10 Wrestlers You'll NEVER Believe Shared The Same Ring
4. Trent? & Ricky Steamboat
Ricky Steamboat is one of the greatest pro wrestling babyface performers ever.
Outside of an improbable (but equally electrifying) WWE twilight years cameo, he was forced into retirement after suffering a back injury in 1994 ten full years before Trent? entered the business.
Steamboat was better at 56 than most are in their wrestler's prime years. He was so great at WrestleMania 25 - never has a skin-the-cat spot created so much anxiety, which Steamboat engineered beautifully, playing with our knowledge of his physical history - and he proved the very next month that he still had it. Definitively. He had perhaps benefitted from the "Christ he looks far sharper than Jimmy Snuka, who appears to have crystallised before our very eyes" principle in Houston.
Trent? is a vastly underrated talent with a disposition, much less style, that illustrates the passing of time. Where Steamboat was very earnest, even corny, Trent? is a very detached and ironic fella numbed into deadpan by the brain-mushing 21st century.
No footage exists of their match, sadly, but it took place at an FCW show on June 18, 2010. Steamboat teamed with his son Richie, at that time a highly-touted developmental prospect, to square off against the Dudebusters. If he likes to give the people what they want, run that sh*t back on Dynamite.
Ricky probably still rules to this day.