Ted DiBiase

[BigBadMick]

Was it off the top of your head K8 or from my post just above which lists exactly the same stuff? lol

 

I would like to hold off listing out DiBiase stuff K8, until I finish my 80s Catchup rewatch of the Murdoch series, and I'm currently in the middle of a bunch of Williams / Ted tags, which is a pretty underrated team -- underrated on PWO that is, not elsewhere in the fandom.

Is that second paragraph directed to me?

[JerryvonKramer]

Yeah. Sorry, should have said you and not K8.

[KB8]

KB8, man. KB8...

 

Was it off the top of your head K8 or from my post just above which lists exactly the same stuff? lol

I would like to hold off listing out DiBiase stuff K8, until I finish my 80s Catchup rewatch of the Murdoch series, and I'm currently in the middle of a bunch of Williams / Ted tags, which is a pretty underrated team -- underrated on PWO that is, not elsewhere in the fandom.

 

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.

[BigBadMick]

Cool. I'll look forward to it. I think this DiBiase-Windham comparison is really interesting.

[JerryvonKramer]

One other thing I'll put out there, if something like Hansen and DiBiase vs. Jumbo and Tenryu from 85 happened in a WWF ring at a major PPV, it would be remembered as a classic and raved about.

 

It happened in an All Japan ring in the midst of a mind-blowing Choshu's army feud.

 

Take a match like that and isolate it, and it's way way better than it would appear in the context of binge-watching AJ from the period.

 

The charge brought against Ted is that he doesn't stand out in AJ, but he wasn't meant to, he was meant to be Hansen's number 2 and he played that part well. He also held his own -- and the FACT HE HAS THE RUN at all should be to his credit not his detriment. Many other 80s guys don't have the resume of AJ matches to their name.

 

There's a very engaging match they have with the Funks which ends with Hansen barking at Ted to whip Dory with his belt. Considering the Japanese crowd would have known Ted as a West Texas guy and Dory trainee, and seeing Hansen really goading Ted into it, is one of the few moments of genuine heelery I've seen in an AJ context, but it also gets across the dynamic of the Stan-Ted team quite well.

[Childs]

The argument was never that he shouldn't get credit for his AJPW work. It was that he looked like a second-tier talent compared to the best guys, and it reinforced the idea of him as a guy who'd fall into the back half of a GWE list rather than contending for the top 20 or 30. I don't even think you'd disagree with that.

[JerryvonKramer]

Right, I'm just saying that there is sometimes a bit of SLIPPAGE there where it goes from being "Okay, so he's not a Jumbo / Tenryu level guy, but is still really bloody good", to "yeah, this guy wasn't all that and shouldn't make the list".

 

You see the difference?

[Childs]

I do, but I'm honestly not sure how many people will leave him off. Some, obviously.

 

I've got him at 62 on my working list.

[Phil Schneider]

Right, I'm just saying that there is sometimes a bit of SLIPPAGE there where it goes from being "Okay, so he's not a Jumbo / Tenryu level guy, but is still really bloody good", to "yeah, this guy wasn't all that and shouldn't make the list".

 

You see the difference?

 

You realize that you are working from this tiny subset of available wrestlers right? You aren't ranking anyone from this century, anyone from Mexico or any shootstyle wrestlers, so from you little corner DiBiase is a no brainer, but most people aren't so myopic. You are like the guy who never left his home town who insists that Mario's down the street has the best pizza in the world.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think it really stretches things to call me myopic, all things considered.

 

There will also be post-2000 guys in my list, despite some of my misgivings about modern WWE style, or 00s Indie style.

 

I won't rank Lucha workers or shootstyle workers, for reasons discussed.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think I also reject the terms of the slightly snooty analogy.

 

It's less insisting that Mario's down the street has the best pizza in the world, and much more in line with sticking to the idea that the greatest bands are The Bealtes, Led Zeppelin and the Stones as opposed to some post-rock indie metal band no one has ever heard of.

 

In this analogy, fans of certain niches -- let us say shootstyle -- are much more akin to the fans who swear that, I dunno, Yes's Close to the Edge and Can's Ege Bamyasi are the best albums of 1972 as opposed to Ziggy Stardust or Exile of Main Street which are "overrated".

