Pillars: The Versatility of Sammy Guevara

When Sammy Guevara sauntered down the entrance ramp at Double or Nothing 2019, his nickname was “The Best Ever,” his theme song proclaimed that “the World is Mine,” and the disturbingly realistic panda-head cloak he wore gave the audience something to remember him by. Despite all of the swagger and the theatrics, this match wasn’t about him. Nor was it about his opponent, Kip Sabian.

Guevara and Sabian fought in the first ever singles match in All Elite Wrestling history, facing off in a pre-show exhibition match meant to convince curious Buy-In watchers to fork over $50 to watch a new wrestling promotion’s paramount show. Though the two competitors gained a story the night before Double or Nothing — with Guevara kicking Sabian below the belt during their weigh-in — the match was ostensibly arranged to have two high-flying youngsters get the crowd hot and introduce the home audience to what Excalibur called the “merit system.”

Though commentary leaned into Guevara’s big stage advantage (as Guevara had previously wrestled at AAA’s Triplemanía events in Mexico), he and Sabian were evenly matched throughout their bout. Sabian would cut Guevara off with various hurricanranas; Guevara would stun Sabian with multiple suicide dives.

Guevara’s slight experience edge got him in prime position to hit Kip Sabian with his tried-and-tested 630 senton at the end of the match, but Sabian got his knees up just before Guevara could land on him. Sabian immediately hit Guevara with his Deathly Hallows finisher, and Guevara got pinned for three.

While the pair were near-equals, and the match was still an overall showcase for AEW rather than for either competitor, this first loss for Guevara painted the “Best Ever” as miscast. Instead, people could look at “Superbad” Kip Sabian and think, “Wow, this guy is going places.”

The same went for Fight for the Fallen in July. Sammy’s team did win the match, but the story going in was Darby Allin’s hatred for Shawn Spears, and the finish saw Spears pin Allin. Guevara padded his record, but the story coming out of the match was, “Man, this Shawn Spears guy is despicable.”

Guevara made history again that October by wrestling in the first match in AEW Dynamite history, this time taking on top star Cody Rhodes. Cody got a pre-match hype package with his cute dog and loving wife. Sammy lost yet another big match to a wrestler who put his knees up during Guevara’s high-risk finishing move.

After Sammy got pinned, the story was that Cody Rhodes was on a roll. Cody Rhodes just beat that despicable Shawn Spears, too. Cody Rhodes should go for the AEW World Championship.

At the end of the night, though, right when Cody capitalized on his ready-made story and did go after AEW World Champion Chris Jericho, who was there to attack Cody but the man who Cody embarrassed earlier in the night: Sammy Guevara.

Sammy hoofed Cody in the groin and began beating him down until Dustin Rhodes could save him. A minute later, Sammy’s attack was already playing second fiddle to the debut of Jake Hager.

Sammy Guevara finally struck back, and yet, Sammy was still at maximum the fifth most important person in the ring as far as the crowd was concerned. Hager was the headline. Jericho was the top guy. Guevara, meanwhile, stood there with Santana & Ortiz as a crucial figure in his own right, but in the moment, he was simply a beneficiary of the crowd reaction that his newfound friends brought his way.

But, at least for time being, maybe that relationship with Jericho and Hager and Santana and Ortiz was the best thing for the “Best Ever” to have?

The Dependence of Sammy Guevara

Though Darby Allin’s story last week was a story of an independent man who happened to find a lot of allies and respectful rivals along the way, Sammy Guevara’s story is one fully rooted in dependence. Guevara has had many a friend (and frenemy) in AEW since that first episode of Dynamite, but no one person has had as much of an influence on young Sammy Guevara than “Le Champion” Chris Jericho.

There literally isn’t a “Spanish God Sammy Guevara” without Jericho, as this nickname was the first thing Jericho gave to Guevara upon establishing the Inner Circle on episode two of Dynamite. Pretty soon, Jericho and Guevara became the Inner Circle’s second tag team as “Le Sex Gods,” and they even got Guevara his first title match, as SCU beat Le Sex Gods and handed Jericho his first pinfall loss in AEW.

As part of AEW’s premier league of villains, Guevara spent almost all of his time fighting the Inner Circle’s enemies rather than his own. Matches against Hangman Page, Dustin Rhodes, and Brandon Cutler were due to their relationships with the Elite. Matches with SCU were because Scorpio Sky got the better of Jericho. His first ever match against Jon Moxley was because Moxley was challenging for Jericho’s championship soon.

