10 Best Wrestling Gimmick Changes Of 2016

Some are better broken, others better decayed.

by John Bills
Broken Matt Hardy 2
impactwrestling.com

A gimmick can make or break a wrestler. We all know this by now, a sentence that probably didn't need to be written but was nonetheless. A great wrestler can become a true superstar with the right gimmick (hello Stone Cold Steve Austin) after all, and the various merits and issues of others can be truly accentuated by the character they are portraying.

Professional wrestlers are always evolving too, and whilst some end up portraying one character forever others cycle through persona after persona after persona. For a number of individuals on this list their newly-discovered 2016 character is just the latest in a long line of personalities. For some it is their finest yet.

2016 has been a strange year in professional wrestling, and arguably two of the strangest happenings came from men on this list Whether it was a slight tweak in the wrong direction or full-blown madness, gimmick changes have led to the reinvention and resurrection of numerous careers in 2016.

I'm not including plain old heel turns and haircuts in this, so no Usos and no Braun Strowman (sorry Braun). Nonetheless, here are the 10 best gimmicks changes in wrestling this year. Well, so far this year, at least.

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Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.