Ric Flair vs Volk Han

[elliott]

Ric Flair had more matches in 3 months than Volk Han did in his career. Volk Han has the highest batting average of good/great matches of any ever. Who you got? 

[elliott]

@Microstatistics made me think of this earlier when they said Han was a top 10 contender. Other than the general fun of watching & talking about wrestling with all of you, to me the most fun aspect of this project comes in the actual comparing of wrestlers. There a lot of easy ones. I don't have to think hard to know that I think Shinya Hashimoto is better than Keiji Muto. I have to think harder about Nick Bockwinkel vs Buddy Rose, but ultimately I can reach a conclusion fairly easily. But over the course of this project at some point you're forced to compare radically different wrestlers. It might be a modern wrestler with their entire career on tape vs someone from WoS. It might be a short but amazing peak vs someone with crazy longevity who wasn't that good. Or it might just be Volk Han vs Ric Flair. 

I ended up voting for Volk. I think we probably know the cases of these two wrestlers pretty well and I won't spend much time there. Flair is obviously Flair. I'll say a little more about Volk because he's still a little obscure to some of the folks here. At its simplest, Volk was awesome from his very first match and was awesome until the very end. He didn't have many matches (~60), but we have every single one of them. We can see him against fellow masters, we can see him against good wrestlers, we can see him against bad wrestlers, we can see him in intense matches with high stakes or virtual exhibitions. We can see him against big powerhouses or smaller speedsters. Within his narrow style, we have the opportunity to see Han against a decent variety of types of opponents and he delivers against everyone. I'm not going to say every match is a classic, but I will say every match is at worst interesting because of Han's work. There is no down period where he's good but hasn't figured it out yet or is still good but has clearly lost a step. Volk was genuinely always great.

We talked during the last project about all styles not being equal and I firmly believe that. Just because someone is the "best indy death match wrestler" that doesn't mean they're a candidate for the top tier strictly because they're the "Best of their style." Some styles are better/more difficult/more impressive than others. I have a real reverence for the best of the shoot style wrestlers: Han, Tamura & Fujiwara. I consider them all top 10 candidates and I anticipate making space for them all. Someone like Tsuyoshi Kohsaka who had an even shorter career still has a place reserved on my list because he briefly hit this upper echelon. I think shoot style when it is worked at its highest level is the most difficult style of wrestling to master and those that did it represent the absolute elite tier of in ring pro-wrestlers. I think it takes an entirely different level of skill to build dramatic and exciting matches in RINGS than when you have all the tools available to a traditional pro-wrestler. 

I know the big argument against Volk would be lack of matches. I understand that, but I disagree with it. Sure it would be great if there was 1000 Volk Han matches. But if there were, we probably woudln't be able to see literally all of them. With Ric the big argument is that he had a long stretch of being terrible and thats a bigger issue for me than someone having too few matches.