I loved when Animal would say "Tell em, Hawk!"
Does anyone know of old videos where the guys would throw fire? Ronnie Garvin got burnt i remember. Ricky Morton, maybe? NWA/WCW had a lot of wild stuff before wrestling turned glam.
Here's the Garvin one, with the famous Jimmy Jam charging into the heel locker room part after and a slo mo replay. Cornette tells a bunch of stories about this on his podcasts, including how he had to redo a promo he was taping because he said that Garvin "went up like the Challenger!".
The Sheik (the original one, Sabu's uncle) threw fire in damn near every match he was in. The fucked up part is he only occasionally let his opponents know it was coming.
The other famous fireball user was Jerry Lawler. So much so they made an amazing compilation video of it back in the day.
And a bonus full clip of the great Andy Kaufman
Memphis loved fire. You had a decent chance of seeing it on any given week, especially when business was down and they were trying to draw people to the shows. Eddie Gilbert was another prominent flame thrower (and a hell of a good talker too).
Believe it or not, Chris Jericho has brought the fireball back into style to some degree. One of his many personalities is "the Wizard" and he throws a very accurate one. He just burned someone like two weeks ago on AEW TV.
Totally agree with you about the old NWA and just territory wrestling in general being awesome. As dumb as it probably sounds to someone who doesn't watch, it was just so much better when they actually treated it like they were fighting and the stars were pretty much all dudes who looked like they could genuinely beat your ass if they felt like it.