My brother recently found a list of the Wrestling Observer Awards on wikipedia. While it's interesting to know who writers voted the wrestler of the year and such, I mainly found it interesting because it has a lot of focus on gimmicks, including awards for the best and worst gimmicks. Now some of the best gimmicks were pretty awesome, and they included The Undertaker, Disco Inferno, and The Hurricane. But some of the worst are pretty bad, and it is from the Worst Tag Team column that I bring to you The Godwinns.
Now I should tell you first off that I freakin' loved the Godwinns. I went to a wrestling night one time in Worcester as a kid where I saw the Godwinns fight and they were hilarious. Mostly I just loved that 1) their manager Sunny was a babe and 2) they covered everyone in their path with the contents of their slop buckets, which had to be one of the grossest gimmicks in wrestling history.
That being said, the Godwinns still kind of sucked. They were never a very well thought out gimmick, as their initials (Henry O. Godwinn, Phineas I. Goodwin) spelled out something not so subtle. They had major feuds with two different tag team title holders during their first year in the WWF (first the Bodydonnas, then the Smoking Guns) but only held the tag team belts once, which is just kind of embarrassing when you remember how many matches took place in that time period. They later won the belts back in a match against the Headbangers (another pretty bad gimmick), but lost them two days later to the Legion of Doom, which was made more embarrassing by the fact that it was a "retirement" match. The Godwinns were done, although they did continue to wrestle on other circuits.
The Godwinns were, simultaneously, the best and worst aspects of gimmicks, as well as a good summary of the WWF at the time they left. They were fun and they made kids laugh a lot because of the slop buckets, while older guys could get interested after Sunny joined them for a bit. But otherwise they had no real staying power - The Godwinns were basically a one joke pony that dragged on for three years. But you could do that back in mid to late 90's wrestling, and they did it pretty well.
Gotta Love a Gimmick - The Godwinns
