Mike Sharpe

[2] Sharpe came from a family legacy of wrestling, as his father and uncle were a successful tag team in the 1950s, recognized as champions from San Francisco to Japan.

He became a two-time NWA Canadian tag team champion, partnering first with Moose Morowski and later with Salvatore Bellomo, and also won the Pacific Coast Heavyweight Title.

[8] In 1984, Maclean's verified Sharpe's claim to the title of being Canada's Greatest Athlete, which he held until 1990) and was further distinguished by his near-constant yelling and grunting throughout his matches, as well as a black brace on his right forearm, supposedly protecting an injury but more widely believed to contain a foreign object.

Initially in his WWF career he was managed by Captain Lou Albano and received a sizeable push, regularly defeating jobbers after smashing them with his forearm.

This culminated on April 30, 1983, with a match against world heavyweight champion Bob Backlund at the Philadelphia Spectrum, where Sharpe was defeated and would never reach such main event heights again.

He appeared on Piper's Pit in 1984, provided the opposition in Ivan Putski's 1987 comeback match at Madison Square Garden, and pinned Boris Zhukov to reach the second round of the 1988 King Of The Ring tournament.

Sharpe was described in at least three books by former wrestling personalities; Dynamite Kid, Hulk Hogan and Gary Michael Cappetta, and by longtime WWF wrestler-commentator Gorilla Monsoon, as having shown characteristics of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as evidenced by a preoccupation with cleanliness that caused him to spend hours washing his hands or showering at arenas and meticulously folding and re-folding his clothing.

[17] Only in 2015 did he allow a videocamera to record him as part of a tribute to Angelo Mosca Sr. Sharpe died on January 17, 2016, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada at the age of 64.