Matt D

Looking back, I had forgotten I had even wrote that write-up but I think at the time I was sad no one engaged me on it. It was probably pretty late in the process, like my Bock case but at least people find that useful now.

https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/28786-mark-henry/?page=2

Wrestlers I expect to absolutely stay in my top 10: Bockwinkel, Casas, Funk, Satanico, Rose, Lawler Wrestlers who may stay in my top 10: Flair, Andre Wrestlers who will probably not stay in my top 10: Breaks, Virus Wrestlers who could potentially end up in my top 10: Jumbo, Tenryu, Fujiwara Wrestlers who are contenders that I have new thoughts about but still don't have a great shot at my top 10: Pillars, Hansen, Bryan Wrestlers who I just don't know enough about to judge yet but that I imagine could make it: Hashimoto, Liger, Ishikawa, various joshi wrestlers

We have five years to delve into Virus' 00s, especially that 00-10 period that I think is underexamined in general. I put it through the match finder and found that there was actually a hair match he had in 07 vs Tony Rivera that made tape and it's actually online thanks to Cubs. I bet most people haven't seen it, so here it is: I hadn't seen it so I gave it a quick look. I think it bodes well for 07 Virus in general, but it also makes it an absolute shame that we don't have more meaningful singles matches from this period: This isn't the 23 minutes that the video indicates as there are a bunch of bits hyping up Del Rio included, but past the start of the segunda and tercera, you don't get the sense it was clipped too much. It's good. I think it's especially a good Virus performance. The primera goes way too quickly with an immediate missed dive by Rivera (a pretty nasty one at that, made even worse by the insult to injury of a Kemonito pratfall graphic announcing that it's the primera) overlaid upon it. They accomplish a lot in a minute or two after that, with Virus foreshadowing his facebuster with a failed attempt before hitting it a few moves later so he can lock in a submission. I liked the segunda as it felt fairly unique. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I haven't seen quite enough mid-card singles matches in 06. The idea was that Rivera would keep kicking Virus off when he tried to put on a submission (or get a roll up) and the disruption of momentum felt like hope spots in a way you rarely get in lucha. It also felt like desperation which, because they weren't exactly bringing the hate, helped create a more proper apuestas feel. Virus' punches looked really good both here and in the tercera, which is not something I usually think about with him. There was also a fairly spectacular spot where he caught Rivera when he was flying in with a lightning-fast whipping arm drag. Throughout, Rivera was definitely game but he wasn't the most graceful guy in the world, even if I thought Virus based well for him, especially on the two dives that did hit. The tercera could have gone another rotation or two (and again we might have missed a bit with the clipping) but the nearfalls were exciting. Virus had an awesome little spot where he hit an armdrag by stepping up from the floor to the apron and then lost the advantage shortly thereafter by gloating too much about it in the ring. The finish had the necessary oomph but also a crystal clear mechanical precision by Virus as he shifted one movement into the next. Overall, you'd want this to bring just a bit more hate given the stakes but it had more weight to it than a title match would have, and it's a really good look at a bridging sort of Virus where had had more athleticism than he'd bring in the 10s but still had the making of a maestro.

If you guys are engaging with me (And the page starts with others raising the question, so maybe not), let me reiterate and refocus my argument so we don't have six pages on this. I'm not talking about generalities here, but about a specific decision I made in ranking Shawn in 2016 that you can see me deliberate here and in the match discussion archive for the Taker matches and in the podcast with Stacey. In 2016, I felt like Shawn's execution in the big melodramatic matches was poor because his acting was so facile and poor. I thought that the ideas/concept/ambition was potentially very good, potentially very worthwhile, and posited that if he could "direct" wrestlers in a setting like that without his own miserable acting dragging it down, he could create something potentially very interesting. So while I docked him points for the overall matches, I didn't punish him as much as I might have otherwise because of that potential. In the meantime, we've had a chance to see just that and I stand here five years saying that I was wrong and in light of new evidence that I should have penalized Shawn more for those matches than I actually did. That's nothing to do with his overall booking/influence, just one area where I went too easy on him and now regret in the face of new evidence.

@Childs, this was a good post and more of the direction I was leaning. My argument was going to be that Shawn realized he couldn't make it to the top through conventional means given his size, his boss' proclivities, how the fans were conditioned, and his overall competition, so he worked to alter the playing field into something that best benefited him. Bret may have sought success by moving backwards, by trying to be a Jack Brisco style technical champion who was credible in more sports oriented way, but Shawn tried to push it forward to a point where the false tents of pro wrestling mattered less than the real performance elements. I was going to build a whole picture with WM XI as a center point (if his good friend, Nash succeeded, that'd basically shut the door on Shawn's future success, so he had to show how much better a performer he was than Nash, etc), and how in order to break the glass ceiling, he actually tore down the whole building in the process. As for whether or not we hold NXT against Shawn, I will in one specific way: I was working on a mindset in 2016, and I think you can see it earlier in the thread, that I thought Shawn had ambitious and compelling ideas but he was just terrible at execution them from an acting standpoint, just absolutely terrible, so that he would be a better director than an actor. I think I gave him some credit for that and thought if he just had the chance to push the right talent through his grand creations (EDIT: in these specifically over the top melodramatic matches), he could create something great. Obviously, that's not been the case, so I'm going to not forgive things that I had previously forgiven. It's one of the two or three pieces of outside knowledge we've gotten that will affect my ballot (some of the info on Jumbo is fairly interesting to consider and knowing that Arn came up with so many specific finishes for Cena has a small impact on Cena and makes me feel a little more comfortable attributing good ideas I see in matches with Arn to Arn). But in all counts, remember that how I'm trying to understand wrestlers is very different than how some of you guys are going about this, so bear with me, you know? Or adopt my insane attempts at total understanding. It's a hell of a five year journey.

