Matt D

Pete would have made a terrible Ken Shamrock anyway.

Parv discovers he has a heart and my #2 and #3 suffer. Figures.

Is this a double turn with Johnny?

OJ, can you point to some Iron Fist matches you think are particularly weak?

I have Bryan criticisms (He'll still do fine on my ballot in the same way Hansen will do fine because there's a lot of brilliance and a lot of good matches). I just don't have time to flesh them out. I'd need to watch a lot more and write up a lot more than I have time for right now. There's just a lot of disparate footage and I just never got around to it. I can criticize elements of a Claudio match or the Kamala match or some of his 2013-2014 selling, but I can't get all the way around it to make more endemic criticisms right now. That's a regret. It also has me feeling that even if he's ten+ below where a lot of you will have him on my ballot, he's still too high.

Hechicero has performances I love. Hechicero has performances I don't like. I much prefer him as a rudo. A lot of the pre-CMLL indy matches we have of him are as a local hero tecnico. That's just an awkward fit for me.

The only advantage in a LMS match is that Ambrose could be built up as never-say-die. I think it'd end up being pretty tedious though for the reason goc stated.

I bet Bill Apter would return an e-mail.

La Sombra is someone who I think was really quite good by 2010 or so and also had a good last couple of years, in two wildly different roles. If he thrives in NXT, he's someone that I could see having a case even in just a few years. That's a big if though.

I love it when bets come into play.

Well "rest of the way" is another way of saying "rest of the matches." I was trying to find the post where I wanted to find more context for some Satanico match in 84 by watching the matches that led up to it right when the lucha set came out. High comedy.

I have Villano III on my list right now, but I'm tempted to go back and omit him. He's one of those frustrating people where I think should be better than I have him, maybe even by 50 slots or more (which is huge), but based just on the footage I've been able to see, is actually too high. There are only a few people on my list like that (Patterson is one, though not as extreme on one and far more extreme on the other; Ladd is another). It feels like a token inclusion right now, or a handicapped best guess.

I like the resolution most of all. It's like the Grinch's heart growing. Also great, was Chad's "oh boy" after the commercial break.

A crab is something pretty common for people to go to in this era, that's true. The reason why I brought it up as I did was that it's a reversal and not a spot. It involves the other wrestler actively doing something instead of passively having something done to him, or something happening by chance or in passing. I've watched well over a hundred of these matches in the last six months and the crab takes me out of the match more than almost anything else I've seen in the midst of the really good stuff. It's not that I think it's actively bad or that much more egregious than anything else. It just happened to break the chain of engagement a couple of times in his matches in the same way the Kidman power bomb always does. I think the issue, like Childs mentioned, was that Walton points it out too much. Given the congeniality in the match, I actually half had the sense vs Clay Thomson that Clay was putting it on him almost as a kayfabe favor so he could let his pal show off to the crowd.

Looking at my list, I've got Condrey above a lot of guys and he's had no discussion. Is he rating for anyone else?

Boscik is at the very of my list and I can't imagine him leaving it. He's everything I ever wanted out of Dean Malenko mixed with a Hungarian Toby Jones.

I'm leaning against him. He's an absolute wizard but I just don't feel like I've seen enough for him to pass the confidence test. I'm going to keep watching more of him over the next week, so we'll see if I can wrap my head around him the rest of the way.

Been meaning to ask: is his Boston Crab escape the WoS version of trying to power bomb Kidman?

I have Ted over Curt. Put very quickly, Curt's highs are very high but his lows are lower than Dibiase's in my mind.

Better draw on top, Bossman or Brock?

Are you more frustrated by that or Inoki?

This is a match which took place very shortly after Martel entered the Portland territory. They used up their shot at the NWA champ on the new guy. They pushed that he demanded the match be on TV, and in the weeks that followed, that he demanded kids would get in free to a show, etc. They were obviously trying to get him over. The match was made him look strong in very specific ways. It's not some amazing stretch to think that Harley worked the match in the way that he did to help get Martel over, which meant giving him almost the entire first fall. I appreciate it if people think I am somehow creative or deeply analytical but most of the stuff I come up with really isn't rocket science. It's connecting a bunch of not so disparate dots.

On #2. It's perfectly okay for you to value different things than I do. THAT makes the discourse richer. It's art. (and let's double back in April and talk about how it's commercial art, maybe, because I think there's an interesting line in that direction).

We learn a lot. We watch a lot. We do our best. I understand if you feel like we can never get close. But I think we actually do a great job with it. I'm impressed each and every day that I'm on this message board by the discussions of the people around me, the history that they know, the context they bring in, the analysis they bring to bear. When they tell me to look for something, I very often see it. When I don't, or when I disagree, I argue. I have a lot of faith in my fellow posters, though, because they've earned it with their hard work.

It's because I don't actually look to do any of this, Parv. You've got it backwards. It came naturally from what I was watching. The lightbulb went off when I just happened to be watching every bit of TV and house show and big event we had in 89 WWF. I saw patterns and worked backwards from there. I'm still refining all of this from watching a lot of matches. I didn't come in with a thesis. I ended up absorbing a lot of data and making conclusions and that helped me make a lens to see more matches through and so on. In the AWA set, the wrestlers that jumped out at me were the wrestlers that jumped out at me. The things that pissed me off were the things that pissed me off.