Ultimate Warrior In WWE: How It Started, How It Ended
The wildly different WWE bookends of one of the company's most controversial characters.
Explaining "how it started", at very least should be so simple, but nothing's made easy when analysing The Ultimate Warrior.
Warrior's WWE legacy is such a strange mix of mythology, misunderstanding and misapprehension that even the two 2021 profile pieces on him from A&E and Dark Side Of The Ring will still only serve as welcome accompaniments to the likes of the Self Destruction Of The Ultimate Warrior and that shoot interview that is perhaps now remembered more for a guilty hilarious supercut that Hellwig himself would absolutely detest.
The clichés about him being a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in being a bit of a f*cking a*sehole are all true. Away from hatchet jobs from ex-colleagues and bosses, he submitted enough of the evidence himself on his own website. It is easy to be critical of so much of who he was, yet his objective mass appeal was briefly untouchable and retrospectively undeniable.
He lived his professional life as a persona in such a way that made his traits almost impossible to accurately define. Apart from the latter-day bigoted ones, obviously. Not that any of that mattered in 1987, or indeed nine years later when he left his WWE in-ring career behind for good.
"To get to the end, we must begin at the start" sounds ripped right out of the pages of the Big Book Of Destrucity, but they also fit quite nicely here, too. Maybe the mad b*stard was on to something...
CONT'D...