Matt D

Do we know anything about Sullivan?

Someone remind me to watch this.

Eats up guys to the detriment of the match from 88 on and to a lesser degree from 84 on. People are now lower on Harts tags but higher on Dream Team ones. A lot of what made his case was of the moment and not timeless.

I always suggest people watch the Jumbo test series from the 70s and how hard everything is worked vs Verne, Funk, and Robinson and then how everything is given away for free by Harley.

Speaking of the lack of critical analysis of lucha over time.. Guess who this 1990 quote I just came across is from... "I'm not the world's biggest Lucha Libre fan. To me, it's kind of like you sit and watch a bunch of bad wrestling waiting for the spectacular dives during the finishes."

Lucha can be very vibes based. It’ll be pretty funny if the kids find and glom onto Octagon and Rayo, Jr. or something.

Hey, we're all way better off for having you as part of the community. Keep doing what you're doing.

It's the journey that matters, not the destination!

You should go out and see what it's like out there for a couple of weeks. Not right now since the top of the list and the whole list will make things rough, but maybe in a month. Don't stay there, but just dip your toes. Current wrestling is very cagematch/star rating oriented maybe with arguments about specific spots. Old wrestling tends to be more performance based/clip based/attribute based/summation driven in how it's discussed. (Unless you're talking about Kurt Angle never getting a five star match which comes up once every three months and is very painful).

All I’ll say about Bryan vs HHH is that it might be Hunter’s only match ever that feels shorter than it actually is.

It’s been a hoot, but let’s not do this again for ten years.

So, here's the deal... Austin is a perfect storm candidate for this voting pool. I don't quite think he hits the "coalition" element, though he did have the Owens match a few years ago. But if GWE 2026 is about how wrestlers make people feel, with babyface aces, ECW/deathmatch guys, aura-farmers, larger than life presences, and guys who are always "on" and very clear in who and what they are, while being incredibly accessible and stalwart presences in people's lives, that's Austin. I don't think anyone saw him coming, but he's sort of the platonic ideal of so many of the 2026 trends.

What a run for Tenryu.

It’d be AWA Super Sunday 83. I can’t outdo history.

It all makes the rise of Inoki fascinating.

Kobashi also has a more modern presence. He posts big smiling pictures like this all day every day.

I think it fits the trend. Misawa is an ace but Kobashi is more open and effusive. Maybe more accessible as well. Easier to drop in on. All Japan fell overall, even the other two pillars. While he got a big chunk of the vote, I don't see him as big of a coalition candidate as someone like Rey.

Bret is too high. He's a peak case as strange as that might sound. I think the work that has been done on him in the last ten years has primarily been people going through the Hart Foundation matches and overall finding them lacking and his inputs in them not necessarily better than Neidhart's. It's a great peak, but that gets you more to 30, not 10, given the overall strength of the pool. But what are you going to do right? The work done on him probably doesn't equal the influence of FTR and Punk in pushing for him. Punk's AEW run was the height of Neo-Bret-ism and it was great for it. I love Bret from a nostalgia level and I love his peak work certainly. I had him at #30 this time around and if my list had been more robust, he probably would have been closer to #40.

I feel like Aja is a bit like that too.

I'm going to do some sort of... thing on Twitter where I have everyone watch a match throughout the month of June and then post about it at the end. Just trying to get some more people into it and willing to give it a shot and discuss it. Twitter is obviously at terrible place to do it but i want to go to where people are. I had fairly solid traction on the post, 68 likes so I figure it's worth a shot. Even if a couple people give it a try and get into the style then it's a win. I was thinking starting with Steve Grey vs. Jim Breaks (5/12/81). What do people think of that as a starting point?

I think it's a little endearing that Foley is probably here because he's on so many ballots. He was on my 2016 ballot, even if not particularly high. The thing with Foley is that he really, really got pro wrestling. He understood the imagination of fans in a way that only someone that is a fan himself could. I think he thought about things years before his time. He thought about "What's the one thing that could capture someone's imagination in this match?" in a way that people weren't really thinking, not in those terms at least. I think he was more "objective" driven than a lot of his peers who were great in other ways that were more based on anecdotal evidence and the legacy of doing things because they've always been done. If everyone around him did what worked, he thought about what might work. Does that mean he's a top 20 wrestler of all time? No, but I do think he's very special in his own way.

Rey continues to feel like the ultimate coalition candidate to me. I don't think younger fans have the same connection to Eddie. We shall see.

Fair enough. It’s good things are still interesting down the stretch then.

I think this is very possible. We're in a year of charismatic aces doing very, very well. We're in a year where the territories are not. But we also saw some downstream dropping for All Japan guys like Kikuchi. I think I'd still lean for Funk over Kobashi but we shall see. There just seemed to be such a groundswell for Punk. But then it's clear there are a ton of ballots we didn't see.

The Super Indie Pillars have fallen save for Danielson. The Pillars remain save for Taue. Somehow, Foley persists. Jumbo's ranking probably tells us that Tenryu has a ceiling. Somehow, Foley persists. We're down to Danielson, Funk, Flair for the top. I'd argue that Lawler's ranking says something about Flair. Somehow, Foley persists.