Matt D

Back in 2001, when I was in college, on the night before Halloween, my roommate and I went to go see Alice Cooper in Boston. It was the night before because he played New York on Halloween. So he was just over 50. We sit down to see him and the guy behind us says that he sees him every year and has seen him every year for years now and it's always the same show but it's a good show. He told us how things would go. And it's exactly how it went. On Halloween of the next year, he played Boston instead of New York. We went again. It was the same show. It was a good show. No variation. The same show. It's what the people in the crowd expected. It's what they got. It was interactive to a degree. It was ritual. It was preordained. Years and years and years of guys who may or may not have a moonsault or top rope rana in their arsenal going up to the top so that they could get cut off for the same spots. Rote and ritual. The fans can sing along. Entirely unique in wrestling.

Ok. Sure. Die Hard 3: Die Hard with a Vengeance then. I’m flexible?

Sequels have subtitles right? Die Hard 2: Die Harder I'm pretty sure this should officially be GWE 2026: The Best In-Ring Wrestler Based on Footage It'd avoid us so, so many headaches later. It's not limiting at all based on the spirit of the project. It just clarifies. Those are the four elements: "best" "in-ring" "wrestler" "footage" that 90% of us agree upon right? Also sort of turns it from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC which eliminates false advertising for why we can't all vote for Danny Hodge or why we're not all voting for Hogan and the Rock.

Yup. Edge says a lot of the right things. Then he gives us crazy bug eyes.

I'll put together the Catch matches later as they were taken down a few years ago and I don't have them handy.

Andre's personal case is only better. Let me start with that. Nothing in the new footage will bump him down. That said, I foresee a world where I have 30 new people on my list easily. It's just too early for me to say. I don't anticipate putting the pillars in my top ten, however, but I could foresee putting a guy like Tenryu in there and Andre was towards the end of the ten, so one or two of those and he's out of the top 10.

There's a headhunters tag, but this is the big new piece of Cota footage we've gotten if I'm not mistaken:

The 3-4 French matches are a huge get. The new NJPW Tito + Pedro tag is awesome. The Rudge tag is great. We've gotten a spattering of other things.

First and foremost, this is not the sort of thing which should cover a whole page in a thread. It's errata. It's a marginal discussion. It's a versatility concern. It probably doesn't matter to some of you, but we've got five years and maybe this will be a twenty page thread and this being one page of it won't be so bad. Also, sorry guys, but this is what you'll be dealing with me over the next five years. Especially on candidates where we know everything there is to know. I'm going to go back and break down that one heel Tito performance we have or the few heel Pedro ones. I'm going to look at Casas' Super Astros performances. I'm going to look at 71 year old Lawler. I'll look at those Buddy Rose WWF TV jobber matches to see if he really did fail to do what he should have done to get over in New York. Probably not just the top guys either. I'm going to look at Ray Steele in UWF or Black Bart in Germany. Well, I don't think anyone's going to nominate Black Bart, so I probably don't have to do that. In this specific case, go back to my reviews, or more than that, go back and watch the matches. What he chose to do. The fact he looked almost lost or hesitant or unsure or unwilling to commit or that he seemed to be trying to do something but only went halfway and it was a failure because of his choices as much as anything else. That's what is interesting to me.

Hyper-focused experience with him so far, but as I've been going through 89, I'm not overly moved by him in Footloose. He's fine. The matches are fine. Where I find him really interesting is when he's put into a different sort of scenario, like when he tags with Ogawa against then Can-Ams on the 11/20/89 handheld, or recently released full 7/11/89 30 minute draw with Kobashi, matches where he's a more senior guy and can lead things a bit more. I look forward to following him into the 90s.

Rush was so compelling in 2013-2014 because he was wrestling heated, spot-filled lucha brawls in front of a lucha crowd that legitimately wanted to kill him, something that hadn't existed anywhere else in wrestling in regular way in a decade and that almost can't exist now and likely never will again. It certainly isn't going to happen in ROH. There's an alternate reality where he took Atlantis' mask, took LA Park's mask, took Ultimo Guerrero's hair, took Cavernario's hair, and ultimately put over some up and coming tecnico (or Dragon Lee, or hell, Hijo del Santo or Atlantis' kid getting revenge) in the most amazing, most heated, biggest drawing apuestas match imaginable. Unfortunately, that's not the reality in which we live.

