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Is Triple H in your top 100?


Grimmas

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I definitely think there's a lot of Flair in Triple H in the way he takes offense/bleeds/stumbles around from like 2000 to 2004.

​I know this thread is moved on from comparing Andre The Giant to Hunter for great matches but I looked into my database of star ratings and there are 7 Triple H matches that I've given a higher rating for than the best Andre match I've seen (vs Hansen in NJPW) and a further 4 I gave the same rating. Not the best way to compare guys and admittedly I'm not a big Andre fan but I just thought I'd put that out there.

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I definitely think there's a lot of Flair in Triple H in the way he takes offense/bleeds/stumbles around from like 2000 to 2004.

​I know this thread is moved on from comparing Andre The Giant to Hunter for great matches but I looked into my database of star ratings and there are 7 Triple H matches that I've given a higher rating for than the best Andre match I've seen (vs Hansen in NJPW) and a further 4 I gave the same rating. Not the best way to compare guys and admittedly I'm not a big Andre fan but I just thought I'd put that out there.

could you list the HHH matches?
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Brain, I dislike HHH too, but credit where it is due, he performed brilliantly in the Foley street fight. It was the first time he had done anything of that sort, and he absolutely came through. It was not your typical "HHH main event heel performance in a self-bloated so-called epic" that he has done to death in such a way that he makes me cry every time he as much as shows up on TV. Same with the D-Bry match. Bryan of course was the better wrestler, but Hunter more than carried his share of the load.

 

That said, the list involving HHH that I am interested in is not this one, since he would not make my top 500, but that infamous list Dylan made of "100 wrestlers who had a better 2000 than Triple H". I heard about it for the first time on an HHH podcast where he participated, along with Will (I think) and a couple of others, and have since then tried a lot to find it somewhere on the internet, but no luck.

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I definitely think there's a lot of Flair in Triple H in the way he takes offense/bleeds/stumbles around from like 2000 to 2004.

​I know this thread is moved on from comparing Andre The Giant to Hunter for great matches but I looked into my database of star ratings and there are 7 Triple H matches that I've given a higher rating for than the best Andre match I've seen (vs Hansen in NJPW) and a further 4 I gave the same rating. Not the best way to compare guys and admittedly I'm not a big Andre fan but I just thought I'd put that out there.

could you list the HHH matches?

 

vs Benoit vs Shawn Michaels (Wrestlemania 20)

​ vs Mick Foley (Royal Rumble 2000)

​ vs Daniel Brian (Wrestlemania 30)

vs Mick Foley (No Way Out 2000)

vs Batista (Vengeance 2005)

vs Chris Jericho (Fully Loaded 2000)

Evolution vs The Shield (Extreme Rules 2014)

 

The ones I gave the same rating (****) to are:

w/Steve Austin vs Chris Jericho & Chris Benoit (Raw 5/21/2001)

vs Jeff Hardy (No Mercy 2008)

vs Shawn Michaels (Summerslam 2002)

​Evolution vs The Shield (Payback 2014)

 

 

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That Batista HIAC match might be Batista's best match so have to give him some credit for that. The Foley street fight and Bryan matches are excellent. His 2000-1 run is really good. That being said he has no chance of making my 100. Majority of the time he is pretty boring to watch and he is poor as a babyface. Also I have no idea why WWE kept pushing the idea that he was a technical wrestler given so many of his top matches were brawls/gimmick matches.

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I do not exactly get what "cerebral assassin" means as well. He does what, play mind games to psychologically beat you and make you doubt yourself? I have a hard time believing that the "dick joke, dick joke, something something ass, homophobic slur, claim that I am going to beat you and destroy you, 4-on-1 Horsemen style beatdowns" template is the best way to show psychological mastery.

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He'll be on my ballot. I kind of hate saying it because it feels like a dirty thing to say, but it's true.

 

Of the guys in the "I can't stand you most of the time but you did have those flashes of brilliance and I'm ranking people on the good times" category, he comes out comfortably ahead of Edge. His highs are simply much higher. He and Angle seem about lateral to me.

