10 Things WWE Fans Need To Know About Chris Hero

As you’d imagine from such a well-traveled wrestler, Chris Hero’s skillset represents a patchwork of some of the world’s most prominent wrestling styles. He can do everything from going hold-for-hold in a straight-up grappling contest to dazzling the audience with gravity-defying flips over the top rope, but his striking game is his bread and butter. Much of Hero’s offence is comprised of puroresu-style spirited strike exchanges, and he adopts this approach with the blessing of one of the all-time greats.

Mitsuharu Misawa is widely regarded as one of, if not the, greatest Japanese wrestlers of all-time. It’s almost impossibly to do his legacy justice, and though he tragically passed after a horrendous in-ring accident in 2009, Misawa left the world with a feast of classic matches. Misawa, to this day, holds a quarter of all matches to ever be granted Dave Meltzer’s hallowed five-star rating, and Hero, like many of his peers, counts Misawa as one of his biggest influences.

Unlike said peers, however, Hero actually had the chance to work with Misawa in the Noah Dojo in 2009. Before leaving, Hero approached the office about returning to the US with Misawa’s trademark Roaring Elbow technique, and he was given the green light by the man himself. It’s a strike he makes great use of almost every time he wrestles, and it won’t be long before we see him throwing it with reckless abandon in WWE.