10 Wrestlers Who Will Change The Business Over The Next 10 Years
4. Hangman Page
In the pro wrestling of yore, the good guy (technically accomplished, rugged, or just hard and brave and humble as f*ck) would fight the bad guy (vicious cheat, or, because America, preening or foreign).
Those lines no longer exist, and haven't existed for a while. Even Hulk Hogan was a bit of a glory-hogging bitching complainer. But the fashionable antiheroes of the '90s, whether they bent the rules for the f*ck of it or not, were all drawn in the same alpha male image. Wrestling, for all of its artifice and pomp, was still geared towards the blokes and appealed to them by pushing aspirational men.
Hard men. Tough bastards who faced struggle, but overcame it when they won the gold. But that struggle while identifiable wasn't relatable, beyond Steve Austin anyway. We were all still in thrall to a live action cartoon.
Hangman Page is different. This is a man who captured the World Tag Team Title and still doubted himself because anxiety and depression can't reconcile achievement by their very nature. Page is currently mapping a story of mental health struggle rich in detail to an extent that you must pay the same attention to the pro wrestling weekly soap as you would prestige television.
Page might make all of this worthy and acclaimed one day, and if he doesn't, the person who does will steal his work as the Velvet Underground of 21st century wrestling.