10 Embarrassing Times Wrestlers Tried To Be Badass
6. Alex Riley Is Enraged Inside Of A Cage
The WWE system - and its gatekeepers, allegedly - knackered Alex Riley.
He was so good on NXT that he was immune to its bizarre remit of humiliation. The game show conspired to make everybody look like a right tw*t - even Daniel Bryan quite understandably couldn't come up with a t-shirt-selling catchphrase after The Miz just told him to, then and there - and yet Riley bounced back the bullsh*t with a grin. He cut genuinely damn good promos about chickens or whatever the f*ck he was asked to do. Cocksure, handsome, loathsome in a way you were compelled by: he had the intangible star factor.
And then they f*cked him, like the they f*ck most everybody else, and he never recovered the confidence on which he relied to play the best version of himself. That was his big attribute, and it was beaten out of him. As a result, he developed a new persona in NXT, and the results were, in a word, tragic.
Low on confidence but angry at his lot, he used this rage to become a bad badass. Now, what rhymes with rage? Cage! And that's what I'm in! It's genius!
Bitter-and-ain't-takin'-it Alex Rley sucked, and his Photoshop skills were even worse.
Wikipedia claims Riley was released in 2016, but that can't be right. He was the graphic designer for those Usos segments where prison bars flashed over their faces.