KB8

It's Regal's WWE run that really fires him up my ballot. I actually watched all of the WCW footage on Will's Regal set a few years ago and thought that, while it was generally a great run, there were times where he maybe smothered guys too often. I mean, this is Regal and if you want someone taking the majority of a match then it might as well be him, but I still came out of it feeling a tiny bit cold on it. The WWE run is really stellar, though, right up to the NXT Cesaro match from 2013. I'm not sure how high he goes yet, but he'll do well.

Going through the 1993 yearbook, I thought he was definitely the best wrestler in the world that year. Other than that I generally agree that there might not be one single year where he's an absolute slam dunk, runaway WOTY, even if he's in the discussion for some of those years. But in '93, man was he fucking tremendous. The New Japan/WAR feud is my favourite feud ever in wrestling and Tenryu was incredible against every single person he matched up with, from Hashimoto (who's also top 5 for the year) to Chono to Kido to fucking Michiyoshi Ohara. I'm pretty much echoing what you already said, but still, it bears repeating. If I had to whip up a top 10 matches for the year, I think Tenryu would be in five of them, and one would be my MOTY. You mention 1989 there, and you're dead right about him being great then. I watched the Tenryu/Hansen v Jumbo/Kobashi tag from July this morning and I thought Tenryu was fucking spectacular in it. It's about as good an example as any of him selling for guys much lower down the card than him. I mean, Kobashi might've been a prodigy, but Tenryu was so awesome selling down to his level and making him look like a young stud (while Hansen steamrolled him and gave him almost nothing at all). Then Kobashi would bite off more than he could chew and Tenryu would stare him down before slapping his teeth out. Fast forward thirteen years and here's Tenryu in 2002, at 52 years old, making another potential WOTY run, being a cantankerous old bastard towards guys like Kiyoshi Miyamoto and Kaz Hayashi, having a great match build around legwork and blood loss against a wildly inconsistent Mutoh, and doing modern day bomb throwing epics with Kojima. He's one of the three guys I'm left strongly considering for my #1 at this point, but if I could only watch one wrestler for the rest of my life then he'd definitely be top of THAT list.

Tentatively: Rey is somewhere around my top 15, Steamboat is somewhere around my top 25, and Martel and Morton are somewhere between 30 and 40. Tito is bottom quarter right now, but I'm going to re-watch a handful of matches from the Valentine series for the purposes of seeing where Greg lands, so I don't doubt Tito will get a boost from that.

He's climbing his way back up my rankings after the last couple days. I watched the Jumbo/Tenryu v Choshu/Yatsu series mostly to see how high Choshu would go, but I came away thinking Jumbo was excellent in all of it. I mean, I remembered all four guys being great during it, especially in matches like 1/26/86, but I guess I'd watched so much late 70s/early 80s Jumbo recently that I didn't much care for that I forgot how good Jumbo was when he was GOOD. So I went and revisited some stuff from the '89-'92 period, which is my favourite stretch of his career by a million miles. God damn is 6/5/89 a fucking transcendent piece of the pro-wrestling. I had it below 1/26/86 on my All Japan 80s ballot (tag was my #1, Jumbo/Tenryu was #2), but I'd switch them now. It's never resonated with me before the way it did this morning. From the micro to the macro it's incredible, and I thought Jumbo was the star of it. It's sort of a novel performance from Tenryu in that he feels like such an underdog, and of course I loved that, but Jumbo's performance might be one of the three best of his entire career. I also watched a couple of the lesser six-man tags from 1992, and while the matches weren't necessarily blowaway I thought Jumbo was very good in them. That's probably not very surprising, but still. I think I'll watch some more before the deadline as well, since I'm kind of back on a Jumbo high right now. Honestly, I think I'll still end up ranking him outside my top 20 because of how uninteresting I find the majority of his pre-working with Choshu stuff to be (though that's an All Japan house style issue and Jumbo certainly isn't the only one I find uninteresting from that period), but ageing Jumbo trying to hold onto his place in the world and beat back the potential usurpers in Tenryu, Misawa and pals is still a near-four year run that I will absolutely get behind. And man, 6/5/89 is so, so good.

My buddy and I used to love him showing up on random WCW shows back in the day, and that ladder match from Starrcade 2000 is a fun train wreck of a spotfest.. He also had some fun stuff in M-Pro, but he might've been the weakest guy in Kaientai DX. Actually, I'd probably say he was. I haven't watched a match with him in it since the Kondo match mentioned above. In 2006 I liked it. I re-watched it a few years ago and didn't.