Even Guevara’s first personal rivalry started as a beef with the Inner Circle, but Darby Allin — who first crossed paths with Guevara en route to Darby’s AEW Championship match with Chris Jericho on an early Dynamite — took a particular interest in knocking Guevara down a peg, peaking when Darby interfered in a match between the Inner Circle and Jurassic Express, stopped Guevara from cheating, and allowed Guevara to be pinned by another of AEW’s rising stars, Jungle Boy.

At Revolution 2020, Sammy Guevara and Darby Allin tore the house down with a violent brawl, then had a sprint of a match that saw Darby get the advantage in their series. The next time they fought one-on-one, Guevara had in the meantime beaten Darby in a handicap match with Jericho as a partner and again in a tag match where Guevara and Shawn Spears took advantage of Darby’s waning chemistry with Cody Rhodes. Still, when Guevara had another shot at putting Darby down by himself, he lost again, proving that he could only beat Darby with help from others — not on his lonesome.

As an Inner Circle flunky, Guevara did his part in the war against the Elite, but he lost when facing Kenny Omega and Matt Hardy one-on-one, and even when he did get a tag team win over both men, it was Jericho and the rest of the Inner Circle who truly got the win since Guevara was busy getting absolutely DEMOLISHED by a full-speed golf cart.

If one were to sum up Sammy Guevara’s early AEW run in one moment, though, it would be the ending of Double or Nothing 2020’s “Stadium Stampede” match. There Guevara was, in the main event of the flagship pay-per-view, fighting alongside the Inner Circle and taking tons of punishment for about half an hour, all leading to Guevara taking a 100-foot-high One-Winged Angel (an already dangerous move from its normal height) from Kenny Omega and taking the pin for his stable.

Guevara had been involved in the main event scene of AEW since the first episode of Dynamite, and yet, he wasn’t close to being a main event player himself. Most people could agree that he had potential, but as long as he was losing for Chris Jericho, how could he ever reach that potential?

The Freedom of Sammy Guevara

Matt Hardy clearly agreed with the sentiment that Guevara would be better off free from the Inner Circle and stated as much to Guevara’s face. Guevara responded to this negatively, punctuating his “no” with a chair throw to Matt’s face that made the Hardy Boy ooze blood all over the table that Sammy would then put him through.

Like with Darby, this feud with Matt Hardy started out as Inner Circle beef but quickly became a solely Guevara-led affair, but it wasn’t the coming out party that Guevara really needed. Aside from the tables match they had right after Matt returned from the chair shot incident, none of the matches that Hardy and Guevara had were great for Guevara’s image. All we got was footage of Guevara repeatedly and seriously injuring Matt, then a match that ended with Hardy literally shoving Guevara into a trash can and murdering-him-but-not-really-but-also-for-real.

Still, Hardy put the worm in the people’s ear: would Guevara be better off without the Inner Circle?

Sammy obviously didn’t think so, and he probably wouldn’t have tested the waters for a long while if not for interference with his happy family from one Maxwell Jacob Friedman — MJF.

When MJF campaigned to join the Inner Circle in the autumn of 2020, both Friedman and leader Jericho were certain that they themselves had the upper hand on the other. The one man left out to dry was Sammy Guevara, who simply saw repeated snubs, belittling, and outright ignorance from MJF throughout the entirety of MJF’s trial period in the Inner Circle. After a while, Guevara decided that the Inner Circle could only have either MJF or Guevara, but Guevara made the choice for them when he walked out of the stable himself in February 2021.

Then, exactly one month later, Guevara came back with proof that MJF was trying to oust Jericho from the Inner Circle. Nothing happened in the meantime with Guevara (for reasons that will be explained later), but Guevara’s return did paint him as a righteous babyface. And once MJF formed the Pinnacle and had them brutally attack the Inner Circle, Jericho and company followed Guevara’s lead and turned to good, making Guevara about as crucial as MJF was in this tide-turning shift in the AEW faction ecosystem.

Though Guevara reuniting with the Inner Circle could have reset his character, it ended up making Guevara more important in AEW’s upper card, and nowhere was this clearer than in MJF and Guevara’s first AEW singles match against one another to close out the final Dynamite of AEW’s pandemic era.

As a good guy, Guevara was easy to root for. His recklessness with others was replaced with a seeming lack of care for his own wellbeing, and the lengths that Sammy went to in order to try and take MJF down a peg were incredible. Sammy took all of MJF’s punishment — including a top-rope tombstone piledriver — and still kept coming, and in the end, when Sammy had MJF dead to rights, MJF didn’t outplay him.

