10 Weird Ways We Remember Legendary Wrestlers
9. Marty Jannetty: Silver Medal/Creep
Marty Jannetty was a dynamite in-ring talent. He is remembered not merely as shorthand but an actual punchline to lame jokes - many of which levelled by talents nowhere near Marty's level - unfavourably comparing him to former Rockers partner Shawn Michaels. Jannetty is the cruelest victim of relativity. Next to Michaels - one of the most gifted athletes and storytellers in wrestling history, a man who created and perfected genres, the chief architect of WWE's in-ring style to its benefit and much-imitated detriment - anybody would have suffered in his wake.
Part of the reason Jannetty suffered was his attitude. Known as Party Marty years before Marty Scurll watched A Clockwork Orange, Jannetty was in and out of the WWF with too much frequency to justify any serious push. This deviancy degenerated into a very ugly realm last year, when Marty asked his Facebook followers if he was justified in doing the old in-out in-out with the young girl he had raised under the mistaken belief that she was his biological daughter. This was deeply unsettling stuff and, since Jannetty's "I was hacked" protests were written out with the same idiosyncratic style as his incest bargaining was, all too plausible.
An innovative athlete of earnest grit and explosive fire, Marty's own contribution to the formation of latter-day WWE style goes unnoticed in 2018.