NintendoLogic

Does it really? In such a world, any triumph is necessarily going to be fleeting and tenuous.

Yeah, if somebody new to All Japan asks "How the hell did this Albright dude get a shot at the Triple Crown?," the correct answer is not "Who gives a fuck about Albright? Talk about Kawada more!"

Actually, Daniel Craig's character in the Dragon Tattoo film smokes Marlboro Reds.

Cigarettes are significantly more glamorous than dip. I don't even see how that's arguable. And if you think smoking hurts your chances of picking up a lady at a bar, you must not go out much. If nothing else, going out for a smoke puts you in contact with other smokers, and ladies who smoke are generally looser than ones who don't.

Lots of things worked in 1998. That doesn't mean they have much value in determining what will work in 2012.

I don't really get why any company would want to promote the idea that the people who run it are indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst to what its fans want.

It's all a matter of perspective, I think. If Teddy had come right after Jack Tunney, everybody would probably hate him for being on TV all the time. But since most people's most recent frame of reference is heel authority figures who revolve everything around themselves, a GM who rights wrongs and is generally unobtrusive seems like a breath of fresh air.

Sugar was only 74? Looking at him, I figured he was at least a decade older.

That's true during the Batista feud. But HHH disappeared for several months after that. When he came back, he worked the midcard against Flair and Big Show. When Cena was drafted to Raw, it was clear that he was being positioned as The Guy. Even more so after Batista was drafted to Smackdown. Cena made HHH tap out at Wrestlemania and pinned him in a triple threat match at Backlash. And again, I fail to see how beating up on Vince McMahon and the Spirit Squad in the midcard constitutes being booked stronger than contending for the world title in the main event. Austin bled in the 2001 Rumble. And Cena bled plenty of times before the Umaga match. Like the I Quit match with JBL. And the Elimination Chamber match where Edge cashed in his MITB. Cena/Jericho was booked above HHH/Edge/Kozlov at Survivor Series. The Elimination Chamber with Cena was booked above the Elimination Chamber with HHH at No Way Out. Cena/Edge was booked above HHH/Orton at Backlash.

2008 strikes me as a rather arbitrary starting point. Why include HHH's 210-day reign and the bulk of Orton's 203-day reign and not Cena's year-plus reign and 280-day reign? You should also probably include Cena's 105 days as World Heavyweight Champion, during which time he was usually booked above the WWE Champion. Plus, title reigns only tell part of the story. Look at all the times, like the Nexus feud and his current program with The Rock, where he was clearly the focal point of the promotion despite not having the belt. Since Cena first won the title in 2005, the only year I would say HHH was booked above him is 2008. HHH disappeared for much of 2005 after the Batista feud, and when he came back, he feuded with Flair over the Intercontinental title. In 2006, HHH was occupied by the DX-McMahon feud while Cena was feuding with Edge for the title. HHH was injured for most of 2007. In 2009, Cena feuded with Orton over the world title while DX feuded with Legacy and JeriShow. And HHH stopped being a full-time performer in 2010.

I'm not disputing that something can be analyzed critically even if it wasn't created with critical analysis in mind. But just because most musicians are primarily concerned with entertaining drunk crowds or making people dance doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of musicians who simply played what they liked with little or no regard for commercial success. And just because most comic book writers have been only really concerned with getting a paycheck doesn't mean that there aren't comic book writers with serious literary pretensions. By the same token, most wrestlers may simply be haphazardly throwing out spots to entertain a live crowd, but there are also plenty of wrestlers who study tapes and put serious thought into how their matches are put together. I don't know why you're disputing this. To be honest, though, we've gone so far afield from my original point about Flair that I'm not really sure what we're supposed to be arguing about.

Did Vince really lose faith in Batista after his fight with Booker?

Not only was 2007 WWE in much better shape than 2012 NOAH, there's a pretty big difference in how wrestling is perceived in the two countries. In the US, it's bottom of the barrel lowbrow entertainment, so another helping of sleaze isn't going to have much impact. I think the only thing that would seriously hurt the WWE is something implicating John Cena.

