KB8

Koko and Chavo Sr. were both on my ballot. I'm actually a little surprised Chavo never made it a little higher, honestly. Koko picking up a top 20 vote is just the greatest thing ever. I had him somewhere around sixty and figured I might have an outside shot at being the high vote. Boy was I dead fucking wrong.

Pretty good run for Stan Lane, all in all. I'm an unashamed mark for the guy and he's been in some of my favourite tag matches ever, but he was a casualty of my final batch of cuts on deadline day.

Sydal definitely had a lot of fun stuff in WWE. I remember almost nothing now of the ROH/Dragon Gate run from around '07 that I watched at the time, but the WWE run was good. Gorgeous George is the first top 5 vote to drop, right?

I'm only about half an hour in, but this is already everything I hoped it would be. Loss not ranking Childs' #98 at all was surprising to me, though. I should've voted him top 30 to make up for such deplorable behaviour.

Eh, I wouldn't really look at it that way. Considering that this time a year ago no one would have considered Jose for a list like this and he made 11 ballots pretty much solely off a slow trickle of new matches from NWAClassics, it's pretty impressive. Tells me that a large number of voters who have been watching NWAClassics decided to vote for him. Tells you just how valuable NWAClassics is that guys like Jose & Gino who probably would not have gotten any votes at all have done this well (with Gino still to come) The NWA Classics footage certainly gave Lothario a huge bump on my own ballot (from "never would've given him a second thought" to making it onto the ballot, period), but it also bolstered cases for other guys I voted for like Chavo Sr., Reed, Tito, Andre, Hector Guerrero (I think the TDM with Lothario was what 100% solidified both guys' spots on my list, actually) and the Midnight Express. Also bolstered cases for a number of other guys that wound up just missing out, like Wrestling II, Wahoo and Gino. I wouldn't necessarily say I think I voted Lothario too low on my own ballot, but when it came to the final draft I kind of wanted to be careful not to end up overrating him due to the dreaded recency bias. The same went for Hector Guerrero, Mariko Yoshida, Tito Santana, Daisuke Ikeda, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Kiyoshi Tamura and Shinobu Kandori, who were all wrestlers I watched a bunch of footage of in the last couple months for the purposes of ranking them (the last handful of candidates I looked at closely, more or less). In the case of Hector, Yoshida, Lothario and Kandori, I was blown away by just how good I thought they were and saw them as personal "new discoveries" of sorts (though Lothario is a relatively new discovery for almost everyone who's watched the Classics footage), while in the cases of the others I was reminded of just how awesome those guys were. Would I have voted Hector Guerrero higher than someone like Sgt. Slaughter if I'd watched all of that Hector footage before, say, the AWA set? Maybe not. Would I have ranked Mariko Yoshida higher than Ted DiBiase if I'd watched the ARSION footage a year ago and spent the last month going through the Mid-South set again? Who knows. I guess my point here is that Jose Lothario was awesome and the case for him is only growing and fuck it, I should've voted him top 5.

I guess Casas might be the only person to receive both a #1 and #100 vote, then.

Astro was a low-ballot candidate for me, but I eventually wound up dropping him. Dean's ballot is just the gift that keeps on giving!

Ono was another of mine, albeit in the bottom quarter somewhere. The 2009-2010 FUTEN run was pretty spectacular and I'm also in the "Ono/Ikeda is the best sub-5 minute match in history" camp. Koshinaka finishing in the top 100 even in 2006 sort of surprises me. I can't think of many wrestlers who have such a huge gap between their lowest lows and highest highs. He bored me to tears on the New Japan 80s set and was one of my least favourite guys on it, but then he gets older and grumpier and is often very fun during the NJ/WAR feud. Had a nice run in the '96 G1 as well, if my memory of it from the yearbook is worth anything. I enjoy watching him match up with Tenryu about as much as I don't enjoy him matching up with Takada, and it's not necessarily because his opponent is dragging him up or down a level (this is not me taking a dig at Takada, btw).

I'm looking forward to this, and I say that as someone who hadn't even listened to a single podcast in its entirety before the two Parv/Chad GWE podcasts in the last couple weeks. Maybe that's what I learned about my fandom from this project - that I like podcasts now.

