Wrestling heels who should have turned

By Rick Morris

My post from the last week addressing Vince McMahon spitting in the face of his fans by not elevating Jeff Hardy to become a legitimate main-event player at the Royal Rumble, combined with my stint as a guest co-host on Pro Wrestling Insider on SportsTalkNetwork.com this past Tuesday night where we elaborated on the Superstar Billy Graham precedent and others in company history, led me to wonder about other times promoters dropped the ball.

This column does not delve much into situations like that of Jeff Hardy, because Hardy was a red-hot babyface who could have taken the final step into superstardom. Rather, I will examine situations involving Graham and other insanely over heels who could have parlayed their status into main-event face runs. I rank them in order of the impact I feel that they could have had on the business had they been given a chance to convert the cache of their bad guy personas into dramatic face turns.

1. Superstar Billy Graham (circa 1978). I covered his situation a bit in the aforementioned previous column, but the mind still reels at the alternate universe possibilities if the WWWF had decided to make him "Hulk Hogan before there was Hulk Hogan" back in '78. As the man who basically invented the colorful, arrogant musclehead persona in the business, he was attracting unbelievable crowd heat before dropping the strap in very anticlimactic fashion to the charisma-challenged Bob Backlund in February of 1978. Had Graham instead been attacked by former tag team partner Ivan Koloff, how wild would the New York territory have been for his before-his-time character as a sanctioned crowd favorite instead of cult antihero face? We'll never know.

2. Ric Flair (circa 1987 or 1988). We saw in late 1989 and early 1990 how popular Flair could be even with the Four Horsemen by his side. He was only turned heel again in February 1990 to make way for Sting as the #1 face in the NWA at the time. Now, Dusty Rhodes as the me-first booker would have never shared the fan favorite spotlight with Flair and the Horsemen in the '80s, so this is another pipe dream. But "what if's" are very fun to imagine, and few more so than this one. Imagine a conglomerate formed by mid-level heel managers like Jim Cornette and Paul Jones tiring of the Horsemen dominating the title picture and launching a vicious attack on Flair and his cohorts (the Blanchard/Anderson vs. Midnight Express feud of 1988 was a miniature version of what might have been, but it was cut short by Tully and Arn splitting for the WWF in September). Imagine the ultimate "strange bedfellows" situation, Dusty having to tag up with the Horsemen for War Games matches back in the mid-'80s. The Four Horsemen retrospective DVD put out in the last few years by WWE makes clear just how much the fans seemed to be dying to have a reason to outright root for Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen. What if they were turned face during the phase when they were drawing their strongest collective crowd reactions? Ric Flair could have had great main event matches against strong heels (they could have accomplished this merely by never turning Luger face in '87, keeping Sting heel after the UFW merger, etc.).

3. Nick Bockwinkel (circa 1980-84). I admit it, I'm going through a huge Nick Bockwinkel markout phase, hence the videos you will now see for the time being on the right-hand column of this page. He gave perhaps the most articulate interviews of all time and could generate outstanding crowd heat -- plus he had a good moveset and could execute excellent matches all the time. Imagine him breaking away from Bobby Heenan and feuding with the Heenan Family. Imagine if such a feud started in 1980 after Bock lost the AWA World Title back to Verne Gagne for the last time and if Gagne/Bock had joined forces for tag matches prior to Gagne dropping the title to his "new friend" in his retirement match, "a respect match" (as with Dusty's ego being the impediment to Scenario #2, Gagne's selfish desire to "retire as World Champion" drained credibility from the belt and would have easily precluded this smart business decision). The fans would have really gotten behind the cocky, tanned, smooth-talking Hollywood champ battling the bad guys. If the AWA could turn such hated bad guys as Crusher, Bruiser and Mad Dog Vachon face to great success, there's no question this would have worked. Why wasn't it tried? In all likelihood, it's because Bockwinkel's vast credibility, as a great-drawing titleholder from 1975 to 1980, would have been the foundation for a face run that could have even eclipsed the popularity of Verne Gagne himself. And nobody is ever allowed to surpass the booker -- that's the first lesson of pro wrestling. Even if Bock's turn had been saved for the end of the AWA Heenan era in 1984, he still would have been way more over than Rick Martel, the white-bread babyface who inexplicably got a face title run with the belt for a year and a half when Gagne was doubling down on pure scientific wrestling in the face of Vince's looming "sports entertainment" empire.

4. Arn Anderson (circa 1991-1992). Another admission -- I am a tremendous Double A mark. But I think that if you look back at Gene and Ole Anderson in the 1970s or Ole and Arn in the 1980s, they almost fell into that cult face classification in that there were a lot of fans who cheered because of their toughness and greatness. Picture Arn as a "lone wolf" tweener-type face battling the Dangerous Alliance and holding them off for the World Title. Picture Arn doing battle with Big Van Vader during the behemoth's heyday. WCW probably could not have gained on WWF at that time no matter what they tried, but Arn Anderson riding the cheers of the crowd all the way to the top certainly would have been outside the box -- and there was no more public acclaim for a Ron Simmons title run then than there was for an Arn championship opportunity.

5. Finlay (circa 2007). The crowds are reacting well to Finlay in his role as a newly-turned face as part of the "Littlest McMahon" storyline. But I have long maintained that his tough-guy style, which has faint elements of a 1996-97 Steve Austin flair to it, would be massively over if he were going against the bad guys. When Smackdown was suffering the period of countless main event injuries last year, could they really have done worse than to try Finlay on top as a babyface? The question answers itself -- this is a company that wasted several months on The Great Khali as a monster heel champion when they didn't even trust him to wrestle an important pay-per-view match the previous year.