Wrestlers who had a lot of great matches but aren't great

[JerryvonKramer]

Someone like Taue has more great matches than a guy like Ted, but you put Ted higher (if I'm remembering right). Why? Because of all the shit that Ted does better than Taue.

As I'm sure soup would delight in telling you, it's cos the AJ boys got screwed on the A rating, which was my stealth category to ensure that every single territorial heel of the 80s got a 8 or 9 point bump

[JerryvonKramer]

I should say that I'm not saying Steven isn't entitled to his opinion or that he's objectively wrong.

 

This is more about the underlying approach and the easy dismissal of "great match theory", or the assumption that it had been categorically debunked.

 

It all started with Rick Steiner, somehow.

[Jimmy Redman]

For what it's worth, I do want to say that the point that was made repeatedly in the beginning of this thread that "I'm not sure why a laundry list of great matches isn't an actively good thing and shouldn't be a credit to someone's case" is a good one and bears repeating.

For whoever it was who asked why you'd put a guy you hate on your list just because he has a list of great matches, my answer is that I put him on because he has a list of great matches.

 

A list of great matches is a good thing to have. A really good thing. Something a lot of wrestlers in history don't have.

And obviously there's more to it, but I don't think I've seen any wrestler yet who achieved a list of great matches through osmosis. Not even Triple Fucking H. Hunter contributes to his great matches. He usually contributes less than his opponent, but he's still there and playing his part. I find it really hard to give complete and total credit for a truly great match to one guy at the total expense of the other. It would have to be the most egregious of carryjobs of the most egregious of stiffs.

 

Hunter gets credit from me for the Undertaker Mania matches. He gets credit for the Shelton match. He gets credit for the Orton LMS. He even gets credit for the Shawn matches - the good ones. Those are his best matches to me and I think he absolutely adds to all of them and works to make them great.

 

I think it's the tier below that where you get into him not adding as much. He has a lot of those **** WWE main events where he was basically The Other Guy and his opponent (Foley, Benoit, Rock, Cena, etc.) is the driving force. And that's the kind of thing that limits how high he can go on my list, because I start looking at input and finding it lacking. BUT, that doesn't change the fact of the output. He was in a lot of great matches.

 

That's my justification for that, anyway. I look at both input and output, and for GWE my criteria was to look at the positives and the best case put forward. Hunter's best case to me was his list of great matches, and his list of super dooper great matches. That's what got him on my list, and I think that's as valid a case as a guy who is on my list for a million little things he inputs into matches of varying quality.

[The Man in Blak]

Someone needs to create a Great Match Carcassonne where the farms and castles are replaced with wrestler's names and you score points by putting together the best wrestler vs. wrestler combinations.

 

 

I disagree about the selling, universal crowd affection is something I'm not as familiar with when it comes to Kobashi but Bret was a huge baby face overseas for a long time as well as Canada and the US until 97. I think Brets offense was also a tad better and have seen Kobashi called a spotty offensive wrestler which isn't always true but more so than Bret in my opinion. I think Brets ability to have great matches with low grade opponents has also been over looked. He has good to great matches with guys like Diesel and Carl Oullete. He might have had Undertakers first great match if that was before the cell and he also had a pretty good match against The Patriot in 97. I'm not as familiar with Kobashi being able to do that so if he has excuse my ignorance. I would also like to imagine that if Bret were able to have matches against Austin for a five year period of time his list would be doubled.

 

Bret was a big fish in a hugely diluted pond that was US and Canada wrestling in 92-97. I stack Kobashi being a guy with huge crowd appeal from a young lion to the day he retired in 2013 as a better testament to his connection to the crowd. Bret certainly has good matches with lesser talent but also has mediocre to mundane matches with really good talent which weighs into the house show effect with him. I again hate playing the what if game. Bret had plenty of matches with good workers as a tag wrestler and singles star. Bret did have a chance to have a showcase match in 1992 vs. Shawn Michaels. This match headlined a PPV and was given 26 minutes. Most at best call it very good. Name a Kobashi performance on the big stage where he was that flat for a huge performance making opportunity. Even the excessive Kobashi matches have pretty great heat.

 

1. Not all opportunities are created equal -- you're not going to get a lot of heat in a rapidly declining period for the company with a newly hotshotted champion and challenger in Bret and Shawn, respectively.

