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Serious Greatest of All Time Candidates


Dylan Waco

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I'm sure Lawler, Fujiwara, Tenryu and Hash would do better if we ran a poll right now. Benoit, Liger, Kobashi and Takada would do worse.

This is mostly correct, but I'd expect Takada to drop more than the others. Most of the shifts are 'positive', that is, discovering the volume of greatness from great talents. Takada's case has really been obliterated over the years. Between the '80s sets and the increasing respect for shoot-style that wasn't UWFi, what support Takada had as a Top 5 type is now either going to shift to other shoot-stylists (ie. Fujiwara, Tamura, Han, maybe Yamazaki), or he'll just flat-out drop. I never really 'got' the case to begin with, and in recent years I think it's almost become a boogeyman. It's mentioned more by people who don't hold the opinion than by people who do.
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Really, with a few exceptions (Fujiwara, Lawler, lucha guys), I don't see that much of a shake up.

I'm surprised to hear you say this, because you always strike me as "Oh, so this isn't liked anymore, when did THAT happen?" guy. Maybe that's unfair, I don't know.

I guess that's what I'm projecting these days, maybe because I've been very vocals about trends. But really, looking at the big picture, and outside of the guys I mentionned, I don't see a big shake up. Guys like Tiger and Dynamite were already harshly criticizes twelve years ago by some people, so there weren't any big concensus on them, ever.

Maybe I said what you mentionned a lot, but I do think I repeated it over and over again over the same two or three topics.

 

Luckily, I don't see much of the guy who always did that the most anymore -- one Mike Oles.

Oles was the "pro-wrestling as figure skating" guy.;)

 

Having a better career and being more talented are two different things. I think what bugs people about Takada is his lack of emotion. It bugs me. That said, I'm not sure why I have no problem with Misawa's stoicism, but Takada's annoys me. Both are key players who the wrestling scene in Japan would be drastically different without, both are great wrestlers, both are highly regarded. All I know is that Takayama, Hashimoto and Tenryu outworked Takada in their big matches against each other in '96, and Misawa's big matches feel much more even. Maybe I just answered my own question. :)

Man, at some point I will really have to revisit Takada, because I don't remember him lacking emotions at all. This anti-Takada trend has been the oddest to me. Hearing that Takayama, in 96 no less, when he still kinda sucked (and really, Takayama was very overrated to me during his peak several years later) outworked Takada just boggles my mind. I dunno, I changed my minds before about workers I thought were good or bad, at this point I've heard so much about Takada that I just wonder what I would think of this guy now, after hearing all this criticism that doesn't seem to fit with the memories I have at all. Takda being stoïc ? He never struck me that way at all.

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I'm sure Lawler, Fujiwara, Tenryu and Hash would do better if we ran a poll right now. Benoit, Liger, Kobashi and Takada would do worse.

This is mostly correct, but I'd expect Takada to drop more than the others. Most of the sifts are 'positive', that is, discovering the volume of greatness from great talents. Takada's case has really been obliterated over the years. Between the '80s sets and the increasing respect for shoot-style that wasn't UWFi, what support Takada had as a Top 5 type is now either going to shift to other shoot-stylists (ie. Fujiwara, Tamura, Han, maybe Yamazaki), or he'll just flat-out drop. I never really 'got' the case to begin with, and in recent years I think it's almost become a boogeyman. It's mentioned more my people who don't hold the opinion than by people who do.

 

As an old shoot-style fan, I never though Takada was great at straight shoot-style. Don't get me wrong, I thought he was really good, but not *great* at working the style, but it was not what Takada was about. He was all about working pro-wrestling epics with opponents as varied as Vader, Maeda, Backlund, Tenryu and even stiffs like Allbright. I always thought Yamazaki was superior in shoot-style, but then again, Yamazaki is the great lost worker of the 90's.

As far as RINGS goes, Tamura, Han and Khousaka are also vastly superior to Takada in the straight style.

