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The 411 Wrestling Top 5 5.09.12: Week 171 – Top 5 Worst Career Transformations

May 9, 2012 | Posted by Larry Csonka

Hello everyone and welcome to 411 Wrestling’s Top 5 List. What we are going to is take a topic each week and all the writers here on 411 wrestling will have the ability to give us their Top 5 on said topic, plus up to three honorable mentions.

So, on to this week’s topic…

TOP 5 WORST CAREER TRANSFORMATIONS

Gavin Napier
5. The De-evolution of Barry Darsow – Darsow is an underrated guy, in my opinion. He was half of two of the dominant teams of the 1980’s, the Russians in the NWA as Krusher Kruschev, and then as Smash in Demolition. After Demolition came to an end, and the should-have-been-awful-but-Darsow-made-it-entertaining Repo Man ran it’s course, Darsow eventually found his way back to WCW, where he became……a construction worker. As the Blacktop Bully, he was part of one of the worst matches in history, taking on Dustin Rhodes in a King of the Road match at Uncensored 95. From there it devolved into a golfer, then to just plain Barry Darsow. That’s a long fall from a dominant multiple time world tag team champion.

4. One Man Gang to Akeem – I grew up as a fan of the NWA. The aspect of realism always appealed to me over the characters of WWF in the 80’s. So for me to see the One Man Gang in WWE, it was a breath of fresh air. A huge guy that existed only to beat people up and whose “character” was simply that he was a tough guy stood out to me. Unfortunately, he was eventually turned into a shucking and jiving, yellow tent-wearing spectacle. Even as a kid I realized it was the same person, and I couldn’t understand why he would make such a stupid switch.

3. Nick Dinsmore to Eugene – Disclaimer: I realize that if nothing else, Eugene was over with kids and provided Dinsmore a way to make money on the Indy scene. That said, it’s a shame that Dinsmore wasn’t allowed to just be Nick Dinsmore in WWE. The guy can flat out wrestle and shouldn’t be reduced to a wrestling version of Johnny Knoxville in The Ringer. He’s been gone long enough that Nick Dinsmore could probably re emerge in the X Division without a problem, but the best years of his career were spent playing a mentally handicapped guy. That’s gotta do wonders for the self-esteem.

2. Terry Taylor to The Red Rooster – In the mid to late 80’s, Terry Taylor was a clean-cut, slick wrestler that had potential. He was a part of the UWF, and their television champion when they were purchased by the NWA and the merger happened. Just like WWE’s “invasion” angle with WCW, it was remarkably under whelming. Taylor quickly moved on, and debuted as Bobby Heenan’s newest wrestler…who happened to act like a chicken. That went about as well as anyone could imagine, as he ended up feuding with jobber supreme Steve Lombardi before quietly disappearing. Taylor would have other runs as a singles guy in WCW, but his credibility never recovered.

1. Goldust to Black Reign – Dustin Rhodes has long proven that he can handle playing weird characters. Goldust will go down as one of the all time great gimmicks on wrestling history. Dustin pushed the envelope effectively to generate heat as a heel and big pops as a face. He altered his in-ring style to suit the gimmick. Making the transition to an equally weird gimmick in TNA proved disastrous. Black Reign elicited little reaction and feuded over rats. Dustin generally seemed to not be interested in being there. He looked out of shape, out of place, and that didn’t change until he embraced the Goldust character again.


TRANSFORMED INTO


Robert S. Leighty Jr
HM: Crow Sting to Lobster Sting – Sting joining any faction of the nWo always came off stupid to me, and I just couldn’t take him seriously with the all red face paint.
HM: Kerwin White – Poor Chavo!

5. Rey Mysterio Jr: Unmasked – WCW made the stupid decision to unmask Rey Mysterio which cost them millions of dollars in merchanside (see WWE selling masks for eternity now), and for me personally I couldn’t stand Filty Animal Rey Mysterio Jr (w/ horns). Sure his work was roughly the same, but without the mask it just felt wrong. So glad WWE was smart enough to put him back under the mask.

4. The Stalker – I still have no clue why the WWE decided to turn Barry Windman into a gimmick character called the Stalker. I mean, we have one of the legendary 4 Horsemen and you give him this gimmick? What’s wrong with just plain ole Barry Windham?

