How Good Was Eddie Guerrero Actually?

7. Time’s Test

Fans and wrestlers alike share an intense nostalgia and longing for Eddie Guerrero. They love him. 

This personal, deeply-felt emotion will make anybody’s work feel “timeless”, which is the most faulty category listed here. Hulk Hogan’s work is timeless and very much isn’t, at the same time. His selling is as corny and histrionic as the decade of his peak, but emotion lasts forever, and Hogan was able to elicit it whether you wanted to give in or not. It’s tricky. 

Ironically, given the fervent demand for Hulk Hogan to go away at the time, many of Eddie’s contemporaries in the WCW Cruiserweight division don’t hold up to scrutiny all these years later. Many cruiser matches were so ambitious back then that the wrestlers could barely keep up with their own original ideas. The execution was sloppy more often than you’d like to remember. In many ways, that scene was a rough demo for the homogenised style that won’t go away today. 

Eddie didn’t suffer from this problem, and his work was more crisp and snug and believable than a lot of what you see amid a relentless quest for critical acclaim in 2026. 

Not that you’d necessarily want to, but watch Eddie take a Chris Benoit powerbomb. Very few people now, when wrestling is supposedly better, are able to do it with the same ferocious snap.

Eddie’s body of work holds up because what he helped revolutionise is now in its final form: a hybrid of lucha libre spectacle and puro physicality and pacing. It also holds up through the fundamentals: Eddie could tell a story and project emotion to incredible effect - more often than not, if not all the time.

9.5/10