Cheap Heat
Heels draw "cheap heat" by blatantly insulting the fans, a local sports team, or the town they are performing in. This is called "cheap" because it is an easy way for heels to receive boos. Faces will sometimes do the equivalent, referred to as a Cheap Pop, by referring to the town or promising to "win one for the fans".
Heel wrestlers can also draw cheap heat by referring to a mainstream news event as part of their promo, especially if the event has strongly emotional or political ramifications (e.g. a natural disaster), although they sometimes do not mention it by name. One example of a wrestler using cheap heat was Sgt. Slaughter, who often delivered anti-American promos during the Gulf War (and Operation Desert Shield immediately before it) as part of his Iraqi sympathizer heel gimmick; one of those promos came at Survivor Series 1990, where Slaughter insulted servicemen stationed in Iraq for Thanksgiving. In 2003, The Rock used the Lakers-Kings rivalry to gain a lot of heel heat, when he was singing a song about leaving Sacramento. The last words of the song were "I'll be sure to come back when the Lakers beat the Kings in May."
Historically, another common practice of heel wrestlers to draw cheap heat involves using racial and ethnic slurs to offend the collective sensibility of wrestling fans. In 1972, as the American Indian Movement was gaining momentum, Baron Von Raschke was known to refer to Native American WWA World Heavyweight Champion Billy Red Cloud as a "dirty low down Injun" as a means of drawing cheap heat. Rowdy Roddy Piper also used racist terms when promoting his match against Hulk Hogan and Mr. T for WrestleMania I when calling T's fans "porch monkeys", calling T a "monkey" and feeding his poster bananas, and threatening to "whip him like a slave". In 2004, while in Germany, JBL (John Bradshaw Layfield) used Nazi salutes and was booed heavily by the crowd.
Read more about this topic: Heat (professional Wrestling)
Famous quotes containing the words cheap and/or heat:
“I hate cheap pictures. I hate pictures that make people look like they’re not worth much, just to prove a photographer’s point. I hate when they take a picture of someone pickin’ their nose or yawning. It’s so cheap. A lot of it is a big ego trip. You use people as props instead of as people.”
—Jill Freedman (b. 1939)
“When the heat of the summer
Made drowsy the land,
A dragon-fly came
And sat on my hand;”
—Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965)