Stumbled upon this guy when doing some research into the origins of catch-wrestling and thought he was awesome.

Ad Santel or his real name Adolph Ernst was one of the greatest practitioners of catch wrestling. The coolest aspects of his life can be summarised as

• World Light Heavyweight Catch Wrestling Champion
• Wants to challenge himself more
• Decides to challenge the best judoka in the world in their own rule set
• Wins
• Declares himself Judo World Champion
• Jigiro Kano gets irritated and sends more of his best practitioners
• Santel keeps winning
• Kano gives up and stops sending people
• So Santel decides to travel to Japan to fight more judoka
• He wins one match and draws another. But the Japanese people are so fascinated that is sparked a new age of catch-wrestling in Japan.

Highly recommend his Wikipedia page as a starting point if you want to read up on him. A great example of a well rounded grappler with crazy confidence. Somehow I had never heard about this guy but now he's my new hero

The chad himself