Listening back to our PWTorch.com VIP interview with the late Larry Sweeney from March 2008, it’s easy to hear the excitement in our voices when asking Sweeney who inspired his over-the-top wrestling character, as it translated so well into his cornerman persona in Ring of Honor. As a pro wrestling manager, he was smarmy, he was loud, he was obnoxious, he dressed poorly, and he made you want to grab him by his shaggy, curly hair and just shake him until he left you alone.

He was an antagonist to the nth degree, more effectively than most in-ring performers of his time and certainly a throwback to the days when wrestling managers like Capt. Lou Albano, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, Jim Cornette and Jimmy Hart ran rampant outside the ring.

Managers played an important role in pro wrestling for decades, often acting as the mouthpiece for a behemoth who couldn’t get his point across verbally, so audiences would understand what that grappler’s motives were in the fight. Sometimes managers performed the duties of a general whose army’s collective goal was utter annihilation, and in the war room, the manager strategized the chaos.

Sometimes managers were only there for aesthetics, contributing to the look of an act by simply being part of an entourage, a dog-and-pony show to mask any short-comings. Some managers were only good for screaming bloody murder (or blowing annoying whistles) but were entirely physically ineffectual; in those cases, the weapon they’d bring to ringside (canes, bullhorns, high-heeled shoes) were placed in the able hands of the heel wrestler. (These seem to be the attribute of a lower tier in the canon of managers but have been character traits nonetheless.)

And, particularly on the heel side of the roster, managers were button-pushing loudmouths who you wanted to see get smacked around by the babyfaces.

In an era (arguably starting in the mid-1990s but definitely continuing today) when wrestling managers were all but phased out in favor of scantily clad female eye candy and monstrous script-memorizers, Larry Sweeney learned from the best of the past, applied it at ringside, and, for a bright but short time, became the most effective manager in pro wrestling.

As an “agent” (smart naming convention on his part), Sweeney “guided” the Ring of Honor careers of Chris Hero, Bobby Dempsey, Sara del Ray, Tank Toland, Davey Richards and Go Shiozaki, good-to-great acts on their own who benefited from the rub given to them from a well-developed heel manager. (It’s hard not to get rub from someone named the Wrestling Observer’s Best Non-Wrestler of the Year in 2007 and 2008.)

No less than Bobby Heenan, regarded as wrestling’s greatest manager ever, calls cornermen “the crouton on the salad” that is a wrestling match. Heenan said he’d get heat, for his wrestler but not himself (although he had his own heat, and his protégés often benefited from their association with “the Weasel”), that he’d play to the crowd only when it was appropriate and wouldn’t distract from what his charge was trying to accomplish in the ring, that he’d get his wrestlers’ points across in interviews or help them put the period on the sentence if they were capable talkers, and that he’d take a bump from the babyface wrestler in order to send the crowd home happy.

Wrestlers and managers since Heenan’s retirement have lauded his ability to enrage a crowd with a simple shake of his shaggy blond hair or a shake of whatever foreign object was in his pocket as he slithered around ringside. Often, he never even touched his wrestler’s opponent; why would he, he’d wonder in later interviews; “I’m not gonna pin the guy!”

Sweeney, who began his career as a wrestler, was appointed a manager – of the stable Sweet ‘N’ Sour, Inc. – in Ring of Honor, and, while his wild shenanigans outside the ring often drew more laughs and appreciative applause than heat for his wrestlers, he did talk the talk when his wrestlers couldn’t, compounded the verbiage when his wrestlers could, involved himself in the action when appropriate, and shook that crazy, 1970s head of hair and shuffled in his god-awful leisure suit to the uproarious reaction of the jaded boutique-wrestling fans of Ring of Honor.

Sure, his techniques were hackneyed in the eyes of the power brokers in WWE and, as if their opinions matter, TNA. But for his role, and for the storied and memorable role of the pro wrestling manager, they worked to perfection. Even in his most controversial angle – simulating, but not explicitly, rape on an unconscious woman – one has to think some of the backlash the angle received was due to Sweeney’s love-to-hate character; a lesser roster member and the angle would have fallen flat, felt forced or failed entirely. The character of Larry Sweeney was a jerk. This is what jerks do. And for such a funny, accommodating and motivated man, he played the jerk very, very well.

Thankfully, albeit only for a short time and until Sweeney’s own personal undoing, Gabe Sapolsky and the Ring of Honor brass recognized the valuable addition Larry Sweeney would make as a pro wrestling manager and gave him his grandest stage, on which he shone brighter than the rest.

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