 

He just has a bunch of great matches that I can't ignore. I said this about someone recently and it applies here, in that his bloated epic style makes for dross a lot of the time, but sometimes a bloated epic works and you end up with an...epic. These are the things I think about when it comes to Hunter's candidacy:

 

vs Shawn, Summerslam 2002

vs Shawn, Raw December 2003 - I know Hunter/Shawn matches are incredibly popular here, but for me these are two that really hit the mark. They're both "about" Shawn, but Hunter also does his job perfectly as the heel champ to play off. At Summerslam especially he is a total asshole, and is great targeting the back and trying to get this dude back into retirement, while at the same time selling Shawn's comebacks like a million bucks. The Raw match is just a great, long title match. My favourite part is towards the end where they have escalated things so much and are selling so well that they get a punch over as a nearfall.

 

As an aside, I re-watched the Rumble 2004 LMS for the first time since it happened recently, and to be honest I thought it was fine. I was expecting a disaster, and it was a perfectly fine brawl that didn't exactly touch greatness, but didn't suck either. I wonder what others would think if they saw it now.

 

vs Shelton Benjamin, Raw March 2004 - This is honest to God one of my favourite ever matches. It's like...I dunno, it's like if Hunter's usual output is Kansas, and for one night a hurricane plants us in the middle of Oz, where everything is in colour and Hunter actually works like we want him to work. Like he THINKS he works. I love everything about this match, including Hunter's performance.

 

vs Orton, No Mercy 2007 - This seems somewhat forgotten to history but this was after Cena went down in late 2007 and they crowned a new champ at the PPV. Booking-wise it was all a bit of a masturbatory exercise (Orton handed the title, loses it immediately to Hunter in a match, only gains it back in LMS after Hunter had to wrestle Umaga in the interim) BUT if you ignore that aspect (as we often have to do) the match itself is an awesome war. Orton was really on in this period, and more to the point, Hunter is actually really good in this. It might be his best ever babyface performance in the ring.

 

vs Undertaker, WM27

vs Undertaker, WM28 - Again, I know it's not a popular opinion around here but I absolutely, completely, utterly love the Taker matches. I think they are exactly as epic as they claim to be. I probably like them more than Hunter does. Like I said above, sometimes a bloated epic is exactly what's needed, and at this point in time Taker's Mania matches had become mythical in proportion, and required exactly this kind of unabashed bombastic overkill. I love the stories, I love the way they work the matches, I love the big spots and the nearfalls (Hunter's terrified crawl away from Taker after he kicked out of his Tombstone at WM27 is literally my favourite nearfall reaction of all time) I love all the overblown theatrical bullshit. Nothing beats that shit when they get it right.

 

Plus there's a bunch of great matches with people along the way - Foley, Rock, Austin, Jericho, Benoit, Batista, Flair, Cena, Big Show, Jeff Hardy...I'm sure there are others I can't even remember. And sure he's had all of the help in the world to do that, but whatever the reasons underlying his resume, the resume is still there.

 

Honestly, without the Taker matches and the Shelton match, I'd have Hunter closer to Edge, and right at the bottom in a kind of "you're just there but damn you have all these great matches damn you" way. But his best performances get him to the next tier with me, because his best performances are really very good indeed, and he shows flashes of the brilliance that he thinks he has all the time. I just wish he would work like that all the time. But his best stuff probably gets him out of my bottom 10, is what I'm saying.

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People are underselling his resume of good TV matches. The Big Show match from early 2006 is one of my favorites from him and cage match with Kane from 1999 is also a lot better than it sounds. The Taka match from 2000 and the Shelton one from 2004 are also really good examples of him getting the underdog over. The whole Mankind feud from 1997 is great, too, especially the MSG street fight.

