10 Wrestlers Who Changed The Business Forever
An article free of ice cream bars.
The pro wrestling business is wild in 2019.
WWE is signing virtually every talent of even the vaguest renown, purely to spite the competition and render the Independent scene untenable. Shotzi Blackheart is the latest Performance Center recruit, and while she is a very talented (and crazed) performer, she in the last year has sold pictures of her faeces for $5. Session Moth Martina is another new recruit, and again, while she is a splendid comedy performer with great taste in men, her shtick is grinding on men for "bants". Rumours surfaced not to long ago that WWE had flirted signing with famous d*ck wrestler Joey Ryan, too.
These aren't WWE hires.
This is a new, scarcely recognisable WWE - a relentless monolith that is no longer beholden to any of its old rules. The wider wrestling industry has changed, and this is WWE's attempt to catch up: by creating various satellite promotions and signing anybody Tony Khan may have once followed on Twitter.
This is an attempt to both map that change, and to map the institutional grip WWE (once) held to make it inspiring and irresistible...
10. Superstar Billy Graham
Superstar Billy Graham changed what a pro wrestler looked like.
Subsequent to his rise, to succeed in pro wrestling, one had to look like Billy Graham. The antecedent to Hulk Hogan, who literally modelled himself after him, you can all but trace Vince McMahon's vision for sports entertainment back to Graham's DNA - not that his DNA had much to do with it.
Graham begat the steroid explosion that came to define the image of pro wrestling in the 1980's, in which the appearance of toughness was considered far more marketable and appealing than the stout look of an actual hard man. Graham was an expert talker with a far more organic presence, but his physique was iconic. Game-changing.
It changed the complexion of drawing cards and indeed recruitment; the Ultimate Warrior, perhaps most famously, entered the industry almost entirely on the strength of his physique. Attitude, aptitude, skill: he had none of it, but that no longer mattered: the public was drawn to these manifest superheroes, and bodybuilding fanatic Vince McMahon had the same affinity for them. His WWF, now the 'Hoover' of pro wrestling, changed things so irrevocably that MMA killer Cain Velasquez cannot be taken seriously by too many people on Twitter.
One man, unable to match his physique despite his best, grotesque efforts, chartered his own, revolutionary path...