JvK's Six-Factor Model for GWE rankings [BIGLAV]

[JerryvonKramer]

That seems self-important. It was an attempt at humility. Guided or misguided, who knows.

Yeah as we've talked about before, I don't get the charge that trying -- even if we ultimately fail -- to minimise personal biases and so on to try to arrive at a list that is fair is perceived as arrogant or totalizing.

 

To my point of view the oppoisite position of "I know what I like and what I like is great and that's the only criteria that matters!" seems in my view arrogant and almost Nietzschean. It actually reminds me of watching Jerry Springer or something, it's those levels of entitlement and those values I see at play. And the impulse is pretty alien to me. It's surprised me at times during this whole process.

[Dylan Waco]

I think many more voters were roughly in line with that thinking than you'd think. That said I do think searching for greatness in things you don't think are great because you were told they are great is something that has to be guarded against. I'm not accusing you or Loss of that, but I do think for many people that is how your approach comes across. For my own part I couldn't vote for anyone for what I regarded as the wrong reasons (namely peer or canonical pressure that didn't fit with what I had seen). This meant a handful of controversial omissions, but I'd rather have left them out then included them and not be able to justify them on my own terms.

[Matt D]

There's exactly one person on my list that if cornered in an alley, I'd have a hard time justifying the placement of based on my viewing. And some people were cut off because I couldn't justify (Matt Hardy being one, as peer pressure had him on before I needed to make cuts. Styles was another, as the list felt somehow more 'legitimate' with him on it, but he's gone now).

[Loss]

I'm actually glad you made that post because it gives me a chance to talk about that take as deference to canon, which I've been meaning to do. I can see how that conclusion would be easy to draw, but that's not actually it. I am not ranking any wrestlers based on anything except my own observations. I can sometimes see greatness that leaves me apathetic all the same. Have you ever watched a match where there's nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn't punch you in the gut? When you look at what they did in the match, it was well-worked, but it failed to excite you on any level. I actually see a lot of wrestling like that -- stuff that feels dry but is technically very good and when you try to figure out why you didn't have that visceral reaction, you realize it was something completely incidental that doesn't mean that much. I have trouble with Masa Chono matches because his breathing pattern creeps me out, as one example, so even his great performances don't really pop me. I hate Shawn's entrance music and ring attire. Don't get me started on Toyota, who won't stop shrieking. I have that experience watching wrestling frequently enough that I tried to account for it in my ballot.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think many more voters were roughly in line with that thinking than you'd think. That said I do think searching for greatness in things you don't think are great because you were told they are great is something that has to be guarded against. I'm not accusing you or Loss of that, but I do think for many people that is how your approach comes across. For my own part I couldn't vote for anyone for what I regarded as the wrong reasons (namely peer or canonical pressure that didn't fit with what I had seen). This meant a handful of controversial omissions, but I'd rather have left them out then included them and not be able to justify them on my own terms.

Right, I totally get it. But for me I guess there's a heart vs. head thing that goes on.

 

I can intellectually recognise the greatness of Jerry Lawler and admire what he does well, without LOVING him.

 

It's kinda like saying "yeah, well, I'm not a huge fan of Elvis but can I really deny those first couple of albums their power?" Who am I to say really that Elvis doesn't have his place?

 

I hope you like that I used Elvis as my analogy there! But it's the same as any list I'd think about. I'm a Dylan guy, I'm a Kinks guy, I'm a Beatles guy, I'm a Bowie guy. But I'd also want to find room for acts that I respect without loving. I don't love Leonard Cohen but I respect his work and get why he has such huge supporters.

 

I don't know why I always find it easier to talk about this stuff with music than with wrestling, but I do. Lawler is like the Elvis or Leonard Cohen in my list. I don't have that personal connection like I do with some of the other artists, but I have to give him his due.

 

My attitude will be similar in lots of cases.

