20 Most Hated Heel Moves In Wrestling History
11. What's Life Without A Little (S)laughter?
By the time the nineties rolled around, the Cold War was done and the easy cheap heat that an eeevil foreign heel could elicit from rabidly pro-American fans was fading fast. So, thank goodness for Saddam Hussein, right?
As America flung itself gratefully into another conflict on foreign soil (no country needs a great heel to work with quite like the US of A), for once the WWF was riding a topical wave, when one of their top babyfaces of the eighties dramatically changed sides to become an Iraqi sympathiser.
Reliable indications are that for a few months in the Golden Age of wrestling, Sgt. Slaughter’s popularity in the WWF nearly rivalled Hulk Hogan’s. Certainly Hogan never got to be a GI Joe, and it was supposedly the Sarge’s involvement with Hasbro that caused the rift that led to him leaving the WWF for the AWA in early 1985.
When he returned to the WWF in 1990, it was as a heel. Siding with one of his enemies from the AWA, Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissey turned General Adnan, Sgt. Slaughter reverted back to the villain he’d been for all those years previously. Although the real life Robert Remus found that the anti-American promos he had to deliver stuck in his craw, you wouldn’t know it from listening to them.
Always an underrated interview, Slaughter began disparaging the USA while championing Saddam’s regime, fawning over pictures of the dictator while wearing a keffiyeh. While US WWF fans had grown used to the classic anti-American heel, a turncoat was a whole new ballgame.
The all-new Sgt. Slaughter became a heat-seeking missile, the target of fan hatred that people hadn’t seen since the heyday of the NWA and that wrestling pundits genuinely didn’t think could take place in Vince Junior’s cartoonish WWF.
Forced to wear a bulletproof vest, the Sarge had to move through airports via side channels rather than through the public terminals. He and the McMahons had death threats, bomb threats, even threats to their families. It was beautiful, but it couldn’t last, and after he transitioned back to babyface status again, his career never rose to the same kind of heights again.
Still, for a while… it was brilliant.