Yeah, I remember the old-school “rasslers”...Ric Flair, King Kong Bundy, George “The Animal” Steele, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, etc...and how about real old-school, like Bob Backlund and Bruno Sammartino???
I used to watch WCW with my “redneck” friends back in the mid-1990s...they had some good storylines back then...the NWO and all that...I actually liked Benoit when he was in WCW with the Four Horsemen...he always put on a good show. What a shame he had to go out like he did.
Rasslin’ has gone downhill big time in the last several years...WWE sucks compared to the old NWA and WCW. This Benoit thing may be the final nail in the WWE coffin...good riddance...
I’m not really up on my wrestling history, but I think that a lot of the old MACW folks ended up in the old-school NWA. Flair and the Andersens in particular.
The thing about those guys was that they were, for lack of a better term, normal. Take Dusty Rhodes. Dusty Rhodes looked like some big beer-drinking redneck you’d run into down at the local truck stop, with his crazy accent and his beer gut. The kind of guy that’d hang out in a country bar, down a few beers, then get into a fight with a couple of out-of-towners and kick some ass. Same thing with Wahoo McDaniel, he had a belly. “Number One” Paul Orndorff was practically a midget compared to modern wrestlers, yet he was extremely good technically and played the role of the quiet, yet arrogant bad guy to perfection. Ric Flair was (and still is) the consummate showman, a good but not awesome wrestler whose personality made up for it.
When somebody like Ricky Steamboat or Jimmy Snuka came along, admit it, we were all like “wow, that guy’s cut!” Steamboat wasn’t all that big, and I don’t think Snuka was either. But they were in fantastic shape compared to a lot of the other wrestlers of that day.
Jump forward a few years, and all of a sudden everybody became these hyper-inflated Hulk Hogan clones. Even Snuka bulked up massively. And my least favorite was always The Ultimate Warrior. Is he even alive now? My God, he looked like some sort of real-life He-Man caricature. What he must have been pumping into his body to get like that, I don’t even want to think about.
Combine all that with the increasingly weird storylines, and it just ran me off.
}:-)4