Matt D

Bumping this, because I was genuine. I'll take up another "terrible Andre match" challenge if someone really feels strongly about giving me one, but it'd probably be more of the same.

It's amazing. Jericho's gone from pretending to be Bockwinkel to pretending to be Miz. I could see Miz giving that promo almost word for word, just with better, more earnest delivery, which is funny, because Jericho probably believes a lot of it anyway.

People would think that it was too hokey/unbelievable.

I'm hoping that we don't see the Portland set for at least a few months. While I'm familiar with a huge chunk of the matches that will almost certainly be on it (and they're all going to be great and people will love it), I need a little bit of a break from list making. I was talking to Loss a little while ago about making lists in general and how specific criteria makes things easier. He said it he was more interested in something like "best match of a specific year" or what not, but that's not hugely appealing to me save for the discussion maybe. On the other hand, he didn't find "best hot tags" or what have you too compelling at this stage of his watching. The middle ground I thought was interesting was more narrative based, but also match based. Something like "Best big man vs little man matches" where we see how different wrestlers handled the same narrative challenge. I don't think I hooked him with that though.

BIGLAV: +1 for Johnny actually critiquing something

If we were making a list of our favorites, Garza would probably be in my top 15. That's not what this is and he likely won't even make my top 50, but I'm probably still going to be the high voter on him, based almost entirely on the back half of his career. He was really the ultimate middle ground between athleticism and character. Not only was, he so, so smooth in almost everything he did physically (most especially the corkscrew plancha and the way he'd bound up to the top rope for his moonsault), he was an amazing, emotive rudo, someone who felt to me like the heir to Eddy Guerrero. I could watch him react to a total stiff like Jon Strongman Anderson all day. He's someone who could make whatever was happening in the ring immediately a thousand more entertaining and meaningful through his reactions. I probably put 10+ gifs in the review below, and while gifs are a terrible way to get across someone's candidacy, I think it fits here. http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2015/03/mlj-2010-garza-odyssey-20-strong-man.html

We've been working so hard on this for years now and especially focusing on matches through a very specific lens. There is a sense of "eating your vegetables" that I think people are expressing to some degree, and of boxing wrestlers in to one set of criteria or another just so that we can make a list. As ambitious and enjoyable as this process has been and even though it's opened a lot of us up to wrestling we wouldn't normally watch, or that we might not have watched in such a crash-course manner, I think most of us don't entirely find the ideal wrestling viewing one where we're constantly keeping a top 100 list in mind. So I'm asking what's next for people? We've found lots of different strands to explore out of this process, roads that we couldn't fully go down to the depth we wanted. Or maybe it's comfort food, or being able to revisit some things without having to think too much about it. 1. First and foremost, it's 80s NJPW. Fujinami and Choshu and all that. I'm probably going to nab the 80s set. 2. More WoS. I have a lot more to watch. I still have only dipped my toe in for all that's out there and i enjoy it a lot. It's a great way to spend 20-30 mins at a time, and I really like Kent Walton. 3. Joshi. I don't even know where to start. I have some sense where NOT to start, mind you. I could watch Aja Kong all day, but there's also a lot of storytelling elements you don't get in almost any other sort of wrestling that makes it an interesting thing to explore. 4. Shootstyle. I'm not big on the really punchy stuff, but the more grapply stuff... 5. I'd love to watch Continental at length at some point. Maybe I'll get there.

I don't think it needs to be an either/or thing, though, and the people who will do best on most people's lists are likely wrestlers that can manage both things well, or that don't sacrifice one for the other, or that don't rely on one as a crutch. (I don't think my list is necessarily most people's lists, by the way)

It'd be a bigger problem for me if I was trying to put anyone over him.

I don't think that it's productive to assume that Bockwinkel didn't have an overall strong 70s. My worry would be in a totally different direction than Parv's.

I find the 1/80 Race vs Martel match from Portland fascinating as a tool to get a new babyface over in a territory by using the travelling champ. (It's on youtube). I've not seen the Australia match, so I'm curious how it compares.

Reading Dave's commentary through 1984 is fascinating because he had initial optimism about Hogan and that slowly faded through the year to the point he was ready to quit entirely.

Did he choose not to be Duggan or was it forced on him either by his opponents, the agents, the differences in crowds, the travel schedule, or some other factors? Was Duggan only so good in Mid-South because of crowd expectations, opponents, and Watts riding him so hard?

Duggan couldn't even be Duggan in the WWF though.