 

(Also, that's one pair of finishes that didn't come up in the List of Great Bret Finishes -- Bret catching Shawn off the top for the sharpshooter and win in '92, then teasing that same spot as the finish in the '96 Iron Man match, only to see Shawn persevere and hold on until the time limit.)

 

2. If you're considering 1992 Shawn Michaels to be a great worker, I'd be very interested to see a further elaboration of that idea, especially since I put forward Shawn as a serious answer to the question posed by the thread topic.

 

3. On the other end of the spectrum, Kobashi had a lot of wind at his back with Baba's booking, as well as quality of opposition, throughout the 90s in All Japan. When did he face a situation like Bret's Survivor Series '92? How did he respond?

 

I think a lot of the talk about "projection" and what-ifs is being misread (and maybe misrepresented) as an acknowledgement in contextual differences in opportunity. For me, it's not really about awarding extra credit to Bret or someone like Buddy Rose based on what they could have done in a hypothetical situation. It's about recognizing what they actually did in the context that they were dealt -- which includes identifying great opportunities that were squandered, mind you -- and then assessing and examining what someone like Kobashi or (yes) Flair did in a more fertile environment.

 

Rather than jump on top of another sports analogy grenade (Bret Hart is actually Warren Moon!), I'll point to a concept in sports analysis that influenced my critical processes for this list: value over replacement.

 

In baseball, there's been enough statistical rigor and research done to identify a rough output from a level of talent known as "replacement level" -- basically, the idea that any freely available player from the minors or independent leagues can be brought onto a major league baseball team and provide approximately value through hitting/defense/whatever. This level of output can vary based on the context of a given league - there was much more offense in the 2000s than in the 1960s for a number of reasons (legitimate and otherwise) and, thus, the expectations for a replacement level player as well as a great player are raised and quantified in conjunction to match that.

 

As a result, if you're arguing about whether a player from the 2000s is more deserving of being a Hall of Famer than a player from the 1960s, you can't just do a nose-to-nose statistical comparison between the two and leave it at that; you have to make an adjustment on context and understand that thirty home runs in the 2000s doesn't mean as much as thirty home runs in the 1960s, even if they both put the same amount of runs on the scoreboard.

 

So, yeah, there are a few things that I think Kobashi does better than Bret Hart, but I measure that observation with a caveat that I believe Kobashi had more valuable opportunities to not only demonstrate those skills, but use them to create a great match with a great opponent. (And, from here, we could probably sidebar for hours on the notion of what makes a great match, which is another key contextual difference that makes it sort of useless to just fling lists of matches at each other in my book.) In my eyes, the replacement level in 1990s WWF is different enough to warrant a deeper examination of what Bret was able to accomplish beyond a simple skimming of matches that met criteria for greatness that 1990s WWF had comparatively little interest in chasing.

 

If you're only looking at the great matches, I'm not going to say that the approach is inherently wrong, but I would posit that it might be making less of an adjustment for context than I would personally prefer. How many 80s NWA wrestlers made your ballot? How high did the four pillars rank? And how curious is it that wrestlers from those two eras mysteriously seem to show up on so many people's lists?

 

I don't know of any field where the body of work is not absolutely central in assessing "greatness". Like none.

 

Ask old school baseball fans about Sandy Koufax some time.

[joeg]

The arguement that Hart is in anyway better than Kobashi astounds me. The idea that he wasn't a smart worker is rediculous.

 

Kobashi may have the best baby face fire up outside of Hogan and Steamboat, which is why I think he worked better gainjins than other Japanese workers.

 

Also aside from maybe Misawa, I can't think of anybody that sells limb work better than Kobashi. I don't mean having a part worked on and selling it for one match or even having a part worked on in the beginning of a tour and selling it for the whole tour (which is something that you will see a lot in New Japan). No I mean Kobashi would land akwardly and spend the next 4 months selling his knee. He would come back from shoulder or elbow surgery and spend the next year selling the arm every time he chopped a guy, he would comeback from a knee surgery and spend the next year walking around with a limp that would get worse after he did the moonsault. He did shit like this better than anybody outside of Misawa.

 

Oh yeah and he was 6'4" built like a brick shithouse and had the most graceful moonsault ever. He did cool moves but wasn't overly movezy. He worked snug but he wasn't reckless with his opponents (with himself, yes).

 

Oh and have you ever seen somebody who was one of the best Ricky Mortons ever when he was the weak link on a tag team and at the same time a better Robert Gibson than Robert Gibson when he was was in the big brother role?

