anarchistxx

Wonder whatever happened to Alex Shane. His 2002 match with Paul London was a favorite of mine at the time, probably wouldn't hold up now though. Thought he had quite a bit of potential, literally seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

Cody had a decent look, and seemed to have some spark at the beginning. Hard to think of a memorable singles match he had though, and for someone featured prominently in the company for over a decade that is appalling. The tag matches with The Shield were pretty special, though. He won't be hugely missed. Hard to see where his role on the card could be moving forward, since he isn't a workrate midcarder who can make people look good, and doesn't have the size to be a monster or the athleticism to be a flyer, he doesn't excel on the mic or at comedy. He didn't fit any niche really. Hanging around in various teams as a useful tag worker is as good as it was going to get. Perhaps he should have joined forces with Randy Orton again as the Hollywood Blands. Seems like someone who could have been really over in another era as a white meat underdog or a blowjob babyface. On an unrelated note the main event on Smackdown was very well booked and delivered. Decent match, too.

Ryback's argument seems pretty misguided to me. Saying 'the people who lose matches get paid less' is very reductive, because the reason they are losing is that they are seen as lower card talent who are less important to the company/brand and therefore should be paid less. They aren't getting paid less because they are losing - in a sense they are losing because they are paid less. WWE pay structure rewards those workers whom the management think are the most important to the company, the most valuable. It figures that those workers will be booked to win more often, to stay strong. I'm sure Ryback wasn't moaning about enhancement talent earning less than him when he was on top of the card going through jobbers every week. Does John Cena get paid more because he wins a lot of matches? No. He gets paid more because the company values him as their top star. Ryback might be right in that some people are getting paid more than they deserve and some people are getting paid less than they deserve. But it certainly isn't for the reasons he articulates, and it is also something that happens in every company in the world, because of all the variables than are involved. Equal pay will not work because in wrestling the contributions are unequal. Wrestlers should be paid based on how much revenue they bring into the organisation.

It's an unrealistic fantasy of course, but The Shield vs Brock Lesnar & The Briscoes is what dreams are made of.

The post production on that Chris Jericho opening segment on Smackdown was amusing. Cutaways to the crowd showing kids with thumbs down and a piped in 'You suck' chant from some other time in the show that the audience had clearly been prompted to say. When they cut back to Jericho in the ring the crowd wasn't doing anything like what they were showing on the supposedly contemporaneous cutaway shots. At another time they failed to match the audio up with the supposed chanting and the people they cut to in the crowd were chanting different stuff. All a bit unnecessary.

Even the talk show is ridiculous. What kind of unhinged crazy lunatic hosts a fucking talk show? Other than Piers Morgan.

I don't think the idea of a 'safe space' contributes to discussion really. There really isn't much scope for 'triggering' here, otherwise people wouldn't watch such a regularly distasteful and offensive industry in the first place. This is primarily a very liberal and progressive forum, especially in comparison to the product itself and the rest of the IWC, I think tagging on the 'safe space' moniker can be anti debate.

That might be just perception though. When Wrestlemania is bad, expectations are lowered so any improvement in the product seems marked. When Wrestlemania delivers, it feels like they have some momentum and it is deflating to watch them lose it again and again and the product return to the usual levels of inconsistency and mediocrity.

Yes, against HHH - who also had heatless, boring, ineffective Mania main events against Randy Orton and Chris Jericho. See the common denominator here? Roman Reigns had a superb main event the previous year against Brock Lesnar. The way that match was structured and played out was perfect. That should have been his coronation, not the stale predictable Money In The Bank run in that makes a mockery of having a title match at all. Has it? He gets a huge reaction on every show, probably the biggest on the card. A mixed reaction, but a reaction nonetheless. All heat is good heat in the current climate. Noise shows people care one way or the other. Gone are the days when traditional heels and babyfaces will get the 'correct' reactions all the time. John Cena got the same reactions in 2006, and had the same people saying his push had been a massive failure because he was getting a lot of boos from the smart crowd. That turned out just fine. It isn't as if there is anyone else on the card to go to, so it is well worth persevering with someone who has a fantastic look, natural charisma, is a believable badass and has the crowd making noise. These days people are always begging Vince not to keep forcing someone down their throats. I've certainly always gone to bat for him. He has been badly let down by booking. He exudes star power, and has done for some time. His push in early 2015 was misguided, especially since at the time people thought Daniel Bryan was healthy and deserved a proper run with the strap as the most over guy on the roster. A lot of the heat on Reigns can be traced back to him getting pushed over DB at that time. Still, the company shouldn't have bottled it. He should have gone over Lesnar clean and had a proper run, instead of the stop-start stuff that happened over the last few months. I didn't see any of his work in the second half of 2015 really so can't comment on that.

