I Wish WWE Took Dwarf Wrestling Seriously

This Tuesday, Big Cass demonstrated what he was going to do to Daniel Bryan on Sunday. As a dig at Bryan’s below-average stature – and to accentuate that Cass is seven feet tall – he did this by brutalizing a dwarf wrestler.

For anyone who’s been watching WWE for more than a few months, this is hardly a new image. The Vaudevillains pulled the same exact thing on the Lucha Dragons in NXT. Hornswoggle was treated as a comedy character. El Torito was a legitimately good wrestler who could pull off amazing stunts, but he was named El Torito, put in a bull costume, and paired with matadors.

I get that size, and size perception, are a big part of WWE-style wrestling. We ooh and ahh at giants. A smaller person is an automatic underdog against someone bigger. But there’s clearly a threshold of shortness past which one crosses from beloved underdog to complete joke, and there’s no justification apart from a history of treating little people as a sideshow.

Despite its presentation, anyone watching in 2014 who wouldn’t accept Wee-LC as a legitimately awesome match is a liar.

There’s a spot on the roster for a character completely unheard of in mainstream American wrestling: a dwarf who’s just really damn good. Obviously, given the current structure, he’d be kept to 205 Live, but that’s not nothing. He wouldn’t be believable as a power guy, but a striker/high-flyer? I could see it. Take a dwarf wrestler seriously. Just once.

Just try.

Bobby Murphy (@RobertJMurph)

Image courtesy WWE