Matt D

Do either of the two Butch Reed title matches exist in full?

Alright, I've given it a couple of days for the most part. Let's spew some text. It's the amount of stuff done in the match, basically. Stuff/time is fine. That's where you get the rate I guess. I do see it as much more of a qualitative thing. It means something other than just that. And it's usually only discussed when it comes to someone with high workrate. You don't talk about a match having low workrate. A lot of it is a backlash to WWF main even wrestling in the 80s-early 90s, I think. It was a way to band together against what was presented in the mainstream and maybe to make people feel better about the aspects they liked. "Wrestling is dumb and fake," says person one from 1997. "Well, the stuff you see, but I like this stuff from Japan called puroresu, which has a really high workrate," responds person too as if that explains everything. As a general concept? The fact the concept exists is important to me. It was much more important to me when I was younger. Now I generally see it as an unfortunately dismissive thing. Frankly, I think people who primarily enjoy workrate in wrestling look at wrestling in the laziest, least interesting way possible. I'm not saying this to be offensive or to be a jerk. It's the lowest common denominator to me. Workrate is candy. It doesn't involve thinking to enjoy. You can shut your brain off and watch guys huff and puff and run around the ring and hit each other in the face really hard and do elaborately planned spots very, very well, and that's great, but it doesn't take lick of intellectual engagement. Emotional engagement, sure, but not a intellectual engagement. You don't have to break it down, except for maybe in a "Well, how did he get the leverage to do that dive!" There's the what, the how, and the why of the what. The why of the what is psychology. It's why you do every thing you do in the ring, not just moves, but pauses, interactions, "character work," selling, everything. To me wrestling is symbolic. A punch is symbolic. It's not really a punch. It's something done that is supposed to have the effect of a punch. A legdrop has a specific effect both in a match and in the context of all matches. A punch isn't a punch anymore. It's a "punch." And it's all relative to everything else. Let me put it this way. Selling is so much more important than workrate, because selling defines importance, especially over time. Selling (as well as other aspects such as announcers and actual match results) help define things. John Cena does not have great looking offense. People consistently sell John Cena's offense as if it is great. Therefore, it is great and it is credible. Wrestling is symbolism and controlling perception. That means that at any point the facade can be broken though. It can't be broken through something that's done consistently. It can be broken by a break from that. Wrestling within your own personal limitations and understanding them is thereby far more important to me than wrestling hard. I love wrestling. Working a hold is important. If something's happening in the ring, you should be selling it. The more consistently you sell things, the more they matter. On the other hand, if you do a lot of stuff and none of it is sold, then none of it matters. Do I want exciting stuff that looks cool? Sure, it's candy, who doesn't want that, but it needs to mean something. I'll take a logical match that really means something over an exciting match than means nothing anyday. I'll take a really clever match where they don't do a lot but they tell a great story, sell really well, and move the crowd, over a really exciting match where some things mean something and some things don't. I'd value a supremely clever match where everything means something and they really play with the storytelling tools of prowrestling and a really exciting match where everything builds and has weight and leads to something fairly equally, but I'd probably lean towards the clever match due to my own tastes and because I think it's more impressive to do more with less. I'll still really enjoy the other one though. In general I won't call a match bad if it tells a story with some success, especially if it does the job I think it was sent out to do. I might not call it GOOD either, unless that story is interesting and compelling. i think a match can be great without having one high spot, though. Here, we have for the most part. I appreciate how someone like FedEx feels. He likes what he likes and he likes it a lot and more power to him. To me though, manipulating a crowd and putting together a coherent narrative, especially an interesting and compelling one, is so much better than just being able to hit a bunch of stuff smoothly. A trained monkey could probably do that on command. To really understand hearts and minds and story, there's just so much more to that. A ton. I came in through DVDVR, and their workrate reports, but they were only half about "workrate" I think. They were more about What Worked/What Didn't Work. Still, you could look at the basic assignment webpage I made for compsci 2a in 1999, one that was about wrestling and that defined workrrate and talked about how amazing Chris Benoit was because he worked so hard. I have it on a hard drive somewhere and it's the most embarrassing thing in the world. I liked the guys I was supposed to like and I lived for Cruiserweight matches with lots of moves and dives and whatever else. It wasn't until after 07 when I started to watch a lot of whole shows instead of just great matches and older shows, that I really started to look for patterns and try to understand how and why matches worked instead of just drooling at how fast guys were moving. I don't think workrate is a useful phrase anymore, to be honest. I think it was, in part, a way to rebel against something that has long ceased to need rebelling against between the ease of availability and stylistic changes. If all you could get on TV was Superstars and Wrestling Challenge and Prime Time Wrestling, that was one thing. In today's day and age, forget it. I think it's also done far more harm than good as a concept since it made people look past the actual nuance and craft of wrestling. Part of that IS knowing how to do things, how much to do things, when to do those things, and how to make those things matter, and sometimes the answer really is "A lot," but it's a tool to a greater end, not an end to itself. From an aesthetic sense, Good Storytelling IS the end. (From a functional sense, making money is the end and part of that is being able to extend your career, but that's not what we're talking about). Workrate (as in how much you do or how many cool moves you do or how hard you work) can be a stylistic decision towards that end.

My biggest problem with his WCW run is his string of throwaway tv matches. This is the guy who was frothing at the mouth to get back into the ring regularly on WWF TV in 94, and when he gets his shot, he wrestles some of the most interesting and diverse wrestlers possible (be it a guy like Finlay or the hugely underrated Pittman), he gives them the whole match, hits a bodyslam and his elbow and that's it. Over and over and over again. It's maddening.

"Why is Taue so awesome relative to the obviously far superior Pillars of all japan?" "An eyepoke." The internet explodes.

What do the clouds represent?

That's just the Madness.

I actually kind of hate sports. I like baseball though. And I like books; books are good.

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.