This is something I've been mulling over in my head for the past few weeks; the possibility of a list ranking the all-time greatest wrestlers from a fairly objective standpoint, whilst accounting for many of our western biases with regards to our exposure. For example, someone like The Miz would probably make our top 100 list if we're judging strictly on a modern western perspective, but there's no way he's making the list when going back to the days of Gotch and Hackenschmidt, and accounting for Japan and Mexico.

Now, Dave Meltzer has already done this, but there's a couple of issues with his work:
1: It was released in 2002, so that obviously doesn't account for 17 more years of wrestling, as well as allowing the legacy of more modern names to sink in.
2: It contains your standard Meltzer bias like ranking Jushin Liger over Harley Race, and putting fucking Sting at #92. There's accounting for western bias, and then there's just being blatantly biased against the West. I like Jushin Liger, but this would be like ranking Rey Mysterio over Steve Austin. Totally cretinous, and I'd love to see people make the argument he should be ranked above Sting in terms of impact. But I guess that's my "western bias" speaking.

So I thought it would be fun if we could draw up a list together, 10 wrestlers at a time perhaps, and make our own rankings and list together, for the sake of clarity. I have enough faith in people here to not make this like the Wrestlezone Tournament and have people like Goldust rank above Lou Thesz, and just turn it into a popularity contest, but I also think we're not going to go Meltzer levels of contrarian and have the list filled to the brim of names your typical wrestling fan would have never heard of. It's obviously important to remember people like Jim Londos and their impact on wrestling, but are we really going to say, I dunno, Gene Kiniski for example is ranked above The Undertaker? Both are definitely in a top 100 list, but a lot of people pointing out the limitations someone like Kiniski had like a lack of television exposure due to the time period are also missing the limitations current wrestlers have today with regards to weekly televised shows which will hurt W/L ratio, as well as a more tumultuous schedule factoring in house shows, which results in the straining and ending of careers much earlier on average. I have mad respect for people like Gelgarin for educating me more on wrestling's past, but we shouldn't positively discriminate against wrestlers from the past as a result of technological limitations. This isn't entirely a one-sided conversation about which generation was at a greater disadvantage (even if I do agree ultimately that the prior generation does have a disadvantage).

I've been hard on Meltzer, but to be fair, his list is easily the best I've seen, given I've seen some particularly horrendous examples throwing Frank Gotch in as a token #100 and having Abdullah the freaking Butcher at #33, over guys like Tiger Mask and Gorgeous George. And I'm not expecting us to get a perfect list by any means, or even one as good as Meltzer's necessarily. But I think it would be worth a try anyhow, and just a bit of fun at the end of the day, sparking some interesting debate.

Would anyone else be interested in this? If we get a few people wanting to take part, I'll be happy to post my personal top 10, and running it by other top 10's to hopefully draw together an average ranking.