There's something to be said about a guy who just "knows" how the wrestling business works and accepts their fate long before even getting released. In a different era, the team of Hawkins and Ryder would have been easily comparable to the team of the Young Stallions, Jim Powers and Paul Roma. Roma and Powers were 1987's hot young team, but after an initial run, lost steam, broke up, and moved on to singles careers largely spent as enhancement talent. Ryder is similar to Roma, a handsome young babyface given the opportunity of a lifetime (Roma's 1991 Four Horsemen induction being similar to Ryder's big-time run as "Long Island Iced Z"), while Hawkins is similar to Powers, a skilled grappler able to make other talents look tremendous, but not favored enough by the office to get a major push. Having opened the Create-A-Wrestler Training School in March 2014, it's clear that Hawkins (the recipient of numerous start-and-stop pushes (and thus the owner of some of the sweetest gear in the company) saw the writing on the wall and was un-surprised by his release. A case of a solid talent getting caught up in the numbers game, his release may actually be a great asset to his new business aspirations.
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.
