10 Loudest Wrestling Pops You Didn't Know About
4. Dean Malenko Exposes Face, Bad Takes
Many of Scott Hall's words have formed the story of modern professional wrestling.
He captured the heartbreaking truth of the old headliners versus cruiserweights divide of the 1990s: apocrypha has it that Hall congratulated two flashy talents after a particularly dazzling match, and said "Now I'm gonna go out there and get a bigger pop with a headlock".
Almost too cute to be a shoot, it was also wrong. The cruiserweights weren't just opening TV match guys who worked a style that engulfed a crowd by the finish; allocated enough resource with which to tell a story rich in emotional heft, two members of that legendary division - Chris Jericho and Dean Malenko - brought a different kind of noise. They engineered one of the loudest and most sustained pops of an era defined by them.
Malenko was known as a wrestler more than a worker, but he played the role of the latter in sensational fashion at Slamboree 1998; convincingly performing as Ciclope in plain sight, Malenko unmasked at the climax of a well-built storyline to avenge Jericho's terror campaign against his family.
When he lit Jericho up, the crowd was caught in the backlash: they went ballistic, popping dafter with every short round blast.