Silly Little Guys Who Didn't Belong In WWE ?
Turning funny into money - the most unlikely and WEIRD Superstars in WWE history.
There's a big movement building around wrestling not being serious enough at present.
The tide has turned on MJF and Adam Cole's extended bromance, and the thinkpieces are coming armed with ticket statistics that might - might - reveal some home truths. After All In and Grand Slam ended with handshakes and hugs and the 'Salt Of The Earth' moved deeper into comedy with his injured tag partner (and his "injured" partner Roderick Strong), the knives and the jury were out on the AEW Champion's entire title run.
There's no easy or objective answer to any of this, but part of the debate completely discounts how fun some of wrestling's stranger characters and storylines have been in the past. It's an odd industry; so odd that even the market leader in all of its insanity doesn't feel like the perfect fit for some of the talent that travel through it.
Buried within the bowels of WWE's history sit a selection of silly and/or little guys who couldn't have matched their surroundings any less. About as far away from the polymath Maxwell Jacob Friedman as it was possible to get, these weren't better than you...and you knew it.
10. Johnny Saint
Perhaps it's cruel to single out the elder statesmen of the already-forgotten NXT UK brand rather than highlighting the silliest of the silly little guys on that roster, but Johnny Saint was perhaps most representative of how silly and little the whole project was.
Any wrestlers and/or gimmicks that didn't feel particularly TV-ready - and there were plenty of them - were like that because they weren't TV-ready.
The entire idea was hurried into existence when World Of Sport dared to get a few hours on ITV in the UK, and the brand itself only existed to make good on a doomed promise about further elevating a then-booming scene. It was all a facade, broadly serving the purpose of creaming a little bit off the top of a diluted market before the pandemic and SpeakingOut were the two biggest of several final nails.
WWE trying to make a WWE-adjacent show out of all these decidedly non-WWE properties was silly. Making Johnny Saint the "tonight in this very ring" authority figure (because god forbid a show not have one of those) was silliest of all.