 

I say, after considering both, nah, prog sucks, it's still Ziggy, then Exile.

 

Or maybe there's someone who says it's Miles Davis's On the Corner.

 

And I say, after struggling for a month to get into discordant trumpets and whatnot, nah, fuck that jazz sucks too. It's still Ziggy.

 

Much closer to what it is, I think. Call that myopic, but I don't think it's fair to say that the sampling range is narrow.

 

Ziggy is a no-brainer, it doesn't stop being one just because jazz or prog exist.

[JerryvonKramer]

I would also hate this exchange with Phil to detract from Windham / DiBiase comparisons and would love to hear move people weigh in on that.

[GOTNW]

 

In this analogy, fans of certain niches -- let us say shootstyle

Shoot style is only a niche because that fits your narrative. In reality someone like Maeda was a far bigger star and way more influential than Jumbo.

[JerryvonKramer]

Within the purview of pro wrestling, whichever way you cut it, whichever way you want to slice it, it is a niche.

 

Jumbo and AJ style are both strongly influenced by US work and US workers. Jumbo was a Funks trainee. They had NWA matches. They were plugged into the mainstream of what wrestling was.

 

However, I would honestly much prefer Barry / Ted talk to continue. If you want to talk about how you think Shootstyle "isn't a niche", please make a new thread for it and do it there where I can ignore it.

[GOTNW]

Glad your quality contribution is continuing mate. Continue pushing your narrative of "these things are important are important because I say they are".

[JerryvonKramer]

Can you please leave me alone. Ted didn't work shootstyle, so this is basically irrelevent. If you want to talk about contributing, I felt we were starting to really do that with Ted vs. Barry discussion.

 

As an aside, you're wrong. Hip-hop records sell in the millions, and Jay-Z is a household name. It doesn't change the fact that hip-hop, within the purview of popular music since the 1950s, is a niche.

[DR Ackermann]

I would take Windham over Ted without even thinking about it. I also think Windham is a top 20 wrestler despite having an overall disappointing if underrated career. Ted is a guy who can go out and fill any role on the card effectively. Windham is a guy who can go out and do anything and everything (in the ring.)

[GOTNW]

 

Can you please leave me alone. Ted didn't work shootstyle, so this is basically irrelevent.

This isn't the first time an off topic discussion has happened in one of these threads your boy will be fine. Not that you'd care if it was someone else. I'll leave you alone when you stop spouting nonsense.

 

As an aside, you're wrong. Hip-hop records sell in the millions, and Jay-Z is a household name. It doesn't change the fact that hip-hop, within the purview of popular music since the 1950s, is a niche.

Now this is something constructive that actually gives me an idea of what you were aiming at. The better question then is what isn't a niche to you if that's where you'd categorize hip-hop.

[JerryvonKramer]

It should be self-evident. NWA, with all its consistuent members, including AJ and NJ (and WWF) represents the mainstream of wrestling history since Sam Muchnick and friends got together in the 1950s.

 

ECW, shoot-style, garbage matches, high-flying, etc. etc. represent niches, essentially departures from that.

 

Lucha is its own thing that doesn't plug in neatly to this narrative and the relationship is much closer to something like the relationship between jazz -- something with its own history and traditions -- and rock n roll.

 

I don't think any of this is remotely controversial.

[Childs]

Yeah, I have Barry a good bit higher. He was just better than Ted at most aspects of pro wrestling--more exciting offense, more inspiring as a babyface, more badass as a heel, better tag wrestler, longer list of great matches. I give Ted credit for greater consistency and for effectively anchoring a promotion. He'd probably benefit if we had more footage from his earlier days. But I've just never seen Ted work at the level of Barry at his best, and that would be a difficult gap to close.

[Matt D]

I've got Barry just about 20 spots higher than Ted, and frankly, I think I'm going to be higher than most people on Ted. Some of that is due to exactly what Phil referenced as a slight on Parv's list and that will be an admitted slight on mine. I'll have strong lucha and relatively strong UK representation but a dearth of the Japanese and women.

