10 Most Creative Wrestlers On The Planet Right Now
7. Joey Janela
Joey Janela is a product of the generation that turned Hasbro collectors into wrestlers, but he stopped paying for the figures.
Instead, the Bad Boy unboxed and positioned different ranges against one another in his guise as the industry's mad scientist booker. It didn't matter if the dimensions clashed, or if one figure had suffered damage over the years: his limitless imagination found a way of smashing them together. Janela birthed the strange bedfellows match genre and indeed an entire market dedicated to irony wrestling - one that has aroused the interest of the dedicated lifer wrestling fan thrilled to celebrate most years of that life in a single match.
As a worker, he's incredibly versatile - he can go in matches that don't require stunts or gags, just story and athleticism, but operates best across the spectrum of an avant garde that he himself is broadening to encompass matches against invisible opponents and, most recently and hilariously, matches wrestled at a safe social distance.
When not gleefully spitting in the face of tradition, Janela spits in the face of traditionalists; he has just cracked a tremendous running gag in which he is insistent that himself and Jim Cornette recently met and squashed their beef in Chili's. Good on you for letting this grudge go, Jim.
It wasn't healthy.