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| A prince too sweet for WWE Photo Credit: WWE.com |
WWE would take a shine to them, and so they were signed to contracts. They quickly moved up from Deep South Wrestling through to the main roster, where they were given shiny new names, Cardona Zack Ryder and Myers Curt Hawkins. They were placed as grunts for Edge and Vickie Guerrero on Smackdown, where they were involved in their fair amount of hijinks in defense of the Ultimate Opportunist. While the team made enough of an impact to be an effective nostalgia act in later years, they were not to last. The team was broken up after La Familia ran its course, and the newly minted singles superstar Zack Ryder was sent to WWE’s reboot of ECW.
When he was next seen in WWE, he had spiked hair, sunglasses, more spray tan than usual. He had tights with one full leg and one leg terminating at the top base of the thigh, but those didn’t last. He had a catchy entrance song and first said a catchphrase that thousands of people at live crowds would soon be chanting along with him. To say Ryder capitalized on the burgeoning popularity of The Jersey Shore would be a bald-faced lie because his premiere in ECW predated the “gym, tan, laundry” reality show’s series launch by seven months. It was the rare case of an act in wrestling, let alone WWE, predicting the zeitgeist rather than reacting to it far too late. It makes me think that Ryder himself was at the forefront of pitching the character, because it wouldn’t have been the first time that he led the proverbial horse to water.
While the ECW character had moderate success as a niche wrestler on a dying brand, it was more of what Ryder did when not in the ring that first got him the attention of the masses at-large. At a time when no one in WWE had a real social media presence, Ryder took to YouTube and created a weekly show called Long Island Iced Z. The show would feature guests like his father and a body guy named The Big O, and in addition to being an entertaining weekly show at a time when wrestling YouTube was ignored mostly by companies and was populated by kids doing top 10 lists of indie wrestlers’ movesets, Ryder was producing extracurricular content. It was, in a word, unprecedented, and people took notice to the point where he became popular.
While you could argue that at any point after the purchase of World Championship Wrestling and the implementation of its invasion story has been Vince McMahon vs. his audience rather than providing for it, the direct antagonistic relationship between McMahon’s booking decisions and the outward fan reaction did not really reach a head until 2014, when CM Punk walked out of the company the night after the Royal Rumble and never looked back. Still, one can look at the fervor Ryder’s YouTube show drummed up and how over he was while not really getting much to do outside of C-show matches after ECW’s demise and see the beginnings of fan unrest. His popularity got so undeniable that he finally got some time to shine on television. It culminated in his first ever singles Championship, winning the United States Championship over Dolph Ziggler at Tables, Ladders, and Chairs in 2011.
After the event, Punk gathered all the young gun champions in the company for a picture. It featured himself as WWE Champion, Ryder as US Champion, Cody Rhodes as Intercontinental, Daniel Bryan as World Heavyweight, Beth Phoenix as Divas, and Kofi Kingston and Evan Bourne as Tag Team Champions. In short order, the picture revealed itself as cursed, and Ryder was the first victim. His story took him from an apparent friend and ally of John Cena’s to the victim of his homewrecking. He had been courting Eve Torres, but she turned on him to get with Cena, who outright refused her. Ryder was collateral damage, being used as fodder for Cena’s feud against Kane. He lost the United States Championship, and no matter what he did online or off, he was forgotten. It didn’t help that prominent other writers at other outlets focused on how misogynist the angle was and blamed Ryder for it instead of creative. “Hoeski” was a gross song, but those same outlets fawned over noted homophobe Brock Lesnar and didn’t really give Cena or other favorite stars flak for when their stories called for them to be sexist pigs. Either way though, much in the same way it wasn’t Ryder’s fault the story took that turn, it’s not the blogs’ fault that he was de-pushed. They were just useful idiots.
McMahon loves talking about “the brass ring,” this mythical thing that supposedly sets the superstars apart from the “good hands.” The ones who end up carrying the company are the ones that go the extra mile and do the things that the complacent wrestlers don’t do. The dirty secret is that there is no such thing as a brass ring. It’s a lie that McMahon tells to keep people running the hamster wheel. There’s nothing he hates more than when someone gets over all on their own. It’s a rebuke of the system, one that puts the figurehead leader at the center of all that is good and the blame on the satellite labor for all that isn’t. It doesn’t matter that Ryder was ahead of the curve on a pop culture thing. It doesn’t matter that he was the Sherpa that guided an entire company’s social media and YouTube strategy up the digital K2. It doesn’t matter he CTRL+F5’d until every eye in the crowd was on him. McMahon didn’t create the phenomenon. Unlike Daniel Bryan, who also forced his way into prominence, Ryder wasn’t one of his favorite wrestlers. He was doomed the moment his title win was over.
