Matt D

I'll have some matches I want you to take a look at later, Bill. Not necessarily to say he makes my 100, but I think Bossman was actually a king of the 3 minute WWF/E C show match, and you'd be curious to see it.

A lot of what we have is just snippets: It's cool that we have it, but I don't have a great picture either.

I'm not jumping into this note frothing at the mouth and throwing around "Workrate Dogmatism." I'll look at this in a couple of days after people say what they say. But I do want to repost this. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/24598-what-is-good-wrestling/&do=findComment&comment=5588073

All I remember is that Hayes got super drunk at Steph's wedding and starting singing.

Savage/Garvin Cage. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvc125_icw-randy-savage-vs-ronnie-garvin_sport

If it was like that Dump vs Chigusa match I saw the other night, they'd work towards a spot where the person with Hep would have an open wound and the entire heel stable would try to force the babyface towards it. In related news, I'm going to tackle the two Brisco vs Jumbo matches next.

I think right now Cesaro is unquestionably better than Bryan. I have a lot of Bryan indy matches to watch, but as I go back I'll have to see if I think any of those matches are better than how good Cesaro is now. They could well be. People regard them highly after all.

I WISH we had so much more Flair/Valentine tag work.

Is anyone going to vote for Flair just because they think he has the most great matches on tape? I'm honestly curious. Likewise Misawa or Hansen or whatever other candidate someone might feel that way about? Is anyone looking this as a purely numerical exercise and will vote for Flair for that reason? And it's a matter of people digging up obscure matches with other guys or what not?

Mainly, that is not an issue because we are dealing with the best of the best here. Almost everyone in this argument has both great matches and great performances. There are situational constraints to consider however. We have talked about this elsewhere. I think it is more interesting if you invert the question you just asked. Then it becomes "if someone has great matches, how can they not be great?" That is a tougher question for me to deal with. It comes back to subjectivity though. Usually I want to know what a wrestler did to make a match great. Regardless, I am not looking for the wrestler who has the highest number of great matches on tape. I am looking for the wrestler who I think is the greatest using what matches we have as evidence and what the Wrestler does in those matches as evidence. More later if you really want it but I can't imagine anyone wants it at this point. The old wrestler stuff really does tie in to my views however.

Or by watching a ton of matches and seeing different wrestlers in different situations and trying to find patterns and understandings. That's why we are doing a greatest wrestler of all time poll and not just a greatest matches one. Otherwise it would be a strictly numerical exercise.

It's all guess work. This is us trying to find patterns and understand things when we never have total information. That's why every bit of viewable data and every different situation we can see a wrestler in helps.

I think you guys are missing the point. It's not about the performance in and of itself but instead about what can be learned from it, the choices made, the ability to adapt, the understanding of craft behind that ability. Why does one wrestler have better late career performances than another? Why does one adapt and another not? That's the point of it. The why. It's an element of versatility and there are clues there to explain performances from earlier in a career. Seeing someone late in their career can help explain how they see wrestling and how well they understood what they were doing earlier in their career and how well they can handle limitations. You have to factor in context but then you always do. To me it's not about output; it's about understanding. I'm not counting the number of bad matches and dividing by pi. I'm trying to understand how a human being interfaces with his craft.

Rollins could bump around the ring for him at least, though. Could he have a sort of misunderstanding face vs face brawl with Ambrose or would that hurt Ambrose since Austin might eat him alive as a personality?

I think there's a way to use a legend to get a new guy over without necessarily pissing the crowd off because the legend loses. Someone could wrestle a match and earn Austin's respect or what not. I think the point is to maximize the use of the legend, certainly. Part of that is popping a buyrate and protecting future buyrates(because you don't want to turn people off with how the legend was used), but building for when the legend isn't there is important too. He's more like the travelling NWA champ than Da Crusher.

I don't think his TNA work is bad from what I've seen. it's just that he wasn't put in the right situations to show us anything meaningful one way or another. If he had a non-garbage singles match that got any time, I'd like to see that.

In WWE, Batista was talking about the things they couldn't do, be it nut shots or whatever else. Certainly Jericho got suspended for screwing with a flag on a tour. We saw what happened to Bryan.

Hot tags and comebacks and timing? It's definitely trickier. Maybe variation? I love Demolition for how well they changed up their act depending on whether they were wrestling the Hart Foundation at Summerslam or the Killer Bees in Philly. Presumably a team should have different looking matches if they're wrestling Arn and Tully or the Road Warriors or the MX, etc.

Yep, another guy to basically start from scratch with. Can we do this in 2022?

I think the major thing the next few months might do for Dustin is give him a bit more meaningful heel work. That's the biggest hole in his resume. I don't think his late 95 work holds up very well. His 96 does somewhat better, especially once he really got the heel character down, with his ladder match with Michaels one of my favorite Michaels matches from that year. After that, there's really just 98, and his run vs RVD which is better not mentioned (likewise: Black Reign, though if they'd given him something other than garbage work during that run it'd be interesting to see what he could do as bloated as he was). If he gets to hold the tag titles for a few months now, it might be just what he needs, really.

Another guy I have to see basically everything of.

I think what might be useful would be a watching party like done for the 80s sets with some people who love Lawler and some who don't get him watching at the same time on the same line.

And frankly I wish they'd get off my lawn. Were I to use smiley faces one would come in here. Where we ended up in the standards argument after pages and pages was that what made wrestling good and compelling hasn't changed. Just the tools. Even better tools have to be used well though and sometimes they can be a crutch to make it so people don't learn to use them well. They can distract.

Have you seen Buddy Rose week to week in 79-81? Just curious.

They changed the timeline the second they came back.