10 Wrestlers Who Were Secretly Promo GODS
5. Bob Backlund
Bob Backlund rocking up in 1993 WWF was so bizarre.
He didn't play a cub scout, but that's what he essentially was, and his gimmick - of older pale feller who was quite good at the science of wrasslin' - was somehow more out of place than the dentists and baseball players and race car drivers that would follow.
He later turned heel as the WWF came to their senses and realised that he was a living anachronism. The psychotic version of Bob Backlund, who raged against modern values, is best remembered for singlehandedly undermining Bret Hart's Wrestler Of The Year candidacy in 1994 and 1995 and making the WrestleMania XII Iron Man feel like a mid 2000s Dragon Gate Trios match - but the character work wasn't half-bad at all.
Backlund's stuff worked in contrast to his utterly generic normal man look. If it's always the quiet ones you need to look out for, Backlund's nonentity of a face embodied the cliché: his capillary-bursting, unhinged rants, screaming about a society in decay in "the f*ck?" non-sequiturs, were intense, believable, almost frightening.
The man looked as though he had lost his mind entirely - so much so that you can't tell if he worked or lived the gimmick.