Wrestling’s Best Ever…Heel
A handful of elite wrestling ar*eholes are detestable enough to draw a reaction, and at last, the days of the “cool” heel are as much a thing of the past as the white meat babyfaces they replaced in the maturing hearts of the pro wrestling fan.
The traditional heel is back—but, whether through a general increase in cynicism, a swing towards match quality over character work, or the final kayfabe kill-shot aimed throughout the late 1990s—the traditional reaction is consigned, permanently, to history.
No wrestling villain was ever as effective at generating that reaction than ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie.
Consider this promo.
“And for every hold you know in wrestling, there should be two escapes. Every wrestlers knows two escapes. Freddie Blassie knows three or four,” Blassie says, his suit as smart as his white hair is gleaming. “I am greater than any wrestler that ever stepped foot in the ring,” he continues.
Blassie cut this promo before the invention of colour television. Read the verbiage. He doesn’t just refer to himself as the best technician in all of wrestling; he deems himself twice as good as anybody else. The words, the suit the hair: it’s all Ric Flair. Note also that he does not say “I know three or four”; much like another all-time super-heel, Blassie refers to himself in the third person decades and decades before The Rock, in a flash of inspiration, uttered the immortal words “The Rock thinks you should fire him” in 1997.
Blassie isn’t just unimpressed by the inferior pencil-necked geeks he shares a ring with; again, like Flair, only the most beautiful women will do. “The women around here are nothing but pigs,” he says, bemoaning also the “potato sacks” they call clothes. When asked what clothes they should wear, Blassie, hilariously cupping his imaginary breasts, says “form-fitting clothes; something that, well, sorta, you can see what they look like.”
The cadence differs to Flair’s hysterical hollering. Blassie, with his utterly certain deadpan, inspired yet another über-legend in Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan. Heenan irritated Gorilla Monsoon beyond belief with his staunch, unblinking refusal to see events as they had actually transpired. “What?” he would say, disingenuously, tapping into Blassie’s infuriatingly removed disposition. There is little more annoying than screaming into an uncaring void, or the face of a man so adamantly wrong. Blassie doesn’t threaten the interviewer; he raises his voice, sure, but the unerring calm, not fire, drew the ire.
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