My argument about Michaels in 2016 was that he was very likely an excellent director, a great stuntman, but a terrible actor. If he ever had the chance to direct wrestlers, I thought he'd excel. Boy was I wrong.

There's one word: "Footage" Going a slightly different direction, I found Kristen's argument re: Speaking Out that wrestling is a team sport and you can't consider someone who's predatory to other members of the team as great sort of interesting. It could be extrapolated out to things like ribs, both in negative ways (shitting in a crown or Dynamite injecting the wrong stuff into Davey Boy's butt cheek) or positive (Owen cracking guys up in the ring to keep the long travel bearable). But that seems to lean against footage, you know? It's hard enough figuring out how to deal with Lance Storm's terrible chair shots.

And that's a great way to make a list of your favorite bands or favorite wrestlers. It's also a very solid way to judge peak vs peak, which is totally valid, and is an approach a lot of people will be going with. Who was the absolute greatest when they were as great as they could possibly be? That's not what I'm going with.

I like this because it controls for opportunity and forces you to think more about different situations which may have different purposes. It's still not nearly enough for me. I'll unveil an acronym at some point too.

Of course. And you reward the ones who managed it well despite limitations. And more than that, you look at specifically how they dealt with it and try to see what that can teach you about them as wrestlers. Maybe they aren't that great but you can tell they did everything they could given the limitations they obviously had. That might even help their case even if the matches weren't great. To me, literally everything a wrestler's ever done helps us understand them and helps to figure out their greatness, and that includes working under certain limitations. If you only care about peak, that's another story. And I agree that this is tiebreaker stuff, but it's still interesting, especially in a top candidate. Why would you not want to talk about matches someone had? Their "case" may be the thing they did best but wouldn't the case against then partially be about things they didn't do well when given a chance? Was he suddenly not a wrestler anymore when he in Japan (during a year he's touted heavily for while holding the freaking NWA belt!) even though it's not part of his "case"? It also matters less for a guy at 95 on your list than a guy at 15. It's tiebreaker stuff, generally, at such a high level. Most of all, it's not that Steamboat didn't have good matches in 89 Japan when he was in NWA champ; it was my experience in watching the matches and seeing the specific things he did or didn't do that was so striking to me. It's HOW the matches weren't good, which is always going to matter to me, personally, more than whether or not the matches were good or not. But the latter should probably matter to some of you.

Time does weird things too. For instance, I doubt he'll get nominated, though he was very good, but here's Spartacus: French wrestler from 1960, good KO punch, good strength, good mat technician, right? What if I told you that later in life he was a contract killer? A hitman. Probably killed people. That he was arrested trying to kill the Gaston Glock? Since it's a crazy historical story and we only have black and white footage of the guy and you've probably never heard of him before, how does that make you feel? How would you feel if, let's say, a strong, agile wrestler like Brian Cage got arrested four years from now for doing something similar? See? Time is weird.

1. I've seen people get good stuff out of Takano and Nakano in 89. 2. Getting shit out of subpar workers is one of the things a NWA champ is supposed to be able to do. It's also, I'd argue, something that someone in the top 20 should probably be able to do, even in unfamiliar settings. 3. I'm not saying it changes everything. Steamboat came in 15 last time around. He was 13 in 2006. We know him. His case is very much built on being one thing well. Some of the reason for that is that we just don't have examples of him being something else. Here's an example! It didn't go well. How is that not an aspect to his case worth talking about a little bit?

All I can say is that I looked at some early 00s stuff five years ago so I'd have something to talk to Stacey about when Ozaki came up on the podcast and that was what was going on then too.

The most interesting one was going to be Sami vs Owens and that’s the one we don’t get.

From a GWE "input" perspective, I did think the Gonzalez singles highlighted Dandy's selling very well in a scenario where he didn't really have a lot to work with.

