Matt D
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Everything posted by Matt D
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I did love those really tight AAs.
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Why in the world wouldn't Rollins just wait for the match to end and then cash in on the winner?
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AJ's skipping has somehow begun to start feeling like Groucho Marx stumbling around.
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Yeah, the Paige package was well done.
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Crowd seems way more into this than we are. What the hell was Jericho even going for?
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just catching up now. Re: Sandow selling at what Miz got hit with. When I first saw Aaron Stevens in Chaotic in MA, he'd do that on the floor when his stablemates were getting hit and it was hilarious. Funniest thing I've ever seen live in wrestling maybe. I imagine this wasn't that.
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That Show/Henry backstage segment made me want Show to go Soviet. I'm going to use this match to get the toddler to sleep.
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I need to rewatch that tomorrow. Got caught up in some work I had to do. That corner knee was nuts though. Now I'll have Sting's theme stuck in my head for the rest of the night.
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Do any WWE (past the very top belt) runs end in a climax?
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I may have done a fist pump at that result. May have.
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Greatness is going to be decided by democratic vote. After the vote's over, you can tell me that I was wrong, as it pertains to the quasi-objective results of the poll. In the meantime, however, I don't go around and tell you that your criteria is faulty. I only explain how I feel, because it's my right, and in part because I do think it adds SOMETHING to the discussion and because I feel strongly about it. I honestly appreciate that you go to such lengths to try to understand me. In the meantime, I'll still rank Flair very highly, because he does a number of things well, and because, on a lesser level, he has great matches. I might even rank him #1. I don't know yet. That's why he's my #1 priority. I don't ignore those matches. I try to understand them and see if the reasons they're so highly considered match up with my criteria or not. I try to understand back. I just don't always agree.
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Personally, I'm going to absolutely look at Terry Funk when he gets old. I'm going to look at how he understood and modified his act for the Philadelphia Crowd or for the crazy stuff in Japan he was doing at the time and if he as able to continue to have good matches despite and because of that. I'm going to look to see what happened to him when he was in 00 indies and couldn't quite do some of the stuff that allowed for his post-prime career, and I think he had a match with Lawler a couple of years ago and I'm really interested to see what I can learn from that, pro or con. Likewise Ricky Morton. I don't get why people don't think there's something to learn in how a wrestler adapts to not being able to use the same tools that they once did. I just really don't get that. It's not about giving or taking away points, it's about understanding a wrestler and how well they understand their craft and thereby how well they potentially understood it when they were younger and how that understanding shaped every match of their career and how it developed or didn't develop over the years. How is this not interesting to you guys? When I watch wrestlers I look for clues in almost everything they do. How else am I going to figure out whether they're good or not. You look for patterns and how they handle different situations. I get that not everyone does it that way, but there's so much to learn about a wrestler in almost every match. That's what makes a project like this so great. To be fair, when I'm done looking at everything, what I might come up with is that Flair not being able to adapt just paints a new and different light on how well he DID know how to the tools that he had when he was younger. I don't know yet. It's not about penalizing or giving points. It's about figuring things out.
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A lot of this goes back to what I value, and again that is different than what is my favorite, though it does inform it. I value a style were physical tools aren't the most important and so long as I am honest and open and consistent about this, then I don't see what the problem is if I use the tools that I have available to make the decisions I need to make.
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It's about getting data points for evidence. You use them to plot a map of a wrestler. It's better to have them scattered throughout the career. With Bock basically all we have is his late career. It's not better for Lawler if he retired in 95. It might have been better for Flair. That's the whole point. Figuring out how or why and what it means. You figure out ability through body of work and more diverse primary sources you have in type and role and situation, the easier it is to work this out. I think you learn something from a wrestler's ability to adapt to different situations, including the loss of physical gifts.
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That's why this discussion will not get resolved. I think that statement is as baseless and incomplete as saying that wrestling is pure sport and not art. There are fortunately elements of both on display to varying degrees every time out. There is an athletic element but it's more like a narratively-driven improv dance than like Michael Jordan. Maybe I'd be more apt to liken it to folk music duets, where you need to tell a story, have the physical skills and training, and know your range while working with someone else, than anything else, and that's so far off it's not even funny. It's very much it's own animal, which is in part why we love it so much. That said, differences of opinions make the world go round, though "Baseless" might be a little harsh.
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Wrestling is art, not sport. Brando is punished for his late career. Metallica is. It's not a 100% comparison but I don't think it's an entirely outlandish idea either. One aspect of being a good pro wrestler is understanding and working around your limitations, whether you are twenty or sixty. I won't penalize someone for having a less athletic match later in their career. I might penalize someone for trying to have one later in their career and failing. I think a lot of times you can use data from those matches to go back and better understand their earlier matches.
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I'll take a look at what's online if I can find it.
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To be fair, that's true of any standard though. There are so many differences in candidates: footage, opportunities, tag vs singles, territory that they're in, quality of opponents, tv matches vs arena matches, etc. Ultimately, the number of voters and their different backgrounds and opinions will even things out, I think. All we can try for is consistency.
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What I will concede is that maybe it's ridiculous to expect that someone change up their act when it served them so well for almost 30 years in the ring, so successfully, more successfully than almost anyone ever, but he had a lot of matches in the 00s, many more than I think he expected to have. Maybe the issue wasn't a lack of understanding of wrestling and how it works, but instead a lack of perspective in the fact that he couldn't bring it to the table anymore, because he was Ric by god Flair and if anyone's delusional about himself and his capabilities, it's Slick Ric. And I'll see that in his older matches, maybe, if I can make enough of a throughline to provide me the evidence I feel I need to make that call. I'll do my homework. Right now, between what I've seen in his earlier career, what I've heard through interviews, and what I've seen in the 00s, I'm not convinced that it just wasn't a lack of understanding of certain aspects of wrestling, or at least a disagreement with what I value. But it could be that he was just a delusional old mule trapped in a lifetime of glory and not necessarily a deficient wrestler when it came to the mental game. I don't entirely know, though I have my opinions. In the end, since he's such a strong candidate for #1, I'll probably have to make an exception with him and try to decide whether or not I'd give him a pass for things I wouldn't give someone else a pass on and not just go on the matches as primary evidence. In general, I have to feel like there's strong mitigating evidence otherwise not to apply the same criteria across all wrestlers and looking at a wrestler's late career is something I think is important, because I care about situational reactions more than almost anything else. With the way I look at things, with the way any of us looking at things, the biggest danger is not trying to be as consistent as possible.
