8 Wrestling Megastars That Started As Backyarders
1. Mick Foley
Mick Foley's legendary first life as a backyarder was a crucial ingredient during perhaps the most crucial period of his WWE career.
His early-1980s teenage misadventures as Dude Love were thankfully captured on camera - and deployed masterfully by the company when they utilised a series of sit-down interviews to humanise his tortured Mankind persona in 1997.
A fresh-faced Mick Foley tied together how the young man had become the masked psychopath audiences had come to respect, cleverly weaving his WCW and ECW runs as Cactus Jack in order to blend yet more reality with the fiction.
The pieces concluded with Foley assaulting Jim Ross with his Mandible Claw, but the highlight of the entire project was the release of an amateur home video the commentator could salivate over without updating his anti-viruses first.
As the 'Dude', Foley infamously leapt from the roof of his house, foreshadowing the even greater height he'd be thrown from in his career-defining moment. His original was merely a tribute to Jimmy Snuka. His Hell In A Cell homage became the standard against which all major bumps would ever be held to,