10 Awesome Times Wrestlers Learned From Their Mistakes
7. Hangman Page Atones For His Mistake
Hangman Page's AEW arc is amongst the best, richest stories ever told in pro wrestling - incidentally, it is covered in great analytical depth in my book Becoming All Elite: The Rise of AEW, which is available to pre-order now.
In a landscape in which babyfaces and heels are more fluid and situational, Page perfected the new scale by bravely capturing the zeitgeist. He wasn't a tweener. He wasn't an otherwise sound dude who sometimes did bad or unjust things to serve his own interests. He, and this was a genius exploration of mental health in a dumb macho world, was a babyface who through anxiety and the self-loathing it generates believed himself to be the heel.
That self-loathing intensified when, during a gauntlet match on Dynamite held to crown the #1 contenders to his and Kenny Omega's Tag Team Titles, he cost the Bucks their shot. He thought the Bucks thought little of him, and FTR did use his anxiety to serve their own interests.
He learned from this mistake, or at least atoned for it, by mimicking the heel tactic as a babyface plea during his All Out 2020 downfall.