10 Wrestling Heels Who Generated The Most Heat
8. Los Gringos Locos
Art Barr looked like he was (and likely was) on something as he entered the ring at the seminal joint WCW/AAA When Worlds Collide pay-per-view spectacular of 1994. He was, ahem, white-eyed with "glee" at the prospect of insulting the Mexican-heavy crowd in the LA Memorial Sports Arena.
The match itself was as antagonistic as the entrance; Barr and Los Gringos Locos partner Eddy Guerrero provoked wrestling's most vocal support with outlawed moves, bragged unbearably about their state-of-the-art arsenal, and, to escalate the existing racial tension, "swam" across the canvas. This was the psychologically rich version of cheap heat. Barr and Guerrero didn't unimaginatively scream out "wetbacks!", like Bubba Ray Dudley may well have done, were he to have spotted a person of latino ethnicity in Viking Hall. They incorporated the heat into the physical narrative and drew an ear-splitting crescendo of hate as a result. There was no lull in that all-time classic. The heel psychology incinerated the arena.
Decked out in the old glory colour scheme, the tandem - so successful that it begat a faction - were reviled in Mexico to such an extent that the heat carried over to the States, in which AAA was very popular in the early 1990s, wherein, were it not for Barr's untimely death, ECW and WCW were very keen to channel it.