10 Early WWE Hall Of Fame 2018 Predictions
8. Davey Boy Smith
WWE tends to induct just the one deceased performer per year - a deceased performer with a history of fast living who died young, anyway - so as to not shine too harsh a light on how horrific the industry was in the pre-Chris Benoit era.
Davey Boy Smith is probably less deserving of a place than his old tag team partner, the Dynamite Kid - but ironically, the broken state in which Tom Billington finds himself is somehow more damning of the industry's toil than Davey Boy would be in death. That's not to say Smith on his day wasn't a great worker (not that that matters much, obviously); he might have been almost literally carried through his finest moment, at SummerSlam 1992, but his sequel with Bret Hart at In Your House: Season's Beatings was an equal, bloody and massively dramatic effort. A 1997 RAW match with Owen Hart is a minor and sadly forgotten classic.
Smith was a major draw in his homeland. The then (legitimate) WWF record attendance owed much to the company's popularity via the nascent Sky Sports in the UK, but Smith was a massive factor behind it in his own right.
WWE's latest foray onto UK shores is scheduled to continue apace with a weekly Network programme. Inducting Davey Boy would be a sound way of publicising it.