Your personal most Overrated and Underrated

[donsem43]

Overrated - Late 80's WWF tag teams. Sure there was a lot of talent, but it sure didn't produce much. It got better once the Rockers and Brainbusters got there but if you compare it to what was happening Crockett at the same time there's it is night/day in terms of match quality.

 

Underrated - Recent Joshi - I sure a lot of people thought joshi fell into a black hole in the mid-'00, but there has actually quite a few good workers still around. Yoshiko Tamura, Azumi Hyuga and Meiko Satomura are debatable top 10 GFOAT. There's also a bunch of really good young workers like Arisa Nakajima, Kana, and Hiroyo Matsumoto now.

[fxnj]

We all know that there are people who will defend Brody to the end of time, such as Dave.

I'm not sure if Dave really meant argue that Brody is an indisputably great worker so much as he was giving his stock response to the mentality that leads people to ask him if he wishes he could somehow go back and change the thoughts he had on something. Once you concede that a match (or worker, if you prefer) is really only as good as what the tastes of a viewer lead them to see it as, it seems pretty pointless to ask if he might have been wrong in pimping a guy who he not only liked at the time, but who his peers also liked and who is still remembered as one of the greats by a pretty large section of older fans in Japan. I call Brody underrated because it seems the hate for Brody on boards like these has gone beyond just people watching old footage and coming up with different opinions to active attempts at revisionism, like making a set chronicling 80's AJPW and not giving people the opportunity to vote for Brody matches like the tags I mentioned that are not only highly regarded but also very significant to the promotion's history. I think that's just dumb.

[JerryvonKramer]

I wonder if the same people who rag on Brody for his lack of selling are as critical of the sacred cows from mid-90s All Japan (who I sometimes see being given a pass for no-selling bombs because "it's the syle") or of people like Vader or even, on occasion, Stan Hansen who we recently on Titans saw basically no-sell a Bob Backlund piledriver.

The hate for Brody seems to be extreme, and it is worth asking if everyone is held to the same standard.

[Matt D]

I'm pretty consistent at least?*

 

*except about Sting

 

The big issue with Brody is the myth where 95% of people stating it haven't seen much if at all of him to realize how wrong it is, with much of the rest having not seen him in decades. He's the ultimate case of false advertising which is even more of an issue than the no-selling.

[Childs]

 

We all know that there are people who will defend Brody to the end of time, such as Dave.

I call Brody underrated because it seems the hate for Brody on boards like these has gone beyond just people watching old footage and coming up with different opinions to active attempts at revisionism, like making a set chronicling 80's AJPW and not giving people the opportunity to vote for Brody matches like the tags I mentioned that are not only highly regarded but also very significant to the promotion's history. I think that's just dumb.

 

This is horseshit. We put 10 Brody matches on the set, which was more than voters wanted based on their response to what we included. We didn't pick the Brody/Hansen vs. Funks match you mentioned because there was another version of the same match-up we liked better. We didn't include Jumbo/Tenryu vs. Hansen/Brody because we all viewed it as action-filled but shapeless. However, we included another version of the match-up and a match with Brody/Hansen against Baba/Jumbo. The idea that there was some grand bias against Brody controlling the picks is just asinine. Voters had plenty of chances to weigh in on his All-Japan run.

 

Speaking to JVK's comments, I really had little notion of the backlash against Brody when I first started watching his stuff. I assumed he'd be awesome based on the Apter mags from my youth and everything I'd read about him subsequently. What I actually saw was a guy with an awesome look and ring entrance who didn't seem to be good at anything in the ring. He lay around in holds, he didn't brawl with much fire, he barely sold. I kept looking for the great Brody performances and found few, if any.

 

I don't think he's held to a different standard than Hansen or Jumbo or the the '90s crew. He just wasn't as good, and that's based on lots and lots of empirical observation.

[subatomic_elbow]

No joke, I don't think I've ever paid attention to a Brody match. I've always thought he LOOKED like he would be awesome, but I've never been inspired to watch him. Sort of like Frank Zappa, actually.

[Lee Casebolt]

No joke, I don't think I've ever paid attention to a Brody match. I've always thought he LOOKED like he would be awesome, but I've never been inspired to watch him. Sort of like Frank Zappa, actually.

