ohtani's jacket

I have a love/hate relationship with Rocco that's really a love/indifference relationship since I can't muster such strong feelings anymore. But take that '76-79 period and isolate it, and I'm as onboard as I am with early Dave Finlay. I like some of his 80s stuff. I think the Steve McHoy match is a great testament to his ability, and the long Kung Fu match from Reslo is one of his better bouts. There's also a catch weight with Pete Roberts (from memory) that's one of the best bouts of 1980. But the free reign he got away from Dale Martin and Joint Promotions was almost too much for a guy who already wrestled like a loose canon. Dylan alludes to him being sloppy or mechanically deficient. The word is that he was just as manic to work with in the ring as he appeared to the viewer. In other words, he was kind of just going berserk. The one thing I can't ignore about him is that Rocco/Jones is an all-time great in-ring feud. I've seen four of their 70s bouts and not much else compares in British wrestling or anywhere else in terms of a 70s rivalry. And it wasn't just that Jones was s great talent. Rocco was a perfect foil. I don't feel as strong Saint, for example, despite his matches/rivalries with Breaks or Grey. Rocco vs. Jones is a cornerstone for my WoS fandom, and I can't underestimate that when it comes to Rocco.

Roach is one of the best big men ever. How many other big men could work the judo throws he could, take it to the mat, and look so good in forearm smash contests? A lot of the footage we have of him is from when he was older, and he slows down as the years go by, but even his early 90s stuff is fun, and I don't think there's ever been a better "bear with an angry head" in wrestling than Pat. I wish we had more of his 70s heel work, but he's one of the better heavyweights of the period we do have footage from.

Tibor is a British wrestling God to me. He reminds me of Volk Han in a lot of ways, not only because of his grappling skill but because of his background. There's a footage issue, but the 60s stuff we have of him isn't far removed from his 70s work. It's basically the Casas effect that Matt D often describes -- younger Casas is more athletic and does everything a bit faster -- but the mind was stll strong in both guy's veteran stage. Voting for him is only justifiable on the grounds of pure talent, but it's Tibor Szakacs. The man was s God.

Roberts would make my top 5 British workers list for the 80s without much hesitation (the only four being Breaks, Grey, Jones and Cortez.) His 70s work is good as well, but the 80s were his peak, and he has a strong case for being the best worker on TV in 1985. The big knock against him is his complete lack of charisma aside from the familiarity that comes with watching him dozens of times and knowing when he's angry and when he's fired up. As a worker, he was exemplary. Great technique and skill. Could wrestle and brawl with equal aplomb. Perhaps the best thing about him was that he was surprisingly good in roles you wouldn't expect like the feud with a heel Bridges and fighting the foreign menace of a guy like Indio Guajaro. Of course there are some disappointments (Jones vs. Roberts has never really clicked for me), but he has a large volume of work for a guy who spent so much time abroad each year.

There are different types of seizures. The seizures that everyone is imagining when they think of Danielson's condition are grand-mal generalized seizures where the person loses consciousness and begins convulsing. It's possible that he had partial seizures with different symptoms.

I'd hasten to add that I'm sure there are people who watch his work from Reslo or CWA and think it's great.

I don't know how the St. Clair sucks narrative started. I remember Dean saying he'd never see a good St. Clair match but that was mostly based on his work in Japan. The thing about his later work whether it was for All-Star, or Reslo, or Eurosport, or CWA, was that the European wrestling landscape had changed and the expectations were different. You couldn't really work the old-school British style anymore and had to incorporate the standard Japanese and American spots into your work, which St. Clair did with aplomb.

