The D'Amore Drop: WWE fans keep cheering heels John Cena and Seth Rollins. Is that a problem?
Seth Rollins is one of WWE's top current heels — yet the crowd loves him. ()
The D'Amore Drop is a recurring guest column on Uncrowned written by Scott D'Amore, the Canadian professional wrestling promoter, executive producer, trainer and former wrestler best known for his long-standing role with TNA/IMPACT Wrestling, where he served as head of creative. D'Amore is the current owner of leading Canadian promotion Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling.
WWE's top heels John Cena and Seth Rollins continue to get cheered, even when they berate the fans (see: Cena) or perform two-on-one beatdowns on popular babyfaces (see: Rollins and Bron Breakker destroying Sami Zayn on "Raw").
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As we talked about before, some fans just won't boo Cena on his farewell tour. But Rollins? They are cheering him for very different reasons.
In the late '90s, Vince McMahon famously told fans 'the era of good guy vs. bad guys is passé,' but the truth is that a percentage of fans have always made their own minds up who to boo and cheer.
My trainer 'Irish' Mickey Doyle once told me about his travels working the Southern loop back in the '70s as part of his California Hippies tag team with Mike Boyette. They were heels: Long, pretty hair; tie-dye outfits; peace signs ... you can imagine how hated they were in places like Alabama and Mississippi!
But by the time they got to Florida, it all flipped. The surfer types down there saw the Hippies as part of their own counterculture. To these fans, Mickey and Mike were cool, and they got cheered even though they worked as heels.
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I asked Mickey, 'Well, what did you do to make 'em stop cheering you?' And he told me they didn't do a thing — they let the section of fans who wanted to cheer, cheer. He explained that, if anything, hearing some fans in the arena cheer only made the section of fans who were booing boo even louder.
And that's what WWE is going to do with Seth Rollins: Let the audience make whatever noise they want, as long as they make plenty of it.
But here's where it gets tricky: It is OK for your heels to be so bad they are cool. It is not OK for your babyfaces to be presented as so ineffective, so weak, that they look impotent and dumb.
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The best example of this will always be WCW vs. the nWo. The nWo were the coolest bad guys in the world and they were always going to get cheers, but the WCW wrestlers were made to look so feckless that fans washed their hands of them.
The WCW side were betrayed over and over, conned again and again, and beaten down so often that no one saw them as heroes anymore, but instead as eternal victims. Victims have to fight back — and win — at some point in order to become heroes.
The bad guys have to be overwhelmingly powerful at the start, but as the story goes on, the two opposing forces have to balance out; otherwise, the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
Another factor is that fans are so smart these days. And I mean that as both 'intelligent' and as in 'smart to the way wrestling works.' They knew, with all respect to Sami Zayn, that Rollins, Heyman and Breakker were not getting their comeuppance just one week after coming together as a trio.
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They know we are very early in Act One of this new evil faction, and the bad guys won't begin to get theirs until at least the end of Act Two.
Fans want to look cool too, and won't always play along and cheer for the guy they know is, for well-understood storytelling reasons, temporarily unbeatable.
I mean, how could you not root for these guys? (Craig Ambrosio/WWE via Getty Images)
(WWE via Getty Images)
The only talent in the world who gets guaranteed, universal, nuclear bomb heat is AEW's Don Callis.
Absolutely no one, not from any culture or tribe on Earth, likes that man.
I'm his friend, and even I hate him.
Speaking of AEW, I saw my old friend Adam 'Edge' Copeland say he has maybe two years left wrestling in AEW, and then he'll call it a day at age 53.
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AEW boss Tony Khan knows how to book a legendary end to a legendary career — see what he did with Sting's emotional and satisfying finale last year. Wrestling is so much better for having AEW as a viable alternative, and Tony, who has as much love and passion for this business as anyone, will give Adam a worthy final run.
I've known Adam a long time, long before the world met him as Edge in WWE in 1998. Thirty-five years ago, we were both young, hungry, broke, and trying to figure out how to make it in this crazy business we loved.
In early 1997, I picked him up in Orangeville, Ontario, and we drove across the country to Moncton, New Brunswick, to wrestle for Grand Prix Wrestling. That wasn't just a booking — it was an education. Seven nights a week, 2,000 miles in my Jeep every week, wrestling in every little town the Maritimes had to offer. Adam's childhood friend Christian Cage joined us a few weeks later, and the three of us rented a dingy little apartment in Moncton. Glamorous, it was not.
We'd come home after midnight, talk about our matches and getting better. I'll talk about Jay 'Christian' Reso in another column, but even back then, Adam had it.
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He had the swagger, the confidence. He was a nobody, but even when we'd be out shopping for food or at a gas station, folks would look at him twice, thinking, 'Hey, is that a rock star? He looks like SOMEONE!'
Adam wasn't just hoping to make it — he was dead set on being one of the best ever. And damned if he didn't do it.
