Cook’s Top 5: Smelliest Wrestlers

Sometimes a match stinks, and sometimes it’s the wrestlers. Literally.

Wrestling is a dirty, rotten business.

Anybody that’s been to a show can tell you that! I remember back in the day when I would go to Ring of Honor shows at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds. The building was affectionately referred to as “The Oven” because things tended to get a little warm due to the lack of working air conditioning. Add 500 or so wrestling fans, many of whose personal hygiene could be called into question anyway, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience to smell.

As much as we wrestling fans complain about odors at venues, imagine what wrestlers have to go through! Generally, fans aren’t bear hugging each other or applying chinlocks or headlocks or doing other things where they really get a good whiff. The most clean people get a pretty good stank going after a workout, so you have to assume there are all sorts of foul smells inside the ring.

Today, we rank the top 5 stinkiest pro wrestlers. Not from personal experience, mind you. Just idle speculation with assistance from opinions of other wrestlers.

5. Brooklyn Brawler

Just looking at this guy tells me he had to be one of the most foul smelling folks in wrestling. Dude shows up wearing ratty clothes & pants that couldn’t have been washed in years. It looks like he fell asleep under a leaky bus. It’s like wrestling’s version of Pigpen. I have no idea how the Brawler graduated the Terry Garvin School of Self Defense.

4. Kane

It’s not that I want to call out the Mayor of Knox County for being super smelly. It’s that Daniel Bryan already outed him for it. When your best friend is throwing you under the bus like that, it says something. I’m sure Daniel was merely trying to encourage Kane to wash that stinky glove once every few weeks or so. Kane was not pleased, but a dwarf appeared and took the Big Red Machine’s mind off the matter.

3. Brian Knobs

The Nasty Boys were two disgusting human beings that had to smell all kinds of awful. Knobs gets the nod over his tag team partner Jerry Sags because he was the one that had other wrestlers’ faces forced into his armpit. That’s one move I never saw anybody no-sell.

2. Vader

Bret Hart has called Vader the smelliest wrestler he ever worked with. Now, Bret is known and loved for his ability to bury people, but he’s got some backup on this one. Apparently Vader had a superstition that involved never washing his ring gear. Imagine a 400 pound man wrestling several matches a week in attire that he never washes. You’d prefer wrestling him early in the tour as opposed to later.

Honorable Mention: Natalya?

I’ve heard people describe WWE Creative’s ideas as “poopy” before. This was probably the stinkiest idea to ever come out of the writers’ room, which is saying something. Natalya was just chilling as one of the Divas of Doom with Beth Phoenix. Beth was getting most of the attention and the title opportunities, so Nattie needed something to stand out. We ended up with multiple segments with Natalya farting. I almost feel bad for bringing this up, as it’s likely you had forgotten about this angle until this very moment. Now everybody will remember that Natalya farts all the time.

1. Bastion Booger

Listen to that theme music. Look at that ring attire. See his finishing move, where he drops to his knees and plants his lower mid-section right on his opponent’s face. Nobody ever kicked out of that. How can you say anybody in pro wrestling stunk more than Bastion Booger?