Best Worker in the World in the '80's

[jdw]

When was the GOAT poll? Jumbo died in 2000. I suspect that the majority of the people who voted for Jumbo in the GOAT poll (regardless of whether it was #1 or lower) knew who Jumbo was before he died. It wasn't like the voters in that poll all happened to discover puroresu in 2011. Certainly not 90%.

The SC poll was early 2006 though I think the discussion for it started late 05.

 

And I think most of the people who participated in the pool knew about Jumbo before he died. A lot of those guys went back a decent amount of time online.

 

John

[JerryvonKramer]

One little spot of Flair's that has been bugging me of late is his cage escape attempts. They make zero sense and are really quite silly.

 

However, in the interests of balance and fairplay:

 

What are Terry Funk's weaknesses?

What are Jumbo's weaknesses?

What are Lawler's weaknesses?

What are Stan Hansen's weaknesses?

 

Surely only after all of those things are meted out can anything like a fair call be made. Let's be

.

[jdw]

However, in the interests of balance and fairplay:

 

What are Jumbo's weaknesses?

What are Stan Hansen's weaknesses?

Stan didn't work holds especially well. In a sense, he seemed to know it and tried to work around it.

 

Stan was also to a degree a spot-centric worker. Stan-Taue in the 1994 Carny was a story match. You don't get a lot of that out of Stan over the course of his career: a lot of his matches had more of a "feel" to them than a "story". Sure, you'd have consistent spots / items pop up, like Work Stan's Lariat Arm. Some of them turned into good story matches. In others, it was just time filler. That's not a massive weakness, more a work choice (like Flair's "I've Got Stuff To Do" choice). But it's there.

 

Jumbo... his sustained selling could be off. He'd sell some stuff really great, and then other times he'd be fine quicker than you'd want.

 

I'll leave Terry and Lawler to bigger fans of his than me.

 

John

[Graham Crackers]

Returning to your original point, I actually think we caught up with what Japanese fans already knew in regard to Fujinami and Choshu most recently.

One thing : who the fuck are "we" ? I warmed up to Choshu and Fujinami ten years ago when I began to watch shitloads of NJ TV. I guess my tastes are dated as far as Takada goes but are pretty well advanced as far as Fuji and Choshu go then.

 

It seems to me like interest in those guys dried up at some point because it was barely there when I first got online. When I first started joining wrestling forums (2007ish) there was very little classic NJPW discussion going on. The primary attitude about older Japanese wrestling was that 90s AJPW was where it's at and NJPW only had good juniors. Early on I watched very little NJPW heavyweight stuff because guys like Ditch had some online but it wasn't perceived at being on the same level as AJPW heavyweights so I never bothered to watch it. I became curious about NJPW after the 2008 Battlarts resurgence got me interested in the roots of shoot style but prior to the DVDVR 80s set I hadn't really sat down and watched much of either wrestler. I recall a couple people pimping Fujinami and people talked about the initial Choshu angle but because no one had really pimped Choshu or Fujinami as an all time great worker I was very surprised when I came out of the DVDVR set with Choshu as one of my all time favorites.

[NintendoLogic]

Jumbo has never been regarded as the strongest Japanese wrestler. I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

That's what his Japanese Wikipedia page says. The sources it cites are an All Japan TV special and an article in Weekly Pro-Wrestling, neither of which are online. And for what it's worth, the Jumbo stand-in is the strongest character in the Fire Pro Wrestling games.

 

If people are lifelong Beatles fans that's their business, but do people go around touting the best ever in other fields of entertainment? It seems a particular obsession of wrestling fans. If pushed I would name what I think is the greatest of all time in any other field, but it's not some badge of honour like it is with wrestling. I wonder if it's because wrestling fans spend more time talking about wrestling than watching it. Or maybe I don't move in the right circles in regard to my other hobbies. Wrestling sure has its sacred cows, though.

At the risk of piling on, this isn't exclusive to wrestling at all. I've seen more greatest film/album/video game/NFL team/etc. of all time lists than I can count.

