Let’s face it, Top X Lists are a cliche. They’re rather overdone in wrestling, in particular. After all, PWI puts out a list every year five times this size. However, if there’s anyone on Inside Pulse who can turn a cliche on its ear and make it work in a new and different way, it’s Mistah Joshua Grutman.
In the Super-Secret Writers’ Forum, he came up with an interesting twist on creating a Top 100 list. Everyone else recognized the merits and jumped on the idea. We only had a few ground rules for doing this:
1) The list would comprise wrestlers from 1980 to present, under the presumption that none of us were really watching wrestling on a heavy basis prior to 1980. This includes me; I was watching during the 1970s, but I don’t really consider myself becoming a true wrestling fan until 1982.
1a) Wrestlers who began their careers before 1980 would have their accomplishments post-1980 weighted more heavily.
2) Wrestlers would be judged on their accomplishments in the United States and Canada only. Gordi Whitelaw will be leading the way to help us create a complementary list of “international” wrestlers, giving us his guidance on the myriad meanderings of puroresu. David Brashear will assist us in deciphering the contributions of luchadores. Iain Burnside and Danny Wallace will be giving us tips on European wrestlers.
3) Wrestlers will be judged only on their accomplishments as single performers and what they brought to various tag teams and stables. Tag teams themselves are not included. Pulse Glazer and myself will be in the lead to create a complementary list of tag teams.
4) Voting would be done on this basis: we would each list our Top Ten in order, and points would be assigned based on position on each of our lists: 10 for first, 9 for second, and so on. Once voting was complete, the points would be tabulated and the top ten point-getters would be our Top 10. Then, we would repeat the process to get #s 11-20, moving up those on our individual ballots who didn’t make the Top 10 and substituting new choices at the bottom of our ballots for those who did. We repeated this process for ten rounds of voting until we obtained a Top 100. And, no, despite the efforts of some people (*coughFingerscough*), the ECW World Heavyweight Champion that preceded Johnny Nitro did not make the list.
We then collected our list and started parceling tasks. The write-ups for each of the individual entries are credited to the writers who volunteered to write them, starting with the wrestlers at the bottom of the list and moving up, ten at a time. Later on, when we start getting closer to our Top Ten, you’ll see more group efforts from us.
This was a fun little exercise (and fun enough that we’re going to be doing two more of these). We hope that you enjoy our results as much as we enjoyed compiling them.
The Voting Panel (in alphabetical order):
Our selections were determined in April 2007, and #s 100 to 76 in the countdown will be unveiled over the course of the next five weeks.
100. July 2
99. July 3
98. July 4
97. July 5
96. July 6
95. July 9
94. July 10
93. July 11
92. July 12
91. July 13
90. July 16
89. July 17
88. July 18
87. July 19
86. July 20
85. July 23
84. July 24
83. July 25
82. July 26
81. July 27
80. July 30
79. July 31
78. August 1
77. August 2
76. August 3
The entire Top 100 Wrestlers feature can be found here.