I wonder why Khousaka doesn't seem to be pimped as much as Tamura or Han BTW these days. Back then Tamura and Khousaka were linked together as the two great shoot-style workers. I guess RINGS was never really popular and people are discovering it today or something, because the fact that a top 5 shoot-style workers "shifting" toward Han and Tamura is rather amusing to me when these two were always at the top of the rankings to me as far as the style goes. I guess waching RINGS 12 years ago put me in a ultra small minority. I wonder what people think of Yamamoto.

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Speaking for myself, finding new workers is the only thing that keeps me interested in wrestling and seeing any list of great workers with names like Jumbo or Kawada instantly bores me. This tends to influence my own wrestling opinions a lot, but it can'be helped. New is better for me, and revised opinions are paramount. Personally, I'd like things to go further. I'd love for there to be a great overall of the thinking about lucha, for example, but I can't see it happening.

I see this, but I also worry that the end result is that it bleeds over into opinions about the wrestlers themselves. Jumbo and Kawada being talked about in a GOAT context may bore you, but I think allowing that to limit their case is unfair. It's not any wrestler's fault how much they're talked about years later. And new opinions aren't always better opinions. They are more interesting to read sometimes, but that's a statement about a message board poster, not a wrestler. I think it's important to not let emphasis on being original impact matches or wrestlers themselves.

I completely agree with you, but it takes a broad minded person to not say, "forget all that old sh-t, this is the real stuff." It kind of reminds me of when you're a kid and the first records you buy are top of the pops stuff. Later on, you get your first rock album -- maybe something your older brother listened to or something the older kids at school are into -- and by the time you're at college you're into all sorts of obscure stuff. I don't know what comes after that, but maybe a lot of us are in our college phase of wrestling viewing.

 

All told, I think wrestling opinions are becoming less and less important.

I don't know that I understand what this means. Less important to whom?

What I meant is that there used to be a lot of generally accepted ideas about wrestling. For example, the AJPW heavies were better than the NJPW heavies, the best thing about New Japan was the juniors, and so on. People read this stuff, bought the tapes and more or less formed the same opinions. There were arguments and what have you, but for the most part the lay of the land was clear. This is going to sound kind of cringe worthy, but these opinions were important for becoming not smart as such but for knowing about things like Japanese pro-wrestling or Lucha or even older American wrestling. It was an education in a type of way, and for some people almost a rite of passage. Others may not remember it that way, but my memories of first discovering wrestling discussion on the internet was that you were either a WWF fan or a WCW fan and you hoped like hell that one would beat the other in the ratings every Tues morning. Then when you finally got tired of that, you "converted" to some alternative form of wrestling and wound up being accused of being an elitist or something worse.

 

I don't really think this culture exists anymore. Perhaps it does and I'm just not aware of it, but I don't think there are guys trying to learn every bit of backstory that went into 6/3/94 or 6/9/95 anymore. It doesn't really matter what's been said about those matches in the past and you don't really see a lot of people throwing up reviews of that sort of stuff anymore. I've mentioned this many times before, but the growth of the internet has really changed the way people discuss wrestling. "What are you watching" threads have more or less replaced the internet review site, and the more disposable wrestling becomes the less discussion there is. It seems to me that people who used to buy tapes did so to join a community where they spoke about those tapes, but now there's a bit of a click/play phenomenon going on. Whereas lack of knowledge used to be a barrier, now there are no barriers. It doesn't really matter what the consensus is because people don't have to make difficult choices about what to watch/buy. The way the various YES/NO threads operate is an example of what I mean. Once upon a time, people would be making choices about what to buy based on the yeses. Nowdays people have no qualms about voting yes or no based on how they feel not what the consensus is or what they've read about the match.

 

That's my impression, anyway. It used to be that Herb Kunze was your gateway to Japanese wrestling, one of Dean's reviews in DVDVR could sell a bunch of tapes or you were in awe of guys with big tape collections. Now Phil says something is awesome and we scurry off to youtube to see where he found it. I don't know how to describe it, but it feels like a different exchange of ideas.

