Reactions to the Honorable Mention List Part One

[Eegah]

 

 

 

 

Gentleman Jim Holliday mostly managed in Florida where he acted as a frontman for J.J. Dillon. Presumably that's where the Gang photo comes from. He also gets on-air credit for Ray Candy and Leroy Brown dumping their "slave names" and becoming the Zambuie Express. He briefly turned up in Knoxville when Flair & Mulligan owned the promotion, and in World Class in '87. Brother of longtime Georgia jobber Mike Fever.

 

I know I have some people who won't finish in the top 100 but I'm still waiting for somebody of mine to show up as well, and I may be waiting as long as Parv and Grimmas.

I'm only 22 away from someone on my ballot appearing.

You already had Muraco, no?

Muraco got cut when Tim reminded me that I forgot Sangre Chicano

Boooooooooo!

[anarchistxx]

Alberto Del Rio, ugh. Don't think any other worker in history has had me reaching for the fast forward button so often. Mike Awesome and Davey Richards side by side seems strangely appropriate.

 

Doug Williams would have been higher if I had known he was nominated, an easy top fifty pick for me and maybe higher.

[Parties]

Smarkschoice comparisons this round:
162) Don Muraco - 203 Points (PWO: #346)
196) Manny Fernandez – 124 Points (PWO: #337)
341) Kazunari Murakami – 31 Points (#344)

We’re now getting into the portion of the list where pretty much everyone is really good and I find myself thinking, “Yeah, wow, how about Jimmy Rave?” There are others like Del Rio or One Man Gang who I don’t put at a GWE level, but who I still like a lot: their rankings feel more fun than unreasonable. Still, if YAMATO and Yoshino are here, I wonder how many more Dragon Gate guys we still have to come. If nothing else I’ll say that Heenan and Warrior deserve to be here a lot more than like, Shuji Kondo.

Huge drop for Muraco. That Grimmas didn't even vote for him is the most surprising result yet. I still quite like his late 70s/early 80s run, but he’s developed the rep for being lazy and having dull feuds, which is too bad as him and Backlund in the MSG cage is one of my favorite WWF/WWE matches (or was when I last watched it 8 years ago).

I am a huge BattlARTS fan, but Murakami’s one of my least favorites from that era of shoot style. Just always felt like a mark for his own gimmick who never wanted to sell for anyone and had nothing but boring matches post-2000. I like my Satanic wrestling characters to be more like King Curtis than Fear-era Mark Wahlberg.

For me Kevin Sullivan falls into the Heenan/Cornette category of “One of the great wrestling characters and personalities both in and out of the ring, but not of the great workers.”

I had Cassandro at #60 and am surprised not to be the high vote on him. As I’ve said elsewhere: best live performer I’ve ever seen, and him jumping off the balcony of Webster Hall onto Kraneo in the middle of a full crowd is the greatest live spot I’ve ever seen. Also: anyone who hasn’t read The New Yorker profile of Cassandra that ran a year or two ago needs to check it out, as it’s one of the best pieces of wrestling journalism ever. I’m a hypocrite for everything I said about Heenan fanboys, as I almost certainly overrated Cassandro based on my own love of his persona and my own experiences seeing him wrestle guys like the second La Parka and Damien 666 in Harlem high school gyms.

[Grimmas]

New most crazy ranking?

[El-P]

New most crazy ranking?

 

To me, it's between New Jack and Murakami.

[Eegah]

Yeah, Quackenbush at 6 is insane. Makes me wonder if Mike put his own ballot in.

[Jingus]

Why the hell did we allow someone to vote a tie on their ballot? Isn't it hard enough to count all these totals already?

 

 

Heenan certainly counts as a for-real worker. Cagematch has him listed at 729 documented matches, and that's despite missing almost the entire first decade of his career. Heck, he even worked two full tours for All Japan in the early 80s. Once Baba not only books you but asks you back again, surely then you can call yourself a capital-W wrestler.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

The fact that HHH hasn't shown up yet and guys like One Man Gang and Kevin Sullivan have has me worried.

[Parties]

Alright, I didn't want to say it until now, but these anonymous voters are chumps. Show yourselves and be judged for being inferior nerds to we, the publicly displayed nerds.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

Alright, I didn't want to say it until now, but these anonymous voters are chumps. Show yourselves and be judged for being inferior nerds to we, the publicly displayed nerds.

Agreed. After making fun of the anonymous voters for certain votes, I'd genuinely like to learn more about their wrestling tastes.

[Grimmas]

Alright, I didn't want to say it until now, but these anonymous voters are chumps. Show yourselves and be judged for being inferior nerds to we, the publicly displayed nerds.

In retrospect I regret giving that option..

[MoS]

Pretty sure the Quack one is from a friend who has been lurking here for years, and whom I convinced to form an account here. Unless I am much mistaken, he also would have another crazy high Chikara dude in his ballot. He does plan on defending them publicly, so it would be interesting. I never got too much into Chikara myself.

[El-P]

Alright, I didn't want to say it until now, but these anonymous voters are chumps. Show yourselves and be judged for being inferior nerds to we, the publicly displayed nerds.

 

WORD

 

And yeah, WTF with that indy guy #6 of all time ?

 

Tarzan Goto placing, however, is pretty cool.

