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#124 - Kevin Sullivan Nominated by: Eddv

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The phrase "Heavy lies the head that wears the crowd" is quite fitting when it comes to the story of Kevin Sullivan, a wrestler-turned-booker who was either blessed or cursed (depending on your point of view) with the job of wrangling the personalities working in WCW during its burgeoning years of 1995-1997. After that point, he was put on a committee before being phased out completely. Sullivan, of course, is best known for sounding and looking like Granny Goodness and Ed Asner's love child under the name of The Taskmaster in the most infamous storyline of Hulk Hogan's career. The Taskmaster was a spurned ally of Hogan who, betrayed by Hogan being a total douchebag (and why anyone would be surprised by that clearly never actually watched Hulk Hogan), formed the DUNGEON OF DOOM in order to end Hogan once and for all.

This would lead to some of the most horrendously stupid matches and story arcs in Hogan's career, including the match featuring Final Solution that we talked about earlier in this ranking. But I don't want to spend too much time talking about the Dungeon right now.

Instead, I want to talk about a guy who didn't get nominated on this list - Chris Benoit. Now, regardless of what you thought of Chris Benoit before or after he died, it was clear in the mid-90s that Benoit and Sullivan were not exactly the best of friends. After all, Benoit started having an affair with Kevin Sullivan's wife while Benoit was rising through the ranks in the Four Horsemen. Not long after, Nancy Sullivan (also known as "Woman" in her WCW manager role) left Kevin Sullivan and would eventually marry Benoit. Now, people vary on what happened during this topsy-turvy era of WCW, but it's clear that Sullivan took the opportunity to book Benoit against himself in a pretty brutal 50/50 feud that HE HAD BENOIT WIN. Sullivan actually let Benoit go over in a feud that was literally based on the fact that Benoit stole his wife.

It's all very Lita-Edge-Matt.

Sullivan was by most accounts a team player who just wanted to occasionally got his time in the spotlight. Usually, however, he was a very generous booker and would almost always let other people go over on him in big matches. But there seems to be a lot of shady innuendo out there in regards to Sullivan's personality and motives, and because WCW was the equivalent of a catty girl's locker room in high school, it's hard to say whether many of the rumors are true.

As for his wrestling, it was pretty awful. He was a short, stumpy man without much wrestling acumen. What worked with Sullivan was that he could take a beating and keep going. His matches (aside from those with Hoganites) were usually extremely rough. But so often his feuds suffered due to his opponents, his own prowess (or age), or just a terrible storyline that detracted from everything around him.

Now, there is a strange and baseless theory that Sullivan murdered Nancy Benoit years after their divorce. I highly, highly doubt the validity of this story. Sullivan clearly had put all of that behind him, choosing to work out his aggression with Benoit himself a decade earlier in the ring like men. And hell, he even found closure and gave Chris Benoit the opportunity for success. Still, this entire story has always left me with an uncomfortable feeling, so any good Sullivan has done has always been met with feeling of hesitance on my part. And in a ranking like this, a gut feeling of trepidation such as that can land you pretty low on this list.
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