Your Favorite Wrestlers Ever: Bill Dempsey

Now that my own favorites list is out of the way, I posed the question to some of my colleagues in the fan/writer community. Who are your favorite five wrestlers?

Yes, I'm still taking submissions. So yeah, if you want to send in a list, feel free. If you don't have my e-mail, well, now you do. tom DOT holzerman AT gmail DOT com. Just sub the DOTs out for .s and the AT out for a @ and you'll be fine. Anyway, this unordered list comes to us from one Bill Dempsey, one of my oldest running buddies on the 'Net. We started out together in e-feds, and when I tell you he was one of the two best handlers I've ever come across, he's one of the two best handlers I've ever come across. Bill now works for HBO, and he's met some pretty cool celebs, but he still gives lil' ol' me and TWB the time of day. Here are his five favorite wrestlers ever. Enjoy!

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Two of the best, two of Bill's faves
Photo Credit: WWE.com

Steve Austin - When thinking about the Austin era I got a little hung up on who my favorite guy was from those years. Strong cases can be made for The Rock, Angle, Jericho, Benoit (I know) and several others. But the fact is that when I consider it I still think of it as “The Austin Era” and that says it all. Not that it’s easy to leave Rocky off the list, as I look back on his contributions with a lot of joy, but Austin was always more fun for me, because he was an ass kicker who could force some comedy from time to time whereas Rock excelled with humor, but I didn’t always buy his ass kicking. Chalk it up to personal preference. Then there is the physical aspect of Austin, where, beyond his frankly limited moveset (post knee surgeries) he was one of the best bumpers I have ever seen. The guy bounced around like a rubber ball and always made things look like they hurt, which is a really under-rated skill, I think. The great thing about anyone on this list is that by the time they are in the discussion you can look back at the early parts of their career and appreciate them more than you did at the time. Not that Stunning Steve was ever not fun to watch but knowing what he would become, I find it really cool to go back to the Dangerous Alliance Era and watch him knowing what he was growing into. He was a guy that excelled at two vastly different characters and also bridged the gap between those two characters with a masterful run as half of one of the greatest tag teams in history. Once he got to WWE the record speaks for itself. Yes, in the later years he became sort of a caricature and things got repetitive, but I appreciated that he tried to go heel and wish we had seen where that was going minus the Trips injury and the Invasion angle. And the fact remains that starting with the Bret Hart feud right up through WrestleMania 17 I don’t know that I’ve ever had more fun watching a single guy, and that is despite Russo booking a ton of that stretch.

Bret Hart - If I were putting these in order I might have Bret Hart listed as my favorite wrestler of all time. He’s just so good at everything. He certainly doesn’t have the promo skill of Flair, but minus that, I think he is everything we all think of when we talk about Flair, just better at most of it. Like Flair, his matches definitely have a similar feel and flow about them, but I find them much easier to go back and watch again, despite the fact that Flair’s super high end stuff is probably better than Bret’s if I’m being honest. But seriously, name a bad Bret Hart match. Even if you can come up with one or two (and the McMahon thing from a couple years back doesn’t count) you’ve gotta admit it’s not easy to do and the fact that he was such a consistent guy with so many different opponents is unreal. He bumped great, his offense was always crisp and tight, and his psych almost always made sense – the perfect triple threat. Again I find myself heaping a lot of the same praise on Bret that is usually reserved for Flair, but where Bret gets the edge in my eye is that he stopped before becoming a total joke (notwithstanding that it wasn’t really his choice). We have the benefit of not having to have had to watch Bret decline the way we did with Flair. In fact, if not for the move to WCW, who horribly mismanaged his career (he’s still got good matches there, but the whole period feels like a bore, minus that one match with Benoit and maybe some Goldberg stuff), I think Bret might be in the discussion as a unanimous Best Ever guy.

Vader - I’m very comfortable listing Vader as the best big man I have ever seen if we’re talking straight peak. Other guys have lasted longer (Taker comes to mind & we can argue other names depending on how we want to define the term “big man”) and it’s impossible to ignore Vader’s almost immediate fall from grace when he showed up in WWE, but at his best, he was clearly in the conversation for best in the world, big man or not. Obviously the matches with Sting are legendary, the Starrcade match with Flair is nearly perfect and the Cactus Jack stuff was way ahead of its time. Beyond that he was able to pull off remaining a scary no nonsense badass in a particularly goofy time in WCW in the days before and just after Hogan’s arrival and right up until Hogan killed him dead. Even after his WWF debut he had a few standout matches (vs. Bradshaw at Breakdown, Michaels at SummerSlam, & the Fatal Four Way come to mind) but he was clearly done by then and just got fatter and less motivated. But for 5 or 6 years before then he was absolutely must-watch and his matches tended to make everyone else’s look that much worse in comparison, which is a pretty good gauge of talent in my book.

