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Top 10 Managers Ever in your view


JerryvonKramer

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Albano would probably be a solid #2 behind Heenan all time when it comes to being a guy who could get people to pay to see him get his ass beat. The main difference I noticed is that Bobby usually would get his ass beat and bump like a superball for the babyface, while Albano would usually do his "take one bump, juice, and bail" routine when it came time for the payoff.

The very little i've seen of Heenan as an actual wrestler he was actually quite good. Never saw Albano in ring but i've always heard he kinda sucked.

 

I'll use this as an excuse to post a link to Lord Alfred Hayes vs Bobby Heenan from AWA, awesome match that everyone should see if you haaven't allready. For what's billed as a "battle of the managers" they look better then all but the top tier talent around.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKASakc7_zY

 

This is aas good a place as any to note that Lord Alfred hayes had a nice run as a heel-then-face manager in the AWA from the later 70's through the middle of 1980. He subsequently moved to Montreal and managed some heels there, including Billy Robinson. It's why you see Hayes at ringside for Robinson in some AWA Winnipeg matches, even though Robinson was a face in the rest of the AWA.

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It's weird because you think of Hayes as like a WWF guy through and through. Vince did a very good job not only of stealing Gagne's talent, but of making them loyal too. Partly that'll be better pay, but it's also man management skills.

No correlation between Vince getting Hayes and his departure from the AWA. Hayes was out of the AWA by mid 1980, and it wouldn't surprise me if Hayes didn't start for Vince in early 1984 but not earlier.

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It's weird because you think of Hayes as like a WWF guy through and through. Vince did a very good job not only of stealing Gagne's talent, but of making them loyal too. Partly that'll be better pay, but it's also man management skills.

No correlation between Vince getting Hayes and his departure from the AWA. Hayes was out of the AWA by mid 1980, and it wouldn't surprise me if Hayes didn't start for Vince in early 1984 but not earlier.

 

Hayes is backstage interviewing the Iron Sheik after his WWF title victory, so he pre-dated expansion by a tiny bit, but it can't have been by much.

 

He had a

in '82, managing guys like King James and Billy Robinson and also doing commentary, leading to a feud with fellow commentator Johnny Weaver.
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God I hated Alfonzo. Initially I liked him and thought he added to the ECW shows, but I thought he was absolutely wretched with Van Dam. During the ECW project by FAR the worst part was knowing I was going to get a 20 plus minute RVD match where he is working a Carrot Top gimmick, with Alfonzo blowing the whistle the whole time, talking up Gabe or whoever was shooting the handheld, rolling around setting up RVD's stunts, et. Just fucking terrible, totally distracting and annoying. I suppose the whole point was to be annoying when he was a heel, but as a face? Even still it wasn't annoying like "man I want to kick this guys ass" but rather annoying as in "man I wish this guy would fall off a cliff and never come back."

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I really need to watch some non WWF/WCW Jimmy Hart at some point, because he always struck me as a totally useless buffoon there even when I was a kid. Having seen mostly just that, he never did anything for me at all. But the (very) little I've seen from Memphis was quite different and looked really promising.

Search out the 1980 Memphis TV set; the guy pretty much carried the territory in the wake of Lawler getting injured and being out most of the year. So much of the stuff would revolve around him.

 

Also, honestly? I think that Hart w/Lawler was GREAT and I hate that it was cut off too short. I think Hart vs Lawler was great. And I think the stuff with Tommy Rich and Bobby Eaton right before Lawler came back was really good too. But Hart with Valiant in 80 and ESPECIALLY with Paul Ellering wasn't so hot. He wasn't quite there yet without Lawler to bounce off of.

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God I hated Alfonzo. Initially I liked him and thought he added to the ECW shows, but I thought he was absolutely wretched with Van Dam. During the ECW project by FAR the worst part was knowing I was going to get a 20 plus minute RVD match where he is working a Carrot Top gimmick, with Alfonzo blowing the whistle the whole time, talking up Gabe or whoever was shooting the handheld, rolling around setting up RVD's stunts, et. Just fucking terrible, totally distracting and annoying. I suppose the whole point was to be annoying when he was a heel, but as a face? Even still it wasn't annoying like "man I want to kick this guys ass" but rather annoying as in "man I wish this guy would fall off a cliff and never come back."

I loved the gimmick in 1995, but I suppose he wasn't a manager then. I've heard great things about his match with Beulah which I still need to watch at some point.

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I thought Jones was a horrid manager when I started watching him in 1986. It didn't help that he had Corny and JJ as manager to compare with along with a number of other guys who could talk their asses off (Flair, Arn, Dusty even if I hated Dusty on the mic back then). But... Jones was terrible. Sek nails is: mush mouth, loses his place and/or stumbles in his promos.

 

I wonder if he was good on the mic as a wrestler to have been pushed as long and hard in Mid Atlantic as he was... or if he's one of those oddball local guys who just happened to be pushed.

