Jetlag

Based on the fact I am interested in 100% of available Johnny Valentine matches and 0% of available matches from Nese, I'd easily give it to Valentine. Not the best comparison since we have full of matches of Valentine on tape where he looks good. I would never vote on somebody based on hearsay though.

Well, with some of the recent nominations, I might as well... Hiroshi Watanabe The story of Hiroshi Watanabe is that he was an incredibly talented wrestler whose lack of size denied him success or exposure beyond Z-level indies. That said if you come across him, he is an incredible discovery. The most apt description I can come up with is that he's a sleazier, shorter Osamu Nishimura. A guy who has a knack for working lengthy, extremely technical, brainy matches. Fortunately for us the fed called MUMEJUKU allowed guys like him to do their thing and work the niche 70s throwback matches our hearts long for. I'd say Watanabe is easily one of the best pro-style matworkers outside of lucha of the 21st century. Given how rare quality pro style matwork is these days he's remarkable. He also manages to do his throwback style without feeling phony or like a LARP. That kind of dedication - the fact he's wrestling for over 20 years working the lowest of the low indies and still puts on great performances working brainy technical matches in front of the smallest crowds - should make him well worthy of all-time level consideration despite limited tape history. Recommended matches: vs. Fuminori Abe, HEAT-UP 5/19/2019 vs. Yasushi Sato, Mumejuku 4/17/2019 vs. Kousei Maeda, Mumejuku 6/2/2007 Yasushi Sato The case of Yasushi Sato is even more mysterious than Watanabe. From what I know he only started wrestling in the mid-2000s, at a pretty old age, and barely ever making tape. But when he does, this guy looks like a wrestling genius. He is incredibly efficient working technical matches built around his leg grapevine moves. He also has a neck for unique amateur spots and cradles, a bit like a smaller Tamon Honda. I wouldn't hesitate to call his match against Masamune a match of the decade contender, and for someone who shows up on tape so little his hit rate of great matches is incredibly high. Definitely someone everyone should check out. Recommended matches: vs. Masamune (Mumejuku 6/3/2018) vs. Hiroshi Watanabe, Mumejuku 4/17/2019 w Konaka Pale One vs. Hiroshi Watanabe & Hideya Iso, Mumejuku 2/5/2017 Fugo Fugo Yumeji Okay, hear me out. On the surface he's a Zero1 jobber who rarely made TV. How on earth can he have a case? But really, if you look at his indy career, he has been a great wrestler since at least 1997 (only 1 year in his career), and up to 2018. That's a 21 year span. He's shown up in huge variety of different settings, and is always extremely efficient. And he was a pretty great character in Z1 too, attacking people with crazy headbutts and having a few memorable short TV matches. His technical ability is pretty good and he has a knack for building great matches around a few suplexes and his incredibly violent headbutts, which he uses better than almost everyone. Another interesting thing about him is his project EXIT, a promotion that seems to focus on short, intensely violent matches in a ring that has chains instead of ropes. If anything, he's a guy I always want to check out no matter what kind of match he's in. Recommended matches: w Makoto Saito vs. Cosmo*Soldier & Takeshi Sato, WYF 6/10/1997 vs. Katsuhiko Masada, MUGA 4/6/1999 w BUKI vs. Yuki Ishikawa & Johta, EXIT 7/14/2018

It's Keita Yano.

GAEA was pretty great in 1997. Chigusa, KAORU, and probably Hokuto all warrant Top 20 consideration, along with the young girls. BattlARTS was mad strong, too. Tarzan Goto had those crazy feuds against WAR, WYF, and Masashi Aoyagi. Obviously, CMLL was at an all time high level with Casas, Santo, Felino, the minis and a bunch of others looking amazing. On the Japanese indy scene, Masao Orihara and Tadahiro Fujisaki were quietly some of the best guys going.

Keita Yano feels like he's going to be an Ian Rotten tier contender in a decade or so.

Definitely check out the Inoki and Fujinami singles. Hoshino definitely doesn't have many singles matches to watch sadly. He also had one singles match post retirement against I think Gedo which was stupidly better than a match involving an old man who was clearly out of training for a while had any right to be.

That's a new match, indeed!

Rahs post plus his initial 2016 nomination consisting off nothing but "look in the NWA Classics thread for reviews" makes this possibly the funniest nomination in the whole project.

