NintendoLogic

There is no universally agreed-upon set of criteria, so subjectivity is inevitable. Which is like I'd like to move away from speculation about people's motivations. Are people going to favor criteria that cast their favorites in the best possible light? Probably. But it's not really relevant whether you first decide what's important and then see who best fits the bill or work your way backwards to stack the deck in favor of the guys you like. As long as you're open about the standards you use and apply them consistently, I don't see the problem.

Rock won after a restart against Chris Benoit at Fully Loaded 2000, but it was with a Rock Bottom.

First two matches were both solid. The tendency to give creative finishes to matches that are supposed to be feud-enders will never not piss me off, though. The Rumble was a lot better than last year's. Much less dead weight, much less reliance on comedy and nostalgia pops. The Bo/Wade segment sucked, though. It's one of those things that makes both guys look like shit. Rock/Punk was definitely better than Rock/Cena. It was an especially miraculous performance from Punk considering that Rock looked as blown up as Bulldog at Wembley. If the ending was so they could run an angle where they hold the title up and hopefully draw a bigger buyrate for Elimination Chamber, I'd rather they just have Punk retain. Overall, there was nothing earth-shattering, but everything was at least decent, so it's an easy thumbs-up.

From where I sit, I see a lot more unprovoked derisiveness from New Japan haters than unprovoked defensiveness from New Japan fans.

I have to say that I find Loss' argument far more persuasive, to the point where I would now rate Flair above Funk on a GOAT list. So this discussion has served a purpose.

I agree that psychology is more important than execution. But psychology can be taught. Worst case scenario, someone can lay matches out for you. But if you don't possess the requisite athletic ability to physically perform in a match, there's nothing that can be done. Look at Giant Baba. He "got" wrestling arguably as well as anyone who ever lived. But once he went downhill athletically, he relegated himself to comedy matches. And since we're talking about post-prime Terry Funk, remember that the guy was doing moonsaults in his fifties. He may not have been the athlete he was in his thirties, but he was objectively very impressive.

The problem with this is that I think it misinterprets what wrestling is. If you're saying that someone should be able to compensate for diminished athleticism by working smarter, you're assuming that wrestling is mainly a mental activity. But it's mainly a physical one. With that said, I wouldn't discount matches after one's prime entirely, but I view them as roughly equivalent to bonus questions on a test. They can't count against you, only for you. But I wouldn't take them into account for head-to-head comparison purposes unless I thought their primes were close to equal.

OJ. http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?show...p;#entry5530949

I'm pretty sure the Sun City part of Phil's review was a joking reference to the protest song by Steven Van Zandt. I haven't seen anything stating where that Regal match took place, but Tiger Dalibar Singh and Gama Singh drew several big houses in Durban, so if it's a match in South Africa where an Indian guy is the ethnic babyface, that's probably where it took place.

I thought the handspring elbow counter was more of an uranage than a release German. Regardless, I'll echo the praise for this match. Vader totally looked like WCW Vader, and Mutoh was kind of foreshadowing Hansen/Kobashi with all the pin attempts he was going for at the end. Mutoh's no-selling comebacks were pretty annoying, but this was great otherwise.

We're in agreement about Hash/Ogawa being a disaster, so let's move on. That's not how the formula works. Look at your own post about the Bruno/Backlund formula. The first match ends with the babyface getting DQed after losing his temper or the match getting stopped due to blood loss or some other schmoz. The babyface doesn't get a decisive win until the blowoff. If it were a standard match and Cena had to resort to hitting Lesnar with a chain while the ref was down, that might work. But it was a no-DQ match. Within the context of the stipulation, Cena's win was perfectly clean.

I had planned on responding to SLL's last post, but recent events have rendered a response superfluous. If you want to know what going out of your way to not protect someone looks like, look no further than Dolph Ziggler's current booking. Anyway, tomk with the run-in: We've already been over this. To make this argument, you picked an arbitrary starting point that omits Cena's year-plus reign and his earlier 280-day reign. Not to mention that in 2012, Cena was in the main event of every PPV where he was on the card despite holding the world title for exactly zero days during that period. Divorcing the ace from the world title doesn't constitute not protecting the ace. Unforgiven wasn't supposed to be the blowoff. They were clearly building toward Orton taking the title from Cena at No Mercy, but Cena got injured.

Dropping stuff from one's repertoire while not adding anything new does not constitute reinventing oneself.

My take on Regal is that he's absolutely outstanding at the little things that add spice to a match. But he's not nearly as good at the big picture type stuff, so the whole tends to be less than the sum of its parts. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single Regal match that was really strong from a storytelling standpoint. Also, someone needs to tell Phil that Durban, South Africa has a huge Indian population. In fact, it's the largest of any city outside of India.

