Randy Orton? Yay or Nay?

With reports of a heel turn imminent for the monotone one, where do you stand on the wrestler, character, and the hypothetical move to turn him?

I’ll confess where Orton’s concerned; I descend into the blind fan boy mentality. As with your favourite James Bond, he was the one I grew up with and therefore the sentimental favourite by default, and where others found the bland canvas which gave birth to Randy Boreton, I discovered heel wrestling perfection. And as such, converting this psychologically damaged monster who’d single headedly held my interest in WWE since 2007 into a hyper bipolar abomination of his former self was the cause of my personal sabbatical before Punk’s revolution racked me back in like many others. And unless any heel turn arrangements involve butchering the foundations of his character in recent times, that’s the direction you’d expect him to go back down once he established any change.

As far as his portrayal of the bad guy goes, the legend killer was alright, the juvenile douche was ok, but the methodical psycho was as good a character performance to hit the mark of ‘disturbingly corrupt’ as I’ve seen within WWE’s universe (Eddie Guerrero’s rendition of the same basic formula in his feud against Mysterio was also exceptional). When built up properly, that’s the heel that only gathers personal strength and fan momentum win lose or draw, as made evident by Eddie’s feud with Mysterio being founded on his failure to defeat Rey. And unlike many other typical wrestling templates, it doesn’t require expressionistic mic skills or a larger than life personality, but a discipline and demeanour which projects something everyone responds to, calm authority. When Michael Myers does nothing but patiently stalk his victims, biding his time we translate that as dominance where we perceive Freddy Kruger’s constant narcissism as a sign of inferiority. Orton didn’t need to be verbally charismatic to transmit strength, nor did he need to wrestle at a ratio of 5 impact moves per second, his character at the time was so far beyond needing to sell anything but his ideology. When he cut a robotic ‘Boreton’ promo, his body language, eyes and facial expressions were projecting one thing – dominance (it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it). When he had his opponent in the headlock for 2 minutes straight, stumped out at stray limbs one at a time, looked into the camera/crowd with a out of body look in his eyes he was projecting one thing – dominance. It’s these demonstrations of discipline and control which make that Randy Orton character carry more presence than this current CM Punk character for example who does nothing but flash his metaphorical knifes for fingers in our face.

One of the most frustrating things about the nature of his face turn was it made a point of reversing pretty much everything I admired about that particular Orton character, suddenly he’s moving across the ring like a turbo jet, adopting his own 5 move exploding heart technique, smiling like a sycophant. I eagerly anticipate the day this fool once again gets adsorbed by the demon which kept me invested in WWE two years after they’d mentally driven me away