Matt D

If it helps, when I watch her in a couple of years, I'll be coming mostly new to her. I am not someone who's going to enjoy/forgive something because it was true to the style or the moment or the crowd or whatever though, but I'm usually consistent to a fault. I'll be coming in with as open a mind as possible and from a place of general ignorance. I will say that I enjoyed the hour long Toyota vs Inoue hour long match way more than I was expecting to (which I mean, yeah, open mind, I guess?).

I've been going back through 87 JCP TV as it's on youtube (when I write this, of course), and I needed to watch something in the background while I was doing some work and the squash match/promos/angles format of JCP studio TV works very well. It cuts out in the middle of July and while I'm sure I could keep going with it through other means, it's easier to just move on to something else. I'm going through the July Bash matches on the side but I thought I'd hit this too since I've seen most of Ronnie's year. The most interesting moment in the match to me is when Ron misses an elbow drop midway through and sells the arm big, because Flair had targeted it for his primary offensive advantage through the match so far. It's an obvious transition moment. It's also paid off much later with in that "flight" phase with Flair moving out of the way but Garvin moving with him and hitting one after the roll. Here, though, Ron obviously sells it and, I think, is expecting Flair to go back to it, but he uses the opening to go for the leg, starting the shin breakers and a figure-four. And I wonder why he did this. There are thoughts that come to mind. Familiarity: It's what Flair goes to. It what he's comfortable with. Both the man and the kayfabe wrestler. It's how he builds the back half of his matches. Arrogance: Garvin had gone for the figure four himself earlier in the match and there's a level of affrontry to that. This match also builds from the last big Flair singles cage match, in July, when he beat Jimmy Garvin after his leg gave out on a leapfrog. He wanted to beat Garvin the same way. Lack of imagination: Flair could have created a different sort of narrative and he chose not to. In the match, it worked. It worked because Garvin was set to win, I think, and because of that, he was able to survive the Figure-Four and had an amazing Hands-of-Steel counter for one shin-breaker too many, which was another turning point. You can absolutely read into this that Flair's arrogance combined with Garvin's ruggedness is his undoing, all because he didn't follow up on the arm, which is actually a feeling I don't get from a lot of other Flair matches where he shifts gears to the leg mid-match. Maybe you needed all of those earlier matches to make this match work so well, but I don't think that's entirely the case or that it excuses the other matches as much. That doesn't mean that the train of thought might not be effective, but I'd argue that because the announcers never bring it to the forefront and because I imagine the fans weren't necessarily thinking about it on that level, especially as they didn't have the luxury to rewatch matches, it's sort of a bridge too far. Within this one specific match, however, it absolutely worked. Why? Because it built so tightly off of the very similar match two months prior and here, he got his comeuppance for it.

The best part of FCW was that you could hear Dusty on commentary again.

If they want to name the current WWE era, “purgatory” is right there.

I’m two in and it’s really good. Conrad is even good and I think a lot of that is that he’s heard a lot of this in bits and pieces before so he knows what follow up questions to ask.

Probably from a May 8, 93 Superstars episode which had that trio vs Kamala and the Nasties. It was the last Nasty Boys WWF match apparently. Just the entrances below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XNj9HMLlU

Yeah, I saw the change and I’m planning on doubling back this summer.

Looking back, I had forgotten I had even wrote that write-up but I think at the time I was sad no one engaged me on it. It was probably pretty late in the process, like my Bock case but at least people find that useful now.

https://forums.prowrestlingonly.com/topic/28786-mark-henry/?page=2

Wrestlers I expect to absolutely stay in my top 10: Bockwinkel, Casas, Funk, Satanico, Rose, Lawler Wrestlers who may stay in my top 10: Flair, Andre Wrestlers who will probably not stay in my top 10: Breaks, Virus Wrestlers who could potentially end up in my top 10: Jumbo, Tenryu, Fujiwara Wrestlers who are contenders that I have new thoughts about but still don't have a great shot at my top 10: Pillars, Hansen, Bryan Wrestlers who I just don't know enough about to judge yet but that I imagine could make it: Hashimoto, Liger, Ishikawa, various joshi wrestlers