Give us some more on what makes something better or worse here?

Childs, I will expound at some point in the near future. And it wasn't necessarily the idea that someone could think the Rockers were better than ANY of the teams I listed, so much as the notion that they were better than ALL the teams.

Sure, but at some point causality has to come into it. Blood in the Sand is brilliant, but it's brilliant because two journeymen wrestlers, one of them being one of the most instinctually brilliant wrestlers of all time were shaping and molding very game bits of raw material that were still pretty green and that had just been put together. I think there are diminishing returns throughout the year; it peaks in August. I have huge problems with the first cage match (though i know others disagree) which is when Shawn and Marty were getting more experience and seasoning and agency. Blood on the Sand is sort of like how Lawler vs rookie Bam Bam is Bam Bam's best match. With the exception of that one match (because no other team listed would give themselves over to Rose/Somers so thoroughly), I think Rose/Somers could have had as good matches with any of the other teams, and certainly more consistent ones across the horn. You should applaud the raw talent in that match, but don't use that as the basis that the Rockers were the best team ever. Shawn will make my list and he's going to make the list on the combination of his raw talent and his sheer ambition. He reached farther and wider than anyone else of his time. Part of what makes Blood on the Sand work is that he was so game and ambitious and he wanted the best. That meant he was willing to do anything to achieve it. 100%. I agree there. He'll be in my bottom twenty because I think he failed as much as he succeeded (that's a lot of strike outs for a guy who hits a lot of home runs) and because I think his ambition (combined with some of his physical detriments and self-consciousness) drove him to the wrong goals. He felt he could only succeed by dismantling certain aspects that made pro wrestling work up until then and by working so hard to tear those walls down, he broke wrestling maybe as deeply as the loss of kayfabe did.

Yeah, the Rockers were my favorite team as a kid and the first comp I bought as a teenager and there are a few matches I love, but if a brand new match was going to drop from any of those teams against the same opponents, Rockers would probably be the last on the list I'd be excited for.

This idea that so many of you apparently think that the Rockers are some how better than the RnR, Fantastics, Fabs, (maybe the Rock'n'Roll RPMs in PR), High Flyers, Ricky Morton/Ken Lucas, etc. is kind of nuts to me.

It's only 8 minutes but you can get a fairly good look at how he moves and his overall attitude here. It frustrates me that we don't have more young Ramos since he was a key figure in territories I care about but everything we have of him from the late 70s on doesn't really give us a good look at why.

He’s Bull Ramos before he got old, like in that one Inoki/Baba tag we have.

27% of the fan base then?

Hey, no thread drift in the Christian thread. I will watch these TNA matches. I will. What about Indy matches during that era. Jimmy Rave for JAPW? Tyson Dux for BSE? Xavier for NEW? PCO/Styles/Christian for Great North Wrestling? Sabin for NEW? Any of this out there?

I kind of think that at least part of how I handled things in 2016 was that every wrestler in contention started tied for #1 and then I knocked them down based on flaws or things missing, etc. I'm not 100% sure that's how I handled things, but it's how I ended up treating Virus, where I just had a really hard time finding anything wrong with him other than a lack of easily accessible 2000-2010 footage. And then I desperately, in this thread, asked for someone to do a hatchet job on him and no one stepped up. @ohtani's jacket kill the golden god that is Virus for us?

I don't know about that. I think it's an incredible effective match in making Martel feel legitimate to the Portland crowd and he's basically a made man as lead babyface (or lead with Piper) for the rest of the year afterwards. I think it's a very focused, purposeful performance from Race, and when I say he gives too much, it's not really what I'm talking about because it's so exceptional and worked as such. But as a MOTYC and in a bubble, I find it pretty unsatisfying. If you didn't have to put it next a lot of Japan matches where Race gets eaten up when he's NOT the champ, I think it would be a better mark for his career overall. BTW The biggest new Race match we got in the last few years is the Dory draw, right, which was exactly how you picture it? There's also the 83 Dibiase match in Japan that Eric, Phil, AND myself all thought stunk for the opposite reasons.

The full Houston 1985-12-29 match is really good.

You see glimpses though. The 89 singles match with his pal Yatsu starts that way and it’s a big shocking moment (to Yatsu most of all) when Jumbo starts taking liberties out of nowhere because you can’t go home again and put that genie back.

I'm in a weird spot as Jumbo is "new" to me. I don't think he's going to crack my top 5 or anything but I don't have decades of baggage with him as someone like Dylan does. I wonder how much of that is the wrestling itself and how much is just the community. I don't think there's anyone here who's been here for more than a few years that wants to touch the idea of comparing Bret and Flair with a ten foot stick.

But did you?

One thing that felt very clear to me in watching all of their 87-89 encounters was that, while it varied in different venues, the fans were definitely behind Jumbo relative to Tenryu. There’s always a lot of Tenryu goading Jumbo (though sometimes that’s reversed) often to Yatsu’s frustration. While I like the match where Jumbo regains the title better (maybe more of a “me” match than one that belongs to them), the one where Tenryu wins really feels like their two philosophies of wrestling clashing.

Let’s not kill the magic here, guys.

Speaking of rare lucha apuestas matches: http://www.thecubsfan.com/cmll/2014/03/21/robin-hood-versus-shu-el-guerrero/ I reached out to cubs on this and he said that he never had permission to share it and he wasn't even sure if he still had it. It was on my mind for GWE reasons, not because either guy would necessarily rank but because my approach has SHU as an acronym and because I'm challenging people to really say that Goldberg was better than Robin Hood (let alone six other Brazos). I'd still like to see the thing someday though.