Matt D

I don't necessarily blame him as a human being, but I do feel like the things he listed/focused on were a hindrance for me personally to understand lucha.

I've said this before, but a lot of the problem is that Tenay (and WCW in general) did way more than harm than good in promoting an actual understanding of (traditional 2/3 falls) lucha. We could unpack the why of that (90s sheets writers/readers emphasizing unhelpful things, short distilled TV matches that had completely different goals, etc)., but I doubt it's really necessary.

That's my ultimate suggestion anyway. Just watch it in context for a while and look for the patterns. It's a little counter-intuitive to what we're otherwise trained for. Eventually you figure out that the dives are a means to clear the ring for the finish instead of ends unto themselves. Eventually you get the idea that it's about overall momentum shifts (with a lot of symbolic action as opposed to literal action) as opposed to a hot tag. Eventually you get the idea that most trios matches are built around a central pairing and that the pairing isn't necessarily the captains. It's like a word problem with a lot of extraneous information. The information adds color (and wonder and joy) but you have to figure out what to cross out first so that you can figure out the math you're supposed to do, then you can add all the extraneous stuff back now that you have the equation worked out.

I have pretty strong feelings that most of the traditional tools "newbies" have been given to understand lucha are faulty. My life does not work well for creating any sort of podcasts/video content/live video chat/etc. but I'm thinking about how to help here in a way that isn't patronizing or gatekeeping or whatever else, because I sympathize as I really struggled with it ten years ago. @Kadaveri recently made an excellent gif-laden review, which isn't the sort of thing you can do often but might be something that could be done with a few matches to help connect some dots.

I have marks against Michaels for “evil use of genius” too.

It’s genius used for evil.

Read the guest columns in the Observer in the mid 80s too. They constantly lament pushing people like Bock in the AWA instead of Brody. He was a great bumper but he bumped so that he could immediately jump to to nullify the point of the bump and make himself look good.

Anyway, like I said, we've got 5 years and even if this is over multiple different locations and mediums, it's up to people to make cases and point out aspects and meet these people halfway and bring it to them. I'm not convinced we're going to have a million people around the internet who are eager to do this but who aren't willing to check out a discussion forum now and again.

Isn’t that why Jumbo dropped though? Why Flair was pushed against? Or the idea that Bossman has BOTH better AJPW and WWF output than Dibiase. You can't have it both ways.

Anyway, it's up to us to make the case to people who are less familiar with someone like Martel and to highlight what we find great about him. We get to share something we really enjoy with people who are less familiar. That's great. Hopefully, they'll see what we see and they'll end up loving pro wrestling all the more because of it. I'll want people to be able to back up their lists with footage, but the only thing I'm going to draw a hard line on is Brody. If you're putting Brody high, I want to hear about the specific matches and the moments that brought you to that point relative to his rep and superficial observations. I'm not going to be a real jerk about it, though, just a minor one.

Figured out where I noticed it last: 1/29/82: Nick Bockwinkel/Pat O'Connor vs Jumbo/Baba: I'm sure I saw this years ago but I'm much more familiar with Jumbo now. Here he looked far younger than what I'm used to even though it was just seven years. I liked him in this structure, where O'Connor and Bock really tried to grind down and he was able to come back by unveiling his different suplexes throughout the match. My favorite bit in the whole match was O'Connor trying to headlock takeover Baba, being unable to, and muttering "Ah, you try it." to Bock before tagging him in. Baba was a force here but they did a good job, by using holds and takedowns of never quite letting him be unleashed until it was time for it. Between that and the bullying of Jumbo, it was measured and meticulous, but all in a good, smart way.

I've seen a few older Jumbo matches lately too, and what I will say is that the number of suplexes allowed him (at times; I need to see more to decide if this is endemic or just a couple of matches) to switch things up narratively and build to them in different ways. He could tease one earlier in a match, but then use a different one for a transition or to cement control for a time which let him pay off that initial one later. I'm much more interested in how he used the suplexes from match to match than the fact he had them, at least as it pertains to his earlier work before all the heavyweights started power bombing each other.

I don't know if you can come home again given where you've been and where you still are; just saying. But if you are going to try to come home, for fuck's sake, err on the side of kindness and respect as best you can. Focus on the arguments, not value judgments of people who may or may not be voting. Like I said, engage with the text.

Re: Jumbo. I will say I don't find the "best guy in the best promotion" very compelling as an argument. For one, I'm not at all convinced 70s-80s AJPW is the best promotion even if it had big stars from all other facets. But even if that's true "Best guy in the best promotion" is an anti-argument that doesn't at all delve into his work and what made him the best. Engage with the text.

