10 Years Without Perfection

As a wrestling fan we’ve grown accustomed to young deaths. I know that sounds harsh but it’s the honest truth. But once in a while there’s a death that really gets to us. Curt “Mr. Perfect” Hennig was one for me. I had grown up watching him since he had short, curly hair and a stocky build. It was years later when I was able to watch his old AWA stuff where he was known as “Cool” Curt Hennig. He eventually went to the WWF of course and went on to have amazing feuds and matches Bret Hart.

In one of my first Tha Classics posts I mentioned their match at the first King Of The Ring as one of my favorite matches of all time and it still is. Click here to read that post that contains links to that match. You can hold that match up against your best PPV match in the last 15 years and it’ll still stand strong. As the late great Macho Man Randy Savage says “This is a class match.” Hell, their match at Summerslam was incredible when you know that he had bulging discs in his back and was leaving soon.

Hennig would stop wrestling, become a great commentator, come back to wrestling, head to WCW and join The Four Horsemen, New World Order, The West Texas Rednecks, WWE, and then TNA. And the scary thing is that he didn’t lose a step. He was still in great shape even after all those years. You can watch him hanging with Stone Cold and Rob Van Dam who are arguably two of the best at what they do.

I don’t wanna sound like I’m some kind of insider or anything, but when you think of someone selling a move the first person I think of is Mr. Perfect. Watch any match with him and you will see him making guys look amazing by taking a punch and flying away, being kicked in the leg and flipping backwards (a move his son Michael McGillicutty is now doing), and struggling to get out of submissions. Watch a match nowadays when someone is in a submission move. They lay there refusing to tap until the crowd gets bored. Perfect would fight to get out of headlocks like a wolf with its leg in a trap.

It sucks that he died. It sucks even more that its been ten years. Hennig was one of the most entertaining wrestlers to ever step into a ring. Thankfully there is a stockpile of great matches featuring him. They aren’t hard to find and almost all of them are good. I cant vouch for anything he did in TNA. Did I mention that he once did the Perfect Plex on The Big Show/Giant? Well, he did! Watch this if you wanna shart yourself.

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