 

Regarding Fujiwara, neither shoot style nor 80s New Japan were widely watched by the swarm of new fans who got into Japanese wrestling late. They may have been watched by hardcores previously, but those people didn't make up a vocal presence on the internet from 1999 onwards in my experience. Fujiwara was not well regarded in real time, so to speak. You only have to look at Lorefice's site to get some idea of the dated opinions about shoot style and Fujiwara from the late 90s. I always kind of dug Fujiwara but began to seriously re-evaluate him with the failed Smarkschoice best matches ever initiative around five or six years ago. That was some glorious revisionism. Revisionism is a wonderful thing even if it may be disrespectful or sacrilegious at times.

See, Fujiwara is a lot closer to what I think of as revisionism. He wasn't highly regarded in his own day, but he received greater appreciation from certain circles after the fact.

[ohtani's jacket]

Making a best of list for films or records isn't the same as these type of wrestling discussions. Very few people would argue that only the Beatles knew how to record songs or that only Hitchcock knew how to make movies to the extent that people praise (or used to praise) All Japan Pro-Wrestling. There is far more leeway in other forms of entertainment because despite the fact that there are seminal figures people don't go around claiming Hitchcock and Kurosawa are the be all and end all unless they've just discovered Hitchcock and Kurosawa. Those directors are the jumping-off point for most people not the end point like All Japan Pro-Wrestling. All Japan was seen as the perfect way to wrestle and therefore nothing could better it. I don't think that's completely analogous with the way people treat other forms of entertainment despite there being people who think the Beatles made perfect music or that the '87-88 Lakers played perfect basketball.

 

The Smarkschoice poll was in 2006 a full six years after Jumbo died. Plenty of people who participated in that poll had not seen a significant amount of Jumbo prior to his death as Jumbo was not a gateway to Japanese pro-wrestling when many of us first began watching. Just because he was talked about among WON readers in 1990 doesn't make a difference to those people, most of whom were in elementary school in 1990. What Meltzer thought of Choshu in 1983 is also irrelevant to these people. There were a group of people who began writing about wrestling and joining discussion post-2000 who got into things much later than the first wave of people online. If you want to squabble perhaps more than 90% of them were aware of Jumbo prior to his death. I think the first time I heard about him was when he retired and I think it was on 1wrestling. I doubt very much they were watching Jumbo prior to his death, though they may have seen the Tenryu feud or the early 90s All Japan opposite Misawa and Co., but even that became more widespread with the DVDVR best of the 90s results through the early part of the 2000s.

 

There are people for whom the GOAT was Bret or Shawn and then suddenly became Misawa and Kawada and then Jumbo and never really moved past the jumping-off point. That's all right, it's not really a criticism, but like this Choshu and Fujinami thing which Graham Crackers spelled out, to act like it didn't happen because x and x knew about it all along is way off. We're not talking about x and x.

[Matt D]

He IS part of the conversation, so he sort of has to be. I've come to realize that he wrestles in a way that is very much not for me when it comes to the things I like and care about the most. That doesn't mean I don't think he's probably the very best at what he DOES do instead and I admit that what he does do is very, very important.

 

But when it comes to what I care most about, Flair is basically blasphemous. I feel like there's an entire school of wrestling thought that stems from Flair's feelings about wrestling and how he (brilliantly) executed those feelings. To me it's wildly short-sighted and limited, and helped to set back wrestling analysis thirty years.

Can you say more about this Matt?

 

If Flair has any sort of wrestling philosophy at all it's calling matches in the ring, thinking on your feet and reacting to / controlling the crowd.

 

Which is to say that going into a 45-minute match, he probably only knows a few things: 1. the opponent, 2. the finish, 3. possibly one transitional detail

 

How he gets from A to B is develops organically. A Flair match is almost entirely unplanned. Flair will dictate the match, the tempo and the transitions. This is the opposite of the "self-conscious epic" of today that El-P keeps talking about.

 

Because of this, sometimes his matches aren't coherent, but A LOT of them time they tell very compelling stories. I watched the Jimmy Garvin cage match from Great American Bash 87 recently, and that match tells a fantastic story built around a chance knee injury from Garvin. Flair spends the first half of the match getting his ass kicked, but then the second half viciously going after the injured leg like an assassin. Garvin eventually passes out in pain. Flair is the consummate dick heel throughout.

 

How did that set wrestling back 30 years?

