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| Sorry, this is just not effective Photo Credit: WWE.com |
I don't know the reason why fans haven't latched onto him, because I am not an expert in extrapolating the mindsets of thousands of people at a time. One guess is his ill-fated babyface turn in the beginning of the year, one that had him extolling the virtues of being American despite the fact he'd been portrayed firmly as a Mexican national his entire career. However, if crowds en masse were taking the side of Tea Party nutjobs over him as a good guy, shouldn't charismatic faces be able to draw heat from him like a stone as a baddie?
My hypothesis lies in the ultimately repetitive way he's been booked, a microcosm of which could be found in the last week of WWE programming. On RAW, a newly rebranded Sin Cara was apparently sent like a lamb to slaughter at the altar of El Patron, but after a medium-length television match, he got the duke. del Rio snapped, and then during his next match on Smackdown, he beat the ever-loving piss out of Kofi Kingston. If that pattern of booking sounds familiar to you, then congratulations, you have been paying attention to Alberto del Rio since his debut.
In between those couplings of matches, del Rio, one of WWE's surest hands in his tenure on the main roster, has been placed into feuds where he just cannot win. He either is matched against a wrestler out of his paygrade, like John Cena or CM Punk, or he's put into utterly degrading feuds where dudes like Sheamus take a dump in his car after stealing it to the repercussion more non-existant than reasoned, rational takes on Miley Cyrus in the mainstream media. IN short, del Rio may be the worst-booked main eventer in recent WWE history.
(Speaking of shit, did WWE give Dean Ambrose a convenient bonus for working 10+ minutes AFTER CM Punk shit his drawers? Did Punk buy him dinner for the rest of the week, especially after going deep on the lateral press with leg hook and sticking his shit-packed ass in his face?)
I wouldn't blame any live crowd sitting through del Rio beating Kingston like he'd just walked in on Kofi having sex with his significant other in sheer silence. They've seen the story before. The cry of wolf has lost all meaning. Kingston himself is at a nadir, having done everything he could do as smiling innocuous good guy and getting into bland feuds with The Miz over being "competitive guys with big attitudes." Gravitas is in short supply in WWE, and apparently, it can only be rationed to a few people at a time.
The shame part is that del Rio is a guy with subtle but vibrant charisma. He's one of the best heel workers they have. He should not be met with hands under thighs, nor should his overness be the subject of countless columns, sucking bandwidth like a remora on the underbelly of a monolithic shark caring not that its blood is being sapped in search for more with which to replace it. He is the poster child for WWE Creative's utter failure to consistently build wrestlers they've been handed with a mandate to place right in the main event.