His best match happened in 2010: He also had a Barnett match that people really liked. I don't recall him doing much of note in IGF or his other BattlARTS matches, although some of the matches, like him vs Katsuhisa Fujii, look fun. Suzuki never really set my world on fire, but I guess he has his place as one of the few decent workers to come out of Japan in the 2000s.

Bolshois been uploading hard to come by stuff to her YouTube channel and its a treasure trove: https://reverseviperhold.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-treasure-trove-of-command-bolshoi.html Really one awesome match after another. If this keeps up she's heading straight for my Top 100. Her clown sambo lucharesu technician style rules so much.

Yes, it‘s Kandori taking on 5 girls in a row. It may sound preposterous on paper, but it ends up totally working in practise. You can talk about how this may have buried half the LLPW roster, but realistically only Saito and Handa have a chance of lasting longer than 5 minutes against Kandori here, and both are smartly placed at the beginning and end of the match. This first match up is Kandori vs. Saito. I was worried about this, thinking Kandori might squish Saito, but they had a fierce competitive match. Both went for the kill right out of the gate and it was intense stuff. Saito belted Kandori with her signature hard kicks and Kandori fired back with her stiff offense and flash submissions. It was reminiscent of their classic 1990 encounter, not quite on that level, but it was damn good shit. Saito ends up pushing Kandori to the limit and Kandori wins on a fluke. Pretty interesting way to start the match. Instead of a power start Kandori just went through a fierce 18 minute match against Saito and she looks pretty beaten up already. Nagashima comes in next. She‘s a rookie at this point so she does rookie stuff. She flies right at Kandori with a big dropkick and gets in some hip attacks, but Kandori snatches a half crab and almost rips her in half for the tap after about 1 minute. So now everyone remembers Kandoris submissions are really dangerous, and in retrospect Saito looks tougher for surviving them. GAMI comes in next. It looks like Kandori wants to be nice to her and challenges her to a grappling match. They do about a minute of cool grappling before GAMI decides to stomp on Kandoris face and hit a pretty nasty knee slide. Big mistake as Kandori flips out and beats the shit out of her. GAMI lasts a bit longer and can get in some offense on Kandori – making you respect her – but falls to a nasty powerbomb pretty fast. Leo Kitamura is #4. And Kandori is looking pretty spent now. I don‘t think Kitamura has ever looked threatening in a match, but damn she looks threatening now. She has the night of her life taking it to Kandori, trying to roll her up and hitting nasty looking elbows. Kandori catches her in a sleeper and she‘s fighting for dear life, and – the bell rings? Oh, this match had a 30 minute time limit? Kandori says she‘s done here, call it draw, but Leo is pissed off. Kandori seems to leave, but Kitamura gets on the mic and says something that causes her to come back. The match is restarted and Kitamura is going even harder at Kandori now, but Kandori keeps surviving until she‘s able to lock in a nasty chickenwing that fucks up Kitamuras shoulder. You did your best, Leo Kitamura, but Kandori was in beast mode that night. The last one in the match is Miki Handa, and she goes for the kill out the gate dropping Kandori fat missile dropkicks and germans. Kandori looks done, but Handa misses an elbow. Now Kandori is all hitting crazy Fujiwara armbars from angles and just working like a wounded beast trying to tear someones shoulder out. Handa isn‘t much special but she can drop bombs and sell desperation. 44 minutes in and Handa ends up losing on a technicality and Kandori just walks away not giving a fuck while Handa looks on the verge of tears. Post match Hokuto and her crew come in to wreak havoc, and we get a face off between her and Saito. This match was pretty unique and honestly great, if you can stomach watching something different. But Kandori looked like an absolute monster here destroying people left and right hich is what you want to see, and while she looked beastly she had to work hard for her wins, so you end up respecting everyone coming out of this.

Does Arn have any singles match on the level of Andre vs. van Buyten or Andre vs. Khan?

