10 Wrestlers Who Had To Destroy Themselves To Get Over
3. Sabu
Sabu occupies such a strange place in the annals of professional wrestling.
It's fitting for such a unique, unprecedented and inimitable presence. He lies somewhere between the realm of super-working Gods and the most lamentable of Botchamania fixtures. Sabu was so ahead of his time that time seemed to spew him back into the present day, crotching him on the ropes.
He was a genuine sensation in the magazine circuit. Those images of a bloodied madman vaulting from chairs, of him lying in a daze surrounded by broken tables, put him over as a new, subversive force. As an icon. Sabu did not invent furniture wreckage, but he popularised it. His New Japan Pro Wrestling stint in 1995 was brief, and not unsuccessful - he captured the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship - but he left because he felt the glass ceiling lowering. Even in a promotion he didn't enjoy much success in, he left his imprints all over it, too: several tables were shattered throughout this year's G1 Climax tournament. Throughout Kenny Omega's legendary run, his table spots often marked the most dramatic moments of his epics.
Sabu crashed through so many - and landed on the concrete next to them, through his wildly inconsistent timing - that he shuffles around the ring now as broken as the ground he tore apart.