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RIP Pat Patterson


nofuture

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As a wrestler his credentials are great.  Not even including the WWF stuff.   Pat Patterson and Ray Stevens is one of the most greatest tag teams ever in the seventies.   Of course he has also had one of the greatest WWF matches ever in the street fight against Slaughter in 1981 I think.  Backstage he is basically the reason why the Royal Rumble is one of the most exciting matches 

Unfortunately you can't mention the 1980's scandals without his name.  It will be interesting to see how he will be handled online. 

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14 minutes ago, Wyld Samurai said:

People actually believe the accusations from the 80s?

I guess I should prefaced it with the Mel Phillips part.  There was that guy in the Donahue interview that completely made shit up and did a lot to ruin his reputation

Pat was very important in many it not all of the current stars especially the current crop of Canadian stars like Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn.  Haven't seen Sami's response but here is Kevin's

 

Edited by hammerva
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If there was one wrestler who I wish we had more footage of, just one, holding my feet to the fire and having it be one and one only, which is incredibly hard, literally the hardest question I can answer about wrestling, it'd be Pat Patterson.

NJPW has cracked down on stuff so I had to take a few matches down, but I'm putting this back up on my burner account because I think it's a different side of him than we usually get to see. He could be a chickenshit heel but he could also kick so much ass.

 

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Pat's a huge reason why we're all wrestling fans. Even if you hate the WWE, there's no way you're a big enough wrestling fan to post on a message board about it without having the WWE influence your fandom to some degree, even if you grew up in a part of the country more NWA/Mid-South/etc. centric. 

Pat had a hand in planning out SO many matches with huge finishes. We'll never know exactly what ones (unless discussed in a shoot interview somewhere, but I could be forgetting a documentary about him), but he's been called the greatest ever at those sort of ideas by a lot of people. 

Of course, the Royale Rumble is the greatest. Even people who don't watch wrestling go out of their way to watch The Rumble. He took the worst wrestling gimmick (the Battle Royale) and turned it into the best. A really great Rumble can tell so many stories -- minor plots like Jake the Snake pulling out Damien and giving Andre The Giant a panic attack to eliminate him to Cinderella Stories like Santino and major ones like Ric Flair's epic victory or Becky Lynch's last year. 

Also: Pat was one of the first (and maybe the first, who knows) wrestlers to come out about his sexuality. That must have been really hard to do in the world of wrestling with so many tough guy types. One of my best friends is gay and a huge wrestling fan. He's a psychologist and teaches at the college level. He uses Pat's book and video of him talking about coming out in his class when he touches on that subject.

A true genius who shaped America's greatest form of performance art.

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Pat Patterson beat Ted Dibiase for the WWF North American Championship which he proceeded to unify with the South American title which he won in famous Rio tournament creating the Intercontinental Championship.  I wonder if The North American championship shares lineage with belt Lio Rush currently holds?

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53 minutes ago, Greggulator said:

Also: Pat was one of the first (and maybe the first, who knows) wrestlers to come out about his sexuality. That must have been really hard to do in the world of wrestling with so many tough guy types. One of my best friends is gay and a huge wrestling fan. He's a psychologist and teaches at the college level. He uses Pat's book and video of him talking about coming out in his class when he touches on that subject.

Not the first wrestler by any means, but I daresay he's easily the biggest star in wrestling to come out. From what I've read, most wrestlers he shared a locker room with could care less if he was gay or not... he was a phenomenal worker, drew money and was a good guy. His being gay just meant there was more trim for everyone else. ?

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If you knew about his recent health issues it's not a complete shock that this day would come.  But Pat's death is a really huge blow to the business.  I haven't seen as much of his wrestling as I'd like but what I saw was pretty damn good.  But his legendary mind for the business will be his legacy and will be missed a lot.  I just hope that for whoever sat under his learning tree that somebody was able to absorb all that so they can pass it along to future generations.

44 minutes ago, Pete said:

Not the first wrestler by any means, but I daresay he's easily the biggest star in wrestling to come out. From what I've read, most wrestlers he shared a locker room with could care less if he was gay or not... he was a phenomenal worker, drew money and was a good guy. His being gay just meant there was more trim for everyone else. ?

This might be for a separate thread but I'd be curious about those before Pat who came out.  It's something I've been meaning to look up but I can't imagine many fared as well as Pat did when they came out.

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18 hours ago, NikoBaltimore said:

If you knew about his recent health issues it's not a complete shock that this day would come.  But Pat's death is a really huge blow to the business.  I haven't seen as much of his wrestling as I'd like but what I saw was pretty damn good.  But his legendary mind for the business will be his legacy and will be missed a lot.  I just hope that for whoever sat under his learning tree that somebody was able to absorb all that so they can pass it along to future generations.

This might be for a separate thread but I'd be curious about those before Pat who came out.  It's something I've been meaning to look up but I can't imagine many fared as well as Pat did when they came out.

Cassandro and Pimpinela Escarlata come to mind immediately. I imagine other Exoticos as well, but they'd be the two major standouts.

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It probably was in the last decade or so that I went back and watched some of his more famous matches in WWF like some of his Backlund matches and the Slaughter bootcamp matches and a few others. He was always linked to Ray Stevens and he spoke so highly of him that it makes me want to see more matches of Ray Stevens. Its no surprise he was one of the best finish guys in history. Listen to him on podcasts you can tell he had a great mind for the business and even in this era he seemed to be just as big of a fan of guys today. I'm 33 so still have a mind for old-school territory wrestling as much as the current style and Puroresu and British Style, I enjoy it all but I can understand why someone can't get it to alot of the Modern wrestling form an inring perspective.  I think Pat was one of those guys that tried to amalgamate old school psychology in to what ever psychology of the time.

I wish he got to do one of those seminar type shoot interviews that these other legends got to do because I'd really like to hear the advice he'd give to guys or what he'd do as far as inring psychology. Bret speaks well about how much of a visionary he was as an agent and how he'd invasion parts of a match in his head before it happens. I don't think you have to many minds like that. As great as people say Shawn and Hunter are/were , I don't think they are good agents but what do I know?

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6 hours ago, Pete said:

Not the first wrestler by any means, but I daresay he's easily the biggest star in wrestling to come out. From what I've read, most wrestlers he shared a locker room with could care less if he was gay or not... he was a phenomenal worker, drew money and was a good guy. His being gay just meant there was more trim for everyone else. ?

I think it was Jericho's podcast where Pat told the story about how one day early in his tenure in California that Roy Shire confronted him about his sexuality and Patterson confirmed it and said he wouldn't do anything to have it be an issue, punctuated by "...and I worked there for another 15 years." 

And this was pre-Stonewall, let alone what a pro wrestling locker room had to be on that front at the time. 

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One of my favorite matches from Attitude, and probably the best one of the era, was Dude Love vs. Austin and Pat was a big part of that. Not only was he the one that changed the rules both him and Brisco got chokeslammed through tables at their age, which was crazy to watch. 

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