One thing about Kofi that makes him stand out to me in a way not many people do*, is that he will regularly perform a dive where the first part of it looks great, getting some crazy height on it and at times some near-Ohtani-level gracefulness...then when he connects with whatever the actual move is it ends up looking every bit as lousy as it looked good at the start. He can go from awesome to terrible literally over the course of performing a highspot. Most of the Kofi stuff I've seen - not a lot - has actually ranged from okay to good, but I say that having really only watched pimped matches involving him, and those matches have usually involved guys like Drew McIntyre, Cesaro, Daniel Bryan and The Shield being the better guys in those matches. I don't hate him or anything, but I don't think he's very good, either. *not necessarily in a good way

I'd watch Vader/Choshu from 6/89, Jimmy. I actually re-watched it tonight and it was fucking awesome. I don't remember where I had it on my original New Japan 80s ballot, but if I had to redo it now I would probably have it top 20.

There's no way I'm not voting for him. I mean, he won't be super high, but I love him and he's genuinely one of my favourite wrestlers ever.

I started watching a bunch of 1994 WWF a few years ago and Owen really stood out as one of the best guys in the company, which I guess isn't a super high bar, but still. He was consistently good. I'd agree that he doesn't necessarily have a litany of outstanding matches, but I usually always find him to be individually fun. I'm not sure it's enough to get him on my ballot (honestly, it's probably not), but he'll act like a total shithead and wheel kick someone's teeth out on the regular so he wins points for that.

I wouldn't necessarily say it's out of vogue now, although I really don't pay enough attention to know for sure. It might be for all I know. I got the impression it certainly was a few years back, though; or at least aspects of the style, like early matwork "not going anywhere"/feeling perfunctory, the first half of the match being disconnected from the second half, etc. Those criticisms don't only apply to New Japan juniors matches, but it felt like those juniors matches copped the most flak for it.

I actually wouldn't say we're a million miles apart on those juniors matches, honestly. I don't really think about star ratings so I'm not sure what I'd give Ohtani/Dragon, but I would probably have it at...something like ****, or just shy of it, I suppose. So I liked it less than you, but not to the point where I didn't think it was still really good. I also mainly brought up Ohtani/Samurai because I seemed to like it less than pretty much everyone else who commented on it in its yearbook thread, but again, I still thought it was really good. And because of how long it takes me to go through a whole yearbook it's now been five years since I last watched it. Some peoples' tastes will change dramatically in that amount of time, so my take on it now might end up swinging all the way back to my original from when I first watched it about fifteen years ago (which was that it was probably a 'best juniors match ever' candidate). Basically, I'm not really a juniors fan either at this point, but even when I started to lose interest in the style Liger was always a guy that would keep me coming back, because on the whole he still did lots of things that my tastes were beginning to shift towards even within a style I was becoming less interested in. It's just that at some point over the last six/seven years I stopped thinking about him or paying any attention to what he was doing, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Liger's absolutely a guy whose stuff I intend to revisit before the deadline. Six/seven years ago he'd have been a contender for my top 5, but when I started to lose interest in the juniors stuff I sort of lost interest in Liger by extension (I'm not the only one in that boat, of course). I've watched hardly anything from him over the last five years, though I did re-watch the New Japan/NOAH feud and he was still amazing in those interpromotional tags where he was just hating everybody to death and being a violent bastard. I've gone through the '96 yearbook in that time, though, and not a lot of the juniors stuff on that did a ton for me, including things like Liger/Ohtani from March and other highly pimped juniors matches that haven't otherwise seemed to be affected by the "junior revisionism" or whatever (Ohtani/Dragon comes to mind, and to a lesser extent so does Ohtani/Samurai. In fact the only match that REALLY held up to me was Pegasus//Black Tiger). Then again, there were a couple tags and multi-man matches from that year that I thought Liger was really fun in. The last Liger match I watched was the Rey match from Starrcade, and while the match isn't all that great I did start to wonder during it why Liger was only sitting around the middle of my ballot when a little over half a decade ago he'd have been about forty sports higher. So I guess I'm conflicted and not entirely sure where I stand on Liger at this point. Honestly, he probably suffers right now from being a guy I just haven't thought much about it a long, long time, while in that same timeframe a handful of other guys have really jumped to my attention (which kind of goes back to the "fresher versus better" point Loss has brought up about Flair in the past). I need to do something about that before the deadline.

I thought he was clearly the weaker Trauma from '09-'11 or so (I watched all of this stuff as the time and haven't gone back to revisit it, so my timeline is possibly off), but then at some point he really seemed to step up huge and hit the same level as his brother. I pretty much fell off a cliff with IWRG (and all current wrestling) around mid-2012, so I have no real idea how the Teaumas have been since then, but there was a point in 2010/2011 where both guys would've been in my five favourite wrestlers in the world.

I kind of love that match and went to bat for it in the 2000 yearbook recommendation thread. I mean, I won't vote for Shane, but still.

