Robert S

There are people believing that the earth is flat, others that a significant part of the leading politicians are nothing more than a pedophilic, satanist cult, not to talk about all the bullshit spread about COVID-19 all over the net. Believing that an election is rigged is nothing compared to that.

On the positive side, this couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Cornette (who was involved in bringing them in) has said as much. I guess giving them shitty gimmicks was to make clear that they were just JTTS. Mantaur (Bruiser Mastino, a cousing of Cannonball Grizzly / PN News) was a year earlier than the other guys, so there might has to be other reasons for his gimmick (maybe for a short-term Undertaker run on house shows?).

He might have gotten a good USWA run or two, but he would never have had the career Jeff had. I don't see Tracy getting a serious midcard run even in mid-90ies WWF or a upper midcard to main even run in late 90ies WCW. For the national landscape of that time, he was just "too southern".

I had a silly thought: wouldn't the Wild Samoans be decent candidates going by influence? Just consider the list of wrestlers, that would have never stepped into the ring without them: Family: Roman Reigns, Yokozuna, Rikishi, Samu, Tonga Kid, Umaga, Rosey, The Usos, Jacob Fatu, LA Smooth, Manu, Sean Maluta, ... Trainees (going by cagematch): Michael PS Hayes, Batista, Kidman, Rocco Rock, Kanyon, Virgil, Snitsky, ... Not all guys on this list turned out to be stars, but there quite some good names on this list.

fixed Seriously, I am used to turn down the volume of my TV to tune down the announcers, now I have to turn down the volume to not hear the terrible acting by the wrestlers? Why does a 30 minute wrestling match have as much talking as a Shakespeare play? Also, why to the tease us by having Jey come out fully dressed in white when there is not a chance to see any blood (especially in a match that should have blood, going by pre PG-era wrestling logic).

I realize that Helms' public problems are like ages ago, but still, you would not exactly pick him to be the guy speaking sense. Though someone should explain to those people that masks are primarly meant to protect others, not yourself.

They could just call him Chasm.

The torrents are missing stuff and some files are corrupt. Or so I heard. Allegedly.

I don't follow modern wrestling too closely, but wasn't the MSG show after the Elite dropped out of ROH due to the formation of AEW?

That can't be legal, right? I mean they obviously can stop talent use the companies IP on Twitch or whatever, but I really doubt that they can say "go on, use whatever name you want, we will just pay you less". Sure, you can setup contracts to work that way, but you cannot interfere in contracts that way.

Meltzer talked about this in the past as well. When he came up with the additional list (I forgot who helped him on it, probably someone like Steve Yohe, I would assume - in the initial listing in the Observer (August, 19th, 1996) he does not list anyone in particular), at first he went "Moolah should be in, no doubt about it", but then after thinking about it more deeply, it turned out to be not so clear and that's why he put her on the ballot instead.

Is that the official Twitter account of USA Network? If so, I guess it is a coincidende that they are using Gabe Sapolsky's commentating catchphrase here?

For Stu Hart I guess is in as a combination of his trainer career as well as being a long-time promoter and the top start of a smaller territory. I doubt that Dragon is in for his training. How much training did he even do? Going by cagematch, he his listed as having trained 68 wrestlers. But looking at the individual guys, the first group was trained or co-trained by Dos Caras and the later groups by Skayde. Some guys also had some pre-training from Animal Hamaguchi. On Wikipedia, the following people are listed as gotten inducted due to (at least some part) their trainer career: Stu Hart, Killer Kowalski, Diablo Velasco and Martin (Farmer) Burns. I don't really get Kowalski, he might have trained a lot of people, but not many ended up being stars, so I guess for him training was only a minor part for his Hall of Fame case.

Looking at the super young mega talented Dortmund roster, in two or three years they might be the team to beat.