 

John

He was just a great foil for the Boogie Woogie Man.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKJeC4jhkZU...player_embedded

 

Holy shit, I found it. The first time I ever saw NWA wrestling was an episode of Worldwide on UHF 17 one Saturday afternoon. I had an epiphany that day and decided to flip around channels to see if there was more wrestling than just WWF on WOR or Philly 29. Earlier I found Pro Wrestling USA on WPIX 11. I turned on I7 to see an interview with Jimmy Valiant about how he was back and wanted Paul Jones and his Army. Then THIS happened and I was totally sold. It was so much better than the WWF I'd been watching for years.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isd-cJhx7-4

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I mentioned Adnan. I think if you consider him a manager he was a very good one and one that was effective in both garnering heat and drawing money. In fact he was really good at sustaining heat and helping to draw money. I actually think Adnan is a reasonable candidate for the WON HoF to be honest.

He is vastly underrated as a manager and he generated a ton of heat in the AWA.

 

His book is a fun read if you ever get your hands on it, too/

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He was just a great foil for the Boogie Woogie Man.

I thought it was tremendous booking by Dusty (and whomever) to have a strongly focused mid-card / undercard feud between Jones and Boogie. Dusty did a good job continuing to put heat on Jones in an unending feud. When you saw a JCP card and a Boogie vs Jones' Army match was on there, you knew exactly why it was on the show rather than just being rolled out.

 

That said...

 

Jones was really bad on the mic. :) To a degree it was sorta kinda okay in the feud with Boogie since it was like not even B-Movie level relative to Flair and the MX & Corney. Once Jones stepped out of the Boogie feud with Raging & Rood, he got more exposed as a shitty talked. It was a brutal manager he had to follow:

 

MX & Corney --> R'n'R --> Raging & Rood with Jones

 

You couldn't help but see that the talked for the World Tag Champs wasn't up to the snuff of Corney. Whereas over on his own little world of a garbage feud with Boogie, you just accepted Jones being Jones opposite goofy ass Boogie.

 

The stuff with the Roadies exposed him more. I agree with the earlier poster who said that while Ellering wasn't "great", he did a solid enough job setting up the storyline for Animal & Hawk to go off on. It's really amazing to ponder how solid the Warriors & Paul were in those mic spots in getting across their feuds/storylines and themselves. They sort of launched the era of Screaming Mic Spots, which Scott Steiner took to another annoying, less coherent level (long before his Poppa Pump days). The Roadies were actually pretty solid. So if you're looking at *them* making sense while Jones opposite them was mediocre... not a great sign. :)

 

John

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I thought the whole package of Animal, Hawk and Paul Ellering were great on the mic. I think Hawk in particular was underrated as far as talking. To me, Hawk is the one that tied it all together at the end and threw the catch phrase out there. Animal was a little more incoherent but his anger and intensity usually made up for it.

 

But I think Ellering loses some of his luster in hindsight. At the time, he had still been active as a wrestler pretty recently and I think part of what he brought at the time was tough guy cred. He wasn't like those managers that hadn't wrestled 10 years ago. He had been recent up until then and you were pretty sure that if things really hit the fan that Ellering was probably the third toughest guy in whatever scrape the Road Warriors got into.

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I agree that they collectively were real solid. Don't know when it struck me that was the case.

 

Started watching TBS in 1986, and instantly knew Flair and Corney were great: they were what sucked me in and held my attention. Could easily tell the difference between the people who were totally comfortable on the mic (say Arn and JJ), those who stumbled on occasion but could also nail good ones (Tully), those who really hard to work hard (Maggie was no Rock), those who sucked (Jones for the most part). Dusty... I always hated Dusty on the mic until the WWE's Dusty DVD came out and I got to see him far removed from my hate of him. :P

 

The Warriors were different... and so clearly an "act" rather than "personality" like Flair or Corney were tossing out. There was very little that felt natural or ad-libbed in what they did on the mic: it was thought out... and not really my cup of tea as a Flair-Corney Fan. So it took a while. Then got a sense of the rhythms of their segments, Ellering and Animal laying the foundations, hitting storyline... then Hawk wrapping things together, sometimes saying nutty shit, sometimes funny (though not as a "comic" like Corney), and sometimes to get across that they wear going to rip the heels heads off... but in a more "scary" way to the fans than Animal yelling they were going to rip some heads off. :) He had the catchphrases.

 

John

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Hawk was the best performer all around anyway. The most charismatic, the best promo, and the best worker.

Ellering was good for the "Tell 'em Paul" spot only.

I think it was:

 

PAUL: "Tell 'em, Animal!"

 

ANIMAL: "Tell 'em, Hawk!"

 

:)

 

I'm not 100% sure that Hawk was the best worker. It's been a long time since I watched them, but at the time I thought Animal did a little better selling for the heels. Not that the Roadies sold a lot for the heels, but when they did try short peril stretches, it seemed Animal was better at it while Hawk was a little stiff/unnatural in his selling. Not stiff in the normal working term, but in his movements.

 

I think Ellering was useful for more than just "Tell 'em, Animal" on the mic. Not great... but solid enough in laying down the initial storyline before passing it off to the guys.

 

John

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