I looked at my 2016 list for the first time in a while tonight and it is nuts once you get past the top 30 or so.

Has anyone nominated Horst Hoffman? 

1 hour ago, JerryvonKramer said:

Has anyone nominated Horst Hoffman? 

I don't see him in the list of nominees, so if you want to nominate him go right ahead.

All I've seen of Horst was a handful of AJ matches in 1975-1977 and it's now been a few years since I've seen that early into the Archive, but I was extremely impressed by him and now I see he had an AWA run including matches with Bock. Seemed like a guy Inoki would have tried hard to poach and then get his ass thoroughly manhandled like he did against Roland Bock. 

We've gotten another match of Horst's in the French catch footage, which is a good glimpse of him in the '60s when he was closer to his physical prime. 

Is Rusher Kimura worth exploring? I see he's not nominated. 

I'm about to see a shed load of him in the AJPW Real World tag leagues so will mention if I think he's worth it. Seems perennially to be in that mid-card tag team role and then later in the comedy spot. Not sure how much IWA-era footage of him there is.

Great! Thanks! There appears to be an good bit of IWE stuff out there, I just haven't made that leap yet. Looks like more than enough to get a decent picture. I'm wondering if @ohtani's jacket or someone else has been through it? 

Rusher vs. Jumbo from '76 is the big match of his from that era. But if you get all the IWE stuff that's out there, that's quite a bit of Rusher. The standout singles that I remember seeing are against Blackjack Mulligan and against Strong Kobayashi.

Rusher from time to time is involved in some really good matches but most of the time he's just kind of there

 

3/28/76

Rusher Kimura vs. Jumbo Tsuruta

UN Heavyweight

Title reactivated after closure of JWA in 1973, part of IWE vs AJPW show

Highly Recommended

 

It seems to me he has about 3 pretty strong performances a year and the rest he's just a guy filling the card

Good brother @KinchStalker reviewed a bunch of Kimura's IWE matches over at Cagematch. It looks like he gave the highest rating to the 1976 cage match against Gypsy Joe. It should be noted that the cage match was Kimura's signature match.

The Mad Dog Vachon match from 1977 is also a fun brawl. I gave it a **3/4(5/10) but that was more due to it being clipped. (I tend not to deal in hypotheses about how good matches were in the building from edited versions when I rate them, at least not in terms of my submissions on that site.)

Kimura is a legend more for his promos, maybe the GOAT in Japan in that regard?  i remember one of my buddies from some years back had learned Japanese and did a bunch of wrestling searching on places like Nicovideo (Japanese Youtube, basically) - the only promo compilation he found on there at all was for Rusher.

His Japanese Wikipedia entry has an entire section dedicated to it with extensive quotes, which I've ran through DeepL before. A lot of it is very culturally specific, but an easily accessible subject was his frequent attempts to "help" eternal bachelor Fuchi get laid.

1. "Fuchi, did you see Taue's vigorous fighting? Hey, Fuchi, do you know why he's doing that? Because he got married, motherfucker! It's time for you to get married too, you son of a bitch! You know what? If you don't have a matchmaker, I'll be one for you."
2. Kimura "considered" introducing one of his relatives to Fuchi, but decided against it because he didn't want to be related to him.
3. Putting over the local women: ""Fuchi, how about an Akita beauty? Akita beauties are good, Fuchi! Get an Akita beauty as a wife, you bastard!"
4. "I'm going to find your wife in this hall." Then he proceeds to ask an elderly woman in the crowd to marry Fuchi.
5. Advising Fuchi to sing "Bésame Mucho" at karaoke to seduce someone.

 

Also, on the day that he was supposed to face Tenryu in a singles match, but Tenryu had already left the company, Kimura told the audience never to buy from Megane Super even if they developed presbyopia, and the audience erupted.

That is awesome. I would really be interested in reading translations of what Japanese wrestler promos and the on-air interviews. It just feels like something that would of interest to me, to understand the wrestlers or the matches better.

Yeah, I'll be watching a handheld of Baba/Rusher vs the Can-Ams as part of the RWTL or something and he'll cut a promo afterwards and I'm wondering what the hell he'd even have to say about Furnas/Kroffat, you know?

I might experiment with YouTube's autocaption feature, downloading them as .srt's and feeding them into DeepL. 

A question: Apart from Mil Mascaras, Antonio Inoki and Bob Holly, which wrestlers do you think would honestly rank themselves as number-one-and-the-best, the Greatest Wrestler Ever?

