Dean Malenko

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[El-P]

One of the most overrated worker of the 90's. Worked in a vaacum. Kicked out of his own pin attempts so he could do cool looking sequences. Worked better as a fiery babyface, but he needed a solid heel who would push him. Great mechanic involved in some great matches, but not a great worker by any stretch of the imagination.

[Timbo Slice]

He's overrated, but that doesn't mean he's not a good wrestler or a good worker. Great base, good on the mat, has the Ciclope reveal against Jericho at Slamboree '98 that's one of my favorite WCW moments ever, but I don't think he's gonna make my list, as much as I enjoy his stuff.

[Dylan Waco]

What hurts Malenko most for me, is that Little Guido was right there in ECW and would have been vastly better in the same role

[Gregor]

When I was first getting into watching old wrestling matches, his were the first ones that I remember routinely disappointing me. I don't know about working in a vacuum - it seemed like WCW fans were generally into him - but he was just so boring on offense as a heel. He'd work these long, uninteresting holds without ever getting crap for it, I guess because he used armbars and leglocks instead of chinlocks. I'm not someone who lets weak punches ruin a match, but Malenko's were distractingly bad.

 

I agree that he was better as a face. He has a house show match with Guerrero in 1997 that I thought was good enough to be 1996's or 1998's WCW match of the year.

[JerryvonKramer]

My nomination of Malenko was semi-strategic insomuch as I have defended Dory Funk Jr and Malenko is an interesting comparison point.

[Shining Wiz]

Looks like I might be the high vote for Malenko. I always enjoyed his matches as they often stod out as crisply performed sport-like contests when compared to some of his contemporaries. The no frills, icy persona dovetailed nicely with the way he executed his moves in match.

 

I'm looking froward to revisiting some f his WCW matches on the Network.

[BigBadMick]

What hurts Malenko most for me, is that Little Guido was right there in ECW and would have been vastly better in the same role

How do you mean, Dylan? I can't see the comparison.

[Grimmas]

Looks like I might be the high vote for Malenko. I always enjoyed his matches as they often stod out as crisply performed sport-like contests when compared to some of his contemporaries. The no frills, icy persona dovetailed nicely with the way he executed his moves in match.

 

I'm looking froward to revisiting some f his WCW matches on the Network.

Malenko is the wrestler that I need to re-evaluate the most. I have not watched any Malenko since he retired and I have no idea how I feel about him anymore.

 

What should I watch?

[BillThompson]

His work against Rey in 1996-1997 holds up well, same for the Jericho feud. In the WWF his initial Light Heavyweight run, especially the Scotty match from Backlash '00, is pretty great overall.

[DR Ackermann]

Rey's debut match against him in wcw is complete garbage in my opinion, but some people really like it. It's a polarizing match. That would be a (not) good match to check out

[stomperspc]

Dean was (is?) generally overrated as a mat worker/technician in as much so as his gimmick was that of a world class technical/mat/holds wrestler and he was actually none of those things. I do think he was proficient and solid at all of that but not to the level that his gimmick portrayed.

 

I tend to think he is a bit underappreciated now for some of the other stuff he brought to the table.

 

Malenko was very good at being the pissed off face and blended it into his general persona rather nicely. You can talk about wrestling in a vacuum or whatever, but in 1997 and 1998 he was very over given his general positioning on WCW cards. He established the Texas Cloverleaf as a big time move. Crowds reacted big to both teases of the move and when he would lock it on. He timed his big/hard bumps well and I thought he did an overall good job fighting from behind. He was effective as the underdog/injured face fighting the odds against the NWO in the fall/winter of 1998.

 

As a heel he was a bit more hit or miss. I disagree with Bill that the Rey matches hold up well. A criticism of Malenko that I definitely would agree with is that he didn’t understand how to work & control a match against the big time high-flyers like Rey. It wasn’t even that he didn’t give Rey enough necessarily (although I would argue against that), but that he didn’t give Rey the right openings at the right time and his heel work wasn’t strong enough to make people get into Rey’s abbreviated comebacks. Malenko was poor as a heel in that role.

 

He was rather good as a heel with the Horseman in the spring of 1999. He is a complete prick in the Spring Stampede tag and ends up getting great heat on his taunts even though the Tacoma crowd was partial to the Horseman at the start. He wrestled those matches with the kind of intensity that he should have always used as a heel. He also showed himself to be a fine tag worker during that run. It’s a role I wish he was put into more during his WCW run.

[El McKell]

Rey's debut match against him in wcw is complete garbage in my opinion, but some people really like it. It's a polarizing match. That would be a (not) good match to check out

That's the one from The Great American Bash in 96? When I watched that show about a year ago I was shocked at how boring that match was, didn't like it at all

[Shining Wiz]

 

Looks like I might be the high vote for Malenko. I always enjoyed his matches as they often stod out as crisply performed sport-like contests when compared to some of his contemporaries. The no frills, icy persona dovetailed nicely with the way he executed his moves in match.

 

I'm looking froward to revisiting some f his WCW matches on the Network.

Malenko is the wrestler that I need to re-evaluate the most. I have not watched any Malenko since he retired and I have no idea how I feel about him anymore.

 

What should I watch?

 

I'm not one for having a list of matches right off the top of my head, particularly not with dates, etc.

 

I do recall some very good matches with Benoit and Rey earlier in his WCW run. As someone else mentioned, he was a very good ground base for a lot the luchadors to work with in the cruiserweight division. I like he ECW persona, but I'm not sure there's much in the way of good/great matches there. I haven't watched the full Guerrero matches in quite some time, but I don't recall liking them as much as some other folks at the time (and since).