 

It came back around to Flair so I should say something. I will lead with the fact it was pretty late after a few hurricane days BUT my feeling is that Flair's feelings on wrestling (he doesn't consciously go out there trying to tell a story, he makes sure to hit his shit and pop the crowd, he does "what works") very much influenced general pro wrestling analysis thought in the 80s, along with Brody's "believability" and DK/TM ACTION over substance and I don't know, that shoot promotion in Japan I can't remember the name of (UWF?) Maybe I have the historiography wrong, but this is the feeling I've gotten from piecing a whole bunch of shit together and reading old Observers and listening to shoots and reading this board for years.

 

To cover a bunch of other crap, I like the Magic Johnson reference since i was trying to indicate how Flair is undeniably great but he doesn't do the things I feel are personally great. He hits the marks for enough other people and I recognize those marks and respect them. What I feel is purely subjective. I would never participate in a GOAT or Best Worker of the X poll since I have way too many blind spots. I have a lot less than I did four years ago but I still have so many. And I certainly think you can go out there to tell a story without it being some sort of meta-fiction. There are elements I love like trying to make every movement fit into a narrative (I always point to Big Show vs Mayweather as an example of this), foreshadowing with things set up in the first act and paid off later, especially during transitions, and just good quality, consistent selling. All I really want out of a match is the ability to watch what's on the screen and piece together a narrative from what you're seeing with as few extraneous parts as possible. Wrestling is fiction, not sport. If the story is clever, then that matters, if the action is crisp or the moves interesting, all the better, but the bare minimum to me is coherence. Some of it can work out unintentionally, or through repetition of "what works" since what works is generally drawing the crowd in with a meaningful drama.

 

Most of which has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but i always figure if I babble on enough about what I like, someone other than Dylan will get it eventually. Someone can go debunk my first paragraph if you want (It basically sums up as "Meltzer heard X through talks with Flair. If Flair, being the best wrestler, felt this way, then X has to be true and anything that goes against X obviously isn't important.")

[ohtani's jacket]

Jumbo has never been regarded as the strongest Japanese wrestler. I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

That's what his Japanese Wikipedia page says. The sources it cites are an All Japan TV special and an article in Weekly Pro-Wrestling, neither of which are online. And for what it's worth, the Jumbo stand-in is the strongest character in the Fire Pro Wrestling games.

 

On the pyramid of Japanese wrestling Jumbo wasn't at the top. There may have been people post-humously giving him props, but for the most part New Japan was the Yomiuri Giants to All Japan's Hanshin Tigers.

 

I agree that Fujiwara was closer to proper revisionism. He did attain a certain level of popularity in his home country, mind you. With Fujiwara it was a matter of taste. Matwork based matches became in vogue amongst a certain segment of fans and then it was discovered that the carney crap that Fujiwara was so good at translated superbly to the pro-style as well. I'm not sure his look helped either. People generally preferred flashier wrestling through the 90s.

[jdw]

Making a best of list for films or records isn't the same as these type of wrestling discussions. Very few people would argue that only the Beatles knew how to record songs or that only Hitchcock knew how to make movies to the extent that people praise (or used to praise) All Japan Pro-Wrestling.

Wait... what? People say only AJPW knew how to work?

 

This is little more than an inferiority complex. The biggest AJPW fans online also like things as varied at NJPW, AJW, Stone Cold and The Rock, Flair and the MX, Hayabusa, Bob Backlund, UWF-style... christ, one of the best things Jewett ever wrote was breaking down how well worked the Stinky Face Match was.

 

People talked about All Japan *exactly* how people talk about Hitchcock. I could pop in *any* of my Criterion Collection releases of Kurosawa films, flip on the Commentary track, and listen to someone break down and put over Kurosawa in ways that *vastly* go beyond anything that Frank or I ever did.

 

 

There is far more leeway in other forms of entertainment because despite the fact that there are seminal figures people don't go around claiming Hitchcock and Kurosawa are the be all and end all unless they've just discovered Hitchcock and Kurosawa.

There's every bit as much leeway in pro wrestling. There are people who like Hulk Hogan, and there are people who like Ric Flair. There were Shawn Michaels Fans, and there were Bret Hart Fans. There were Misawa Fans, there were Kobashi Fans, and there Kawada Fans. There were AJPW Fans, and there were NJPW Juniors fans. There were ECW Garbage Fans, and there were WCW Fans, and there were WWF Fans. Toyota vs Hokuto. And on and on.

