Every Tuesday, we take a look at an outlandish character from wrestling’s days gone by. Sometimes laughable, sometimes revolting, but always preposterous, they’re part of what makes pro rasslin’ so great. Ranging from slightly peculiar to downright ludicrous, these are the wrestlers that time has rightly forgotten.
WWE’s history of lying about a wrestler’s ethnicity, or in this case exaggerating it, is extensive. In 1994, Peter Polaco, best known to wrestling fans as Justin Credible, was transformed from the bottom feeding WWF jobber PJ Walker into the slightly-higher-on-the-totem-pole WWF jobber Aldo Montoya. The masked Montoya, billed as the Portuguese Man O’ War, never really took off the way the World Wrestling Federation creative team would have liked. A quick look at his match history will reveal the kind of career that Aldo Montoya enjoyed. He earned victories over the likes of Nick Barbarry, The Black Phantom, and Brooklyn Brawler, and then suffered losses to Goldust, Hunter Hearst Helmsley, and Mankind. He was established by defeating enhancement talents before becoming an enhancement talent himself. A jobber to the stars, if you will. I suppose not much better could have been expected from a character whose entire gimmick was his Portuguese ethnicity and whose ring attire consisted of what looked like a yellow jockstrap on his head and four matching sweat bands on each forearm. If only WWE would have handed him a kendo stick, maybe old Aldo could have shown audiences just how incredible he was. Over time, Polaco grew tired of being sparsely used by the company, and requested his release. He was initially denied his request, but he was eventually granted his wish. His release was a conditional one, however – he was not permitted to sign with rival promotion WCW. As a result, he found his way to the Philadelphia’s rising Extreme Championship Wrestling, where he adopted the character that would make him a star.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9wrE69939Q]
credible sells that stunner perfectly.
Very realistic sell, no flip flopping showmanship
[…] Lugar after a 10-minute-too-long stay in the ring. The biggest victory he ever earned was over Aldo Montoya to qualify for the ’95 King of the Ring, a tournament from which he was eliminated by […]
Aldo Montoya was not portuguese so… “whose entire gimmick was his Portuguese ethnicity” makes no sense. The colors, so you know, are based in the colors of the portuguese flag and the music is absolutely ridiculous (has nothing to do with Portugal, but like African/Mexican style).
Comments are closed.