[GOTNW]

Shoot style isn't something that was created in a vacuum. The first New Japan show was main evented by Karl Gotch. New Japan provided training for the original UWF group. Maeda was the intended heir to Inoki. I believe by now you should be familiar by how succesful the New Japan vs UWF feud was. It was even repeated ten years later vs UWFi-again drawing INSANE amounts of money. I wish I could find the numbers for how much the first Takada-Mutoh dome show drew but I'm pretty sure it was the biggest gate for a japanese wrestling show ever. If shoot style had been a true niche PRIDE wouldn't have been successful to the point of driving Inoki insane so much he made New Japan more shooty and started pulling ridiculous booking, which went on from about 1997-2005. To say shoot style is a niche you would have to ignore the history of New Japan, Japan's biggest wrestling promotion. Even today you have the president of New Japan begging Maeda to come to his show, Minoru Suzuki and Sakuraba having a UWF rules match after which they played the UWF theme etc.

[JerryvonKramer]

Metal and hip-hop weren't created in a vacuum either, what's your point? Every new style comes from something. "Nothing comes of nothing", as someone once wrote.

 

You are talking as if being a niche is a bad thing. It isn't. It's a descriptive and generic label. It's not a mark of how popular or unpopular something is.

 

I don't care for shootstyle which is why my list will not be representing it. Ditto lucha. I will leave them for the enthusiasts.

 

I was mainly objecting to Phil's characterisation of the local pizza place as a mischaracterisation. I just don't think it is an accurate analogy.

[The Man in Blak]

It's less insisting that Mario's down the street has the best pizza in the world, and much more in line with sticking to the idea that the greatest bands are The Bealtes, Led Zeppelin and the Stones as opposed to some post-rock indie metal band no one has ever heard of.

 

In this analogy, fans of certain niches -- let us say shootstyle -- are much more akin to the fans who swear that, I dunno, Yes's Close to the Edge and Can's Ege Bamyasi are the best albums of 1972 as opposed to Ziggy Stardust or Exile of Main Street which are "overrated".

 

Or maybe it's 1982 and Robert Christgau has albums from Ornette Coleman, George Clinton and Kid Creole & The Coconuts ranked higher on his Pazz and Jop list for that year than Legendary Canon Entries like Thriller, Prince's 1999 and Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. This is one of the most well-known curatorial voices in the history of rock criticism we're talking about here, not whatever hipster strawman windmill you seem so hellbent on chasing. And he was pretty fond of Exile on Main Street too.

 

All critical viewpoints don't have to come from the same place or methodology, as you yourself have described in other threads. Dibiase offered things as a worker that were certainly valuable to wrestling promotions and I could very easily see a sort of sabermetrics-y "value over replacement talent" case being advocated here.

 

But you're not really doing that. You're making allusions to different aspects or mechanics related to the steadiness of his work from time to time, but you typically fall back on vague generalities about how Dibiase was "a ring general" without really putting forward a compelling argument as to why that even matters in a discussion where more people are concerned with high-end expression than yeoman's work. (Including yourself, if your dutiful lists of high-end matches in Jumbo and Flair threads are any indication.)

 

You can feel as strongly as you like that it's self-evident, but holding so closely to that sort of thing feels a bit antithetical to a project like this. It was "self-evident" to critics for years that Sgt. Pepper was the greatest album of all time until it wasn't; nowadays, it's not even a lock that you'll see it as the most highly-ranked Beatles album over Revolver. The canon is always changing, not just because of the performers and works (matches) that enter it, but because those performers and works have the power to change what we find meaningful and valuable in the medium itself.

[JerryvonKramer]

As an aside, I really have no time for Christgau. Why? This was his review of Liquid Swords

 

Liquid Swords [Geffen, 1995]

gangsta as mystery, religious and literary ("Shadowboxin'," "Killah Hills 10304") **

 

Great insight Rob.

 

As I said, I will provide lists of Ted's high-end matches in due time. I really need to see 85-7 stuff again because I watched it in a blur last time, and my tastes have changed a bit.