As a kid I remebered Lawler being a great wrestler, butbut when I've watched old matches he hardly rates compared to the greats. He was a good mic man but thats it.
You know, I noticed the same thing about Dusty Rhodes.
I always used to think Dusty Rhodes could work and carry a match, like you, on watching his stuff recently, I realised he was a lot more out of shape than I remembered. The Starrcade dvd showed a lot of Dustys lack of talent, his team up with Sting against the Road Warriors was interesting in that Dusty is hardly in the ring, leaving Sting to do almost everything!
He was particularly useless in his WWF run!