10 Things I Hate About WWE Champion Dean Ambrose
9. His Really Wild Days Are Years Behind Him
So Dean Ambrose is really more Cool Hand Luke than The Shining: but it wasn’t always that way. In point of fact, it was the former Jon Moxley’s unhinged work on the indies for companies like Insanity Pro Wrestling and Combat Zone Wrestling, IWA Mid South or EVOLVE that got him WWE’s attention in the first place.
At one point, Jon Moxley was a specialist in the violent gimmick match. The Drunken Death Match; Tables, Chairs & Silverware; Barbed Wire Boards & Glass Pits; the Four Corners Dog Collar Death Match; that old ECW favourite Fans Bring The Weapons, and many, many more besides. Along with the garbled, pain and hate filled promos he’d cut backstage at crappy gymnasiums and armouries the length and breadth of the USA, those were the matches and the feuds that defined his pre-WWE career on the independent circuit.
Then there are all the legendary stories of his partying. Who hasn’t heard the tale of him filming himself having drunken sex wearing a bear suit? Good times… but that’s all behind him now.
He can’t be that guy in the WWE - not even anything approaching him, really. That’s why the ‘Lunatic Fringe’ gimmick doesn’t work. He tried to put over his side of a personal, dramatic and intense feud with Mick Foley while in FCW, but (depending on who you talk to) the notoriously thin-skinned Hardcore Legend either took some of the invective from Ambrose’ promos a little too personally and put the kibosh on the angle, or was simply not medically cleared to wrestle to advance the feud.
Whatever the truth of it, Ambrose has never been allowed to go to that place again, and it shows. The only kind of insanity he’s really able to get his teeth into is less Joker and more court jester...