Tha New Look

I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago. They used to be a wrestling fan and hadn’t watched since they were a little kid. Its cool when you can fire off what their favorite wrestler growing up is into.

Them: “What has Iron Sheik been up to?”

Me: “Dude! He’s lost his fucking mind! He talks about humbling people. And by humbling I mean ramming them in the brown eye!”

When I look at the guys being inducted into the WWE Hall Of Fame or when they show up at shows its cool. Its nice to see how they look now be it good (Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat) or bad (Ric Flair). Some wrestlers have led a crazy ass lifestyle, Roddy Piper comes to mind, doing drugs and drinking and sleeping with fans. They traveled and wrestled over 300 days out of the year and here they are. Getting awards, managing, and still wrestling.

Sadly, this will not be the case for future wrestling fans. We all watch how every year some young wrestler dies, usually from drug use. In the old days it was plane crashes and car wrecks. The guys that are dropping off nowadays are because of sleeping pills, heart conditions from past drug use, and steroids and such. All this in the hopes of getting “The Look.”

Here is “The New Look.”

I don’t watch NXT but an O-Ster mentioned Brodus Clay and compared him to Trevor Murdock. A big guy that can move and has a different look. I decided to look Clay up and was pleasantly surprised. This guy does indeed look different. Big ass Samoan dude that has a basic moveset and is just fun to watch. But you know what actually made me a fan of him?

He screamed.

I know that sounds weird but let me explain. During a couple of his matches (I caught them on youtube) when he got his knee dropkicked he fell to the ground and screamed. I have seen so many matches where someone is having their ankle snapped, bear hugged, or stomped and they are dead silent. When Clay screamed and went down I actually went “Ow!”

He didn’t have to go through a flaming, barb wired, thumb tacked table either. I know what a hurt knee feels like so when it happened to him I believed it. One of the best examples is when Mikey Whipwreck hurt his knee against Justin Credible (start at the 6:54 mark).

Brodus Clay gives me hope that not every new wrestler will be a jacked up freak of nature, which is fine in small doses, but an entire roster of Lex Luger’s and Scott Steiner’s has never appealed to me as a fan. We have seen very few new looks recently (Sheamus comes to mind) and its cool when I can watch a guy wrestle and believe that what he is doing is real.

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