Pro Wrestling

From the 70's forward, who booked NJPW / AJPW / NOAH and what were the years of their tenures? AJPW: Baba - Until Death? Misawa - Until leaves for NOAH? NJPW: Inoki? Choshu - 90's - 2002 ???? Jedo - Gedo - ?? - Current NOAH Misawa - ?? - ?? Akiyama - ? - 2005 - ?

This was a comment on DVDVR that I thought would make a good topic for debate. Just a random comment in the middle of a reply but it really made me start to think: On the other end of the spectrum are guys that are usually in matches that you have low expectations for that leave you feeling that it was a lot better than anticipated. For me, John Cena was one of those guys for quite some time. Eventually, I just realized the dude is money when on Pay-Per-View. What are some examples of both that spring to your mind?

I watched Starrcade 91 for the podcast this morning. Sort of a spoiler but I hated it a ton and hope to expound on why in detail. By contrast, Grimmas asked a year and a half ago to be on that show and I was listening to the latest Voices of Wrestling show and Joe was talking about how much he loved Starrcade 91 too. This begs the question, what shows or PPV's do you love or champion more than the reviews that are out for that show.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to watch as much 2014 wrestling as I could and blog about it (here) using a match review format. As you can see, I stopped about mid-way through the year. I fell behind during the summer and eventually threw in the towel in terms of doing reviews. I did keep watching current wrestling at a similar pace, however. As a means of doing something tangible with all that wrestling watching, I wanted to do something at the end of the year to wrap it all up. Hopefully this thread will can serve as a helpful resource in terms of being a look at 2014 in semi-real time. I am going to do this in a couple of parts. First, I want to list …

What matches do you think look like they are potentially amazing that we only have clipped, be it JIP or in highlight form? Note that this is a different question than asking about holy grails. What are the big matches that come to mind that are not available in full that you wish were? Let's point to specific ones if we can instead of "just about anything from Memphis" and that type of thing.

As I was watching the Wrestle Kingdom 9 show on New Japan World Sunday morning, there were times where I thought that maybe modern wrestling has passed me by. After watching the PPV, I came away thinking it was a very enjoyable 4 hour show but nothing kicked me in the gut and made me go, “This is something I can’t get anywhere else – especially from a historical perspective.” And I want to be clear that I’m not singling out New Japan here because I thought the Ishii/Homna G-1 match was a great match and would rate it in my top 5 of 2014. I thought Suzuki vs. Styles was great and felt Nakamura was as consistent of a performer around in 2014, especially after Daniel B…

The recent peak vs. career stuff reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while now: the idea of "base talent". Using Football Manager as a template, I've come up with a spreadsheet on which you can plot any GWE candidate and rate them out of 20 in 18 different areas. (Fans of EWR / TEW - I deliberately didn't go with their rating system for a variety of reasons, not least because these are all "in-ring" skils). Get a blank spreedsheet here: https://www.sendspace.com/file/a1vc2p I am going to stick a few guys through the spreedsheet later and will post screengrabs of them in this thread later. I encourage others to do the same.…

WK9 is only a few days away and I'm stoked. It looks like a stacked card. Here are some hype videos.A lot of you have seen them already. I will say they do a good job, not perfect, but good.

Here's an idea, and one that may really help introduce people to wrestlers/matches/feuds that they otherwise wouldn't come across, using the abundance of YouTube and DailyMotion matches out there. Name a Wrestler Link a video of what you believe to be their Greatest Match State what you believe to be that wrestler's Greatest Feud (this should be an actual feud that features wrestling matches, the idea being that the person interested can do a bit of searching and stumble across great matches) Example: I'll start off: Wrestler: Riki Choshu Greatest Match: Riki Choshu vs. Shinya Hashimoto © - NJPW Wrestling World 1997 (IWGP Heavyweight Championsh…

What's more important to you: how great wrestlers were at their best, or how great wrestlers were over the course of their careers? This is something that comes up a lot when talking about baseball's Hall of Fame and I was wondering how people here applied it to this project. For me, I generally think about wrestlers in terms of how much they've done rather than best vs. best. Some questions: How long is a peak to you? How many matches or what amount of time is required for someone to establish greatness? Is it possible for someone to make your list without ever having been great at any point in his/her career? Who's your top all peak candidate? Who's your top no p…

Do you want to watch more wrestling? Watch less wrestling? Focus on specific things? Read certain books or learn more about certain promotions or time periods? Follow current stuff more? Here are mine: - Work with goodhelmet to finish and release the 1998 and 1999 Yearbooks, along with the 90s Errata set - Begin counting down the top 500 matches of the 90s and post them here w/mini-reviews on each of the matches - Watch more current wrestling and for Christ's sake, try to smile while doing so (at least once in a while) - Become more knowledgeable of the names of wrestling moves - Continue doing Wrestling With The Past podcasts and thinking up new topics

I'll go first: - Roman Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship in the Wrestlemania main event. Both end up destroyed from the war and the referee begins his 10 count as they struggle to get to their feet. Seth Rollins runs out, announces he's cashing in his MITB contract and entering himself into this match, - therefore it becomes a triple threat - hits the Curb Stomp on Roman Reigns and pins him 1-2-3. Seth walks out of Mania as the champion, screwing Roman out of his big moment and becoming the premier heel asshole in the company. - Brock doesn't lose the title by actually being personally defeated, therefore he has something to go …

No big deal, just using my NJPW World subsription to watch the Tenryu/Ishikawa/Kitahara vs Koshinaka/Kimura/Aoyagi match from the 11/92 Sumo Hall show. My god, the crowd heat back in the day was amazing. This service is unbelievable! They have 67 episodes of NJPW Classics on demand! Every 1/4 show! Tons of random matches from the last 40 years. Tons of live shows going forward. And it's 8 bucks a month! For those of us that remember driving to Japanese supermarkets so we could pick up a month of AJPW product condensed into four 22 minute episodes, this is really cool. Wait, I've moved onto Inoki/Hansen from 1980.

