10 Wrestlers Audiences Weren't Ready For
The wrestling geniuses and crazy characters misunderstood by the masses until it was too late.
One of the worst things even the most casual of observers can do when analysing a wrestling show is to blame a crowd.
Promoters will occasionally fall into the same trap and that's even worse. We're all guilty of morphing into the Seymour Skinner-blaming-the-children meme from time to time, but wrestling still exists to generate a response that may reveal future financial or emotional investment. But crowds that behave exactly as you wish the rewards bookers and wrestlers get for a job well done. Well, that and immense financial riches, so yet again maybe lay off the punters if they happen not to worship absolutely everything in front of them.
There are loud crowds, quiet crowds, good crowds and f*cking rotten ones, but as long as their reactions aren't hurting, offending or upsetting others around them or the wrestlers themselves, they have all paid the same amount of money to see the show and can react (or not) how they wish.
It's sort of a rule. But the following ten wrestlers are rule-proving exceptions. Sure enough, each wrestler below got 'em in the end. Sometimes they just had to wait a little longer...
10. Goldust
Wrestling audiences, wrestling bookers, wrestlers themselves. There were a number of people that weren't ready for Goldust.
An increasingly-frayed Scott Hall had no interest in working with him during Razor Ramon's final months, not least when WWE went down a gay panic route between the pair. Sections of the crowd hurled slurs his way, and felt as if they'd been invited to as part of the show. Vince McMahon might have had to explain what "androgynous" meant to Dustin Rhodes before the son of a son of a plumber made the move north, but it was as if The Chairman didn't entirely know the meaning himself when it came to actually deploying the more controversial aspects of the character in 1995 and 1996.
Typically ten years (and then some) behind popular culture, wrestling wasn't anywhere near for a character that even played with homosexuality as a theme, let alone attempted to insert it directly as a character trait. "Mind games" was the typical safety hatch, but WWE knew enough of what they were whipping up before scaling things down.
As if to prove the hypocrisy at the heart of their rebuffed claims of homophobia, Goldust's 1996 babyface turn came when he proudly declared that he was straight. They weren't saying the quiet part loud, exactly, but they weren't whispering it either.