11 Weirdest Freaks In Wrestling History

2. The Self-Effacing Babyface

Byron €˜Dewey€™ Robertson was a high profile player in the territorial system of the US and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, he was most famous for either playing an ultra-heroic fan favourite or his brief run managed by the original €˜Nature Boy€™ Buddy Rogers, who went to bat for Robertson as the next face of the NWA and allowed him to use his trademark figure four leglock as his finisher. A white bread babyface or the new new €˜Nature Boy€™: those appeared to be the veteran Robertson€™s options as the 1980s started and the territories began to vanish€ but he was too old to carry on with the former, and couldn€™t talk well enough to carry off the latter. In one of the most remarkable transformations in pro wrestling history, the clean cut Robertson went a different way: west (you know, the way of Horatio Alger, Davy Crockett, the Donner party), shaving part of his hair, donning green face paint and renaming himself The Missing Link. The Missing Link showcased Robertson completely subsuming his more traditional wrestling characteristics, including his sound technical skills, facial expressions and voice, beneath a savage monster heel gimmick beloved of pre-enlightenment professional wrestling (just substituting a bizarre prehistoric twist for the usual sour-tasting racial element). Adopting the diving headbutt as a finish, roaring unintelligibly, careening around inside and outside the ring like a man possessed and generally savaging his opponents, The Missing Link was genuinely the link between old school wild man monsters like Ox Baker and Mad Dog Vachon and the cartoonish era of wrestling popularised by the WWF at the time. Robertson may not have made much of his own WWF stint due to his well-publicised drug and alcohol addictions, but his outlandish persona as The Missing Link remains an important part of wrestling history.