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| source// wwe.com |
Think about your favourite wrestler – did they start out this awesome, or have they become so through an artful alteration of gimmick, or simply through changing their style or becoming a more well-rounded performer?
It’s fair to say that not every wrestling performer lucks into the character that’s going to propel them to stardom straight away: in fact, those that have are the exception, not the rule.
Glenn Jacobs was notorious for labouring under some of the crappiest gimmicks that ever existed until he was given the Kane character out of nowhere in 1997. Unabomb was just weird, Isaac Yankem (DDS) unintentionally hilarious. Fake Diesel was one of the most poorly conceived gimmicks in history, and The Christmas Creature was, let’s face it, The Christmas bloody Creature.
None of those idiots were ever going to work WrestleMania opposite The Undertaker, were they?
Similarly, not every wrestler starts their career with all the tools needed to deliver at a high level. It’s something that can often come in time. Here are ten examples of workers that took their time getting it right, and characters that began life with the worst or most heelish gimmickry imaginable.
The wrestlers we had to hate before we could love them…
10. Dolph Ziggler
In order to fully understand how bizarre and counter-productive the introduction to Dolph Ziggler was, you probably have to understand the context.
Even back in the mid-noughties, Nick Nemeth was a quality worker obsessed with becoming even better. He’d been a peripheral part of the whole godawful Kerwin White fiasco that had threatened to kill Chavo Guerrero’s career in 2005, and when that died, he was sent back to OVW, where he became a member of the Spirit Squad in 2006.
He had been one of the more interesting members of that stable of male cheerleaders, but when that angle fizzled (ie, when D-X buried them and literally shipped them back to OVW), he was eventually repackaged as Dolph Ziggler… a man who went around introducing himself and shaking hands.
The idea – I think – was that a new addition to the roster would go around introducing himself to everyone, and that veterans find over-enthusiastic rookies really annoying… so fans would feel the same way. It’s difficult to say, as if that actually was the concept, then it’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. Why saddle a brand new character with a ‘sh*t rookie’ gimmick?
Fortunately, Ziggler was allowed to look fairly impressive against Batista in his first singles match on WWE television, beat Charlie Haas via pinfall and after defecting to Smackdown in the 2009 draft, went over United States champion MVP in a non-title match.
Fans began to forget about the weird-ass gimmick he’d come in with, and Ziggler began to get over – just a little bit – with his big-bumping style and furiously energetic offense.
9. Kurt Angle
Long before he was the highly-respected ass-kicking ‘wrestling machine’, Olympic gold medallist Kurt Angle debuted in the WWF in November 1999 with a carefully calculated heel gimmick. Someone at Titan Towers had taken careful note of the way in which ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and The Rock had gotten over with the fans as heels first before they became babyfaces, and theorised that they could use the same mechanic to create a heel character… just in reverse.
That’s how Angle – under his own name – found himself playing an enthusiastic yet overweening white meat babyface, preaching Hogan-style motivational nonsense via his three ‘I’s: Intensity, Integrity and Intelligence. With his patriotic singlet, his habit of wearing gold medals to the ring and his triumphalist ‘Rocky’ theme music, he was the Attitude Era’s perfect fit for a despised heel.
Angle and the fans connected instantly. The crowd began to chant ‘you suck’ in time to his music, and Angle displayed a natural ability on the mic with this new geeky character, who for the most part remained oblivious to the cheerful hatred the fans had for him.
What’s great is that, in his debut at the 1999 Survivor Series, babyface play-by-play guy Jim Ross is pro-Angle and heel colour commentator Jerry Lawler is anti-Angle… that is, until an agitated Angle grabs the mic mid-match to remind the crowd that “you do not boo an Olympic gold medallist”.
At that point, the two veteran announcers seamlessly changed sides, J.R. now anti-Angle, the King now pro. Well done, boys.
8. Tommy Dreamer
Before he became ECW’s poster-boy and the ‘Innovator Of Violence’, Tommy Dreamer was a pretty boy babyface in horrendous green suspenders, cheerful and hated by the notoriously heel-loving ECW crowd. He had what would later be referred to as ‘die Rocky die’: the chant that Attitude Era crowd used on the bluechipper babyface version of Rocky Maivia, before he became The Rock.
Seeking to blur the line between heel and babyface, ECW evil genius Paul Heyman had Dreamer participate in a Singapore Cane Match with The Sandman, who’d become ECW’s resident violent psychopath. Well. One of ECW’s resident violent psychopaths. Anyway, Dreamer took the loss and the ten lashes’ punishment, and then asked for another, and then another. The crowd began the first stirrings of a turn, empathising just a little more with the defiant Dreamer.