[DR Ackermann]

One of the most overrated worker of the 90's. Worked in a vaacum. Kicked out of his own pin attempts so he could do cool looking sequences. Worked better as a fiery babyface, but he needed a solid heel who would push him. Great mechanic involved in some great matches, but not a great worker by any stretch of the imagination.

 

Perfect description of Maenko.

 

To El Mckell:

 

Yes. Sooooo boring.

[El-P]

What hurts Malenko most for me, is that Little Guido was right there in ECW and would have been vastly better in the same role

 

We can agree on this. Guido was a better mat-worker, understood how to work a crowd and how to build a match better, not to mention he was more charismatic.

[ohtani's jacket]

Malenko wasn't a bad mat worker. He was bad at the selling and transitions that go along with mat work, but his stuff looked good. His best opponent in WCW was Ultimo Dragon in my opinion.

[y2stump]

I liked his mat work, always felt he did a decent job working a body part as well. His selling is non existent, he feels very choreographed & we all know about his "personality". That said, I still love to watch him work & he's one of my favorites from that era.

[JerryvonKramer]

So are people just not rating Dean now because he's been overrated?

[El McKell]

I'm not rating Dean because I don't think he's particularly special. Who cares if he's overrated or underrated, he has no charisma/personality, his matches often feel like they don't have any sort of story, emotion or sense of escalation.

[Dylan Waco]

So are people just not rating Dean now because he's been overrated?

 

I'm not rating him because their are easily 100 wrestlers better than him.

[JerryvonKramer]

Alright, just wanted to get a sense on if he's ranking for people. I can't recall if he will for me or not.

[Dylan Waco]

With Dean and a lot of people I do think they were overrated at a point, but their ultimate fates have less to do with a narrative or over or underratdness than it does the fact that I've seen way more and a lot more has happened since 2006.

 

If you look at Dean as a cruiserweight/junior he never stacked up with the elites of his era, but he did have a lot of television match volume relative to many of the guys that came before him or even worked at the same point of him. His strongest case compared to his peers is "showed up on tv a lot and had solid to good matches." But no one ever really argued Dean at the level of Ohtani, Sasuke, Liger, Benoit, Eddie, or even someone like Ultimo. At the time their may have been people who would have argued him over a Taka or El Samurai, but even that was something that was far from a sure thing, and maybe even something he would have lost out on among people who were watching all of that stuff at the time and the years immediately after.

 

Dean gets some points with some people for being an innovator of some sort, or maybe a better way to put it would be a "first to the door" kind of cruiserweight. I have no problem with him being dumped into that group in the states, but I do think his alleged influence is overstated. While the Dean/Eddie roll up trading sequence is something some of the early indie stuff adopted, I tend to think that style evolved more out of Tajiri/Crazy type of stuff and that is certainly the narrative that is often spun by the people who worked in and created that style. More to the point I think the other "first to do the door" guys of his era were stronger and the subsequent first to the door indie talents have stronger arguments as well. Styles, Bryan, Ki, for example all strike me as easily better. I'd probably have him above Christopher Daniels, but the fact that I'd even have to think about it isn't good for Dean. Really someone like a Paul London has a case every bit as strong as Dean's at minimum - I'd argue him above by a fairly substantial margin - the only real advantage for Dean being that his peak was during the Monday Night Wars.

 

If you want to view Dean as a mid-card talent, who had strong television matches, I'd concede that up to a point, but I'm not sure he rates well at all in regards to others in that comparison either. Perhaps comparing him to the widely loved Arn Anderson isn't fair but it's a comparison that's there and not favorable to Dean. If you pull away for whatever reason and compare him to someone like a Christian or Matt Hardy I honestly think Dean fails there too. He doesn't have the volume of memorable matches, I don't think his individual performances are as good as, I don't think his psychology is as sound, et.

 

Really there is no angle with Dean that I could take where I think I could argue for him to make my ballot. I could keep looking for ins and I just don't think I'd find one. Too many other wrestlers were better and more impressive, even in the areas where he excelled.

[JerryvonKramer]

Yeah I wasn't accusing anyone of bad faith. Dean is maybe the most extreme test case of where the general perception has shifted the most since the late 90s.

[Jetlag]

I'd say Dean Malenko during his time was a far above average TV worker. I've yet to find a better Benoit TV match from WCW than Malenko/Smiley or Malenko/Parka. People dismissing him so hard irks me a little because the guy really was good against a variety of opponents. Just look at those names: Ultimo Dragon, La Parka, Norman Smiley, fucking Scotty 2 Hotty. I'm almost tempted to get some of the matches he had in austria just to prove he could please a european crowd too. The line about Malenko/Guerrero style exchanges has been used a lot in negative reviews over the years but I really dug their 2/3 falls match from ECW, cliche as it is it's not more in your face as a "self conscious technical masterpiece" than your typical maestro matches from Mexico.

 

People give him shit about being robotic. Don't really care about it. 90s Benoit is far worse, acting like a computer simulation. To me Dean gives the vibe of a silent killer and that fits his style. He even facially looks like a psycho during his big babyface reveal as Ciclope. Malenko also benefits from the fact that in WCW he'd wrestle matches where the announcers actually put his style over as in "the guy has hands like pliers!!!" and there was an air of genuine excitement about cruiserweight matches.

 

All that and I'm not likely to vote for the guy at all. I imagine if he had a slightly bigger run of TV matches in the 2000s, maybe a short stint in a Tajiri booked promotion he'd probably be in. The guy deserves some credit.