>>6410487There's been sports gimmicks that have gotten over. Second Doi, the one black baseball player in Japan and Dasher Hatfield got over baseball gimmicks. There's been a bunch of different football gimmicks in lucha like Super Maquina, Rams and Chikara's Mark Angelosetti. There haven't been a lot of basketball players except for Slam Dunk and Sugar Dunkerton. Dragon Gate's Shimizu was doing a shotputter type of gimmick and Dragon Gate had Ryo Saito be a cyclist. DDT's KANON played volleyball I think and does a volleyball spike, which he usually makes look good. Darren McCarty also brought some of his hockey stuff in for ICW deathmatches.
People get given these gimmicks and don't realize that you have to be subtle about the gimmick. Just because you have a sports gimmick, doesn't mean you need to do a bunch of puns and stuff. Maybe it's just your background and maybe you stick to doing one move from that sport. The gimmick can even stop at the gear like it did with Kaori Yoneyama, who wasn't an indian, but wore indian gear to the ring. They never claimed she was an indian and she never acted like one, just she wore the gear.
I think promoters also come up with these gimmicks but don't really have ideas for how it will work or what exactly they want to do with them. They don't think about why a tennis player wants to wrestle or what exactly a tennis player would do and such. And they don't think about whether a tennis player would really try to wear a visor and sunglasses when wrestling.
I think there's a lot of room for more sports gimmicks in wrestling and more gimmicks period. It's a lot more interesting than seeing Midget McFlippy in his blank trunks and kickpads.