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The kinds of consensus opinions you would see in the late 90s no longer exist to a large extent..and that's a good thing. Back in the day people bought tapes, the tape-trading community was far more prominent and the expense of the media meant people had to have their opinions dictated to them so that they could be directed to make the 'correct' choices of what to buy - everyone had the usual stuff on their tape lists; Flair comps, Dreamslams, All Japan 90s heavy comps, token lucha show When Worlds Collide etc. There was almost a scholarship devoted to things like the All Japan 4 or NJ juniors and everyone else followed and knew these matches by they dates they took place. Limitations of money / space meant it was almost impossible to have everything so you had to be very selective and look to opinion-makers for guidance. Now those out there still buying DVDs can pick up whole season sets of USWA and WCW Saturday Night at dirt cheap prices, and the majority who no longer buy have youtube, torrents, downloads, 24/7 and can get everything instantly. Wrestling footage has become democratized and people watch what they want rather than what they 'should' watch so there is less of the heard mentality. Like others have said, the interest to me is seeing what else is out there rather than revisiting the same old. I now find the epic All Japan matches boring and joshi unwatchable but that's part of the process of not feeling bound to hold certain opinions. People gravitate / stick to what they like or find cool new shit that's now out there and accessible that was never on their radar before rather than simply knowing a list of great matches by date.

 

Relevant to the debate going on here, I find 80s and early 90s lucha to be the most interesting stuff these days. Even in this era, it's still largely untapped and remains very niche in terms of the small group who watch and write about it, the footage remains obscure and people aren't talking about the wealth of great workers and matches. The most prominent lucha talk used to be around AAA 93-95 and bigger matches from late 90s / early 00s CMLL and I don't think we've moved much past that point. There has been more print in recent years given to 89-92 EMLL but it's still seemingly limited to a small group of watchers who have actually seen the matches rather than just the occasional heavily pimped match like Atlantis vs Panther for example. What talk there has been has at least pushed guys like El Dandy, Negro Casas and Satanico into the consciousness of being on the radar of GOAT lists but there's still a goldmine of stuff out there from the 80s lucha we have and EMLL from 90 - 96 that should add to the debate; even if not GOAT at least recognition of legitimately great but little-seen workers who have a large body of great work outside of the small subset of prominent matches which are pimped - guys like Sangre Chicana, Bestia Salvaje, Pirate Morgan, Javier Cruz, Javier Llanes, Brazos, Villanos, Herodes, La Fiera, Masakre, MS-1, Super Astro, El Faraon, Americo Rocca, Emilio Charles, Gran Cochisse, Texano, Ringo Mendoza, Apollo Dantes, Gran Markus, Solar, Atlantis, Gran Markus Jr, Jacques Mate, Colosso Colisetti, Rambo, Espanto etc; and also to revisit guys who had a rep for being 'poor workers' when that wasn't necessarily the case - Cien Caras and the Dinamitas, Perro Aguayo Sr, Rayo de Jalisco Jr etc

 

Not sure if I've added anything to the debate here other than to repeat what OJ said earlier that the old wrestling opinions and opinion-makers don't really matter anymore and that there's a ton of legitimately great lucha workers and matches that are rarely part of these greatest workers / matches debates.

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What I meant is that there used to be a lot of generally accepted ideas about wrestling. For example, the AJPW heavies were better than the NJPW heavies, the best thing about New Japan was the juniors, and so on. People read this stuff, bought the tapes and more or less formed the same opinions. There were arguments and what have you, but for the most part the lay of the land was clear. This is going to sound kind of cringe worthy, but these opinions were important for becoming not smart as such but for knowing about things like Japanese pro-wrestling or Lucha or even older American wrestling. It was an education in a type of way, and for some people almost a rite of passage. Others may not remember it that way, but my memories of first discovering wrestling discussion on the internet was that you were either a WWF fan or a WCW fan and you hoped like hell that one would beat the other in the ratings every Tues morning. Then when you finally got tired of that, you "converted" to some alternative form of wrestling and wound up being accused of being an elitist or something worse.

