It might be a requirement to be a professional wrestler to spend at least one year in Tampa, Florida.
Back in the day, Tampa was home to one of wrestling’s most thriving territories. Once the 2000s rolled around, WWE moved their training/developmental operation to the city. Even after that enterprise moved to Orlando, plenty of pro wrestlers still made their home in Tampa. Weather, taxes & general ambiance make Tampa popular to people working in the business.
Since WrestleMania won’t be held in Tampa this year, I decided to go ahead and produce a column I was planning on doing around WrestleMania Weekend. We’re going to look at the five best wrestlers that came to us from the Tampa area.
5. Austin Idol
https://youtu.be/pc92fI9GoU8
The Universal Heartthrob was a staple of Southern wrestling throughout the 1970s & 80s. He was known as one of the best talkers in the business, a man that could talk people into buying tickets. Now, once the match started, people had bad things to say about his ability there. I’ve enjoyed the matches I’ve seen just fine, but some say that he wasn’t exactly willing to take the proper amount of punishment. Does that matter? Probably not. All I know for sure is that Austin Idol can tell one heck of a story.
4. Steve Keirn
This guy had one of the more interesting gimmick changes I can think of. Through the decade of the 80s, he was one-half of the Fabulous Ones with Stan Lane. Dude went from being a pretty boy to being the Alligator Man, spitting chewing tobacco all over the place while wearing hunting clothes. He was also one of the Doinks. I would think he would prefer to be remembered as a Fabulous One, but in the FCW documentary recently he was more interested in talking about Skinner & Doink. They may have left out the hour he talked about various tag matches with Lane.
3. Mike Awesome, #3 from Tampa
I wasn’t big into Japanese wrestling in the 1990s, so Awesome coming into ECW and having crazy matches with Masato Tanaka was my first impression of him. It was a good one! Loved him in ECW as the Champion with the awesome theme music above, but then he went to WCW and had eight different gimmicks in less than a year. All of which were terrible. His team with Lance Storm had potential, but had bad timing. Awesome’s WWE stint afterwards didn’t lead to much, then his return for the One Night Stand show was marred by Joey Styles going into business for himself and burying the guy. Even though his match with Tanaka on that show kicked ass. Sadly, wrestling politics led to Awesome falling through the cracks. He deserved much better.