Nothing with Kevin Owens in is interesting. Also, they need to retire the Money In The Bank gimmick as well, so tired and played out. The belt loses all credibility when you are essentially defending it under 24/7 rules like the fucking hardcore title. The title matches really suffer also, because: a. they cease to mean anything when someone can come down at the end when they are exhausted and win the belt b. the crowd are often sat around waiting for the Money In The Bank run in If they must keep the match they should have the winner needing to give 24 hours notice before he cashes in the contract.

IMO, Ambrose has been unintentionally sabotaged just as much as Reigns (if you don't buy the "political hit" theory, and I don't). He's terrible at his current persona because he's been turned into a goof with a bad talk show, bad lines, etc. He'd be fine again if he got more freedom. Remember, he supposedly had a bunch of ideas for the Brock WrestleMania match and they got shot down, leading to what was easily the most disappointing match on the show and the most disappointing match I've seen all year. I do agree with all of this. He must die a little inside every time they make him tell some lame joke or cringe inducing line. You can hear the nervous deflation in the crowd as well, this stuff isn't even over and yet the writers have been dishing out these embarrassing gags to their 'happy go lucky' faces for years. Whether it is intentional sabotage is questionable, since they have such a long, esteemed history with incompetent booking. Doesn't even feel original either, they seem to want to reincarnate him as a combination of Mankind and Steve Austin and it is all so obvious and lacking in subtlety. WWE can't do quirky or crazy characters without overplaying everything to the point where it looks like a badly written cartoon. Just let him run with it and be himself. Don't think he is good enough in ring to ever be in the top tier, but he definitely has a place in and around the main event scene. He should be protected in tags and weapon filled brawls and put in as few regular singles matches as possible, since he is very unconvincing as a conventional worker.

The AJ Styles vs Roman Reigns feud has been booked beautifully. So nice to see some ambiguity for once, instead of everything running in predictable straight lines. Reigns looks like such a star, has an aura beyond that of anyone else on that show. Absolutely amazes me that people think Dean Ambrose should be in his spot. It is amusing that the criticism is that Ambrose is 'authentic' whereas Reigns is a 'fake product', because in practice it works the other way round - Ambrose is really forced and doesn't sell his unhinged 'loose cannon' character at all, where Reigns has this natural charisma and is much more believable. The IC title scene has been booked quite nicely as well, as bad as Kevin Owens and The Miz are. Enjoyed the way it played out at Payback, with the matches crossing over into one another, a good example of the cross pollination this product so badly needs that I was arguing for a couple of months back. The main event scene has also rectified this a bit with The Usos and Bullet Club involvement, it opens up far more possibility than the complete separation of feuds which leads to predictable one dimensional booking. I had planned to take a break from the product but Payback was much better than expected. In the ring it was poor, and there are still too many people that don't give you a reason to get invested, but as a show itself it was put together nicely. Loved all the run ins in the main event, added to the drama.

Don't think Ambrose would have to turn. For a start, he would be a dreadful heel as a singles wrestler, doesn't have the offence to carry it off or the ability to be in control of a match for long periods. You could just run the match as it is now, since the fans who are in love with Ambrose are the types to despise Reigns. Just run it as a weird face vs face match with ambiguity. That is the beauty of Roman Reigns right now, he can work with a face or a heel because his reactions are so mixed. This is just a postsmark dream. Bubba Dudley is not a main event wrestler in a top company, no matter how fun and enjoyable his stuff is sometimes. He doesn't look or sound like a star. This is the sort of mini feud they should be running though to freshen up the booking. Have a small feud over something petty and have Reigns run through him.

This is every list thread, ever. The whole point is that people discuss placement, and a part of that is disgruntlement that certain workers finished higher/lower than a particular poster thought they deserved. It is inevitable in this kind of project. I don't think it is negativity to say "x finished scandalously low" so long as you are prepared to articulate why you had formulated that opinion. JVK himself spent many posts mocking the placement of The Undertaker, usually with flippant dismissive remarks that added nothing to the discussion or gifs he considered to be humorous. That is far more likely to put people off the threads than someone complaining that Joshi workers finished too low due to underexposure or reacting in bemusement because Chris Hero finished ahead of some pimped lucha worker or whatever.

