Former TNA Wrestling President Scott D’Amore wrote a column for Yahoo! Sports’ Uncrowned, discussing various topics, including why fans cheer for heels in WWE.
D’Amore said, “My trainer, ‘Irish’ Mickey Doyle, once told me about his travels working the Southern loop back in the ’70s as part of his California Hippies tag team with Mike Boyette. They were heels: long, pretty hair; tie-dye outfits; peace signs … you can imagine how hated they were in places like Alabama and Mississippi! But by the time they got to Florida, it all flipped. The surfer types down there saw the Hippies as part of their own counterculture. To these fans, Mickey and Mike were cool, and they got cheered even though they worked as heels. I asked Mickey, ‘Well, what did you do to make ’em stop cheering you?’ And he told me they didn’t do a thing — they let the section of fans who wanted to cheer, cheer. He explained that, if anything, hearing some fans in the arena cheer only made the section of fans who were booing get even louder.”
On when fans cheering heels can go wrong:
“Let the audience make whatever noise it wants, as long as it makes plenty of it. But here’s where it gets tricky: It is OK for your heels to be so bad they are cool. It is not OK for your babyfaces to be presented as so ineffective, so weak, that they look impotent and dumb.”
On babyfaces needing to be able to fight back:
“The nWo were the coolest bad guys in the world and they were always going to get cheers, but the WCW wrestlers were made to look so feckless that fans washed their hands of them. The WCW side was betrayed over and over, conned again and again, and beaten down so often that no one saw it as heroes anymore, but instead as eternal victims. Victims have to fight back — and win — at some point in order to become heroes. The bad guys have to be overwhelmingly powerful at the start, but as the story goes on, the two opposing forces have to balance out; otherwise, the whole thing collapses under its own weight.”
