WWE Gallery - 20 Most Badass Wrestlers Of All Time
Only Mick Foley would battle a chainsaw with a steel chair...
Watch today's WWE product and you'd be forgiven for wondering where all the tough guys have gone. For an industry built on aggression and testosterone, there's just a bit too much niceness on episodes of Raw and SmackDown. It doesn't sit well when exploring the hard men of the past.
The question is: what made these characters so menacing, and why are they remembered for being badasses all these years on? Using WWE's PG format to explain what has changed is a flimsy excuse for sure, but that has to be at least part of the reason. Things weren't always so child-friendly in wrestling, and the product was better for it. Competition also hardened these men into granite. They knew they had to protect their spot and neck alike in an intra-territory fight for survival.
It helped, too, of course, that some were so verifiably insane that they would happily - and literally - bite your face off.
Seeing menacing brutes and tough personas a-go-go was once taken for granted. Now, aside from a few exceptions, badasses aren't quite so prevalent. That's a shame, because some of wrestling's most memorable characters were rough as hell, but crucially given freedom to express themselves fully...
20. Bad News Brown
You don't challenge Andre The Giant to a fight unless you're a badass, and that's reportedly what Bad News Brown did back in the 1980s. The man from Harlem, New York was one of WWE's most atypically ominous characters during the glitzy era of Hulkamania.