 

And there was a 3 to 4 year stretch where he was probably the biggest fucking draw in the fucking WORLD despite having his biggest run at a time when business was down in Japan thanks to the MMA boom. Bret Hart was never even the biggest in the US let alone the world.

 

There is no single metric by which one could say Hart was better. Perhaps he was a better heel only because Kobashi never had a heel run.

[BigBadMick]

 

 

 

Also Parv, I'm not really out for one side or the other in this argument, but it's worth noting that you're the guy who had the BIGLAV system. In this system, only two of those factors deal with output. G and V.

Basic skills are input. Intangibles are input. Ability to play different roles is input. Longevity is kind of both I guess.

More of your factors deal with input than output, if you think about it. And a guy can do really poorly on G and V and still do very well in your system if he ranks highly in B, I and A, i.e. someone who is very much an input over output wrestler.

Correct. I am only arguing that output really can't be overlooked, taken away, dismissed lightly etc. And often forms the core of a case.

 

And when the output is literally Kobashi's career, I don't really understand how anyone can pick up Bret's career and say those two things are in the same ball park.

 

The disconnect is how Steven gets from saying output is important but he also values input (true of most of us) to his valuation of Bret as someone at #5, while KK is at #18.

 

He talked about evidence and that appears to be willfully overlooking it.

 

 

It's not about willfully overlooking things as much as just reaching a different conclusion.

 

Steven rates output but he rates input more, as he's admitted. So even if he agrees with you vis a vis the relative outputs of Kobashi and Bret (and I don't think he does since he'd probably give Bret a bit more credit there), it's the input that makes the difference for him, since he ranks Bret's input a fair bit higher than Kobashi's. And he's not wrong for that. You've sort of decided that Kobashi is levels above Bret and anyone who disagrees is wrong but nobody is fucking wrong here. That's where people take issue, where you've decided the objective answer and anyone who comes to a different conclusion is "willfully overlooking evidence".

 

Steven has evidence. He has it in all of the little things Bret does. All of the touches he adds to his matches, all of the neat finishes he comes up with that play off stuff, all of the ways in which Bret portrays realism and serious wrestling in a WWF ring, all of the good things he was able to do with the scrubs he was working with, with all the crispness and effectiveness of his offense and moves, all of the ways in which he works EXACTLY like Steven wants a wrestler to work. AND he has it in all of the great matches Bret has. THAT is Steven's evidence.

 

Kobashi doesn't do those things for Steven, or at least he doesn't do them nearly as much. What Bret inputs into his work is better than what Kobashi inputs into his. Steven values input highly. Therefore he put Bret higher on his list. I'm not sure what's so hard to understand about that.

 

Someone like Taue has more great matches than a guy like Ted, but you put Ted higher (if I'm remembering right). Why? Because of all the shit that Ted does better than Taue.

 

Steven has justified his case for Bret over and over. Just because you disagree doesn't make him wrong.

 

Wow, that is everything I've tried to say. Thank you.

 

That was a hell of a bit of peacekeeping there, Jimmy. Respect.

[Dylan Waco]

I had Kobashi WAYYYY higher than Bret on my list. I think Bret as a top five pick is completely indefensible via the criteria I used, and I'm deeply suspicious of the idea that he'd be top five on any list that favored a criteria which didn't heavily adjust for circumstance and also put massive stock in the importance of peak (while also rating Bret's peak FAR higher than I would). So I am actually on Parv's side in the sense that I think Kobashi is a much better wrestler. I am also on Parv's side in the sense that I don't really think it's wrong to point to the amount of matches as an obvious determining factor in this case, because it's one where the gap between the two parties is very large (and I'm not sure I see Steven arguing that point).

 

That said I don't think great matches are the be all, end all. I don't even think good matches are the be all, end all. And I also think that context is really critical at times, and that gets really lost if the focus is solely on "was this match good."

 

The example I always point to here is a comparison between the way Nick Bockwinkel worked Jake Milliman, and the way Ric Flair worked George South. I think watched in isolation it would be almost impossible to argue that the Bock v. Milliman match was better. It was completely devoid of drama, had little meat to it, and wasn't long enough to exhibit anything in way of build, deep psychology, super highspots, et. By contrast Flair v. South (or least least my memory of it) had many of those things and was extremely dramatic to be watching it live as a child. I thought South was going to beat the World Champion and was losing my shit! It worked on me!