I caught JBL's speech which was pretty much what you'd want it to be and expect it to be (albeit lacking enough stories). On the phone, I can rewind. On the PC, I can't. So I had a few minutes to pop back in and the Bella Twins reading off a screen and referencing "s-heroes" is brutal in comparison and I can't jump back to the previous one.

Did anyone see the good performance Satanico supposedly had this week in his 70s? I didn't feel qualified to vote for Japanese candidates in 2016. As it is, if I add in joshi, French Catch, shootstyle, 70s-90s AJPW and NJPW, and whatever else I can make work in 5 years, I am going to have to kill so many darlings off my 2016 list through no fault of their own.

Re: Jumbo, I'm most of the way through watching every AJPW match we have from 89 now and I've done conscious sweeps backwards to give me the context I needed for it and Jumbo will certainly rank on my list. I say that without giving a real look to 90 and 91 as well. I don't know if he breaks into the top ten because of stylistic reasons. I do feel like I've fully cracked the narrative structure of 89 AJPW tags, to the point where I could make a flow chart that would cover and categorize almost all of them. So I get how they work. But it's not my preferred sort of pro wrestling storytelling and that'll probably hurt Jumbo for me. For what it's worth, I absolutely loved 10/11/89, more so than 5/7/89.

For me, it’s more that I have enough to rank Wahoo 60 but not enough to rank him 20. That sort of thing.

To me, there are two elements to footage as it pertains to people towards the top of your list: The first is your own level of confidence. For instance, I tend to rank people on two things: 1) their theory/instinct/understanding of pro wrestling and 2) their ability to put this into practice/create purposeful success with it. In order to understand this, I'd like to see them in multiple situations over time and against multiple opponents in multiple situations if possible. I'd point here to my case for Bock post which sums up what I'm looking for in order to understand someone enough to be at the top of my list. I understand that people will have different criteria and different goals than me, though, so how much footage you need to rank will vary based on what you value and what you're looking for. I will say this about a specific example since you invoked him. I watched a Yatsu match from 89 vs Abby/Tiger Jeet Singh the other night and he worked it completely different than I've seen him work any other match in 88/89, much more vulnerable, selling bigger, fighting back less, getting over the threat of his opponents and building things up for Jumbo's big entrance. It was an element of earnest (as opposed to scrapping) versatility that I honestly didn't know 89 Yatsu was capable of (or willing to tap into even if the match called for it) until i saw the match and it was very effective within the match. That's the sort of thing which might have him land one spot higher on my list. Not anything monumental but just something that broadens my understanding of him as a total pro wrestler. The second importance of footage is in your ability to back up what you're saying vs rep alone. I'd point to Patterson vs Stevens here. We probably have a few more Patterson matches than Stevens matches, but not a ton, but you can far more clearly see what made Patterson great in those matches than what made Stevens great. I recently (finally!) found a few Stevens performances I sort of liked (in 80, teaming with Snuka in JCP), but it's certainly not on the level that Patterson is or that Stevens' rep has him. Whatever memory Dave or Flair have of Stevens, we don't have the performances. So you can rank Patterson well off of his performances but you can't easily back up, in a communal/social sense, ranking Stevens high on footage alone.

One thing you have to understand about the French footage too is that you get a lot of guys who weren't French. Spaniards, Italians, Belgians, Peruvians, Brits, Canadians, Americans.

I see Invader 1 as a top 25 candidate for my list so that’s two.

I can see 3-5 but I’m biased and they’ll be limited on how high I can actually put them. We do have the footage-over-time and “different scenarios” for guys like Delaporte and Bollet and Corn. On the other hand, if you are someone who feels like you can rank a wrestler high based on only 2-4 performances, your list could have 30 of these guys easily.

Everyone should watch as much French catch as possible, but maybe not for this project....

My experience early on was that whenever Tony started to talk about someone earnestly, Conrad would goad him into giving him a funny name instead. But that might have changed,

Personally, there's no chance of Tony Oliver making my list on one or two matches, no matter how great he is in them. Some of the guys like Peruano or Sola or Bernaert or Jacky Corn where we have them over a span of multiple years and multiple settings and multiple opponents, that's a different story. But one element of my list is clarity. I have to be sure that Wrestler X is better than Wrestler Y to be ranked above them and I generally need a number of performances in a number of settings to be sure. Even with Heenan, there just isn't enough of Heenan out there for him to break my top 80, I think. That said, in the last few years, we've gotten better/extended footage of the Comiskey Park 70s Brazil/Bruiser tag, one or two AJPW matches (like Jumbo/Tenryu vs Heenan/Larry Z), and one or two AWA matches like Andre The Giant/Hulk Hogan vs. Bobby Heenan/Nick Bockwinkel/Bobby Duncum/Ken Patera. Plus him in certain other settings like seconding Bockwinkel vs Ricky Morton in Houston. He didn't make my list last time and I don't seriously see that changing this time.