 

It's a great look, but you'd be better off watching literally any of the Brody clones - John Nord, The Predator, whoever.

[Matt D]

Nord in 91 is pretty damn underrated.

[fxnj]

This is horseshit. We put 10 Brody matches on the set, which was more than voters wanted based on their response to what we included. We didn't pick the Brody/Hansen vs. Funks match you mentioned because there was another version of the same match-up we liked better. We didn't include Jumbo/Tenryu vs. Hansen/Brody because we all viewed it as action-filled but shapeless. However, we included another version of the match-up and a match with Brody/Hansen against Baba/Jumbo. The idea that there was some grand bias against Brody controlling the picks is just asinine. Voters had plenty of chances to weigh in on his All-Japan run.

Thing is there's plenty of repeated match-ups on the set so I don't see why that disqualified those matches when you look at the historical significance factor. The RWTL 1983 Jumbo/Tenryu tag was huge in getting over Tenryu as a top level star and establishing Jumbo/Tenryu as the top native team, while the 1984 RWTL tag was the big rematch following up on Terry's retirement and works to bookend the era before the Choshu/Tenryu feud. Both of those, especially the Jumbo/Tenryu match, also happen to be clear examples of Brody putting over his opponents as bad asses and disprove the idea that he was just a politician who never got anyone over.

 

 

Speaking to JVK's comments, I really had little notion of the backlash against Brody when I first started watching his stuff. I assumed he'd be awesome based on the Apter mags from my youth and everything I'd read about him subsequently. What I actually saw was a guy with an awesome look and ring entrance who didn't seem to be good at anything in the ring. He lay around in holds, he didn't brawl with much fire, he barely sold. I kept looking for the great Brody performances and found few, if any.

"Laying around in holds" is pretty much wrestling 101 on how to build heat. Him going in there and working even with old-school technicians like Jumbo and Dory also added to his legitimacy as a main eventer by showing that he wasn't just a one-dimensional brawler. I'll admit that he wasn't exactly doing RINGS level matwork, but then how much of that did you see from Tenryu?

 

I also don't count it against him just because he didn't make too many funny faces while brawling or selling. He might not have been flopping around like a cartoon character in his 4/82 Dory match but looking at the overall layout reveals a smartly worked match that builds to an explosive climax of Brody being forced to expend every bit energy and ring smarts he has to put away Dory while still coming out of the match looking like a monster. Sure, you can rag on his selling in things like the Steamboat/Youngblood match but then you'd be missing the point as you can't have your monster team working every match 50/50 and wrestling a throwaway tag in that way only serves to make it more compelling in those rare moments when he does look hurt.

[JerryvonKramer]

For what it's worth, I think Dory is the least boring he's ever been in the 10/81 match, and Brody seemed to be the one making that happen.

 

I think the problem with Brody is the extent to which he was overhyped

 

Dory and Terry Funk vs. Bruiser Brody & Stan Hansen (4/20/83) - that was given five stars by Meltzer. It finished 65th in the All Japan voting, and didn't stand out at all in the context of the set.

 

The best Brody match for me was when he tagged with Snuka against Dory and Terry Funk on 12/13/81, and I think the DVDR voters agreed, it finished top 20. Interestingly, on Harrington's points scale, Brody finished above Misawa (as Tiger Mask) for the set.

[jdw]

Overrated - Late 80's WWF tag teams. Sure there was a lot of talent, but it sure didn't produce much. It got better once the Rockers and Brainbusters got there but if you compare it to what was happening Crockett at the same time there's it is night/day in terms of match quality.

 

The entire WWF Golden Tag Era from 1985-91 was overrated. I would have been happy to simply get "solid" matches out of them. As an example, that's all I wanted out of Hogan, and I tended to get more solid matches out of Hogan than the tag division.

[jdw]

 

We all know that there are people who will defend Brody to the end of time, such as Dave.

I'm not sure if Dave really meant argue that Brody is an indisputably great worker

 

 

Dave would call Brody one of the greatest working big men of all-time. You'll never be able to talk him down from that one. I've been there in person when someone said to Dave that Hansen carried the team and Brody wasn't as good as people thought. It went over like a ton of lead bricks.

