are qualified. That said, as someone who constantly seeks out 'more', whether it be good wrestling or good music or good analysis, I can't help but need a *person* to focus on. 90-99% of everything in life is mediocre to bad, and emphasizing the best/most consistent people makes it easier to sift out the gold. In the context of wrestling, I buy DVDs based on what I anticipate to be good matches. I anticipate based on two things: good reviews and wrestlers I like. With each DVD, I will either watch in full or at least skim through the parts I'm less interested in. I give the other matches/segments a chance. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised... but not often. The handful of top performers are overwhelmingly responsible for the best product.

What I don't get about Brody is why *bookers* were always putting him in these 20+ minute main events. Nobody booked Abby in 60 minute broadway, and if they did it would have been miserable. I wonder if Brody would have been more active with less time to fill.

I've seen a 'remote control spot' in CHIKARA with Player Uno but what is it in these matches?

You mean like 1993 where the finish to the last match was Kobashi pinning Kawada? Kobashi was competitive with Kawada by mid '89 and slooooowly caught up. Didn't beat him in a singles match until '98!

Choshu vs Hashimoto 8/10 (HH) and 11/5 are compact and continue the ever-reliable rivalry.