10 Times Wrestlers Got Over With ONE Match

This situation is bullsh*t. Its impact on professional wrestling is an inconvenient and irritating byproduct of something exponentially more grave, but god damn. This thing couldn't suck more unless Baron Corbin grabbed two chinlocks on it in an 18 minute match.

We never got to see fans jeer Rob Gronkowski's dry-humping on SmackDown. What was he doing? Does he want to f*ck everybody? Is it PG? Are fans expected to cheer this hyperactive, obnoxious jock? Fight Owens Fight?

More like F*ck Gronk F*ck!

Proper wrestling will resume at some point, and to park the facade for a moment, even the most successful practitioners on the Independent scene are struggling badly in an industry without a union. This is awful. Careers are in jeopardy. Companies are in jeopardy. Entire scenes are in jeopardy, and scenes create the future of the mainstream, from ECW to ROH to PWG. One depressing possibility emerging from all of this is that the John Laurinaitis era might not be the unthinkable memory it once was.

One slight, Orange Cassidy-esque thumbs up to all of it is that sometimes, one match is all it takes to get noticed...

Orange Cassidy was already over - to a consistent, improbable and thoroughly endearing extent - when he wrestled his first AEW singles match at Revolution.

Newer disciples flocked to his hilarious, shrugging persona and his tremendous, outrageously athletic cameos, but the more intent of fans knew of his ability to work - provided his opponents prod him hard enough - a scintillating match in the classic underdog babyface mode.

Orange Cassidy worked the secret Orange Cassidy match - the major label David Starr match - to incredible effect at Revolution. He drew PAC into his psychological ploy with an earned, protracted spot of calf-grazing, and in a superb punchline, PAC, so miserable and intense, joined in on the bit. Cassidy tore the roof off with a heartfelt, deeply authentic selling performance - the genius of his irony is that it makes his subsequent plight that much sharper, more perilous - in which he rolled slowly from side to side to lure his opponent into the danger of his legitimately jaw-dropping explosion of a comeback. But even before that crescendo, Cassidy got over as a true modern magician. How he does lucha libre - a more cooperative genre viewed through a western lens - with his hands in his pockets is astonishing.

That persona of Cassidy's is genuinely aspirational in a world of such strain and anxiety, and that is before these grim events unfolded. The reaction he generates isn't knowing.

He is the wrestler for these times.