10 Most Inspirational Wrestling Stars Of All Time

Professional wrestling gets an unfair rap as a business full of trainwrecks and carnies. While there are issues with performer mortality and promoter morality, it’s not like wrestling is a swamp of corruption and deceit. It’s not politics.

Nonetheless, it’s harder than you’d think to find genuine role models in wrestling. Part of the problem is that it’s subjective: one person’s inspiration is another’s imprecation.

Another is that it’s a product of the post-kayfabe era - when we started to form attachments to the people behind our favourite on-screen bruisers. That leads to confusion between the performer and the gimmick. For example, Bret Hart was a narcissistic serial philanderer, not the hero he set himself up to be, and the less said about Hulk Hogan the better.

And then there’s John Cena. Much has been made of his peerless charity work and phenomenal work ethic - but this is the highest paid man in wrestling, a corporate soldier deeply invested in protecting the WWE/Cena brand. Make-A-Wish is a part of that brand: it’s what Stephanie McMahon meant when she said that “philanthropy is the future of marketing”.

Like thousands of lawyers, accountants and executives across America, John Cena is a careerist workaholic, nice guy or not. So is he still inspirational? I’d argue that true inspiration comes from authenticity, from people who inspire as a function of who they are, not a role they’re playing.

With that in mind, here are my candidates for the most inspirational wrestling stars of all time.

Never the biggest or most athletic guy in any locker room, CM Punk had the edge over his peers in that he could talk a snowman into the oven, never mind people into the building, and he had old school built into his bones. In every other respect, the only thing that made CM Punk stand out was attitude, and he had that in spades.

Attitude informs every aspect of Punk’s life and career, that refusal to sit in a box that someone else made for him. He’s made self-belief, self-motivation and sheer bloodymindedness into a mantra - when he says ‘luck is for losers’, he means that you make your own luck, you don’t rely on something happening for you.

You’ve heard the schtick before, in promos and in out-of-character interviews - he was never supposed to make it to the WWE, he was never supposed to make in the WWE. All of that’s true: and the reason he reached all of those milestones was because he worked his tail off, never backed down from anything, protected his name and his character as much as he could, and earned the push he received.

Then there’s the straight edge thing. The story goes that after he fractured his skull in a match in summer 2002, Punk was raced to the emergency room, where he actually tried to punch out the guy administering painkillers. There are plenty of teetotal men and women in wrestling, but a headstrong refusal to touch anything, including drugs for the purposes of recovery or pain relief, is a discipline few others can match.

It’s said that we admire those who display characteristics we wish we ourselves possessed. There are many, many people, stuck in all kinds of horrendous situations, who desperately need a role model that displays this kind of drive, this kind of self-belief. But then, that infamous attitude of his did more than make his name, it made him enemies.

He’s the definition of a ‘love him or hate him’ guy, and it’s a sad fact that CM Punk would be far more inspirational - and rank far higher on this list - if so many people didn’t dislike him so much.