Matt D

I started to watch it a few weeks ago when I was finishing up my list and had to place Orton but caught up in other stuff. I'll catch it in full later.

Between that and the Dusty Hard Times promo tease in an earlier episode, you could totally do a show with Johnny.

I'm having some troubles too. We are wholly reliant on Parv (which we appreciate) so if others are having problems, there might be a delay. The good news is that we did in fact get through it! ... And may have spent 1:45:00 on our top fours.

Part 7 of the Parejas Increibles podcast is the epic, almost four hour long finale of Matt and Stacey's countdown of their Greatest Wrestler Ever lists. They discuss picks #11-1, including some surprising choices and long-held favourites, and make detailed and fiercely personal arguments as to why these wrestlers are the absolute best of the best. https://soundcloud.com/jerryvonkramer/parejas-increibles-7 PTBN Link to follow

I may have had a slight recency bias for Terry because of all of the "Our Friend In Japan" matches that popped up during the course of the bias. For 90s work, it's dumb but i really kind of love the NWF we have with him.

This is a great social experiment thread if nothing else. It was years after the fact, but I think in most ways that mattered, Ric Flair introduced me to Terry Funk. I started watching wrestling in 90-91, really after Funk was gone from WCW. I stopped watching during the years he was in ECW. When I came back in 98, he was Chainsaw Charlie but that hardly counted. I didn't even know what I was looking at. When I was a senior in high school, some guy on Prodigy was kind enough to send me a comp tape. On that comp tape was Funk vs Flair - I Quit. And in that regard, Funk introduced me to a different sort of Flair. I had known him from WWF, from WCW a bit, and from the 5 tapes for 5 dollars rentals I could do at the local video story where I could see him against Eddy at Hog Wild or whatever, but I had definitely never seen this Flair, brawling, violent, fighting for his life, desperate, with his back against the wall and wanting revenge.

I've got something like 8-9 #1s. I'm just going to run through them freely.

Happy about Funk over Hansen, though I have no major problems with Hansen here.

I've gone from Garza to Breaks to Bock.

Especially that one with Cesaro where Miz is the babyface. That's a great match.

That's probably my fault again. Liger would have been higher than my 88 or whatever.

The short answer is that Buddy represents something different than Flair. I'll try to write the long answer tomorrow. Very valid issue though.

Japan is what got Funk as high on my list as he got (ironically).

Hey! If Buddy made it to ten, I'd have been super happy! (Even 25; even 30 I could have lived with) Getting Lawler to #10 is the culmination of overturning an entire philosophy of wrestling thought to allow for the acceptance of an opposing viewpoint, really (and one that I really value). And Will was one of the key players in that movement. He shouldn't see this as anything less than a major victory.

Unless I'm reading the math wrong, if I had ranked Jumbo in my top 35 or so, which I imagine was a possible thing if I had more time, he would have beaten Lawler into the top 10. Man, that would have been a sad day. For want of a nail and all that. My utter temporal failure worked out for the best.

I did try to go into a little more detail on the idea (and why it may have hurt Flair's ringwork) in the first half of the last pod I recorded with Stacey earlier this week. Ideally, we finish that up tomorrow and get it out to people at some point soon, but the hardest thing for me in the entire audio process was expressing justification when she called me on Flair being relatively high on my list when he's not a "Matt D" worker.

I still think that Flair HAS benefited from the footage. Look, I don't remember what was out there in 2006, but being on the 80s sets against a lot of different opponents in a lot of different settings helped him. People being able to see things like the Koko match and the Sawyer match and the Colon match more easily, some of the garbage tapes tag work, for instance; I think all of that makes a difference, as does the sheer number of great matches that we know about rising. He still has his negative traits, absolutely, but I think it's easier to weigh the stages of his career more equally now, and to understand how and why those negative traits exist and, if not forgive them, to learn to cope with them to some degree. As Parv's indicated at times, some of those potentially negative inputs could actually lead to a number of positive outcomes or opportunities, even. (The Distance from Old Man Flair being right in our face as an active in-ring worker probably doesn't hurt, but it's not what I'd focus on first). EDIT: Re: Hansen: I wish I could say that I'm a mastermind that really wanted to find a critique against him because no one was doing it, but that's not really how I operate. If it was, maybe Buddy would have done better, because I could have made a case that was more manipulative or cunning. With Hansen, a bunch of matches dropped. They were matches that on paper sounded really exciting to me (like Race/Bockwinkel vs Hansen/Brody, for instance, or hey, Bockwinkel/Hennig vs Hansen/Dibiase, or even Jumbo/Tenryu vs Hansen/Dibiase) and I became increasingly frustrated in watching them. What followed was me watching more and more and just trying to wrap my head on what the hell was happening and why it was happening and how that synced up with the rest of his work, things I liked and things I loved and things I hated. The criticisms came out of my earnest frustration, not out of me trying to poke holes in Stan. It took me months to really come up with a theory. It definitely wasn't me coming up with a theory and then trying to find evidence for it. I was just trying to understand.

