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Bam Bam Bigelow passes away


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Another one of my all time favorites gone. Bigelow is a sad case of a guy who jumped out of the gate, but never really got enough momentum behind him to reach his full potential. Great look, great worker, and solid on the mic, but he never really got to the point where a guy with those attributes should have been. Sadly by the time people really started to realize how good he was, with the Triad run in WCW, he was already winding down. One of the five best workers in the history of ECW, easily one of the best big men ever, really good at hiding guys weaknesses in the ring (see the ECW "classic" with Van Dam, where Bammer does a better job feeding RVD his contrived spots, without making them look contrived than any other person has ever managed to do), very good tag wrestler, and in my expierence a very nice guy. It took alot to reivent himself after the LT thing, but he turned it around become a star in ECW, and really the buildup to him and Goldberg was one of the last truly great things WCW did. He got out of the business relatively early, but I guess it was too late. It's shame. RIP.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had tossed this up at tOA after Bam Bam died:

 

This has a chance to be one of Dave's more interesting obits. When he broke in, Bam Bam looked like he'd be one of the big stars in the business. That never happened, and the story really has never been well told on *why*. Bam Bam also appears to have had a long history of personal demons, but since so much of his career seemed to have a lesser spotlight shined on it than expected, it seems that those demons flew under the radar. It only was in his post career in the last few years that he started getting press in it. Even then, since he kept such a low profile (rather than melting down on a national level like Hall did in WCW and his return to the WWF), it again seemed to fall off the radar.

 

We just don't know a whole lot about Bam Bam. It's obits like this where Dave has the biggest opportunities to shed light on the subject.

The WON had a piece this week.

 

Hard to tell if there's going to be a second part to this. Dave usually says "more next week" or "a full bio next week" when the first one is just a brief overview.

 

*If* this is the full bio, it would be pretty disappointing. It's not that I'm a Bam Bam fan. But he is an interesting subject as one of the biggest "Prospects" of the 80s and never really reaching the potential. This issue didn't really scratch the surface.

 

Hopefully there's a full bio this week.

 

 

John

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I don't know if it's really that hard to figure out why Bam Bam didn't make it as big as everyone thought. He came into WWF as a face, and he was never going to be able to leapfrog the likes of Hogan and Savage. He probably would have been better as a heel as he could have drawn big money doing a house show run with Hogan, but I guess they had enough fat heels at the time (Andre, OMG, Bundy) and felt that he should be pushed as a face. He only lasted a year before leaving and turning up briefly in the NWA, and after that I guess he spent the next several years mostly in Japan. He returned to WWF and got a decent push, and was supposed to be pushed big as a face after doing the job for LT but I guess politics got in the way of that. From there he spent several years in ECW in the pre-TNN period, and although he was a big star there he never really seemed to stand out among the "authentic" ECW stars like RVD and Sabu. He went to WCW in late '98 and had a pretty hot feud with Goldberg, and then faded into the midcard until that promotion went under. Overall, I'd say it was his lengthy absences from the national wrestling scene which hindered his career the most.

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On the Observer website where Dave Meltzer previews the current issue he says this week's Bigelow story was part one of a two part series.

 

 

On Alvarez's Figure 4 Daily radio show Meltzer said he was pushing back the Bigelow bio for another week. ~SWERVE~. On a sidenote he took a pot shot at the HBK haters. He pretty much said that Michael's and Kobashi were at a different level of work than everybody else.

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