PWO Greatest Wrestler Ever

Pro Wrestling Only is in the midst of running down the results to its “Greatest Wrestler Ever” poll. I participated in the poll, which you can read more about here. As wrestlers that made my personal list are crossed off on the overall list, I will add a post that provides a brief explanation of why I ranked the wrestler where I did, recommended matches and anything else that may or may not be relevant. You can find these posts below, in order of where the wrestlers appeared on my personal list.

In putting together my list, the only groups of wrestlers I did not consider were Golden Age wrestlers and prior (essentially pre-1960) and female wrestlers. The first was strictly a footage issue; there is not enough full length matches from that era in order to assess those wrestlers. The decision not rank women wrestlers was because women’s wrestling is a bit of a blindspot for me. I did not feel comfortable ranking them based on inconsistent and scattered viewing.

I did not use a specific system or process in creating my list. What I did do was weigh (in a decidedly non-scientific way) how much I enjoy watching a specific wrestler with my assessment of the wrestler’s overall skill. For example, I am far more likely to sit down at some point in the near future and turn on a Bill Goldberg match than I am a Shawn Michaels match. However, Goldberg missed my cut somewhat narrowly while Michaels sneaked on. I felt I didn’t like Goldberg enough to overlook his obvious lack of skill and conversely, I don’t personally dislike Michaels’ matches enough to totally ignore his obvious positive attributes.

Having a significant number of excellent matches is important to me. Being a great big match wrestler is as well. If a wrestler is said to be really skilled but that skill does not translate into a great portfolio of matches, then what good are those skills? Wrestlers who I recognized as having positive attributes, but who were unable to translate those attributes into creating excellent matches had a tough time in making my list.

From the time the poll was announced in October 2014 up until the time I submitted my list a week before WrestleMania 32, I watched a lot of historical and current footage with this poll in mind. Periodically, I listed out my top 100 as an exercise to discover what wrestlers I was must unsure about in terms of placement. I would then focus in on those “problem” wrestlers. I also spent a lot of time reading the nominee posts to determine which wrestlers I had not previously considered that I probably should look at. There are definitely wrestlers that I did not take enough of a look at but I felt like I was able to get a good grip on all of the important names and then some. On my final list, I cannot thing of any names in the top 75 or so that I was not relatively sure of their ranking.

That is more or less it for general thoughts (I’ll edit this page if any other others come to mind). Now onto the countdown . . .

Paul’s 100 Greatest Wrestlers Ever List (April, 2016)