8 Awesome Wrestling Stars You've Never Even Heard Of
7. Brad Armstrong
Coming from one of the lesser-known wrestling families, Robert Bradley James was the most talented of the James family that included his father Bullet Bob Armstrong, and brothers Scott, Steve and Brian. Scott would later become most famous as a referee and producer with WWE, while Brian - the best talker and worst worker of the family - later changed his name to Jesse James, and had a phenomenal career in the WWF/E as Road Dogg.
But it was the second oldest James boy who had the majority of the talent. While never the mic guy that Road Dogg eventually became, Brad was an astonishing wrestler, a highly-skilled performer that never received his proper due. A champion in every company he ever worked for, Armstrong never managed to break into the super-stardom that his talent seemed to demand, but managed to find some small success with the Fabulous Freebirds in WCW as the masked Badstreet, and more embarrassingly, as Arachnaman, the Spider-Man ripoff that caused Marvel Comics to threaten the company with litigation.
Armstrong died in 2012 of a heart attack, aged only fifty-one. No less an authority than Jim Ross remembers calling hundreds of Armstrongs matches, and says that he never - ever - saw a bad one, and that the man was so funny, personable and well-liked backstage that if anyone had a beef with him then they really needed to take a long look into a mirror.