9 Wrestling Heels Who Were Totally Justified
1. Cane Dewey And The Anti-Hardcore Legend
The best ever example of a wrestler playing the role of bad guy with a completely justifiable motivation came in Extreme Championship Wrestling, with one of the single greatest heel promos of any generation. Mick Foley, as Cactus Jack, had been asked to turn heel against Tommy Dreamer, who'd finally begun to get over as a babyface.
The only problem was, this was ECW. How on earth do you turn heel in a promotion where the babyfaces are the heels? You turn babyface, of course well, sort of. Foley devised a promo, based upon his wife's visceral shoot reaction to seeing a sign in an ECW crowd saying 'Cane Dewey' (Dewey was their then three-year-old son) that would help to get Dreamer over even more with the hardcore faithful. More than that, it would also serve to change his own alignment in the process, and for an apparently entirely justifiable reason.
He portrayed his Cactus Jack character - a genuine innovator of violence, and the recent winner of the IWA King Of The Deathmatch tournament - as a cult hero to ECW fans, who he claimed asked too much of their heroes in the squared circle and gave nothing back in return except scorn when those heroes fell short. Here's the relevant sections transcribed:
Cane Dewey. Cane Dewey. Dewey Foley is a three-year-old little boy--you sick sons of b*tches. You ripped out my heart, you ripped at my soul, you took everything I believed in and you flushed it down the damn toilet. You flushed my heart--you flushed my soul--and now it sickens me to see other people make the same mistake You don't expect me to be bitter? Tommy, when you open up your heart, when you open up your soul and it gets sh*t on, it tends to make Jack a very mean boy. And so, I say to you--before I take these aggressions out on you, to look at your future and realize that this hardcore life is a lie, that these letters behind me are a blatant lie, that those fans who sit there and say, 'He's hardcore, he's hardcore, he's hardcore,' wouldn't p*ss on you if you were on fire, you selfish son of a bitch!
As is the case with many of the best wrestling characters, the promo tapped into some issues that Foley was considering for himself: about his future in the wrestling business, about the unrealistic demands beginning to be made of so-called hardcore matches, about the diminishing returns that come after you can't up the ante any further.
It's an exaggerated, and entirely accurate, representation of the attitudes of most devoted fans of garbage wrestling as a phenomenon, even today. Brilliantly, Foley would change his wrestling style to reflect his new heel persona too. How do you work a heel character in a promotion that loves heels? Work slow, methodical technical matches to wind the fans up, and really get under their skin by tearfully telling them that hated WCW boss Eric Bischoff is a genius. Beautiful.