2. Everything post Goldust – Goldust was a fascinating character that pushed the boundaries and was just bizarre enough to take seriously. Everything after that was just plain stupid: The Artist Formerly Know as Goldust, Seven in WCW, and Black Rain in TNA. All just awful and at times would make me turn my TV. I give Dustin much credit for running with the characters, but wow.

2. BikerTaker – I was not a fan of a complete overhaul to Taker’s gimmick and still to this day I don’t like the move. I tried to give it a shot, but to me it just hurt some of the mystique of the character. I especially didn’t like when Taker went all Hulk Hogan Real American and started waving the red, white, and blue in his feud with Test. I guess was worth a shot, but you don’t mess with something the fans aren’t tired of seeing.

1. Brutus Beefcake – I can handle all the Barber stuff in the WWF because that was fun. All the good will went down the drain in WCW though. The heel turn where he became the Butcher was ok as people turning on Hogan is something we expect to see (though Beefcake headlining Starrcade was well, questionable). After that though we had to endure the idiotic run of The Man with No Name, The Zodiac, The BootyMan, and the Disciple (nWo and oWn versions). Being only member of oWn besides the Warrior by itself makes him #1.


TRANSFORMED INTO


Jack Bramma
HM: Val Venis to Chief Morley – The porn star gimmick had a short shelf life but Chief was bland as hell and just a generic heel with all black attire and a shaved head.
HM: Chris Harris to Braden Walker – Knock knock. He’s Braden Walker and he’ll knock your brains out and get fired after one match on ECW in the process.
HM: Mike Awesome to Fat Chick Thriller/70s guy – While I got a few laughs out of Awesome’s career transformation, he was a guy who worked best as a high flying, hard hitting asskicker that had classics with Masato Tanaka, Spike Dudley and others in ECW. He didn’t need a mullet or the Partridge Family’s bus or some portly seconds to get him over. Not everyone needs to be a character.

5. Jake “the Snake” Roberts to Born Again Christian – I understand why this was done and I sympathize with Jake’s real life troubles with addiction one million percent. But the Jake the Snake character is one of the best in wrestling history and anything after that couldn’t possibly live up to his previous iteration.

4. Team Angle/World’s Greatest Tag Team to broken up for singles careers of Gold Standard, Big Mama, imitating other wrestlers, hurting Lilian Garcia, etc. – These two guys perfectly complimented each other and Kurt Angle as a tag team. Like Paul Heyman would know, when you have two great wrestlers who can’t talk but can wrestle, you put them in a tag team and let them kick ass possibly as hired goons or just out for themselves wanting tag gold. It’s a mind-bogglingly simple gimmick and yet somehow the WWE screwed it up. They decided sometime in the last 15 years, that every successful tag team must be broken up so we can double the number of breakout singles’ stars in the process thus simultaneously gutting the tag division and bloating the undercard with a plethora of guys that aren’t over by themselves and probably won’t get over. Team Angle is just one of the more notable examples but thankfully they are back together now.

3. Diamond Dallas Page to a Stalker – Like Barry Windham, DDP was a very talented guy with an already well-known character who just got saddled with the FU heat magnet that is the stalker gimmick. I’ll grant the gimmick in theory “could” work. I think a stalker in wrestling could be done effectively with no camp or lesbianism or comedy; I just haven’t seen it yet to my memory. But even if the gimmick could work, DDP was so thoroughly demolished by Undertaker in his first feud that he was done before he got going in WWE.

2. The American Dream Dusty Rhodes to Yellow and Black Polka Dots – For these last 2, it’s not so much how bad the new gimmick was (although they were bad), but how classic the original characters were that makes the steep fall that much more glaring. The American Dream IS professional wrestling. It’s about a man who understands the hard times of the world that can get you down, but who keeps fighting anyway — not for money or power or championships, but because he’s too much of a man to let the world get the best of him and to quit. He wasn’t good looking or even in good shape, but damn he could talk and could go with the best of them. How Vince McMahon ever thought a character named THE AMERICAN DREAM needed to be changed will never cease to amaze me. First, Vince tried to take the character too literally and devised a series of vignettes with Dusty working manual labor jobs to build him up as a pizza deliveryman, garbage man, and guys who cleans toilets. While Dusty’s charisma still shined though, the promos portrayed the character as kind of a loveable goof who smiled his way through shitty jobs like Hacksaw Jim Duggan as a janitor in WCW. While everyone wants a man of the people who understands their way of life, it’s another thing to lower a larger than life-type hero DOING those shitty jobs to build him up. It just didn’t work. And the less said about the polka dots and Sapphire the better. I still feel both were ribs no matter what Dusty himself says.

