10 Wrestlers Who Gambled On A New Character
4. Hangman Page: The Anxious Millennial Cowboy
This really does qualify as a gamble.
Historically, the babyface only ever showed weakness when he was outnumbered or was bleeding out. They started the matches hot, as the better man, and only struggled when the baddie cheated.
Pro wrestling operates in a macho context that rewarded traditional masculine norms. The archetype wasn't fixed - Bruno Sammartino was the humble everyman, Hulk Hogan the do-gooding patriot with superhuman powers of recovery, Steve Austin the anti-authority renegade - but none of these men were vulnerable. Only when they were physically ambushed did they draw sympathy.
Life is different - i.e. drastically more sh*tty - now. Hangman Page, a man who suffers from anxiety, sensed this and embraced a new, empathetic approach to pro wrestling storytelling removed from his old generic throwback heel bit.
He was tortured by his own failure and was left isolated when his support network abandoned him at All Out 2019, and from there, his arc was seminal. He was withdrawn, cold, almost rude at points, but he was projecting. He was savvy enough to use irreverent humour as a defence mechanism, which got him over big, and his quest was so rich with emotion that he became one of the very few wrestlers to feel like an actual, relatable human being.
This betrays the point of wrestling, but Page has banished that to the past tense.