20 Most Hated Heel Moves In Wrestling History
1. The Foreign Devil
Blanchard was a b*****d, Flair a backstabber. Zbyszko was Judas, Kane was Satan. Punk was insolent, Owens was callous. And ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie? He was all of those things at once, and in his time, was the most hated wrestler to walk the face of the earth.
Larry Zbyszko might have been stabbed in the rear end and attacked in the street, but Blassie had acid thrown at him on his way to the ring, lost some of the vision in his right eye from a flying projectile, had last rites administered to him twice, and (if the stories can be believed) was stabbed by fans over twenty times during his career.
A natural on the mic as well as a trendsetter and a snappy dresser, with his heelishly platinum blond hair immaculately waved, Blassie was the perfect villain for the burgeoning platform that television had given pro wrestling by the 1950s. Few people have ever been able to whip a crowd into a frenzy like Blassie… but it’s his effect on the Japanese audience that gets him the number one spot on this list.
Billed as ‘the Vampire’ because of his fondness for biting his opponents, his filed teeth drawing blood, Freddie Blassie was the heel’s heel: an urbane monster, the Hannibal Lecter of professional wrestling before the death of kayfabe made ‘the monster’ a caricature.
He claimed - with some legitimate justification - to have caused a spread of heart attacks amongst television viewers of his matches in Japan with Rikidozan and The Great Togo, horrifying that staid, dignified society with his bestial gnawing on the bloody heads of his foes.
Although he’d boast that “In my whole career ninety-two people dropped dead of heart attacks. My ambition was to kill one hundred, and I failed,” in reality there were genuine news reports of coronary events having been precipitated by elder members of whole families gathered together to watch the gaijin devil take on their national hero Rikidozan. That number may be worked, but not the incidents themselves.
Legendary journalist Jim Murray once referred to ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie as “the worst villain since Hitler". He’d have seen that as the huge compliment that it was.