The People vs Dean Ambrose

He’s down, but is he out?

That’s the other problem Dean Ambrose ran into on Smackdown. The main event is damn near empty. Who else was gonna challenge him for the top prize, or even challenge him to put some gusto back into his performances? Ziggler couldn’t do it, Bray is off in a corner talking about The Purge trilogy or something, nobody seems to be able to break out of the mid card (but that’s also pretty thin so maybe leave them there) to step up to the plate.

AJ swooped in and now has all eyes on him, with the best possible opponent for him being John Cena and Cena’s desire to tie Ric Flair’s World Championship record of 16. That right there is a better story that already has a beginning that’s been cemented, a middle that’s just starting, and an end that is one hundred times more interesting than “fans used to like me.”

That’s where we’re at with Ambrose. A fan favorite who coasted his way straight to the bottom of the top. It’s not all for him to shoulder the blame, fans can be a fickle bunch as a rule, but to those of us who have been truly rooting for The Luna Refrigerator, we’re let down. Part of it is the weak in-ring performances, part of it is the lack of competition. Some of it, at least on my end, is not being able to focus on what he’s saying because I’m busy trying to pinpoint exactly where his hairline is today.

Like I said earlier, some fans like to compare Dean to Stone Cold Steve Austin. That’s ridiculous. I compare him to Nirvana’s Nevermind. When most of the mainstream first caught wind of Ambrose, he was Smells Like Teen Spirit. New, exciting, scraggly hair...any real fan knows that’s not the best song on the album, though, and soon we’d grow tired of that song being played all the time, regardless of how good it is.

We had to find a replacement for that particular song to take residence in our ear brains as the actual go-to song we played for ourselves and our cooler friends. What we ended up with was Come As You Are when what we really wanted, what we deserved, was Lounge Act.