 

But why the fuck was the World Champion playing "just barely escape!" with a literal jobber who I had never seen win a television match? It made zero sense. In the past when I have brought this up some have conceded this point and argued that the Bock v. Milliman match was better without even seeing it. But I literally cannot imagine anyone thinking it was a "better" match given how we tend to evaluate things. It was a smarter and more logical match.

 

None of this is to argue that I think Bock is better than Flair, and I swear I'm not just picking on Flair (I've made a similar context criticism about a Rey v. Eddie match from 2004 that I think is great in isolation). The point is that this is an instance where I would be hard pressed to argue against Flair v. South being better as a match, while I also thinking that Bockwinkel's performance was better than Flair's. I'll freely concede that others may disagree if they have a different view about what the goal of a champion or one of the matches in question was, but that is my takeaway.

 

Are these sort of things anomalies? I don't really think so. I think they come up far more often than you'd think. Having said that I also think it's ridiculous to just throw out the idea that volume of good and great matches doesn't matter. It most certainly does. I don't even object to that idea that it should be the most significant metric (I'm not sure it is to me really, but also not positive it isn't). But I do object to the idea of the GWE as a math problem, and I do object to the idea that the number of snowflakes placed at the end of a match review can tell us all we need to know about the level of the individual performances involved.

 

On the Kobashi and Shawn comparison, I'm actually mystified that Parv would find it problematic but perhaps it a comparison that would force him to self-reflect a bit too much. No Shawn's lame gimmick isn't (entirely) comparable to Kobashi's. And I obviously don't think Shawn was influenced by Kobashi in the way that he was by Flair or Hennig or even Buddy Rose. But in certain ways that I find very transparent I think they are remarkably similar workers

 

- Both of them clearly wanted to be great workers. Note that I did not say great wrestlers. To me Kobashi and Shawn are guys who wear their effort and desire to be the best on their sleeves. This observation is one I know Loss and Childs share with me as it regards Kobashi, and I think there is ample reason to believe that the "showstoppa! Mr. Wrestlemania!" monikers affixed to Shawn were to a large degree expressions of how he viewed himself. I would note that this is NOT a characteristic that I feel was all that common at the time of each man's peak (it is probably more common now, though maybe less so than we might think)

 

- While Shawn was certainly a more pinballish bumper, I feel both guys were willing to destroy their bodies, and take unhealthy levels of punishment in the interest of having "epic" matches. I literally cannot imagine a world where "self conscious epic" could be applied to something like Shawn v. Taker and not say Kobashi v. Misawa from 6/99 which might be the most overt case of a guy destroying himself to get over something as being big time, next level wrestling that I've ever seen.

 

- I think both guys were prone to bloat in their matches. This is something that people will not necessarily agree with me on, but I would note that the dynamic stretch runs of Kobashi and Michaels feel distinct from that of their peers, even if Kobashi's are more compelling because of the fact that he was so much better offensively.

 

- Most importantly both guys are extremely theatrical sellers, who I think cross the line into out right hysterics at times. Parv is an admitted offense mark so I get why he would like Kobashi much more than Michaels, but for the life of me I can't see how someone could hate Michaels and love Kobashi. The selling and comebacks of both guys strike me as cheapseat emoting on steroids, whether it be Kobashi crying/hamming it up or Michaels blubbering/hamming it up. Kobashi's comebacks are often times more nuanced than Shawn's, but I don't think that's uniformly the case, and if anything Kobashi is an even MORE melodramatic guy than Shawn.

 

I think Kobashi is a much, much, much better wrestler than Michaels, but I think the parallels are fairly obvious.

 

With Cena I think there is an extent to which it is true that the matches are his case, but I also think his adaptability and understanding of how to work to opponent and context is being radically undersold. Yes his execution is often poor, and his worst handful of selling performances are pretty egregious, but I also think he's had some all time selling performances, and he's actually managed to make his poor execution something akin to a net positive by virtue of the fact that his "never give up" schtick seems to apply to his moveset and the way he approaches his matches. He comes across as a guy who will legit try anything, even if it is beyond his abilities, in order to get the job done. I find it hard to believe that is a coincidence, but even if it's not intentional it's something I think is easy to read into his performances and that is more than good enough for me.

