10 Most Damaging Figures In The History Of Wrestling
Appetite for destruction.
WWE's near-total market share of the professional wrestling landscape is as much an indictment of their former competitors than it is a testament of their own quality.
The apportionment of power in the cable TV era of wrestling has often been completely baffling. The heavily-financed WCW was inept years before Vince Russo was handed the booking pencil - so much so that a lower level Pizza Hut executive was once installed to oversee it. Vince Russo had a major hand in killing the company for good in the year 2000 - Judy Bagwell On A Forklift matches will do that - so what did new TNA president Dixie Carter do, when she was appointed president of TNA in 2003?
Give Russo the confidence vote and allow him to make a nonsensical mockery of the only promotion vaguely equipped to challenge WWE's monopoly, of course. It's the hope that kills you. Paul Heyman was once seriously considered (and had a serious interest in) overseeing TNA's creative. It didn't happen. The Russo nightmare continued to bleed out into the daylight for years.
It's no wonder the mainstream wrestling landscape is a synonym of WWE. Great wrestling minds have rarely been handed the keys to the kingdom. It also doesn't help that great wrestling minds are all too often their own worst enemy.
10. John Laurinaitis
John Laurinaitis steered WWE's developmental system for a decade between 2001 and 2011, at which point Triple H informally (and mercifully) wrested the reins from him. WWE struggled to create new main event acts within this time frame. That isn't a coincidence; Occam's razor slashes the throat of any argument to the contrary.
During his reign of terror, Laurinaitis:
- P*ssed off Jim Cornette - the man who secured WWE's future by cultivating John Cena, Batista, Randy Orton and Brock Lesnar - to such an extent that he left in a blaze of vaingloriousness, slapping Santino Marella silly.
- Accepted Jody Hamilton's Deep South Wrestling pitch, when Hamilton had precisely nothing resembling even the most humble of wrestling territories in place.
- Subsequently severed ties with Ohio Valley Wrestling in order to set up shop in Florida - where Steve Keirn's FCW was equally as ill-equipped as the facilities in Georgia. The building in which developmental guys trained didn't even have running water for a few months.
- Hired the wrong one-legged wrestler (!).
Oddly enough, no established stars reached the permanent main even pinnacle in WWE proper during the post-Cornette era. It's almost as if Laurinaitis was a buffoon.