Sanity's Eric Young Debuts New Look

WWE held a house show in Elmira, New York as part of their buildup to WrestleMania 35 on Saturday [...]

By Connor Casey

WWE held a house show in Elmira, New York as part of their buildup to WrestleMania 35 on Saturday night, and one of its Superstars showed up with a very different look. Eric Young, former NXT Tag Team Champion and leader of Sanity, appeared at the show in a tag team match alongside Killian Dain with his trademark beard shaved all the way down to a stubble. Fans of Young from his days in (TNA) Impact Wrestling will recall how Young spent the majority of his early career clean-shaven, only to grow out a massive beard as his popularity in the promotion grew.

WWE's usage of Sanity on the main roster has been a topic of contention for many fans. The faction — comprised of Young, Dain, Alexander Wolfe and Nikki Cross — worked in NXT for roughly two years as a dominant heel faction. The group won the NXT tag titles at NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn III and competed as one of three teams in the return of the WarGames match at NXT TakeOver: WarGames (2017) before dropping the titles to The Undisputed Era in December 2017. Meanwhile, Cross rose up the ranks in the Women's Division by challenging Asuka on multiple occasions for the NXT Women's Championship.

The men of the group were initially called up to the main roster in April 2018, but didn't appear on SmackDown Live until June and have only sporadically appeared on WWE television since. Meanwhile, Cross finally received her call-up in December as part of a six-pack of wrestlers (Cross, Heavy Machinery, EC3, Lacey Evans, Lars Sullivan) to move up form NXT, but WWE has kept her almost exclusively on Monday Night Raw.

But even without appearing on television, Young has worked hard to keep fans interested in the group on social media, releasing a number of video promos on his Facebook page.

"The sickness has spread," Young said in a video in January. "The sickness is stronger than we originally thought. The sickness is smart, you're infected with the sickness. Now you may not know it, you may not want to believe it, but I assure you the sickness has taken hold. A symptom of the sickness is that it wants you to protect it, it wants you to help it grow, to nurture it, to water it, to spread it, to make it more powerful."

"Now they're saying that they're listening to you, and you have a say in what goes on," he continued. "If you believe that they're listening to you and the sickness hasn't taken control, than you're crazier than we are. I promise you the sickness is controlling you. It's controlling your thoughts, it's controlling your mind, it's controlling your actions, your word,s how you breath, how you live, what you think, what you see, what you do, everything. The sickness is all around you. It's everywhere, it's inside everyone. But I can see the sickness, we can see the sickness."

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