The other day, I was reading through the great book, Wrestling at the Chase: The Inside Story of Sam Muchnick and the Legends of Professional Wrestling, and I realized something. I realized I miss the gold old days of pro wrestling. I miss when guys like Dusty Rhodes were at the top of the sport. The bygone era when guys who didn’t look like your typical star could still get a chance to shine. Guys like Terry Gordy, Big Bubba Rogers, “Playboy” Buddy Rose, and numerous others were on top because they were the best at what they did. Days when having a great muscled-up physique didn’t automatically make you a star. In short, I miss fat pro wrestlers.
Back in the days when wrestlers earned their checks by how many tickets they sold, the emphasis wasn’t so much on looks. It was a combination of their actual skill in the ring, along with their charisma out of it. If they could use their words to rile the fans up to the point that they would buy a ticket to see him get his butt kicked, that was enough. If he was good enough in the ring to make the fans believe what they were seeing, that was enough. Looks were just a bonus. Some of my favorite wrestlers would never be offered a cover spot on a men’s magazine, but they sure could make you believe they would whip the ass of whoever DID appear on the cover.
I use the term “fat wrestlers” loosely here. I’m not just talking about fat guys, I’m talking about guys who just don’t fit the “fitness” profile that you see with most guys in the ring today. Guys like Arn Anderson may not have gotten a chance in today’s wrestling world because he was not muscled up, and didn’t have six-pack abs, but he could talk, he could express emotion, and he knew how to tie guys up in a pretzel to get his point across.
You turn on WWE programming today, and you’re sure to find plenty of guys that are ripped and look like they’ve stepped straight off the pages of Muscle and Fitness. What you won’t find, however, are guys wrestling who looks like your dad, or the tough guy down the street who works on cars.
The loss of the average looking, but the tough son of a gun, in favor of hiring muscle-bound freaks who sometimes have trouble with the basic concepts of wrestling, has hurt the suspension of disbelief of wrestling to a degree. I want to see a guy who looks like my uncle fighting a guy who looks like your uncle.
A lot of the best wrestlers to ever come along were great examples of what I’m talking about. Mick Foley never looked too imposing physically, but because he knew how to connect with the fans through his interview style, and his brutal style in the ring, you always knew he was a threat. He didn’t have to rely on being muscled up with baby oil dripping off of him to become a star.
Take Phil Hickerson as an example. Phil spent a lot of his career wrestling in the Memphis area. While he certainly didn’t look like a star by today’s standards, he was one tough son of a gun and you had no problem believing what he did was real. Above is a video to help get my point across, and if you’ve never seen many of these guys I’ve mentioned, I urge you to search out footage of them and see just how some of these less than stellar looking athletes were some of the better workers in the business. And as a special bonus in that video, the two muscled-up chumps Phil was beating on here grew up to be Sting and The Ultimate Warrior.
Guys like, for example, Dusty Rhodes, are not merely ‘fat’ but they can ALSO be muscular and/or powerful. Referring to them as ‘fat’ reeks of this weird fixation that has brought about the clone-like legions of least interesting gym rat types we have in much TV wrestling today and its lacking the ‘fun’ of the 50’s-70’s era (OK, this is an unfair generalization, with respect to today’s wrestlers – but I share the sentiment of missing the ‘fat’ and ‘older’ wrestlers. It seemed to me through the 80’s, 90’s and up to today, there was some sort of internal effort to make wrestling chic (probably a misguided effort to generate more “mass appeal” which guided by greed rather than focusing on keeping wrestling entertaining – it HAD a strong following at one point, but I’d be willing to bet ‘marketing’ people got involved and convinced someone that if they got guy wrestlers that looked like gym rats and didn’t deviate from that paradigm and Even got some gymrat women involved (I.e. let’s make it “sexy” – which it ISNT! Nor should be – at least not ‘completely’, originally we had the Fabulous Moolah!), then professional wrestling would become even BIGGER than it was. Guess what? … WRONG!! I mean, I can’t see anything like “The Bushwhackers” existing today – but people loved them cuz they were fun and entertaining – albeit a bit droll and lowbrow, but that was the POINT and the APPEAL.
It comes down to that there was a decision made at some point to do away with the droll, lowbrow aspects of wrestling and instead, tried to make it, uh, sophisticated (?!), and, for those of us who miss the big, fat guys, that WS not a good decision. And that same mentality was implemented in other things besides wrestling and a lot of other things lost a sense of fun and silliness and became pretentiously serious and boring instead, sad to say.
Dusty was always one of my favorites. Read recently that Vince made Gunther/WALTER slim down a little before he would let him debut on the big brand and that Keith Lee was let go because he did not slim down, so it is definitely intentional when it comes to the WWE though Kevin Owens is not your typical body type and he just was signed to a long contract.
Keith Lee is a great one to watch.
I’ve seen Keith Lee a couple of times, but while he is a big guy, he wrestles small. I just miss the great talkers who kicked ass.