10 Wrestlers You Didn't Know Were HUGELY Influential
6. Jerry Lynn
Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were the two wrestlers so good that their size couldn't deny them (not that Vince McMahon had much of a choice amid the steroids scandal), and they were the two wrestlers most beloved by the fans and aspiring wrestlers who stuck around during the perilous lows of the early '90s.
Shawn was more influential stylistically; the vast majority of aspiring wrestlers who watched when nobody else did idolised him, and his DNA is hard-coded into the form.
Sean Waltman also broke down the barriers for the smaller wrestler, and the WCW cruisers also inspired the generations that followed, but a wrestler who doesn't quite receive the credit is Jerry Lynn. He and Waltman worked a programme in the Global Wrestling Federation in 1991, and as wildly futuristic as it was, it wasn't influential, being proper hidden gem stuff.
Of vastly more significance was his series with Rob Van Dam in the late '90s post-peak era of ECW - a programme so electrifying and fondly remembered that people conflate it with ECW's glory years. The fluidly choreographed, rapid exchange of early counters in those matches - particularly the leg scissors kip-up spot - was directly ripped-off in, no exaggeration, about 85% of the early 2000s indie matches that followed.
Hell, you see it in about 50% of all US matches to this day.