The useful obscurity
Tom Magee is a real professional wrestler whose name becomes the first major memory test in Jumbo Dumbsludge / NEVER FORGET. X, who prides himself on knowing the 1980s wrestling field, cannot place him. The failed recognition primes the later and more extreme encounter with King Baggot.
A real lost-tape story
Magee carries an archival charge beyond simple obscurity. His 1986 tryout match with Bret Hart became famous among tape traders as lost footage; WWE later publicized its rediscovery as a “Holy Grail.” The source work does not need to explain this entire history for the reference to fit its structure unusually well: a real wrestler survives culturally as a mixture of rumor, missing media and retrospective myth.
Function in the story
Magee helps establish the work's governing uncertainty before any apparently impossible figure arrives. A knowledgeable person can simply fail to know a real thing. Once that mundane fact has been demonstrated, the story can no longer cleanly separate ignorance from altered history.