 

Those directors are the jumping-off point for most people not the end point like All Japan Pro-Wrestling. All Japan was seen as the perfect way to wrestle and therefore nothing could better it.

This is just insecurity. Flair vs Steamboat was also seen as a perfect way to wrestle. Shawn Michaels was seen as a perfect way to wrestler. Liger and the Juniors was seen as a perfect way to wrestle. Stone Cold and The Rock were seen as a perfect way to wrestle.

 

I don't think that's completely analogous with the way people treat other forms of entertainment despite there being people who think the Beatles made perfect music or that the '87-88 Lakers played perfect basketball.

 

People treat Bob Dylan and The Beatles like they treat AJPW and NJPW Juniors. They treated the WWF and WCW online in the late 90s just like they treated the Celtics and Lakers in the 80s... christ, RSPW was one big argument between the camps over which was better.

 

 

The Smarkschoice poll was in 2006 a full six years after Jumbo died. Plenty of people who participated in that poll had not seen a significant amount of Jumbo prior to his death as Jumbo was not a gateway to Japanese pro-wrestling when many of us first began watching.

Your comment was that 90% of the voters has seen 0 Jumbo before he died.

 

I call bullshit on it. And I'll stand by that. "Plenty" isn't 90%.

 

 

What Meltzer thought of Choshu in 1983 is also irrelevant to these people.

You're shape shifting here. The comment on Choshu was about people coming to think of his as great, and my response of No Fucking Shit - he was thought of as great 30 years ago. It would be like a 20 year old posting online that finding out The Godfather is great is a revelation. No shit: it want the fucking Oscar, and if you asked around you would have been told it was great.

 

Before you try to pawn off that no one in the 00s talked about Choshu being great, plenty of us put over Choshu prior to the 80s NJPW set. Christ... I've been publicly trying to get Ishingundan in the HOF, including digging up old WON quotes for Frank to put into his pieces on them. I've regularly put over "past his prime" matches like 11/90 vs Hash, 1/93 vs Tenryu and 8/96 vs Hash. It's been out there.

 

There were a group of people who began writing about wrestling and joining discussion post-2000 who got into things much later than the first wave of people online.

I became a baseball fan in 1972. Do I get credit for "discovering" Babe Ruth despite the fact that people were talking about him all the way back to 1914?

 

Seriously?

 

Are you going to take credit for talking about Tokyo Story despite it being talked about for decades, long before you saw it? Jesus, Donald Richie, love him or hate him, was writing about Ozu before the two of us were born.

 

God bless new fans coming in an watching stuff for the first time, adding new life blood to the fandom. We need it to continue on. But let's not get goofy about it.

 

 

I think the first time I heard about him was when he retired and I think it was on 1wrestling. I doubt very much they were watching Jumbo prior to his death, though they may have seen the Tenryu feud or the early 90s All Japan opposite Misawa and Co., but even that became more widespread with the DVDVR best of the 90s results through the early part of the 2000s.

On 1wrestling? Guys like Scherer watched Jumbo back in the early 90s when he was *active*.

 

 

There are people for whom the GOAT was Bret or Shawn and then suddenly became Misawa and Kawada and then Jumbo and never really moved past the jumping-off point. That's all right, it's not really a criticism, but like this Choshu and Fujinami thing which Graham Crackers spelled out, to act like it didn't happen because x and x knew about it all along is way off. We're not talking about x and x.

To act like is has significant meaning is way off.

 

We have the desire to think that opinions, such as GOAT, starts with the first time we run across it.

 

That's largely delusional. As it will in 50 years when some folks have a revelation about Kane again being the GOAT Movie after several decades of being pushed below other films.

[FLIK]

Making a best of list for films or records isn't the same as these type of wrestling discussions. Very few people would argue that only the Beatles knew how to record songs or that only Hitchcock knew how to make movies to the extent that people praise (or used to praise) All Japan Pro-Wrestling.

Wait... what? People say only AJPW knew how to work?

