WON HOF 2009 thread

[kjh]

Here's this year's ballot courtesy of Steve Yohe:

 

PERFORMERS LIST

Gene & Ole Anderson

The Assassins (Tom Renesto & Jody Hamilton)

Atlantis

Red Bastien

Carlos Colon

Big Daddy (Shirley Crabtree)

Edge

George Gordienko

Ultimo Guerrero & Rey Bucanero

Gran Hamada

Volk Han

Owen Hart

Curt Hennig

Chris Jericho

Rocky Johnson

Ivan Koloff

Konnan

Karloff Lagarde

Mark Lewin

Jose Lothario

Midnight Express (Dennis Condrey & Bobby Eaton & Stan Lane)

Mick McManus

Bill Miller

Fabulous Moolah

Pedro Morales

Dick Murdoch

Rey Mysterio

Kendo Nagasaki

Jackie Pallo

Blue Panther

Rollerball Mark Rocco

Rock & Roll Express (Ricky Morton & Robert Gibson)

Rick Rude

Sabu

Masa Saito

Seiji Sakaguchi

Kensuke Sasaki

Hans Schmidt

Sgt. Slaughter

Jimmy Snuka

Wilbur Snyder

Sting

Kiyoshi Tamura

John Tolos

Enrique Torres

Vampiro

Villano III

Dr. Wagner Jr.

Dr. Wagner Sr.

Johnny "Mr. Wrestling II" Walker

Tim "Mr. Wrestling" Woods

 

 

NON-WRESTLERS LIST

Lou Albano

Jim Crockett Jr.

Gary Hart

Jerry Jarrett

Gorilla Monsoon

Dr. Alfonso Morales

Don Owen

Roy Shire

Jesse Ventura

[Bix]

Wow, he finally realized the easy way to settle the British complaints. Took long enough.

[kjh]

Somehow I don't think Big Daddy rolling straight off the ballot will placate the most rabid of his HOF supporters.

[Bix]

Putting him on the ballot along with other HOF level Brits is the fairest way to do it, and there are so few Brits that if they're their own region (which they should be), then he has a decent chance of being voted in.

[kjh]

I agree that the UK should be treated as a separate region (though I have my doubts that that will be the case), but even so does Dave have enough voters who are knowledgeable enough about British wrestling for it to be a fair election? That the British wrestlers have only just been put on the ballot suggests that few if any of his old voters were pushing for them to be placed on the ballot. I think at the very least we know William Regal probably won't be voting for any of them!

[Bix]

JDW said in the comments that don't warrant a thread thread that Europe is separate.

[jdw]

What's funny is that they're almost a lock to have someone go in. I don't know if Dave has a rule of a minimum number of votes in a region. It would be odd if only 1 person votes in the "Euro Region" and those guys all get in with just one vote.

 

That's not likely, but 5 votes? 10 votes? Could be a very low threshold.

 

There also doesn't seem to be someone in there who could split up votes.

 

I'm willing to bet one or more gets in barring:

 

* a group of voters manipulating the vote (easier to do in a region with a small number of ballots)

 

* Dave had a minimum number of voters needed to get in

 

John

[Indikator]

I shouldn't be suprised that he left off Giant Haystacks. Even though he does his newsletter for a quarter of a century he doesn't know of his success outside of the UK. He was the Andrè to Crabtrees Hogan, but was in contrast to him and most others on the list as omnipresent and all over the place like Andrè in the pre-Hulkamania

[jdw]

BTW - someone should create a good, solid, in one place "piece" on each of the Euro candidates. I'm open to voting for people, but need to read through something. A 10 page thread (if one exists) is a bit like reading though the Ole Anderson thread on WC. While there's a boatload of fun in that thread, by the end it's a clusterfuck.

 

Put it together, and I'm more than happy to point Yohe and even Bruce to it.

 

John

[Al]

I get the feeling there are WAY too many candidates on one ballot. I count around 20 guys I would at least listen to arguments for among the Americans alone. If you give voters up to ten votes apiece, they are never going to form a consensus around one candidate. If Dave doesn't get a new HOFer of this group, I think he should consider establishing a runoff procedure.

[Loss]

I like the idea of eliminating the ballot altogether. Just let the voters vote in whoever they want without a list to choose from, and see what happens. There's always too much talk about who's on the ballot, when everyone knows only a handful of them stand a chance anyway. Having no ballot at all would make the results more unpredictable.

 

I think a lot of this is also Dave doing anything he can to keep the HOF relevant, when almost everyone who should be in is already in. This decade hasn't really produced any HOF-level candidates. Cena will be an interesting discussion in a few years, but we're not there yet. Rey is such a no-brainer, and I have no idea why he didn't get in by a landslide the first year he was on the ballot.

 

And does anyone else agree that considering the downward spiral Kurt Angle has gone on the past few years, his induction looks even worse than it did at the time it happened? Talk about a guy who has nowhere near a HOF career -- other guys who aren't HOF level like Jericho and Sting have far stronger cases than Angle.

 

If you want to compare WWE main eventers with drug issues, Jeff Hardy is one of the biggest merchandise sellers in company history and is probably a better cumulative draw than Angle.

 

When are we going to start hearing cases for UFC guys? I'm surprised it hasn't already happened (or maybe it has and I've totally missed it).

[Cox]

I think there is a separate MMA Hall of Fame so the UFC guys would be candidates for that.

 

I wonder if Jericho will make any headway this year after the year he had, adding a Wrestler of the Year to his resume, even if it was the weakest year for candidates ever. Every eligible candidate to ever win the award is in the HOF, so that would seem to help him. It's probably not enough by itself to put him in, but he should see a nice bump from it.