Brock Lesnar - I went back and watched the Iron Man match with Angle last night, which is my first exposure to Lesnar in years. He totally holds up. Definitely the most natural and gifted wrestler I can think of. Just completely fluid and instinctual and a guy that just looked like he knew what he was doing at all times, not only throwing guys around like a gorilla, but actually wresting smart matches. Even the infamous botch at WrestleMania was something he went for 100%, just believing he would nail it. I can’t imagine how good he would have been if he actually liked wrestling and stuck to it. He couldn’t really talk, but he didn’t need to, and who knows if he would have developed that skill or not. Either way, I think we’d be talking about him as a GOAT as far as in-ring is concerned, and as mentioned above, depending on your definition probably calling him the best big man ever. Sadly, his run was way too short, but even with just those few years we have incredible matches to look back on with Hardy, Undertaker, Rocky, Angle, Big Show, Benoit (yeah, I know) & Guerrero. Just thinking about this now as I write it a Lesnar/Vader match with both guys at their prime would have been fucking ridiculous (and arguably we never even saw Lesnar in his prime). Not to mention how incredible a Lesnar/Mike Knox match would have been (I think Knox may seriously be my favorite guy from the past 5 years, although there are clearly guys more talented).

Randy Savage - Like everyone else, I remembered how much I loved Randy Savage when he died. My only real beef with him is I don’t think he had a single match worth watching once he left the WWF (and didn’t have many after his “retirement” match with Warrior, although the Flair match at WM8 is the clear exception). That said, even as he got older and less mobile and his matches all started blending together, he remained an exciting guy to watch just because he was so insane. The intrigue surrounding whether he would join the NWO was incredible right up until they had him join and become totally irrelevant. Still, he’s clearly the best that the WWF had in the WrestleMania era leading up to his departure and his resume in those 10 years is incredible. If he only had the two years between WrestleManias 3 & 5 he would be in the discussion as the best guy in the 80’s (with the year long Hogan feud being possibly the most perfectly booked main event program ever), but there is so much more to it than that, and as I get older I really enjoy his shitty weasely scumbag pre-WM3 heel act from a lot of the MSG and Boston Garden shows with him being the best wrestler on the card, moving at about 100 coke induced miles an hour at all times, blowing everyone’s minds collectively and cheating like hell without needing to. The guy was totally electric and it was so obvious that he had to be moved up the card. Just an all around great, with the only real complaint being a slightly repetitive offense, which he made worth watching by being completely crazy at all times.

Your Favorite Wrestlers Ever: Brandon Stroud

Now that my own favorites list is out of the way, I posed the question to some of my colleagues in the fan/writer community. Who are your favorite five wrestlers?

Today's entry in giving me their fave fives is the illustrious Dashing Brandon Stroud of With Leather. Fun fact, it was actually B-Stroud's idea for me to do this. Here they are, in ascending order rather than descending order (mainly because that's how he gave it to me):

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It's time, it's time, it's VADER TIME
Photo Credit: WWE.com

5. "American Dragon" Bryan Danielson - Nothing gets me through the dark ages of unsatisfactory mainstream wrestling like the independent circuit, and nobody got me into indy wrestling like Bryan Danielson. I'm one of the lucky few who managed to follow Ring of Honor from the very beginning, and some combination of Dragon, Paul London and Low Ki kept me moving past the death of wrestling I loved (WCW, and to a lesser extent ECW) and all the Katie Vick angles the E could throw.

Dragon appealed to me because of how great he was (is) in the ring, because I've always been drawn to those Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko types who do tons of moves but always for a reason. As my tastes in indy wrestling evolved, so did Dragon, turning into an airplane spinning hobo and eventually into the Bob Backlund-esque ROH champion that gave me the happiest and most productive year or so of wrestling fandom in my life. I'm happy he has a good job now, and I hope he keeps getting paid to do it.

4. Tiger Mask - This spot was The Great Muta's for the longest time. I grew up on the NWA and WCW, so The Great Muta was my favorite wrestler when I was nine. When he left, I had to know where he went, and some combination of Japanese supershows and tape trading through magazines and eventually the internet led me to Satoru Sayama. He's still completely unlike anyone who came before or after (even the other Tiger Masks, and Tigers Mask) and was so far ahead of his time we're still working up to it.

He gets bonus points for having the coolest music this side of Jushin Liger (ti-eeeee-gah, maskoo-oooooh). One of my prized possessions is a signed copy of his shootfighting book.

