Rob Conway says La Resistance should never have been broken up because getting hated was the one thing the team could do better than anyone, and fans threw rocks at their car as they left arenas.
Asked on Insight with Chris Van Vliet where the act should have gone, Conway did not hedge.
“I don’t believe we would ever stop getting heat, because that’s what we were good at,” he said.
He put the difference down to when he came up.
“I grew up watching professional wrestling. I didn’t grow up watching sports entertainment. So when I got into the business, it was still considered pro wrestling. The heels are heels,” Conway said. “You want to be entertaining, but if you’re that hated, you shouldn’t be selling T-shirts and stuff like that.”
That shaped what the team did in the ring.
“All of us had the mind frame of getting heat, not trying to do cool moves,” he said. “I could do cool moves, I just didn’t do them. And if you do something like that, you’ve got to put it in the right spot.”
His example was a wrestler he came through OVW with.
“Randy Orton is a heel. He throws a beautiful dropkick, but he has to do it when the babyface starts making a little comeback, and then he hits that dropkick when people don’t want to see it,” Conway said. “And then he can pop up and do his thing.”
He said he wanted no part of the modern version where the audience is let in on the joke.
“If you want me to be a good guy, I’ll be a good guy. But if you want me to be the heel, I want to be hated,” Conway said. “I don’t want it to be like, oh, we hate him, but we know he’s really a nice guy. You show up to the building, you’re not mean to fans, of course, but you don’t have to go out of your way to say, hey, I’m really a nice guy.”
He said the proof turns up at conventions.
“People all the time say, man, you were my favourite. I say, I don’t believe that. And they say why. I say, because I never heard one person cheer for me,” Conway said.
Asked whether the heat ever followed the team out of the venue, Conway said it did.
“We’ve had rocks thrown at our car and stuff when we’re leaving,” he said.
He was quick to say that was the exception rather than the rule, and that face to face it was a different thing entirely.
“For the most part, when you meet fans in person, they’re just happy to meet you. They love wrestling,” Conway said. “Even if they hate you, they meet you in person, it’s totally different.”
The appearances that produced the most were the ones in front of service members.
“We’d do personal appearances sometimes before the show, and it’d be like us and all the military, and those guys got it,” he said. “When we come out, people get patriotic all of a sudden.”
That was the response he wanted.
“That was music to my ears when I hear the people chanting USA or booing us,” Conway said. “For a heel, that’s like getting cheered.”
He also talked about the parts of the job that mattered to the company rather than the crowd, and named hitting your time as the main one.
“If you were supposed to have a seven minute match, and you had the greatest eight minute match in the history of wrestling, you’re going to be getting cussed at when you come back, because they allowed for seven minutes,” Conway said. “You’re supposed to be a professional and hit that time cue.”
He said the reverse was just as clear.
“You could have a pretty good match, but you hit that time cue, and you come back, and they’re literally clapping, going right on time, guys,” he said. “That’s important.”
Conway joined René Duprée and Sylvain Grenier in La Resistance in 2003, after the act was already established, in an anti-American gimmick that ran through the Iraq war years. He is from Louisville, Kentucky, and was the only member of the group who was not billed as French or French Canadian, which is what made the act work. He came in as an American serviceman who turned on his own country to join them.
The group held the World Tag Team Championship three times across 2004 and 2005 before being split up, with Grenier moved to SmackDown and Conway repackaged as a singles act called The Con Man. Neither man held a championship in WWE again.
