This is the Call for Nominations for the 2016 Theszie Awards.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 31, 2016.

To see a list of current nominees, click here.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2015, here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

Welcome to the results of the 2015 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 753 voters participating – less than last year, but that was largely because last year we had a large flood of voters from With Spandex and this year WS felt that they didn’t want to campaign overly for the Awards so they limited their linkage to one post. Which meant less voters from them – but more voters coming in from other sites. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Awards can be found here.

The “Worst” Awards can be found here.

And finally, full ballot counts for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you next year!

This is the Call for Votes for the 2015 Theszie Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszie Awards are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

(We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination – for example, someone nominated Adam Rose for Worst Babyface, and whatever one thinks of Adam Rose he turned heel in 2014 and hasn’t been a babyface since – however, this does not mean people cannot vote for those wrestlers in those categories.)

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2014.

A note on category changes: This year, after deliberation, we have removed four categories, three negative and one positive, in order to streamline the voting process further. Most Deteriorated was axed after we decided the category is frankly just depressing; voting for “which wrestler aged the worst” is simply not fun and we don’t need to bother with it. Worst TV/Youtube Show was killed for two reasons: firstly, we killed Worst Promotion in 2013 because we felt it was too generally negative in a broad-brush-tarring sort of way and Worst TV/Youtube Show seemed to have the same problem, and secondly, there really aren’t a lot of truly bad wrestling shows lately so there is insufficient competition.

Finally, we decided to axe Best and Worst Promotional Move. This was the toughest decision since the idea of awards specifically focused on the “business” side of wrestling is appealing. However, in practice, what happens is that most of the time these awards end up being awards for booking decisions and angles, because that’s what common wrestling viewers interact with most regularly. It’s true that a booking decision can be the best possible thing, business-wise, that a promotion does in a given year (for example, pushing Hulk Hogan in 1984 is what turned the WWF into the unstoppable wrestling juggernaut it is today) but these moments are rare, and signing decisions, TV deals, and other things fans don’t have as much familiarity with are, most of the time, more important. Basically, these awards were smark awards in a bad way, so we nuked them. You’re welcome.

The deadline for entering votes is February 7, 2016. Have fun!

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2015 Theszie Awards.

To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by December 30, 2015.

To see a list of current nominees, click here.

Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2014, here for 2013, here and here for 2012, and here for most historical awards.

Welcome to the results of the 2014 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we officially hit 1,000 voters – and I mean exactly 1,000 voters, after we manually eliminated the usual bunch of duplicate/scam voters (seriously, guys, why do you do that, it just makes this all take longer). We came out to exactly one thousand, which is pretty amazing.

For next year, we’re looking at some ways to improve the Awards. We may end up killing some of the “worst” Awards – not all of them, but people are generally less enthusiastic about them, and also it gets boring seeing people use various awards to complain about how much they dislike John Cena (or, presumably, Roman Reigns next year). We’re also looking at ways to streamline the nominations process for at least some of the awards.

Finally, I’d like to thank Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

You can find the results for the “Best” Awards HERE.

You can find the results for the “Worst” Awards HERE.

Finally, you can find full ballot counts for all awards HERE.

See you next year!

Voting is now open for the 2014 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards – the Theszies! You can vote HERE.

The Theszie Awards are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

(We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination – for example, someone nominated Aiden English for Best Flyer, and while we might like Aiden English, he’s not exactly a luchador – however, this does not mean people cannot vote for those wrestlers in those categories.)

We have added a new award this year for Best Wrestling Media, to celebrate independent wrestling journalism and commentary. This was done partially because we recognize the importance to the wrestling community of recaps, podcasts and fan reviews, and partially because fan-created media was threatening to completely overwhelm actual wrestling shows produced by wrestling companies in the Best TV/Youtube Show category, and while we’re fans of Botchamania and other shows like it, the work that goes into creating Botchamania is far different than the work that goes into creating a regular original wrestling program. We want fans of these fan-driven shows to be able to celebrate their favorite shows; we just don’t want actual wrestling to be ignored or overlooked in favour of it. Hence the new category.

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2014.

The deadline for entering votes is February 7, 2015. Have fun!