10 Biggest AEW Creative Mistakes
3. Almost Everything To Do With Sammy Guevara In 2022
How do you ruin a wrestler mere months after he entered the performance of a lifetime?
What was this: a late 2010s NXT to main roster promotion?
Sammy Guevara's performance in his January 26, 2022 Dynamite Ladder match win over Cody Rhodes was sublime. Fusing stunt work with opportunistic strategy in a match with a stirring competitive energy, Guevara entered a complete genre performance that literally scaled the heights of the classic and modern iterations of it.
Informed by his...happy existence on social media, Guevara was turned heel when the "happy and contented person" bit hardly conveyed a babyface struggle. "A computer took your place, daddy," is exponentially better than "I'm the hot chick's daddy on your computer", but even the heel role was ineffective. A handsome guy with an attractive girlfriend was deeply midcard, and just didn't cut it in a promotion with several too many main event-level names. The rank misogyny, title devaluation, frequent turns: this was Vince Russo in the extreme.
Guevara's status in AEW at time of writing is a grim byproduct of AEW's recruitment drive. He's back where he started, effectively, undermining what was an inspired push to get the 'Four Pillars' over so that AEW's dream singing spree in the summer of '21 wouldn't serve to abandon that which had already been built.
He's not the only one...