 

The last few times I've read Dave talk about Brody, he does not appear to have changed his mind.

[Bix]

Is Triple H officially underrated now? More so now that he appears to have come to terms with a bunch of his more annoying habits.

[anotherspammer]

Is Triple H officially underrated now? More so now that he appears to have come to terms with a bunch of his more annoying habits.

He's had 3 good matches this year, with some of the best wrestlers in the world involved, and one decent match with Lesnar a year ago. His previous matches with Lesnar were as over-wrought and bloated as anything else he's done. The matches with Undertaker I actually liked as the overbooked, no-pacing messes they were, but there are plenty of people that didn't. What else has he done that should change any negative opinions of him?

 

FWIW, I like HHH some,and think he gets criticized a bit too harshly, but I can't help but roll my eyes and assume anybody that treats him as an all-time great doesn't watch a lot of wrestling, and probably didn't watch at all from 2002-2009.

[jdw]

The rest:

 

Once you concede that a match (or worker, if you prefer) is really only as good as what the tastes of a viewer lead them to see it as, it seems pretty pointless to ask if he might have been wrong in pimping a guy who he not only liked at the time, but who his peers also liked and who is still remembered as one of the greats by a pretty large section of older fans in Japan.

 

 

I don't think there's any thing wrong with giving thought to people from an earlier generation, even if your pimping from the earlier generation might not hold up.

 

When I was 13-15, I thought Jim Rice was a great, great, great baseball player. The stats backed it up: he averaged .320-41-128 in those seasons with another 31 2B and 12 3B thrown in to boot (or .320/.376/.596 if you're looking at BA/OBP/SLG). That's a whale of a hitter. And he was recognized as such at the time: 4-1-5 in the MVP voting, an all-star, etc.

 

What fewer people paid attention to in that era:

 

.350/.405/.699 Home (Fenway)
.290/.347/.498 Road

 

Or putting it into Triple Crown numbers, dividing the three year totals by 1.5 to give a "season":

 

.350-55-153 Home (Fenway)

.290-28-102 Road

 

Which isn't surprising given Fenway was an excellent hitters park.

 

Rice wasn't a horrible hitter on the road, but he also wasn't a .320/.376/.596 hitter. Those overall loaded numbers were a function of playing in Fenway.

 

Was Rice a Bad Player? No. He just was overrated. Quite overrated.

 

Does it ruin my early-to-mid teens to have discovered that? No. It's good to know. In turn, some of the other guys that I liked turned out to be better than I thought (such as Ron Cey), and some that I thought were great were born out to be historically great (Mike Schmidt).

 

Jim Rice was thought of as great in his time, by fans and sports writers. He eventually got into the HOF. That doesn't mean that one can look at him and factually point out why he was overrated. Or point out that his two old Red Sox OF mates, Lynn and Evans, were quite likely better... well... most high end analytics would probably say that also is a fact.

 

There's nothing wrong with that, similar to looking at Brody over the past 15-20 years and finding the old consensus about his greatness as a worker to be lacking.

 

 

I call Brody underrated because it seems the hate for Brody on boards like these has gone beyond just people watching old footage and coming up with different opinions to active attempts at revisionism, like making a set chronicling 80's AJPW and not giving people the opportunity to vote for Brody matches like the tags I mentioned that are not only highly regarded but also very significant to the promotion's history. I think that's just dumb.

 

 

The rethinking of Brody has been around since the late 90s / very early 00s when his old matches started getting circulated more, along with the old matches of his peers like Hansen and Terry Funk. That included the famous tags you point to. A decent number of people watching them for the first time, along with a decent number of people watching them again for the first time in a while, found his work to be pretty lacking. It was going on long before the 80s AJPW set was done. I'm pretty sure over on WrestlingClassics is a copy of the write up I did of Brody & Hansen vs Steamboat & Youngblood, probably from 2003 or so, and I pretty much ripped the living shit out of Brody in it.

 

Again, significance is important. But Hogan-Andre was significant, and you'll get a wide variation of what people think about the match. Back in 1987, Dave thought it was dogshit. It's possible he's changed his mind since then, which would be ironic given this discussion.