But something else happened a few years down the line. He was tasked with getting another tag partner over, this after Hawkins was released into the wilds to open the Create-a-Pro Wrestling Academy and be one of the least likely Pro Wrestling Guerrilla Battle of Los Angeles entrants ever. This time, the raw but enthusiastic Mojo Rawley and Ryder formed the Hype Bros, an obvious vehicle to allow fans time to acclimate to Rob Gronkowski’s best friend. Once again though, the intended effect was not realized as much as it was a chance for crowds to reconnect with Ryder, who by this time was off promoting himself on YouTube and more using the medium to show how much he fuckin’ loved action figures. The spark was there again. He was thrust into the spotlight for a secondary title chase, and when he won again, this time in a ladder match at WrestleMania 32, the place went unglued again. Twice, he was never meant to be more than a bit player in a company that punishes anyone who isn’t to be presented as gears forward. Twice, he stoked the fans to be red hot for him to succeed. And like clockwork, his Intercontinental Championship reign ended as quickly as it started, this time, losing the title to The Miz the next night on RAW. History repeats itself for those who don’t learn from it, and I’m not sure McMahon has learned anything since 1998.
The slow decline over five years can seem like an instant to those cursed to grow up. When you’re a child, weeks seem like months, years like decades. When you’re an adult, things that happen years ago feel fresh in your mind. WrestleMania 32 feels closer in time than it has any right to feel, even as Ryder has been removed five years from real prominence. His Gratitude Era revival run with the rehired (and concurrently fired) Hawkins always felt like time filler, even observing from afar, but there’s always the feeling of grievance in the back of my head when thinking about him, how he should have been a WrestleMania headliner. Even those who enjoyed him can tell me I’m crazy for this, but at the same time, he’s always been a hard worker when in the spotlight, even from his ECW days. The continuation of his raucous cheers even after years of disusing his talents show he has magnetism, and his smile exudes an enthusiasm for wrestling that few have ever had. If the bootstraps conservatives were right about how the world works, there’s no way Zack Ryder would have been released on Wednesday, along with all the others WWE cut for reasons not of their fiduciary health, but pure greed.
I don’t know if Matthew Brett Cardona holds a grudge over the release. I can’t speak for him because I don’t know him. I know WWE did allow him a few moments in the sun and a chance to earn money to buy more wrestling action figures than his prepubescent and teenage selves ever could have dreamed. He’s also far from the only egregious release WWE made yesterday. Sarah Logan leaves the company for which her husband works, similar to Ryder’s girlfriend Chelsea Green staying behind. Lio Rush was cut having never recovered from a silly joke that if a person with lighter skin had made, it would’ve been forgotten within 15 minutes. Drake Maverick allowed WWE to shoot an angle at his wedding for crying out loud. Rusev paid people of his own money when McMahon refused. Heath Slater’s gimmick was that he “had kids,” which at the end of the day wasn’t so much a gimmick either. Every single one of these firings should stick in your craw whether or not you liked any of those wrestlers in WWE because it’s not about them as fungible commodities or “good wrestlers.” It’s about the maltreatment of human beings in a time when they need to be treated at their best.
Even above everything else, Ryder’s treatment feels the shabbiest of them all. In many ways, he was the most groundbreaking wrestler they really ever had in terms of trends where the company would go from the end of the Aughts through the Tens. Even through his influence, he remained red hot whenever he had time to work his magic in front of a live crowd. He was supposed to be the poster child for how you succeed in WWE if you were fortunate enough to make it there. Instead, he became the cautionary tale, the guy that showed that maybe making it to WWE wasn’t fortunate at all. I’m not sure if he’s going to wrestle again. His pal Cody runs All Elite Wrestling, but if you listen to Myers, who will probably return to churning out excellent prospects at his Create-a-Pro school, Cardona is done with wrestling if not with WWE. Still, I can’t think of someone with a more bittersweet legacy in the business, one who got part of what he deserved and was denied so much more, than Ryder.