Been searching the web for some detailed write-ups on the biggest feuds of CMLL (EMLL) / AAA / or other defunct federations (UWA) of the 70 / 80 / 90 / 2000 / 2000+? Anyone know of any good places to look or read about them? Or does anyone care to start detailing some of the biggest feuds here?

This was discussed in the Bruno thread over at GWE, but I thought this was interesting enough to warrant a thread of its own. Meltzer, writing about Steve Austin's failed heel turn in 2001, said that Austin was more like Bruno, and there was a reason Bruno never turned heel. My question is, what exactly is the difference between the two and their connection with the crowd? Parv talked about Bruno being more earthy, but, I am not sure that is true. Hogan was presented as a larger-than-life superstar. Bruno was presented as a larger-than-life superstar, although not as cartoonish. So, how did Bruno get more earthy? Was it because of his understated promos? I …

Simply put, what matches could and perhaps should have happened, but never did? I'm not talking about how the WWF should have signed Sting, Goldberg etc for the invasion (that discussion has already been held enough times), but instead what matches were actually possible and for whatever reason (money, politics, stubbornness) didn't happen. For example, I'm amazed that WWE didn't run Undertaker vs Cena at Wrestlemania this year. It would have guaranteed a monster amount of interest and buys, with the result of an Undertaker mania match actually in reasonable doubt for the first time in years. (Possibly since the Orton match at 21). It's also amazing to think t…

I have no idea how much of this has already been floating around, but Chicago Film Archives just started uploading this stuff on YouTube. Most of the matches are full length, and it features tons of all time greats & HOF'ers. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWXxP_rvXryBPpjIw7Dl9Tg/videos

For this week's podcast, we're looking at classic examples of guys in wrestling history who may have been more successful if they had come around at a different time or place, and as always, we're looking for your suggestions. So who is the ONE guy that you've always watched and thought they would have done better had they come along at a different time or place, when would have been the best time for them, and more importantly, why? I'm really looking forward to the feedback from you guys on this, as there's been a lot of tape watching done that would identify some of the unsung gems who were caught in the midst of the wrong time frame to stand out... We'll be reading t…

I'm not really following it, but considering how much talk of it there is everywhere, we should have a thread for people to post their thoughts. Have at it.

After the WWE did another bad decision on Monday with Charlotte I started wondering about women's wrestling in the States. All Japan Women had a huge run in Japan. The women in UFC have done huge business too. So, will any American company utilize women in a proper way? Can a company focusing on Women be successful, ala Lucha Underground or something? Will the WWE ever push women in a prominent spot? Is this business in America just too sexist or what are your thoughts on this?

Posted Today, 10:59 PM Hi all, Apologies, I'm new to posting on the board and I accidentally posted this over in the Greatest Wrestler Ever section but couldn't work out how to delete my own posts. I'm guessing mods have to do it? If so, sorry for giving you extra work! Anyway, sorry to crosspost this from the Definitive Puroresu Facebook group but I'm guessing not everyone here is on that and I wanted to get the take of those more knowledgeable than me on this. So in discussing a recent piece in the Observer about NJPW World, their new network type thing, the point was made that they can't hope to expand business until they create their next generation of talent.…

Had a discussion about this via e-mail and the question was posed to me about whether or not Ray Stevens was the primary influence of the "Pinball" style of bumping, taking such bumps as the upside-down-turnbuckle roll (ala Flair), or holding the ropes and getting your leg kicked so you go flying upwards (ala Hennig). A lot of guys that worked in the late 70's and 80's that employed some form of the Pinball style as their styles developed (such as Adrian Adonis, or Curt Hennig) would have had exposure to Stevens in their formative years, so I can see them learning from him. Bobby Heenan would certainly have picked up a lot of how he bumped from watching and working w…

What is everyones opinion on this? I dont know why they do it, I remember they did it a few years ago I think it was either Angle or Khali winning a World Title on smackdown and they gave it away on WWE.com before the match had even been televised. One that really got my head scratching was 1984. I was tuning in last night watching WWF Championship Wrestling edition January 14th 1984 and after the first match Gene Okerlund says Hogan beat Sheik for the belt and we have more news on this later. Considering this aired a good 9 days before the MSG its a bit strange why they would do a announcement for this. What I found even more baffling was they were promoting …

Hey guys, I've been reading here for a while and try to participate where I can, but I had a cool idea. I floated the idea somewhere else but it just got buried, and then I realized it would be smarter to do it here instead. Essentially I want to see who watches the most wrestling, most diverse viewing, what decades are viewed the most, etc. So here are a couple of guidelines. - Matches can only count once, no duplicates allowed (Same match up but different date is of course acceptable) - Doesn't have to be just 2015 Wrestling. - Challenge goes from 12:01 AM EST on 01/01/15 to 11:59 PM EST 12/31/15. - Please don't lie, no prizes are involved so what is the point …

Sad news as Jimmy Del Ray has passed away. The Heavenly Bodies are a damn great team IMO and really anchored SMW for large portions of its existence.