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WRESTLER OF THE DAY: BRIAN PILLMAN

RIPPA

By RIPPA
in ...OF THE DAY

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Pete

Pete

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I actually watched this the other day- Pillman tags out 30 seconds into the clip and is helped out, never to be seen again. The whole clip is a backdrop for

Karachi Vice turning on VC1 (Hiroshi Hase).

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Matt D

Matt D

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Brian Pillman was my favorite wrestler as a kid. I joked about Jim Ross and the courage award because JR saw football as this holy pillar, but there really was something to it. I was a scrawny little kid as a pre-teen, around 1991-92, and Pillman was my hero in wrestling. He was the underdog who could stand up to anyone. He had the chops, just like Flair, and the dropkick and the Air Pillman springboard and that flying body press which meant as much to me as it did to fans of Ricky Steamboat five or six years before or similarly, Snuka's Superfly Splash a few years before that. I couldn't do Lex's Torture Rack or Davey Boy's running power slam but I could climb something high and put my arms out and take a leap of faith. I could try to never say die in life or on the playground. I didn't care about football, but for a year, when they were the worst team in the league, I rooted for the Bengals. He came from nothing, from a life that was supposed to be weak and tiny and afflicted, doomed from birth to be a near cripple, and he became my hero as a kid.

 

I hung up on my best friend in wrestling when he called me in 91 and told me he thought that Pillman was going to go bad and join the horseman some day. I hung up on the kid. I was never someone who BELIEVED in wrestling, not even as a ten year old. Maybe it's because I came in at 9 or 10 instead of 6 or 7, but I was invested enough in Brian Pillman that I hung up on a friend of mine over a spurious comment. There was nowhere I would have rather been in the entire world during Christmastime 1991, than in the Omni to see Pillman vs Jushin Liger. The only problem was that I lived in a small suburb of Boston and that definitely wasn't happening. I never saw him live. I had his action figure, with the outstretched fingers and those damn Bengal pants, but I never saw him live. I could only imagine that match that night but it sounded like the coolest thing in the world, Pillman finally getting to face someone that was his aerial equal, this mysterious being from Japan. I know people, a few years before, bought into the mythos of Muta or even before that, Kabuki, but to me Liger was that great unknown, something larger than life and more than human and he was the ultimate rival for my hero. The light heavyweight title was, for six months, the most important thing in all of wrestling to me, and I still hold a bit of a grudge against both Scotty Flamingo and Bill Watts, one for taking it away and the other for screwing it up. 

 

I missed most of 93-97 because I just wasn't into wrestling anymore, but the Hollywood Blonds were always this legendary team to me. Stunning Steve was another huge important part of the few years I was a wrestling fanatic as a kid, and while I was tuned out, the idea of them together as heels was something I'd get behind, sight unseen, for really the decade to come. It was okay he was a heel somehow, cool even. I was a few years older and hey, at least he wasn't a horseman. I don't remember even knowing he became one, to be honest. All the loose cannon stuff I missed. His WWF run, I missed, until I turned on randomly one night and found out he'd just died. When I bought my first comps a few years later, it was a team that had no bearing on my youth, the Midnight Express, then two entities that did, the WWF version, the Rockers, and the WCW version, Pillman. 

 

He carried a few traits now that I don't care a ton about in wrestling anymore, and while I'll always go back and watch a match of his and most of the time enjoy it, though I've seen very little of his 97 still (and I'm not sure I want to), I don't think he'd make a top ten of my favorite wrestlers of all times. He, more than anyone else, however, was the wrestler I believed in the most as a kid. Maybe he was the only wrestler I ever believed in. I know too much about the guy now. He was a Meltzer friend and contact so I think he had one of the more measured bios in the WON. Yes, he had severe personal challenges; yes he was flawed; yes he drove himself to terrible things, but it was all tempered by how much he tried and how deeply he cared, and how much it all meant to him, and you know what? For this one person, unlike anyone else in wrestling, I'm okay looking past the bad, to try to understand it, to give, if not the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of empathy. I break things down and tear them apart and piece them together and and look at wrestling on every level but the emotional these days, but when it comes to Pillman, maybe I still let myself be a bit of a kid.

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Greggulator

Greggulator

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Pillman absolutely ruled. Like Matt said, his initial face run and eventual stuff against Lyger felt like something I absolutely had -- HAD -- to see. His match on Clash 19 where he teamed with Lyger against Benoit/Wellington is so, so, so good. It's one of the best matches of the time period (but the second best on the show, behind the epic Steiners vs. Doc/Gordy match that is the most slept on match ever).
 

The Hollywood Blondes were my favorite tag team. I loved that shtick so much, especially their taunt of operating video cameras. Their "Flair For The Old" segment was also great -- the nWo and DX would later rip off the "insulting impersonation" stuff to a bigger audience, but Pillman/Austin did it before them and did it way better.

Pillman's crazy shoot stuff made him the most interesting person in wrestling for a decent stretch of time. In a lot of ways, he bridged the gap between the traditional style and the work-shoot stuff we see now.

My favorite Pillman story may not be true. He did a lot of fun, weird stuff for a spell in ECW. The ECW crew used to stay at a Doubletree hotel and a lot of fans knew that and would hang out at the bar. Pillman supposedly came down to the hotel bar, had words with Sabu for some reason (who had no idea what was going on) before marching back to the elevator. He knew some fan was watching and/or taking notes and then winked at him right when the elevator door was closing shut. So great.

He also led a "prayer service" of sorts when he was aligned with The Hart Foundation in their feud against Team WWF. He was in the awesome Calgary Stampede match, too.

One of the greats.

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Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

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The chapter on Pillman in the unauthorized ECW book that's a straight interview with his Bengals coach is the fucking best. He was a legend in both football and wrestling locker rooms for pulling the best women (and apparently fucked them upside down in those ceiling attachment, hang-upside-down boots) and taking some dude's eye out and stepping on it, survived numerous throat cancers as a kid, pulled the wool over literally everyone's eyes in both major organizations, and only told the coach about it when it was going down. Really, really great interview. If he hadn't OD'd he'd either be a radio host or in JBL's place right now most likely.

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Curt McGirt

Curt McGirt

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Just rewatched the Pillman doc. There's a tackle he makes where he hammers a pile of dudes at top speed and somehow manages to spin around, grab the guy with the ball's leg, and basically dragon screw him into falling right into the human wall. It was easily as cool as anything I've seen in any lucha match ever. 

 

The rest of it is equally awesome and totally heartbreaking. I forgot that he was heart attack victim and misdiagnosed his death in my last post. Weird seeing Benoit on this as it was released in '06...

 

And now two disgusting stories from it.

 

Oh yeah, there are two defecation stories in this that are really fucked up. One is Brian shitting a giant turd and showing it to all the boys, the other is him shitting on the bathroom floor of the house where they shot all the ECW's promos, which is told by a repulsed Joey Styles, who says it "poisoned him to the whole Pillman experience after that". 

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