Jaguar Yokota retired for 8 years and came back looking amazing. Finlay came back at the age of 48 and we all know how that turned out. I know, I know, the gap isn't as huge as with Dump, but she was younger than Finlay when she came back. I'm surprised so many people are in favour of only factoring in ones prime. Where will Randy Orton rank if we consider only the Top 10 matches of each wrestler? I mean, this forum is supposed to be Pro Wrestling Deep Dive, not Pro Wrestling Surface View. We're supposed to nitpick things like how workers deal with aging and their old crowds being gone, that's the fun in these projects. It's not like post-comeback Dump is hard to come by. There's quite a bit of her feud with Shinobu Kandori online: https://adult.mat6tube.com/watch/180842215_456241097 https://adult.mat6tube.com/watch/180842215_456242311 https://adult.mat6tube.com/watch/10757491_160363739 (yes, yes, porn site, but its pro wrestling, I swear) As you can see, Dump does the exact stuff she did in the 80s. A bunch of heinous, grizzly shit, brutalizing the referee, and having a dozen underlings jump into the match. It's pretty fun stuff honestly and if you enjoy the 80s material I don't see why you wouldn't want to look at this stuff. So, there you have it. First I'm accused of trying to rain on the parade and now I have to tell people to not ignore the post prime stuff because its good. But hey, I enjoyed discovering Dump vs. Aja

Dumps prime is all people watch, it seems. I hope I don't have to explain why exploring unexplored stuff can be worthwhile. I mean, if Dump is #2 of all time, there has to be something in that 10 year plus period worth watching, right? So it stuns me how bringing up the fact she has more to her career than the 80s is an attempted derailing. It's like pointing out how Fujiwara had some great matches in WYF is derailing because that's not his peak stuff. If we are only allowed to bring up negative things about workers discussions are gonna be one sided. Yes, I don't have much to say on Daniel Bryan, Flair, and Negro Casas. People are analyzing these guys to death, there's nothing to be added. And their late career work is being actively discussed as its happening. People also hold Flairs post prime work against him, so if anything I'm making things fairer by applying the same idea to other workers. Are we gonna make "you have to write a 200 word post on Flair before you can comment on anyone else" a requirement before we get this project underway?

Yes but it would still be interesting to talk about, no?

Not to disparage Dump, who is probably the most effective crazy sadistic heel ever, but I dare anyone who's giving her consideration based on a handful of 80s matches to watch some of her post comeback work too. She had 78 matches in 2003 AJW alone.

I wouldn't be shocked if Ogawa vs. Kiyomiya ends up being the best match to come out of Japan in 2021. Meaning Ogawa has had great matches in 5 different decades now. And he looked as good in that match as he did 20 years ago and pretty much carried the show.

How about 7 matches? Le Petit Prince/Francis Louis vs. Daniel Noced/Jacky Richard 2/22/71 Le Petit Prince vs. Albert Sanniez 10/15/77 La Petit Prince vs. Michel Saulnier 10/4/69 La Petit Prince vs. Michel Saulnier 9/30/67 - EPIC LE PETIT PRINCE & CLAUDE ROCCA VS BOB REMY & ANTON TEJERO (08/18/1980; 36:17) Le Petit Prince & Gerard Bouvet vs. Anton Tejero & Albert Sanniez (7/24/1982 or 1/1/1979) - OJ says this is likely from 1982 The French archive has about 17 Prince matches, so that covers about half the available footage.

I'm not saying its the best ever, but it's really good stuff and it adds a ton to Gotos case. And I'm not the only one who's allowed to see this, I just happen to know a guy, who knows a guy, if you have bought tapes from a few different people then you probably know said guy too, and the condition of selling and buying tapes is that they cannot be shared widely because that is the condition under which they were obtained in the first place otherwise the people in Japan who gave out the footage in the first place might stop giving out more footage and we don't want that. I wouldn't be surprised if Goto ends up cruising into my Top 20, so I'm just putting the disclaimer there in case folks get surprised by how high I'm placing him. I mean, it's the equivalent of discovering someone like Barry Windham working epic 30 minute matches against local yokels in a tiny indy company in the early 2000s, and Barry Windham selling you those tapes but also threatening to cut out your kidney if you put them on YouTube. Last time the rule was that if you saw someone wrestling you can rank them based on that even if there's no footage, so I'm guessing the same applies to footage you can only get from certain tape traders. I mean, there was that Robin Hood/Shu el Guerrero apuestas match that only one person was ever allowed to see, too. FWIW here's the Goto results page with match times: http://fmwwrestling.us/GotoResults.html?