 

On the general subject of thread I think it depends on where you set the mark for great matches and how you quantify the term "a lot." I suppose Jericho had a lot of great matches but I don't think he was great. I don't think Inoki or Mutoh were great, but I could probably name 20 matches from each guy I thought were great. Atlantis has been in a lot of matches I'd probably call great, but I don't see him as a great worker though there is a degree to which I see this as an issue on my end and not his. Tiger Mask has actually been in a lot of matches I'd call great or near great, and while I'm higher on him than many realize, I'd be hard pressed to call him a great wrestler and I'm not sure he ever was. A guy like Jeff Hardy has probably been in a sneaky number of great maches, but I don't think he was great even though I think he had greatness in him (if that makes sense). I can kind of go back and fourth on whether or not I think Sabu was great, right now thinking that he was great in his own way, but that his greatness was largely about his ability to make anything seem interesting and special, and less about the actual final result even if I think he had a fair number of great matches. Sting had an all time great series and if pressed I could probably come up with ten other matches of his I thought were great or close to it but I don't see him as a guy who was great. I'd be willing to bet that a guy with a career as long as Kane would have a shockingly long list of great or near great matches if we went back and watched everything obsessively. Aside from Bix no one thinks he's great. If you count tags Kofi Kingston has probably been in over a dozen matches I think are great at minimum. I'm not a Kofi Kingston fan.

 

Again this largely depends on what you define as great, how high your standards are for that term, the meaning of "a lot," et., et., et. Not trying to be Clintonian here, but the meaning of these things is really central to the question.

[MoS]

I had Bret as my number 30, I think, and I actually thought that was a quite generous rank for someone who I think was somehow alnost always a little less than the sum of his parts. (I had Kobashi at 11.)

[GOTNW]

Kobashi was an incredibly hard worker and always gave it 100%. Plenty of people say Bret phoned in performances on a regular basis. If you want to play what-if, that's not what Kobashi would have done in his spot. (that might've even been brought up earlier but fuck this last page is full of essays)

[mprice]

All of this is giving me a headache.

 

Here's the way I broke it down....

 

Kobashi entertained me more than Bret in the matches and overall showcase that I was presented through his matches.

 

Bret, while good, just didn't do as much for me overall because I just couldn't get as invested.

 

For me, personal investment does have a great deal to do with whether I think the person is a great wrestler or not because if I am not invested, I am not going to watch.

 

Ergo...if memory serves, Kobashi is ranked higher than Bret but I can still sit back and watch a Bret match every so often and... .....enjoy it!

 

Everyone is starting to take this whole GWE thing way too seriously. It seems like it went from "Okay, let's make a list of the 100 greatest wrestlers IN OUR OPINION" to "Well it seems like your OPINION is wrong and here is why."

 

Doesn't that seem like it could end up leading to a huge divide with people before it's all said and done?

 

Just my two cents as someone who doesn't post a lot on the board.

[mprice]

As for the original topic, Mutoh is a good candidate for the great matches, though I did put him on my list somewhere.

 

Even for me, I would have to say Hogan. Though Hogan became the prototypical wrestler of the 80s WWF style, the main thing that carried him was the fact that he had charisma and could structure his comebacks at the right moment.

[Jimmy Redman]

...starting to?

 

Mate we've been at it for 18 months and been in way worse arguments than this.

[mprice]

Well I have only been on here for about 6 months and really just started looking at a lot of the topics over the last 2....sooooooo yeah I am a little behind.

 

Though the masochist in me wants to see the Flair/Bret thread, I just can't bring myself to do it.

[mprice]

Basically what I am trying to say is

 

[Matt D]

This is us getting along.

[BigBadMick]

Basically what I am trying to say is

 

I used to think like that. These things blow over quickly enough.

 

Grimmas and JvK do (did?) podcasts together, they'll be fine.

[soup23]

Someone needs to create a Great Match Carcassonne where the farms and castles are replaced with wrestler's names and you score points by putting together the best wrestler vs. wrestler combinations.

 

 

I disagree about the selling, universal crowd affection is something I'm not as familiar with when it comes to Kobashi but Bret was a huge baby face overseas for a long time as well as Canada and the US until 97. I think Brets offense was also a tad better and have seen Kobashi called a spotty offensive wrestler which isn't always true but more so than Bret in my opinion. I think Brets ability to have great matches with low grade opponents has also been over looked. He has good to great matches with guys like Diesel and Carl Oullete. He might have had Undertakers first great match if that was before the cell and he also had a pretty good match against The Patriot in 97. I'm not as familiar with Kobashi being able to do that so if he has excuse my ignorance. I would also like to imagine that if Bret were able to have matches against Austin for a five year period of time his list would be doubled.

