Jerry Lynn

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Timbo Slice]

He's fine, and his career arc has some interesting peaks, but I don't think he ever did something that made me want to see more of him, honestly. He was a good flyer base and took all that punishment from RVD, but I think the aura of Jerry Lynn was what pushed the idea of Jerry Lynn as an actual great worker.

[shoe]

He was a guy who always worked hard. It just didn't translate into great matches all the time. Won't sniff my 100.

[Dylan Waco]

This will be odd coming from me, but I actually think Lynn had one of the most bizarrely interesting careers of the post-territory era.

 

The guy breaks in and comes to prominence working legit indie classics on Minnesota indie and GWF shows against Sean Waltman. In some respects these matches would set the template for indie dream matches, but they did it better than most who came after them and before the idea of such a thing existed.

 

Despite having these great matches, and Waltman getting noticed at least in part due to them, Lynn is just a guy on the indie scene with significantly less buzz than guys like Sabu, Al Snow, and other darlings of the period. He eventually gets a gig in WCW in 95 with the incredibly lame J.L. gimmick where he becomes a solid, usually pretty good, utility cruiserweight but he's never really pushed or promoted at all despite the fact that he was brought in early on and pretty much all of the other early hires ended up with strong pushes and/or promotion.

 

From there he lands in ECW where he is basically given the "underappreciated super worker" gimmick which is pretty amazing when you consider the fact that he really didn't have the public profile or reputation for that at the time (even though you could argue he deserved it based on the Waltman matches and his rep as a hard worker). He has the feud with Credible which is good, and the RVD feud which I don't love, but there are matches in the feud that are better than most anything RVD was doing at the time. In the process he gets hugely over in ECW, has some other solid and even very good matches with a variety of people (Corino, one of Douglas last really good matches, et), but in part because he is now pushed as a top level or close to it guy he doesn't have lengthy rivalries with guys like Guido, Tajiri or Crazy who arguably would have been his best opponents in the promotion (yes I know they had matches but he wasn't really wedded to them the way they were to each other).

 

He gets signed by the WWE from there and does almost nothing at all, before ending up as a founding member of the TNA X-Division. People forget it but Lynn actually helped establish that division and was huge in getting it over mainly through the early feud with Styles (which also made Styles in the promotion). He also resurrected his rivalry with Waltman there which is hilarious given that it was a feud that very few people would have seen or known about at the time. He ends up as a TNA agent for a while, and then works some more for them before leaving.

 

Then he goes to ROH where he wins the belt from Nigel which at the time pissed a ton of people off. I have no memory of what his output was like from this period but he always seemed like a weird fit as champ, even if Flair came in and endorsed him.

 

Finally he ends up doing a retirement tour going to famous indies, ECW reunion shows and then finally a show back home against Waltman where Sean ripped himself a new asshole (literally).

 

It's just a really, really weird career to me for a lot of reasons that I'm not sure I can fully articulate. At the end of the day I think he's sort of responsible for both the bad/excess of indie wrestling (v. RVD feud, to a lesser degree the Styles TNA feud) and the good Danielsonish indie main event (v. Waltman series). He is a guy who had way more influence than you might think, but never really meant shit in either major promotion, and his big legends title run at the end in ROH was widely rejected by the fanbase.

 

I actually think when you break it down and think about it he's a better wrestler than most of those who mimicked him, and I wonder if he gets punished for the sins of his children. That said, he's not a top 100 guy. Not even close.

[El-P]

On 5/29/2015 at 5:03 AM, Dylan Waco said:

At the end of the day I think he's sort of responsible for both the bad/excess of indie wrestling (v. RVD feud, to a lesser degree the Styles TNA feud)

 

That's a point that is really interesting to me, and it's actually why I'm watching early TA stuff these days, because I wanted to see where did that style come from. You know, the gazillion highspots and über convoluted/"cool" sequences that we can see basically everywhere now. The Young Bucks, and that kind of stuff. I really wonder when things too that (bad) turn. (ok boomer) And I do also think the RVD vs Lynn feud in ECW, as much as I do enjoy it, is probably one of the main influence for this stuff. To me Lynn, by catering to RVD's worse tendencies (because RVD wanted to work matches like that all the time) to get a "great" match out of him, kinda helped created a prototype of a match that had a terrible influence on the indie workers that came up later. (ok boomer) It's interesting to compare it with Tracey Smothers who by 2000 also got a really good match out of RVD, but by applying his own old-school wrestling science (a thing RVD absolutely didn't understand as showed by what he said in his ECW Timeline).

 

Anyway. Although I really like Lynn and think he was one of the best workers in ECW in 98/00, his shortcomings keep him from being a really great worker. I want to say that the whole "cool sequences clap-clap-clap" bullshit actually began in the 90's with the Eddie vs Dean serie in ECW, which I always thought was overrated as hell, and RVD vs Lynn clearly followed that template, only adding the insane convoluted spots in the mix. (ok boomer)

Edited September 28, 2021 by El-P

[WingedEagle]

I actually think when you break it down and think about it he's a better wrestler than most of those who mimicked him, and I wonder if he gets punished for the sins of his children. That said, he's not a top 100 guy. Not even close.

 

Very, very interesting career as you highlighted. I'd completely forgotten about the ROH title run. But yeah, far from 100 at the end of the day.

[dedhemingway]

I like Lynn's work, but I have to admit that the fact he helped birth the 'modern indy style', which, to paraphrase something I've seen stated elsewhere, I'm not a big fan of unless it's taking place in Reseda, definitely hurts him some in my eyes.

 

At the end of the day, I think my take on Jerry Lynn would be 'solid hand, great guy to have on the roster, not Top 100'.

[Jesse Ewiak]

If I remember right, Lynn's ROH title win was a total take-off from 'The Wrestler', unless I'm hallucinating the online chatter of the time.

[elliott]

Not someone I've ever been crazy about, but he had a longish run as a quality wrestler and I love that bloodbath with Steve Corino where he writes DIE in blood on his chest.