10 Wrestlers Who Visibly Hated Their Own Gimmicks
7. Saba Simba
Does Vince McMahon not know? He mustn't know. He must be oblivious.
He can't possibly have balls that big - balls big enough to call up Tony Atlas and say, "Hey, Tony, do you have anything going on right now? Because I want to set race relations back a few decades, and you're just the guy I have in mind!"
Perhaps Vince McMahon was simply an innocent all along - a man who received the racist depictions of minorities in the overarching culture with wonder, as opposed to malice, like the old white guy in Trading Places who says "They're very musical people, aren't they?"
They're also, to Vince, very savage people, hence the introduction of Saba Simba: barefoot tribal African warrior! They're also a very rhythmic people, and so Atlas was instructed to dance around the ring before his matches. It's not often you see a wrestler wear a job face before they squash a jobber. Atlas hated the gimmick; the only redeeming feature, to him, was that it was marginally preferable, relatively, to being hopelessly addicted to drugs.
According to Atlas himself, JJ Dillon conceived of the gimmick having recently visited Africa...which, for f*ck's sake, is absolutely insane.
Where did he go?