Featured image from Allie Kat
One of the great crimes WWE has committed against the pro wrestling is creating cynicism around hometown heroes. It must have been around 2016 that someone online pointed out that the WWE has a habit of booking wrestlers to lose or be otherwise humiliated in their own hometowns. That pretty much put a cloud over any hometown storyline extending beyond the WWE. Just another example of that bleak cynicism that the WWE instills into those most invested in their own product.
It’s sad because a hometown crowd can add so much to a match. Take this encounter between Nick Gage and Allie Kat in Austin, Texas. Allie Kat is the hometown hero here with her family present in the audience. When she comes out, decked out in attire that pays homage to Terry Funk’s ECW days, she’s greeted with admiration and even a shower of streamers. She feels like a big deal even though this is my first time watching her perform.
Nick Gage on the other hand is someone I have very limited exposure to. Mostly I saw him in Beyond’s Uncharted Territory and outside of the Kris Statlander match, he’s done very little for me in the ring. That is not the case here. Gage beats the tar out of Kat and plays a fantastic heel bully. He riles up the hometown crowd by destroying Allie Kat, slicing her open in front of the fans, verbally assaulting Kat’s mother in the crowd. There’s something so purely pro wrestling about a wrestler’s mother flipping off their child’s opponent.
Great work in this match to make Allie Kat as sympathetic as possible so that when she got her hope spots in on her comeback, it felt like a big deal. I do wish she got a few more hope spots in when Gage started bombing her to death towards the end but she survived a lot and looked like a star for it. Great match here that makes the most of the setting and the competitors involved.