Too many new people. No reason to give two fucks about most of them. They are almost uniformly badly presented, badly booked, don't exude any natural charisma. The influx has been too fast. No retread? Ryback, Dolph Ziggler, The Miz, Cesaro,Chris Jericho - all acts who have become stale and lost any momentum. Jericho at least still knows how to cut a promo and make his feuds feel worthwhile. Cesaro doesn't feel special or hot anymore. Just seems bereft of any exciting acts, anyone with star power or who you are invested in.

Is this just a natural result of him retreating into his own mind/ass/ego though, a product of overthinking it and bestowing on it an importance that was unrealistic? The stakes are nil. Literally nothing in the real world is affected by these results. It will even have only a minuscule effect on internet wrestling fandom as a whole. It is just a list, a fairly meaningless list. If people discovered wrestling, had fun, enjoyed it immensely...well, that makes the process worthwhile. But it doesn't mean the list is anything other than another arbitrary, pointless list like the other thousands of such lists about music or film or literature or art on the internet. It is superior to a lot of list due to the number of experts and hardcore fans involved who made it a more educated evaluation. That doesn't make it important. As El-P noted, pretending anything was really at stake is just histrionic navel gazing.

There are about three people I care about on that entire card. WWE feels so light on credible talent at the minute. So many are either unestablished acts who give you no reason to care, stale acts like Ryback & Dolph Ziggler or worthless vets who have been stinking the place up for years like The Miz. Probably three people on the entire show who exude any star power. This company is in a state.

You can't bring politics or social values into something as sleazy as wrestling. Once you start going down that road you end up ranking workers based on their moral, cultural and social qualities. That is pretty dangerous on a list where the good proportion of US workers have stories depicting them as anything from unpleasant bullies to misogynistic pricks to sexual offenders to murderers to selfish drug addicts to manipulative users. Social justice and political worldview have a place in wrestling discussion, but not when discussing the merits of people as workers. Of course, I'm sure that subconsciously it has some effect.

I have a good memory for pointless and irrelevant information. Wish I had the same powers of retention for knowledge that is actually useful. Smarkschoice was a really good board - there was an excellent balance between serious wrestling posters, people who just liked to joke around off topic, people chatting about music and film, a good spectrum of personalities. PWO is really good in a different way - probably the most 'academic' wrestling board there has ever been, a true archive of information. Would be terrible is a lot of the content on here was lost. Considering the fairly humble beginnings as New Millenium Blues on as I recall some free Proboards server, this board has flourished to be the best wrestling forum on the internet by an absolute country mile.

How long did it take before the board went down. Wasn't some hacking involved too by a loony member, or did I just mix this with something completely different ? Seems so long ago, almost like another life (and really, it was, on more personal levels). The initial board was gone by sometime in early 2007 - all the content was lost, as well as the content from the earlier forum from circa 2000-2003 which had been preserved as a viewable archive. Nobody had been paying the server bills since early 2006 or something, and eventually the host pulled the plug and none of it was retrievable. Unfortunate, as you would have thought there was some way to preserve an archive. The board was restarted as a free forum, Invision or something. It never regained the popularity but had a reasonable amount of traffic. There was a 'Best WWF/E Matches' poll that got some traction. The 'loony member' you refer to is Modest, who as the forum declined in activity gained admin rights - and promptly wiped the whole thing. It was restarted and hacked and wiped another time as well I think. Still exists as a ghost town here http://s7.zetaboards.com/Smarkschoice/index/. Agree it seems like another lifetime. An age when the internet had not been homogenized, when it was less of an extension of real life and more of a lawless little corner where you could indulge fandoms and meet people as a completely separate dimension from what was happening in the real world. I was really young at the time so possibly it is just nostalgia talking. A lot has changed in my life and my psyche since those days, it all seems quite alien to me. Unsure how I even find myself here on wrestling message boards over a decade later - I haven't been properly into wrestling since Smarkschoice shut down. Weirdly the explosion of cheap footage on DVD contributed to this - I ended up having so much wrestling to watch that it became joyless, and it lost the magic of playing a six disc AJPW set at £5 a disc over and over. Force of habit, I suppose, and a compulsion to escape to some hidden room where I can read and discuss pretty meaningless things outside the parameters of real life.

