When done right, the act of the unexpected heel turn is one of the most brilliant things in the wonderful world of pro wrestling. However, more often than not, the move is wildly predictable, and the air is let out of the balloon far too early to get a proper pop when it all blows up.
The heel turn is truly a lost art that is often underappreciated because it occurs so damn often these days that we collectively roll our eyes when it happens.
Two decades ago, the New World Order storyline in WCW executed one of the finest heel turns in the history of pro wrestling when Hulk Hogan stopped telling kids to eat their vitamins and dropped his 330-pound ham hock of a leg across the jugular of Macho Man Randy Savage at Bash at the Beach 1996.
Pro wrestling fans gasped, and WCW reaped the benefits of new engagement because the idea of a pre-racist Hulk Hogan ditching his Hulkamaniacs to go "Hollywood" was something we never fathomed.
And then practically everybody joined the NWO, and it started to feel like an M. Night Shyamalan film in which you just sit through Nitro and wait for the swerve to happen. What made the NWO special essentially ran it — and WCW — into the ground.
Swerves aren’t fun when you expect them. It’s like playing hide-and-seek with a kid who repeatedly hides under the table and audibly giggles. We see you — and it’s no longer fun to find you.
WWE was bitten by a similar bug and went all "let’s turn them heel because they won’t expect it" until we expected it. And it happened over and over and over again. To this day, nobody knows the exact number of heel turns The Big Show has gone through. All we know is that infinity never saw a number that high.
Since the infamous Hogan heel turn, we’ve had our fair share of swerves that shook us to our core. Mark Henry’s teary-eyed, salmon suit retirement speech is one that sticks out because nobody really saw it coming, especially not John Cena, who was slammed into oblivion.
The Rock was a white meat babyface when he entered Survivor Series 1998 and exited as the company’s biggest heel when he aligned with the McMahons. Although what followed stunk to high hell, Stone Cold Steve Austin ending an ultra-hot WrestleMania X7 match with The Rock by shaking hands with Vince McMahon blew our pants off and certainly would have broken Twitter if such a thing existed. Unfortunately, we had to settle with using our Cingular anytime minutes to call our friends because that’s the closest thing we had to social media in 2001. And AOL chat rooms. But that's neither here nor there.
Recently, Tommaso Ciampa’s soul-crushing annihilation of D.I.Y. partner Johnny Gargano and Seth Rollins's meme-worthy destruction of The Shield were the chef’s kiss of heel turns.
Now, you can add this one to the list.
Let’s discuss the setup: After Finn Balor was blitzed by The Fiend at SummerSlam, the first WWE Universal champion (seriously, that happened) popped up at Full Sail for the Oct. 2 episode of NXT. The fans exploded when they saw that the Demon King had returned to the place where he consistently elicited "holy s—" reactions during his epic TakeOver entrances.
The skeptics wondered aloud where Balor would fit into NXT’s current landscape. Was this a quick detour to refresh his character before he would debut back on Raw or SmackDown and be relegated to mid-card purgatory again? Nobody knew if it was just a cheap trick to yank viewers away from AEW Dynamite.
In retrospect, something much bigger was in the works.
Balor had a quick interview announcing that he was back home and then vanished from television for the next few weeks, as it appeared that NXT was laying the groundwork for their annual TakeOver: WarGames network special. The Undisputed Era beat the finely coiffed hair off Velveteen Dream, Tommaso Ciampa stalked Adam Cole so that he could repossess "Goldie" and Johnny Gargano was kind of milling about trying to figure out who his friends and enemies were.
As the weeks went by, we collectively started fantasy booking WarGames by using our flawed pro wrestling logic. Fortunately, pro wrestling logic is flawed because pro wrestling is plagued with predictable booking. We thought we outsmarted the booking (again) when the Oct. 23 edition of NXT was coming to a close. Roderick Strong weaseled his way into retaining the NXT North American title in a hoss match against Keith Lee and Dominik Dijakovic.
The Undisputed Era rushed to the ring to annihilate Lee, which led some of us to believe that an "enemies-turned-friends" storyline was in the works where Lee and Dijakovic would join forces after beating the ever-loving piss out of each other across multiple promotions.
That didn’t happen.
During the fracas, Ciampa and his trusty crutch made his way down to the ring in that slow, brooding, "you-know-I’m-going-to-beat-y’all-up" kind of way that Sting used to annihilate the NWO with a single baseball bat while the goons wait their turn to get hit.
That, too, didn’t happen.
Clearly outnumbered and waiting for something as Undisputed Era’s Bobby Fish made sure to remind Ciampa that it was four against one, Johnny Gargano soon joined the side of his frenemy.
We wondered if Gargano was a complete idiot due to his rivalry with Cole and the uncertainty that Ciampa was on his side. Some of us waited for Ciampa to turn on Gargano again while others waited to see if Lee and Dijakovic would even the score and properly set up WarGames.
But that didn’t happen either.
The Undisputed Era again motioned that they had Gargano and Ciampa outnumbered, which was a sign that another wrestler would join their side. The obvious answer was Velveteen Dream, who was just pounded into a pulp a week ago.
Nope.
Finn Balor’s music hit, and Full Sail exploded. Now, this was a dream match with Ciampa, Balor and Gargano against The Undisputed Era at WarGames. As Balor — in all black — made his way down to the ramp, most of us thought that Dream would be the final man to join and one of those long staredowns to get fans excited would ensue. Mauro Ranallo would gift us with a pop culture one-liner of excitement as NXT went off the air.
Nope.
The man who has only been a babyface since joining the house that McMahon built pulled off the smoothest pump fake in recent memory as he began to remove his jacket and, in one beautiful motion, Pele kicked Gargano in the face.
No pop culture references from Ranallo. It was a simple "what the hell?" as Gargano sold the kick like a million bucks and fell stiff like Nate Quarry when Rich Franklin punched his lights out at UFC 56.
There was no single tell that this swerve was coming, and we were so caught up in the bait-and-switch storylines that we never realized Balor was undergoing a character change.
After you get over your own feelings of shock and awe, take a look at the crowd reactions. When a heel turn is brilliantly executed, there’s a brief silence as people process exactly what’s happening.
Sometimes, we are anticipating the heel turn and just react because we wanted it so bad (see: Bayley). That’s not the same thing. Or, a character flips and flops so much or has a checkered history with a character that you kind of see it coming and are just waiting for it to happen (see: Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn in NXT).
But this was pitch-perfect because Balor has been the consummate babyface who was returning to his stomping grounds. Without a previous heel turn to reference, fans truly didn’t see this coming. It also helped that the fog of multiple storylines and a looming WarGames special had properly subverted expectations.
Even better, those of us who remember Douchebag Devitt in NJPW as the originator of Bullet Club felt really stupid (in a good way) for not seeing this coming. Because, honestly, that was always the best version of Finn Balor. And now The Demon character has a whole new spin because the body paint isn’t necessarily a gimmick for an indestructible babyface — it’s a symbol pure evil.
Now, that’s how you execute a heel turn. When it's done properly, there is truly nothing like it.