Unlike with Kip Sabian and Cody Rhodes, Sammy Guevara really was the better man that night.

Still, Shawn Spears came down while the ref was distracted and took a chair to Sammy’s head. MJF pinned his young rival — a man MJF only recently referred to as a pillar of the company — and claimed the win in the history books.

Yet Sammy was still finally on the cusp of being a made man off the back of this amazing match.

So, months later, when Sammy finally got his win back over Shawn Spears, then went on to challenge then-TNT Champion Miro in the late, great, forever TNT Champ Brodie Lee’s hometown of Rochester, New York, it didn’t feel unearned when Guevara ended Miro’s undefeated streak and earned his first title.

Still, something felt off.

The Controversy of Sammy Guevara

One thing that kept Sammy from reaching that peak earlier (and from getting there again later) was the controversy that followed Guevara wherever he went. And while this series is mostly about the on-screen characters of the Pillars, this section has to go behind the scenes a bit.

The first and most egregious controversy that Guevara faced in his AEW career were the sexually aggressive comments he made about then-WWE Superstar Sasha Banks. Though the comments were made years before he made it to AEW, they resurfaced in the summer of 2020 and were so horrible that they got him pulled from TV for months to undergo sensitivity training. Though this is many people’s biggest gripe with Guevara, this wouldn’t be the last of them.

Some of the things Guevara would get dinged for were small, like his brief Twitter feud with WWE’s T-Bar. Others were more medium-sized, but didn’t really affect AEW fans—this mostly pertaining to the implosion of plans that were supposed to see him do a tour in IMPACT Wrestling after he left the Inner Circle in 2021.

Then, there were more huge things, like the aforementioned Matt Hardy feud that kept seeing Matt get injured. Later on, there were the two backstage “fights,” one of which saw Sammy get hit by Eddie Kingston for comments made during a Rampage taping, while the other saw Andrade El Idolo attack Guevara after a public disagreement about how hard they’d hit each other in matches.

All of these things are notable on their own, but while some of these tanked Sammy Guevara the person’s standing with fans, none of these were as detrimental to Sammy Guevara the character as his on-screen pairing with Tay Melo, née Conti.

For a while there, Guevara’s title run was going pretty great. On his own, Sammy was defending his title in great matches against guys like Bobby Fish and Jay Lethal in their debuts. As part of the Inner Circle, Guevara got to wrestle outside stars like Junior Dos Santos and Andrei Arlovski as the Inner Circle fought American Top Team (although that rivalry and specifically Dan Lambert and Chris Jericho’s promos were grating at the time).

Another rocky patch came when Sammy Guevara got sucked back into the “Codyverse,” where Cody randomly beat Guevara for the TNT Championship, Sammy promptly won the Interim TNT Championship while Cody was gone for a week, and then Sammy won the (admittedly amazing) title unification ladder match that ended Cody’s AEW career and left Sammy with two identical belts when he’d only lost the belt a month and four days earlier.

To make matters worse, Cody leaving AEW at that time meant that his and Brandi’s burgeoning (and already maligned) feud with American Top Team simply HAD to go to someone else, and this lucky pair of wrestlers happened to be Guevara and his off-screen girlfriend, Tay Conti.

Sammy and Tay went from being a fighting champion and a fiery underdog, respectively, to a pair of ooey-gooey teens in love in a few weeks’ time, all the while Dan called Tay unsavory names, Sammy retorted by talking about fornicating with the prestigious championship belt, and the crowd refused to give either Sammy or Tay a chance anymore.

See, right at the beginning of AEW, then-heel Sammy Guevara proposed to his then-girlfriend before an AEW show, and she said yes. The crowd was warm to Guevara at least for the night, and fans of Guevara’s vlog were happy for the new couple. Then, due to life being life, Guevara’s engagement got called off, which isn’t the fans’ business. Still, the optics of Guevara’s long-term relationship ending right before Tay and Sammy publicly began flirting with one another soured many a nosy fan on the couple from the get-go, and this behind-the-scenes drama being paired with the gimmick of “Cody and Brandi 2” was doomed to fail.

