Chris Hero

William Christopher Spradlin was born December 24, 1979 in Dayton, Ohio. He trained in Middletown in the summer of 1998 and wrestled his first match on September 12 of that year in Xenia, Ohio, against Shawn Halsey for a small outfit called Unified Championship Wrestling. He then did something most 18-year-old rookies skipped: he kept training. Les Thatcher's HWA camp in 1999, then Dory Funk Jr.'s Funkin' Conservatory in Ocala, Florida from December of that year.

The Funk schooling shows up in everything he did afterward. Hero worked long, he worked on the mat, and he understood how to make a match feel like a fight rather than a routine. Ian Rotten's IWA Mid-South in Indiana became his first real home, and he held its heavyweight title four times between 2001 and 2003, in a locker room that also contained CM Punk, Colt Cabana and a young Daniel Bryan.

Combat Zone Wrestling, the Philadelphia-area promotion best known for ultraviolence, signed him in 2002 and got a technician instead. He became the face of the company's wrestling side, and in 2006 he won the CZW World Heavyweight Championship. The same year CZW and Ring of Honor ran a cross-promotional war, with Hero leading the CZW invasion of ROH shows. The angle was worked; the crowds' hostility toward him in ROH buildings was not, and it made him a star in both companies at once.

He turned an ultraviolence promotion's title into a wrestling title, then took that credibility across the street.

With Claudio Castagnoli, the Swiss wrestler now known as Claudio in AEW and Cesaro in WWE, he formed the Kings of Wrestling. The team won the CZW World Tag Team Championship twice, Chikara's Campeonatos de Parejas in 2006, and the ROH World Tag Team Championship in 2006. They split, reunited in 2009 and took the ROH tag titles again in 2010 in a run that most observers of the period rank among the best tag-team work of that decade.

Pro Wrestling Guerrilla in Southern California booked him from 2004, and in 2008 he won the PWG World Championship and held it for 425 days into 2009, the reign that anchored the promotion during its move to the Reseda legion hall era. He also won Westside Xtreme Wrestling's 16 Carat Gold tournament in Germany in 2007 and again in 2014, and from 2007 worked regularly for Pro Wrestling Noah in Japan.

Around 2009 the act changed. He switched to an elbow-based offence, adopted a weighted elbow pad as a heel device, and built a style around the Rolling Elbow, the Hero's Welcome and a series of knockout strikes. The gear was a storyline. The elbows were real enough that opponents' comments about them became a running feature of indie shoot interviews for years.

WWE signed him in early 2012 and renamed him Kassius Ohno for the NXT developmental brand, where his best-remembered program was a series against William Regal. He never reached the main roster and was released on November 8, 2013. The independents took him straight back: PWG from 2013, Ring of Honor in 2013 and 2014, the Evolve title in 2014, and a second 16 Carat Gold win the same year.

In January 2017 he returned to NXT under the same name, this time as a veteran gatekeeper for the brand and later for NXT UK. It was steady, well-regarded work without a championship. WWE released him in 2020 among the cuts made that spring. Two WWE stints, roughly four years combined, and the record shows no WWE title of any kind. That says more about how the company used him than about what he could do.

Hero's importance to the independent scene is structural rather than anecdotal. He was the connective tissue between IWA Mid-South, CZW, Chikara, ROH and PWG at the exact moment those companies were defining what American independent wrestling would look like after ECW. He worked all of them at once, often in the same week, and he carried a reputation as a wrestler who would give a full match to an opener as readily as to a main-eventer.

The most recent public record has him signed to All Elite Wrestling as a coach, which places him alongside several of his 2000s contemporaries in the business of teaching what they once did nightly. Whether he wrestles again is his business. The archive's interest is in what is already down on paper: more than two decades in the ring, titles in five countries, and an elbow that a generation of indie fans still talks about.