Remember, Ricky ended up as 15 on the overall list last time. 15. That's super high. I am more or less a proponent of the idea that we shouldn't penalize someone for something that they didn't do, as in, I don't hold the fact that we don't have footage of Steamboat as a heel against him (except for maybe if we're talking top 5 candidate), but if we do have him in a specific role and it didn't go well, that's another story.

I am quite high on the Stevens/Snuka vs Steamboat/Youngblood glimpses we get from 80. It's the only time I've ever seen anything at all special in Stevens and Snuka is really impressive. As for my point above, it's three matches where he had a chance to wrestle as a traveling NWA champ in Japan, which is a metric we can compare him with other people on, and it was a pretty big failure. I think versatility is important to a lot of people, especially as we enter a top tier, and this is a real chance for him to show it off and he floundered. It's the sort of thing which could impact him a few spots on my list. Nothing monumental, but if he had succeeded, it could have helped him in the same way.

https://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2019/04/new-footage-friday-fuchi-liger-bock.html Yes, and I'm sure SOMEONE captured it and it'll show back up sometime in the next five years, right?

As part of going through all of AJPW in 89, I watched his run there as NWA champ. My casual write-ups: 3/3/89 NWA WORLD CHAMPION Ricky Steamboat vs Takano: Yeah, this was problematic. Steamboat in Japan can be a little underwhelming, but this was all over the place. Yes, it's very cool on paper to see traveling champ Steamboat, but he didn't know what he was supposed to be here. He worked technical. He let himself get outworked on the mat, but he didn't clown or stooge. He got clotheslined over the top right after skinning the cat but he wasn't really heeling enough to make that seem like stooging. He hit the arm drags instead. He heeled in the corner with the chops and let Takano bully him. Then he hit the huge superplex off the top (which dropped Takano on his head because it's not something Steamboat should be doing against a guy that big) and got the oohs for the Flying Body Press. Despite Takano's size, Steamboat gave him way too much, as much as he should have given Tenryu or Jumbo. So lots of little things that were neat but it absolutely didn't come together. I'd call this one a real strike against Ricky, honestly. 3/4/89: Ricky Steamboat vs Shinichi Nakano: This was terrible. Maybe the worst Steamboat match I've ever seen? He gave Nakano something like 95% of the match, which is made all the more terrible because it was ten minutes tops. I'm sure he was trying to be gracious and put him over but Nakano didn't look better for it. Steamboat and the NWA World Heavyweight Championship both looked like jokes. He had some cheapshots and really lame hairpulling to try to escape a hold, but his heart wasn't into it. It was completely unbelievable. I don't know if he was trying to mimic Flair but if so, he only dipped his toes in the water the tiniest bit. No stooging, no engaging with the crowd, no emotion in anything he did, no stakes, no fire, no pride, no grandeur. This was basically a jobber match where Nakano slipped on a banana peel and the jobber somehow won. 3/8/89: Ricky Steamboat vs Tiger Mask: I feel for Ricky here, I really do, because it's obvious what he was trying to do, but it doesn't work if you don't commit fully. You can't stooge for your opponent early and let him take most of the NWA title headlock exchange, and then stooge for him in the middle of the match and let him dropkick you out of the ring after you skin the cat, and then stooge for him at the end and let him piledrive you on the floor but be completely unable to piledrive him and have it work. Flair stooging throughout the match worked because when he was on offense he was dangerous and effective and in control. You never, ever get the sense Steamboat is in control. His offense consists of one inverted atomic drop cutoff and then a bunch of chops (standing and diving). He has a cool entrance into the ring from the apron by standing on the ropes and jumping in, but never, never, never is there any sense that Tiger Mask is in trouble. He's always one irish whip reversal of getting back in control. If Steamboat wasn't going to outright cheat, what he had to do was focus on the double chicken wing and work a body part to set it up. That would have at least focused his offense and give some form to all of this. As it was, he comes off like a loser, again, and makes the title look meaningless. This had a bit more atmosphere than the other matches but it was another terrible match. Poor Ricky. I came in having no idea what to expect and came out severely disappointed.