10 WWE Stars And Their Wrestling Role Models

2. Mick Foley & Terry Funk

There's no other possible choice here - the man who inducted Mick Foley into the WWE Hall Of Fame, one of his best friends in the business, the original Hardcore Legend before hardcore was even really a thing. Terry Funk and Mick Foley have far more in common that a willingness to bleed or get hit in the head with an international object. From the early days in WCW to Japan and the WWF and all manner of stops in between, Funk saw himself in Foley and vice versa. Long stereotyped as a glorified stuntman by luminaries like Ric Flair, Foley was actually a gifted wrestler, a worker who understood his limitations as a star and as a performer and - like the best of them - worked to accentuate the positives and hide the negatives. That's something that Funk can relate to. More famous these days for his brutal, dramatic contributions to garbage matches around the world, people tend to forget that Terry Funk was the NWA World Heavyweight Champion for fourteen months in the mid-1970s, back when that meant something. A wrestler of the Southern old school, he brought the same flair (no pun intended) for drama that he'd showcased in the NWA to the King Of The Deathmatch in the IWA. Funk's the man who taught Foley how to work as a heel - and although Foley would find his greatest success in the WWF as a babyface, playing heel was his bread and butter before then. Like Funk, he would invest his promos with intense, passionate creativity, getting over the emotion he needed first and foremost: hitting the right chords at the right moment, rather than obsessing over each and every note. Like Funk, he would take the most basic of movesets and allow the storyteller inside himself to make each move mean something. Like Funk, he knew the secret that very few other wrestlers ever properly grasp: how to get your opponent and yourself over, regardless of which one of you is going over.