10 Wrestlers Who Changed The Business Forever
9. Dynamite Kid
The Dynamite Kid was almost antithetical to Graham: naturally small, inhibited, and lacking entirely any ability to talk, he was gifted in a world that increasingly did not recognise his talent. To make any significant money from it, he intensified and ruined that prodigious talent by applying it with a destructive recklessness.
He still had to juice himself to the gills, in order to secure work stateside, but it was in Japan where he revolutionised the industry.
His seminal rivalry with the original Tiger Mask, Satoru Sayama, was an explosion of advanced style, athleticism, and physicality. It was the big bang of the dreaded/celebrated workrate era so profound in its influence that, to this day, the Kid is compared to any and all talents that perform well beyond the confines of the work. Will Ospreay is the latest pro wrestler to study the Kid's seismic body of work, the gruesome impact and adrenaline-fuelled pace of which is like a drug to him.
The Dynamite kid changed wrestling for the better, artistically, but he also betrayed its core principle.