Qualifications, Rules, Criteria

Briefly, while I wait for the last of the ballots to come rolling in, I'll go over the groundwork for creating this list.

Qualifications
By and large, I have left determining a wrestler's eligibility up to the list-makers themselves. If an expert thinks that Lawrence Taylor is one of the top wrestling superstars of all time based on his WrestleMania XI match against Bam Bam Bigelow, who am I to disagree? If somebody ranked Jameson in their top ten, well, I guess I won't argue, but I will roll my eyes.

Essentially, since the action word for this list is "superstar" and not "wrestler", I consider our experts to have a fair amount of leeway when constructing their lists.

For example, I didn't select anybody whose career was over by 1986, when the television program WWF Superstars of Wrestling debuted. I consider that to be the dawning of the "superstar" era in professional wrestling, and thus certain old timers (like Danno O'Mahony, left, whose finishing move was the Irish Whip, which was named after him) are sadly missing from my top fifty. Obviously, the next expert could populate their entire list with O'Mahony's 1930s contemporaries, if they chose to. To each his own.

Rules

As lenient as I decided to be with regards to the pool of superstars our experts got to choose from, I did have to put a couple of general guidelines in place. First, only one superstar is permitted in each slot. The goal is to keep tag teams from being ranked together. You'd get into a philosophical discussion about what constitutes a tag team if you let that happen. Could I rank the Rude Brood from Survivor Series '89 at #1? Well, if I did that, then I'd end up with a list of more than fifty superstars, and that's just wrong. The second rule wasn't ever explicitly told to the experts, it was more of a post-compilation decision on the part of the Excel Wizard (my super-intimidating wrestler persona). Many superstars have competed as different characters, or with different gimmicks, over the course of their careers. As I compiled the lists, I thought that it wouldn't be fair if one person voted for Sid Justice, another voted for Sycho Sid and a third voted for Sid Vicious to tally points separately for each of Sid Eudy's characters. So, if an expert voted for any of those, it all went into a big pot of points for Sid. And what if someone voted for the Orient Express's Kato and another voted for Maximillian Moon? All those points went to the same person, whether voters knew they were the same guy or not. And what if one ballot included both Kato and Max Moon in different spots of the same list? Well, I had to make a couple of judgement calls in cases like that.

Criteria

Again, this is similar to the qualifications section. The criteria undoubtedly varied from expert to expert. One member of our esteemed panel made a spreadsheet of his own, rating wrestlers in a variety of different categories and then used a weighted formula to determine how high on the list each person should be. I'm sure that there were others who just went with their guts, and still others that used wrestling action figures to construct an enormous double-elimination tournament to determine who the top wrestlers were. I won't ask any of these wrestling aficionados what their methods were, but I'll assume that they know what they're doing.

And that's your little peek behind the curtain at what went into the construction of this list of the Top 100 Superstars of Wrestling. And very shortly, the reveal will begin with the announcement of the 100th greatest superstar of professional wrestling!