I agree. It was exactly that way for people who showed up on the internet during the Monday Night Wars. First thing I read back then was the Raw/Nitro reviews. Then I stumbled onto Quebrada/DVDVR and so on, and yes, the way things were presented is exactly what you said. I'm pretty sure tons of people got their first taste of puro with the Super J Cups, the IWA deathmatche tournament (thanks to ECW) and bought When Worlds Collide as their first (and often only) "lucha" tape.

 

 

I don't really think this culture exists anymore. Perhaps it does and I'm just not aware of it,

I don't think either. Now shitloads of wrestling is available in a snap of a finger, without even having to pay. It changes everything. When you can only buy a few tapes a month, you are very selective and follow the gospel of what's supposed to be great. This is gone, and this is better. I wish I was ten year younger in that sense, that would have saved my some serious money... If I had the passion I had ten years ago with the availability of wrestling now, I would get crazy.:)

 

That's my impression, anyway. It used to be that Herb Kunze was your gateway to Japanese wrestling, one of Dean's reviews in DVDVR could sell a bunch of tapes or you were in awe of guys with big tape collections. Now Phil says something is awesome and we scurry off to youtube to see where he found it. I don't know how to describe it, but it feels like a different exchange of ideas.

Totally agree. Availability of a wide range of wrestling from all eras and territory make things totally different. Bt like Loss said, it's a subculture of a subculture of a subculture.

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I wonder why Khousaka doesn't seem to be pimped as much as Tamura or Han BTW these days. Back then Tamura and Khousaka were linked together as the two great shoot-style workers. I guess RINGS was never really popular and people are discovering it today or something, because the fact that a top 5 shoot-style workers "shifting" toward Han and Tamura is rather amusing to me when these two were always at the top of the rankings to me as far as the style goes. I guess waching RINGS 12 years ago put me in a ultra small minority. I wonder what people think of Yamamoto.

Because TK didn't get *really* good until '96 or so, then RINGS was all-shoot four years later and TK did very few works after that. Han was high-end in '92, and I think Tamura was a hell of a semi-rookie when he returned after injury in '91. TK doesn't have the body of work to match up with Han or Tamura from the RINGS crew, and then you throw in the likes of Fujiwara, Yamazaki, maybe Maeda or Anjoh or Sano, and it's tough to crack the top 5.

 

I think Yamamoto is really underrated but he's in roughly the same situation as TK.

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I don't think Tamura/Kosaka gets as much play as it used to which doesn't help his rep. I don't buy the body of work argument for shoot style but at the same time it's unfair to favour Kosaka because of how far the style had progressed when he hit the scene.

 

Speaking of Kosaka, what's up with Sherdog counting his works in his MMA record?

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Because TK didn't get *really* good until '96 or so, then RINGS was all-shoot four years later and TK did very few works after that. Han was high-end in '92, and I think Tamura was a hell of a semi-rookie when he returned after injury in '91. TK doesn't have the body of work to match up with Han or Tamura from the RINGS crew, and then you throw in the likes of Fujiwara, Yamazaki, maybe Maeda or Anjoh or Sano, and it's tough to crack the top 5.

Haven't seen enough of early Kohsaka to judge, but at his peak he was clearly one of the best ever, right up there with Han and Tamura.

It seems I have missed another rehabilitation, but since when did people like Anjoh ? I always liked him a lot, but he did have a poor rep at one time.

 

I think Yamamoto is really underrated but he's in roughly the same situation as TK.

I never thought as Yamamoto as being in the same league as Tamura or Khosaka, which is not a knock on him. But I think he got banged up rather quickly too.

RINGS has always been very overlooked anyway. Not as much as PWFG, but still never got much attention.

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-I think Yamamoto was a notch below TK but not by much.

