Traditional wrestling (together with its many off-shoots) is a sport of genuinely ancient origins. Archaeological evidence reveals that wrestling was practiced in ancient India, Greece (the philosopher Plato was actually a wrestler), Egypt, Japan and pretty much everywhere else in the world. Professional wrestling (one such off-shoot) is also pretty old, having existed, in one form or another, since about the turn of the last century. Thats a lot of ground to cover. What youll get here, then, is a sort of potted history of the grapplers in question, together with how and why they changed the wrestling business forever. Of course, the ten wrestlers picked here are by no means the ONLY wrestlers to ever change the face of the business, nor are they listed in any real order, these are just ten wrestlers who, for better or worse, had a profound impact on the development of the spandex-clad pseudo sport that we all know and love today. To paraphrase The Grateful Dead, the journey of professional wrestling, from then to now, has been a long, strange trip indeed. Here are ten performers who cast some of the longest shadows and left behind the most indelible marks...
I am a professional author and lifelong comic books/pro wrestling fan. I also work as a journalist as well as writing comic books (I also draw), screenplays, stage plays, songs and prose fiction.
I don't generally read or reply to comments here on What Culture (too many trolls!), but if you follow my Twitter (@heyquicksilver), I'll talk to you all day long!
If you are interested in reading more of my stuff, you can find it on http://quicksilverstories.weebly.com/ (my personal site, which has other wrestling/comics/pop culture stuff on it).
I also write for FLiCK http://www.flickonline.co.uk/flicktion, which is the best place to read my fiction work.
Oh yeah - I'm about to become a Dad for the first time, so if my stuff seems more sentimental than usual - blame it on that!
Finally, I sincerely appreciate every single read I get. So if you're reading this, thank you, you've made me feel like Shakespeare for a day! (see what I mean?)
Latcho Drom,
- CQ
