Pro Wrestling Greatness
Thanks to everyone who sent me feedback on my column on my choice for the 16 greatest pro wrestlers of the modern era. A surprisingly small number of people ripped me for any of my choices. Nobody even complained about the decision to include mat wrestling specialist Volk Han at the expense of many better-known grapplers. The most valid complaint I received regarded my decision to leave off Steve Austin even though I’d included Hulk Hogan based on his star power and charisma. I now agree that Austin belongs on the list. I’m not sure if I’d bump Han (due to his relative obscurity) or Kobashi (due to there being ‘too many’ AJPW guys on the final list) to make room for Stone Cold.
It looks like The Wrestling Blog has just dropped the 64-man tournament idea that inspired Ditch and I to write extended tributes to Jumbo Tsuruta two weeks ago. I haven’t seen any sign of the tournament since then, anyway.
A couple of people wanted me to go into greater detail on the criteria I was using to narrow my list of great wrestlers down to sixteen. It was no easy task, since there are literally hundreds of wrestlers that have consistently impressed and entertained me over the years.
Here are some of the factors that I considered:
The Aura of Greatness
There are a huge number of wrestlers who are excellent in one way or another. Maybe they have a complete package of skills, image, charisma, look, and personality (Like Rick Rude), Maybe they did one thing as well as it can be done while doing other things pretty well, too (Kikuchi or Morton and their great selling, for example) Maybe they wrestled in a ton of great matches (Akiyama), had an innovative offense (RVD) or had huge star presence and great crowd connection for an extended time as both a heel and a face (Mutoh/Muta).
I was easily able to come up with a list of well over a hundred wrestlers who achieved their own form of excellence, and I bet most of the people reading this would have no trouble doing the same.
What I’m thinking, though, is that not every excellent wrestler achieved greatness. To me, greatness involves such concepts as innovation and impact. A great wrestler in my book is one who had an affect on the way Pro Wrestling is perceived, who brought something genuinely new to the table, who was clearly the very best at what they were doing over a given period, or who has created a lasting legacy. I’d say an argument could be made for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15- 20 wrestlers having had an extended run of greatness where they were constantly pushing boundaries, changing expectations, or setting the bar ever higher. Jumbo, Dynamite, Benoit, Takada, and Liger are people who fit that description in my eyes. Even if you disagree with the specifics, I hope you can see what I mean here.
Peak vs. Longevity
An interesting question for me is: What about the people who were genuinely great over a short period? Do they rank higher than the people who were ‘merely excellent’ over a longer time? Shinjiro Ohtani, for example, ranks below Liger on my master list of great wrestlers because I feel that Liger’s run of greatness was much longer. But does he rank above or below someone like Koji Kanemoto, who arguably had a longer run of really good work without ever quite achieving true greatness? For me, it hinges on whether I perceive that peak as having extended into “Greatness” territory. Of course it’s pretty difficult to define where exactly that territory begins.
To sum up: A short run of true greatness is still greatness, but a long run of mere excellence is not.
How Important, Really, is Innovation?
Ric Flair wasn’t really an innovator. I’d say that Flair’s well-deserved reputation for greatness is based more on the fact that he was clearly the very best at what he was doing over a given period. What he was doing could be taken either as “Wrestling the mid-Atlantic style” or “Being the World Heavyweight Champion” and I’d lean towards the latter. His influence is an interesting point to debate. Like Mozart, he didn’t so much innovate as take the very best of what was around him at the time and work it into a functioning package. People then stole stuff from him that he’d stolen from others. Is that having an influence? I’d say yes.
Is There Such a Thing as a Great Garbage Wrestler?
For a time, Sabu was really the best there was at what he did. And, you cannot ask a man to give more of himself than Sabu did during his brief but very exciting peak. He was like a brilliant meteor lighting up the sky… then smashing into an orphanage. Death Match pioneer Atsushi Onita and all time classic brawler Abdullah the Butcher also make my top 100. I like them now more than ever, in part because what they did has become so unfashionable. It’s like debating whether the best Hair Metal band out of LA in the 80s belongs on a list of the 100 Greatest Rock Bands in that you know that a lot of people who are screaming “NO!” probably used to wear Motley Crue T-shirts with pride. At this point in time, there are people who will never admit to being Sabu fans no matter how hard they marked out the first time they saw the Barbed Wire match against Terry Funk. I may not be able to listen to Motley Crue any more, but I can lose it over a Sabu table spot, Abby stabbing Brody in the eye, or Onita braving the explosives to save Terry Funk I consider all three of them to be great wrestlers, just not three of the sixteen greatest ever.
What About the Old School Wrestlers?
We’d pretty much have to rely on word of mouth and newspaper reports in trying to form any kind of opinion on the greatness of Farmer Burns, Strangler Lewis, George Hackenschmidt, Frank Gotch, Stanislaus Zbyzko, and their contemporaries. I have read about Bert Assirati, Bill Longson, and Yvon Robert, but I’ve never seen footage of them and I don’t know if any exists. I’ve seen – and in some cases I have – footage of Gene Kiniski, Don Leo Jonathan, Mad Dog Vachon, Gorgeous George, Killer Kowalski, Lou Thesz, Karl Gotch, and Dick the Bruiser, but I have no idea of any of what I’ve seen really represents their best work, nor do I know if any of their very best matches have been collected and made available. Antonio Inoki & Seiji Sakaguchi vs. Lou Thesz & Karl Gotch (10/14/73), for example, is pretty widely available and it’s a hell of a match… but I doubt that either Gotch or Thesz was anywhere near their peak in 1973! Everyone knows that Santo was a great Icon in his home country, but most of his available footage was shot to be used in monster films. Pat Patterson, Ray Stevens, and Johnny Valentine are all guys that I love to watch wrestle in the old time clips, but even those clips were from well after their primes. There is no way of knowing how highly these wrestlers would rank if their best matches were available on video.