 

Bret was a big fish in a hugely diluted pond that was US and Canada wrestling in 92-97. I stack Kobashi being a guy with huge crowd appeal from a young lion to the day he retired in 2013 as a better testament to his connection to the crowd. Bret certainly has good matches with lesser talent but also has mediocre to mundane matches with really good talent which weighs into the house show effect with him. I again hate playing the what if game. Bret had plenty of matches with good workers as a tag wrestler and singles star. Bret did have a chance to have a showcase match in 1992 vs. Shawn Michaels. This match headlined a PPV and was given 26 minutes. Most at best call it very good. Name a Kobashi performance on the big stage where he was that flat for a huge performance making opportunity. Even the excessive Kobashi matches have pretty great heat.

 

1. Not all opportunities are created equal -- you're not going to get a lot of heat in a rapidly declining period for the company with a newly hotshotted champion and challenger in Bret and Shawn, respectively.

 

(Also, that's one pair of finishes that didn't come up in the List of Great Bret Finishes -- Bret catching Shawn off the top for the sharpshooter and win in '92, then teasing that same spot as the finish in the '96 Iron Man match, only to see Shawn persevere and hold on until the time limit.)

 

2. If you're considering 1992 Shawn Michaels to be a great worker, I'd be very interested to see a further elaboration of that idea, especially since I put forward Shawn as a serious answer to the question posed by the thread topic.

 

3. On the other end of the spectrum, Kobashi had a lot of wind at his back with Baba's booking, as well as quality of opposition, throughout the 90s in All Japan. When did he face a situation like Bret's Survivor Series '92? How did he respond?

 

I think a lot of the talk about "projection" and what-ifs is being misread (and maybe misrepresented) as an acknowledgement in contextual differences in opportunity. For me, it's not really about awarding extra credit to Bret or someone like Buddy Rose based on what they could have done in a hypothetical situation. It's about recognizing what they actually did in the context that they were dealt -- which includes identifying great opportunities that were squandered, mind you -- and then assessing and examining what someone like Kobashi or (yes) Flair did in a more fertile environment.

 

Rather than jump on top of another sports analogy grenade (Bret Hart is actually Warren Moon!), I'll point to a concept in sports analysis that influenced my critical processes for this list: value over replacement.

 

In baseball, there's been enough statistical rigor and research done to identify a rough output from a level of talent known as "replacement level" -- basically, the idea that any freely available player from the minors or independent leagues can be brought onto a major league baseball team and provide approximately value through hitting/defense/whatever. This level of output can vary based on the context of a given league - there was much more offense in the 2000s than in the 1960s for a number of reasons (legitimate and otherwise) and, thus, the expectations for a replacement level player as well as a great player are raised and quantified in conjunction to match that.

 

As a result, if you're arguing about whether a player from the 2000s is more deserving of being a Hall of Famer than a player from the 1960s, you can't just do a nose-to-nose statistical comparison between the two and leave it at that; you have to make an adjustment on context and understand that thirty home runs in the 2000s doesn't mean as much as thirty home runs in the 1960s, even if they both put the same amount of runs on the scoreboard.

 

So, yeah, there are a few things that I think Kobashi does better than Bret Hart, but I measure that observation with a caveat that I believe Kobashi had more valuable opportunities to not only demonstrate those skills, but use them to create a great match with a great opponent. (And, from here, we could probably sidebar for hours on the notion of what makes a great match, which is another key contextual difference that makes it sort of useless to just fling lists of matches at each other in my book.) In my eyes, the replacement level in 1990s WWF is different enough to warrant a deeper examination of what Bret was able to accomplish beyond a simple skimming of matches that met criteria for greatness that 1990s WWF had comparatively little interest in chasing.

 

If you're only looking at the great matches, I'm not going to say that the approach is inherently wrong, but I would posit that it might be making less of an adjustment for context than I would personally prefer. How many 80s NWA wrestlers made your ballot? How high did the four pillars rank? And how curious is it that wrestlers from those two eras mysteriously seem to show up on so many people's lists?

 

I don't know of any field where the body of work is not absolutely central in assessing "greatness". Like none.

 

Ask old school baseball fans about Sandy Koufax some time.