 

There ARE times when I completely disagree with whatever the canon is. I think The Who are ludicrously overrated. In the world of film, I really have come to hate the works of Nicholas Roeg. If I have strong views on something -- if I actively think the work is BAD -- that's when I'll register my taste. But if I can see where the supporters are coming from, I can admire the thing on an intellectual level with no pretence. What I love and what I have a personal connection to doesn't dictate greatness. In many ways GREATNESS comes from the fact that a guy who doesn't have that connection STILL has to give it to him. That's why Lawler is #11 on my list, and why Flair is #10 on Steven's. Greatness is something above the foibles of personal connection.

[Loss]

Sorry, one more point: I'm only deferential to canon in the sense that it helps me prioritize who and what to watch. But if I think something is lousy, hell if I'm giving it credit, even if it's pretty universally loved. Someone else can cart that horse.

[anarchistxx]

 

 

Have you ever watched a match where there's nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn't punch you in the gut? When you look at what they did in the match, it was well-worked, but it failed to excite you on any level.

 

You just described the majority of WWE matches over the last few years, since they started having long workrate style television matches.

[Childs]

I tried to strike a balance between understanding every wrestler's objective case and paying tribute to what excites me as a fan. If you follow your bliss too purely, you end up with an amorphous ball of gloop. If you try too hard to squeeze out personal taste, you're not acting as a good critic. When I see lists, I want to know what excites the lister.

 

BTW, I don't see Parv leaning nearly as far to one side as some might perceive. His BIGLAV ratings are built on mounds of personal opinions, as I'm sure he'd be the first to say. But I respect his attempts to follow consistent criteria and to give objective credit for length of peak, numbers of great rivalries, etc.

 

Personally, I wouldn't rate someone I loathe as he did with Inoki. But I don't think his fundamental approach was that different from mine or lots of others.

[Dylan Waco]

Speaking for myself, I ended up including Jumbo on my list, but I do have him MUCH lower than I expect most too. Ultimately I felt it would be more "wrong" to my sensibilities to leave him off than it would be to include him despite my disgust for the idea of watching him wrestle. I did this because of the handful of core values that I tended to put the most value in when constructing my list, he was fairly strong in all of them. I can't let go of the notion that a truly great wrestler should be able to connect and he anti-connects with me, but I also don't think my inclusion of him was bowing to canon so much as it was admitting that Jumbo is the exception - a great wrestler who I never want to watch wrestle again as long as I live.

 

Having said I do think canonical pressure effects everyone to varying degrees. Sometimes it's as simple as choosing to watch a favored style/promotion or another, other times it's giving repeat chances to people you instinctively don't care for that you never would for a random person with no reputation. But the pressure is there.

[Luchaundead]

Yeah as we've talked about before, I don't get the charge that trying -- even if we ultimately fail -- to minimise personal biases and so on to try to arrive at a list that is fair is perceived as arrogant or totalizing.

 

To my point of view the oppoisite position of "I know what I like and what I like is great and that's the only criteria that matters!" seems in my view arrogant and almost Nietzschean. It actually reminds me of watching Jerry Springer or something, it's those levels of entitlement and those values I see at play. And the impulse is pretty alien to me. It's surprised me at times during this whole process.

 

To myself I can see it from your point of view but also from the point of view that this is the entire point of the process using everyone's personal point of views as wildly bias or as minimally bias as possible will give you a greater consensus of who is truly great because if you use BIGLAV to come to the final view that Ric Flair is the GWE and I come to the view using Steven's patented Canadian-feels system doesn't that show that he is great when two different people using two totally different processes come to the same outcome?

 

I can totally go with throwing stones at others about their arrogance I based my entire world view on this stance but a project like this that makes it so that everyone's votes equal the same and you are giving into democratic rule is the absolute stripping of arrogance when you say my opinion is just as important as everyone else.

[Jimmy Redman]

Dylan summed up

 

I think many more voters were roughly in line with that thinking than you'd think. That said I do think searching for greatness in things you don't think are great because you were told they are great is something that has to be guarded against. I'm not accusing you or Loss of that, but I do think for many people that is how your approach comes across. For my own part I couldn't vote for anyone for what I regarded as the wrong reasons (namely peer or canonical pressure that didn't fit with what I had seen). This meant a handful of controversial omissions, but I'd rather have left them out then included them and not be able to justify them on my own terms.

 

This sums it up for me so well.

 

Especially for me, coming at so much of this stuff from a position of ignorance, or a blank slate to put it more nicely, and seeing really exalted guys for literally the first time. I can appreciate Loss' point that I'm not the only arbitrator of what is greatness in wrestling, BUT I am the only arbitrator of what I think is greatness in wrestling. We're all submitting individual ballots, we're all answering the question of who is the greatest for ourselves. And speaking for myself, I can only judge greatness if it's there, if I can see it. I can't not see it and then just assume it's there because other people think it is, or because someone was doing things that got them over with the crowd, or because they worked in a way that ticked theoretical boxes. All of that means nothing to me. We all view the text in our own way.

 

Parv tends to characterise the "feel" ish kind of process as un-academic or haphazard or just a personal favourites list, but speaking for myself it's much more considered than that. I'm including people who aren't personal favourites, I'm including people whom I wouldn't really want to watch today, and I'm including people who I think are great without resonating too much with me personally.

 

I think the key difference with me is that I don't have those kinds of people too high. Parv can not be a fan of Lawler at all and have him #11. If I felt a similar way about Lawler I'd probably have him WAY down my list. I'm trying to think of someone comparable for me. Akiyama maybe? I don't see an elite level worker there like others do because his work just doesn't resonate with me, and his big matches cap out at a certain level. I have Akiyama in the 70s. I can appreciate what he does to a certain extent and like a lot of his matches, but if I don't see what makes someone supposed to be truly great, I don't think they're truly great. I have to believe my lying eyes.

[JerryvonKramer]

Having said I do think canonical pressure effects everyone to varying degrees. Sometimes it's as simple as choosing to watch a favored style/promotion or another, other times it's giving repeat chances to people you instinctively don't care for that you never would for a random person with no reputation. But the pressure is there.

This articulates something I've thought about for years really well, and I'm so glad I've read these three sentences today.

 

And it is true that with those people who have had that weight of praise placed on them, you give them second, third, fourth, fifth chances. Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn't.

 

On my 30th attempt with lucha, I ended up just giving up. But the reason I kept trying over and over and over again was because people I like and respect speak so highly of it. But eventually you have to cut your losses and draw your conclusions.

 

This is true of other forms too. It took me about 6 or 7 years to "click" with Tom Waits. But when I did, I never looked back. However, I would not have kept trying with Waits if critics and music friends of mine didn't speak in such exalted terms about him. The "pressure" is real and I'm glad to see people be honest about it. It's also not pretentious or kow-towing to try. The nature of the beast is in the trying. And in those times when I try and simply can't understand the thing -- most of the time, MOST of the time -- I see it as my personal failing, not the failing of the thing itself. I fully believe that Don't Look Now and Performance ARE the masterpieces they are made out to be, and it's on me that try as I might I can't get it. I feel much the same way about Blue Panther, or Dandy vs. Azteca. It's on me, and eventually I have to stand for "I don't get it" as my position. That's not pretentious, that's actually the OPPOSITE of pretention. But that's the thing we all have to navigate.

[funkdoc]

 

That seems self-important. It was an attempt at humility. Guided or misguided, who knows.

Yeah as we've talked about before, I don't get the charge that trying -- even if we ultimately fail -- to minimise personal biases and so on to try to arrive at a list that is fair is perceived as arrogant or totalizing.

 

To my point of view the oppoisite position of "I know what I like and what I like is great and that's the only criteria that matters!" seems in my view arrogant and almost Nietzschean. It actually reminds me of watching Jerry Springer or something, it's those levels of entitlement and those values I see at play. And the impulse is pretty alien to me. It's surprised me at times during this whole process.