We have five years to delve into Virus' 00s, especially that 00-10 period that I think is underexamined in general. I put it through the match finder and found that there was actually a hair match he had in 07 vs Tony Rivera that made tape and it's actually online thanks to Cubs. I bet most people haven't seen it, so here it is: I hadn't seen it so I gave it a quick look. I think it bodes well for 07 Virus in general, but it also makes it an absolute shame that we don't have more meaningful singles matches from this period: This isn't the 23 minutes that the video indicates as there are a bunch of bits hyping up Del Rio included, but past the start of the segunda and tercera, you don't get the sense it was clipped too much. It's good. I think it's especially a good Virus performance. The primera goes way too quickly with an immediate missed dive by Rivera (a pretty nasty one at that, made even worse by the insult to injury of a Kemonito pratfall graphic announcing that it's the primera) overlaid upon it. They accomplish a lot in a minute or two after that, with Virus foreshadowing his facebuster with a failed attempt before hitting it a few moves later so he can lock in a submission. I liked the segunda as it felt fairly unique. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I haven't seen quite enough mid-card singles matches in 06. The idea was that Rivera would keep kicking Virus off when he tried to put on a submission (or get a roll up) and the disruption of momentum felt like hope spots in a way you rarely get in lucha. It also felt like desperation which, because they weren't exactly bringing the hate, helped create a more proper apuestas feel. Virus' punches looked really good both here and in the tercera, which is not something I usually think about with him. There was also a fairly spectacular spot where he caught Rivera when he was flying in with a lightning-fast whipping arm drag. Throughout, Rivera was definitely game but he wasn't the most graceful guy in the world, even if I thought Virus based well for him, especially on the two dives that did hit. The tercera could have gone another rotation or two (and again we might have missed a bit with the clipping) but the nearfalls were exciting. Virus had an awesome little spot where he hit an armdrag by stepping up from the floor to the apron and then lost the advantage shortly thereafter by gloating too much about it in the ring. The finish had the necessary oomph but also a crystal clear mechanical precision by Virus as he shifted one movement into the next. Overall, you'd want this to bring just a bit more hate given the stakes but it had more weight to it than a title match would have, and it's a really good look at a bridging sort of Virus where had had more athleticism than he'd bring in the 10s but still had the making of a maestro.

If you guys are engaging with me (And the page starts with others raising the question, so maybe not), let me reiterate and refocus my argument so we don't have six pages on this. I'm not talking about generalities here, but about a specific decision I made in ranking Shawn in 2016 that you can see me deliberate here and in the match discussion archive for the Taker matches and in the podcast with Stacey. In 2016, I felt like Shawn's execution in the big melodramatic matches was poor because his acting was so facile and poor. I thought that the ideas/concept/ambition was potentially very good, potentially very worthwhile, and posited that if he could "direct" wrestlers in a setting like that without his own miserable acting dragging it down, he could create something potentially very interesting. So while I docked him points for the overall matches, I didn't punish him as much as I might have otherwise because of that potential. In the meantime, we've had a chance to see just that and I stand here five years saying that I was wrong and in light of new evidence that I should have penalized Shawn more for those matches than I actually did. That's nothing to do with his overall booking/influence, just one area where I went too easy on him and now regret in the face of new evidence.

@Childs, this was a good post and more of the direction I was leaning. My argument was going to be that Shawn realized he couldn't make it to the top through conventional means given his size, his boss' proclivities, how the fans were conditioned, and his overall competition, so he worked to alter the playing field into something that best benefited him. Bret may have sought success by moving backwards, by trying to be a Jack Brisco style technical champion who was credible in more sports oriented way, but Shawn tried to push it forward to a point where the false tents of pro wrestling mattered less than the real performance elements. I was going to build a whole picture with WM XI as a center point (if his good friend, Nash succeeded, that'd basically shut the door on Shawn's future success, so he had to show how much better a performer he was than Nash, etc), and how in order to break the glass ceiling, he actually tore down the whole building in the process. As for whether or not we hold NXT against Shawn, I will in one specific way: I was working on a mindset in 2016, and I think you can see it earlier in the thread, that I thought Shawn had ambitious and compelling ideas but he was just terrible at execution them from an acting standpoint, just absolutely terrible, so that he would be a better director than an actor. I think I gave him some credit for that and thought if he just had the chance to push the right talent through his grand creations (EDIT: in these specifically over the top melodramatic matches), he could create something great. Obviously, that's not been the case, so I'm going to not forgive things that I had previously forgiven. It's one of the two or three pieces of outside knowledge we've gotten that will affect my ballot (some of the info on Jumbo is fairly interesting to consider and knowing that Arn came up with so many specific finishes for Cena has a small impact on Cena and makes me feel a little more comfortable attributing good ideas I see in matches with Arn to Arn). But in all counts, remember that how I'm trying to understand wrestlers is very different than how some of you guys are going about this, so bear with me, you know? Or adopt my insane attempts at total understanding. It's a hell of a five year journey.

