The Wrestler Who Was Cancelled
Pity the fool who messed with Mr. T...
David Schultz was a super credible wrestler.
In the modern era, the grizzled wrestlers of yore are held aloft as real men who made it all feel real, mostly to counter positive arguments about today's scene in bad faith. Even if the heel teams of the 1980s were great slapstick comedians, even if the ten punches to the head spot never resulted in a black eye, even if the histrionic babyface appeals were more corny than an episode of Being The Elite, the "old school" wrestler has been lionised through the lens of totally unreliable and very childish nostalgia.
Read the following quote:
"A lot of wrestlers nowadays look like a trampoline act. Nowhere could you ever see a guy crawl up on the turnbuckles. It's just like the Empire State building. Just stand there and wait for someone to push you off. Where is it ever logical to put a guy on the turnbuckle while you stand on the second rope?"
This wasn't what Jim Ross had to say about AEW's multi-man tag style in 2020, though it reads very much like his critique of the modern dive to the outside spot back in 2020; this was from Karl Gotch, burying Harley Race to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter in 1990. JR's problems with the modern style weren't too far removed from it, as he disclosed on Grilling JR:
"All you guys go outside. You cluster up like coils. You stand there in a huddle, friends and foes together, side by side so you can catch some leaping idiot going over the top who never wins with this move."
Ross even used almost identical verbiage to Gotch by saying "It's a trapeze act", and, out of nowhere, said that the DDT should be a finish. Ross believes that wrestling in the 1980s was the most logical and believable version of the form. Harley Race is enshrined in legend as a mutton-chopped hard bastard. Schultz was nowhere near Race's level as a worker, but the man was equipped with a formidable aura like few others.
If the fabled 1980s wrestler actually existed, David Schultz, who worked for the WWF at the cusp of its national expansion, would look rather a lot like him.
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