10 Veterans Who Would Be Ideal Role Models For Younger Wrestlers

On one hand, wrestlers are all tough by nature; after all, they’re in an industry built on toughness. On the other hand, if you want to present yourself to the crowd as the toughest of them all, then you need to show that you can take a lot of pain and dish it out as well.

For this lesson, there might not be a better teacher than Kenta Kobashi, arguably the one true Iron Man of professional wrestling.

Though All Japan didn’t really have anything in terms of ‘gimmicks’ for its wrestlers as understood by American wrestling, wrestlers were booked in certain ways and followed specific psychologies in their matches.

In Kobashi’s case, he was the gutsy, never-say-die babyface who never cheated, but instead kept going as long as he could. Think of the character of ‘the Juggernaut’ from ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’, and that’s what you’d get with Kobashi: once he started attacking, he kept going, and no matter how hard he’d get hit him, he kept on getting up.

This has manifested itself in some brutal moments where Kobashi would take insane bumps and hit and get hit as hard as possible. One of the most famous of those moments is this one, where Kobashi and Kensuke Sasaki engage in one of the most legendary chop battles in all of wrestling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8TiJfMOV_w

That is how you make someone look incredibly tough; you have them dish out punishment and take a lot of it at the same time.