Loss

If anything comes out of GWE at all, I really hope it's that when this is over, we can table all the spinoff battles of the Flair-Bret thread that are still going. And going. And going.

We've talked about the slippery slope of intent before. That's why I wouldn't factor that in.

He wasn't always that feisty. He just really hated the idea of GWE. Opinionated, yes, but not feisty. He was also at DVDVR as ValeRudo and Ravishing Rick Rudo if that rings any bells.

Any spots that require setup shouldn't be done.

Everyone, I started a self-contained thread for Benoit talk, if you could continue that there. Thanks for understanding.

Just creating this thread for people to post whatever they want to say about Chris Benoit and GWE in here. I think it may be best to keep all of that talk limited to this thread just so it doesn't color everything, but I do think having a place for people to talk on this topic is important.

I get the joke, but someone asked the question of what his best 00s matches were. and it was answered. Understood. So I'll tweak my question: Are those simply his best matches, or the matches where he contributed the most in a positive way, end quality level be damned?

Seriously though, I thought lists of good matches weren't supposed to prove anything.

The thing about Great Aura Theory is that it focuses more on output than input.

Undertaker's lows aren't just lows. They are the skeleton bones buried beneath the sewer system of pro wrestling.

Someone who follows the in-ring more than me can say if WWE matches were better when Flair was in TNA and they gave the edict to everyone except Yoshi Tatsu to stop doing them.

Lots of guys in wrestling seems to love Ziggler -- Flair, Nash, Shawn, Cornette, Steamboat. Austin is the only one to really offer up useful critiques of his working style.

Chops were so much better when only a handful of guys did them, and when they didn't get the "WHOOO!", which, SHUT UP.

I think the Low Ki criticism translates to "He's a great worker, but I hate every time that I have to begrudgingly admit that about a guy who played to 'This is awesome' and 'Match of the Year' chants in front of a few hundred attention whores far too frequently."

I said this on WWTP, but watching young Andre really puts in perspective how awful Kevin Nash was. It's not that Nash wasn't a great athlete or anything like that. It's that he was a 7-foot-tall dude who could just suck the life out of a match because everything he did felt so small. The guy had a certain charisma when walking to the ring with his friends or doing shoot interviews, but in the ring, it just completely vanished. Andre was a great athlete, but Andre's athleticism was incidental to him being a great worker. His calling card for me was that there was no wasted movement -- everything he did just seemed so consequential and "big". He had so much presence, and not just because of his size. Thinking about big men, I realized when making that comparison that even though Nash is probably more fundamentally competent, I'd still put Sid higher on a list like this. Sid's charisma at least didn't disappear into thin air when the bell rang.

Cena's no great shakes there either, but he's much more fundamentally sound than The Rock.

Also, yeah yeah, crowd connection, but have you seen Rock's sharpshooter and spinebuster and punches and just overall general fundamental awfulness?

It's funny that Rock is 101, because I imagine this super-long promo about it full of outdated dudebro jokes that will continue until the morning when the countdown resumes.

I'm pretty sure they have faced each other, but it's never made tape, sadly.

I do think in general guys like Dylan are sometimes branded as anti-Flair when I think it's more that they have to sometimes focus on his weaknesses in order to make whatever point they are trying to make. Similar to how some people laughingly think I'm anti-Bret Hart. No one that I know of except GOTNW and Frankensteiner thinks Ric Flair was anything less than a top-tier, great wrestler.

Hell of an accomplishment for those who have praised and recommended Puerto Rico footage. I expect a much higher overall placement ten years from now, but wow, impressive.

Hogan in Japan reminds me a lot of Johnny Ace in Japan.

Continuing to read that thread and it looks like a lot of us shared our final ballots in it. I was a lot more adventurous then it would seem, trying to put people like El Texano in my top 100.

"He was a great heel and annoying as fuck but being the king of Portland is like being the top dog in CZW today. It doesn't mean much in my eyes." -- goodhelmet on Buddy Rose

Me working out my ballot picks here back in 2006, with others chiming in: http://goo.gl/evKa8L