By Coach B

For decades, the recruiting process for pro wrestlers was straightforward: you played football, wrestled amateur, or were just too large and volatile for a career that required khakis.

Big? Good.

Mean? Better.

Enjoy hurting people while surrounded by women in various states of undress?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Honorable Mentions

Nikita Koloff

Born Scott Simpson in Minnesota, then legally changed his name to Nikita Koloff and kept the Russian accent going around people who presumably knew where he went to high school.

John Nord

Montana State offensive lineman, No. 67, 1981–82.

Teamed with Bruiser Brody and eventually became the Berzerker.

Came within inches of stabbing The Undertaker with a sword on WWF television.

Huss.

Barry Darsow

Krusher Khruschev. Demolition Smash. Repo Man. Blacktop Bully.

My God, that is a lot of range.

This man persevered through professional wrestling in every form it could invent.

10. The Iron Sheik

Sheiky baby!

Technically, not a bouncer. But serving as a bodyguard for the Shah of Iran gets you considered.

After leaving Iran, Sheik became an accomplished amateur wrestler in the United States and later worked with the U.S. Olympic wrestling program.

As much as Sheiky spent the rest of his life threatening to humble B. Brian Blair, there was a hell of an actual wrestler underneath all of it.

Plus, Sheik was always one of my favorite LJN guys.

Excellent right-arm positioning for the body slam.

If you ever need a stirring tribute, now you know who to call.

9. The Undertaker

Before he was The Undertaker, Mark Calaway was bouncing in Texas, which already sounds like a poor situation to test your luck in.

Dutch Mantell told the story of a guy hanging around after closing time who kept saying, “I’m going, but you ain’t making me go.”

Taker apparently snatched him up, ran his head into the wall, put the boots to him, and threw him outside.

8. Mad Dog Vachon

Vachon represented Canada in freestyle wrestling at the 1948 Olympics. He was eighteen. Later won gold at the British Empire Games and spent several years bouncing in Montreal before turning professional. nwhof.org

Mad Dog wasn’t enormous by the standards of this list. Around 5’9”, 230 pounds.

That’s plenty of human being, especially when it’s arranged like Mad Dog Vachon.

7. Bill Goldberg

Goldberg was apparently bouncing at sixteen.

His dad was a doctor. He didn’t need the money. Nobody forced him into this particular employment pipeline.

At sixteen, Bill Goldberg looked around and thought:

“You know what looks like fun? Removing grown men from buildings against their will.”

6. Scott Norton

World-class arm wrestler. Bouncer extraordinaire. Checking in at 6’3”, 360 pounds, Scott Norton is built like a porta-john, which, from a football coaching standpoint, remains the highest of compliments.

Norton did not go to Robbinsdale High School like so many others on here.

He went to Patrick Henry.

A whole 2.8 miles away.

He played football with Mike Hegstrand, future Road Warrior Hawk, and had already become friends with Rick Rude in junior high.

Then they grew up and started bouncing in the same Twin Cities nightclub scene.

Hawk. Norton. Rude. A few miles away, Darsow and Nord.

At some point this stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like somebody dumped industrial waste into the Minneapolis water supply.

Norton went on to become one of the best arm wrestlers in the world, then became Big Scott Norton in professional wrestling.

I still don’t love having him this low.

Who knows, I may run into the big man outside Griff’s Hamburgers in Ruston, Louisiana, and he wants to discuss this ranking.

To hell with that.

5. Ken Shamrock

Shamrock worked nightclubs, entered Toughman contests, and generally discovered there were people willing to pay him for things he was already pretty good at.

Kicking ass.

He also doesn’t get appreciated enough as a professional wrestler, mostly due to some weird booking decisions.

Like religion and politics, I’m sure we all agree Shamrock was booked like a warm turd during his WWF run.

Top five. One of the few people here who doesn’t need much of an explanation.

4. Kevin Nash

“At center, 6’10”, 225 pounds, a junior from Trenton, Michigan, No. 43, Kevin Nash.”

John Ward had the call during Nash’s 1979–80 season at Tennessee. Nash started 26 games, averaged 5.4 points and four rebounds, and played against a collection of future NBA big men that included Kevin McHale, Bill Cartwright, Buck Williams, Sam Bowie, and Herb Williams.