It wasn’t until his feud with Raven that this turn crystalised into full-on support. Dreamer was constantly merked by the sociopathic grunge stereotype, pulverised, never able to catch a break. When he finally turned the tide – that’s when he had them. Tommy Dreamerwas ECW from that moment on. Before that, he was pretty much Mr. Anti-ECW.
7. John Hennigan
Long before he became the parkour-loving, high-flying rock star John Morrison, John Hennigan was a university dropout who applied for Tough Enough season 2, appeared on Tough Enough season 3 and, as a result, won (with Matt Cappotelli) a developmental contract with WWE in 2002.
After some mandatory time in Ohio Valley Wrestling, Hennigan debuted properly on RAW in March 2004, under the name Johnny Blaze. Apparently no one told WWE until it was too late that the name was likely to be copyrighted by Marvel (it’s the name of one of the men behind the Ghost Rider persona), so the following week Hennigan was named Johnny Spade. That name was clearly completely sh*tbox: three weeks later, he was renamed Johnny Nitro.
Working as the onscreen assistant and protégé of hated RAW General Manager Eric Bischoff, the new name was no coincidence – Hennigan had been named after Bischoff’s WCW creation, the competitor to RAW on Monday nights, Monday Nitro. As a heatseeking device for a pretty-boy wrestler that fans saw as not having paid his dues, the name was perfect. Johnny Nitro was despised by fans and performers alike, playing Bischoff’s lackey/golden boy for over three months until returning to OVW for more in-ring training.
It wasn’t until he reappeared in April 2005 as a part of the MNM stable (with Melina and Joey Mercury) that people began to slowly appreciate that Nitro might well have what it took to be a WWE star. Initially, Mercury was the talented one carrying Nitro but by the time the team split, it was the other way around, Mercury’s issues having affected his head and his performance, while Johnny Nitro had become the in-ring MVP of the group.
6. Bo Dallas
Bo Dallas is a weird one. Initially a plucky, happy-go-lucky fired-up babyface champion, the NXT crowd hated him. Absolutely hated him. As in, they would cheer for literally anyone facing him in the ring, scream TAP TAP TAP TAP at him when he wasn’t even threatened by a submission move. That kind of thing.
Rocky Maivia joined the Nation Of Domination and started quirking an eyebrow and talking in the third person. What does Bo do? He did exactly what he always did… only he added the element of the disingenuous. Slowly – so slowly that it was barely perceptible if you were watching week to week – Bo Dallas turned heel, and he did so by carrying on being the fired-up babyface, but gradually removing all traces of sincerity.
It took weeks, if not months, but by the time Bo Dallas, Ultraheel NXT Champion was in full effect, he wasn’t a car crash of a character anymore. He’d become something amazing: a heel so astonishingly delusional, so breaktakingly insincere, so wholly oblivious to the hatred that the crowd felt for him, that he flipped everyone around the other way and began getting babyface reactions again!
Bo Dallas became the best part of the show, not by getting deadly serious and ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy’ (aka the excuse for 93.57% of all WWE heel turns), but by being the greatest babyface in the world and being a total d*ck about it.
5. Bayley
When Bayley first started on NXT in her current character, there was a lot more Eugene in there – crossed with AJ Lee’s ‘sweet kid’ character from when she was in a relationship with Daniel Bryan. That was it: a girl with apparent learning difficulties that got excited about wrestling and lost a whole lot of matches through being naive and clueless.
Bayley was not popular… she was kind of tolerated, if that. The ‘special’ parts of her persona made things a good deal worse, because they made her insufferable, but they also made you kind of feel awkward about finding her insufferable.
In the same way as the Bo Dallas turnaround, the story of Bayley showcased NXT’s slow-burning character development to the hilt. First of all, they quietly got rid of any indication whatsoever that she was on any form of spectrum. Secondly, they built her gradual strengthening of character into her storylines.
She lost. She got beaten up. She was betrayed and humiliated by her friends. She lost some more. All of this gradually built up Bayley’s backbone – but unlike every other fiery babyface turn in WWE history, she didn’t let it make her into a bit of a d*ck.
Bayley had the opportunity on countless occasions to become the traditional WWE babyface, all eye-rolling cynicism, sarcasm and bad jokes, and chose to remain a nice person. The nicest person, in fact: she chose to remain Bayley, while simultaneously growing stronger and less willing to be messed around.