 

I think having something fresh like Bret vs. Shawn in the landscape of 1992 US wrestling would be a great opportunity for them to prove their worth. I liken it to Kawada vs. Kobashi headlining Budokan in October 1993. That was a fresh first time match up and Kobashi had not had much experience headlining the big show. They even had a weird working match for the first half that was counteractive to their feud throughout the year up to that point. Then, the second half was an awesome display of them finding their legs and delivering an exhilarating finish.

 

Kobashi obviously faced higher levels of opponents in the 1990's. It is silly to argue otherwise. However, compared to his peers he had a better feud with Akiyama and Hase than Kawada and Misawa (minus 2/27/00 Misawa/Akiyama match). I think Bret was given ample opportunities that he squandered. Going through the 1994 yearbook, he never felt like the ace champion you would have hoped when he was given a lengthy reign. Coming off of a screwjob, he really missed the mark in WCW and just became a face in the crowd in a rapidly quick fashion.

 

Context was something that I did weigh in compiling my list. Bock will be some peoples' #1, he finished top 20 for me with a huge emphasis on context. As far as stuff on tape, I have probably seen as many great Bret matches as Bock but I thought Bock was a much more compelling ace and better babyface in the tail end of his AWA run.

[pol]

Grimmas, it's no point saying X is different from wrestling.

 

I don't know of any field where the body of work is not absolutely central in assessing "greatness". Like none.

 

It's like trying to judge Picasso on his brush strokes rather than on Guernica or whatever. The output is just the core, part and parcel of his rep.

 

I don't really see how wrestling his different. Or why you want it to be.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=great+performances+in+bad+movies

 

It seems like the obvious point that nobody has touched on in these comparisons to other media (maybe because it's too obvious?) is that wrestling is a collaborative medium. That's the big reason why it can make sense to privilege input over output.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

Basically what I am trying to say is

 

 

I used to think like that. These things blow over quickly enough.

 

Grimmas and JvK do (did?) podcasts together, they'll be fine.

We are in constant Facebook contact on an almost daily basis, and this is really nothing. Disagreeing and debating stuff is what happens here. Sometimes we go hard at it, but hopefully everyone comes out the other side having thought about whatever it is more. And you know, really, aside from a few placements Grimmas's list was pretty similar to mine.

 

AJ Excite will be back at some point too.

[Jingus]

And the goal isn't to put on a great match. I think that is the biggest misnomer. The goal is to make money. Putting on a great match is small part of this, but Timothy Thatcher is putting on amazing matches in front of 50 people every weekend so there is more to it than that. Being able to talk the people into the building and get them to come back again is way more important than a great match.

Problem is, a massive number of wrestlers, bookers, and promoters in recent decades have come to disagree with you on that. You can say "the goal SHOULD BE to make money", but almost nobody besides the WWE is actually managing to do that with any significant consistency. And even half of the WWE's own performers obviously think that getting the highest snowflake rating for their matches is a more important goal than cornering the market or selling merch or whatever.

[pol]

Even if the point of wrestling is to make money (as if anyone can own what the point of wrestling is), that's relevant neither to this project, which is about in-ring work, nor to most people here's interests as fans.

[goc]

The goal is simply to put smiles on people's faces.

[Goodear]

I think I'm going to deep dive into Parv's list of Kobashi matches for giggles as I get the chance. I should finish around never.

[JerryvonKramer]

I think I'm going to deep dive into Parv's list of Kobashi matches for giggles as I get the chance. I should finish around never.

Something that some might not be aware of on that list of matches. I watched ALL of them with Steven (aka Grimmas) on a show we do together called the All Japan Excite Series. He, himself, gave 4.75 or 5 stars to almost all of them too.

 

Part of this whole argument is because I know how highly Steven rates those matches and those Kobashi performances, and yet he's still basically turning from them to put Bret over.

 

It's trying to understand his thought process really, how he can be the same guy who I've talked All Japan with for literally 18+ hours. I cannot square it really.

[Cap]

Sort of a tangential point, but does the issue of safety play into anyone's thinking, particularly in this discussion of Kobashi vs Hart? Hart has said numerous times he didn't like some of the Japanese style (read: those All Japan guys) because they didn't protect their opponents and he is always going on about how he never hurt anyone. I am sure Kobashi wasn't necessarily reckless or intentionally hurting people, but there is no doubt that the style he thrived in was a put it all on the line style in a lot of ways. I saw someone refer to Mori' as an injury machine (or factory or something) yesterday and it got me thinking about this.