Has Teddy Hart Changed At All in the Past 15 Years?
Credit: MLW.com
The maniac stylings of Hart wowed wrestling fans who only had one mainstream company at their fingertips in the early part of the new millennium. The often reckless move-set of a fresh, younger crop of wrestlers was able to ignite, and reignite, a love for the sport for fans and future wrestlers alike.
Much like his gear, not a whole ton has changed about Hart’s in-ring style or the moves he brings to the table. Just as he did 15 years ago, he zooms around the ring with a Devil-may-fly attitude. If there’s a thing to climb onto or a rope from which to springboard, chances are you’ll find Teddy Hart there briefly before he spirals dangerously toward his opponent and the floor.
Watching a Hart match now brings me back to the days of scrounging for fan-made clip and highlight videos on Kazaa where you’d see guys like The Amazing Red flipping from pillar to post to the sweet sounds of “Headstrong” by Trapt. Back then, it was hard work to find anything that wasn’t the mainstream. YouTube wasn’t yet a thing and streaming services were even less so; if you wanted to get your hands on clips or videos of underground or international wrestling, you had to get yourself on forums, Usenet groups, or file-sharing services.
Those videos, though, illuminated an entire generation to a style of wrestling that wasn’t being performed on a mainstream level. You wouldn’t find much of this death-defying action in the WWE of the time and the era of luchadors and cruiserweights stealing the show in WCW were a distant memory. The style of wrestling seen in those videos surely inspired a whole mess of backyard wrestlers to get a trampoline and set up a league in their parents’ backyard – at least, that’s what it did for me!
The more you dug around for videos and the more you were exposed to different styles of professional wrestling, though, the more your own tastes and styles would grow. No longer would flipping and flying for the sake of flipping and flying whet your appetite; it meant more if the wrestlers built to those moves over time rather than just dropping them all right out of the gate. I don’t think that this is a growth pattern that Teddy Hart has experienced.
Hart recently wrestled John Hennigan on MLW Fusion and the contrast between the two was fairly stark. Hennigan is a modern-day flyer who builds to his spots and brings the crowd to their feet through sheer anticipation. You know Hennigan is going to commit some feat of acrobatic delight during a match, so when it finally happens it does so in a way that you can appreciate it within the structure of the match. For Hart, moves just feel like moves happening one after another without a delicate thread sewing them together in an intricate tapestry. He’s hitting the beats and, while the athleticism is impressive, it results in matches that don’t feel like much of anything.