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Booked to Lose: Three Wrestlers Who Became Stars Anyway

How Zack Ryder, AJ Lee and Kane Went From Jobbers to Stars

Most wrestling careers that start at the bottom of the card stay there. You debut as a body for someone else to beat: the cocky loudmouth with nothing behind the mouth, the coward heel who bails on every fight, the comedy act nobody is meant to take seriously, the third man in a tag team that exists to lose. WWE has filed away more promising acts than it ever pushed, and the file rarely gets reopened.

A few names climb out anyway, and they almost never do it the way the office drew up. One of the three below built his own audience with a webcam when nobody would book him. One was handed a rocket by the right partner and then refused to give the spotlight back. One simply waited, through years of junk gimmicks, until the angle finally fit. Three escapes from the same hole, no two alike.

The crowd is the only scoreboard that has ever counted for much. Chants, merch tables, the noise a name gets when it is not even booked on the show. A writer can script a champion, he cannot script the reaction, and a reaction pulling the other way usually wins given enough time. Fans know this, which is why they treat the product like a market.

They call who wins the Rumble, who gets the next push, which forgotten undercard guy the building will drag into the main event whether the writers like it or not. Reading a room and backing an outcome is a habit that does not stay put, and the fans who carry it over to real sportsbooks just want options worth the time, which is why TipsGG selected best sites for Dutch players and spared them the trial and error. These three, though, were backed by the crowd long before any bookmaker or booker came near them.

Zack Ryder built his own spotlight

Zack Ryder, real name Matt Cardona, is the closest thing here to a tragedy with a happy ending. A genuine veteran, on TV losing squashes in the mid-2000s before most fans knew his name. When WWE signed him and Curt Hawkins they ran them as brothers, then as Edge's lackeys in La Familia, and the pair even won tag gold before the office broke them up for no reason beyond the usual Vince-being-Vince shrug.

Then came the rebrand. New hair, new theme, a valet in Rosa Mendes who never looked better than she did standing next to him, and a fresh start on ECW, the third-string brand that doubled as a dumping ground. Ryder was good there. He had a sharp moveset, a loud theme, a look that stood out down to the much-mocked one-legged tights, and a New Jersey bro gimmick he was running before TNA built a whole act around copying the trend. The booking still treated him as filler. He jobbed on Raw, on the C-shows, everywhere, and saw the firing coming.

So he did the thing nobody had really done yet. He pointed a camera at himself and made a web show, mocking his own irrelevance without a drop of self-pity, plugging his catchphrases, shouting out the fans who started showing up for him. Merch moved. Arenas chanted his name for a man who was not on the card, in the same summer CM Punk was rewriting the business, and in raw popularity Ryder was outdrawing nearly everyone but Punk from behind a webcam. Vince never understood it, which is the real heartbreak. The company got shamed into a United States title win over Dolph Ziggler at TLC 2011, the place came unglued, and the push died within weeks. He dropped the belt to Jack Swagger and went back to losing. A fluke Intercontinental title in the WrestleMania 32 ladder match came and went the next night against The Miz; a tag run with Hawkins followed at WrestleMania 35. Cardona left and turned himself into one of the most inventive self-made acts on the independents, the kind of run the wrestling press still follows week to week. The version the crowd had been voting for the whole time.

AJ Lee took the rocket and never gave it back

AJ Lee began with almost nothing and, for a stretch, was the most popular wrestler in the company, full stop, not the most popular woman, the most popular anyone. She came up on the third season of NXT, the one built around the women, mentored by Primo, which told you exactly how much the company expected from her. She lost her season. She got called up regardless and floated, the way most of the women did then, until an alliance with Daniel Bryan handed her a story and a character, and helped birth the Yes chant that turned Bryan into a movement.

She played the sweet girlfriend and then cracked into something far more fun. A wedding blown up at the altar, a betrayal, and by 2012 she was Raw General Manager, one of the few bright spots in a grim year for the product. She was wired into the main event, bouncing Bryan, Punk and even Kane off one another, carrying segments as an unhinged boss who outshone half the locker room. The Divas Championship followed, along with a needling little promo aimed at the reality-show wing of the business and a run beside Big E and Dolph Ziggler. Her shirts sold like nothing else on the women's side. A whole generation grew up on her, some of them main-eventing now, and they point right back at AJ when asked who started it.

Kane waited out everyone

Kane is the patience case, the proof that talent and the right moment can outlast a terrible start. Glenn Jacobs did not debut as the Undertaker's brother. He debuted as Isaac Yankem, Jerry Lawler's evil dentist, a gimmick about as promising as it sounds, saddled with a genuinely great entrance theme it did not deserve. It got worse before it got better. When Scott Hall and Kevin Nash left for WCW and lit the NWO fuse, Vince decided fans loved the gimmicks rather than the men and rolled out a fake Razor Ramon and a fake Diesel, the latter played by Jacobs, a bootleg of a star that fooled no one. The idea died on contact.

Then the door opened. In late 1997, during the famous first Hell in a Cell between the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels, the brother who supposedly burned to death walked through the curtain, and the debut became one of those moments fans still argue about the details of decades later. Through the Attitude era Kane was booked strong and felt it, a credible monster who piled up a strange breadth of titles, world champion among them, WWE Champion for a single day. He feuded with the Undertaker, then teamed with him as the Brothers of Destruction once the biker turn handed Taker a new edge. Unmasking him should have ended the act. Instead it set loose the best actor's face in the company, and Jacobs became one of the strongest promos on the roster. Plenty of junk feuds followed, true, but so did what fans came to call Kane magic, the trick of being thrown beside anyone, a hopeless fit on paper, a Hurricane or an RVD or a Daniel Bryan, and building a great team out of it. Team Hell No was the loudest proof. For the sheer range of championships won under one roof, almost no one matched him.

What links the three

Three routes, one destination. A webcam, a perfectly timed partner, and a decade of waiting all ended in the same place, because the office writes the matches but never the reaction. The crowd handles that, week after week, whether a name is booked or buried. Read which way the room is leaning before the bell, and the rest tends to follow.

 

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