The other day, I was flipping through my well-worn copy of Wrestling at the Chase: The Inside Story of Sam Muchnick and the Legends of Professional Wrestling, and somewhere between the tales of blood feuds and body slams, it hit me like a steel chair to the soul. I miss fat pro wrestlers. Not just the rotund ones, mind you, but the whole glorious breed of grapplers who didn’t look like they were carved out of granite or dipped in baby oil before stepping into the ring.
I miss the days when a guy like Dusty Rhodes could be the face of the sport. Dusty wasn’t chiseled. He didn’t have abs you could bounce a quarter off of. But he had charisma. He had soul. He had that raspy voice and those polka-dot tights that somehow made you believe he could take down anyone, anywhere, anytime. He was the kind of guy who looked like he could fix your transmission and then powerbomb you through the hood of your own car.
Back then, wrestling wasn’t about looking like a superhero. It was about selling tickets. If you could talk fans into the building and make them believe what they were seeing, you were a star. Guys like Terry Gordy, Big Bubba Rogers, and “Playboy” Buddy Rose didn’t need sculpted physiques. They had presence. They had grit. They had the kind of faces and bodies that told stories before the bell even rang.
I use the term “fat wrestlers” loosely. What I really mean are the guys who didn’t fit the modern mold. The ones who looked like your uncle, your mechanic, or the guy who ran the local bait shop. Arn Anderson comes to mind. He wasn’t flashy. He didn’t have a six-pack. But he could tie a man in knots and make you believe every second of it. He had that quiet menace, that Southern drawl, and a spinebuster that could shake the rafters.
These days, you turn on WWE and it’s like flipping through a fitness magazine. Everyone’s ripped. Everyone’s glistening. But something’s missing. The suspension of disbelief has taken a hit. I want to see a guy who looks like he just clocked out of a factory shift take on another guy who just finished mowing his lawn. That’s the kind of wrestling I grew up with. That’s the kind that made you believe.
Mick Foley is another perfect example. He didn’t look like much. He had a wild beard, a flannel shirt, and a body that looked like it had been through a war. But he connected. Through interviews, through pain, through sheer willpower. He made you feel every chair shot, every fall from the cage, every moment of madness. He didn’t need to be pretty. He needed to be real.
And then there was Phil Hickerson. He spent most of his career in the Memphis territory, and he was one tough son of a gun. He didn’t look like a star, but he wrestled like one. He made you believe. In one match, he beat up two muscle-bound rookies who would later become Sting and The Ultimate Warrior. That’s right. The future icons of the sport got tossed around by a guy who looked like he could have been your neighbor.
So yes, I miss fat pro wrestlers. I miss the days when wrestling was raw, unpredictable, and full of characters who didn’t need a gym membership to be legends. They were tough. They were believable. And they made the sport feel like something you could reach out and touch.
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.