Thread: "To be a great babyface, first you have to be a great heel"
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Old 01-29-2015, 03:01 PM   #31
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Quote:
Originally Posted by XL View Post
I guess what I'm trying to get at is;

To be a top, top guy (Austin, Rock, Cena) you almost have to be a heel, one who eventually gets over on in-ring credentials or an interesting character (or both), a guy that the crowd get behind and the company then push.

A heel who the fans get behind, turns face and the company then push > a face that the company strap a rocket to.
Hulk Hogan was a face that had the company strap a rocket to and he's the most famous wrestler ever.

It's just much harder from a basic fundamental point of view, it doesn't matter if it's a WWE audience or a town hall audience, as a face you are a lot more limited in what you can do. It's just percentages, it just so happens that most top faces from the last 20 years have been heels in the past. The problem nowadays isn't that you have to be a great heel first, it's that guys are either too inexperienced to pull it off because they're put into the spot too quickly, things get switched around so much they just happen to have been a heel before or there aren't enough "organic" things going on. Anybody can make people dislike them, getting everybody to love you is a completely different game. Hogan, Warrior, Diesel, Bret, Jeff Hardy, Batista etc, these guys were never "great" heels before their top line babyface runs.

A guy like Finn Balor could very realistically come up onto TV and with a bit of luck find himself in a Daniel Bryan babyface top spot without 90% of WWE's audience having ever known he was once a (very good) heel because he has the tools and you just can't say that about most of the guys that come through now. If you have the tools and experience to be a top babyface, you'll be a good babyface, simple as. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past, good faces don't get cheered because fans remember their good heel work/character, only a small portion of the crowd that think that way. If you wrote a list of all the decent heel characters you can think of and all the decent face characters you can think of, the heel list would be much much longer. That should pretty much tell you everything.
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