Why Dean Ambrose is the gold mine WWE let slip away
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and they do not necessarily represent the views of Sportskeeda.
It’s no secret that WWE have been struggling to keep fans invested in the week to week programming of both Raw and SmackDown Live. There have been several reasons for that over the years. One of them being that WWE has not had a name to carry them through these dark ages of decreasing viewership. A name that will be the flag bearer for the company, in the same way, the likes of Hulk Hogan, 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin and John Cena were in their respective eras.
One name the company did try to push to the moon and beyond was Roman Reigns, but he was and always will be the wrong choice for WWE’s top babyface. If anything, the company should have tried to make Reigns’ Shield counterpart Dean Ambrose (now Jon Moxley) as the next big thing in this current era.
Ambrose was the gold mine Vince McMahon never knew he was sitting on and is just one name in a long list of wrestlers WWE has had in their books over the years who had the potential to be something more in the company.
The problem of lack of depth of characters in WWE is one that has persisted for many years now. If more time was spent developing Ambrose’s character, we could have seen him become the biggest name in WWE since John Cena.
Each Superstar in WWE today is given a nickname which rarely counts for anything. Ambrose’s moniker of “The Lunatic Fringe” was one where WWE could have done something amazing as Ambrose could have portrayed every part the moniker describes. Ambrose looked like a lunatic and could act like one if it was required.
The problem was that WWE never went far enough with his character. If Stone Cold drove a beer truck out to the ring in 1999 to give The Corporation a beer bath, why couldn’t Ambrose do something similar to drive The Authority crazy? Isn’t that something a lunatic would do? There are so many different things that WWE could have done to make Ambrose come across as a crazy, no-nonsense babyface you can’t control.
Ambrose could have been the modern-day, rebellious anti-hero version of Steve Austin. Some say CM Punk could have been the same thing, which is probably true, but Ambrose edges out Punk and even Austin due to his comedic timing. Ambrose could have made Vince McMahon many more millions had they only seen the potential in him.
Now Ambrose has his career as Jon Moxley in the hands of a new employer in Tony Khan at AEW (All Elite Wrestling). It is now up to Khan and even Ambrose himself to understand how far he can go with the character he could have played when he was still in WWE.