That was a great post, Dylan, and made me wish you posted more since I'm not that au fait w/ Twitter and podcasts. I'm glad to see someone turn a critical eye on McManus. The ghost analogy is apt. What we're doing with McManus is taking the kind of work where you'd usually say "and he was still doing good stuff after his prime" and using it to formulate our entire opinion of his worth. There's a few things I'd say about that '74-78 footage we have of him. Firstly, if you compare him to the other 50s & 60s wrestlers that wrestled through to that era, McManus stands out as better than most of them. There wasn't that much adaption in WoS. Guys who wrestled through to the late 70s were essentially working the same as they always did. The average TV bout was a four round showcase of a top star. There was an increasing amount of showmanship as the 60s transitioned into the 70s and a new decade took hold, but the difference between McManus in the 60s and 70s is largely athletic along with the fact that his legend grew over time. I don't think McManus was ever one of the better pure workers. My impression is that the likes of Pallo and McManus were generally seen as showmen. I have a copy of their famous Cup Final Day match and McManus looks like the far superior worker, but I don't think he was as good as dozens of other Brit/Euro workers. The feeling is that Preston shot on him for underlying reasons. But there's still something magic about him in the 70s. It's hard to compare him with Nick Bockwinkel as he seems like a cartoon in comparison. It's hard comparing outsiders w/ WoS guys. I'm sure Billy Robinson matches on WoS weren't as serious as his 70s All Japan matches, for example. My barometer w/ McManus was always how does his matches with X worker compare with X worker's bouts with other wrestlers and generally McManus comes up trumps. There's a trade off, obviously. I don't think McManus could have had as good a series w/ Davey Boy Smith as Breaks did, but I don't think Breaks/Kung Fu could ever be as good as McManus/Kung Fu, and as much as I love Breaks carry jobs, beating Breaks wasn't quite the same as beating Mick. Breaks was a far better worker than McManus, but McManus was basically the top heel in the territory until the Daddy/Haystacks era took over and that's not for nothing. As for a defining series of matches, I'm not convinced that McManus vs. Pallo is it despite popular opinion. I don't know if he has one on tape. What he does have is multiple matches with Saint and St. Clair that prove the McManus formula worked more than one time. Repeat doses ought to count for something, IMO.

Alan Kilby vs. Tony "Banger" Walsh (2/17/82) I was excited to see this turn up. Sure it only lasted two rounds but it was fun while it was lasted. They could have had a really nice four rounder, but Walsh was a disqualification waiting to happen, and with two public warnings against him, his pearl harbour on Kilby after Al took the opening fall was enough for Kwango to throw the bout out. It reminded me of when my mate and I in New Zealand would pop for heels that marched to the beat of their own drum. Interesting that Walton mentioned that Walsh was writing a book given his infamous expose. Kilby was in such great shape in the early 80s. He didn't get to show his wares here, but what an awesome talent.

Dave Finlay vs. Chic Cullen (10/15/86) This was a 20 minute duration contest with two falls, two submissions or a knockout to decider the winner. Many of the spots were familiar from the British Heavy-Middleweight title fight, but Finlay was utterly dominant here. Despite being the champ, Cullen was totally outclassed. He made the briefest of comebacks to take the first fall then the editor did a bit of time shaving by shortening the second session so it looked like Finlay replied straight away. With two minutes remaining, Cullen signaled to the ref that he couldn't come out of his corner for the third session and Finlay won on yet another technical knockout (this time the ribs.) That led to a pretty solid promo from Finlay warning the boys not to mess with the best and claiming that losers are the scrum of the earth, but wouldn't it have made sense for the champ to gut out those final minutes and frustrate Finlay? You'd think so, but this was Dale Martin, not All-Star, and apparently they didn't give a fuck.

Not yet but there's always a chance Arthur Psycho will upload it.

I don't see how 1998 was all that different from 1997. The difference between Bret vs. Austin at Wrestlemania XV and the earlier stuff would have been the neck injury.

Dave Finlay vs. Chic Cullen (9/17/87) This slipped under my radar for years. I figured it was 1987, Finlay was annoying, Cullen hadn't looked good in the stuff I'd seen post-85, it was an All-Star match, and the TV was clipped to shit once All-Star began sharing the bill. But, far from being a throwaway TV match, it was a British Heavy-Middleweight title fight that took up the entire episode of wrestling. Title matches didn't air on TV often but the few that did were stone cold classics. I had high hopes for this when All-Star pulled out all the pageantry that a British promotion could muster in the late 80s. Kellett was pulled out of the crowd to wave at the fans, and Dave Taylor's father and grandfather (famous wrestlers in their own right) were invited to present the winner w/ the title belt. The tension was thick, the pre-match promos solid. Cullen had his fingers taped. Finlay had been hunting him for months. It was a Northern Irishman vs. a Scotsman, and they were ready to go. The great title fights threaten to get out of hand. That's how it was with Rocco and Jones and Ben and Kilby and that's what they teased here. Finlay sauntered up to Cullen and gave him a little nudge to the forehead the way a stag might and Cullen gave him a Scottish kiss. They did this great spot where Finlay tried to follow through on a posting by springboarding off the ropes and Cullen caught him with a dropkick. That fired Cullen up and the crowd. At that point, I was thinking "this is pretty great." Title matches generally went 12-15 rounds, which meant the workers were legit buggered in the later rounds, so you have to make concessions for that. The ring set-up was weird as well. The match took place in an auditorium and the ring was set up on the stage. What that meant was that any time they fell out of the ring (on the hard camera side) they risked falling off the stage. Finlay took the bump early on, but after that it became a mildly annoying scaffold match style tease and a pesky distraction from the in-ring drama of a title match. Even so, it was shaping up as pretty special for 1987 and I began thinking '87 MOYTC for Europe, but the finish... I'm a believer that you should be able to go over clean in a title match regardless of whether both guys are stars and the winner is a heel. Here they had Cullen save face by having him injure his face. Finlay caught Cullen coming off the ropes with his knees then caught him coming off the ropes with a nasty knee lift. The ref wouldn't let the fight continue and Finlay took the title on a technical knockout. Poor Chic had to sell that his cheekbone was broken, which is a difficult thing to fake with no swelling. I wouldn't say the finish left a bitter taste, but it wasn't the kind of finish you want to see after watching two men wrestle the half hour and put the brakes on it being a stone cold classic.

