What Have You Learned About Your Own Tastes?

Another thing I learned is that the "Terry Funk's GOAT case is hurt by a lack of classics" talking point is wrong. I had 10 Terry Funk matches make my final list, another one was my literal last cut, and I can think of at least 10 more I strongly considered.

Tenryu will have about as many matches on my final list as anyone so I absolutely disagree on him struggling with high end matches. Casas will be pretty well represented too (and I think he's the best to ever do it anyway).

Agreed on brawling Flair being the best Flair. The parts during his lengthier title matches where things break down into a fight are routinely my favourite parts of those matches now, and at this point I'd much rather watch him against Morton or Funk (and Garvin, whenever they're beating the brakes of each other) than guys like Windham or Steamboat (though Flair/Steamboat chop exchanges always rule).

Kandori was someone I wound up digging way more than I expected during the GWE poll and she's only gone up in my estimation during this. That Hotta feud is badass and the August 97 tag is a joshi MOTDC to me. Mariko Yoshida is another woman who I'd never really given a ton of thought to prior to the GWE project and she was someone else who I wound up loving. Her stock has also continued to rise during this, and even if she won't have a bunch of matches on my list she'd be my highest ranking joshi worker on a revised GWE list.

High end lucha and high end shoot style are my favourite kinds of wrestling. I already knew that before this project but it's certainly been reinforced as a result of it.

I'm nowhere near as fond of 90s All Japan as I was 10-15 years ago, but when it's good it is fucking good. It won't be terribly well represented on my list just because I haven't seen so much of it in over a decade and never got around to rewatching a ton of it, but the real superclassics that I did get around to checking out again mostly all held up great.

Top one is the 3/21/98 singles match, bottom one is the 8/15/97 show and the Kandori/Endo v Hotta/Maekawa tag starts around 43 minutes in. Watch the tag first, I guess, just to whet your appetite for the singles. 

So some stuff I learned about my taste.

I think the biggest take away for me is that I like brutality and I am not totally sure how I feel about that. I'll eventually post my list after the the deadline with some commentary or something, and if you care to look at the whole thing you will see I clearly put a premium on two people actually beating the shit out of one another. I guess I have always known it and it has never really bothered me, but something about seeing my list really made it clear how much value I place on a match being brutal, maybe even going off the rails in a way that is boarderline unsafe. In some ways that bothers me a bit. I don't want encourage or celebrate wrestling that is dangerous or actually hurts people. Part of what I like about wrestling and respect about wrestlers is their ability to do all this without murdering one another. At the same time, I think what I really like about those matches is there is something unpredictable and organic about them. I love organic, natural moments and matches and it is just so hard to fake it. This feels like something I may work to articulate more fully later (over summer maybe).

Stan Hansen and Kenta Kobashi are the best big match workers of all time in my eyes. I think more than anyone else (even other wrestlers with lots of representation on my list) their matches feel big and important to me. They feel like they could do it at any moment. People like El Hijo Del Santo, Kandori, Flair, Misawa, Jumbo, Danielson all show well on my list and are all in that conversion as well, but to me Hansen and Kobashi sort of stand alone in that regard (and it shows in how well both their singles matches with one another did for me).

The one potential exception to this might be Sangre Chicana. If we had as much footage on him and if I had seen as much footage from him in his prime as I have on the people listed above he might run away with the most spots on this list.

I am sort of a match guy, but this project also really reinforced what a small sliver of wrestling big matches are. LA Park is probably one of my top 5-7 favorite wrestlers ever and he doesn't have a single match on my list right now. Part of that was maybe me not getting to revisit two matches that I really wanted to, but I got to look at quite a bit recently and it just didn't get there. I still think he is absolutely brilliant. Obviously, there are endless examples of this. The project itself just drove home how we are dealing with a really fun but relatively small piece of the pie we call wrestling.

Some classics that started high for me fell a decent amount as I put in the last of my tape time. Matches that started as top 10 fell a good bit, still classics in my mind, but when I was really parsing out what I thought the best match ever was for me, they were clearly riding a bit on reputation and/or that first watch. Bockwinkel/Hennig, Jumbo/Tenryu and the first two of the big three Lawler/Dundee LLT matches are the biggest examples of this in terms of universally accepted classics. They all still finished in my top 100 and some finished really well, but they gave way to some matches I didn't expect to have as high.

A personal example of this is Nigel vs Danielson (United). That is a match that has – since I saw it for the first time – at the absolute top levels of greatness. It still did quite well on my list, but it dropped pretty hard in the 11th hour and it pained me.

I like lots of different types of wrestling. That may sound a little conceded in tone, but I am kind of ok with that. I don't mean it to sound "worldly" especially around this group of extremely knowledgable fans.  I just like that I enjoy lots of different types of wrestling. I have really varied list that certainly reflects my biases and personal tastes, but I like how diverse it is all the same. Honestly, all the lists I have seen submitted so far are varied and diverse in their own way, which makes this project pretty rewarding to go through.


I was a little surprised by how poorly matches on U.S. soil did at the top of the list. I am not really sure what to make of it on the whole, but I may want to try to carve out some time to watch top end U.S. matches right up next to some matches that finished well on my list. I really enjoyed the direct comparison/contrasts so that is something I will continue to do.

Some things I expected going in played out. I've been vocal about preferring brawls and over half of the matches that made my list were brawls including 16 of my top 20!

I would say my biggest surprise was how well Joshi did on my list. I had 14 joshi matches make my final list with 2 in my top 4 and 4 in my top 10. The Joshi I really liked was more storytelling and spectacle based though instead of what folks usually think of when they think of Joshi.