Yeah, it was like the anti-Samson effect with Austin. He was decent-to-good early in the Dangerous Alliance run but felt like the weakest in the group by a noticeable margin. Then he cut the hair and it was around that time where he seemed to just put it together, to the point where he looked on par with anybody else in the stable. Early in the year he was mostly clotheslines, clubbering and basic headlocks/chinlocks (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but then you watch him against Steamboat at the Clash in September and he has a far bigger bag of tricks for that match. He just flat out looked way more comfortable by then. He never really looked back after that. He's a guy I hadn't really thought about for a long time before this project, other than re-watching his 2001 run a few years back now (which held up). Going through the '96 yearbook reminded me of how much I used to love him, though. I don't love the '98/'99 stuff, but I'd still rather watch it than most other things in America at the time. He'll probably end up around the middle of my ballot.

Solar and Negro Navarro.

I don't really listen to podcasts, so I'm another one on board with Loss' idea. I took part in a couple of the SC polls and they worked great, primarily because you had a ton of people contributing to the discussion as the countdown progressed.

I'm not sure I'll rank him, but I've always been a bit of a mark for him, even his goofball karate horseshit. I've re-watched some of the Fabs/Moondogs matches from the Memphis set in the last couple years and they're still fucking great. Him wildly flinging himself at the Moondogs and trying to bite their faces off is as big a part of why as anything else.

KB8, man. KB8... Ha! I honestly did not notice that. Point remains, though, that the 90s Windham bolsters his case. At least it does to me (and without it he wouldn't be as high on my list as he'll end up being). Weighing in on DiBiase, I've been slowly going back through the Mid-South set over the last few years, and I think Ted has been right around good-at-worst in pretty much every match of his I've re-watched. The Duggan series is of course tremendous and I'm okay on the DiBiase/Williams team. I think he had a bit of a drop off after '85, but there's a lot of very good to great DiBiase stuff in '85 Mid-South. I'm not sure where I'd rank him on a list of Mid-South wrestlers for that year, but I certainly don't think his '85 laps Windham's '92, even if DiBiase played a more prominent role in his promotion at the time (I mean, Windham still had plenty of opportunities to work and have good matches in '92). Coincidentally, 1985 Mid-South and 1992 WCW are probably two of my three favourite calendar years for any wrestling promotions in history.

I would say there's absolutely stuff in the 90s that adds to Windham's case, and substantially at that. Horsemen v Doom from Starrcade '90 The Pillman feud in '91 A litany of good/very good/great matches in '92 that Barry is a big part of The Regal match from 4/93 and the Scorpio match from the June Clash There's a good deal of Windham stuff from the early 90s off the top of my head. And it's not like he was only there as luggage in any of it. Late 90s Windham/WWF Stalker is probably the 90s stuff I'd say is inconsequential, but even then there's some fun tag stuff in '99. Windham has a shot at my top 30, but without the 90s stuff he certainly wouldn't be.

That Somers match is really damn good and there's a Money Inc./Steiners match from Superstars (made the 1993 yearbook) in which I think Rotunda does one of the best drop toe holds I've ever seen. Or maybe it was DiBiase that did it. The match was also good, IIRC. I don't think I've seen any of the Rick Steiner stuff in WCW, but he's really bland in all of the other WCW stuff I've seen. Those Razor matches in 1994 WWF are not good at all. There's a match against Randy Savage on an episode of RAW that year that's pretty fun, but I thought that was mostly because of Savage being motivated to do something after Vince let him work on TV for a change. Other IRS matches that year are mostly plodding and riddled with long, sweaty chinlocks and abdominal stretches where he loosely grabs the ropes for "leverage." Granted, he wasn't working with all star talent regularly (the Waltman match was probably okay considering Waltman was pretty awesome in '94), but even within those matches he rarely did anything of note. That Somers match is REAL good, though.

I've started re-watching that run from when he came back to WWE in 2002 and the first thing he's done is make RVD look halfway worthwhile. There no way he doesn't make my top 20.

I would've voted for Tajiri even without the SMASH run, albeit lower than I will now after seeing it. His '99-'00 is a great two year run and he became my favourite wrestler in ECW history off the strength of it alone. I can't think of anybody else who managed to come across as such a genuine wrecking ball psychopath despite being a relatively small dude the way Tajiri did. The bit in the Mexican Death Match with Super Crazy where he starts skimming chairs across tables and just about decapitates someone in the crowd pretty much sums up his "dangerous little nutcase who you do not want to fuck with" character from that period, and man do I love that Tajiri. He's also involved in maybe my favourite tag match in WWF/E history, so there's no way I can't vote for him.

The match is on YouTube and it's one I was very much looking forward to watching (you pimped it in this thread already and that's when I looked for it online). If that screenshot is anything to go by then yeah, it should be good.

That channel is a goddamn goldmine. I'll definitely check that out.