Workers who never had their best match

[Embrodak]

Cesaro/Sami in NXT seemed really great at the time, idk if it still holds up.

 

The weird thing with Claudio is it’s hard for me to imagine what a “Claudio match” would even look like. Maybe it’s just that his personality is not that strong, so it’s difficult to say that any match he might have is one that is both technically great and encapsulating of his persona, which I think is a big part of saying something is someone’s “best match” in the sense meant by this thread.

[KawadaSmile]

20 hours ago, Jmare007 said:

Do we have a defining, classic match/performance by Claudio? Never really thought about it but he kinda is the modern version of "always great, barely got the chance to have a classic of his own". Could it be one of the Generico matches?

Claudio vs Kofi at one of those Main Event tapings was batshit crazy.

He's had that 7 match series with Sheamus that was nothing but bangers, the matches against Roman, but my personal favorite, which kinda encompasses what bubba Embrodak is talking about, is his short and sweet match against then Aleister Black. 

[NintendoLogic]

Claudio's match with Cena on Raw is probably the best PWG Cena match, for whatever that's worth.

[Gramsci]

Claudio's best match is against Generico, either at BOLA 2011 or at Kurt Rusellreunion the same year. They were made to wrestle each other.

[Clayton Jones]

The tag where he gets his teeth knocked out is one of the best WWE modern tags by a wide margin. His cage match with Brodie Lee is probably my favorite match in CHIKARA history. Everything mentioned but especially those PWG and NXT Sami matches. But at the same time I get throwing his name out there because I could still see him having one defining career match yet to come.

[Chess Knight]

I was actually going to mention Claudio but I think his defining performance is vs. Kofi in 2013, the absolute ideal one man show vs. almost a total non-entity. Several awesome moments that made Claudio look incredibly smart while targeting the leg, like the one-legged swing, and double stomping it. I like the best Cena match a lot (2/17/14) but I have no enthusiasm for it when thinking about it. It's maybe the best example of how he could easily be planted in a main event scene without a hiccup, though.

[Alucard]

the 7/6/15 Claudio/Cena match that went 30 in the main event is the first to come to mind for me

[Timbo Slice]

On 7/23/2022 at 7:05 AM, JerryvonKramer said:

Thing is though, Ted's rep was as a great technical worker and I don't think he ever had THAT match. Closest were probably the Savage matches in WWF, but still. Even in Japan he never seems to get out of 2nd gear. I saw this as one of Ted's biggest fans.

Somehow I missed this but a good point: Savage matches are probably the closest to that. I think in Japan, he just never found his spot. A man who had the tools but couldn't use them correctly in that particular setting.

[Dale Wolfe]

I like Dibiase in mid-south a lot. Been a while since i watched it but I remember a great couple of matches against orndorff, a really good flair one, magnum ta etc 

Nostalgia is a killer but i wouldnt be surprised if it holds it own against the wwf stuff. My taste couldn't have been that too bad at the time! 

Edit- the flair one is the murdoch double turn, is on youtube 

[JerryvonKramer]

3 hours ago, Dale Wolfe said:

I like Dibiase in mid-south a lot. Been a while since i watched it but I remember a great couple of matches against orndorff, a really good flair one, magnum ta etc 

Nostalgia is a killer but i wouldnt be surprised if it holds it own against the wwf stuff. My taste couldn't have been that too bad at the time! 

Edit- the flair one is the murdoch double turn, is on youtube 

To be clear, I'm not saying Ted didn't have great matches, but that they are not *technical* masterpieces and that was his rep.

 

That double-turn Flair match for example is am all-time great juice job and sell job and angle.

 

The Magnum TA matches are just very very good babyface vs. heel matches, etc.

 

Mid-South in general had a kind of slugger / brawler vibe through the whole promotion. I mean it is an awesome style, but it doesn't lend itself to *technical* masterpiece. *Technical* masterpiece would be something like Flair vs. Steamboat or  Bockwinkel vs. Hennig or Bret vs. Owen or the  the great AJPW matches.

 

I think the point is that there was a general mismatch in how Ted was thought of by the boys and sold on commentary and thought of by fans and the sort of worker that he actually was.

