Bobby Heenan was probably the best manager of all time but he was actually a very skilled wrestler as well. Bruce Prichard recently covered Heenan’s career in depth on Something To Wrestle With where he discussed how much of a natural Bobby Heenan was in the ring.
“Bobby — and I think everybody they think that they know they think they know wrestling’s a work they don’t think to call it a work. They know that something’s not right, they’re cooperating with one and other. And he had kinda figured it out without anybody ever coming to him and smartening him up and telling him this is how you do this, this is how you do that.”
“And he went out and he started working. He was able to work and do everything like a wrestler because he had been watching it forever and he had been watching as a kid, he loved it so he was just emulating his heroes in the ring.”
“Back in those days even going to when Shawn Michaels broke into the wrestling business, a lot of the old timers — they didn’t smarten you up for your first match. You weren’t smartened up until you were a good three, six months into the business sometimes. Sometimes you never got smartened up.”
“But the old timers would throw you out there, Bobby didn’t even have an old-timer to mentor him and throw him out there. Bobby just put himself out there and started doing this and says, ‘yeah, I can do that’ and lied. Put himself out there and started working with people that didn’t know what the hell they were doing either. But Bobby was better at it than everybody else.”
Credit for the quotes in this article goes to Something To Wrestle With Bruce Prichard and Still Real To Us for the transcription