I'll never forget sitting in my basement watching that "Raw" after WrestleMania in 2011, when Adam had to retire. After everything he'd achieved, all the boxes he'd checked, that's how it was going to end? A doctor told him he couldn't do this anymore. It was heartbreaking. I knew how much this hurt Adam, and it leveled me. That's not how you want a legend's story to close.
His surprise return at the 2020 Royal Rumble all those years later was one of those rare, true "holy s***" moments in wrestling. And his decision to leave WWE and come to AEW? That was another chapter — one he got to decide. He's getting to finish this on his terms, standing tall in the ring, doing what he loves, not because a doctor told him it's over.
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That's rare. That's beautiful. And it's exactly what he deserves.
Enjoy the last 18 months or so of Adam Copeland, guys. This last run in AEW is going to be epic, and once it is over, we will not see another one like 'Cope' again.
With so many storyline headlines coming out of WrestleMania 41, we didn't have space last week to talk about one of the biggest business headlines from the weekend.
No, not that WrestleMania made a ton of money — that was a lock — but the surprise announcement that WWE has officially acquired Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide, commonly abbreviated as AAA or Triple A.
Triple A was founded in the '90s and over the past three decades has not only given CMLL a run for their money in Mexico, but in working with WCW, TNA and others, has a wider audience outside of Mexico than its rival.
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I first learned of WWE making serious offers to acquire Triple A in 2019, but then the pandemic happened and a lot of plans got shelved.
Paul Levesque, aka Triple H, is not going to ruin AAA. (Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports)
(USA TODAY Sports / Reuters)
Triple H has said for a while that he wants the WWE 'Universe' to be more than a single promotion; he wants regional satellites in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and he knew there's no better fit for WWE than Triple A. Founder Antonio Peña — along with guys like Konnan and Perro Aguayo — turned Triple A into a cultural movement not just in Mexico, but in places like New York and Los Angeles, where there are passionate Hispanic fans who live the brand.
But passion and branding weren't holding Triple A back — infrastructure, marketing and simply having enough staff to get done all they wanted to get done were.
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All that's changed now. Triple A has sold out venues in the U.S. before, but with WWE's best-in-the-business muscle behind them? Expect that to happen consistently now.
I disagree with the doomsayers who cry that WWE will 'bleach the identity' out of Triple A. Yes, WWE has a mixed record of doing well with Mexican stars — Rey Mysterio is one of the outliers — but look at how well Penta, Rey Fenix and others are doing in WWE right now.
I think Nick Khan and Triple H are far too smart to spend years looking to buy something only to turn it into something else.
Speaking of Triple A and Konnan, 'K-Dawg' was the first one to tell me that Penta and Rey Fenix were going to be massive stars in the U.S. — and as usual, his eye for talent was clairvoyant.
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I first met Penta at the Impact Wrestling vs. Lucha Underground co-promoted event at WrestleCon 2018 (What? You thought WWE or AEW invented co-promotion?). I saw immediately that Konnan hadn't exaggerated — both Penta and Fenix were electrifying.
Even though I couldn't get them for any length of time, I immediately moved to have both brothers compete at TNA's next pay-per-view event, and had Penta win the world title.
Penta is so cool.
Honestly, you think of the coolest wrestlers of all time — Kevin Nash in the nWo, Bret Hart with the jacket and sunglasses, Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns — and have them walk to the ring with that crazy stepping Penta does! None of them could pull that off! They'd be laughed at. But Penta? Penta makes that crazy walk look so cool! That's charisma you can't teach.
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Penta and Fenix have done an amazing job of protecting their identities in the 21st century (even Wikipedia doesn't have their real names listed) — but one thing I'll reveal here is both of them are awesome, kind-hearted people who you really love to see doing so well.
My Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling promotion's next event is Saturday, May 10. We are really ramping up promotion now. It used to be that the hardest lift for an event was the on-sale, but today's audiences are more likely to make the decision to come week-of, which makes for an — ahem — exciting last few days watching ticket sales for promoters like me.
But we expect another sellout, as MLP visits the iconic Maple Leaf Gardens for the very first time in the venue's seven-decade history.
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We have a loaded card:
Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling
20-Man Gauntlet featuring Josh Alexander, 'The Complete' Matt Cardona, AEW star and WWE Hall of Famer Billy Gunn, Bishop Dyer (Baron Corbin), former ECW & NWA World Champion Rhino, AEW Star QT Marshall, former TNA World Champion Rich Swann, NJPW star Alex Zayne, NJPW star ELP, Canadian Legend PCO (Perfect Creation One), former WWE Champion Raj Dhesi (Jinder Mahal)
Women's Canadian Championship Final: Kylie Rae vs. Gisele Shaw
3-Way Dance: Gabe Kidd vs. Michael Oku vs. Speedball Mike Bailey
NWA World Title: Stu Grayson vs. Tom Latimer
Woman of 1,000 Holds vs. Pink Striker: Serena Deeb vs. Miyu Yamashita
Special Challenge Match: QT Marshall vs. Josh Alexander
Check out our previous stacked events here.
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