From the F4W Raw report: JBL said a while back that the key to being a bad guy is to have no redeeming qualities and not do anything that could be perceived as cool. So burying heels for being geeks doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than to get JBL over.

My first post was probably unnecessarily harsh, so I apologize for that. Still, while Jerry is willing to make arguments for the guys he likes, he seems to struggle with following those arguments to their logical conclusions and tends to shy away from addressing the strongest objections. That's what gives me the impression that they're not entirely thought out.

Hash/Ogawa did ratings that were objectively great. Russo may have produced a slight uptick in ratings (though that was probably more due to Nitro going from three hours to two), but they were still nowhere close to parity with the WWF. That's great and all, but it doesn't answer the question of who in New Japan was so big that it would have undermined the storyline of Kawada as invader. Also, just out of curiosity, how tall do you think Kawada and Sasaki really are? By who? Where in the formula does Bruno or Backlund get a pinfall victory in the first match? Other than special cases like the heel getting an automatic rematch after losing the title, the babyface getting the 1-2-3 ends the feud. Why would you? Cena won. There's nothing left to settle.

The problem is that Jerry operates under the assumption that the guys he marked out for as a kid are the end-all be-all of wrestling and works his way backward to whatever argument he thinks will lead to that conclusion.

Negro Casas is the wrestling name of Jose Casas Ruiz son of Pepe Casas. He is dark and a guy who was inspired by wrestler Negro Navarro. In general with pop culture, it isn't a good idea to do literal translations. Hulk Hogan's gimmick isn't that he's a giant traditional Navajo house. The Hogan part of his name is because Vince Sr. wanted to bill him as Irish, and the Hulk part was to identify him as big and strong like The Incredible Hulk. So in his case, a literal translation works fine. Anyway, if I'm not mistaken, Panther went with the English version of his name because there already was a luchador named Pantera Azul.

I'd basically agree with this. But the gist of the pro-Bret argument is that Flair may win out on quantity, but Bret wins out on quality. Flair may have worked better with Joe Broomstick, but Bret worked better with great workers. Agreed, but I regard the latter as a negative and not a positive. Also, I would argue that the latter is largely responsible for the former. It's easier to carry stiffs as a heel because everyone wants to see you get your ass kicked. Making your opponent look like a threat while not appearing weak yourself is a much tighter balancing act. Sure, but as long as we're talking about shit that has nothing to do with in-ring ability, Bret has fewer failed marriages. Wait, what? Bret was repetitive because he had signature moves? Also, the Five Moves of Doom talking points drive me crazy because almost all of them are wrong. It wasn't five moves, he didn't always do them in succession, and he didn't do them in every match. "I keep using these same moves, because they usually make me win" is so broad that it can be applied to literally every wrestler in history and is thus completely meaningless. Beyond that, I'm rather stunned that Bret's versatility is being questioned. Look at his matches with Davey Boy: the Summerslam match is almost completely different from the IYH match. Then there's the whole deal with Austin. They had an all-time classic match and then had a completely different all-time classic match four months later. How many wrestlers in history can make that claim? Anyway, I'd like to go back to the objectivity thing for a second. In what ways is Flair objectively better than Bret that isn't also true of Hulk Hogan? Yes, he worked harder. What else?

He was talking about Funks vs. Brody/Snuka, but does it really matter?

When I came across the following quote on Lorefice's site, I immediately knew that I had to share it here:

I wouldn't call this a great match, but it is super fun. Savage and Tenryu have styles that complement each other perfectly and work really well in a dome setting. One thing I'm not a fan of is Sherri's involvement. It's like Tully Blanchard said. When managers directly interfere in a match, it puts the heat on them and not the heels they're managing. Still, the spot where she clocks Tenryu with her shoe and he sells it like a Jumbo lariat always puts a smile on my face.

Meltzer: "But years later, in a similar situation–the first All Japan vs. New Japan singles main event, Toshiaki Kawada vs. Kensuke Sasaki, New Japan put the outsider over. In doing so, they got a sellout the second time as well. But after Sasaki went over in the rematch, Kawada was never anywhere close to the level of a draw for New Japan again." Also, I'm a bit confused by your assertion that it took someone as short as Sasaki for Kawada to be a credible opponent. Kawada was perfectly credible against Doc and Vader and Stan Hansen and Gary Albright. Who on the New Japan roster was too big for him to go up against? According to this, the only show Eddy/Rey main evented was the 6/21 Smackdown taping. Eddy wasn't consistently main eventing until his program with Batista.

A narrator who puts over every single red herring as the actual denouement is unreliable.