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The purest protagonist on TV? It's Bayley
Bayley: Living proof that a pro wrestler can be all smiles and hugs and still be great. WWE

The purest protagonist on TV? It's Bayley

There exists an ideal in America: If you work hard, try your best, and never give up, then eventually you make it. I suppose this notion exists in all countries—surely this isn’t the only nation capable of transforming work into success—but it has long been tied tightly to American mythology. This isn’t always a good thing, however. Surely there are people you know, bad people, perhaps people you’ve worked alongside or shared a classroom with, whom you are not happy to see achieve. 

Odds are you aren’t thrilled at how close Donald Trump and/or Hillary Clinton have come to winning the presidency. Perhaps your relationship with pro football is complicated by Roger Goodell’s draconian punishments and the NFL’s profit uber alles philosophy. Maybe you eat your KFC extra crispy chicken with a grimace because you have beef with Colonel Sanders. If a random person works hard and keeps trying and achieves success, it sounds like a good thing, but it isn’t necessarily a good thing, you know?

But let’s tone down the severity of the conversation. Let’s concern ourselves with those who succeed in a world more fun than our own: that of pro wrestling. You could swing a dead snake and hit a bad guy or gal who succeeds in the squared circle. Think of The Rock during his corporate phase, eschewing his millions (and millions!) of fans in favor of throwing his lot in with the avaricious McMahons. Think of the current women’s champ, Charlotte, rising to the top on the strength of dirty tricks learned from her father, Ric Flair. Think of AJ Styles, perhaps the most talented wrestler on the planet, resorting to low blows in his recent title match against Dean Ambrose.

But there is at least one wrestler who, at least so far, is unsaddled with these unsavory labels. There are several these days, in fact. It’s a promising sign for WWE that there are so many babyfaces who—effectively rather than cornily, in my view—embody that pure, old school underdog spirit. Consider Sami Zayn, forever fighting to get out of Kevin Owens’ shadow, or Becky Lynch, who began training in Ireland at the tender age of 15, or Heath Slater, who turned a silly bit part into one of the most compelling storylines in wrestling. But today I’m speaking of one wrestler and one wrestler only: Bayley.

A brief summary if you’re unfamiliar with Bayley’s work: She (along with Sasha Banks and the aforementioned Becky and Charlotte) was one of the so-called Four Horsewomen of NXT, WWE’s developmental property. The group made it their mission—sometimes declared, sometimes not—to make the lewd women’s wrestling of the ‘90s, the pudding matches and the stripteases, a distant memory. They’re women who as girls dreamed of being wrestlers, and over the past year or so they have all moved up to the big leagues.

A better way to introduce someone to Bayley is this: It’s July 2016. She has yet to appear in a WWE ring. We’re at WWE’s Battleground pay-per-view. Charlotte and her similarly evil blonde protégé, Dana Brooke, are set to face Sasha Banks and an unnamed mystery partner in a tag team match. Charlotte, Dana, and Sasha are all in the ring. A sold-out Verizon Center awaits the reveal of the identity of the fourth competitor. A knowing looks sits on Sasha’s face as she looks toward the entrance ramp. And then, this:

Whether you watch wrestling or not, something should be clear: That is a significant reaction.

If the last match on any given wrestling show is the top spot, one could say that the first match is the pop spot. An opening match is no different than a comic’s opening joke or a band’s opening song. It’s the tone setter. You don’t put someone who’s going to get a merely tepid response at the top of the show. Looking for an indication of how confident WWE brass was in Bayley's popularity? In her very first WWE appearance, she led off a pay-per-view. And the crowd, largely composed of adult males, sincerely and unapologetically loved it.

Every wrestler’s music elicits a pop, and every pop is different. Stone Cold Steve Austin’s glass shattering carried with it an intensity, a very “****’s about to get real” vibe. The eerie hum of Bray Wyatt's bass is equal parts exciting and ominous. Brock Lesnar’s screaming guitar and drums connote destruction. Bayley, meanwhile, has happy handclaps that just yield ecstasy. It’s a happy little ditty that makes little girls and grown men alike punch the crowd and scream with joy. The chants of her name at WWE events aren’t just the high-pitched yelps of children; they’re more often the guttural booms of grown-ups. Bayley makes people of all ages feel real feelings. She's undeniable.

It’s often said that your ideal wrestling character is your own personality turned up to 11, but Bayley’s a little different. She feels like she’s herself turned up exactly to 10. Her character began as a sort of hug-happy superfan who was just happy to be there; now she’s a sort of hug-happy superfan who’s still happy to be there. She can be a little goofy, perhaps a little dorky at times. But both in character and person, you get the sense that she is living the dream. I’m not sure she’s a particularly good actor, but I’m not sure she needs to be. The line between fiction and non- is a thin one.

When she’s on the microphone, for instance, she rarely speaks in wrestler-shouts. (Picture Hulk Hogan ordering at the Burger King drive thru.) Many wrestlers struggle on the mic, it seems, because they sound like they are trying very, very hard to sound like professional wrestlers. That particular dialect will always have a place in wrestling—how else are you going to tell somebody you’re going to rip them in half at the Charleston Civic Center next Sunday, brother?—but staying in NXT for three-plus years gave Bayley loads of experience working smaller rooms, which has resulted in a more personal, intimate delivery.

An unrelated story: Once upon a time I was in the elevator at work with some colleagues. The women were discussing who some of the more handsome men in the office were. This was unsettling to me because I was standing, like, right there, apparently not the subject of conversation. Eager to one day change that, I listened closely to the conversation for a game-changing tip. I distinctly remember something one of the girls said about one of the guys she thought particularly attractive. “Guys who smile with their eyes...” she said, trailing off into a world of lip-bit imagination. And I never forgot that, because when you're a guy who hasn't done much in the girlfriend department, you make mental notes about things like that and then try to practice smiling with your eyes in the mirror for hours later on.

This is a long-winded way of making a point: Bayley smiles with her eyes. She smiles with her everything, it seems. She smiles with her side ponytail. She smiles with her two-handed waves to the crowd. She smiles when she hugs fans in the front row. Her song is one big audible smile. The so-called wacky waving inflatable tube men that frame her entrance are big nylon smiles. She’s like if your favorite indie band made it big and you weren’t even mad about it. You’re happy rather than put off because everyone should see her, and everyone should like her.

Bayley’s character generally skews a little too sweet and naïve for the cutthroat world of wrestling, and that’s where many of her stories come from. She’s the one who gets betrayed by her best friends. She’s the one who offers a handshake but receives a cheap shot. She’s the one who suffers crises of confidence as everyone around her insists that her way—the hugging, smiling, Bayley way—is not the stuff of champions. Her story is that of someone forever seeking glory without sacrificing honor.

When Bayley's music hits, like it did at Battleground, the crowd just has a different sound. Maybe it’s because she’s still relatively new on the scene, but there’s an enthusiasm that’s unusual even for a show built around good guys beating bad guys. When you watch Bayley, silly as it sounds, you forget about all those people in the world that you don't particularly care for. Your inner cynic melts away, and your worries with it. In its place goes a pure, unbridled, shameless joy, the sort that you feel so often as a child but find so fleeting as an adult. It's all very puppy dogs and ice cream. But who doesn't like puppy dogs and ice cream?

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