Matt D

I may have done a fist pump at that result. May have.

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.

I know personally, I have a lot to watch, but I do plan on being consistent across the board (maybe too much so as Dylan said).

That's it. A lot of the scrutiny is because these guys are the BEST of the BEST, but at the same time, I think there's a ton to learn from watching any wrestler at any point of his career especially in limited situations.

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.

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.

And I opened up the idea above that maybe I do need to look up Flair inconsistently than other wrestlers due to his delusions and other mitigating causes.

I don't want him to be consistent. I want him to be a good enough pro wrestler to I understand that he needs to adapt and then be able to do it, especially when comparing him to other wrestlers that did just that.

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.

Not a figure skating watcher, I see. Who has time for that? Do you have any idea how many Jumbo matches i need to watch?

I don't think the narrative element is there with that, though.

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.

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.

I'll take a look at what's online if I can find it.

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.

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.

To clarify, I'm mainly looking at his 00s WWF run, when I think "older Flair." I think he was fine in the 90s, though there was a sense of diminishing returns towards the end of the decade. He could still lean on a lot of his physical gifts in the 90s. The guy aged pretty gracefully considering.

We'll revisit this later on, Charles. It all feels a bit too heated now, and I'd like to see more first, but the better you understand pro wrestling as a wrestler, the better you're able to wrestle as you get older. I fully believe that. Someone who's totally broken down like late era Andre, could still do amazing things in the ring, very much on what he DIDN'T do and when he decided to do something. Flair still tried to be Flair. Andre wasn't to do the leapfrogs he was doing earlier in his career. He understood his limitations and adapted his act accordingly. That shows a level of understanding. I'm happy penalizing someone if I don't think they have that understanding, because that's something important to me. The physical matters, sure. Execution matters. But the mental matters far more to me. The art of doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason to the right effect. That matters to me more than how pretty it looks. I'm not trying to single Flair out, but it does say something to me that the problem was Flair still trying to be Flair without the physical gifts to pull it off. It makes you wonder what was Flair without those gifts? RVD is a much worse example of the same. Flair brought (from the beginning of his career to the end) much more knowledge and understanding than RVD has, of course. How is this not consistent with everything I always say? I'm not saying that other people should feel this way too, but I absolutely do, and I levy it across the board consistently. It's something that penalizes Flair somewhat, yes, but I didn't come up with it specifically to penalize Flair. Of that, I promise you. It was a chicken/egg thing. It was something I came to decide upon by watching wrestlers over time, and then I started applying t to wrestlers as I watched them. Organic and without any sort of agenda. You know my opinions and I'm sure you know I'm eccentric enough in them that it's probably true.

Lots of guys adapt and change their act and have good matches deep into their later years. Flair didn't. Why? (Actually, that's not entirely true. He has some pretty good hardcore matches later in his career, both in ECW and the Foley match, which is almost all Foley when it comes to layout).

I think it'd be one thing if the people who said those matches don't hold up then go back and like a lot of the matches that those matches inspired. I think that's not the case. If anything it's the opposite.

I think it does absolutely, because it shows a lack of understanding about how pro wrestling works. If you are fully dependent on physical gifts and not savvy enough to change your act (like a lot of great wrestlers did as they aged to still be effective), then it means you're not as good a wrestler as other people. It means you don't have a good 360 degree understanding of pro wrestling and you just had an act that you honed that worked.

I hate his late WWF run. The guy had the worst napoleon complex I've ever seen in wrestling. So much of the "heel-in-peril" stuff from that era comes from him taking way too much of a match and just eating up his opponents to the detriment of the match. I need to see his heel stuff in Portland because that seems like a more natural fit to me.

Did we ever figure out why Sombra wasn't on the card?

Rose/Wiskowski http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15074-buddy-rose/?view=findpost&p=5565808 http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15074-buddy-rose/?view=findpost&p=5564218 http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/topic/15074-buddy-rose/?view=findpost&p=5543979

Brock is pretty much the last guy I want to see against Austin. They sort of cancel out each other's strengths. I'd much rather see him against Ambrose or Rollins or Heath Slater or someone.