The title says it all: current two-time NWA World Champion Trevor Murdoch is a good fit for the title. He’s that secret sauce that NWA has that very few companies possess. It might be weird since he was a permanent undercarder in WWE but oftentimes, talent can be used better in a different setting.
The experience of coming through WWE and getting released can be looked at as finishing school. Sure, developmental polishes a talent into a superstar but the time on the main roster puts what they learned to the test at whatever level they end up. After being released they have big stage experience and a bigger audience—more fans know who they are and what they’ve done.
The key is just to use that momentum as soon as possible.
Trevor Murdoch Just Works for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship
In the case of Trevor Murdoch, that was easier said than done. He had both the experience and more name value but he was released at a time when change in wrestling was slow. New Japan hadn’t even started doing PPVs on Ustream in 2008 and the NWA World title was…coasting about. Nothing special was happening to it and wouldn’t until the situation with The Almighty Sheik in 2011.
It was back to the indies at a time before iPPV and streaming wrestling. For a period, he and later WWE tag team partner Garrison Cade would hit up the indies and Japan before he began to dial back the dates. Once in retirement, he continued working as a fiber optic cable installer but was only retired for roughly a year when the new NWA came calling in 2019.
Murdoch had an interesting start to his NWA career. He didn’t like he would be a part of the NWA World title picture but that’s what made his early NWA build and eventual main event ascension interesting. The guy was talking about going back into retirement if he couldn’t get the job done! Not only that, he did so in a humble manner.
Return of the Blue Collar Babyface
He had become the blue-collar, working-class babyface that we don’t get in wrestling much nowadays. The closest NWA had prior to Murdoch was Tim Storm who was the kind of NWA babyface that the new NWA crowd could get behind in that studio wrestling environment.
At a time when wrestlers are either built like a wrecking ball but can also take to the sky or they’re built like super athletes and can…also take to the sky, but a realistic working-class babyface that fans—especially the older fans who might have paid for the tickets and driven the whole family to see the show–can see themselves is close to rare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9AJaG0Rff4
That isn’t to say other promotions can’t make them. WWE has enough talent that they could have three or four of them on television. However, they’re not the coolest of archetypes. Also, some promotions might not even need the old-school babyfaces. They might be more competition-based or hardcore and that gimmick might come off as kind of hokey or dated.
For NWA, this is the perfect babyface. It’s not the smiling high-flyer or the honorable technician, it’s the guy who looks like he put his gear on after working a hard day and is there for a hard night. Yet he comes off as knowing what a lot of fans out there had to do to buy those tickets to the show and he’s grateful you’re there.
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