20 Most Underrated WWE Stars Of The Past 20 Years
8. Fandango
There’s a case to be made that, like his former dancing partner Summer Rae, Curtis Hussey - the former Johnny Curtis in developmental, currently Fandango on the main roster - is one of the most under-represented performers in the company.
A WWE developmental stalwart like Dillinger and the winner of the fourth season of the gameshow version of NXT in 2011, Johnny Curtis never quite got the chances that he was supposedly earmarked for - his mentor, R-Truth, was snatched away to work with the Miz, John Cena and The Rock, leaving him adrift.
Curtis wound up featured on NXT’s chaotic fifth season in 2011 and 2012, subtitled Redemption, where his sleazy jerk persona became one of the more entertaining aspects of the show, displaying killer comic timing and character work alongside his on-off onscreen girlfriend Maxine. The following spring, he debuted on the main roster proper - after months of vignettes - as Fandango, and the rest is badly booked history.
“You’re not even a real journalism.” Brilliant.
That’s been the story of his entire WWE career, though: inconsistent, careless creative, with waning audience interest shored up almost exclusively by his subtly magnetic portrayal of the Fandango character. An egotistical, supposedly smooth operator with hints of the Latin Lothario/gigolo type to him, dancer Fandango was one of those retrograde WWE characters that harked back to the old school WWF wrestler-with-a-day-job gimmicks of the eighties and nineties.
Like Ronnie Arneill, Curtis Hussey is a solid, unfussy veteran wrestler (in his seventeenth year in the business!) who makes up for his lack of flash and pizazz with significant charisma and panache, working the crowd like the pro he is. Given the right storyline and TV time, there’s no question that Fandango - or Johnny Curtis, before him - could have gotten over with the WWE crowd, because Hussey is just that damn good.
Fortunately, he’s now paired with the equally talented Tyler Breeze (a latterday NXT standout who also got lost in the shuffle) in a tag team pairing from Heaven, Breezango. Their backstage skits and promos are some of the funniest stuff that WWE does at the moment - let’s hope that this finally goes somewhere for these two talented performers.