Is anyone actually listening to these Podcasts though, or are they just vanity projects for those heavily involved in the project to discuss things among themselves? I can't think of anything worse than listening to three hours of wrestling discussion, especially since if it was written down in text form on a board you could read through it in twenty minutes. The amount of replies to the reveal threads on here shows that the message board isn't a dead format yet. There is something more narcissistic and isolating about posting thoughts on your own blog or radio show or site instead of on the public discussion forum that the project was built on. It can be anti discussion. Depends if you saw the project as an individual, insular journey or just a nice group event really. The Smarkschoice board was gone a few months after the 2006 project, so you could call it either a death knell or a last hurrah of a message board institution. The collapse of the board cannot be entirely blamed on the vacuum of purpose and discussion following the end of such a project, though. The list had actually revitalised that forum, because traffic was down for a while and the people funding the board were losing interest in wrestling and boarding, so the list brought a lot of people back in again to try and rediscover their fandom. It didn't really work, and once the bills stopped being paid it dragged on for a few more months before they cut it off and all was lost. Nobody took the list that seriously, either, as has been mentioned. Every couple of months there was a list on the board about music, film, wrestling or whatever. There wasn't much hand wringing or soul searching about the results. I doubt the completion of this list will spell the end of PWO or wrestling message boards in general. There will always be people willing to discuss and hang out online in this format - it is a nice refuge from the more open ended forms of social media. Niche little corners of the internet should be preserved. They have far more heart and soul than a million Twitter feeds sending out worthless sentences into the ether.

Well, that is the end of that. Thanks for everyone who put in the time and effort to make it happen, very enjoyable. My ballot: Toshiaki Kawada Chris Benoit Aja Kong Jumbo Tsuruta Akira Hokuto Jun Akiyama Jushin Liger Bret Hart Kenta Kobashi Hiroshi Hase Manami Toyota Daniel Bryan Ric Flair Rey Mysterio Jr. Jim Breaks Eddie Guerrero KENTA Steve Austin Mitsuharu Misawa Brock Lesnar Harley Race Shinjiro Ohtani Dean Malenko Devil Masami Ricky Steamboat Katsuhiko Nakajima TAKA Michinoku Matt Sydal Dynamite Kid Arn Anderson Kyoko Inoue Hiroshi Tanahashi Jaguar Yokota Ricky Morton Bull Nakano Rob Van Dam Juventud Guerrera Koji Kanemoto Mariko Yoshida Minoru Tanaka Samoa Joe Shawn Michaels Shinya Hashimoto Jeff Hardy Satoshi Kojima Stan Hansen Yoshihiro Tajiri Kurt Angle Tatsumi Fujinami CM Punk Dump Matsumoto Genichiro Tenryu Great Sasuke Minoru Suzuki Masa Fuchi Mayumi Ozaki Scott Hall Randy Savage Vader Bison Kimura Sean Waltman Chikayo Nagashima Low-Ki Yoshiaki Fujiwara Tully Blanchard Kerry Von Erich Bruiser Brody Riki Choshu Abdullah the Butcher Akira Taue Yoshinobu Kanemaru Mick Foley Ultimo Dragon Akira Maeda Necro Butcher Kota Ibushi Raven Psicosis Rick Rude Ole Anderson AJ Styles Takao Omori Tsuyoshi Kikuchi Jay Briscoe Mark Briscoe New Jack Abdullah Kobayashi Arisa Nakajima Scott Steiner Gran Hamada Mistico Booker-T Makoto Hashi Suwama Jim Brunzell Daisuke Ikeda Dragon Kid Jinsei Shinzaki Paul London Dusty Rhodes

NOAH fans ? As good an explanation as any, I suppose. Misawa doesn't have a huge case based on his NOAH work though, and you would assume someone who dug him in that setting enough to list him would have worked backwards to his AJPW stuff and thus been exposed to Kawada.

For some reason I had always assumed that Matt Stryker and Matt Striker were the same person until now. Probably because pretty much my only exposure to the WWE version was as a commentator, so made the connection that it was the worker from ROH.

Strange that eight people who voted for Misawa didn't vote for Kawada.