Manatee

Nikki ruining the stupid tower of doom spot popped me.

Haven't seen Dakota work in a while. I don't remember her being this sloppy.

Good lord she was 101. Maybe Vince can last that long...

Oh no not 2007

If Miz is a zombie now I'd be kinda into it

I got this without the commercial breaks and watched it this morning and I still thought the pacing of the blood and guts match was awful. There was like a 10 minute stretch where the only thing that happened was someone getting a fork to the forehead. Everyone knows that Wardlow is not good in the ring and they had so much time to plan around his limitations, then he comes into the match and wastes his team's advantage by just standing around looking like a moron and then proceeds to spend the rest of the match rolling around on the mat with Hager and botching moves. Hopefully this was Jericho's last match. He had to stop and catch his breath after every step he took climbing to the top of the cage. Really surprised so many people here liked this.

Waltman has a strong enough case to potentially make my list. He was good from the very beginning. He was a high flyer who would take seemingly insane risks like that move where he just cannonballs onto a guy from the top rope but the guy was always there to catch him and it didn't look contrived like almost every dive that is done today. The only weaknesses with his actual work that I found were that his punches were never very good and when he was selling on his back after a big move, he would too often have a completely blank look on his face and be watching his opponent rather than grimacing in pain or acting like he was knocked out. I think people in this thread have been correct about him being great in his early career run on the indies and his first WWF run and that he was underutilized in WCW. I'm not very high on the X-Pac face run. I think he gave too much, often being on defense for like 95% of the match against guys like D'Lo Brown and only winning because his opponent slipped on a banana peel. I also got the feeling that they didn't want to present him as an underdog because of his size like they did during his first WWF run. It may just come down to the fact that the announcers didn't emphasize his size in the stuff I watched. His heel run as X-Pac was much better than I thought it would be, putting on consistently good matches. If X-Pac heat was a thing, it had nothing to do with his work. Just being in TNA obviously hurts his case a bit. In addition to some of the great matches people already listed, I would add his No Mercy 2000 cage match vs Jericho and his Summerslam 2001 match vs Tajiri as standout singles performances. I'm not sure how much it adds to his case specifically but the best match I saw that he was involved in was the 2/7/00 Raw 10 man tag which has maybe the hottest crowd I have ever seen. Also, it is not a great match but I think the 3/4/09 AAA tag Waltman & Kozlov vs Teddy Hart & Jack Evans demonstrates the difference between knowing how to work and getting the maximum effect from big moves (Waltman) vs guys doing ten moves where one would suffice (Hart & Evans).

Currently I am on two tracks. I started off watching everything from 1983 with the idea that I will make a list of the top workers from that year and then do that for other years. I took a detour after I read the Alexa Bliss thread and got the idea that I should watch a selection of her matches. I ended up watching 35 Alexa Bliss matches, mostly of her working 10-15 minute ppv singles matches but also of her against different opponents with different levels of talent, in tags and multi-person matches and tv matches. Now I am working my way through about 60 Sean Waltman matches. I will go back to 1983 but I suspect I will find watching a career will be more useful and less time consuming than watching an entire year. I know my interest in this project will go through peaks and valleys and I won't get to every worker that I want to explore, which is very frustrating for me as a completist. Right now I am choosing people based on the footage that is available to me and if I can put together a list of their matches spanning their entire career. I have not exactly developed a criteria yet. I mean, right now it is pretty clear that I would rank Waltman over Bliss because he had more good matches and he was a more dynamic worker. I don't know how well that criteria will hold up when I throw more people into the mix.

This is the thread to discuss Alexa Bliss' candidacy for the GWE poll in 2026.

I watched a few of her matches from early on in the pandemic but the empty arena was so alienating that I think I will probably ignore everything that happened in WWE during that time period when evaluating workers. Then I was curious if she is working different in her new gimmick so I started watching a Raw match vs Asuka from earlier this year. A few minutes in she threw Asuka to the floor and then she was riding a rocking horse in the ring so I turned that shit off real quick. Not going to add to her case at all while she is in such an embarrassing gimmick.

I decided to do a deep dive on Alexa to see if I was missing something as my opinion of her up to this point had been that she was nothing special. I watched every ppv match she had from her main roster debut up to the beginning of the pandemic and threw in some of her major tv matches for good measure. The first thing that struck me is that, from the time she defeats Becky Lynch for the Smackdown title at TLC 2016 through when she loses to Ronda at Hell in a Cell 2018, she is arguably the top pushed female in WWE. During that time she is on every ppv as either a champion or challenging for a championship, something that cannot even be said of Charlotte. All this to say that she has many opportunities to produce great matches and she simply doesn't deliver. Her best matches are against Sasha at Great Balls of Fire and Ronda at Hell in a Cell, both of which I had at 3.5 stars. Predictably her best stuff comes against better workers like Bayley, Sasha, Becky and Ronda and she is unable to get much out of lesser workers. When she comes back from injury in 2019 and starts tagging with Nikki Cross she fades more into the middle of the pack and doesn't do much of note. As others have pointed out, she is a pretty good athlete and is good at character stuff. She comes across in her matches as a mean girl and as a brat who throws tantrums when she doesn't get her way. She is able to use her environment very well, doing clever spots involving the ring apron and turnbuckles. Early in her run she was really bad at strikes. Several times she would be on top of an opponent and throwing punches that were coming several feet away from their faces. I suppose she gets a bit of a pass because she didn't have a ton of tv matches in NXT so she was essentially a rookie in 2016 and she did improve at striking eventually. She only has a handful of signature spots. There is the twisting splash off the top rope, the sunset flip bomb, the thing where she stands on her opponent's back and stomps their head into the mat, the ddt and the thing where she jumps on her opponents with her knees then backflips onto them with her knees. When she was doing the knees spot early in her career it seemed like she was hitting it stiff and knocking the wind out of her opponent about 50% of the time. At some point someone must have told her to fix it because then she starts doing it and barely making contact at all and it looks like shit. She won many of her matches with the ddt, which is fine in theory but it was never over as her finisher so those matches always felt like the finish came out of nowhere, not in the RKO out of nowhere way but in the crowd is confused why she won with a measly ddt kind of way. I have not done a deep dive on anyone else yet so I guess technically she is my #1 right now? But I can't imagine she could make my list. She will have to have a lot of great stuff in the future and it seems more likely she is winding her in ring career down.

I don't watch the tv. When did Bayley become Linda Richman?

Kicked the fucker right in the face. Buying a Sheamus shirt right now.

It was a great match but I hate that finish. Not a fan of triple threats.

What the hell did that accomplish? Wrestlemania is heel vs heel now? Fun