One of the strangest and most strangely wonderful stories of pro wrestling in 2016 was the meteoric rise of James Ellsworth, a puny dork who captured the hearts and minds of wrestling fans. He nabbed a WWE contract and a best-selling shirt (before wrestlers like Alexa Bliss or Dana Brooke ever had any merchandise at all), and became a fixture of Smackdown Live, simply by being the best in the world at portraying a hapless jobber loser. (That’s a compliment.)
Jim Ross believes that Ellsworth’s 15 minutes are nearly up, which may be true, but he likely still has a Royal Rumble hope and/or comedy spot coming his way before all is said and done. And retired former WWE Intercontinental Champion Santino Marella, who now runs Battle Arts Academy in Canada, explained on a recent episode of The Steve Austin Show how Ellsworth might be setting unrealistic expectations for undersized wrestlers who are trying to break into the business.
“I have a couple of kids who are great, talented, 5’11”, 6’0″. You can’t walk around and show up at 160 [lbs.]. You can’t show up at 138 lbs. Just, you’re going to get hurt and I’d be doing you a disservice if I said you wouldn’t. And I’ve become brutally honest with these guys.
“There [are] guys like, right now, James Ellsworth or Spike Dudley, and just having them kept that hope alive, so there is a chance because those guys have been there and from time to time they get these little, scrawny guys and it sets up a lot of these kids for disappointment.”
In my experience, wrestling schools have always been pretty upfront with explaining to undersized trainees that they’ve got an extremely steep uphill climb ahead of them. But I understand where Marella is coming from, now that he has students who see Ellsworth on television every week. Heck, the cruiserweight division might also be giving smaller aspiring wrestlers some increased hopes, but it’s pretty easy to point to the last decade of pro wrestling and count the number of “scrawny” wrestlers on one hand … and heck, even Colin Delaney was close enough to 5’10” to fake being taller … and weighed about 170 pounds.
Marella’s doing the right thing by harshly tempering expectations, and I hope other trainers are scrupulous enough to do the same. Meanwhile, we can continue to be happy for Ellsworth, who (despite how his storyline seems to be playing out) is one of the better underdog success stories in recent pro wrestling history.
