10 Wrestlers Audiences Weren't Ready For
7. Orange Cassidy
Not mass audiences anyway. And especially not when judged by the response his AEW signing in 2019 drew.
A unique but not-unique-to-wrestling-if-you-really-think-about-it character, Orange Cassidy was a surface level extreme slacker with onion-like layers underneath that served as his greatest weapons.
He unleashed bombs without ever detonating his own fuses, mostly by lowering the expectations of both his opponents and the punters to such a degree that anything he offered was amazing. That "anything" ran the gamut between featherlight shin kicks to death-defying dives with his hands in his pockets didn't entirely matter. What mattered was that this impossibly chilled out brooding figure had a physical and mental arsenal few were prepared for.
Never was this more evident than in a truly magic bit of business with PAC and AEW Revolution 2020. A phenomenal spectacle finds the 'BASTARD' unable to figure this puzzle of a human out, before he eventually finds himself in the fight of his life. On a card with some fairly transcendent action, the crowd are arguably loudest for this, enriched as they are to something so ostensibly silly.