Does Being the Champ Count for Anything?
I think it really does. Obviously, I don’t mean this in a kayfabe sense, like Hashimikov and Norton automatically rank as great because they were once IWGP Champions.
What I do mean is this: How well a wrestler handles being put in a top position can tell us a lot about their aura of greatness, or lack thereof. The truly great make the titles their own, and get everyone to buy into it. Hogan’s an obvious example. Most people consider him a great wrestler, even though many of us are not big fans of his actual wrestling. He had that aura of greatness. He made that title his own.
Even on a less iconic level, there are wrestlers like Bret, HBK, Flair (he’s a huge icon to some, I know), Austin, Rocky, Tenryu, Hansen, Misawa, Hashimoto and on and on… that wore the mantle of top man with verve and aplomb. They were believable, legitimate World Heavyweight Champions who could reasonably stake a claim to being among the absolute elite Pro Wrestlers of their respective generations. I think that is a big part of the reason that they all bear the mark of greatness, and that they all are generally considered to rank among the all time greats.
Not everyone who’s been placed in that position has worn the mantle so well, though. Failed GHC Chapion Rikio is the first example that leaps to mind. Perhaps if he’d shown the ability to get people behind him as champion, he’d be considered a great wrestler already.
Lex Luger, The Big Show, Kevin Nash, Booker T, Sid, Yoshinari Ogawa, and so on, are examples of good wrestlers who got the huge push but never quite managed to get everyone to buy into them 100 per cent as “The Man.” They lack that aura of greatness to a greater or lesser extent, and it would be surprising to me if many of the people reading this consider any of them to be genuinely great pro wrestlers. Randy Orton and John Cena are in danger of joining their ranks, though both are still young.
JJJ and HHH are arguments unto themselves. My opinion? They are perhaps not utterly lacking in excellence, but they have much less of it than their families think they do. Their hugely sustained pushes have not and never will get them the kind of love that flows naturally to someone like Foley… or Kawada… or Sting… or Vader
Jun Akiyama is generally ranked pretty highly, because he’s been in so many great matches. But think how he’d rank if he’d been a great champion!
Guys like Tanahashi and KENTA still need to show that they can do as well on top as they did as underdogs. Time will tell.
Indy wrestlers like American Dragon, CIMA and TAKA deserve respect just for handling the pressure of being on top of their respective promotions for so long. Not everyone can handle that.
It isn’t easy being the top guy. Not everyone can handle it. Lots of guys get the push but can’t make it work. The champs who succeed as champs and the aces who succeed as aces have really proven something by doing so.
The Greatest vs. My Favourite
I wrote a whole column on this subject back in Septemeber ’04:
Here’s my current take on it:
I would hope that the vast majority of people are comfortable liking things that they know are not “The Best.”
I grew up watching the Vancouver Canucks. They have never been The Best Team in Hockey, and I know that, but they will always be my favourite.
I know that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is the apotheosis of his art, but due to the highly personal meaning that they have for me (memories associated with them, having seen them live at important points in my development as a music fan, etc.) I feel more love for relatively minor works like the opus 69 Cello Sonata and the third of the opus 18 string quartets.
I can recognize Volk Han’s greatness, watch his matches and appreciate his brilliance on the mat, but I don’t get the same kick out of it as I do from watching TenKoji Mocking Nakanishi and seeing Big nak get his revenge. Does that mean I think Nakanishi is a better wrestler than Volk Han? Dear Lord, no!
If you can’t distinguish “My Favourite” from “The Greatest” then I’d guess one of two things is going on: Either you are not confident enough in your own judgement to like things that aren’t considered great, or you are so confident that you think your judgement alone is enough to convey the status of greatness (It probably isn’t – nothing personal).
Nobody Has Seen Everything
Collecting and trading pro wrestling tapes and DVDs is probably my number one hobby. My collection is already ridiculous, and it keeps getting larger. Still, there are huge gaps in my wrestling knowledge, because there is still so much stuff that I have never seen. I haven’t seen much Joshi Puroresu outside of my collection of AJW footage, and my knowledge of Lucha Libre is sketchy at best. Outside of Stampede, Mid South, Memphis, Mid Atlantic, Portland, St. Louis, and Texas, I haven’t seen a whole lot of wrestling form the dozens of different territories that predated the rise of the WWF Empire. I have only seen a couple of matches from Argentina, and I only have two DVDs worth of British Wrestling in my collection.
What all this means is that my lists of great wrestlers and great matches are still very much works in progress. Hopefully, they always will be. As I’ve said time and time again, the great thing about this hobby is that there’s always something new out there to be discovered.
Thanks for reading! Please take a moment to et me know what wrestlers you think are great, rip my opinions, or comment on this column, here.
Elsewhere
In case you missed it, I did a guest spot in Phil’s column on various current issues in the world of Japanese wrestling.
