The Forgotten Observer Awards: The Yearbook Ratings & WON HOF Impact

The annual yearbooks of the Wrestling Observer during the 1980s were where the results of the annual Wrestling Observer Newsletter awards were announced. Right alongside them in each issue was a list of wrestlers under the heading “Wrestling Observer Ratings.” Editor Dave Meltzer had polled a select group of people for a ranking of their top wrestlers at that point in time.

In 1986, the prelude to the ratings specified “these ratings are based strictly on in-ring ability and work-rate when it comes to wrestling skill and athletic ability.” It’s my assumption that this description applies to the ratings prior to 1986, but I have been unable to verify this to date. In previous years, there’s no specification of criteria for this poll.

I can’t find any meaningful discussion of these polls anywhere online, which is a shame, as these provide a nice look back into how wrestlers were viewed during their career. This can be a useful tool for evaluating a wrestler’s career and ensuring that their historical evaluation isn’t forgotten.

It should be noted that 1984 ranked 100 wrestlers, but I excluded 76-100 from that list for the purpose of awarding points later in the article.

Here is a table of all the placements in the lists. The 1981 list is incomplete, only pieced together from listings in later rankings.

You can find every yearbook from 1982 to 1990 on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/wrestling-observer-yearbook

I’ve put together rankings of the various wrestlers covering three consecutive years each, assigning points on the basis of 1^st place being worth 75 points, 2^nd 74 points, and so forth. The grouping is to minimize the effect of a single year on an individual’s ranking.

Let’s use this data to look at some Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame candidates.

Here’s a quick reminder of the instructions to voters:

“The criteria for the Hall of Fame is a combination of drawing power, being a great in-ring performer or excelling in one’s field in pro wrestling, as well as having historical significance in a positive manner.  A candidate should either have something to offer in all three categories, or be someone so outstanding in one or two of those categories that they deserve inclusion.”

Only three people were ranked in all seven groupings – Ric Flair, Ted DiBiase, and Terry Gordy. Flair never finished below second and DiBiase never below eleventh. Terry Gordy peaked at third and never fell below 21^st in these three-year intervals. All three of them are in the Hall of Fame. This is also the case for the wrestlers who appeared in six of the seven lists: Ricky Steamboat, Tatsumi Fujinami, Riki Choshu, and Randy Savage.

There are six wrestlers who appeared in the top 50 for five different three-year periods: Jumbo Tsuruta, Akira Maeda, Nobuhiko Takada, Bobby Eaton, Bret Hart, and Barry Windham. Of them, Windham is not in the Hall. Windham only appeared on the ballot once in 1998, when he immediately fell off the ballot due to receiving less than 10% of the vote.

When Windham initially appeared on the ballot, it looks like he was largely dismissed as a flash in the pan in terms of in-ring quality. However, for a period of seven years, he was a top 25 in-ring performer according to this poll.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if he were on the ballot again. I don’t feel like there’s a groundswell of support for his induction, but in terms of in-ring, he feels like a decent candidate based off these numbers. His name barely came up in the voting for the Flair/Thesz or Most Outstanding Wrestler awards. He finished fourth in the voting for Best Heel in 1988, and never showed up on those lists again. His historical importance seems tied entirely to his membership in the Four Horsemen.

I hardly feel like he’s an obvious inductee, but there is an argument for his induction and it’d be interesting to see how he performed in 2021.

There are five people who appeared in these lists four times – Bruiser Brody, Stan Hansen, Mitsuhara Misawa, Tully Blanchard, and Genichiro Tenryu. All but Blanchard are in the Hall.

Tully Blanchard is currently on the ballot, but in a backdoor sort of way as he’s grouped with JJ Dillon and Arn Anderson. Despite being a group that was together for about one year, they’ve hung around 40-50% of the vote since going on the ballot in 2017.

Let’s assess Blanchard as an individual. It’s obvious he was an in-ring great in his era, and his promo skills were top shelf. He wasn’t ever a big draw outside of the Horsemen, though, and his career was cut short due to various issues. He feels like a borderline case to me. I’m a big Hall guy, so I wouldn’t be bothered if he did get in, but I also think it’s hardly a miscarriage of justice if he isn’t inducted.

The last individual I’ll specifically point out from these lists is Owen Hart. He finished in the top ten in the ‘86-‘88, ‘87-‘89, and ’88-’90  blocks. If you add the points together for 1986-1990 as one single block, Owen is seventh in that time period – finishing only behind Flair, Eaton, Takada, DiBiase, Tenryu, and Maeda, all of whom are in the Hall. Owen Hart continued to be a fantastic in-ring worker beyond this time period, and went on to have classic matches with his brother Bret.

There is precedence for Halls of Fame ignoring career length requirements for candidates who died tragically early. Addie Joss was a dominant pitcher between 1902 and 1910. Joss died of meningitis in April 1911. The Baseball Hall of Fame decided to waive the ten-year career requirement for him, clearing the way for his induction in 1978.

Ross Youngs was another early baseball player who played from 1917-1926 before dying in 1927 due to Bright’s disease. He was inducted in spite of his early death in 1972.

Drazen Petrovic was a rising star in the NBA in the early 90s who died in a car wreck in 1993, when he was just 28 years old. Though he had only just reached All-NBA levels that year, he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002.

In all three cases, high-level athletes who died mid-career were evaluated not only on what they had accomplished to date, but what they would accomplish moving forward. I think it’s more than reasonable that if you look at Owen Hart and examine how WWE would trend towards featuring higher levels of in-ring work in the years after Hart’s 1999 death, you conclude that he would have particularly benefitted from that time period and moved up the card of the company.

I think Owen Hart is the strongest of the three candidates mentioned in this article. He was an elite in-ring performer for his time period who was destined for greater things. He inspired workers in the next generation and his influence will continue to grow as time goes by thanks to the work of the Owen Hart Foundation.

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