When Guevara lost the TNT Championship to Scorpio Sky, it felt like good riddance, even though Guevara had awesome matches with Darby Allin and Andrade El Idolo during this second run with the belt. Then, Guevara won the belt back a month later via low blow, and even if Scorpio was the antagonist, this action still didn’t endear Sammy to the crowd further. When Guevara finally lost the series to Scorpio in another ladder match, then lost the right to ever challenge Scorpio again, the AEW faithful rejoiced, as Sammy had been deemed a plague on that belt.

Sammy Guevara had left the Inner Circle months earlier as Chris Jericho feuded with Santana & Ortiz, but it wasn’t much of a surprise when Guevara came crawling back to Jericho again in the middle of this civil war. Where else was Guevara to go when things were at their lowest? He had no title, the crowd already hated him, and he’d already closed his chapter with the Proud and Powerful.

Maybe siding with Jericho could save his career again?

Sammy and the other Pillars

Today, as MJF is AEW World Champion and the other three Pillars vie for his top spot, we’re once again asked to look at the relationship between these four men. While most of these rivalries are being revisited, one pair of Pillars have only just faced off for the first time.

Sammy Guevara and Jungle Boy have met in tag team matches in the past, and if we’re counting those toward the overall score, it looks bad for Guevara. Prior to 2023, Guevara had never won a match that Jungle Boy was also in, losing two matches to Jurassic Express in 2020 and then drawing with Jungle Boy in two further battle royales. When finally made to go one-on-one in the first round of the Four Pillars Tournament in April 2023, Guevara did manage to beat Jungle Boy, but only after interference from MJF. However, this didn’t end Guevara’s streak of losing to Jungle Boy in tag matches, as Guevara did exactly that earlier in May to gain Jungle Boy and Darby Allin access into this four-way match.

While their history is sparse, Guevara does have an issue with Jungle Boy. Like Darby, Guevara resents Jungle Boy for being “handed” the opportunity to be in AEW. Guevara sees Jungle Boy as a golden child the same ilk as MJF, with Jungle Boy joining MJF in the arena with Bret Hart at Double or Nothing 2019 and both Jungle Boy and MJF having featured matches at Revolution 2023 while Darby and Sammy were both left off the card entirely. Sammy views himself as the underdog that Jungle Boy is made out to be.

As for Darby, Sammy still views him as a rival, if not an inspiration. While Sammy doesn’t respect Jungle Boy or MJF’s routes to the top, Sammy actually started to believe he could make it in AEW when he saw Darby win the TNT Championship, and since then, Sammy’s won that belt three times to Darby’s two. Darby is the only person to fight every version of Sammy—the young, hungry version in 2020; the confident TNT Champion in early 2022; the slimy, reset lacky in late 2022; and most recently the unpredictable Guevara in 2023. And just like in 2020, Sammy knows that every time he’s beaten Darby, it’s been thanks to others (namely Anna Jay in late 2022 and MJF in 2023). Darby is Sammy’s biggest threat, and Sammy might actually welcome that.

Finally, there’s Sammy’s unfinished business with MJF. Like Sammy said in an impassioned promo in Long Island, MJF never beat Sammy Guevara — Shawn Spears and a chair did. Sammy may have played nice with MJF to get through the finals of the Four Pillars tournament, but Tay Melo reminded Sammy that he doesn’t need to play MJF’s games to succeed on the April 22, 2023, episode of Rampage, and on the following Dynamite, Sammy agreed and betrayed MJF. He may have screwed himself over by making the match a four-way instead of a singles match, but Sammy Guevara doesn’t care.

Sammy cut that long, heartfelt promo in front of an incredibly hostile Long Island crowd, and he made sure the fans knew he didn’t care about the reaction. “You can boo me. You can cheer me. I’m not going anywhere.”

Sammy being given the mic in MJF country was a setup for failure, but Sammy couldn’t possibly fail. He had to get his feelings off of his chest, and his feelings were that of a genuine person with an explicit love of AEW.

Does he cheat? Yes. Is he always likeable? No.

Does he care that he’s unlikeable? Not at all, because Sammy Guevara’s biggest ding against MJF is that he got to the top by betraying everyone and having no identity. MJF was Cody’s friend, then Wardlow’s boss, then a member of the Inner Circle, then a member of the Pinnacle, then the leader of the Firm, then an associate of William Regal, and now he’s none of those.

Guevara is still an ally of Chris Jericho. He still uses the same moves and taunts. He still fights as hard as he ever did, only now he wins.

Sammy Guevara got to the top by being himself, and MJF became AEW World Champion by ditching every label he had before.

If Guevara has his way at Double or Nothing, MJF won’t have the “AEW World Champion label” for much longer, either.