[NintendoLogic]

Mid-South was by no means lacking in technical classics. Barry Windham vs. Dick Murdoch, Butch Reed vs. Murdoch, and Chris Adams vs. Terry Taylor all finished in the top 15 in DVDVR voting. It's just that none of them involved Ted. Part of that was the role he played. Bill Watts used him mainly as a catalyst to get angles over and make guys like JYD and Jim Duggan look better than they really were, so he wasn't really put in a position to have great technical matches. It could also be a matter of semantics. I suspect that when his peers praised him as a great technician, they were thinking more in terms of timing and execution than pure mat wrestling.

[JerryvonKramer]

12 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

Mid-South was by no means lacking in technical classics. Barry Windham vs. Dick Murdoch, Butch Reed vs. Murdoch, and Chris Adams vs. Terry Taylor all finished in the top 15 in DVDVR voting. It's just that none of them involved Ted. Part of that was the role he played. Bill Watts used him mainly as a catalyst to get angles over and make guys like JYD and Jim Duggan look better than they really were, so he wasn't really put in a position to have great technical matches. It could also be a matter of semantics. I suspect that when his peers praised him as a great technician, they were thinking more in terms of timing and execution than pure mat wrestling.

 This was exactly what he ended up doing in the WWF too, so you're probably right. 

[ragemaster]

Always thought Ted Dibiase was overrated as a worker, a fantastic Act though.  He just doesn't have any classic matches to his name apart from one cage match with Duggan.  

[G. Badger]

On 7/21/2022 at 4:54 AM, Jetlag said:

I can't think of more high quality competition for Yoshida to face than Hiromi Yagi. Aja Kong and young Ayako Hamada weren't too shabby, either

"never had the best match he potentially could have had. " I guess I was thinking beyond just having great matches but also getting the spotlight that she deserved in AJW. The time she missed was time that she could have moved up the card and got big singles wins. In my mind then she really could have had some classics but on a much bigger stage and with bigger names than in  Arsion. Nothing against those matches at all but I think she would have rather had those in an AJW ring. So in the grand scheme of things, she doesn't get recognized like she should.

[Migs]

On 7/12/2022 at 9:12 AM, CurtainJerker said:

Eddie Gilbert, I just can't see him coming close to the legacies of Jerry Lawler or Jeff Jarrett. I can see him trying to be a Cody-type, and failing, which is QT Marshall, although with a small chance of being MJF.

The current Eddie Gilbert is Joey Janela. A creative indie darling type who's too small and too headstrong (and maybe too into some vices) to work in a major promotion, but has a cult following of people who think he's being underused. 

[C.S.]

On 8/4/2022 at 10:33 AM, Migs said:

The current Eddie Gilbert is Joey Janela. A creative indie darling type who's too small and too headstrong (and maybe too into some vices) to work in a major promotion, but has a cult following of people who think he's being underused. 

Wha...? Eddie Gilbert had more talent and charisma in his pinkie finger than Joey Janela has in his entire body.

The first time I saw Eddie Gilbert, I was glued to the screen because he had presence.

The first time I saw Joey Janela, I wondered when time travel became possible and how a 1980s preliminary bum was able to use the technology to show up in 2020s AEW.  

Actually, scratch that - '80s and '90s jobbers had more personality than Janela.

[Migs]

1 hour ago, C.S. said:

Wha...? Eddie Gilbert had more talent and charisma in his pinkie finger than Joey Janela has in his entire body.

The first time I saw Eddie Gilbert, I was glued to the screen because he had presence.

The first time I saw Joey Janela, I wondered when time travel became possible and how a 1980s preliminary bum was able to use the technology to show up in 2020s AEW.  

Actually, scratch that - '80s and '90s jobbers had more personality than Janela.

Gilbert was incredibly mid-card in major promotions. ECW clearly gets better without him. He was an enjoyable worker who was meant to be an indy guy, same as Janela. Both sold a fair bit of tickets as cult darlings too and started hardcore movements in the northeast. They're the same guy. Eddie Gilbert 100% would have jumped off a building with Danzig as a stunt. 

[strobogo]

The only time I've been impressed with Eddie Gilbert was with Lawler, and the list of guys with less skill and talent than Gilbert that King made look great is impossible to calculate. 

[The Thread Killer]

I’m siding with @C.S. on this one.

In my opinion, Gilbert > Janela.  

Mind you, in fairness I believe…

A Potted Plant > Janela.

[C.S.]

