10 Most Intense Performers In Wrestling History
"The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate."
One of the problems with modern wrestling is that its lunatic, serrated edges have been smoothed over in this heavily scripted age.
WWE's sports entertainers, no longer permitted to be themselves, instead operate largely within one mode - at once measured and curiously jovial. The vast majority of in-ring and backstage segments feature two feuding talents politely exchanging words in what is designed as a witty, sitcom-esque repartee - but all too often is contrived in execution.
Dean Ambrose is the most glaring example of the shackles to which WWE performers are tied. In his pre-WWE days, he channelled Heath Ledger's Joker so effectively that he earned the "Unstable" nickname he was later bestowed - but once in Stamford, he was reoriented as a prop comic, a Lunatic in name only. He is more likely to lose his spot than his mind.
This onscreen whitewash has occurred in parallel with the cleansing of WWE's backstage practises in the Wellness Policy era. Road Warrior Hawk, an honourable mention, attributed his intensity to the injection of rhesus monkey hormones. He woke up every morning with a (mercifully satiable) desire to kill somebody. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.
For libel purposes, there is absolutely no accusation of similar, obscure drug usage here - but you'd barely be able to tell.
10. Dynamite Kid
Tom "Dynamite Kid" Billington was as intense outside of the ring as he was in it.
He was a notorious sociopath, fond of cocking a gun in his wife's face and pulling the trigger, warning his pitiable wife that, one day, it would be loaded. His legacy is a conflicting one. His behaviour outside of the ring was repellent - and his innovations inside of it were dubious. His much-imitated style demanded his spiritual successors incur a degree of punishment at odds with the essence of what pro wrestling used to be, but his early-to-mid 1980s oeuvre was so unbelievably good that the wrestling world, paradoxically, would be a grimmer place without his contributions.
Kid threw himself around the ring with such abandon that he prolonged the thinning veneer of kayfabe. Everything he looked - and effectively was - so real that his matches with the original Tiger Mask, in particular, in which he sold even a back body drop at a terrifying height, hold up as the most exciting and believable bouts in wrestling history well over thirty years later. Kid's insane flat-black bumps were so scarily crisp, so sudden and impactful, that his subsequent downfall was inevitable.
Kid didn't pay the highest toll for his lunatic body of work, but he exists in sorry condition today. Kid sacrificed his body for his innovations, destroying his back and losing the use of his now-paralysed left leg.