[Bix]

Apparently the argument for Angle, at least from Alvarez, is that Angle was so beyond all but a select few in history as a worker that his lack of tenure didn't matter.

[Boondocks Kernoodle]

Angle shows why the 35-year age minimum is still too low. At least part of the rationale for Kurt's induction had to be an assumption that he would continue to work at his '02/'03 level for years to come. He didn't. I'm not a fan of inducting guys in their primes anyway. It would be impossible to not induct anyone until they retire, since nobody retires in wrestling, but at least let their careers wind down a bit.

[kjh]

Rey struggling shouldn't be surprising. He's getting the same level of support that Eddy did before he died. As ludicrous as this might sound, I think his lack of size, lucha background and lack of consistent main event push, is a barrier to him getting votes, despite objectively ticking all the WON criteria for a Hall of Famer.

 

With regards to Dave's MMA Hall of Fame, for all intents and purposes it's dead. He hasn't held elections for the last 2 or 3 years and I believe he was encouraged by someone to quietly close it down. At the time, it sounded like people were working on an official MMA HOF, but as nothing has transpired in this direction since then, one wonders whether Zuffa also put pressure on him to close his rival HOF.

[Childs]

Yeah, I don't get the Rey thing at all. He's a guy who should go in just for work. And on top of that, Dave has written about how he moved Smackdown TV ratings. I just don't see the argument for keeping him out, when his pure work contemporaries such as Benoit and Eddy are in.

 

I wonder if Edge will get serious support because of his main eventing run and the misguided perception that he's a top worker.

[jdw]

With regards to Dave's MMA Hall of Fame, for all intents and purposes it's dead. He hasn't held elections for the last 2 or 3 years and I believe he was encouraged by someone to quietly close it down. At the time, it sounded like people were working on an official MMA HOF, but as nothing has transpired in this direction since then, one wonders whether Zuffa also put pressure on him to close his rival HOF.

Was all this on boards or in the WON or someone talkign to Dave?

 

I guess we should be glad that it lasted even a couple of years because it got those guys off the Wrestling HOF ballot. Too bad he didn't have the idea before Sak and Funaki got in.

 

John

[Al]

Edge is a guy who I could see going into the Hall someday, but it is way, way too early to make a call.

[Bob Morris]

For those who have been watching WWE TV regularly, how well does Chris Jericho's recent work help his HOF case? Just curious.

[Dylan Waco]

For those who have been watching WWE TV regularly, how well does Chris Jericho's recent work help his HOF case? Just curious.

It arguably helps it if you buy the argument that Jericho is one of the top workers in the company (which I think is a fairly sound argument even if I think he is a clear third behind Rey and Christian). I'm not a guy who believes that work goes a long way in HoF discussions, but he's probably in his working prime and smarks love his heel schtick.

[ohtani's jacket]

Why are Ultimo Guerrero & Rey Bucanero on the list when realistically Villano III stands no chance of being voted in?

[Al]

I like the idea of eliminating the ballot altogether. Just let the voters vote in whoever they want without a list to choose from, and see what happens. There's always too much talk about who's on the ballot, when everyone knows only a handful of them stand a chance anyway. Having no ballot at all would make the results more unpredictable.

I could see that, though you'd almost certainly need to run the voting in two parts. A nomination stage and then a runoff based on that.

[sek69]

Just like how a crappy ending can ruin people's opinion of an otherwise stellar movie, I kind of think Rey's jobberific world championship run left a bad taste in a lot of HOF voters' mouths (not to mention the circumstances of him getting the title).

 

I mean, it totally shouldn't matter to people who are supposed to be above getting upset over things like that, but you know what they say about the biggest marks being behind the curtains.

[GSR]

With regards to Dave's MMA Hall of Fame, for all intents and purposes it's dead. He hasn't held elections for the last 2 or 3 years and I believe he was encouraged by someone to quietly close it down. At the time, it sounded like people were working on an official MMA HOF, but as nothing has transpired in this direction since then, one wonders whether Zuffa also put pressure on him to close his rival HOF.

Was all this on boards or in the WON or someone talkign to Dave?

 

I guess we should be glad that it lasted even a couple of years because it got those guys off the Wrestling HOF ballot. Too bad he didn't have the idea before Sak and Funaki got in.

 

John

 

The MMA Hall of Fame was always a bit of a mystery to me, as the last I found out about it in my back issues was the 09.25.06 issue which saw Wanderlei Silva, Frank Shamrock, Bas Rutten and Chuck Liddell inducted, to join the original class of Randy Couture, Royce Gracie, Kazushi Sakuraba and Ken Shamrock. Meltzer did a bio for Liddell, and said 'we'll have more Hall of Fame bios over the next few weeks', and I don't think anything else was ever written about it again.

[kjh]

With regards to Dave's MMA Hall of Fame, for all intents and purposes it's dead. He hasn't held elections for the last 2 or 3 years and I believe he was encouraged by someone to quietly close it down. At the time, it sounded like people were working on an official MMA HOF, but as nothing has transpired in this direction since then, one wonders whether Zuffa also put pressure on him to close his rival HOF.

Was all this on boards or in the WON or someone talkign to Dave?

I think someone asked about it on an audio update. Can't remember exactly what he said, but the gist was that he was encouraged to close down his MMA HOF, because it would get in the way of plans people were working on for an official MMA HOF. Just to be clear, Dana White putting pressure on Dave to close his rival HOF is my speculation based on Dave's cosy relationship with Dana.