Not hugely surprising that one of the joshi candidates was the first from the SC 100 not to make PWO's. Pretty sure more than a couple people had predicted that'd be the case.

There can't be any way Valentine v Wahoo didn't rule.

Greco just missed my list and Espanto was someone I really wanted to vote for on the footage I'd seen, but in the end still didn't feel like I'd seen enough. I actually kind of regret not voting for them, but then there are legitimately dozens of guys I could say that about. Including Hoshino, who was one of my favourite guys on the New Japan set; like a little Bill Dundee-esque shit kicker. Yamamoto was another one of mine. I had him bottom ten.

Murakami is my fourth to drop. He was my #100. Normally that spot is reserved for the wacky/"out there" (or whatever) pick, so in retrospect I probably should've voted him somewhere else in the bottom 10 and made someone else my #100, because I think the best Murakami matches are really awesome and he brings something to the table in all of them. Is he as good in the 1/4/00 Dome tag as Hashimoto? No, and it's probably not even close, but his presence there certainly made the whole thing feel extra chaotic. He also has the greatest lunatic psychopath death stare ever.

Fuck shame, I will wear my Tonga Kid markdom with pride. Genuinely burst out laughing at this.

Seeing all the crazy picks roll out is just about my favourite part of the countdown process. I mean, I think Honky Tonk Man is pretty rubbish, but I also think it's awesome that someone was compiling their list and thought, "yes, Honky Tonk Man feels right as the forty ninth best wrestler in history."

Kendrick at #9 is gonna be hard to top. Awesome.

May I suggest... The original Funkasaurus. Done!

I would do that already if the Tama pic worked...... (EDIT: in response to Woof, obviously. EDIT 2: actually there is no Tama pic because the folk who finished lower than 500 don't even get one)

That Hakushi pic is fuuuuucking great. I don't think I'm going to come out the other end of this project without an avatar for once. Jerry Estrada was mine. And of course I was the high vote (only three names from my ballot have dropped so far and I've been the high vote on all three). I'm an unashamed mark for the guy who is OJ's least favourite wrestler of all time. A sleazy, coked up headcase of a pro-wrestler who will eat a tope by going six rows deep into the fixed seats, before crawling out from under the debris like Alice Cooper's zombie doppelgänger. Underrated title match worker and someone I always enjoy in apuestas because he constantly looks like he's on death's door because he probably is. Side note: about five pictures in the countdown thread so far haven't shown up properly for me, and three of them are guys I voted for. Maybe someone's trying to tell me something.

Not surprised I was the high voter on Hector Guerrero, even at #75. I'm actually kind of surprised someone else voted for him. He was like an 80s Eddie so how am I not gonna vote for him based on that alone? He's been one of the best guys on the NWA Classics stuff and the Texas Death Match with Lothario is fucking incredible. Him jumping out of an egg in a multicoloured chicken costume was also the greatest moment in the history of our great sport: the Hogan Slamming Andre of egg-hatchings, if you will. Hector ruled.

The Cornette and Kobayashi pictures are probably the top 2 so far. Was that Okabayashi wearing a John Cena sweatband as well? Sapp getting a #66 vote might be the wackiest thing so far. I never knew Javier Cruz finished so high in the '06 vote. Man, he took drop this time around. I had him on my list at one point, but he felt more like a 100-175 level guy and eventually bit the bullet. Although I do still love that Estrada hair match from '89 that I think is OJ's least favourite match in history.

Tama's the first of my list to go. Interesting that all three voters for him had him in the bottom ten (with me being the high voter at 90). I wound up watching a ton of Islanders stuff a few weeks before the deadline and thought he was fun as fuck with some of my favourite stock bumps of anybody ever. I wish they got a longer run as a babyface team, but he was pretty great as soon as they turned heel as well. I basically love Tama and 148 people were wrong when compiling their ballots by not voting for him.

Demus, Fuyuki and Pierroth were all on my list in the lower reaches at one point, but I wound up dropping them a ways back. Demus probably came closest to making it since I wanted to rep the minis, but it wasn't to be.

I will post a list of nominees not getting votes today. Then start with the lowest ranked wrestlers moving forward to number 1. Expect the final 3 to come out the last day of April. Awesome. This'll be fun.

At this rate I'm not sure there'll be a single wrestler who appears on every ballot.