10 Most Criminally Underrated Wrestlers In History
They're punchlines, but their status is the real joke.
Criminally is the operative word.
Neither Ted DiBiase nor Jake 'The Snake' Roberts held a World Championship of note, but the paradigm in their heyday was starkly different to how it today. Nowadays, if a talent is remotely over, title contention beckons - but in the 1980s, with no true weekly primetime episodic TV necessitating breakneck change, there was a stranglehold over the top prizes. The WWF business model was geared towards the house show circuit, and the top babyfaces almost invariably held gold to send the punters home happy.
They didn't hold World titles, even though both were talented and over enough to do so on a transitional basis, but they don't warrant the underrated tag. Referring to them as such is false equivalence.
People naturally reconcile history with broad strokes in order to simplify it, but all too often the results are reductive. It's easy to associate the Attitude Era with uniform popularity, but the undercards of 1999 were received mildly. It's easy to trash the New Generation as a camp era of passé gimmicks without crediting its progressive and exciting in-ring output.
The men on this list are variously seen as lesser lights or punchlines, and it's equally easy - though inaccurate - to perceive them as such.
10. The Big Boss Man
The Big Boss Man was a refreshing antidote to the super-humans who populated the WWF in the Golden Age of the 1980s.
Where Hulk Hogan was a (literally) impossible feat of musculature, Boss Man was rotund and more relatable because of it. Where the Ultimate Warrior was an incoherent wall of sound, Boss Man in the face role was an earnest and direct mic man with a message both simple and honourable. He was never the best in-ring talent, but his matches were far more dynamic than his physique and the simplistic norm promised. In an age where believability was not a concern, you could still buy him. He was an aberration - a rugged and flabby NWA bruiser in a cartoonish environment.
Which makes his Attitude Era run all the more astonishing. Boss Man had played the heel back then, but never with as much cackling enthusiasm as he did towards the tail end of the 1990s. Put simply, he was an absolute b*stard - an almost ludicrously offensive and entirely detestable jerk in an era dominated by the cool heel.
Exhibit A: Even at his most admonished - during his feud with Al Snow in 1999 - Boss Man proved that he could adapt to the new, brawling-heavy style of the Austin years, rag-dolling Snow in a bloody, weapons-filled bar room brawl at SummerSlam.