Terry Funk Forever Will Never Have Enough Flowers
Terry Funk is still owed way more credit for evolving the game of professional wrestling.
For my money, Terry Funk is the greatest professional wrestler to ever live. Ring psychology, presentation, punches and promo work complete him as a five-tool player in the squared circle. However, today's "immediate gratification” ecoscape erodes the world's patience for storytelling, and for the canvas, Funk was Mark Twain. Wrestling's prism further gets perverse by fans not knowing where the guardrail stops and the pencil begins. A lot of today's wrestling is lost in translation, and therefore Terry doesn’t get the credit that he’s owed.
Don’t be mistaken, Terry gets his nods from names who know what they're doing. Eddie Kingston paid several homages to him on AEW television (despite not seeing him on the product nearly enough). Tommy Dreamer consistently name-drops the education he continues to receive from The Funker on "Busted Open Radio". Additionally, there’s some old souls like Mance Warner, Sam Adonis and other who note the greatness of the former NWA Champion. However, the much of the modern mentality when it comes to wrestling needs to blow the dust off of the "Funk U" textbook.
A Pioneer At Reinvention
Terry Funk was pioneer at reinventing himself, but he, more than anyone, reinvented the business. Would we have seen the “Johnny Paycheck” Steve Austin get his due in WWE at the height he did without Terry Funk? Would wrestling been as with the times without Funk turning those clock hands of change with FMW Deathmatches? How about him being the hardcore veteran of ECW? Vince McMahon didn’t create Hulkamania and he damn well didn’t create Terry Funk. However, McMahon held the key to the mainstream lock and his collaboration with ECW in 1997 had to have put a bug in his ear.
“I don’t think Terry Funk gets the credit for being the wrestler he was, I don’t think a lot of those guys do. I also think it’s a generational thing,” CM Punk said at his first AEW press conference, following All Out 2021. Then during the infamous Brawl Out media scrum, Punk took exception to an inferred Hangman Page not willing to listen to such minds. AEW is rife with wrestling legends as producers, but an ongoing notion is that their ears don't get bent nearly enough. “I dare you to f*cking say that to Terry Funk’s face. ‘I don’t need to listen to you, Mr. Funk, I know what I’m doing’ - f*cking go f*ck yourself,” Punk said, picking at his muffin from Mindy’s. To his point, Funk would likely have more than just words for such a talent - Sputnik Monroe be damned
The Business Is Going That Way
“I haven’t spoken to him in about a month, still keeps up on the industry and still understands the business of wrestling,” Tommy Dreamer told me in an upcoming interview. “He has that foresight to be, ‘Okay, the business is going this way, I need to go this way." I’m creeping up on the age of what Terry Funk was in ECW and I’m like, ‘How the hell did this man feel in the morning?” Funk fought the Dreamers, Sabus and other young extremists of that era. He elevated them all to stardom by going against that grain of convention.
Funk stated to me about a year back that its next evolution for success will involve getting back to the legitimacy of fighting. The floodgates of opportunity with wrestling were not as open as they are today. You had to have an amateur wrestling background to even be lucky enough to get a tibula snapped by a gatekeeper. Extraordinary feats of athelticism are reaching a plateau of oversaturation and therein, subliminal dismissal, but what will people always see? Legitimacy.
Still ahead of the times, still crazy, still a legend. Terry Funk continues to be a learning tree more should sit under, but be sure to stop and pick some flowers for him along the way. And have your notepad ready.
(Author's note: I interviewed Terry Funk for WrestleZone.com back in the summer of 2020 to discuss his "More Than Just Hardcore" autobiography in full - you can catch it below)