Matt D

There's a ton I haven't seen, but from a lot of the really classic tags I saw, I think Taue brought as much to the table as the other three, without a doubt. What he brought was a sort of personality and flair and color and verve. It's not the sort of stuff that people would have gone nuts over in the 90s because it's not super workratey (though he held his own really). It felt like he brought a little bit of Memphis to the matches, if that's not going too crazy, the sort of emotiveness and dickishness that plays all the way to the back row, and that's something that's appreciated a lot more now. What he added were things that the other three just weren't doing. Am I way off on that?

No, but he might have had different problems to deal with, like the lack of technology, and it's interesting to see how he deals with those different challenges, and maybe he shows a level of savvy that after seeing what specific challenges he has and seeing what the president does, you decide that he's actually the better politician. It's just a matter of learning enough about politics to try to understand those differences and weigh them.

The corollary here is greatest vs best. Is there a difference between those two words? I'm probably leaning towards no. My favorite wrestler isn't the one I think is the best, necessarily. I have a lot of nostalgia for certain wrestlers (Bret's a good example.). But I will probably go with the best, because otherwise, you're starting to bring in things like drawing and card placement and what not, which aren't part of this aesthetic exercise to me. Rip Rogers is one of my favorite wrestlers. There are qualities he has that appeal to me strongly, and that I consider "great," and maybe those qualities will get him on my list, but I see things that he doesn't do as well as other people, things that I value, even if I might not like some of those other wrestlers as much. I think what I won't do, is give someone a lot of credit for things I don't value. That's another better way to put some of this, I think. And I'm going back to Davey Richards. He does things that pleases his audience. He probably wrestles the right match for the crowd he's in front of. I probably would give him some level of credit for that, but it's sort of a tie-breaker thing. For people who are looking at greatest as something other than "Best by your criteria" how could you discount him or Sabu or RVD or someone who has that level of following and pleases the audience he's in front of? Likewise Hogan, who for much of his career did exactly what he was supposed to make the crowd happy. I guess that's when some of you look at number of what you consider great matches? I'm happier with my approach.

To me, it sort of feels like one of those old Goofy cartoons, where he was trying to do sports, and you'd have a narrator commenting after every mishap but mostly silent otherwise. Or those black and white shorts like "So you want to be a...?" Does that make sense?

I think we have enough output over the last couple of years to really understand his strength and weaknesses (of which he certainly does not have many). I suppose I'd have to dig back into his indy work a bit. I think he's had a better WWE run than Bryan, personally, more apt to implement consistent and meaningful selling into his ringwork and try to tell a total story, including building between his WWE matches which not a lot of guys do. If anything, the lack of babyface matches in WWE is what's going to hurt him for me, because I'd like to see that range. I'd like to see some arguments for Bryan over him when it comes to what they do in ring during that WWE runs.

His work was a huge resource back when the AWA set watching was going on. I was happy to see when he started posting here a bit more frequently. Big loss to the community.

Shawn also had to worry about being the top draw and cutting halfway decent promos and such. All roles have demands. Bill's judgment on Shawn's success aside, that's actually my exact point. All roles do have demands. I'm not saying that I completely know that Haku could have performed as well in a main event role because of what I've seen him do elsewhere, just like I don't know that some main eventer couldn't have done what Haku did as a heel gatekeeper who had to eat a lot of jobs. The point is that they're different roles with different demands, different opportunities, and different challenges and I think both are worth examining when looking at a wrestler. You can learn a lot about a wrestler from the gatekeeper role and you can learn different things from a main event role, and I'm not discounting one or another for the sake of this project.

Have you written about Santo at length anywhere Will? I'd be curious to read that if so

How do you feel about his 91 heel run, Kris? There were a metric ton of TV tags and six mans and he has two fairly big singles matches that got time with Gibson and Pillman.