[jdw]

 

I don't think he's held to a different standard than Hansen or Jumbo or the the '90s crew. He just wasn't as good, and that's based on lots and lots of empirical observation.

 

 

This, and the rest of Childs' post.

[jdw]

 

Sure, you can rag on his selling in things like the Steamboat/Youngblood match but then you'd be missing the point as you can't have your monster team working every match 50/50 and wrestling a throwaway tag in that way only serves to make it more compelling in those rare moments when he does look hurt.

 

 

What one can do is compare Brody's selling in that match with Hansen's. One can also compare Brody's "working with" the opponents with Hansen's. When you do that, Brody's nonsense is nakedly obvious.

 

The only thing that surprises me is that why everyone wouldn't find it nakedly obvious. Two monster heels on the same team together against the same opponents in the same match... it's right there in front of one.

[jdw]

For what it's worth, I think Dory is the least boring he's ever been in the 10/81 match, and Brody seemed to be the one making that happen.

 

Dory is the least boring he's ever been against Horst Hoffman on 12/15/75. And it's Hoffman who is making that happen by forcing Dory out of being pure Dory.

 

Seriously, watch this:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfTJ9RPvqI

 

Fantastic match.

[Zenjo]

Underrated - Recent Joshi - I sure a lot of people thought joshi fell into a black hole in the mid-'00, but there has actually quite a few good workers still around. Yoshiko Tamura, Azumi Hyuga and Meiko Satomura are debatable top 10 GFOAT. There's also a bunch of really good young workers like Arisa Nakajima, Kana, and Hiroyo Matsumoto now.

+1 to the black hole theory. You could build a case for Hyuga and Satomura as borderline top 20 contenders. I'd have Tamura a level down from those two. It's tough to see how any of them have had better careers than Jaguar, Devil, Chigusa, Bull, Kong, Hokuto, Toyota, Kyoko, Yoshida, Kansai, Ozaki to name 11 off the top of my head. You've also got Ikeshita, Omori, Lioness, Yamazaki, Yamada, Mita, Shimoda, Takako, Kudo, Hasegawa, Momoe and others to contend with for a top 20 slot. That's just from an in ring perspective.

 

 

On the Brody issue I was just looking at my personal 80's AJ vote. I had his 10 matches at 11,47,60,90,98,100,115,122,125,146. Hardly crying out for additional footage. He had a great image and persona, and was ideal in his role at the time. He's a wrestler for his era though, and wouldn't have cut it in later years.

[Childs]

 

This is horseshit. We put 10 Brody matches on the set, which was more than voters wanted based on their response to what we included. We didn't pick the Brody/Hansen vs. Funks match you mentioned because there was another version of the same match-up we liked better. We didn't include Jumbo/Tenryu vs. Hansen/Brody because we all viewed it as action-filled but shapeless. However, we included another version of the match-up and a match with Brody/Hansen against Baba/Jumbo. The idea that there was some grand bias against Brody controlling the picks is just asinine. Voters had plenty of chances to weigh in on his All-Japan run.

Thing is there's plenty of repeated match-ups on the set so I don't see why that disqualified those matches when you look at the historical significance factor. The RWTL 1983 Jumbo/Tenryu tag was huge in getting over Tenryu as a top level star and establishing Jumbo/Tenryu as the top native team, while the 1984 RWTL tag was the big rematch following up on Terry's retirement and works to bookend the era before the Choshu/Tenryu feud. Both of those, especially the Jumbo/Tenryu match, also happen to be clear examples of Brody putting over his opponents as bad asses and disprove the idea that he was just a politician who never got anyone over.

 

 

Speaking to JVK's comments, I really had little notion of the backlash against Brody when I first started watching his stuff. I assumed he'd be awesome based on the Apter mags from my youth and everything I'd read about him subsequently. What I actually saw was a guy with an awesome look and ring entrance who didn't seem to be good at anything in the ring. He lay around in holds, he didn't brawl with much fire, he barely sold. I kept looking for the great Brody performances and found few, if any.