[JRGoldman]

I'm sort of shocked at Tarzan Goto being this low. I feel like he's pretty accessible and has a reputation as a work horse. I guess I'm not surprised I was the high voter, but I thought he would be bottom 50 on a lot more ballots.

[Jetlag]

I don't mind Quack. Better than a lot of spotty guys, and he has carved out a niche for himself. Much of these low placings have been a mess, so I'm not taking them very seriously.

[GOTNW]

Murakami is fucking great. I had him like 74 but that feels too low now that I think about it. Matches vs. Ishikawa, Ohtani abd Nagata are all legitimately great as is the Hashimoto/Iizuka tag and he's always entertaining.

[LowBlowPodcast]

Big props to Grimmas and the others who put this together. I did something similar back for the Place to Be in 2010, but it was nowhere near as in depth.

 

http://bigelow34.proboards.com/thread/7200/bes-greatest-wrestler-poll-results

 

It is interesting to see where some people pop in on the low and high lists. I know for me, the One Man Gang was 100 and I have had a couple from the list pop up but still a lot more int he tank.

 

Looking forward to watching it unfold.

[Cap]

I like Quack', but I was stunned by the 6 ranking. I too am interested in the tastes and rationals behind that vote, but without context it seems like the product of a really narrow (and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, just don't have another good word) and niche taste in wrestling.

[Manatee]

I speculated before that Quackenbush probably submitted an anonymous ballot and voted himself #1. Instead he thought he would be sneaky and vote himself #6 and no one would notice. But I noticed Mike...I noticed.

[Loss]

All fun and games until Quackenbush gets a top 10 vote?

[Dylan Waco]

I'll defend Heenan. I didn't vote for him but there is more than enough of him on tape to make a judgment. There are WOS and Lucha candidates who have been touted on barely more than a handful of matches, and Heenan has stuff like the Gagne and Zumhofe match, the Lord Al Hayes match which is legit great, and his performance in the 83 Six-man from AWA that some thought was a top ten match in promotion history. He's an all time great heel when it comes to bumping and psych based on what is out there. If someone wants to argue against his inclusion outside of a bottom ten or so I'd probably say "yea, ok" but he's hardly an absurd pick.

 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'll also defend Quack. I'm personally in the middle of the road with Quack in that I think he's a good worker, who was at times great, but was too full of his own horseshit to become a truly brilliant wrestler. That said what he did do was create his own wrestling universe. Quack is one of the very few people who I think can legitimately claim to have influenced wrestling far behind the scope of his own success as a performer. I myself am not in love with this influence, but the cultish dedication of the Chikara fanbase, the build to international dream match, the silliness that is wedded to an internal logic based on comic book-y stuff...all of that seemed to be if not a Quack creation, something Quack popularized. And those are things that have shown up many places now. Some may argue that has nothing to do with work, but the guy created a universe in which his big matches were dream matches for those fans, he was around forever (and was a good worker for almost the entire period), and he's one of the few indie guys to emerge from the post-MNW era who worked storyline heavy matches built around long term storyline development and angles. It's not really my thing, and six seems nuts to me, but then I think "could I buy an FMW fan putting Onita six?" and the truth is I could. So I don' see Quack that high as being THAT crazy assuming the voter is a Chikara diehard.

 

I like Delphin quite a bit, but I think his ranking at 11 is harder to defend than Quack at 6. I think the guy ages very well, but even if someone was a 90s juniors fan to the extreme, I struggle to see how Delphin gets into a top 20, let alone on the border of a top ten. Good worker, but without a justification that smells like a strategic vote to me.

 

Warrior I won't defend, and he's the first guy to come up where my vision of the process and project are really at odds with his inclusion. I'm not angry about it, but I do think he's way too high using any metric I can think of other than the boring "I liked him as a kid."

 

Ray Gonzalez deserved better and I am mad at myself for not voting for him. He's the only guy where "I forgot" is the reason he didn't make my list. He wouldn't have made it high, and I'm not really sure he'd have made it at all, but he was someone I was looking at for the bottom five at one point. He gets hurt because he became the face of Puerto Rican wrestling after the bottom fell out of the business. He's still worked on top forever on some really big shows, and had really good feuds with any number of top guys. I'm not sure he's ever had a match I would identify as a true classic, but he's had as many fun/good matches over the last 16 or 17 years as anyone not on WWE television regularly, and he's had a lot of matches I'd rate in the very good/great range.

 

I'm fairly happy with the ranking of Jimmy Rave. I had him higher than I thought I would, but I made a promise to myself coming in that I wouldn't rank anyone higher than I could reasonably justify. 65 would have been higher than that, but apparently not to my brother! I'm most happy to see him turn up on so many ballots, as I figured he would have almost exclusively been a Hales family pick and I was worried about how that would look to others.

[Graham Crackers]

I''m very happy to see others voted for Cassandro. I had him in the 90s and he ranked almost entirely due to the fact I've seen him live several times (including that same Webster Hall show that Parties mentioned).

[Dylan Waco]

Two other things.

 

Ray was better than Jacques and this becomes really evident if you watch the Montreal stuff.

 

Murakami and Matsunaga being tied warms my DVDVR-influenced heart.

[Eegah]

I dont mind Quack getting votes at all because he is not a bad wrestler, just thought 6 is absurd.

[KrisZ]

I had Jimmy Rave at #100 and he was the first one off my ballot to go