That's a really good question, but when you look at how I then apply the information, it's very much me looking for patterns and a general sense of understanding wrestling how I want it understood and then executing that understanding in different situations. It's not necessarily about ranking a bunch of performances from 1-10. It's much more holistic (which may not mean what I think it means). But what I need is enough data, enough INPUT for me to make an ultimate decision. That's what quantity means to me in a project like this. I don't care if Windham's career was all that. I care about if I think he's ultimately a greater wrestler than everyone else. (I'd probably end up saying no because I don't think he dealt with his physical breakdown well and that shows a lack of understanding, ultimately. But that's not necessarily because he didn't have great matches late in his career. It's because I'm not convinced by the footage we do have with him. That's sort of the same thing but it's also sort of not. I give Boss Man a ton of credit for his late career 2-3 minute matches because they show me something. I might feel differently if I had more Turnbuckle Championship Wrestling though, re: Windham. That's not the point though). Now if I was just a great match guy then I'd probably be in a much more tenuous position if I was making this same argument, but I'm very clearly not. It's not about me giving a ranking for stats. It's about me ultimately deciding who I think understands and executes what I think is greatness in wrestling. Maybe you could deconstruct what I do and find a statistical way of expressing that, but it's not how look at it. The total picture isn't one of numbers for me. It's also not that I just look at talent. It's like writing a dissertation on a wrestler. I take from matches as my primary sources. If they didn't do something (or avoid doing something in the ring), and usually multiple times, I don't have anything to go on.

I understand that's one school of thought. To me, though, the question is which of the two is the better wrestler, not which of the two have the higher number of great matches on tape, and I feel like we have enough of Bock in varied situations to win that argument. We could have a thousand matches of Flair performing at a high level and fifty of Bock performing at a high level and if I feel like Bock's level is higher than Flair's, then he's a better wrestler. That's on me thinking I'm a good enough judge with the smaller number of matches (which is still a lot and still in a number of varied situations). People can disagree obviously. I need exactly as many matches as I need to figure out what I need to know. To me, that's the only point of quantity when it comes to this project. Now, maybe one thing I need to know is work over time, but you can get that with x number of matches over x years, or what not. At the end of the day, i need enough footage to decide which is the greater wrestler. Having more matches where I see evidence that someone is NOT the greater wrestler than the wrestler I have less (but plenty of) matches with probably hurts you more than it helps you, to be honest.

So the argument is that he did stuff that I think Bock did better but he did it not quite as well many more times! I'm kidding. I'm a long way off from giving a final verdict on Flair.

I didn't realize you thought Flair did anything well. I kid, I kid. I think Flair's great at a ton of things. The joke I could give here is that "No one makes bad wrestling more entertaining than Ric Flair" and that he's the Gorilla Monsoon of great matches, but that be disingenuous. Any criticism I have of Ric is strictly on a "Is he the GOAT?" level. I never question that he should be in the argument.

I'm kind of frustrated that Baltimore seemingly only gets TV tapings or PPVs. I want to go to a house show but I don't want to trek out of my way for it. Also, it's nigh impossible for me to hit something on a Sunday or Monday night but a Friday or Saturday night would be doable.

That's also pretty underrating the first ten years of Henry's career.

I almost hate to say this, but I think I'd have to watch WCW era Piper to really get a good handle on things. I love him in 79-80. I love what I've seen from San Fran. I think he was amazingly dynamic in 84-85. There are a couple of his babyface WWF matches I love (vs Perfect and Hart), but there are gaps and I have the feeling that he was a guy who coasted at points. I need to see more to really hammer that down though. I think he could make my ballot, potentially, but I'm not sure where.

To add to that (and I've been in and out this afternoon, so some replies have been shorter than I would have liked), I do think there are some people that think a match can't be great unless it's also big. People have different definitions for that term (and probably for "big" as well).

All that said, I wasn't kidding that I wasn't going to start heavily looking at anything til the new year. My dance card is pretty full up with how I've stretched myself, and that's before all this 50s stuff dropped. But I'll start looking at 96 with Liger, absolutely, thanks.

I've seen extremely little of ace Liger but I'm looking forward to seeing some of this stuff.

The criteria being listed here in the last few posts, mainly.

Who's the best wrestler never to have a "Great match" by that criteria? Haku, for instance, has, at the least, some heel Islanders stuff (the singles match vs Martel is an awesome TV match), the cage match vs Slaughter/Blackwell (ranked extremely high on the AWA best of the 80s), and maybe Survivor Series 89, and probably quite a bit that aren't on the top of my head. I think those count by the criteria just posted.

I could see Aries getting in the bottom of some people's ballots?

Also, I love the reasoning here. It wasn't Haku's job to have GREAT MATCHES, but his job was in many ways harder with far more constraints than let's say 1996 Shawn Michaels, for instance.

One of the most interesting arguments in this thing, to me, is going to be Blackwell vs Henry. Blackwell's much more in your face and Henry is much more subtle.

Is there a bunch of Montreal Haku that's awesome that I haven't seen?