Because here's my thinking: most wrestlers would point to someone else. Sasha would likely point to Eddie, Triple H would point to Harley or Ric, even Lou Thesz pointed to Lewis. A lot of wrestlers would be embarrassed to be even in the conversation for number 1 (not talking top 100, just the Single Greatest Wrestler Ever). Flattered, yes. But they'd nearly all defer to someone else.

And for a secondary question, do we know who any other wrestlers rate as their Number One of all-time? I know Ray Stevens' name gets thrown around a bit.

5 hours ago, Dav'oh said:

A question: Apart from Mil Mascaras, Antonio Inoki and Bob Holly, which wrestlers do you think would honestly rank themselves as number-one-and-the-best, the Greatest Wrestler Ever?

Because here's my thinking: most wrestlers would point to someone else. Sasha would likely point to Eddie, Triple H would point to Harley or Ric, even Lou Thesz pointed to Lewis. A lot of wrestlers would be embarrassed to be even in the conversation for number 1 (not talking top 100, just the Single Greatest Wrestler Ever). Flattered, yes. But they'd nearly all defer to someone else.

And for a secondary question, do we know who any other wrestlers rate as their Number One of all-time? I know Ray Stevens' name gets thrown around a bit.

Since Bret, who most consider very arrogant, doesn't even rank himself the greatest Canadian ever, I doubt very many.

Maybe Hogan and El Hijo del Santo?

6 hours ago, Dav'oh said:

And for a secondary question, do we know who any other wrestlers rate as their Number One of all-time? I know Ray Stevens' name gets thrown around a bit.

Ray Stevens is basically the only name in existence where if you put him on the top half of your list, I won’t be able to take it seriously. 

10 minutes ago, Matt D said:

if you put him on the top half of your list, I won’t be able to take it seriously. 

No danger of that, I wasn't asking for list-purposes (he's not even on my working list). It was just idle thinking.

1 hour ago, Grimmas said:

Maybe Hogan

Can't believe I forgot him. Was too busy trying to get my shit in my Bob Holly gag in 

That was a general you.

What about Dynamite?

7 hours ago, Dav'oh said:

A question: Apart from Mil Mascaras, Antonio Inoki and Bob Holly, which wrestlers do you think would honestly rank themselves as number-one-and-the-best, the Greatest Wrestler Ever?

Because here's my thinking: most wrestlers would point to someone else. Sasha would likely point to Eddie, Triple H would point to Harley or Ric, even Lou Thesz pointed to Lewis. A lot of wrestlers would be embarrassed to be even in the conversation for number 1 (not talking top 100, just the Single Greatest Wrestler Ever). Flattered, yes. But they'd nearly all defer to someone else.

And for a secondary question, do we know who any other wrestlers rate as their Number One of all-time? I know Ray Stevens' name gets thrown around a bit.

Dave said a while back that Terry Funk has an incredibly high opinion of himself, as well he should. And I know you're taking the piss with Bob Holly, but he said in his book that he considers Shawn Michaels the greatest of all time. He buries the shit out of HBK in every other respect, so you know he's sincere.

2 hours ago, Grimmas said:

Since Bret, who most consider very arrogant, doesn't even rank himself the greatest Canadian ever, I doubt very many.

Maybe Hogan and El Hijo del Santo?

Bret has said that when he calls himself the best there is, was, ever will be, it's based on three things. One, he never injured an opponent in the ring. Two, he only missed one scheduled booking, and that was due to a cancelled flight. Three, he never refused to put anyone over (other than...you know). He's always said that he considers Dynamite Kid the greatest in-ring worker, though. As for Hogan, he called Flair the greatest of all time in an interview a few months ago.

On 4/19/2021 at 7:03 PM, elliott said:

Is Rusher Kimura worth exploring? I see he's not nominated. 

No but also yes. He's got a shitload of boring as hell material but also some goodies. I am particular to the Inoki matches, but due to Inoki magic.

9 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

Bret has said that when he calls himself the best there is, was, ever will be, it's based on three things. One, he never injured an opponent in the ring. Two, he only missed one scheduled booking, and that was due to a cancelled flight. Three, he never refused to put anyone over (other than...you know). He's always said that he considers Dynamite Kid the greatest in-ring worker, though. As for Hogan, he called Flair the greatest of all time in an interview a few months ago.

On a Legends of the Ring, he was asked who the greatest Canadian wrestler was and he said Archie Gouldie, and then when someone tried to argue with him and say it was him, he didn't back down.