Instead, it’s a list of folks whose best work and happiest days played out in gyms filled with 200 people at a time. There’s no Hogan slamming Andre, no Austin and the beer truck, no Flair-Steamboat, no Dusty doing Hard Times. Chris Hero’s talking about focusing on training others.
Jacobs has opted to take his mastery of storytelling to the writer’s room. McGuiness was too devastated by injury to fulfill his potential. And, of course, he’s done now, aged 36 and swearing never to return.īryan’s best was too short-lived, his Wrestlemania moment kept to a fleeting one night of glory. I’m not even sure if there was a single truly memorable match from that period, save maybe the piledriver match with Cena. It worked within the tight restrictions which WWE enforced. The Summer of Punk, which saw the start of his lengthy reign as WWE champion, was great, but it didn’t define anything. The most talented of them have stopped short of immortality.ĬM Punk came closest. Much as it hurts me to look back at this generation of wrestlers as Bryan looks set to retire, I just don’t see that icon out there. Most of the promising ones went on to have fruitful careers, either moving onto WWE or carving out niches in the indies.īut as these wrestlers creep toward 40 and their careers begin to wind down, that question of who would be their Flair or Austin has to be answered honestly: nobody. They’ve not wasted their careers or been busts. That entire group is made up of some of the greatest technical performers I’ve ever seen. Here’s what I’m not saying: They’re not bad wrestlers. But I think it’s not just his legacy that has to be reconsidered but the collective legacy of that entire generation of stars who came up through IWA-MS and Ring of Honor’s early days. In the wake of his in-ring announcement, I’ve seen and heard a lot of talk about what his legacy will be, which is fair. He’s in bad shape, he’s been in bad shape for a while, and he’ll be the first to tell you that he could walk away tomorrow and be happy.
Sure, he put a good face on it, leaving plenty of light for a comeback, and everyone’s trying to be optimistic, but I’m not quite buying it. On the May 11th RAW, Daniel Bryan said he wasn’t sure if he was going to wrestle ever again. One of those wrestlers is flirting with retirement. Who would become the next Flair? The next Austin? That was the big game among indie fans at the time. These people would, I thought, go on to be stars. There was a swirl and color to IWA-MS which nothing else had at the time. I would never become a wrestler, but guys like CM Punk reminded me of the people I knew. It was a star studded roll call of indie stars just beginning their careers, all roughly my age cohort: born in the late 70s or early 80s. Those wrestlers would, mostly, go on to have long careers.
It was a blueprint for the resurgent indies we have today and I fell hard for these men and women busting their asses in Indiana gyms. Basically, everything that I’d loved about the defunct ECW with smaller crowds and venues. What I saw was stunning: ultraviolence mixed with top notch ring work. Metal Jeff insisted I watch the tapes and DVDs he brought over, telling me that there were great wrestlers busting their asses far away from the stale gasps of WWE of the time. I’ll play Cena hipster I hated him the second I saw him and the thought of suffering through his original rapper gimmick was intolerable to me. It was transitioning to John Cena and Randy Orton and Batista, men who had gimmicks that flatly rubbed me the wrong way. The Attitude Era stars had faded, moving on to retirement, other ventures, or lingering on in embarrassing fashion to shoehorn faux 1990s edge into a decade where that didn’t play. I’d finally gotten sick of wrestling in the immediate post-Attitude Era, post-Invasion, post-ECW years no mean feat, as pro wrestling was near and dear to my heart since the 1980s golden era of Southern wrestling. It was 2004 or so and my friend, Metal Jeff, had brought over some wrestling tapes from an independent federation called IWA Mid-South.
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