3. Ricky Morton - You know how you love stuff when you're a kid, but you revisit it as an adult and realize how shitty it was? He-Man is like that. Ricky Morton is not. He was my favorite wrestler when I was really little, and he somehow gets better the older you are, the more you watch him, and the more detached you are from good tag team wrestling. Morton could've stuck being a pretty boy Southerner with bandanas around his legs, but he painted in a medium of peril and ass-whompings I'm still struggling to define. This guy got his ass kicked harder than anyone who isn't a Mulkey but still got fired up and threw big stomping punches at people when he had to. And his finisher was mostly getting dropkicked in the back by his own tag team partner. That's awesome.

I met him when I was 7, and again when I was 27. 20 years later he was still better than 1987 Robert Gibson.

2. Vader - Glorious moments are why you love Vader. He's got arguably the best look and persona of any pro wrestler in history. He debuted in WCW with a fucking mastadon helmet that shot steam. He murdered the Z-Man so hilariously and hard. He had so many unbelievably amazing matches with Sting you can't begin to arrange them all. In Japan, he suplexed Inoki so hard it made the world hurt. He got his eyeball knocked out during a match, but no big D, he just put it back in. He ripped off Cactus Jack's ear and broke his nose. He lived in a WHITE CASTLE OF FEAR. And once when i was 14 I slapped him on the boob as he walked by, and he smelled like peppermint.

Vader is awesome, and you don't need a paragraph on the Internet to know that. Watch anything he's ever done, except anything in the WWF, especially that time he was too fat to stand.

1. Jumbo Tsuruta - A wretler who always made wrestling seem real, even when he didn't. I like him so much I named my cat "Jumbo". The best way to explain is to point you to this old article from Progressive Boink, where I do my best to tell someone living outside my brain why Jumbo Tsuruta is the best ever.

http://www.progressiveboink.com/archive/jumbo.html

Whatever Happened to the Athletic Fat Guy?

Steen: Not svelte, but definitely the goods

Earthquake. Vader. Big Boss Man. Bam Bam Bigelow. The mainstream feds used to be full of athletic big men who had beer bellies to go with their technical prowess and in some cases, high flying moves. Commenter Lucius lamented on Twitter that the athletic fat guy has gone to the wayside. True, if you scour the WWE's roster right now, you'll find one guy who fits the "athletic" mold, rather than the monster role. That guy is Brodus Clay, who's also totally not on TV right now. Mark Henry is a fat guy, but he's also very much a monster-type. He fits a stereotype more than anything else. There's nothing wrong with that at all, as Henry is among the best things going right now in my opinion, but again, variety is a spice of life that WWE doesn't use a whole lot of.

Impact is slightly better. Samoa Joe and Bully Ray are both beer-gutted wrestlers who move around quite well for guys their size. The indies have two other really good examples, one being Kevin Steen, obviously, and the other being Eddie Kingston. Kingston is a borderline example, as he's not really that fat. Steen is a better example in terms of body type. Both men are tremendous wrestlers. Then again, enumerating all those guys, plus adding in maybe Husky Harris, and it's six guys tops who fit the mold. In terms of how many sheer wrestlers are out there, that might be a small number, but then again, what fat people in America today are athletic as well?

Body types have changed over the years too. Be it steroids, better conditioning, better diet, more discipline, more pressure from management to have a better body type or whatever, you don't see nearly as many barrel chests or doughy stomachs anymore. Like it or not, WWE's neuroses over body type have ruled the day to the point where if you want to be a wrestler, you have to acquiesce to WWE's idea of what a wrestler looks like.

Be that as it may, how many truly great athletic fat guys have there been? I wonder if the number of guys with beer guts who can fly around the ring with ease now is just the same as it's been historically. However, the difference is, Boss Man, Earthquake, Vader and Bam Bam all were near the top of the card in WWF, WCW or both. Bam Bam main evented WrestleMania. Boss Man teamed with Hogan and Quake and Vader both feuded with him. Meanwhile, Clay and Harris aren't on TV, Joe and Bully are in a company with no direction, and Steen and Kingston both are kings of the indies.

So maybe Lucius has a point here. It's the number of athletic fat guys, but how they're presented. As a fan of guys like the four historic guys and as boosters of Steen, Kingston, Brodus and Joe, I love seeing this wrestler archetype get its due. So I say yes, let Clay back on WWE TV. Yes, sign Steen, War King and even Joe (if he's available) to WWE and push them to the moon. All body types are welcome, actually. Homogeny is never a good thing. Variety is a spice best applied liberally.

Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography