strobogo

I'm genuinely surprised a much, much, much larger chunk of the wrestling community in the US isn't all in on Q, antivax, Trumpism stuff. That it's really only like a dozen people showing their asses is pretty shocking considering the cesspool the wrestling industry has traditionally been.

I've never once considered Jumbo to be stoic and it's weird to me to see so much discussion on that topic.

I definitely do not believe fans were more into Choshu or Tenryu than Jumbo at any stage during Jumbo's active career. Maybe into the 90s when Jumbo's health made him fade away while the other two grew into legend status, but not while Jumbo was active and not in the same ring as them.

Not going back to watch TNA AJ stuff is a mistake, that dude was putting in the highest quality work from the weekly PPV era all the way to his end with the company, no matter how stupid or shitty he was booked or what spot on the card he was on. You can basically just go look at cagematch and if you see a match with a name that interests you between 2002-2013 and it's a match with AJ, you can be sure it's at least going to be decent. This dude was getting solid matches out of guys like Mike Sanders, Raven, Larry Zbyszko, Dusty Rhodes in 2002-2003 just a couple of years into his career while also having the best junior stuff in the US at the time with the Lynn/Low Ki/Red types at the same time.

Well then the Undertaker is a super worker talk makes even less sense

I might put Bull in the top 100 just for the cage match with Aja

Undertaker was a super worker specifically in 2002-2003, though. I don't know when there was a point outside of 2000-the quad tear in 2001 that anyone would have ever had something like that to say about HHH, though.

There's a lot of discussion about Vader over bumping earlier a page/6 years ago (lol) and the only time I think his bumping is silly is the matches with Flair, and only because it's Ric Flair. And even then, it certainly worked for the crowd(s) it was in front of, so can you really count it as a negative? Part of what made Brock so awesome in his first run was he was this massive freak of nature bumping like a cruiserweight on Nitro.

I hope so for Sammy's sake, because taking him off TV for months just to bring him back sheepishly trying to get back in the good graces of the group that kicked his ass to the curb made him look like a putz and killed any momentum he had (which wasn't much at that point, coming off the Hardy feud). In general, the whole Pinnacle/Inner Circle feud seems very very rushed because TK still desperately wanted to run a War Games match but the Elite/Inner Circle thing had completely fallen off. I think this will be only the 2nd interaction between the groups in a wrestling ring, the other being Dax vs Jericho.

There's quality Savage work all the way up to mid 1998 when he finally took time off to get knee surgery from that insane and utterly stupid ax handle from the super cage at Halloween Havoc 1997.

I could probably agree with Tully being better than Arn if only because he had more opportunities at a higher spot in the card to produce matches of a quality that higher up the card matches would require. They both were fucking awesome at everything they had to do in a wrestling ring and promos.

A bunch of pro wrestlers hubbed and mixing with Florida Man. It's actually astounding there haven't been more huge stories coming out of the PC even pre-COVID era.

Hopefully Inner Circle loses, disbands, and everyone can get away from mid life crisis Jericho for a year

Nick was fine because he was actually working like a douchebag heel and not a guy working as a parody of a douchebag heel. It was like PWG/NJ Young Bucks turned up to 20 and was just fucking weird and bad. Real DX reunion vibes.

I don't know why Matt Jackson was working like a parody of an 80s sitcom wrestling episode but it fucking sucked. I don't think that LOL I'M A HEEL, I'M SUCH A HEEL GUYS, LOOK AT ME BEING A HEEL LMAOOOOOO shit works on a bigger stage than PWG. Also now into the back half of his 30s.

I've seen almost all of his career outside of Southeastern/Continental and I have never seen Arn not put on a 5 star performance in whatever his role was against any opponent, no matter how good or bad. Literally any role you could possibly need in a wrestling match and Arn would nail it. There may not be a better mid card guy in all of American wrestler history. Not to mention top tier promo skills on top of that, frequently better than Ric's promos in Horsemen segments.

Hard disagree on the Reigns match. I think that was absolutely Hogan/Warrior tier in the storytelling and scope, and in fact they reference that match among some other big Golden Era matches and Attitude Era stuff in a much, much more subtle and elegant way than the Orton/Edge match in 2020 that just screamed all the references and shot outs directly in your face each time. It's bizarre they did it with three months of build on a random B show and then basically never mentioned again as they never did any kind of send off or mention of Cena wrapping up his full time run, so it didn't feel like the passing of the torch match it should have. But yeah PWG Cena novelty wore off pretty quickly and I'd actually say the KO feud was the worst set of matches he had during that time doing that style.

Not that I have a lot of time for Mike Rotunda under any gimmick, but specifically under the IRS gimmick, there might not be a more boring wrestler in WWE history. Or sweaty.

I find her reign interminably long and mostly pretty boring, and for someone that has all these big strikes, her strikes often look very very light if not missing all together. It also feels like despite being champion, she's in a completely different division than the rest of the women. It's all very reminiscent of Asuka's booking but without the swag and entertainment value Asuka brings.

Does ROH mean anything anywhere anymore?

Jumbo absolutely torturing Kikuchi and presumably giving him the brain damage he seems to have been sporting in the past few years is actually a better feud than Jumbo vs Misawa. I almost feel like Jumbo was legitimately abusing his position in the company to hit Kikuchi as hard as he possibly could with no chance of reprisal. At times it feels gross, tbh.

He's definitely in my top 20 for beating the fuck out of jobbers. Those poor Mid Atlantic guys. I think he was harder on those pukes than even the Road Warriors or Barbarian would eventually be.

Yatsu is pretty cool. He definitely carries Choshu tags probably 95% of the time. Also lol that he got a WWF Championship match and double lol that he absolutely BLASTED Hulk in the face with a missile dropkick.

I think the pay off is probably Moose brings the title back home and it will be barely mentioned on AEW TV and the whole belt collector thing is just some side story that really has nothing to do with anything. Kenny has been MEGA champion for like a year and a half and I think he's brought it to AEW TV twice.

I want to say the first episode Kenny was on, there was a backstage segment with Tommy Dreamer telling D'Amore this is exactly what would happen, that AEW was going to use them and make them look bad and move on, and D'Amore was like BRO WE GOT KENNY OMEGA ON OUR SHOW THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT. And then 4 months later, AEW has completely big leagued TNA the whole time and TNA looks even lower rent than they did before this started. I really thought Tommy Dreamer was going to weasel his way onto TNT and take a One Winged Angel on thumbtacks, though.