This story isn’t as much about where Damien Sandow has been as much as it is about where he is headed. The former WWE star left the company after years of misuse and misdirection, and in many opinions, the waste of a solid talent with tremendous microphone skills.
I once said when you look at Sandow in the ring, you see a little bit of Lanny Poffo and Nick Bockwinkle. If you judge his career on those two former competitors, it’s a pretty good bet he had some success over the years. If you judge Sandow – or Aron Stevens - by his tenure in WWE, then it was a good trip.
To be honest, Sandow was a mid-card wrestler who could have been so much more – even after he won the Money in the Bank match in 2013, he was nothing more than a character, one who would have thrived in the 1980s cartoonish still of WWF.
Sandow began with the company in 2002 – which tells you something about how obscure he has been in terms of talent versus substance. He was a solid tag team partner with Cody Rhodes and was as much a jobber to the higher profile stars as there was on the roster, even doing the honors for The Miz in one of his last meaningful programs.
For the record, I would love to see Stevens and Rhodes again as a tag team or some faction in another promotion. I hope someone out there is listening.
In a June 7 interview with Sports Illustrated, Stevens spoke about WWE, his future and everything else in between. There is more to the mat man than purple tights and spouting off about being intellectually superior to everyone – a shtick that was successful when he reinvented himself in 2013.
At 6’4” and 246 pounds, he is every bit the prototypical figure in the ring, who was offered a chance to do some acting upon him leaving WWE. He studied Shakespearean acting before wrestling and appears to be as worldly a figure as anyone on WWE’s roster. But wrestling is still something he is exploring.
“By no means am I going to burn my boots,” promised Stevens, who created a “Thank You Tour” with multiple dates on the independent wrestling scene to express his gratitude for those who have supported him. “WWE taught me the performance element, and what I would put into characters in WWE is similar to what you’d do in television shows. I’ve been working with an acting coach for almost a year now, and I’m really digging the idea of playing different characters. The WWE was great, it was awesome, and that will always be part of who I am as a performer. But again, I’m also focused on the future.”
If a wrestler can take an experience and analyze the positives and negatives and learn from it, it makes him/her that much better in the ring. Stevens has a keen sense of being, what worked and what didn’t. He was a soldier of sorts – being passed over time and time again as other stars got a bigger break. His performance in areas, especially mimicking The Miz was one of his best performances.
According to the story on SI.com, Sandow lives with his girlfriend on a 35-acre farm in Scottsburg, Indiana, and begins each day with his customary routine of feeding all the chickens, his rabbit, the bloodhound and the duck.
He admits the piece of wrestling he will miss most is the camaraderie among the talent.
“It’s a competitive environment, but at the same time, you need each other,” explained Stevens. “There were a lot of good, good people in that locker room. I’m going to miss seeing the same people I saw for years.”
When and if he does return to the ring, as he has been part of several indy events since his departure from WWE, he deserves a better lot than he got for the past 14 years. In the latest scoop coming in he may soon debut on TNA Impact Wrestling soon as the promotion dropped major hints of the same.
TNA announced that they would be unveiling a big addition to the roster and even used a video with a print that read “He’s doing things his way,” and the “Hallelujah Chorus” – Sandow’s earlier entrance theme – as the background song.
Sandow himself responded to TNA’s tweet:
You can read more about the possible debut here
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