Loss

Piper in the 90s probably won't change your opinion of him at all.

I'll also throw Jericho vs Ultimo and the lucha six-man from Bash at the Beach up for discussion. Both were ****1/4 in the WON, but does anyone have special appreciation of either match?

Is Vader/Owen a better pick to keep than Vader/Shamrock earlier in the year? Are both absolutely necessary? Also, what are everyone's thoughts on Shawn vs Austin at KOTR? That seems like a keeper, but just checking since no one ever really talks about that match much.

Goldberg's first WWE match was against The Rock, which he won. I do agree with the rest of the point though. If they were going to push Goldberg as indestructible, there was no point in hiring him at all.

Well that statement makes me feel like I'm in court.

Taka/Sasuke at a minimum.

Alex Wright really did progress very quickly as a worker in a short period of time, and it's a shame his career turned out the way it did.

The other match I'll ask about is Owen vs Vader at One Night Only. Does it need to go on at all? I like the match, but I think Bret/Undertaker and Shawn/Davey Boy are the two must-have things from that show. Soup, we definitely won't forsake any of the more rare stuff. I just want to make sure we don't take the WWF/WCW clipping too far. I really like Ultimo vs Alex Wright from Fall Brawl, but that doesn't feel essential either, even though it is a very good match.

What about War Games? Obviously, you want the Curt Hennig turn, but what about the match in full?

On the flip side, I do think Hogan/Rodman vs Luger/Giant should be in full, because of the announcers flipping out about every single thing Dennis Rodman does. I think finish only there would be wrong. We will also include Hogan vs Sting from Starrcade in full even though it's not really a good match.

Thanks. That helps. That's a match we'd include in full in a normal year, but I'm fine cutting it. Yes, One Night Only will be on in full for sure.

I'm actually going to throw this question to the group. Is it critical that Bret vs Undertaker from Summerslam '97 be included in full? Or can it just be the finish? Obviously, the angle was huge, but I have no idea about the match quality itself.

It's hard to say because we're still waiting on a few things to arrive, but we've gone line-by-line through 2/3rds of the year at this point. We usually have to do that 2-3 times before we've got it at 30 discs.

Hayabusa is a wrestler I'm looking forward to seeing in 1997, along with Kintaro Kanemura and Masato Tanaka. FMW had really good in-ring years in 1995 and 1996. I love Onita death matches, but Hayabusa did change the tone of the promotion. The violence was still there, but there was a lot more wrestling to go with it. I think that only increases as the decade goes on, to a point where FMW may be the only promotion in the world by 1999 that's better at the end of the decade than it was at the beginning of it. For Japanese indies, we also get our first glimpse of Big Japan, and Michinoku Pro continues their hot run. Lucha has CMLL and (very little, if any) AAA, but also has Promo Azteca, with famous Rey/Santo and Santo/Psicosis matches, along with the famous riot. Joshi is more splintered too. Soup mentioned AJW and GAEA, but I'm happy with the choices for JWP, LLPW and even Jd' as well. There are also a couple of women's matches from FMW.

If you're interested in rare stuff, also expect to see some ECWA, OMEGA, Music City and IWA Mid South.

It's pretty close to being a reality. It's an insanely loaded year. When we realized that the Cibernetico is followed by the Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi Carnival finals, and that's followed by the famous Austin/Bret streetfight on RAW, it really put in perspective how ridiculously good this year was. Many things that are borderline picks would be strong picks in just about any other year, and many things we'd normally include for filler just won't find their way on to this set. We'll end up leaving many good matches on the cutting room floor, but I think we're going to really capture what 1997 was all about, and the end result is that this should be the highest-quality yearbook we have ever done. If there's a promotion in the world other than AAA that wasn't having a banner year, I sure don't know about it.

Good stuff, Dylan. Are you prepared to rank the top matches you've seen this year as well?

There's no agenda here. This has nothing to do with Dave Meltzer or message board wars, and I wish Dave hadn't even been brought into the conversation. I wasn't sure if I would like the other New Japan, so I picked something that based on the description sounded right up my alley, because I was actually looking to be positive. I didn't care for it, but I'm not going to indict all of New Japan as awful based on watching one match that was praised that I didn't like either. People are silly.

I've seen quite a few matches where a Rey opponent stammers around and then drops to their knees on the middle rope. There was no specific move Rey did to put them in that position.

Carly Simon did an auction where the winner would find out who "You're So Vain" was about, but that was for charity, so I guess that doesn't count.

Not that either is a particularly great thing, but it makes far more sense for a delusional heel to repeatedly try a move that they can never hit than it does for someone to maneuver themselves into an unnatural ring position that they would never do against any other opponent so they can feed a babyface offense. I love Rey, but I hate the 619. I agree that it's a WWE style thing more than a Rey thing. The same thing was true of moves like the Bronco Buster and the Stinkface in the Attitude era.

I watched Goto/Shibata because the descriptions of the match intrigued me. I thought it was garbage. The repeated no selling of the belly-to-back suplexes annoyed the fuck out of me, not to mention that I don't expect to see matches heralded for their "realism" that contain Russian legsweeps, lariats and Irish whips. Those things happening in a match aren't bad on their own, but it just shows a major disconnect from what I was expecting and how the match was described in the WON. It made me expect a RINGS-style match with sprinkles of pro-style moves mixed in. All the slapping during the figure four spot really makes the hold itself seem unimportant, and I HATE slugfests where they seem to just be waiting to deliver the next shot instead of individually selling each shot as something that hurts. Goto also has some really crappy, Edge-looking offense like that twirly-whatever thing that led to the nearfall around the 13-minute mark. But hey, the kicks were stiff. The finishing sequence didn't really build in a way where it was clear Shibata had any momentum. It was just two guys exchanging moves with none of them having much consequence, and then there was a finish. Not sure what made that last kick so devastating when they were so prevalent all the way through the match. I went in wanting to like this a lot, but I didn't at all.

WWE has told her they will no longer pay for her rehab.

Flair pinned Hogan two weeks before this.

Bobby Eaton, Negro Casas, Billy Joe Travis and Ric Flair are the first people that come to mind for me, probably in that order.