This was not Kevin Nash being tall against directional schools. The big man could play. 

After injuring his knee playing basketball, Nash served two years in the Army before working at BT’s on Michigan Avenue, which he called the hottest strip club in Detroit.

He eventually moved to Atlanta and started bouncing at The Cheetah on Spring Street, about half a mile from Center Stage.

Barry Windham, Rick Steiner, and the rest of the wrestling crowd came through. Nash started training in Lovejoy and made his WCW debut in 1990.

Then WCW sent him on the road to job out for six months.

Getting pinned by Tom Zenk in Terre Haute, Indiana, dressed as the Wizard of Oz is bad enough.

Lying there looking up at the lights, Nash had to be thinking about all the ways a Cheetah Buck could be picked up by a woman named Destiny.

3. Ravishing Rick Rude

Another graduate of the legendary Robbinsdale, Minnesota, bouncer-to-professional-wrestler pipeline.

Everybody remembers when his tights got ripped off on national television and everyone thought they’d just seen Rick Rude’s bare ass.

We had not.

But the Kool-Aid was strong back then.

Rude was around 6’3”, 250 pounds, roughly 4% body fat, and somehow THE SMALL ONE.

When he first broke into the business in Georgia, his initial gimmick wasn’t “Ravishing.”

It was being the toughest bouncer in Minneapolis.

He had a reputation in the Twin Cities for knocking grown men unconscious with an open-handed slap.

Not a closed fist.

A slap.

People who saw it happen said it sounded like a head exploding.

There’s also the story of Rude being at a club with his arm in a sling when another bouncer decided this was an excellent time to tell him professional wrestlers weren’t as tough as they pretended to be.

Rude didn’t argue.

He just broke the man’s jaw.

With the bad arm.

2. The Godfather

Charles Wright didn’t just live the gimmick.

He figured out how to merge the gimmick with the life he already had.

Wright was tending bar when wrestlers filming Over the Top walked in, took one look at the massive, tattooed guy behind the counter, and told him he needed to get in the ring.

He called Larry Sharpe, went to the Monster Factory, and that was that.

Years later, he figured out how to keep wrestling and bring the strip club with him.

No disrespect to Kevin Nash, but Charles Wright actually married the two worlds.

The Godfather wasn’t some cartoon brainstormed in a Stamford boardroom. Wright has said it was the closest wrestling ever got to the real Charles Wright.

He worked clubs before wrestling, spent years around the nightlife, and when the ring miles caught up to him, went right back to managing clubs in Vegas.

“Listen, if he puts his hands on Sapphire again, he’s gone.”

I came up in an era where the Ho Train wasn’t simply a form of transportation.

It was a lifestyle.

Kevin Nash always kept the strip club as an emergency exit.

Charles Wright built a roundabout.

1. The Road Warriors

Hawk and Animal were everything that made professional wrestling cool when I was a kid.

Spiked shoulder pads. Face paint. Iron Man. The Road Warrior pop. Enhancement talent occasionally looking like they’d made a serious mistake accepting the booking.

Before any of it, Mike Hegstrand and Joe Laurinaitis were working the door.

Gramma B’s had thousands of people coming through on busy nights, plenty of bikers, and fights were part of the job.

There had to be some kind of HR policy.

Just a laminated sign near the time clock:

GRAMMA B’S: The customer is always wrong, and usually unconscious.

Animal later said bouncing was basically perfect for Hawk because he could beat people up and get paid for it.

There’s also the story about the owner sending Hawk and Animal to collect money from a guy who owed him.

Somewhere during negotiations, the man ended up being held over the side of a bridge by his legs.

Eddie Sharkey was behind the bar.

Former wrestler. Amateur gunslinger. Trainer.

Exactly the sort of guy who would look around this collection of human refrigerators and see inventory.

Sharkey eventually brought Ole Anderson to Gramma B’s to take a look.

Which means Ole Anderson, one of the most famously ornery, permanently red-assed men in professional wrestling history, voluntarily walked into a massive Minneapolis nightclub.

Even if the band was playing a song Ole liked, they were playing it wrong.

Animal remembered throwing a guy out the front door that night and essentially depositing him at Ole Anderson’s feet.

“Hey, how ya doin’?”

Then Animal turned around and walked back inside.

That was the interview.

Ole had seen enough.