Face Managers (and Matt Sells!)

Greetings from Norway! I hope you and the family are doing well. Let me add to the chorus and say how much I appreciate your website. I don’t watch a lot of wrestling right now (difficult access and reduced interest), so I use your reviews to target what I make the effort to watch, both the current product and stuff on the Network.

Before I moved to Norway last year, I lived in the US and got the opportunity to work in a local indie wrestling promotion as a heel manager. I even got the chance to work with our mutual friend, Matt “Sex” Sells a few times! (Not that he needed a mouthpiece) But it got me thinking about being a manage. Being a heel manager is easy – get out there, insult the crowd, interfere illegally, etc. I’m not sure that I could be a face manager. I don’t know what I would do. Try to get the crowd to cheer and clap? Boring!

Which brings me to my question for you and your readers: were there ever any successful or effective face managers? I can only think of a few: Jimmy Hart (accompanying Hogan in mid-90s WCW), Arnold Skaaland (with Backlund), Oliver Humperdink (accompanying Bigelow in 1987 WWF), and I am not sure they were necessary (talking because their men weren’t good at cutting promos) or useful (getting fans to cheer for them). Who am I missing? Was there ever a face version of Bobby Heenan?

Babyface managers are a weird deal because they're really not needed. Maybe Captain Lou after he turned babyface, but he was only around for a year under that guise and then retired anyway. I'm hard-pressed to think of any successful babyface managers (aside from someone like Elizabeth, who was more of a valet anyway), especially ones who managed multiple people.