Despite the fact that pro wrestling is in no way as popular as it once was, you can’t throw a digital rock without hitting a wrestling related article or video online. Whether it’s What Culture and their snazzy Britishness, Cultaholic with more of the same, WrestleTalk with…well, you get the idea, Jim Cornette’s love child on Wrestling With Wregret, or even the encyclopedic knowledge of Dave Knows Wrestling, YouTube is a varied landscape of wrestling content. Not content with only doing video, many of the same channels also have websites that cover the same material. Hell, this is the Exploder blog, a companion piece to the Exploder podcast. We’re part of something, yay! All of this content comes from fans explaining to others the intricacies and colorful history of pro wrestling.
And then there’s these assholes.
In addition to the litany of fan-centric websites, YouTube channels, and podcasts covering pro wrestling, there’s also the occasional website that isn’t any of that. Yes, like any other topic that’s even remotely popular, there’s also websites that cover pro wrestling without getting caught up in messy stuff like “facts” and “context”. That’s where this website comes in. The website in question is a site I honestly didn’t know existed called Bukisa, a general, milquetoast “Lifestyle” website that seems to go the route of covering everything in a base, over-simplistic just kind of there style. Through one of their Facebook ads, I ran across this article about revealing famous masked pro wrestlers. And, to be honest, this article could be 10, maybe 15 entries long, add a couple pictures and short descriptions, and it would work perfectly fine for what it was trying to accomplish. We’ve all seen countless What Culture or SportsKeedia articles using the same format, so it could definitely work here. Unfortunately, no one told the braintrust at Bukisa, who decided to make this list 88 entries long and have it be written by someone who probably just came out of a coma and was desperately struggling to catch up on the last 30 years of pro wrestling. And probably has a learning disability. I read this entire thing and I was amazed at how wrong so much of this list was. So with that in mind, I thought I’d share with you some of the more mind-numbingly stupid claims in this article. Enjoy.
Just to let you know where we’re going here, this is a picture included in the article. The man on the right is ROH mainstay and booker/lizard person Delirious, who is notorious for always wearing his mask in public and has even done shoot interviews in Delirious’ madman rambling style. The unmasked fellow in the center of the left photo is late wrestler/manager Larry Sweeney. That’s right, they start the article by misidentifying the guy under the mask. And believe me, this will get worse.
Right out the gate, the article goes off the rails. Apparently, The Shockmaster lasted for years…in the WWF. Alright.
I’m seriously not trying to go entry by entry on this, but it’s hard when this is what they write one after the other. I had no idea Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart only became famous in 1996 as Who.
Terry Gordy was the Executioner for 4 months.
Yes…they think luchador Pentagon Jr. and Sami Callihan are the same person. I assume because Callihan is holding the Pentagon mask, but then again, that may still be too logical for these idiots.
Here’s where a shred of fact gets mixed up with a lot of bullshit. While Ted “Rocco Rock” Petty would wrestle as The Cheetah Kid long before he started wearing hockey jerseys and putting people through tables…that’s not Rocco Rock. The Cheetah Kid did appear on WCW Monday Nitro on October 14, 1996, losing to Eddy Guerrero. But Rocco Rock and partner Johnny Grunge were already established in WCW as The Public Enemy at this time. The man on the left is Prince Iaukea.
Do I need to even say anything?
The Legion of Doom competed…against…Hawk and Animal. Think about that. Take all the time you need.
They’re actually saying Aldo Montoya and his banana jockstrap mask made it through the attitude era. Really.
Literally none of this is true.
This is a man who literally wrestled as both the Great Muta and Keiji Muto, HIS REAL NAME. And that classic Muta was face paint, not a mask. This is like saying no one knew Stan Hansen was from Texas.
Glacier never wrestled in the mask!
Ah yes, the classic Three Minute Team. From the makers of The British Pitbulls, The Rickers, and who could forget Legion of Danger. They can’t even get the names right.
No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, they listed the Legion of Doom and the Road Warriors separately. Yet they used the same “unmasked” picture for both.
Oh, and keeping with the theme of both not knowing what the hell they’re talking about and being redundant, Owen Hart/The Blue Blazer is also on the list twice, being mentioned in #54 and #4.
So there you have it, a list of “unmasked” pro wrestlers that is amazing only in that it ever got published. I understand that not everyone is a huge pro wrestling fan. I understand that articles are going to make mistakes that nerds like me with a wrestling blog and podcast are going to catch. But this article, if it can even be called that, is so blatantly awful, so factually agnostic, that I’m almost offended by it. They’ve managed to be so wrong that it upset me. That’s an (awful) accomplishment.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my further descent into madness reading this Buzzfeed-esque lie article. Are there more articles I’m missing? Anything you’d like to send my way? Let me know and I’ll see if I can find more wrestling related idiocy to share with you. If I have to suffer through it, I’m taking you with me.
Exploder 