Matt D

I know everyone's watching Funk vs Orton today, but I'm totally with Pete on Harley vs Halcon and the promos/pre-match/post match around it. This feels exactly like another one of those "Great Nights of Wrestling in Houston." One of those angles that if we had on tape 15 years ago, we'd be talking about on the list with some of those Memphis or Mid-South shows. Race is extremely good at playing a vulnerable champion, often times too good because the situation doesn't merit it. Here, it absolutely does and he absolutely shines. I was really expecting a lot of clowning and stooging against Halcon doing all of his quasi-lucha moves but that's not at all what we got here. What we got instead was Race fighting for his very life after Brody's riot. Halcon was quick to bite and do that ridiculous but awesome over the top straight haymaker. I loved Harley using the Atomic Drop as his primary cut off/killshot move. The way he held him up for the first one really let it set in for the crowd before dropping him made it work for what it was meant to be in a way it might not have otherwise. Yeah, this was really good. I ALMOST want to see the follow up Brody vs Race match (almost. I saw some of his kicks at the end when he was doing the post-match run in and that made me want to see it a little less). Everyone should catch this one ASAP though. Harley doing what he does best at a time when he had all the reason in the world to do it.

Big margin of winning. Really I think it's more that he hit the Flying Body Press for the second time in his career.

Just curious, how much were people affected by the AJPW footage that popped up in the last year in voting for Funk? That was a huge part of it for me, supplementing what we already had to what felt like a pretty big degree. If not that, what specific footage that you hadn't seen raised him in your eyes during the voting period?

My gut says that this will have a way bigger positive impact on the numbers than anything else they've done so far.

Steven told me the #1. It's:

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!