I haven't heard of it, but that doesn't mean it wasn't legendary by any stretch of the imagination. The other three are reaches. I love the Virgil/DiBiase SummerSlam match more than anybody I've ever met, but Virgil wasn't hot by '91 standards.

Can't say I've heard of the Mr. R feud or even the JYD one, so can't speak for them being legendary, but Ted had a high profile run in All Japan? Ted was instrumental in getting Dustin over? Virgil was one of the hottest babyface acts of '91?

One 70s Jumbo match I really like is the 3/5/77 Robinson bout. On one hand, it's a bit like watching an adult play tag with a child as there's no doubt in my mind that Robinson was a superior wrestler to Jumbo, but Tsuruta does a good job of hanging with him. It's a snappy bout that doesn't over stay its welcome and full of action. Worth watching if you want to see Robinson flex his muscle.

Fair enough. The only ones I'd strongly disagree with on that list are Jordan, Kidd and Turpin. I don't think Thomson is as good as St. Clair either, but I can't think of five great matches the former three had.

Who are the other guys? Van Buyten is incredible, but like Sarjeant he doesn't have enough footage.

St. Clair is an interesting case. When I first started watching WoS, I thought his work was too loose. Then I thought he was a decent foil for heels like McManus, Kincaid and Bond. And then I thought he was a legitimately good worker. He'll always have my respect for continue to improve and work hard during the late 80s and early 90s when there wasn't a "WoS" anymore. I wish he had stayed w/ Joint in the early 80s and not gone to All-Star so we'd have the same volume of matches from him as Roach, Singh and Steele, but money changes everything. I can think of at least five great St. Clair matches from the WoS era, which ought to have him knocking on a top 30. I'd like to see MM's list.

It just struck me that the Phil Ochs to Funk's Dylan might be a better comparison. Here's one of the Magnum matches:

Mask vs. mask is usually worked a little differently from hair matches, and there's certainly a gritty title match element to them, but I'd still classify them as brawls.

I think Jetlag is comparing apuesta matches where Santo has always had the bloodier, more violent bouts such as the Brazo de Oro fight, the mask match against Espanto Jr, the Dandy hair match, and so forth. Casas is a good brawler but many of his apuestas have been bloodless.

It's considered a style because it was a breakaway movement (although it should be noted that when they first broke away the plan was to be New Japan Mach 2.) You won't find it all that dissimilar to earlier influences like Inoki and Robinson (particularly since Robinson was from the same background as Gotch), but I don't think Billy or Inoki shared the same philosophy or goals as the shoot boys. Windham has a lot of awesome stuff in the 90s that surely bolsters his case. Who cares if it was on TV? TV was a massive part of WCW's output. And who are all these people bringing their A game on late 80s-early 90s PPVs? That didn't happen. The "Best of Ted Dibiase in Mid South" on the DVDVR sets vs. WCW PPV matches argument is not the level of scrutiny demanded in the Blackwell/Andre threads. Jimmy, the DiBiase/Magnum matches are cool. I don't think they'll shoot Ted up your list or anything like that, but they're great stuff. I wonder what the musical equivalent of Ted is -- maybe the John Cougar Mellencamp to Terry Funk's Springsteen or something like that.

I don't think she was underrated at the time when we made the original list as we had enough Joshi fans to also run a Greatest Female Wrestler of All-Time list some months later. Joshi fandom has kind of fallen by the wayside since then (or branched off), and I kind of doubt there's people watching 1996 JWP in 2016. If you don't watch the JWP then she's just a face in the crowd and not the multi-faceted performer you've described. I think the JWP stuff is key.

I don't think Marty will do as well on the final list as he should, but that's where we're at in 2016. Glad you enjoyed him, though, Jimmy.