The usual WWE method of ‘character development’ involves a sudden change of personality with the flimsiest of excuses and some new threads. It’s like someone saw Sandy dressing up for Danny at the end of Grease and thought to combine it with the effects of slight brain damage.
Bayley got over hugely with the NXT crowd over a period of two years by remaining the same sweet, innocent wrestling-fan-turned-wrestler she’d been from the beginning, but with the core of steel that comes from surviving being constantly sh*t on.
4. Xavier Woods
In NXT, Xavier Woods did not work. When he translated to the main roster, Xavier Woods still did not work. The whole gimmick that he was trying to push was intended to be a version of the disco hepcat, which is bad enough – but the fact that it was a middle-aged white guy’s version of the disco hepcat made everything so, so so much worse.
The WWE crowd may not have all worked it out in their heads in exactly that way, but they came to the same conclusion, and the conclusion was: f*ck this guy.
The real life Austin Watson didn’t deserve that kind of reaction – but his character damn sure did. Luckily for Watson, he caught a break, a break he really shouldn’t have gotten as a member of the McMahon-controlled main roster, because the New Day gospel babyface gimmick was so bad that it took the horrendous Xavier Woods character and managed to drain all the fun out of it.
When Big E, Kofi Kingston and Woods began being allowed to do their own thing with the gimmick, the whole focus changed. Making them heels allowed them the creativity to be really, really silly, and suddenly Woods – the least valuable wrestler in the stable – became the MVP of the faction.
His posturing and hectoring outside of the ring became the best part of every match. He brought a trombone to ringside, and got it over with the crowd. That’s the mark of true greatness, right there.
3. Corey Graves
I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon, but there was nothing great about the Corey Graves character on NXT. Had he been a superlative wrestler, the infelicities of style caused by his appropriation of every single square inch of alternative culture at once might have been forgiven.
Had he been a mesmerising talker, the fact that he wasn’t a superlative wrestler might have been forgiven. Had he been astonishingly good-looking… you see where I’m going with this.
None of these things were true. Graves was good but not great in the ring, good but not great on the stick, good-looking but not great-looking (the dodgy eyes didn’t help). When he was invalided out with a nasty relative of our old nemesis, post-concussion syndrome, part of me was relieved… because I wanted to like Graves, and I couldn’t. The NXT crowd seemed to feel the same way.
Then he appeared on the E60: Behind The Curtain TV special, and suddenly we all found a reason to like Graves… or rather, the man behind the STAY DOWN knuckle tattoos. Matthew Polinsky had a wife and kids, and this was all he’d ever wanted to do… and now it was being taken away from him.
When Triple H broke the news that he’d be unable to wrestle again, there were no dry eyes to be found anywhere. Graves was finally over – and Graves was over.
The silver lining of the documentary for Polinsky was that he was being offered a two year contract as NXT’s new announcer. It was small beer, but it was something – and then it turned out that the guy who was good, but not great on the mic was great, not just good, as a heelish colour commentator.
Today, Corey Graves is one of the several MVPs of NXT’s programming. He can get a storyline over concisely and articulately like few others in the industry, he’s funny as f*ck, and he’s cool, cool in a way he never was as a wrestler. Today, Corey Graves is my boy. I knew there was a reason I always wanted to like him.
2. The Rock
This is a no-brainer, and the most obvious entry in this article: so let’s skip all the stuff you already know, and work out why it is that The Rock worked out so well while Rocky Maivia needed to ‘die Rocky die’.
Part of it was a sign of the times. Bret Hart has a theory that well-off ECW fans began to buy ringside seats to every WWF show in the northeast, booing the babyfaces and cheering the heels until everyone who watched RAW on television thought that was the reaction they were supposed to have, and a sea change began.
However it started, the Attitude Era killed the white meat babyface for years, and Rocky Maivia was just the first and most famous casualty.
Part of it was the way that television works these days. It’s an open secret that in the last twenty years or so, the classic babyface character has become a really difficult character to pull off and pull off well: in a television era like this, audiences have become used to morally complex characters played with layered performances.
Part of it was simply, honestly, that Dwayne Johnson sucked as a happy-go-lucky babyface, and sucked badly. The cheesy grin, the slapping hands on the way to the ring. His finishing move blew goats. His reactions were weird and off-kilter. His clothes made me want to travel back to summer 1971, kill myself and somehow frame his parents for my murder so that they’d never get to conceive him.
As much as The Rock in 2016 makes me want to spit bullets, The Rock in 1998 was the finest thing on television, and made me glad that I chose not to abuse the privilege of time travel after all.
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