Give us some more on what makes something better or worse here?

Childs, I will expound at some point in the near future. And it wasn't necessarily the idea that someone could think the Rockers were better than ANY of the teams I listed, so much as the notion that they were better than ALL the teams.

Sure, but at some point causality has to come into it. Blood in the Sand is brilliant, but it's brilliant because two journeymen wrestlers, one of them being one of the most instinctually brilliant wrestlers of all time were shaping and molding very game bits of raw material that were still pretty green and that had just been put together. I think there are diminishing returns throughout the year; it peaks in August. I have huge problems with the first cage match (though i know others disagree) which is when Shawn and Marty were getting more experience and seasoning and agency. Blood on the Sand is sort of like how Lawler vs rookie Bam Bam is Bam Bam's best match. With the exception of that one match (because no other team listed would give themselves over to Rose/Somers so thoroughly), I think Rose/Somers could have had as good matches with any of the other teams, and certainly more consistent ones across the horn. You should applaud the raw talent in that match, but don't use that as the basis that the Rockers were the best team ever. Shawn will make my list and he's going to make the list on the combination of his raw talent and his sheer ambition. He reached farther and wider than anyone else of his time. Part of what makes Blood on the Sand work is that he was so game and ambitious and he wanted the best. That meant he was willing to do anything to achieve it. 100%. I agree there. He'll be in my bottom twenty because I think he failed as much as he succeeded (that's a lot of strike outs for a guy who hits a lot of home runs) and because I think his ambition (combined with some of his physical detriments and self-consciousness) drove him to the wrong goals. He felt he could only succeed by dismantling certain aspects that made pro wrestling work up until then and by working so hard to tear those walls down, he broke wrestling maybe as deeply as the loss of kayfabe did.

Yeah, the Rockers were my favorite team as a kid and the first comp I bought as a teenager and there are a few matches I love, but if a brand new match was going to drop from any of those teams against the same opponents, Rockers would probably be the last on the list I'd be excited for.

This idea that so many of you apparently think that the Rockers are some how better than the RnR, Fantastics, Fabs, (maybe the Rock'n'Roll RPMs in PR), High Flyers, Ricky Morton/Ken Lucas, etc. is kind of nuts to me.

It's only 8 minutes but you can get a fairly good look at how he moves and his overall attitude here. It frustrates me that we don't have more young Ramos since he was a key figure in territories I care about but everything we have of him from the late 70s on doesn't really give us a good look at why.

He’s Bull Ramos before he got old, like in that one Inoki/Baba tag we have.

27% of the fan base then?

Hey, no thread drift in the Christian thread. I will watch these TNA matches. I will. What about Indy matches during that era. Jimmy Rave for JAPW? Tyson Dux for BSE? Xavier for NEW? PCO/Styles/Christian for Great North Wrestling? Sabin for NEW? Any of this out there?

I kind of think that at least part of how I handled things in 2016 was that every wrestler in contention started tied for #1 and then I knocked them down based on flaws or things missing, etc. I'm not 100% sure that's how I handled things, but it's how I ended up treating Virus, where I just had a really hard time finding anything wrong with him other than a lack of easily accessible 2000-2010 footage. And then I desperately, in this thread, asked for someone to do a hatchet job on him and no one stepped up. @ohtani's jacket kill the golden god that is Virus for us?

I don't know about that. I think it's an incredible effective match in making Martel feel legitimate to the Portland crowd and he's basically a made man as lead babyface (or lead with Piper) for the rest of the year afterwards. I think it's a very focused, purposeful performance from Race, and when I say he gives too much, it's not really what I'm talking about because it's so exceptional and worked as such. But as a MOTYC and in a bubble, I find it pretty unsatisfying. If you didn't have to put it next a lot of Japan matches where Race gets eaten up when he's NOT the champ, I think it would be a better mark for his career overall. BTW The biggest new Race match we got in the last few years is the Dory draw, right, which was exactly how you picture it? There's also the 83 Dibiase match in Japan that Eric, Phil, AND myself all thought stunk for the opposite reasons.