Paul Heyman

Heyman built a career on the microphone rather than in the ring. He surfaced in the late 1980s as Paul E. Dangerously, an on-screen manager working for World Championship Wrestling and the Continental Wrestling Federation, in an era when a manager mostly existed to hand his wrestler a foreign object and take the beating afterwards.

What he did next mattered more. In 1993 he became the creative force behind Eastern Championship Wrestling, a small Philadelphia promotion, bought the company in 1995 and renamed it Extreme Championship Wrestling. ECW never had the money or the national television clearance of its competitors. What it had was a house style: harder, bloodier, and built on the idea that what you were watching might plausibly be real. The cult following that produced was small in absolute numbers and enormous in influence, and the more aggressive tone the major promotions adopted afterwards came substantially out of Philadelphia.

In WWE he has worked as an on-screen manager and advocate, most visibly for Brock Lesnar, and that is the credited role across a long run of WrestleManias from 2013 onward. The job is essentially the one he invented for himself: stand beside somebody enormous and explain, at length and with total conviction, why you should be afraid of him. He is the rare figure in wrestling whose talking is the attraction rather than the setup for the match.