 

-Anjoh probably had a bad rep a few years ago from his brief but high-profile All Japan stint. All I know is that over the last couple years I've seen almost entirely positive responses when he's brought up, and several people tout him as being on Takada's level (or higher) as a worker during UWFi.

 

One thing I forgot about Takada is that he's easily a top 5 promo in Japanese history, it would be fascinating to see how that would influence things if more than a couple puro watchers were remotely fluent in Japanese.

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-Anjoh probably had a bad rep a few years ago from his brief but high-profile All Japan stint. All I know is that over the last couple years I've seen almost entirely positive responses when he's brought up, and several people tout him as being on Takada's level (or higher) as a worker during UWFi.

You're getting me wrong, I'm an old school puro fan. I'm refering to Anjoh having a bad rep back as early as the late 90's. No one would have pimped him as being anything special back then, and I guess having goofy matches with Fuyuki in NJ didn't helped his case as a shoot-style worker. Getting killed by a Gracie kinda hurt the perception of UWF-I too.

So, what I'm learning here is that new fans love Anjoh and think he was as good as Takada. Then again, since new fans don't think Takada was anything special, it brings back to the point of Anjoh not being anything special at all in the grand scheme of things. Interesting.

Personally I always enjoyed Anjoh more than he was pimped "back then", he was a great douchebag and a fine worker. His match with Tenryu in WAR was gold. But Anjoh "great shootsyle worker", I have trouble with this notion.

Really this talk about shoots-style worker reminds me how much I loved it.

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People get way too overexcited by a guy playing a great douche character... I mean Anjoh was good, it's not as if he's Tatsuo Nakano, but really?

I've bought a LOT of UWFi shows over the last couple years, and several of the UWFi-in-NJ events. I find Anjoh to be more consistent in UWFi and wildly fun in NJ. Takada was hit-or-miss, and his low-end work was just abysmal. I mean, he was once out-worked in a singles match *by Nakano*. And meanwhile all this is in discussing who would be getting the 5th most support among shoot-style wrestlers.

 

Here's a poll I did at WKO, which is full of shoot-style fans. The overwhelming choice is that he wasn't even top 10 within the style: http://z11.invisionfree.com/wrestling_ko/i...?showtopic=3674

 

Granted that's only a subsection of a subsection of the IWC, but then so is "shoot-style fans". If Takada isn't going to draw any 'one of the best ever' support from a group like WKO, where would it come from? I thought Takada as a GOAT candidate was bizarre and nonsensical in '05 or so. Now it seems more like an urban legend. I can only recall a single person making the case and that was ages ago.

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That I have no answer for.

 

I don't think Takada is a GOAT candidate, but to push him outside a "Top 10 Shoot-Style" blows my mind.

 

Out of curiousity - what is the "contemporary opinion" of Takada/Yamazaki's 80s matches, Takada/Maeda 11/88 and Takada/Backlund?

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No, people also took a pretty big dump on his once-revered NJ junior run in the voting for the '80s set. Takada is a guy who looks great if you do a superficial survey of his career. He was in a lot of great matches, no doubt. But if you look at those matches closely, he was more often than not the lesser performer. And if you take a big bite of his career, you start to see how often he gave flat performances or dragged matches down with his incredibly half-assed matwork. I would still consider him for a top 100, because in the right setting with the right opponent, he could make magic. But he was way too hit-and-miss to merit GOAT discussion.

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His UWFi run was never that highly regarded in relation to the '80s stuff, though... I mean the Vader series, yeah, particularly the second, and there was some love for the Allbright matches (though not as much as the Kawada one). There's a match with Sano (I think 10/94) that got some play as one of those niche underrated matches... but that's about it. Whereas the Yamazaki matches (specifally 12/84, 9/85 and 8/88), Maeda (11/88) and Backlund matches were routinely touted as Top 10 shoot-style matches. Maybe not so much the Backlund match for obvious reasons (and the Vader match would've fell into the same category), but they were "usual suspects" with Han/Tamura and Tamura/Kohsaka. There might've been a DVDVR push for Ikeda/Ishikawa as well. Even if one of those four drops out, that's three great, important matches in the "top ten"; that's generally enough to keep a high spot in a worker's list no matter how lazy he might've been against a Miyato. I refuse to beleive Nakano outworked him at any point ever, though. Fighting charmfully through a busted nose does not make him good.

