In fact, wrestling is probably more affected than this because it never bloody stops, and because it never stops, there’s always something to herald as the televised match of the year or the best promo you’ve heard MJF cut. The edited spin was considered a career high, but was it really better than his manipulative super-villain origin story? Or did it happen more recently? This also swings in the other direction. Because the struggle never stops, it’s rather easy to get bored even with great things. Remember when Blackpool Combat Club, an absolute blood-soaked triumph of a star vehicle, worked one too many three-way matches and it all threatened to become a bit much? Are the fans fickle? Or is the lack of an offseason accelerating the expiration date of wrestling itself? It’s an interesting idea. How does fervent support — so fierce that these fans spend so much of their time rooting for their favorites online in the hope that management will somehow listen — withers and just dies? Does this process happen over time, so much so that you barely notice it until it happens? Sometimes – but there are defining moments… “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This is A) What really happened to Johnny Gargano in the middle of his schedule with Tommaso Ciampa from 2016-2020 and B) The plagiarism purpose behind his heel turn. NXT tried to turn a great grudge feud into an extended saga of comic book movie reach, and the results were awful. The ambition was beyond pretentious. Wrestling fans just wanted to watch the babyface wrestler triumph over the heel wrestler in a storyline that justified its length. It all came to an end with the masturbatory parody of an ‘epic’ fight that was ‘One Final Beat’ in April 2020. It was an unintentionally hilarious story of two former friends agonizing for an hour about what they had become, but what they would they were really being poor actors. By then, it was already over for Gargano. It essentially ended on the November 7, 2018 NXT, when Gargano cut an embarrassing tweezer promo under the delusion that he was the Winter Soldier, when in fact he was Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 3. The story was so removed from what it was that Adam Cole grew into a fan favorite role. Gargano’s incredible performance at TakeOver: New York was incredible. he was never the top babyface again. To his credit, Gargano sensed that too, and reinvented himself as a comedic laugher — only on purpose, this time — as the leader of the Way faction toward the end of his WWE run.