 

This is little more than an inferiority complex. The biggest AJPW fans online also like things as varied at NJPW, AJW, Stone Cold and The Rock, Flair and the MX, Hayabusa, Bob Backlund, UWF-style... christ, one of the best things Jewett ever wrote was breaking down how well worked the Stinky Face Match was.

 

 

I'm sorta with OJ on this, "only AJPW knew how to work" is probably the wrong way to put it & it's not quite as strong as it used to be but for a long time there was a pretty vocal contingent that talked up 90's All Japan as the un-questionable best wrestling to ever exist and Misawa, Kawada or Kobashi as the best wrestlers to ever walk the planet. And yes most fans who thought this way enjoyed other things but typically any suggestion that anything or anyone else could be just as good or even dare to better then AJPW was met with ridicule or atleast bewildermint.

[Graham Crackers]

The comment on Choshu was about people coming to think of his as great, and my response of No Fucking Shit - he was thought of as great 30 years ago. It would be like a 20 year old posting online that finding out The Godfather is great is a revelation. No shit: it want the fucking Oscar, and if you asked around you would have been told it was great.

 

Before you try to pawn off that no one in the 00s talked about Choshu being great, plenty of us put over Choshu prior to the 80s NJPW set. Christ... I've been publicly trying to get Ishingundan in the HOF, including digging up old WON quotes for Frank to put into his pieces on them. I've regularly put over "past his prime" matches like 11/90 vs Hash, 1/93 vs Tenryu and 8/96 vs Hash. It's been out there.

I'm responding to this because I was the one that admitted that Choshu was a revelation for me on the DVDVR NJPW 80s set. When the NJPW set results had come in I had only been a member of this site for a few months and I was yet to discover TOA or see the Choshu's army thread on that board. Before joining this board I was never really exposed to WON HOF discussions and I knew very little about the Observer. My only knowledge of Choshu came from Ditch's site where I had watched his matches in AJPW. Obviously ditch is open minded enough to like plenty of NJPW wrestling (after all he does host plenty of it) but at the time I was so into his AJPW hype that NJPW heavies were of no interest to me so while the initial Choshu's army angle sounded intriguing it wasn't enough to make me dig deeper. I didn't see Choshu getting pimped on DVDVR, you certainbly didn't hear about it on the other US-centric boards I had been on, and in terms of the Observer I was only aware of the snowflakes Dave gave some junior matches, not his thoughts on Choshu. To top it all off, when people did talk about 80s NJPW the only things I remember hearing about were Dave's love of Tiger Mask and the Segunda Caida folks hyping the NJPW vs UWF feud. I may have been aware that Choshu forming his stable was historic but I wasn't aware it would hold up as great.

 

I feel like I may have been rambling there but what I'm getting at is that I wasn't exposed to places where Choshu was being discussed and particularly not where he was being discussed as a great wrestler. I'm not sure whether that means I was in a bubble, you guys were in a bubble, or we're all living in bubbles.

[Victator]

As my Daddy told me about reading old newspapers. "If I haven't read it, its news to me."

 

Its never too late for something played out to be new again.

[El-P]

As my Daddy told me about reading old newspapers. "If I haven't read it, its news to me."

It can be new to someone who ignored it, but it can't be news.

 

Its never too late for something played out to be new again.

Right. 2020 : Nobuhiko Takada revival.

[ohtani's jacket]

It can be new to someone who ignored it, but it can't be news.

There's always going to be people who say something's good before the majority cotton on. Just because a few people were writing positive things about Choshu before the New Japan set hit doesn't mean people were tripping over themselves to see his stuff. How many people watched Choshu because Jewett wrote some Gordy List about Ishingundan? As many people who watched his stuff because of the New Japan site, Ditch's site or even youtube? It doesn't matter whether the consensus is new or old hat, the only thing that matters is what the consensus is now. As Will continues to release sets, people will come round to plenty of workers. Let's say Will releases Portland and people start claiming Buddy Rose is a great worker. Then the consensus becomes that Rose is an all-time great or at least in the discussion. Dylan has written tomes about Buddy Rose, Will always talks about what a great worker he is, John D. Williams gave us an opinion about Rose... are people going to turn around and say this consensus is nothing new, we've been saying it all along, blah, blah, blah? What a load of crap. It's all just words on paper or a computer screen until people watch the matches.

