10 Things I Hate About WWE Champion Dean Ambrose

Time to front up to the court of public opinion and play devil’s advocate once again, with another entry in the misunderstood, misinterpreted and often completely misread 10 Things I Hate About… series.

The current WWE World Champion, Dean Ambrose, is presiding over a lacklustre second tier reign on WWE’s third most popular show - probably fourth, if you include Edge and Christian’s clowning around.

Ambrose supposedly had the ‘it’ factor before he joined WWE developmental in spring 2011 - he’s the member of the Shield that initially seemed to have the most upside, compared to the greener-than-grass Roman Reigns and the talented but tonguetied Seth Rollins. Yet upon the groundbreaking stable’s dissolution, it was Reigns and Rollins that stepped into main event roles earmarked for them, not Ambrose.

Arguably still the most popular of all three men, he’s recently embarked upon his first run with a WWE world title, at long last. So does Dean Ambrose still live up to the hype? Or are there issues to be raised with the writing, the booking, the presentation and the performances behind the so-called Lunatic Fringe?

Tipping the hat once more to the central conceit of a seventeen-year-old teen rom com starring the Joker and Cobra Commander, these are the 10 Things I Hate About Dean Ambrose.

The WWE announcing team, for better or worse, are responsible for the lion’s share of the marketing each and every feud and character gets on television.

Sure, the performers cut their own promos (although sometimes we wish they wouldn’t), and wrestle their own matches. However when the mic gets dropped and the bell rings, it’s the guys with the headsets that control how everything is presented to the millions of people watching with varying degrees of interest back home.

They’re trained to push the nicknames of each of their performers as much as possible: it’s part of that product’s branding for the marketplace. Seth Rollins is the Architect, a nod to his mentor Triple H’s reputation as the so-called Cerebral Assassin. Roman Reigns is the Big Dog, a nod to the doggy odour that his perpetually wet hair gives off (I’ve heard). That also explains why he was wet behind the ears for so long, aha, ahahahah.

Rollins is also ‘The Man’, and Reigns tried to go one better this year by styling himself ‘The Guy’. The Guy, The Man - what could their erstwhile compatriot in The Shield possibly be nicknamed upon reaching the main event? ‘The Bloke’ is too English, and ‘The Fella’ is probably copyrighted by Sheamus. ‘The Dude’? He’s not laid back enough. ‘The Bro’? Bro, he’s not Vince Russo, bro.

No, the one that poor Mauro Ranallo has been charged with trying to put over every chance he gets is ‘the Kingpin’. Of course, these days the chief connotation of ‘Kingpin’ is the tubby bald crimelord nemesis of Marvel’s Daredevil on the hit Netflix show: had they done a little research, they’d have realised that in a former, indie wrestling life, Jon Moxley had cut a promo in which he (kayfabe) admitted to having been a drug-dealing kingpin himself back in Cincinnati.

That’s not the branding they were after, presumably. The nickname they’re more on point with is ‘the Lunatic Fringe’: the crazy man, the wild card, an updated version of Brian Pillman’s ‘Loose Cannon’ gimmick.

Except Dean Ambrose hasn’t been that guy for a while now - certainly not in the WWE. The company’s PG-era programming won’t let him. Without the raving, damaged, Joker-like edge to his persona that he was allowed on the independent circuit as Jon Moxley, Dean Ambrose isn’t a lunatic anything.

The irony is that he doesn’t have to be. The real life Jon Good isn’t a bug-eyed maniac - if anything, he’s a cool customer, a rebel without a cause kinda guy, and that’s what’s shone through in all Ambrose’s most popular promos, segments and matches. It was his unflappable, drawling cool that got Good over with the WWE crowd, not his toothless loony-tunes act.