8 Wrestlers Who Tried To Look Cool (...& Immediately ATE Sh*t)

If you’re a fan of WWE or AEW, you’re better off not getting a Twitter account if you’re not already cursed enough to be addicted to it. 

You can’t praise one promotion without drawing “shill” accusations; you can’t criticise the other without drawing shill accusations. Grifters dominate the landscape. You cannot escape their influence. Even if you diligently mute or block each and every one of them, the people who can’t resist the bait, the accounts that otherwise are worth the follow, will quote them and remind you of the bad faith currency that powers the economy of the app. If you’re a wrestling fan, Twitter is only vaguely worthwhile as an experience at the worst possible time. When a wrestler passes away, you’ll see beautiful obituaries, clips, reminders that these talents truly were exceptional. Elsewhere, it’s bleak. The place is so toxic now that all of the great posters of yore - Kevin Owens, Becky Lynch, Chuck Taylor, Stokely Hathaway - either post infrequently or have abandoned the hellscape altogether. The good old days of Wrestling Twitter are gone. The wrong voices got amplified; the better ones, understandably, could not cope with the noise. The thing about Twitter, or X as nobody calls it, is that every thousandth post is incredible. Do not condemn the addicted; how can one criticise them when posts like this exist? 

‘Check this sh*t out motherf*cker [I slide one foot out from under me and fall on my ass, it’s not clear what move I was trying to do]’.

This, a legendary post from the late, great Mike Fossey, is not only a fantastic take-down of main character hubris; it is a perfect description of a very specific brand of pro wrestling botch. A wrestler often does a body language variant of “Check this sh*t out motherf*cker” because part of wrestling psychology is to get the audience to audibly hold their breath before popping. 

This…does not always work. 

Matt Sydal hasn’t enjoyed the best of AEW careers. Plagued by a very serious injury, after contending with a non-stop influx of generational signings, Sydal, amongst the most underrated and influential wrestlers of his era, has been forgotten. It’s a shame, since his handful of contributions were outstanding. 

Sydal might be the ultimate hidden gem wrestler in AEW history. His May 27, 2022 Rampage effort against Bryan Danielson was a technical ripper. He was amongst CM Punk’s first AEW opponents in a simple, elegant Rampage match in which he wiped the smile off his face with a very witty body slam reversal. His November 10, 2021 tag match alongside Lee Moriarty versus Dante Martin and Lio Rush might be the most unexpectedly great match in Dynamite history. It was never going to be bad, given the talent involved, but it was the sort of special match that takes you aback at just how much the reaction intensifies, sequence by sequence, in the building. Fair play to him for reaching the odd peak after such a staggeringly terrible start.  

Sydal debuted at the omni-cursed All Out 2020 pay-per-view in which so much went wrong. All Out was a sobering reminder that perhaps we should not have escaped the horrors of that year on a weekly basis. 

Sydal attempted to make an immediate and literal splash by noticing and pointing at a prone Powerhouse Hobbs. He was going to blast him with the Shooting Star Press, but what’s funny about it is that Sydal does this ‘Third Eye’ thing, like he can see things that other people can’t. At All Out, he couldn’t see a foot in front of him; he slipped and fell right on his kidney, missing Hobbs entirely.