If you aren’t happy about the main event of the first night of WrestleMania 42 being a program now largely built on Pat McAfee backing Randy Orton in his quest to rid the WWE of Cody Rhodes, you’re wrong. That’s according to JBL, who says actually people being upset about McAfee saying the product sucks is a good thing because he’s getting “real heat.”
As he put it on the Something to Wrestle With podcast:
“He is a bad guy. And the idea that fans online are hating that Pat McAfee is involved and don’t
want him near the main event—that’s the desired result as a heel. Don’t you think? You think it’s just—it blows me away when a guy gets heat like this and people go, ‘Oh, no, no, no—it’s go-away heat.’ No, it’s not. You’re talking about it. If it was go away heat, you wouldn’t be talking about it—you wouldn’t even mention it. It’s real heat. When you come out there and you’re able to strip away the veneer of that person playing a heel to that person just being an asshole and you don’t like them—that’s when you’re winning. The key to being a heel is when they take away the fact that you’re playing a character and they don’t just say, ‘It has nothing to do with Killer Tim Brooks as a wrestler—I don’t like that man. I hate him. I think Pat’s doing an incredible job.’”
On the one hand, yeah, the heel needs to be disliked but the number one job of the heel is not to be hated but to get the babyface over. Is it really getting the babyface over to trash him and the product to such a degree that there’s less interest in actually seeing the match? Ticket sales aren’t moving anywhere near the level they should be, and this isn’t helping.
He is hated, though.
I guess that’s something, right?
