It’s time to lighten up the ol’ daily grind here on the blog, so in honor of Wrestlemania coming in just seven more days (yay! Super Bowl of wrestling!), I’m going to do an 8 part series on my favorite wrestlers from this long, convoluted lifetime I’ve spent as a wrestling fan.
I’m not going to put them in any ranked order, as that’d be too difficult (some mean different things in different ways and it’s a personal list so why would rankings matter?). Anyone who wants that sort of thing, I’ll preface the whole list by saying the best wrestler (technical skill) I’ve ever seen was Chris Benoit (he wasn’t even close to the best person), the best on the microphone was CM Punk (miss that dude), the best “look” for a wrestler was young Hulk Hogan, the best heel ever was Ric Flair, the best face ever was WCW era Goldberg, and the best American style wrestler if you combine his career overall would have to be Hogan. The best international wrestler I’ve ever seen was Ultimo Dragon, though it’s hard to go wrong with pre-knee injury Rey Mystery (and right now Pentagon Jr. is amazing in different ways). The best woman’s wrestler in terms of skill is probably Charlotte Flair who is active right now, though in her day Lita was impressive, too. The best female entertainer in the ring was Chyna, though I will always have a special place in my heart for Sunny (how sad her career and life turned out).
The worst wrestler of all time… Shockmaster.
And now, to the first person on my list of 8: Stone Cold Steve Austin
Wrestling went through a transition in the 90s that comic books went through in the 80s: the anti-hero rose to prominence. In my childhood, as I’ll discuss in other posts here, the good guys (the babyfaced, or faces) were people like Hulk Hogan pre-nWo and pre-Gawker, people who told us to work hard, say our prayers, and eat our vitamins. They would wave American flags and stand up to bullies.
That’s not our experience of the world, though. The reality is that our heroes aren’t perfect, and we don’t get rewarded just for doing the right thing. We all wish we did, but we don’t. That, of course, led to the passive angst that Chuck Palahniuk famously spoke of in Fight Club. Everyone, but young males in particular, was a little angry and had no obvious war to fight. Oh, how things change.
But one day we woke up and a dark, aged Batman was kicking Superman’s carcass around in a robot suit, Wolverine and the Punisher were crushing Spider-man and the Fantastic Four in sales. A bit later, wrestling caught up.
Steve Austin had an interesting career. I enjoyed him as Stunning Steve in WCW, but he was never really given the space he needed to grow. He and Brian Pillman had an amazing tag team, but it was more about their workrate than their entertainment factor. Austin would later grow into something more than just the back-up for Rick Rude in the Dangerous Alliance. But as his star started to rise, he got hurt.
Then WCW hired Hulk Hogan and switched booking directions. Then Austin got fired. Steve briefly went to ECW to work with Paul Heyman again, recording a series of hilarious promos. But his talents would lead him to a career in WWF (the now WWE).
Austin debuted in WWF as The Ringmaster, the new Million Dollar Champion for Ted DeBiase.
It wasn’t until Austin realized that The Ringmaster gimmick was destined for failure that perhaps the most iconic character since Hulk Hogan was born. In the promo after his King of the Ring win (the video up the page a bit), Austin mocked the fact that Jake “the Snake” Roberts used the John: 316 signs that fans tended to bring to events during that era as part of his gimmick. And in one amazing ad-lib moment, he uttered the line that sold millions of T-shirts “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!”
Stone Cold Steve Austin was meant to be a heel, a bad guy. But the fans LOVED him, and when the chance came during a feud with Bret Hart to play off the “only in wrestling” USA vs. Canada rivalry, Austin was officially turned “face” as the anti-hero who redefined the WWF and paved the way for the WWE. Without Austin, the WWF fails in the face of the WCW and their nWo.
But with Austin, WWF had classic moments like these:
The gimmick of Stone Cold clicked so well because, as Austin has said numerous times on his podcast, it’s just who Steve is turned up to 11. And he resonated in ways that a classic, truly amazing character needs to resonate. The mix of his look, his attitude, his in-ring mannerisms, his music… he was just a perfect exemplar of what angst given form and allowed to run wild can look like. He still had a moral code, and he was in the end a “good” guy, but Austin taught a valuable lesson that we all need to take to heart. D.T.A. Don’t trust anybody.