 

 

to me it's not "what i think is great is all that matters". i think of it more as "this community project will be more accurate if each individual involved is true to themselves." if i were doing something like this solely as a personal project, i might even come up with my own BIGLAV...but i think you get a more complete picture from something that reflects all the biases of all the different members of the community.

 

the stuff you said about Dory sums up one of my main problems with your approach - certain people get a benefit of the doubt that others don't, and that benefit of the doubt comes from reasons besides merit or personal connection. Dory gets a fair shake from you because he was chosen to be NWA champion and was constantly praised by his fellow workers, but others who may be just as good or better won't get the time of day. i regard the opinions of wrestlers to be worthless because they have different criteria from fans and they're often being political with their praise or criticism (witness all the Randy Orton love from old-timers, or Lex Luger on the opposite end). that's where we're at a fundamental impasse, probably.

 

EDIT: oh hey others touched on some of this while i was writing this. sorry!

 

also, i think the anxiety over "narcissism" is rather overblown, and usually comes from older generations as a critique of the current one. if anything, most people are constantly told that their opinion DOESN'T matter, and social media is providing an outlet to work through that.

[Loss]

Parv giving Dory Funk Jr. more chances is a microcosm of this project. If you feel that about his take on Dory, then do you feel that way about the project as a whole, where we don't vote for wrestlers who aren't nominated first? That in itself fosters and promotes canon. It's unavoidable. Anytime anyone expresses an opinion of any kind, they're contributing to a wrestling opinion complex. All we can really do is be aware of it. Spending more time on Dory Funk Jr. than on, say, Seiji Sakaguchi, is merely an attempt to understand the opinions and ideas espoused by other people.

[Jimmy Redman]

I will say that canon is infinitely useful for a noob like me, just to know where on earth to start when it comes to unfamiliar stuff.

 

I have no problem with canon as an institution. I just don't feel beholden to it when forming my opinions.

[JerryvonKramer]

Parv giving Dory Funk Jr. more chances is a microcosm of this project. If you feel that about his take on Dory, then do you feel that way about the project as a whole, where we don't vote for wrestlers who aren't nominated first? That in itself fosters and promotes canon. It's unavoidable. Anytime anyone expresses an opinion of any kind, they're contributing to a wrestling opinion complex. All we can really do is be aware of it. Spending more time on Dory Funk Jr. than on, say, Seiji Sakaguchi, is merely an attempt to understand the opinions and ideas espoused by other people.

I make absolutely no bones about the fact that Dory got a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chance from me because an entire generation of fans held him up as the best in the world. Larry Matysik ranked him very highly in his book. Dave Meltzer has always held him in very high esteem too.

 

A lot of the time I want to come to an understanding of where they are coming from. And I think I did that. He ranked in the 50s, not top 10.

 

Let's ask other people why they think Buddy Rose or 2 Cold Scorpio are people the "need to check out"? I've heard people say that. What's the difference? It's still the same deal.

[Matt D]

Maximizing understanding is the god king of this entire project, more so than the end result list, I think.

[Loss]

I'd also add that there are only a handful of contentious wrestlers. We spend a lot of time focusing on those few, so it's easy to forget that there has never been a huge divide in what people consider good and bad in wrestling, and I'm even involving Dave Meltzer in that. It's just that the outliers eat up most of the attention and discussion. For every Shawn Michaels, there's a dozen wrestlers that virtually everyone agrees are great.

[Woof]

I wouldn't go so far as to say I relied on reputation when forming my list, but I also can't say I ignored it. It was a necessary evil in order to make sure certain wrestlers were given proper due, because if I ranked based entirely on what I've seen too many major names wouldn't get a sniff because there wasn't enough time to view a reasonable amount of footage for each of them. I used a worker's reputation (or at least what I could best conceive their rep to be based on the comments on this site and other sources) as a starting point. I did my best to hit the bigger names I was unfamiliar with and see if what I saw was in line with what I'd heard. If it was, then I'd do my best to rank with that rep in mind, allowing myself to make the assumption that the stuff I hadn't seen would also fall in line.

