Since someone mentioned The Warlord in the Zeamen thread, here goes...

 

Influence: Was Batista's favorite wrestler. Batista is a former World Champion. The Warlord indirectly influenced a future WrestleMania main eventer. If we were talking about Bruno Sammartino, Terry Funk, or some other "favorite," everyone would be praising them for being influential. So, why not Warlord? He deserves his piece of the pie too!

 

Character: Memorable physical specimen. Cool as hell ring gear. Rocked that paint on his face like few others before him. Sweet ass action figure.

 

Underrated Speaker: No one rates him in this dept., so he's underrated. Seriously though, while he was not great, he was no worse than any other "musclehead" of the era.

 

Powers of Pain: One of the best tag teams ever. Best tag team name, I mean.

 

Wrestled in WCW in 1996: Did you know this? I did not know this. But it's true! According to Wikipedia: "After leaving the WWF for the independent circuit, [The Warlord] wrestled two matches in World Championship Wrestling in 1996, one of which was a tag team match where he and [The Barbarian] reunited as the masked Super Assassins."

 

Pizza Hut: This chain's incalculable damage to professional wrestling was thought to be confined to the nitwitted former exec Jim Herd. Unfortunately, its reach of evil extends to The Warlord as well. Again, from Wiki: "The Warlord was forced to retire from wrestling due to suffering neck injuries in a car accident involving a Pizza Hut delivery van in 1996." In all seriousness, that's a tough break and it sucks. I always wondered why we never saw him during the Monday Night War era, and now I know why. I'm kinda bummed. But this story, thankfully, has a happy ending...

 

Chikara in 2012: The hell? But it happened, and I must see the footage! Wiki: "In August 2012, Chikara announced that the Warlord would be making his debut for the promotion in the following month's 2012 King of Trios tournament, where he will reunite with the Barbarian and Meng as the 'Faces of Pain'." That sounds pretty badass!!!

on one of the WTBBP podcasts, the guest talks about how warlord looked way better in a chikara match than he ever did during his actual career. moving around like a human being instead of an action figure, supposedly - guess not being so juiced-up helps!

By fall 1991, when they'd worked it for 6 months, I'd give the Davey Boy Smith matches a solid 2.5 stars.

British Bulldog was the all-time best at saying "The Warlord"

 

His Lancashire accent would always be very strong on the "lord" part.

should have been pushed to the moon in 91 as a monster heel.

Im a huge Powers of Pain mark and though the Barbarian was the superior member Warlord still held up his half

One of the first full shows I ever watched was Survivor Series 88, so I've always had a soft spot for the Warlord. I actually think he's somewhat underrated nowadays. Not that he's actually good, but he's become such a poster boy for "early 90's muscle guys who Vince loved" that some of his good points get overlooked. The PoP, whilst not exactly original, were at least memorable and relatively over, which puts them over some other egregious Road Warriors rip-offs (the Master Blasters, anyone?). Warlord was also a fun squash wrestler - I loved his suplex where he'd just drop the hapless jobber mid-move, and he had a great running powerslam. The Bulldog series was surprisingly fun too. As I said, he's not a "good" wrestler, but he's wasn't utterly terrible either.

Good candidate for my "guys who made better action figures than wrestlers" thread as he got a big push from me and I thought his Hasbro figure was pretty awesome.

 

 

His LJN figure wasn't too shabby either:

 

 

Doing a Bing Video search for Warlord brings up a lot of stuff I didn't know about like a match with Chris Adams from AWF, some stuff from Otta Wanz CWA promotion and a match with Carlos Colon in WWC in 1992. I may eventually go down the random Warlord match rabbit hole just for the heck of it. There is also a Hercules & Mr. Hughes vs. Warlord & Jeff Gaylord tag match from AWF which has the potential to be truly awful.

 

Here is one of his WCW matches as Super Assassin though, against The American Males from Worldwide:

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbfd14_american-males-vs-super-assassins_sport

My favourite bit of Warlord trivia is that time I noticed his PPV run with Davey Boy Smith - If you include Royal Rumbles where they didn't necessarily interact but were both officially part of the match, they were on opposite sides of the ring at Royal Rumble '91, Mania VII, SummerSlam '91, Survivor Series '91, This Tuesday in Texas and Royal Rumble '92, and in fact, were also on the same team at Survivor Series '88 - the last PPV Smith was in the WWF for until Rumble '91. That's a run not even John Cena and Randy Orton can match. Or anyone in PPV history, for that matter.

Also, let's not forget the story that Kevin Nash and Scott Hall both tell about Warlord asking Shawn Michaels to inject steroids into his arse, only for Shawn to squeeze with all his might, not to be able to do it and conclude "Dude... I think you're full."

Now the question is, was Shawn so ignorant or unlucky that he stuck the needle right into scar tissue, or was there no part of Warlord's ass that wasn't scar tissue?

yea i'm with matt d - the bulldog matches are the reason i'd have kerry as the least valuable player for '91 WWF. most people would go with the warlord or virgil just on rep, i reckon.

The WrestleMania VII match with Bulldog is underrated. The TTIT match is fun too.

Goc, warlord dear tingly moved like an action figure. I've often said its like he couldn't bend his arms. Remember the little lever at the back of the Thundercats toys where it would move arms up and down? He was like a life size version of that.

I get a big smile out of the Warlord Luv that I inspired.

 

It was good enough for DVDVR #174 it's good enough for me.

if Steve Austin was a roided up monster he would be the spitting image of the Warlord

I remember the Bulldog WM7 match somehow added on to the morning announcements at my high school one morning. Like a few seconds after it was over we got like a minute or two of it joined in progress.

 

He had an impressive looking full-nelson.

 

The Super Assassins are at the inaugural World War 3 battle royal.

 

I saw the RF shoot he did with the Barbarian, seemed like a cool guy. I guess he was a security guard for 50 Cent.

Roddy Piper clams in Summerslam 90 that the Warlord will eventually become the WWF Phantom of the Opera, hiding under arenas training young wrestlers. I imagine in WWF cannon he helped train Austin.

the fuckers at WWF had Virgil go over clean against him in his last match for the company