Short guy with an athletic build who wears short boots and loves backbreakers. What's not to love, right? Roderick Strong's a great case of a guy who has been great with execution of maneuvers almost since day one. As well, he's so gifted that he's been the OTHER guy in great matches with tons of other performers throughout his career. It's only as of late though as the World Champion of Pro Wrestling Guerrilla where he's really come into his own. Yes, PWG's a show that's typically held in front of less than 500 people in building in the suburbs of Los Angeles. However, their shows are easily the longest spreading viral successes in independent wrestling, so in seeing the company be able to consistently bring in top foreign names from all over the world and also have the eyes of WWE squarely on them, it's more than okay to say that their World Champion is great. Like Dean Ambrose in WWE, Roddy's a guy who elevates the entire show around him as much as he elevates himself. When you add considerably more to a cast that could appear to be this niche-marked, hungry and rag-tag crew than you subtract from it, that makes you truly great.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.
