Greg Gagne

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[JerryvonKramer]

For as gangly and awkward as he is, he is not Erik Watts. And as one half of the high-flyers has a load of good matches to his name. I even bought him in some of the singles bouts, and I thought it seemed a bit weird that Brunzell was nominated but Greg wasn't.

[Dylan Waco]

Yeah, I actually don't see Greg as an outlandish pick for this, but I think the type of people who might actually consider him aren't likely to vote (namely people who grew up in AWA country).

 

He really did have a lot of good matches teaming with Brunzell over a ten-plus year period and I don't think that should be undersold. People can say Brunzell was the better worker, and I'm not saying they are wrong, but it's telling to me that Brunzell's WWF team was vastly worse despite the fact that many people seem to cling to the absurd notion that Greg sucked. I also liked several Greg singles matches a good bit, including a match with Curt Hennig that I thought was great and one of Curt's better matches as a heel in the AWA.

 

Mechanically he was awkward...kind of? I think it was more his body type than the way he worked to be honest, as he genuinely did some cool stuff too like Gagne Indian deathlock thingy, and I think his babyface comeback was really good and underrated. You can call it hokey if you want, but it connected to the people in a Backlund-y way and that matters.

 

I would take Gagne over David Von Erich every time, for gangly, physically awkward dudes, who have a kind of unconventional working style. He's not my favorite, but I have zero problem calling him a very good worker during his peak years which weren't insubstantial in length.

[JerryvonKramer]

Do you think Greg Gagne vs. Robert Gibson is an outrageous comparison?

[Dylan Waco]

I don't think Gagne is the Gibson to Brunzell's Morton. But in terms of where they would fall for me on a massive list, I could see them very close. I do think Gibson probably had better peak performances, and I like him as a heel which is something I can't even conceive of Greg doing effectively. On the other hand I think if you were breaking down the High Flyers as a team, it's much closer to a 50/50 proposition than the RnR's are.

[Quentin Skinner]

Always thought the notion that Greg sucked was extremely odd and the fact it took him this long to get nominated is pretty telling. I like the High Flyers a lot and Greg has some good singles stuff to his name, but he won't be making my list.

[elliott]

I'm watching a ton of 80s WWF tag teams and High Flyers are better than all of them. Greg was an excellent babyface tag worker. I will look at some of his singles work at some point but I think he's a viable pick for the bottom half of the list just by virtue of his tag work. Probably more likely he's a top 100-200 wrestler of all time, but I think he's worthy of consideration. Especially if you like tag wrestling. 

[Mr JMML]

9 hours ago, elliott said:

I'm watching a ton of 80s WWF tag teams and High Flyers are better than all of them. Greg was an excellent babyface tag worker. I will look at some of his singles work at some point but I think he's a viable pick for the bottom half of the list just by virtue of his tag work. Probably more likely he's a top 100-200 wrestler of all time, but I think he's worthy of consideration. Especially if you like tag wrestling. 

I really like the AWA run of the High Flyers but he isn't a top 100 wrestler ever, Jim Brunzell is at the same level or even better than him. I want to see more of them.