1. Superstar Billy Graham to Kung-Fu Billy Graham – This one takes the cake. This gimmick transformation is so maligned that even speaking of it in certain wrestling circles will draw the ire of an entire community. Superstar Billy Graham is such an iconic figure in pro wrestling due to his promos, his physique, his bleach blonde hair, and his tie-dye shirts. He influenced so many wrestlers and others to the point that they just copied wholesale sections of his gimmick like Hulk Hogan and Jesse the Body Ventura. But as good as SSBG was KFBG was that bad. The inevitable physical breakdown of his body aside, Graham just looked awful even attempting kung fu or martial arts in any form. It’s hard to find a better example of how far the mighty will far at times.


TRANSFORMED INTO


Francisco Ramirez
HM: Konnan becomes Max Moon – Sure it was for a minute
HM: Mistico becomes Sin Cara – Sorry, so far hasn’t lived up to the hype.

5. Hayabusa becomes H – FMW sure as hell was hard to keep up with, Japanese pornstars, bloodfilled matches and the infamous “Anus Explosion Match” made this fed shall we say, not for everyone? The one redeeming factor was the high-flying poster boy Hayabusa. Hayabusa was known for some great matches, my favorites being anytime he was in the ring with Gladiator Mike Awesome. So what does FMW do to spice things up after some years? They unmask Hayabusa, clip his wings, making him more of a ground based wrestler and then they dye and eventually cut his hair. H was born, he still put on a good show, and it just wasn’t the same! Eventually Hayabusa returned to a huge pop, and continued to work as Hayabusa until his career ending injury.

4. Tony Atlas becomes Saba Simba – Mr. USA Tony Atlas was over, way over. It can be argued that he was close to becoming the NWA World Heavyweight Champion. Racial issues *Cough, Cough, He’s Black* supposedly led to him never actually winning the title. He eventually did became one half of the WWE Tag-Team champions alongside Rocky Johnson. So what does the WWE decide to do when he’s brought back in 1991? They repackage him as Saba Simba! No longer Mr. USA, now he’s brought in as an African tribesman, barefoot and walking to the ring with a shield and spear. Oh Tony Atlas, and you thought there was racial issues before!

3. Hulk Hogan becomes Mr. America – Sure it was short-lived, sure it was for kicks, but was it really necessary? For a short period on Smackdown, Hulk Hogan donned a mask, a crappy mask at that, and put on, well basically an exact same match and show that Hulk Hogan would. More of a meh moment in Hulk Hogan’s career.

2. Heel Rowdy Roddy Piper becomes Face Rowdy Roddy Piper – As a heel Roddy Piper was it. Making headlines for the Cyndi Lauper deal, talking smack with Mr. T, hell tossing a wooden stool at Mr. T! Roddy Piper was the perfect heel! Easy to hate, gold on the mic. Sure his matches weren’t five star quality, well at least those not involving Greg Valentine and a dog collar. Eventually the Hot Rod became a face. Sure he was loved by the fans, but when I look back, my favorite Face Roddy Piper moments are the Goldust brawl, and his Intercontinental Title match against Bret Hart. When you compare that with all the Heel moments we all love to remember, I can’t help but feel that he could have done so much more as a heel!

1. Mike Awesome becomes That 70’s Guy – This one just breaks my heart! I followed Mike Awesome during his Gladiator Mike Awesome days in FMW. I tuned in to watch his ECW run and short lived title reign. I felt he was going places! So what the hell does WCW decide to do with the man that is billed as a Super-Heavyweight, can fly like a Cruiserweight, and can deliver a beautiful freaking powerbomb? They neuter him, make him the “Fat Chick Thrilla” and then devolve that even more to That 70’s Guy Mike Awesome? I don’t give a shit who’s idea it was, but if you wanted to give someone a 70’s gimmick, you should have remembered freaking Disco Inferno was on the roster!


