Matt D

Everything has been worth it.

Finlay was boring to me in person in 1998. Tastes mature.

I voted against people for Texas, so that's sort of countered.

Luckily we're past the workrate mentality that included wisdom like "chops=great tehnical wrestling" and pretended amount of moves used is a valid criteria to judge wrestlers on.Exactly! I'm fact a wrestler should be able to get bonus points for having a compelling match doing nothing but punches!!!! True, but someone should also get props for a match focused around body part work with lots of cool, varied offence working on a limb, not just taking a lazy approach to it and calling it minimalist. Less can be more, especially if you are a Jim Breaks who can make little things seem incredible...but nobody is telling me Kenta Kobashi would have been a better worker if he had ditched all the bombs and varied shit and had a tiny move set, relying on punch exchanges and personality to have great matches. Steve Austin vs Undertaker in 2001 is a prime example of a lazy, lazy match where they just work punch exchanges for twenty minutes. Give me dives and suplexes and bombs over that anyday, so long as they are put in smartly. No, but if he did 20% less stuff in his matches I'd love him 100% more.

Oh hey, Virus made it.

if that's the case, I put forward a motion that whenever the list is presented, we present 1-110 instead of 1-100.

Christian is doomed.

We just jumped big to 68 ballots for Waltman.

The sprint match with Bock, too, is pretty much the antithesis for the old idea of what Larry was.

Today is the day that hope dies.

Flair, the choice of anonymity.

Today will be the worst.

Man I wish Larry could have stalled just a little bit longer.

Shawn's Elbow is part of his finishing sequence. That's something I struggle with when it comes to the match. Shawn just doesn't have the weapon in his arsenal to take Taker down. Yes, him flooring him with superkicks was part of the build but he never had to hold him down for three with them, certainly not at Wrestlemania. Shawn had never been able to pin Taker. On the other hand, Taker has the escalation of moves. Chokeslam -> Last Ride -> Tombstone. All Michaels had, really, was Superkick -> Kip up, Elbow, Superkick. But even then, that's just not ENOUGH escalation. That's, in part, why the countout moment is so important. I had an issue with the caught cat skin/moonsault. I think one of those two was just a little too cute. Having one was okay. Having two was problematic. I think that's endemic of a bigger problem when it comes to matches like these (self aware epics or whatever). It's very hard to find the line and the natural inclination is always for complexity over simplicity. There are points where I think it works (the Choke - block, kick-block, chokeslam, and the sunset flip attempt on the Last Ride before Taker hits it), but when it doesn't work or when a simpler choice would improve upon it, it sticks out badly.

Well, yeah, the major difference is in his run prior to the UFC. But I don't think that's the only difference. I don't think he's religiously against selling, for one. In some ways, I liken current Brock more to Hansen at his worst, just without a lot of the positives.

We can just find and replace on Brock Lesnar if we have to. I feel very differently about Angle and Brock, though I don't think either should be in the top 100.

I won't react to Angle, for the sake of my own sanity and yours. Anything else, though, I'll react to.

My top two would be Gino vs Valentine and that 8-man (with that Jose vs Gino shortly thereafter if it's not one we've gotten already!)

This is the last list you mean, right Bruce? Most of these have gone up, some haven't. EDIT: I bolded the ones I THINK We haven't seen yet but I'm not sure about some of them. Pete would know better.

People value different things. That's something very clear from this process.

A blast. It's about 16 minutes of action, 2/3 falls, a beautiful shine, two FIPs, the double refs smartly used by the heels since they'd draw back and let Slater or Rich draw them away, a super athletic Tully and Gino, a super fiery Rich and Slater, hot tags that are generally earned, and a finish that did a great job of justifying why Slater brought Rich into Houston to even the odds. I wish it had just a few more minutes for the shine and just a few more on both FIPs; that holds it back from being a classic, but the world is a just a little bit of a better place for people being able to see it for the first time in 35 years.

Understood. But I believe by this point its been pretty openly stated by many people that they considered other aspects and yet there's still this sense of "how did guy X make it this high" when it's clear guy X got ranked by a lot of people for being an all-time legend. My head scratching is more about people who are still shocked that those names are doing well. (And by "all time legend" I mean someone like Hogan, who may not have the most sparkling in-ring career but who transcends that in a way that makes him great in certain people's eyes.) I think that's blurring the lines though because a lot of people who voted for wrestling-only, voted for Hogan for his in-ring footage. That's absolutely true with Andre. It's true with Piper. It's true with Dusty. It's true with Sting, as we've heard in the last few pages. That's part of why I like to hear the explanations, because I'm working out what all of this means. I want to hear if people voted for HHH just because he had too many good matches to ignore or because of specific elements in those matches and what those elements are. Yes, it's your opinion, but I want to understand that opinion.

Once again, I think a lot of the answers to your questions go back to the discussion or lack thereof on certain categories. Often times, when someone's come forward to defend their pick, after they were asked to, people were happy that they did and satisfied with their answers. I KNOW why Parv put Dory where he did. I know how Loss feels about Chigusa. People know how I feel about Eadie or Mark Henry. So it's frustrating when a wrestler comes up that there was a lot of discussion for and there's dissonance or just an outright mystery. As for the "worker" thing, I think generally people consider the word "worker" interchangeable with wrestler. As it being in-ring vs promos and everything else, that was something that came up a few times in the process, and it does lead to a few voters' preferences, which, if explained, will lead to a gif from Parv of someone shrugging. It wasn't around work-rate but I think there is a wide majority of people who voted that felt it was about wrestling and available footage. Evidence.

I wonder what this says about you.

It's not about Malenko being voted for so much as it's about there not being enough discussion about him (and the discussion that was there not moving the needle), so that it came as a surprise. If he was someone who was going to end up so high, relatively, then we should have probably talked a lot more about him and people should have come to his defense more thoroughly, etc and then it could have been a debate that may or may not have swayed people one way or another. But apparently this was an issue back in 2006.