"Laying around in holds" is pretty much wrestling 101 on how to build heat. Him going in there and working even with old-school technicians like Jumbo and Dory also added to his legitimacy as a main eventer by showing that he wasn't just a one-dimensional brawler. I'll admit that he wasn't exactly doing RINGS level matwork, but then how much of that did you see from Tenryu?

 

I also don't count it against him just because he didn't make too many funny faces while brawling or selling. He might not have been flopping around like a cartoon character in his 4/82 Dory match but looking at the overall layout reveals a smartly worked match that builds to an explosive climax of Brody being forced to expend every bit energy and ring smarts he has to put away Dory while still coming out of the match looking like a monster. Sure, you can rag on his selling in things like the Steamboat/Youngblood match but then you'd be missing the point as you can't have your monster team working every match 50/50 and wrestling a throwaway tag in that way only serves to make it more compelling in those rare moments when he does look hurt.

 

We could go back and forth on this forever and come to no agreement. The purpose of the '80s set was never to include every significant match. We didn't include the ones you mentioned because we didn't think they were great and because we preferred other examples of the same match-up. Your implication that the choices indicated some conspiracy against Brody is ridiculous. If that was the mindset, why would we have included two matches between Brody and Dory? Our intention was to present the best array of matches, plain and simple. You can disagree with the choices, but I don't appreciate you calling us dumb when we worked our asses off to put out what is clearly the best survey of '80s All Japan available anywhere.

 

As for the specifics on Brody's style, I have no problem with him choosing to work holds. I have a problem with the way he did it, which was consistently boring. I don't have a problem with him selling selectively. I have a problem with the fact that when it was time to put over his opponent's offense, he often refused to go down or look hurt. I'm obviously not saying he never did those things. But if you watch him over time, some clear patterns emerge. As John said, the comparison that kills Brody is Hansen, who worked the same role against the same opponents at the same time and did everything much, much better.

[Loss]

I would like a Brody fan to sort of expand on what Dave's talked about where he would throw a shoot kick in the middle of a bunch of worked ones to really grab everyone's attention. Are there matches where it's evident that is even happening? And is that even a good thing?

[Lee Casebolt]

As John said, the comparison that kills Brody is Hansen, who worked the same role against the same opponents at the same time and did everything much, much better.

 

 

Hansen really is the wrestler that the Apter mags, at least (I'm not overly familiar with Meltzer) tried to sell Brody as.

[MikeCampbell]

Add another check in the overrated column for Kurt Angle. I, and others, have been saying it for years now. It's not that Kurt isn't good. He is good. But that's it. He's good. He's not great and he's not top five of all time. I just reviewed the Iron Man match he had with Brock, and Brock outperformed him in every way possible. What really stood out to me was that Brock made Kurt's finisher look ten times more lethal than Kurt ever bothered to. Brock does an Ankle Lock and it's an nearly instant tap out. Kurt does it, and it's the usual horseshit like crawling to the ropes and getting pulled back, and rolling through it and sending Kurt to the mat, etc.

[Mad Dog]

I think Kurt was at his best when he was starting out in 99 and 2000 when other guys were calling the matches. Look at his TNA work, his best stuff was when he had to let someone like Jarrett or Sting call the match and they made him slow the fuck down. Angle has always thought a good match is throwing as many bombs as possible.

 

I agree on the mid to late 80s WWF tag team division being overrated. I was thinking about my top 10 tag teams of the 80s and the Hart Foundation, Rockers and Arn/Tully were the only teams I was considering.

[thebrainfollower]

I don't know if I'd consider either guy underrated or overrated but the Diesel-Bam Bam Bigelow match from April of 95 on Raw is a really good match, definitely much much better than expected. Nash was as motivated as I've ever seen and energetic as heck, one of his best efforts of all time.

 

The WWF tag team division is rated highly not so much for the matches (there were many many good ones and a few great ones) but because tag teams were taken seriously and treated as important by the WWF then, pretty much for the first time ever and except for a brief comeback in the Attitude era and then Smackdown, pretty much the only time in WWF history. And they usually were placed on the cards after a few boring as heck squash matches which helped a lot. They also had a lot of good SNME matches. It's not that they were head and shoulders above the rest of the company as some have nostalgically rendered, it's that they were right there with everything except the main events.