TRANSFORMED INTO


Jon Butterfield
5. Viscera becomes Big Daddy V – The World’s Largest Love Machine was an appropriate gimmick for a man that, even if you could see past his morbidly obese frame, was actually hideously ugly anyway – so sayeth the WWE! To be honest, no, just no, because what actually happened was that the Big Daddy V gimmick took poor old Nelson Frazier, Jr, further into the mire of Wrestlecrap-worthy gimmickry than ever before. King Mabel was a bit lame, Viscera was just a paper-thin concept with no substance whatsoever, but Big Daddy V – that was the moment they were really scraping the barrel trying to get this huge, 500+ lb monster over. To make matters worse, the very same gimmick had already failed (very badly indeed) for Mark Henry several years earlier… Lessons learned? At WWE? NEVER!

4. Dean Malenko becomes James Bond! – Does anyone even remember this? Seriously? Anyway, post-Radicalz Dean Malenko, genuinely one of the finest technical wrestlers on the planet, was hurried ever-faster towards retirement with a gimmick that dubbed him ‘Double Ho Seven’. I swear, I’m not making this up… ‘The Man of 1,000 Holds’ undoubtedly lost all reason to live (or at least wrestle) during this time, much like I lost all reason to watch the WWE’s secondary show, Heat.

3. Mike Awesome becomes That 70’s Guy – I think anyone who ever enjoyed Mike Awesome’s run in ECW as that unstoppable wrecking machine probably broke down in tears at some point during his WCW run. Instead of playing to his obvious physical gifts, those being his sheer power and unique athleticism, instead of continuing to let him play the role of the dynamic monster that he played so brilliantly well, they instead had him become some god awful caricature of a 1970’s… well, stereotype. And why? Umm… help?

2. Jim Neidhart becomes WHO – Jim ‘The Anvil’ Neidhart, formerly one-half of the legendary Hart Foundation, one of the most recognizable men in wrestling history, was obviously a prime candidate to play this character. I don’t know why, but he was. Ask WWF Creative circa 1996, they’ll tell you! Anyway, WHO, who wore a yellow mask and yellow trunks, never spoke, never won (as far as I’m aware), and never did anything whatsoever to either boost or bolster intrigue in his character. But what WHO did do, however, was provide the commentary teams with ample opportunity to make non-puns and non-jokes with the word ‘WHO’ in and feign complete bewilderment, which was great (I’m assured), and well worthy of our TV screens. But wait, it wasn’t great on second thoughts, hence why the character was scrapped almost immediately and discarded as if the whole sorry affair never happened. But it DID happen, I swear I wasn’t dreaming, and I’ve even got proof – here he is facing Kwang. Enjoy!

1. Typhoon becomes The Shockmaster – A bit of an obvious one maybe, but really quite monumental in the history of awful, awful repackaging. Typhoon (previously Tugboat) was a big 6’3, 380 lb man-mountain who had a successful run as one half of the Natural Disasters. He and his partner, the late Earthquake, crushed team after team to become WWF Tag Team Champions when the titles actually meant something, but when ‘Quake (John Tenta) decided to take a leave of absence, things quickly went downhill for the mighty Typhoon. A limp and lifeless singles run was followed by a move to WCW, where somebody decided it would be a good idea to put a storm trooper mask over his head, put some glitter on it and make it all sparkly, then introduce him as an ‘intimidating’ mystery partner in an 8-man tag. Well, you all know the rest, but if you don’t, words just can’t top the actual footage…


Larry’s Quick Five
5. Ron Simmons to Faarooq Asad
4. One Man Gang to Akeem the African Dream
3. Goldust to Black Reign
2. Superstar Billy Graham to Kung-Fu Billy Graham
1. Terry Taylor to The Red Rooster


YOUR TURN KNOW IT ALLS
List your Top Five for this week’s topic in the comment section using the following format:

5. CHOICE: Explanation
4. CHOICE: Explanation
3. CHOICE: Explanation
2. CHOICE: Explanation
1. CHOICE: Explanation

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Larry Csonka