Remember when everybody loved doing the Fandango dance? Then remember how popular the Fashion Police were there for a while? Like his tag team partner Tyler Breeze, Fandango has a talent for getting whatever weird stuff he’s given over with the audience, despite never really getting near the top in decade in WWE. He’s been out of commission since July of last year, due to a left labrum tear. Now he’s training at the WWE Performance Center to prepare for his in-ring return, and the PC’s YouTube channel — which is consistently great, by the way — has posted a video about it, in which he speaks emotionally about his career so far and his ambitions for the future. Here’s an excerpt:
2019, you know, I was watching some of my old matches, and I like doing the comedy stuff in the ring, but I think I’d like to have some more serious matches. Dusty would always tell us, “It’s your body of work” and I’ve checked the comedy box off on my body of work. And I’m proud of a lot of the cool vignettes we’ve done, and promos, and being able to show our personality and you know, character, comedic time, something I didn’t have a lot of 10 or 15 years ago when I first started wrestling because I was intimidated by the camera, and I didn’t really know who I was in terms of personality. So being able to come out of your shell and letting your guard down in front of the camera is something that took me a while to overcome.
But getting back to why I kind of got into wrestling was those hard-hitting matches that I loved growing up. The Bret Hart matches, Ricky Steamboat/Flair matches, is something I would like to check off on my body of work. Having some matches like that with guys like Daniel Bryan or AJ Styles. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about in my time off, and I’ve been trying to train my body harder, because I’m 35 now, and I don’t have a hell of a lot of years left.
We’ll see how things go when he gets back, and while I would miss the Fashion Files, a stronger push for a more serious Fandango would actually be pretty cool to see.