Hiroshi Hase might be a candidate. I am sure he had his number of tag team / six man tag main events but apart from that? In New Japan he was not far enough up the card to get lots of main events, I suppose, and afterwards he did not wrestle that much (he has no year with more than 30 matches after he left NJPW). There are other guys who did not main event much during their more prolific eras, but had main event runs early on in their careers in territories (e.g. Dynamite Kid or Bobby Eaton). How much did Mildred Burke main event?

The weirdest addition to the ballot is Kevin von Erich as a single candidate. There must have actually been people petitioning Dave to put Kevin there, which seems to strange. Also Joe Higuchi seems to be a weird candidate. What is the draw here? Being a long-time referee or being the liaison for gaijins? Either way, there is nothing about him that screams "Hall of Fame" in the slightest.

For me it's Perry Saturn.

How do you come up with / believe such numbers? I mean even if you don't trust the testing numbers at all, one look at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard should tell you everything you need to know. True story: When all COVID-hell started to break loose, my boss argued with the excess deaths statistics that this is all just fake news. When one or two weeks later there were significant spikes in the graph starting to show up, he came up with the weirdest explanations about the number, basically in a "the cure is worse than the illness" kind-of-way, ignoring that countries with a high number of cases had a fittingly high excess death, even if they a have good public health system.

Blair was there for 1.5 years or so before Brunzell, Blair came in in late 83 / early 84 while Brunzell came in in mid 85. So if the list was done in late 85, it would to some degree make sense to put Blair above Brunzell.

If they want to do a money laundering or tax evasion scheme in Europe, there are better places than UK. Ireland, Jersey, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland or Liechtenstein would have been better choices.

Conrad has podcasts with Bruce Prichard and Eric Bischoff, what's your point again?

Mind you I have not seen that match in 15 years, but I remember it being very spot-tastic, going into the general direction of how the wrestling style has developed in the last 10 years. I lost interest with both KENTA and to a lesser degree with Marufuji at about that time. Their best stuff to me was their earlier stuff. Their rise to fame on western internet was their tag team run starting in 03. Going from my memory (again, matches I have last seen 15+ years ago, so who knows how that stuff holds up) their top matches were again Kanemaru & Hashi (3/1/03 & 9/12/03) and the match against the Untouchables (Misawa & Ogawa, 4/25/04). For Marufuji, one of my favorite matches of his was against Taue (3/5/06). For KENTA singles match, the classic picks include the matches against Takayama (6/27/04) and Kobashi (10/9/04) from his 7 match series as well as the match against SUWA (9/18/05). I remember people also being high up on his team with Shibata, though honestly I don't remember any of that. For later stuff, other people will have to provide suggestions. Though the 4 vs. 4 elimination match Kobashi, KENTA, Aoki & Ito vs. Sasaki, Nakajima, Okita & Miyahara (8/17/08) was my favorite match of that year and I remember some people prefering the straight tag team match from 6/14/08 to that.

From what I remember, that title change was somewhat expected, at least it did not a "holy shit, Ogawa got the title of Akiyama in 4:20, is Misawa high?" reaction. After the failed Rikio experiment, they moved the title forward to Marufuji (via Taue and Akiyama) to give the next young guy a chance. Though the way they booked it (giving Marufuji only one successful title defense in Japan, that being the 35 minute match against KENTA that resulted in quite diverse reactions on the internet), it somehow felt like a test balloon to see if junior heavyweights might get accepted on top. Okay, to check my memory, I went back to the show topic on the German board I was posting back then (which is still alive after over 20 years), and the postings were (translated): "holy fuck", "fuck, what an upset", "OMG", "that's the biggest upset NOAH could have done" (Purolove admin and contributor STRIGGA), "I fell down to the floor reading the result", "NOAH is taking a huge risk, though fitting the NOAH booking of intermingling of the heavyweight and junior heavyweight division" (Purolove admin and contributor Sternness) ... My posting also indicated that I saw this as quite unexpected.

Is the Hansen & Spivey match the one with the "not the legal man" call by Joe Higuchi that totally killed the match? Yes, I remember that match to be very sleep-inducing.