[Graham Crackers]

I also think that pro wrestling because of it's "lowbrow" status doesn't have the same accessibility to critical consensus that something like film does. John mentioned the Godfather and obviously that's a film that has had volumes written about it. Just Google The Godfather and on the first page of results you will see the official site, a Wikipedia entry, and a Rotten Tomatoes page. Each of those pages has a considerable amount of information on the critical legacy of the film. That's in addition to The Godfather being played on TV all of the time and regularly being alluded to in other films since then.

 

Most of the information I've found about someone like Choshu came from watching the actual footage, some things I've read on various message boards, and reading Loss's WON transcripts. When I search for Riki Choshu on Google I don't get this board or TOA. I get some youtube links and a few very dry Wikipedia type pages. Only the Puroresu Wiki page that Hisa's been working on and the Pro Wrestling Wikia page really give context that was not available on the actual Wikipedia page but despite that there is no "Reception" section like on the Godfather's Wiki entry. It tells me that he won some kayfabe titles as well as Best Booker and he made a PWI list. That doesn't really tell me that I should go and watch his classic matches. Even something like "Negro Casas was a big fan and does Choshu tribute spots" would tell me more about his in ring work.

[tim]

I also think that pro wrestling because of it's "lowbrow" status doesn't have the same accessibility to critical consensus that something like film does.

Off topic tangent but this is totally true, and if I didn't find the fact that this is such a niche niche NICHE level of fandom so fascinating I'm not sure if I'd have kept up with wrestling so much over the years. At this point I'll sit down a watch a match every 2 or 3 weeks maybe. But I spent a chunk of time reading the regular boards every day. In general I've just always been fascinated by odd left-field niches(I love Korean Historical Dramas for example). I always love reading discussions like this about what the 'critical consensus' was within this crazy wrestling niche group in years past.

[jdw]

It can be new to someone who ignored it, but it can't be news.

There's always going to be people who say something's good before the majority cotton on.

 

What's the majority?

 

Choshu was a WON Wrestler of the Year. In the 80s. Was pimped to shit. Went into the WON HOF... instantly.

 

The "majority" of hardcore fans at the time who talked about the subject (Puroresu) thought Choshu was pretty fucking great.

 

That's not an insignificant number of people: it was the Entire US Population of Puroresu Fans at the time. There really weren't any non-Japanese puroresu fans in the US who weren't WON readers. Okay... perhaps one: me, who became a puroresu fan about a year and a half before starting to sub to the WON (after Dave's pieces in The National started coming out).

 

How significant were those puroresu fans?

 

WON Wrestler of the Year

1982 Ric Flair

1983 Ric Flair (2)

1984 Ric Flair (3)

1985 Ric Flair (4)

1986 Ric Flair (5)

1987 Riki Choshu

1988 Akira Maeda

1989 Ric Flair (6)

1990 Ric Flair (7)

1991 Jumbo Tsuruta

1992 Ric Flair (8)

 

Right there smack dab in the middle of the Ric Flair Dynasty, Choshu broke in and was the first non-Flair to win the award during the Voting Period of the WON (those earlier 1980 and 1981 awards were before the WON started publishing).

 

Significant.

 

It's the equiv of a person today saying that all they've ever heard about was Babe Ruth, and it was amazing to look up the stats and see this Lou Gehrig fellow was pretty good... why haven't people talked about him...

 

To which anyone whose been a baseball fan for any length and knowledgeable about baseball history would point out the contemporaneous record:

 

MVP Award

1927 AL 1st

1931 AL 2nd

1932 AL 2nd

1933 AL 4th

1934 AL 5th

1935 AL 5th

1936 AL 1st

1937 AL 4th

 

Sporting News Major League All-Star Team

1927 1B Lou Gehrig

1928 1B Lou Gehrig

1931 1B Lou Gehrig

1934 1B Lou Gehrig

1936 1B Lou Gehrig

1937 1B Lou Gehrig

 

1939 HOF

 

So it's a discussion of...

 

Newbie FAN: "OMG~! We've discovered a hidden GREAT here~!"

 

Fan Who Has Been Around: "Really? Did you also just learn yesterday that Cock+Pussy-Birth Control = How Babies Are Made?"

