10 Most Intense Performers In Wrestling History

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.