10 Times WWE Bastardised Wrestling Royalty
3. Barry Windham
Barry Windham is one of wrestling's most underrated and sadly misremembered stars.
Deceptively athletic, the six-foot-six powerhouse was one tenth of the greatest War Games match ever - the 1992 WrestleWar extravaganza - but he was no ancillary player. With a deep enough repertoire and sound enough grasp of psychology to sustain audience interest in a fabled series of marathons opposite Ric Flair, Windham was all too often damned with faint praise. He was far from the broomstick Flair could purportedly carry a five star match to.
His body, not equipped for the high intensity style he'd mastered, gave out on him in the nineties. When he shored up in the WWF in 1996, he did so as a shadow of his former self. His physical condition, however, did by no means justify his repackaging as The Stalker - an act as dated as it was bizarre. Windham as The Stalker was a fusion of the Predator and a green beret, but as his introductory vignette confirmed, he fared better as a promotor (!).
In it, he did more to talk up his future opponents than he did himself. This is a tenet of wrestling which the likes of CM Punk have too readily disregarded in recent years - but a first appearance is definitely not the time to do it.