10 Most Despised Men In Wrestling History
Bullies, billionaires, and Bucky Beaver motherf*ckers.
Hulk Hogan is a dishonourable mention.
His career-preserving crusade of a WCW career afforded him a contractual mandate to do with impunity what he was a political master at for years: obvious subterfuge. He kicked out of the Ultimate Warrior's winning pin at WrestleMania VI and looked to the heavens immediately afterwards, as if God himself had failed him. 1990's WrestleMania VI was the one night Hogan was asked to be selfless. He couldn't bring himself to be that man, brother - but Hogan made every midcard act who performed under him on the house show circuit a yacht-tonne of money. Many of his peers loved working with him for that reason.
Wrestling is an ugly industry naturally populated by ugly people. Even those widely respected for their booking nous, like Jerry Jarrett, were loathed by many of the men who worked for them because they paid peanuts for pain.
There are more despicable men than those this list is comprised of, existing on the fringes of wrestling's already prominent and unseemly underbelly. Rob Black produced and was jailed for a disgusting stripe of pornography, but he was only ever an ECW-aping chancer. 1980s territory stalwart Buck Zumhofe enslaved his underage daughter and forced her into sexual relationship. Jimmy Savile and Grizzly Smith, the father of Jake Roberts, also engaged in unspeakable acts with minors.
As objectively ghastly as those figures were, they weren't known nor synonymous enough with wrestling to provoke true, universal hatred...
10. The Ultimate Warrior
The Ultimate Warrior could only have made it in the massively muscled post-Superstar Billy Graham era. As a talent, he was almost comically limited. As a human being, his behaviour was dubious in the extreme. It was this combination of happenstance and entitlement that led many to decry him as one of the worst people to enter one of the worst industries.
Warrior was detested for the disrespect he showed the industry and his refusal to better himself at his craft, most famously by Ted DiBiase. Warrior's work was sloppy at best, dangerous at worst; he badly injured Bobby Heenan's neck in the aftermath of his WrestleMania V match opposite Rick Rude. His carelessness about tradition extended to his in-ring work. It was a transgression of code too much for his peers.
His latter day career as a public speaker saw him hated by people with only a passing familiarity of his time in wrestling. Warrior gave a speech to the University of Connecticut in 2005, in which he claimed that "queering doesn't make the world work". One woman was so repulsed by his inflammatory hate speech that she cried out "Oh my God." Warrior in response told the woman to save her "orgasm for later".
He was unfazed by the resulting furore; in 2008, he lamented the outpouring following Heath Ledger's death - claiming that nobody should mourn a drug-addled actor who starred in a gay propaganda film (Brokeback Mountain).
He mended fences with WWE in 2014 following the Self-Destruction Of The Ultimate Warrior DVD released in 2005. It was hideous, politicised stuff - but the ounce of truth within it confirmed that Warrior was far, far from popular with his peers.