A no-brainer, this theres no wrestler living or dead hated as much as Billington was and still is. A violent, racist bully, Billington wasnt even the cowardly sort your parents tell you about: hed push and push you with nasty wholly unfunny ribs until you were fit to bust, and then beat you to a pulp in front of your friends when you stood up for yourself. Thats Billington in a nutshell, in the locker room, in the street, at home with his family. Dynamite was a horror show of a human being, the nastiest piece of work imaginable. He makes the John Layfield of ten years ago seem like a basket of kittens. His hazing of new talent was basically an excuse for him to genuinely beat and kick people to pieces in public not that the little nutjob ever needed an excuse. Imagine the psychotic Begbie from Trainspotting on steroids (literally) and with a careers worth of experience in stretching and hooking earned from the dreaded Stu Harts Dungeon in Calgary. As a worker, Billington was a legend: a dynamic high flyer and inspiration to countless wrestlers that came after him. Even the famously difficult to impress Bret Hart says that he was pound for pound, the greatest wrestler who ever lived. But no one and we mean no one has a nice thing to say about the Dynamite Kid personally. Not his friends even Bret Hart disowned him in the end and certainly not his family. One hopefully mostly apocryphal story has him tying his own niece down to a bed and breaking her kneecaps in order to commit insurance fraud. His wife said last year that upon asking him to leave and never come back:
He put me in holds that popped out my jaw, and stretched me in agony. He told his brother to go get his gun, because he was going to shoot me.
Living in a broken-down council estate, unable to work unable to walk having recently suffered a stroke, and with massive heart problems, theres still very few people who wouldnt assert that Tom Billington deserved every second of it.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