 

You could probably find a lot more TV/PPV matches if you went looking, but I think what's been listed is already comparable to a lot of the fringe candidates. Going back to the Andre comparison earlier, I agree that people are placing undo weight to his bad stuff and downplaying all the really good stuff he's been in. The 2002-2003 Ric Flair run, for example, it is commonly seen a low point in his career due to his out of control ego having him spend most of the time burying WCW and wrestling self-indulgent Shawn Michaels matches, and that's too bad as as the 2003 Tajiri handheld actually shows him being good in the Ric Flair role with the right worker. I'm not saying one good matches makes up for all the shit he did, but compare that to Hansen, who spent a similar period also burying many of his opponents, yet seems to get more of a pass for it as him just defending his spot and has people far more willing to look for the hidden gems.

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It's really tough for me to separate my personal dislike of him from his performances, because I do think he's largely responsible for the decline in quality in the most major league wrestling company in the world over the past 15 years. He has the same cult of self surrounding him that guys like Rock and Hogan do, only he doesn't have the other attributes they do that make that somewhat tolerable. His insistence on looking strong at all costs, even at times to his own detriment, permeates everything he does. I'm sure if I tried to think about him objectively, I'd probably find a decent amount of great matches and have at least a halfway good impression of him, but I can't. His contributions to my wrestling fandom are a net negative.

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He's like Flair because if people say he's like Flair over and over enough times, it becomes canon. He has nothing in common with Flair apart from being a perennial heel champ portrayed as wealthy. Flair made everyone look like a million bucks, almost too much so, and Hunter is The Almighty Huntor.

 

I think the Shelton match is the closest he's come to actually resembling Flair.

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Anyone who puts HHH ahead of Arn would be banned if it were up to me.

 

He's not the worst person involved in wrestling of course. There's Buck Z(which I only learned about through Johnny Sorry) and people like that.

 

But there's no one who's done more IN wrestling I've ever disliked. I'd take a darn bullet for Vince Russo before I could be in a civil conversation with HHH.

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The Taka match didn't hold up at all when I rewatched it. Taka has a decent opening shine, but the crowd never buys into any of it because they're too distracted by everything going on with the APA and the McMahons outside of the ring. At one point, the APA double-teams Triple H, throws him into the ring where he gets hit by flying moves from Funaki and Taka and he still kicks out. If that segment was designed to be an instance of him getting shown up like Flair, then it failed miserably.

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In his defense, here's a rundown of what I feel is his good-or-better output, post 2001 -

 

2002 - v Angle early in the year, v Jericho in HiaC

 

2003 - nothing

 

2004 - WM, Backlash, v Benoit at Vengeance, a great triple threat with Edge and Benoit in Nov/Dec

 

2005 - Elimination Chamber, HiaC with Batista, Flair in the cage match, a couple of good Raw matches with Benoit

 

2006 - WM (Bit torn here - not really a match that helped Cena, but he wrestled well), V Edge v Cena (Backlash). Not a fan of the DX stuff, but as the year closed they had a decent 6 man with Cena v Orton Edge Umaga

 

2007 - DX v Edge Orton was going very well until his knee fell apart, loved his streetfight with Umaga in October or November, and the LMS v Orton around the same time.

 

2008 - Really contributed to a very good Elimation chamber in Feb, good match v Edge in July, generally liked his move to Smackdown (Nice match v taker there) Really strong triple threat with Edge and Jeff Hardy in Dec

 

2009 - Good performance in Elimination chamber, and the 6 man tag at Backlash. Another DX reunion gave us one good match v Rhodes and DiBiase jr at Summerslam, and the ladder match v Jerishow in Dec.

 

2010 - liked the WM and Backlash matches with Sheamus

 

2011 - big fan of v Undertaker. Not so much the Punk and Nash matches

 

2012 - big fan of v Undertaker. Enjoyed the SummerSlam Lesnar match, but it looks very tame now.

 

2013 - Didnt like the Lesnar matches

 

2014 - Really enjoyed the WM match, and the first 6 man with Shield

 

2015 - Nope

 

Edit - I'd add the Dec 03 Michaels match, and 2 Ppv matches with Jeff hardy in Autumn 08

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