9 Wrestling Heels Who Were Totally Justified
8. Where We're Going, We Don't Need Rhodes
In 1991, ex-Horseman Barry Windham and son-of-the-son-of-a-plumber, The Natural Dustin Rhodes were a tag team at the very pinnacle of WCW's tag division, poised to win the big one. Then, Windham was taken out by their rivals, The Enforcers, and left on the shelf for a while.
Rhodes didn't miss a beat - he recruited the legendary Ricky 'The Dragon' Steamboat to take Windham's place, and the new team would defeat The Enforcers for the tag titles shortly afterwards. When he returned, Windham had some significant singles success before reuniting with Rhodes in September 1992. The pair would finally win the unified WCW/NWA World Tag Team Championship together, only to lose them at Clash Of The Champions XXI in November 1992 to, of all people, Ricky Steamboat and his partner Shane Douglas.
In that title match, Steamboat suffered an accidental low blow that turned his avocados to guacamole - hey, it happens, this isnt ballet (Copyright John Layfield, 2008). Rhodes saw the potato-mashing agony his friend and former teammate was in, and refused to pin him. Windham, however, just saw his less experienced partner deliberately failing to capitalise on their good fortune to retain their titles. Windham tagged himself in to make good on Rhodes' blunder and Steamboat's pulverised vegetable metaphor, delivering two inverted atomic drops and going for the winning pin. Then Rhodes stepped into the ring and literally dragged Windham off their opponent.
Flabbergasted, Windham stepped to Rhodes and the two had words before exchanging some hard slaps - meanwhile, Steamboat managed to tag Douglas in, and taking advantage of the distraction, Douglas hit a hard belly-to-belly suplex on Windham to take the pinfall and the tag team titles. After the match, Windham went ballistic, kicking and punching Rhodes, performing a massive implant DDT and his trademark floatover superplex before the referees piled in to separate them as the show went to commercial. When they came back, it was with a backstage interview with the new tag team champions, and as Jesse 'The Body' Ventura asked them about the dodgy circumstances under which they'd won the titles, Steamboat as good as shrugged and said, "Well we won, didn't we?"
It was when he was giving a shoutout to his friend Dustin Rhodes that Windham appeared from nowhere, like a chair-wielding goblin, to batter the champions about the head and face. It's almost impossible not to sympathise with Windham over this, and indeed a huge number of WCW fans felt Windham's outrage was justified. If Rhodes, Steamboat, and Douglas were intended to be the babyfaces, then WCW screwed the pooch badly on that one. Windham had always made a cracking heel and the circumstances of his turn were soon forgotten.