Heel (professional wrestling)
For other meanings, see Heel (disambiguation). In professional wrestling, a heel (also known as a rudo in lucha libre ) is a wrestler who portrays a villain or a "bad guy" and acts as an antagonist [1] [2] [3] to the faces, who are the heroic protagonist or "good guy" characters. To gain heat (with boos and jeers from the audience), heels are often portrayed as behaving in an immoral manner by breaking rules or otherwise taking advantage of their opponents outside the bounds of the standards of the match. Others do not (or rarely) break rules, but instead exhibit unlikeable, appalling and deliberately offensive and demoralizing personality traits such as arrogance, cowardice or contempt for the audience. Many heels do both, cheating as well as behaving nastily. No matter the type of heel, the most important job is that of the antagonist role, as heels exist to provide a foil to the face wrestlers. If a given heel is cheered over the face, a promoter may opt to tu...
