Let the Heels Be Heels

By David Crush | Wrestling | 7 min read

Editorial cartoon: in a dim navy living room, a snarling wrestler in a black vest shouts and points out of an old boxy television set while a fan, seen from behind, leans toward the screen. A hand in a navy suit sleeve reaches in from the right edge of the frame and turns the TV's volume knob down. On the screen behind the heel, a small wrestler leaps off the top of a tall ladder over the ring.

Max Caster debuted at TNA’s Bound for Glory and was fired less than 24 hours later over a line in his entrance rap. I already wrote up the show and what I think of how TNA handled it. I am not going to relitigate that here.

I also want to be clear about something up front. Max Caster is not my example of a great heel. He barely got any heat for that line. That is not the point. The point is what the firing tells every other heel watching: say something that actually offends people, and you are gone.

That is backwards. Heels are supposed to offend. The heat is what you pay for. The payoff is watching them lose. When a front office punishes the offense instead of booking it into a comeuppance, it is stepping on the oldest way this business has ever made money.

What a Heel Is For

A heel should be someone you hate to see pop up on your screen. Your stomach should turn a little when his music hits. And you keep watching anyway, because there is a chance that tonight is the night he finally gets what is coming to him.

That is it. That is the whole engine. Jim Cornette has said it better than anyone: the bad guy finally gets his ass kicked, and people pay to see it. I went through his version in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling. It is not complicated. It is basic human psychology, and wrestling has spent more than a century exploiting it and profiting off it. Make them hate him. Make them wait. Then give them the beating they paid for.

Imagine Telling the Green Shadow to Tone It Down

In the 1940s, the Green Shadow, a masked heel in the Tennessee territory, made Nashville crowds so hot that the cops working security at his shows demanded a raise from the promoters. I wrote that whole bill out last month.

Now imagine Roy Welch, the promoter, calling the Shadow into the office and telling him to tone it down. Some people in the stands are upset. Can you maybe not be so hateful?

He would have been laughed out of the building. The upset people in the stands were the business. They came back the next week to see the Shadow lose. The angrier they were, the more tickets they bought.

The Front Office Is the New Heel-Killer

Today, when a heel finally gets over as somebody people genuinely cannot stand, the front office gets nervous and pulls him back. Soften the promos. Cut the line. Apologize. Release him.

I get that companies have sponsors and TV partners now. I get that there are lines a performer should not cross. But there is a difference between a line that should not be crossed and a heel doing his job. Promoters keep mixing the two up, and every time they do, they step on their own ability to draw money. It tells me a lot of the people running wrestling do not understand how wrestling has traditionally made money. You do not sell tickets by making sure nobody is upset. You sell tickets by upsetting people and then promising to fix it.

Where the Heat Goes When the Fans Know

There is a wrinkle, though, and I think it matters. Fans know it is scripted now. Everybody does. So when the heat does not have a heel to land on, it goes looking for whoever the fans think is writing the script.

The 2014 Royal Rumble is the best example I know. Batista came back to WWE that January as a babyface and won the Rumble in Pittsburgh. Daniel Bryan was the hottest act in the company, and he was not even in the match. When Rey Mysterio came out at number 30, the crowd booed him, because he was not Bryan. By the end they were cheering Roman Reigns, a heel at the time, over Batista. Then they booed the win. Aaron Oster of the Baltimore Sun wrote that the boos were “stronger than any Rumble winner I can remember, including when Mr. McMahon won in 1999.”

Nothing in the storyline gave anyone a reason to hate Batista. He had not cheated anybody. He had not insulted anybody. He caught that heat because the fans saw him as the front office’s guy, shoved down their throats while their guy was held down. Batista said it himself later:

It wasn’t like a normal response. It was almost like a personal attack. It had to do with factors that were not in my control.

And here is the part that proves the point. WWE eventually leaned into it. Batista turned heel, and Bryan beat him and Randy Orton for the title in the main event of WrestleMania XXX. The crowd lost its mind. Real heat, real comeuppance, real money.

So heels have to be good to get heat now, because the fans know. The old cheap heat is not going to cut it. A shock line in a rap is cheap heat, and Caster’s barely landed. That does not mean heels should stop being offensive. It means the offense has to come from the character and be aimed at the babyface and at us. Give us a real reason to hate the man in the ring, or we will go find somebody in a suit to hate instead.

The Stunt Treadmill

What has filled the gap is danger. Everybody watching knows and accepts that it is choreographed, which makes the whole thing feel like a weird metaperformance. So the pop comes from the stunt instead of the story. Jim Cornette put it this way in a 2009 column:

Twenty years ago, we PRETENDED to hurt each other, and the fans believed it. Today, we REALLY DO hurt each other, and the fans think it’s fake. Who are the marks now??

Darby Allin is the clearest current case. He has built a career on falls that look like they should kill him. In November 2025, in a Continental Classic match against Kevin Knight on AEW Dynamite, a guardrail shifted under him during a backflip. He could barely stand for the rest of the match, collapsed in the back, and went to the hospital with a head injury. He was out of the tournament. Here is how Darby described the spot later:

It was a nothing in the grand scheme of things.

A backflip off a guardrail is nothing now. That is where the baseline is. When the pop comes from the stunt, every stunt has to top the last one, and when you keep having to one-up yourself, it gets damn near impossible to get it right every time. This August, AEW wrote that real injury into an angle with Knight. On commentary: “This is how Kevin Knight hospitalized Darby in the Continental Classic last year.” The real hurt became the storyline, sold to an audience that already thinks it is fake. I wrote about what that bill costs the people paying it. I will not repeat it here.

Count Your Money

Let the heels be heels. Let them get some heat. Let us get to hate them. Then let us watch them get beat. And count your money.

That is literally all I want. A man I cannot stand pops up on my screen, and I do not change the channel.

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