Bryan is cresting at the right time for this poll, no doubt. On the other hand, you have people revisiting his work from 15 years ago and saying it holds up, so maybe he'll have staying power in the upper reaches. It's an interesting question. I wonder if the answer to that question will be, in part, based on how concussion research and its effect on wrestling plays out in the next ten years.

He landed on his skull. He flew over the top rope like you couldn't imagine. It was nuts! 1979 Gino Hernandez was not prepared to catch him at all!

Another strong tag match. What I found most interesting here was the use of the stuttering sort of heat that we saw in those Guerreros heel matches. Here, though, because of the additional space offered by the 2/3 fall format, each mini heat segment, while not having a super satisfying hot tag, was given more room to breathe, lasted longer, and involved more cut offs. Lothario is the master. I love how he so often makes the action come to him. It makes it mean all the more when he advances. Gino was full on Flair here, the hair, ducking away, begging off, the flair flip, the strutting. It's really interesting to me to see how much he'd picked up of his act so early in the game. Conway was effective. He's very stiff in his reactions, but his stuff looks good. There's a moment in here that Pete might spoil for you guys, but I don't want to. It came right after the Flair flop towards the end of the first fall and it was breathtaking and insane and just has to be seen. For 1979, it is madness.

This seems strangely a bit received opinion from you Matt. I have to say I don't recognise much of this from a lot of the Mil matches I've seen. Like, he will give, and even take a beating sometimes, but you know the match is going to end in a double count out and that he's absolutely not going to get pinned. And that at some point in the match, he'll get his shit in. But the Brody comparison feels off. Mil not taking pins is also made a bigger deal of because it is in the wrestling lore. Like Abby never took pins, Sheik didn't, I mean honestly how many times were Terry Funk or Stan Hansen pinned in All Japan? Dory never took pinfalls either. In the context of AJ at the time, not so unusual. I'm just saying that there's a bit mythmaking and confirmation bias from that mythmaking in here too. I've seen Mascaras sell an uppercut like it killed him. I'm not saying it's not true that he worked strong, but that the line is probably a bit overstated, especially in comparison with his contemporaries. I'll deep dive Mascaras a few months from now, maybe. I've seen it in a number of matches though. People getting heat on him is fleeting and made to feel like a fluke. I also look for it coming in (admittedly), but I sure remember finding it a lot over decades and in different locales. When I don't, I'm happily surprised. I feel pretty certain about this one.

The comparison to Mil, to me, is a guy like Brody. He knew what he was doing in there, but it was in his best interest, as a travelling attraction, a creature of mystery and mystique, to look strong no matter what. Sometimes, it made financial sense to him for him to give more in a match, and in those cases he did. So that makes him either one of the best, most successful, wrestlers of all time, or a pretty crummy one. Beats me. He's not coming close to my list.

Very. But not quite as close as a year ago. I'd like to write something about Buddy in the next few days too.

I've been very vocal about my issues with Hansen's physical peak, especially the "home promotion+physical peak+height of footage" conundrum, so that's fair. We don't know. From what we have, it's POSSIBLE that he spent his more of his physical prime giving too much to his opponents and bumping up and down like some sort of 1990 Mr. Perfect, and if we had it, it would hurt his #1 case (though not his #10 case or whatever). There are hints of that in his matches with Verne, but they're just hints and I feel mostly confident with the evidence we have. Yes it's on the low side, but there are, as I said, lots of angles, and none of the glaring faults I, personally, find in a lot of the other #1 contenders. I completely respect and understand your opinion here though.

There is a far bigger difference between 3 and 50 and 50 and 100 to me, especially lacking evidence where he actively does NOT convince me.

I understand where you're coming from Childs, but for me, it's a non issue because of the fact we see him in so many roles. The evidence we have is exactly the evidence we need. In some ways it's easier for me to judge him than someone who played only a few roles in his career, but we have all of that career. We can see Bockwinkel from so many different angles, far more than most wrestlers we have many more years of, I'd say. We have evidence of him dealing with so many different wrestling challenges. For me, it's more than enough.

My big takeaways so far are 1.) That Billy Gunn was a bump freak in 2001. 2.) That I really want to see the Koslov and Mark Henry matches at the end of 09 into 09 to see if Matt worked the same exact "arm being targeted" story in all four which would either be awesome or terrible (not sure which) and 3.) that while I really liked the Swagger match, the finish drove me absolutely nuts.

Really, just watch the entirety of WWECW starting from ..what, Backlash 2007? That can be your post-GWE project.