20 hours ago, Migs said:

They're the same guy.

Except in terms of in-ring talent, charisma, credibility, aesthetics, believability, and just about every other metric, sure. 

4 hours ago, The Thread Killer said:

I’m siding with @C.S. on this one.

In my opinion, Gilbert > Janela.  

Mind you, in fairness I believe…

A Potted Plant > Janela.

I'd rather see Rhino throw a potted plant into the wall again than throw Janela across the ring.

[CurtainJerker]

It's not a hill I want to die on since I have no stake in Gilbert or Janela or getting serious about hypothetical time traveling, but even early 1980s WWF Eddie Gilbert knew the basic psychology and selling of how to work an undercard match. He was similar to Curt Hennig of that timeframe. Eddie showed his great personality after he left.

Eddie knew how to pull off hot angles wherever he showed up, but he was unreliable. Drugs and Missy did him in. He was even messed up in the WWF (car crash) and Backlund have him a vote of no confidence. So that's why I ranked him in a huge range between QT and Cody, because Eddie was smart about the business and a good mic guy. Eddie would have been real lucky to pull off a Jeff Jarrett career. He wanted the Jerry Lawler career. Eddie's size (still bigger than Joey) would be a non-issue in AEW, which was a deal-breaker in the 1980s/1990s major leagues. 

Joey never has shown an aptitude for working a basic match like Eddie did and when he tries he shows he ought to stick to garbage wrestling, sadly. He is basically a poor man's Mick Foley with ADHD, an even worse look, and an unprofessional moment which "made him" (the rooftop bump). Joey would be a non-prospect from the 1950s-90s, an untrained one-shot TV jobber if he was lucky. Joey couldn't even get over in AEW.

[The Thread Killer]

35 minutes ago, CurtainJerker said:

Joey never has shown an aptitude for working a basic match like Eddie did and when he tries he shows he ought to stick to garbage wrestling, sadly. He is basically a poor man's Mick Foley with ADHD, an even worse look, and an unprofessional moment which "made him" (the rooftop bump). Joey would be a non-prospect from the 1950s-90s, an untrained one-shot TV jobber if he was lucky. Joey couldn't even get over in AEW.

 

[CurtainJerker]

Ted DiBiase was a pure technician in St. Louis and was pushed high on the card and fought other Hall of Famers. From the matches and clips I have seen, those are legit matches which would have been considered going "all out" by his peers and audience, including broadways. That's why his name was dropped as a possible NWA World Champion. We could already see in his early WWWF run what he was capable of even with handcuffs.

Wish I saw his Georgia run, and Amarillo. 

His Mid South/UWF was stuff was the most exciting and holds up today. Was one of my favorites at the time there. Interestingly enough Bill Watts wasn't high on Ted as much as he loved Steve Williams and Jim Duggan. He didn't feel Ted had a killer extinct or exuded "toughness".

The disappointing Japanese matches are problematic. 

Million Dollar Man was all gimmick and it worked for his time and place. Almost every match was a snooze fest for me, a great cure for insomnia, outside of a handful matches (maybe Savage, but it is hit and miss with him), and one has to dig for them.

In the NWA, he did everything right to become the second coming of Jerry Brisco or Dory Funk, Jr but the standards of the time had changed. Wish things were different and The WWF Million Dollar Man wrestled more like Flair or Bockwinkel instead of...Terry Taylor or Dick Slater, I guess? Even Slater was better in Japan.

Ted was at his best when making comebacks and brawling, not to mention he could be plugged in any angle as a heel or babyface (anywhere) and it immediately got everyone's attention.

Still at Top 100 career when you look at his Halls of Fame inductions, number of matches, getting over in various promotions, opponents, memorable angles, best heel in WWF at the time, still remembered, appearing on people's lists, respect of his peers and promoters, etc. Just imagine if he had a legit World Title reign and/or worked with The Horsemen. I don't think the lack of "Great Matches" (a suspect theory anyway) ought to take away from his career, and as I mentioned at the onset he probably did have his best capable matches against Flair, Race, the Funks, Slaughter, Patterson, Duggan, etc. Before WWF, he was a guy who seemed to give it his all and really went out to have his best matches, and I suspect he knows this and had different instruction from road agents in WWF to slow it down.

[CurtainJerker]

8 minutes ago, The Thread Killer said:

 

 

Hahaha