I would say that Cena has been the ace for most of the past decade. And I disagree with your interpretation of Meltzer's description of HHH. But if even he means what you say he means, he's just one guy. There are dozens of voters who have their own reasons for voting the way they did. I think original intent is just as problematic for HOF voting as it is for constitutional interpretation.

As I recall, he said that Hall didn't know how to do a small package. He spent a good chunk of his early career getting by on his size and looks, so the story doesn't seem too outlandish to me.

I don't want to pull a Hunter Golden, so I'll link to a review of Baba/Robinson: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?showtopic=3913 Things like extended transition sequences and putting over certain moves by having the recipient desperately block them the first time around are much more subtle than Flair getting thrown off the top or Hogan hulking up. And they were staples of the King's Road style from the founding of All Japan up until Baba's death. So I think Baba clearly did have a theory. It's one thing to say that purveyors of popular entertainment aren't motivated solely or even primarily by artistic/aesthetic concerns. It's quite another to say that they aren't motivated by such concerns at all. There's a quote by Jose Fernandez I've seen bandied about quite a bit that goes, in part: "Negro Casas knows more about wrestling than the entire internet put together, and he would never do anything that the old women that attend Arena Mexico wouldn't understand." Except I've heard a couple of times that Casas made a point of trying to incorporate the Japanese style into lucha. El Dandy and Blue Panther were certainly known for watching New Japan and UWF tapes and incorporating that style into their work. The old ladies at Arena Mexico must be avid tape traders.

Absolutely. Well, I'm sure Baba could have at least. All Japan matches in the 70s were obviously worked completely differently from All Japan matches in the 90s, but there are also plenty of core structural similarities. It's reasonable to conclude that Baba had specific ideas about how matches should be put together that went well beyond "do signature spots to pop the crowd."

I think a lot of the 619 criticism is based on the fact that it forces the opponent to lie prone on the ropes for a ridiculous amount of time. It's like how Booker T forces his opponent to be doubled over for an eternity before hitting the scissors kick.

Benoit did rolling Germans in WCW.

Right. I never meant to imply otherwise. Flair's matches are samey in the sense that AC/DC's songs are samey. That doesn't mean there aren't differences between them. And what I'm getting at is that Flair's matches frequently deviated from that core. Like you said in the psychology thread, "Wrestling that makes sense is good wrestling." And a lot of what Flair did didn't make sense.

I don't see how this is true at all. It is one thing to say the nature of wrestling encouraged less variation/experimentation in earlier eras. It is not the same as saying "well those matches may not be good now, but they seemed good to people at the time." At this point, even Flair's most ardent defenders acknowledge his weaknesses in psychology and storytelling, but they note that he had fundamentally different ideas of what he was trying to accomplish in a match than, say, Bret Hart. That's closer to wrestling relativism than wrestling universalism, for lack of better terms.

I'm not interested in getting into a semantic debate, so I'll just note that you defended the way Flair worked by noting that his schedule as NWA Champion didn't afford him the opportunity to scout his opponents and mix it up. I completely agree with that, but I would submit that that argument is closer to "matches of past eras can't be judged by standards that didn't apply in that era" than "the fundamental elements that make a match great don't change."

That's the thing. If you look at Flair's individual matches in isolation, they're fine. It's when you look at a bunch of them together that they they start to have a samey feel and you start to notice his tendency to shoehorn in his signature spots. You know this. You discussed it in great detail in the Flair formula thread. As for that poll, I'm pretty surprised that Dave didn't include Manami Toyota considering how much he's pimped her as a GOAT candidate.

In his most recent book, Jericho readily admits that he had no real understanding of psychology before coming to the WWF and basically being trained from scratch by Pat Patterson.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but isn't Ric Flair the obvious counterexample to this argument? He's readily admitted that his matches don't really make sense when looked at in the aggregate. As such, they're not really timeless the way something like Baba/Destroyer is. But he's considered great because of the context in which he worked.