10 Most Old School Wrestlers Of WWE's Modern Era
1. The Man
Ambrose and Wyatt display a fascinating devotion to character, blurring the lines between their real and kayfabricated personas. Holly and Layfield were locker room sheriffs, enforcers of the backstage etiquette and hierarchical respect enshrined in wrestling for a century.
Triple H, Rhodes and Punk dedicated their lives to protecting the business and maintaining old school values in the face of the death of kayfabe and the rise of the smark. Jericho and Regal are veteran entertainers, hardbitten hard men with a shamelessly thick slice of ham running through them.
And then there’s Mark Calaway, the g*ddamn Undertaker himself, who may be the only living man who personifies all of those old school characteristics at one and the same time.
He was trained by old school maestro Don ‘the Spoiler’ Jardine, a brilliant devotee of the business and one of wrestling’s savants, who also taught Jim Ross, amongst many others, everything he knew. In Texas and Memphis, Calaway’s mentor was ‘Dirty’ Dutch Mantell, another canny student of the game and the innovator of the concept of wrestler's court.
Having worked the wrestling hotbeds of the south for five years under some of the fiercest proponents of the old school in history, being thrown the gimmick of an undead mortician with supernatural might have been a stretch. However, Calaway had worked in Memphis, and was already familiar with the vaudevillian side of wrestling: the WWF’s sports entertainment held no fears for him.
Of course, the man behind this slow-moving, expressionless zombie had made his reputation on being a fast-moving, highly athletic specimen: Jardine had taught him how to walk the rope, and his finish in WCW had been a diving elbow drop from the centre, a move he adapted in the WWF to end with a chop to the back instead. Appropriately enough, the move would be named ‘Old School’ later on in his career, in reference to his sheer longevity in the company.
That longevity, coupled with his insistence on respect in the locker room, led him to be named the company’s locker room leader for two decades. Chris Jericho calls him ‘the Fonz’: his authority is without question, and he presided over the WWF/E version of wrestler’s court for his entire full time tenure on the roster.
American Badass era ‘Taker aside, Calaway rarely (if ever) does anything for WWE out of character. Co-workers have been trying and failing to get him to break character or laugh in the ring Photos of a out-of-costume Undertaker are like sightings of Bigfoot, making the front pages of the dirtsheets whenever they appear.
He even turned up to honour his dear friend and storyline manager Bill ‘Paul Bearer’ Moody at the 2014 WWE Hall Of Fame in full Undertaker regalia, draped in dry ice and lightning. The idea of a Mark Calaway shoot interview is practically unthinkable.
Tougher than two dollar steak, possessed of a fearsome devotion to the dying art of kayfabe, and world famous for method acting the role of a zombie sorcerer, eyes rolled back in his head and snarling to camera for a quarter of a century, the Undertaker is the most old school wrestler of the modern era by a country mile.