 

Edit: I can take the inconsistency argument, and I'll admit to being much less put about by someone "taking the night off". I really, really cannot see how he was the lesser performer in any of the Yamazaki matches, Maeda, etc... though. I haven't watched them in forever but I can't see Koshinaka outworking him. Hase? Kobayashi!?

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Daniel and Herodes posts are pretty good reads. What they touch on isn't limited to pro wrestling. We're seeing it with "opinion" in all sorts of thing. Old school major opinion on movies means little these days. Sports and political opinion has changed since I was a kid in the 70s. Music opinion?

 

 

Wrestling is just one of many.

 

There's a mass of cheap/free information/content avaliable. You actually can easily sample stuff before "buying" (or downloading) it.

 

John

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There were people who touted Takada as top five for sure and plenty of people who considered him a "best ever" contender.

At this point the emphasis is on 'were'.

 

But the same thing can be said about Sayama.

 

In 1996, Sayama was an icon. If you asked a lot of people who in 1996 thought he was an all time great in the ring, the majority of *them* would probably still hold that belief. It's hard to shake a dog off their bone.

 

Takada would be in the same boat from 1996.

 

John

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His UWFi run was never that highly regarded in relation to the '80s stuff, though... I mean the Vader series, yeah, particularly the second, and there was some love for the Allbright matches (though not as much as the Kawada one). There's a match with Sano (I think 10/94) that got some play as one of those niche underrated matches... but that's about it. Whereas the Yamazaki matches (specifally 12/84, 9/85 and 8/88), Maeda (11/88) and Backlund matches were routinely touted as Top 10 shoot-style matches. Maybe not so much the Backlund match for obvious reasons (and the Vader match would've fell into the same category), but they were "usual suspects" with Han/Tamura and Tamura/Kohsaka. There might've been a DVDVR push for Ikeda/Ishikawa as well. Even if one of those four drops out, that's three great, important matches in the "top ten"; that's generally enough to keep a high spot in a worker's list no matter how lazy he might've been against a Miyato. I refuse to beleive Nakano outworked him at any point ever, though. Fighting charmfully through a busted nose does not make him good.

 

Edit: I can take the inconsistency argument, and I'll admit to being much less put about by someone "taking the night off". I really, really cannot see how he was the lesser performer in any of the Yamazaki matches, Maeda, etc... though. I haven't watched them in forever but I can't see Koshinaka outworking him. Hase? Kobayashi!?

Kobayashi and Hase were both much better juniors than Takada. Koshinaka wasn't but he wasn't any good at all at that point. I did like Takada and Kosh a lot better in tags from that period fwiw.

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I think Takada's taken multiple hits.

 

-As an NJ junior, was he an all-time great junior? Past opinion: maybe, 'your mileage may vary' type thing. Now: no. Just too much detrius. That Cobra match... ugh.

 

-As a main event shoot-stylist in the late '80s through 1996, was he the best at the style? Past opinion: yes, or close to it. Now: almost universally no. When you work once a month there is zero excuse for 'taking the night off', and what's more, you're compared to guys like Han and Tamura who almost never lazed around for 15-25 minutes in their bouts.

 

Takada's stock drops while other shoot-stylists' rise... meaning Takada's GOAT rank falls precipitously.

 

 

I do somewhat agree on the "people who used to think Takada was the best are likely to still hold that opinion" point, but only to the extent that they haven't watched much new-to-them wrestling in recent years. Same goes for Sayama. Plenty of people who once held both of them in very high regard have revised their opinion.

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