10 Wrestlers Who Improved At Something They Were Terrible At
Roman Reigns, Will Ospreay, Triple H, and other wrestlers who crushed glaring weaknesses.
There's hope for the ultra-green cast of NXT 2.0 yet.
Perhaps one day the Tiffany Strattons, Von Wagners, Lash Legends, and Xyon Quinns of the roster will marry character to skill, bringing them to the level of the Roderick Strongs and Alba Fyres. It's called "developmental" for a reason. These rookies might not be TV-ready yet, but Triple H adding a touch of black and gold to 2.0's technicolour palette should help immensely.
Perhaps there is hope also for Jinder Mahal, who may one day learn how to work the first three minutes of any given match without boring us sh*tless with a chinlock, or for Roman Reigns, who may one day realise that the best means of getting fans on side isn't by lashing out at them on Twitter for voicing incredibly reasonable protests.
Perhaps, one day, the otherwise excellent Seth Rollins will perform an actual suicide dive, rather than an airborne high-five.
There is hope for that lot because through hard work, the help of friends you later convince your wife to castrate on television, and the most bizarre and singular example of WWE's main roster thrashing NXT (!), there is famous precedent...
10. Bret Hart - Promos
One of the most bewitching technical storytellers of all time - his work was so captivating that he conditioned an entire generation to sit diligently through 25-minute epics - Bret Hart was a... perfunctory promo in the babyface role. He was presented as the embodiment of a cool customer, with his shades and leather jacket, but when programmed with somebody actually cool, Razor Ramon, the contrast was as clear as Nia Jax's unsuitability to professional wrestling.
Ahead of their King Of The Ring '93 first-round clash, Razor, yes, oozed machismo in the TV build, economically telling "Gene Mean" to "shut up" about a dozen times. Bret, so smooth between the ropes, tripped over his words. "For the, for the longest time I've, I've known that I'm the number one seed," he said, with Shawn Michaels presumably pretending to yawn just out of shot.
This all changed in 1997.
Genuinely frustrated - "Frustrated isn't the godd*mned word for it!" - Hart unleashed a promo game that was at once authentic, cutting, and teeming with unrestrained fury. Hart was a total revelation on the stick, shouting his brilliance from the rooftops, all but grabbing us by the throat to force respect out of his turncoat American public.
Executing a difficult dual babyface and heel role excellently, his babyface game, quite fittingly, ascended when he travelled to the Great White North.