 

I mean... I guess there are STNG fans who might in 1994 have gone to Star Trek: Generations and wondered who this Kirk guy was, then watched the earlier films, and the stumbled on the original series and thought:

 

STNG Fan: "OMG~! This Kirk guy is the MOTHERFUCKING! bomb! Why hasn't anyone talked about him?"

 

Older Trekie: "Really? Seriously... really?"

 

* * * * *

 

Look, it's perfectly fine for folks who sport wood over Fujiwara to take great pride in their "rediscover" the greatness of Fujiwara and have at it in putting him on their personal Mount Rushmore of Great Workers. The reality is that folks who watched UWF in the 80s didn't pimp him as a great worker. He wasn't pimped in the 90s, either in the WON or online. Several folks watched him in the last decade, lost their shit for him, and helped reshape how people viewed Fujiwara. This is New Thinking, and that's good.

 

But Choshu and Fujinami have been out there. They were pimped at the time. They were still talked about in the 90s as being greats in their prime. They were still talked about in the 00s as being great in their prime. I have a memory of Dylan pimping the DK-Fujinami match as being better than the DK-Sayama matches, and this before the Anti-Sayama Brigade fully took off (and as far as I recall, only Jewett was shitting on Sayama... and ironically the future Anti-Sayama Brigade were fans of much of his analysis of workers at the time). I've pimped Choshu-Fujinami and Choshu & Yatsu vs Jumbo & Tenryu matches from pretty much the moment I came online in 1996. This ain't New Thinking. It's just new people seeing the Same Shit that people have seen for 30 years.

 

Bill James putting over Lou Lou Gehrig isn't a revelation, nor would he claim it was. It's simply seeing what those at the time did, and writing again about it:

 

"This motherfucker could rake."

 

John

[ohtani's jacket]

The majority refers to the majority of people reading and writing about this type of wrestling now, most of whom weren't WON subscribers in the 80s, weren't influenced by the backstory you've provided, hadn't seen a large chunk of the footage the Death Valley Driver provided and for the most part had little exposure to prime Fujinami and Choshu due to a gap in pimping from 1987 to 2009.

 

Nobody's saying that Fujinami and Choshu were never pimped or that there was never any positive consensus about them as workers. Nobody is saying that the post-2009 consensus is entirely new, simply that they were out of vogue and then "rediscovered" or re-evaluated, so to speak. I cannot believe that anyone would honestly say in the ten year period from 1999 to 2009 that Riki Choshu was a highly regarded worker among internet users.

 

If we consider the Smarkschoice poll, Fujinami was #58 and Choshu was #100. Of the 50 odd people who voted, Choshu only received 13 votes. I think it's possible that both Fujinami and Choshu would receive a bump from the Death Valley Driver sets if a poll was to be taken tomorrow.

 

How is Dylan saying Fujinami had a better match with Dynamite Kid than Tiger Mask proof that the rest of us thought highly of Fujinami? All it tells us is that Dylan thought highly of his juniors work. I don't know that Dylan had seen even half the Fujinami stuff that was on the Death Valley Driver set, but he can tell us for himself whether his own opinion of Fujinami was reappraised. Of the 80s Fujinami matches that I would consider widely seen prior to the set, that match did fairly well but there were a number of new discoveries [for people who were not WON subscribers in the 1980s] that did better.

[Childs]

As someone who came to puro relatively late, maybe 2005 or so, I have to agree with OJ. I read a lot of stuff as I worked my way into that world, and though I saw some appreciation for Choshu's series with Fujinami and for his All-Japan run, I did not get the overall impression he was regarded as an elite worker. That's not to say he wasn't regarded that way in 1987. But his reputation seemed to have stagnated compared to those of some contemporaries. So for me, watching all of the footage for the NJ and AJ DVDVR sets, there was an element of "Holy shit, this guy was great."

 

I'm not sure Gehrig is a good baseball comparison. He never stopped being the consensus choice as the top first baseman in MLB history. But think about someone like Lefty Grove. Sure, he was always regarded as great, an easy HOF guy. But until Bill James came along and presented his career in a new light, he wasn't widely discussed as a candidate for greatest pitcher ever. James certainly didn't "discover" Lefty Grove, but he kicked off an era of looking at him in a new light.