 

I was only able to scratch the surface with lucha, and as a result only a couple of guys made my list. When I started spot checking the highly valued guys, Negro Casas really jumped out at me as meeting the expectation I had going in, so I ranked him. Not as highly as he might have got if I had a chance to view more, but making the list is certainly more valuable than not. Someone like Mocho Cota, who I had not even heard of until this project began, also jumped out at me, so after some viewing I went and sought out what people were saying about him to make sure I wasn't overblowing a couple of select viewings. Conversely no matter how many El Dandy matches I watch I can't seem to see what others find so praise worthy about him, so I left him off my list.

I did my best to be objective by giving guys a chance who I didn't really know. I also recognize that I may have over-ranked some guys from ROH and WWE because those are the two companies I am most familiar with and I am a unabashed fan of the "epic match" style they both offer up. In those cases I didn't let reputation factor in because I figured I'd seen more than enough of each guy to form my own clear opinion. Whether or not it lined up with general consensus didn't matter to me. I mean, I tried to be reasonable about separating what I viewed as legit greatness versus personal enjoyment, which is why someone like Tony Atlas didn't rank for me even though he was my first wrestling hero. But it's also why I have no problem rating Michaels and Angle high, because while I've heard the arguments against them I just don't agree with those arguments.

 

And for what it's worth, JerryvonKramer, the fact that I love Angle and Michaels as much I do is probably best explained by the fact that I fucking love The Who.

[JerryvonKramer]

And for what it's worth, JerryvonKramer, the fact that I love Angle and Michaels as much I do is probably best explained by the fact that I fucking love The Who.

Ha!

 

[goc]

I was only able to scratch the surface with lucha, and as a result only a couple of guys made my list. When I started spot checking the highly valued guys, Negro Casas really jumped out at me as meeting the expectation I had going in, so I ranked him. Not as highly as he might have got if I had a chance to view more, but making the list is certainly more valuable than not. Someone like Mocho Cota, who I had not even heard of until this project began, also jumped out at me, so after some viewing I went and sought out what people were saying about him to make sure I wasn't overblowing a couple of select viewings. Conversely no matter how many El Dandy matches I watch I can't seem to see what others find so praise worthy about him, so I left him off my list.

I had the same issue with El Dandy and despite ranking 15 lucha guys, Dandy wasn't one of them. I can totally see what everyone loves about Satanico, Negro Casas, El Hijo del Santo, etc but Dandy has never clicked for me.

[elliott]

If I did a six hour podcast on this, I wouldn't use the phrase "high end matches" once. I'm pretty sure about that. I'm perfectly happy listening to one where someone does for every person though.

 

If someone wants to do a countdown podcast with me, I will use the phrase "high end matches" for every single wrestler.

[funkdoc]

Parv giving Dory Funk Jr. more chances is a microcosm of this project. If you feel that about his take on Dory, then do you feel that way about the project as a whole, where we don't vote for wrestlers who aren't nominated first? That in itself fosters and promotes canon. It's unavoidable. Anytime anyone expresses an opinion of any kind, they're contributing to a wrestling opinion complex. All we can really do is be aware of it. Spending more time on Dory Funk Jr. than on, say, Seiji Sakaguchi, is merely an attempt to understand the opinions and ideas espoused by other people.

 

to address this and JvK's response below this post, i would simply argue that the opinions of fans who've watched thousands of matches are a better basis than the opinions of wrestlers. it's a matter of trusting outsiders more than insiders, if you will.

 

some degree of "canon" is unavoidable, but not all sources of it are created equal.

[JerryvonKramer]

Dory was put over by fans. Go over to Kayfabe Memories. Dave Meltzer at the end of the day was a fan. Larry M was a fan. What's the difference between Meltzer or Larry M and Dylan Waco?

[Matt D]

One is willing to rewatch matches?