Some of this is tricky. I think Satanico is someone who had good legwork done for him, but even then, it was extremely one-sided. You only get a long thread if someone's engaging you back. We also have the microscope so sometimes it didn't make sense to redo effort.

I think people should look at the 150. It's an inclusive, special list, one that can be daring and cheeky but still has a lot of rigor and is full of at least a few wrestlers that I think all of us still have room to explore.

Pretty sneaky that Grimmas, making us think it was in alphabetical order. We're onto you and your sneaky ways. I'm glad Buddy beat Bret at least!

Kelly did an hour podcast making Savage's case. Circling back to Savage who I gave a number one vote to because he's awesome from pretty much every perspective I care about as a professional wrestler. To Whit: From the holistic view, Randy's skill set is virtually immense. Randy could bump like he was shot in the face and hit the mat with a force that if you blinked, BAM he's already on the canvas. Randy could limb sell and sell generalized damage to build sympathy with ease (knee injury during the Flair World Title WWF series being the most obvious example). Randy's strikes were varied and on point: jabs, elbows, the bend the guy over and kick him in the chest... all looked solid and were great in control segments and in the rally. He could work heat and was awesome underneath. His aerial work was groundbreaking and his top rope elbow is an iconic finish. He had unique psychology especially as a heel where he would use the whole ring as a weapon and would utilize spacing in a way no one else did or does. Did anyone ever spend more time going in and out of the ring than Savage? Maybe, I didn't have a stopwatch on him. From the great matches sense, Randy has great matches with a variety of guys with a variety of different skill sets (Warrior, Hogan, Flair, Steamboat, Tito, Lawler etc etc). While some might look at his planning methodology as a crutch, I cannot bring myself to care. Results oriented business allows for all sorts of different ways of getting to the end goal. He's also underrated as a tag guy with his team with Lanny actually being effective foils for the Rock 'n' Rolls. From the cultural perspective, Randy Savage is probably in the top 5 of cross over stars all times. Who doesn't know the voice, the outfit, the snap into it? Who hasn't done the Savage elbow off a diving board into the pool? And while that 'doesn't count' it reflects his charisma and uniqueness which do. Randy Savage is wrestling to me and to a great many people. He's loud and unique and colorful and awesome. And he's awesome. Just so goddamn awesome. As with everyone else who's defended a relatively non-traditional #1 choice, thanks for taking the time to do so. I like the spacing point especially. From listening to the podcasts and from doing one myself, Randy's someone that I think everyone had something of a hard time defending.

It kind of was both Vader AND Steamboat. I think people were looking at it as an either/or.

For me, the most important number for Bockwinkel is that 130. I'm not entirely sure there were 130 wrestling fans in the world that would have voted for him in a list like this five years ago, especially if we were going off of footage. I'm very happy with his placement. I thought he could have fallen at any point in the last day and a half, certainly. As for 70s Bock, the answer is "not much." A lot of what we have is clipped. You can get a sense of him, one that mostly syncs up with the very complete later picture, but it's just a sense. Just off the top of my head, there are some Bock/Stevens vs Crusher/Bruiser matches, some of a Verne match, some of a Ladd match, some of an Andre match, a lot of the match that made the High Flyers. As you get towards the end of the decade, you start to get Japanese footage, like Jumbo/Baba vs Nick/Lanza, and a couple of Jumbo matches. There is some IWE stuff from the end of the decade that I'm really looking forward to see. And you get spatterings of Memphis. Kevin could speak more at exactly what's out there. Much of my case for Bock is that we have every bit of necessary footage in the 80s, in so many different situations where he had to be great to achieve different ends in different ways, that it's more than enough. Enough points to create a very detailed map.

Vader maybe?

Lee Casebolt is a scholar and gentleman. More later.